If You Had Controlling Parents

by Dan Neuharth

  Taking

  Some Abusing parents seem bent on taking from their children by every possible method. They are like Using parents, but in the extreme.

  Rosemary, now a fifty-five-year-old manager, recalls sitting at the dinner table at the age of nine, watching her six-year-old sister, who was beginning to look ill. Her mother was talking incessantly, unaware of her daughters. Next to her mother’s plate was a razor strop that she brought to every meal so she could whip the girls if they spilled anything or didn’t finish their food.

  Her younger sister, Rosemary would realize years later, was developing an eating disorder from the tension at the table. She would gag on her food, try to swallow it for fear of getting beaten, then gag again. When her mother wasn’t watching, Rosemary would sneak some of her sister’s food and eat it for her. Their father noticed but said nothing.

  Over the years, Rosemary became obese. Her sister became anorectic. Many nights Rosemary’s sister would throw up in bed. Her mother would come in and beat the younger girl for throwing up. Eventually the sisters took a pail to their bedroom so their mother wouldn’t know when Rosemary’s sister vomited.

  Rosemary’s maltreatment was pervasive. Her Abusing, Using mother would punch her, then make her rehearse the story she’d tell outsiders—that she’d walked into a door: “If I ever said anything back, she’d crack me across the face. I’d have a purple face and people would stare at me like I was the Elephant Man.”

  Once when Rosemary was singing the happy-go-lucky rock song “Personality” while doing housework, her mother slapped her several times, and shouted, “I’ll give you personality!”

  “She couldn’t stand to see me happy,” Rosemary says sadly.

  Another time, her mother ripped a red bow out of Rosemary’s hair, screaming, “You tramp. You whore. You know what this means to men? You are filthy and disgusting.” Yet her mother did nothing to stop a sixteen-year-old cousin from molesting eight-year-old Rosemary during their “naps” together.

  For most of her life Rosemary has suffered from depression, eating disorders, obesity, alcohol dependence, loneliness, and thoughts of suicide. Some days she wishes her mother would die. Other days, she feels guilt-ridden for having such thoughts.

  Several years of therapy have brought Rosemary to the point of being, as she puts it, “semi-human,” but she cannot make up for her lost years: “It was like being in prison. She was the warden and she had no intention of letting me out. I would have been better off raised by wolves.”

  Poor Impulse Control

  Patty, who is now a fifty-three-year-old counselor, was in seventh grade when she walked into the living room after school; her dad, slumped in his easy chair in front of the television, asked her the time. “Three-thirty,” she told him, since she had glanced at the kitchen clock a moment before.

  “I asked you what time it is!” her father screamed. “Don’t make things up. You go look at a clock.”

  Patty tried to tell him she’d just checked the clock, but her father kept screaming until she went back, looked again, and told him it was now 3:31.

  Recalls Patty, “I guess my behavior looked like disobedience to him.”

  The rage reactions of Abusing parents can be so sudden and inexplicable that we can only speculate on what triggers them. Patty’s father may have expected to see his daughter reverse course and look at a clock. Perhaps that would have comforted him because he would have felt he controlled her actions as he would a servant’s. When Patty did something unexpected, like answering without looking, it may have taken him by surprise, something most controlling parents do not like, since it upsets their sense of being in control.

  Patty’s Abusing, Depriving father had several methods of intimidation. He would grab his daughter and hold a lit cigarette an inch from her arm, then say, “If you move your arm, it’s your fault because you’re burning yourself.” He tried the tactic on Patty’s cousin once and burned the child when he jerked away. When Patty was six, her father put her on his bike handlebars and rode downhill at full speed. During those times plummeting downhill or staring at a hot cigarette, Patty felt completely in her father’s control. She dissociated: “I floated up around the ceiling somewhere. I didn’t identify with the person who was me. I’d look down and think, ‘Look at that pitiful person crying.’”

  Her father also ridiculed emotions. When five-year-old Patty became afraid of spiders, her father commanded her not to be afraid. When a sixth-grade teacher recommended that Patty see a counselor because she was so shy, her father commanded her not to be shy. “For my father,” she now realizes, “emotions were things you could just command.”

  As an adult, expressing her feelings is one of Patty’s biggest struggles. A women’s group and twelve-step programs have helped her to feel whole: “In my women’s group I realized I could cry and people would not reject me. If anything, they drew closer. It was a shock, because as a child my crying made my mother withdraw and my father furious.”

  Physical and sexual violence is often the only close contact abused children can get with a parent. “My dad’s physical roughhousing was the only time he paid attention to me, so sometimes I’d even start it,” Patty admits. “I’d end up getting bruised and hurt but I desperately wanted some closeness. Afterward my mother would say, ‘Oh, you bruise so easily.’”

  Why Parents Abuse

  Abusing parents maltreat their children because they can get away with it; they’re bigger and have the power. Many abusers cannot maintain a consistent sense of themselves or others. At times they realize that their children are delicate, dependent beings, but when the abuse impulse gets triggered, they see their children’s innocent behaviors as deliberate provocations. In those moments, they no longer see their children as preoccupied, forgetful, and dependent creatures who want parental approval. Abusing parents do not regard their children as human.

  Abusers also tend to experience guilt differently from healthier parents. When a healthier parent hurts a child, he or she will generally be troubled by the action and try to atone. But Abusing parents justify their actions based on what the child did “wrong.”

  Abuse runs across a continuum, and most of the people I interviewed experienced less physical violence than Jorge, Eve, Rosemary, and Patty. Yet they hurt just as much and struggle with just as many limits in their lives.

  Clients who come from controlling families without physical violence often tell me, “It wasn’t so bad. Nobody ever hit me or molested me.” But they wonder why they suffer from fallout as lasting as those who were physically or sexually abused. In my experience, wounds from emotional abuse and control can last long and cut deep. Jorge, Eve, Rosemary, and Patty each admitted that their burns and bruises hurt less than the pain of feeling abandoned, degraded, and betrayed.

  We tend to discount the power of verbal abuse and emotional tyranny, perhaps because of the absence of visible bruises. We know sticks and stones break bones, but we forget that names really can hurt us. Labeling a child—“lazy,” “spoiled,” “stupid,” “ugly,” “bad,” “dummy,” “crazy,” “whore,” “selfish,” and a “mistake” topped the “hit” parade among those I interviewed—shatters self-image.

  Threats of violence force children to watch their step and feel under scrutiny even if a parent isn’t around. While the sting or bruise from a blow eventually fades, the threat of violence does not. This can translate into a generalized fear that the world is not safe.

  The most profound violence of abuse is the underlying message it sends to children:

  The person who is supposed to protect me hurts me, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

  Self-Assessment

  My parent(s):

  Physically or sexually hurt or bullied me

  Insulted me or called me horrible names

  Severely overreacted to dissent or disobedience

  Lost control at the drop of a hat

  Seemed oblivious to or showed little remorse over th
e effects of their abuse

  Next: Childlike Parenting

  Abusing parents like Jorge’s mom or Patty’s dad often marry someone who does little to stop the abuse. Like alcoholics who find a codependent to subtly allow them to abuse liquor, Abusing parents, in part, are able to continue mistreatment because their partners allow it. Parents who stand idly by while their children are hurt characterize the final type of controlling parents, Childlike parents. Childlike parents seem fragile, mere shadows of human beings.

  9

  CHILDLIKE PARENTING “Can’t Do” Child Raising

  Life really terrified my mother.

  —EVELYN, 46, A NURSE

  Key Characteristics of Childlike Parents:

  Control through inducing guilt in others

  Seem incapable of being adults or parents

  Receive caretaking instead of provide it

  Often seek Perfectionistic, Cultlike, Using, or Abusing spouses

  Potential Consequences of a Childlike Upbringing:

  Few opportunities to be a carefree child

  A tendency to put others first

  Difficulty in expressing anger or resentment

  When she was six, Evelyn, now a forty-six-year-old nurse, stood in line with her brother, mom, and dad at Disneyland’s elevated Skyway ride. She could feel her mother’s long skirt billowing against her back in the hot summer breeze as they neared the front of the line. When her father hopped in the first available car, Evelyn’s mother shoved her in with him. The door clanged shut as Evelyn watched her mother and brother scramble into the next car. For the entire ride, Evelyn’s father, who loved to taunt and scare others, swung the caged car back and forth, ignoring Evelyn’s tears and shrieks. Years later, she was able to understand what had happened: Her mother had sacrificed Evelyn because her mother was afraid to be in the cage with him.

  “Life really terrified my mother,” Evelyn recalls. Her mother, who took Valium for years, would walk the three miles to town rather than take a bus because she didn’t know what to say if the bus driver said “Good morning.” Once, when eight-year-old Evelyn wanted to play with her brother rather than accompany her mother to the store, her mother wept for three days.

  Evelyn’s mother excused her father’s abuse of Evelyn by saying, “He can’t help it. He grew up with a drunk for a dad.” At ten, Evelyn wanted to write to Ann Landers for advice on how to cope with her father. Since her father read all mail coming to and going from the house, Evelyn asked her mother’s help in mailing the letter. Her mother refused, telling her daughter to “pray to God.”

  When Evelyn reached puberty, her father would come up and lift her blouse and make her stand in the living room while he ridiculed her “small tits.” When this happened, Evelyn’s mother took two actions.

  First, she closed the living room blinds so the neighbors would not see.

  Then she left the room.

  Unfortunately, Evelyn’s mother, Loretta, was not qualified to protect and nurture her children. From her daughter’s description, it appears that Loretta was depressed and anxious for most of her life. In part, this may have resulted from Loretta’s imprisonment from ages two to four in a World War II Japanese concentration camp, days away from death from malnutrition when she was finally freed. It’s sad, because Loretta’s moods and phobias could probably be successfully treated today with a combination of psychotherapy and medication.

  Because Childlike parents are scared and needy, they often play a childlike role, leaving the caretaking to their children, a role reversal that robs children of their youth. While Childlike parents may not seem controlling, they play a crucial role in unhealthy family dynamics. For example, they often gravitate to a strong-willed spouse—frequently a Cultlike, Perfectionistic, Using, or Abusing personality. Drawn to the apparent strength and certainty of the stronger spouse, they feel secure with someone who will run interference, be certain when they are unsure, and act big when they feel small.

  Like Evelyn, children of marriages between Abusing and Childlike parents are deeply deprived, assuming the blame for their abuse since they get no positive messages from either parent.

  Rather than intervening when a spouse victimizes a daughter or son, Childlike parents forfeit their children to the spouse’s control. On top of it all, many such parents demand sympathy for their own problems. “I’m sick,” they say. “I’m afraid.” “I’m lonely.” “I’m depressed.”

  Evelyn’s caretaking of her mother may have influenced her choice of nursing as a career. “I certainly had lots of experience taking care of others,” she declared. While we can have compassion for Evelyn’s mother’s depression and fears, we must regret the price Evelyn paid for her mom’s limitations. For much of her life, Evelyn has tended to put others’ needs before her own and has struggled with career burnout and one-sided relationships.

  Terrified and Anxious

  Molly is a thirty-three-year-old vegetable grower who recalls a recent visit during which her mother rocked back and forth with intense anxiety. “I know there’s something I’m supposed to be doing,” her mother, Lucy, insisted. “I can’t just sit here.” Lucy was terrified of her Cultlike, Abusing husband and lived like a slave. He monitored Lucy’s phone calls, which she could only make and receive during specified hours. He dictated her errands and declared exactly how long it would take her to do them. He checked on her by phone several times a day.

  Molly recalls seeing stark terror on her mother’s face if a spot of grease splattered on the stove in the middle of cooking. If her father saw one grease spot, he’d launch into a tirade.

  When she was in her twenties, Molly brought her mother the book Men Who Hate Women & the Women Who Love Them, hoping her mother would get some insight into her marital relationship. Lucy’s response was to beg Molly to take the book away before her husband found it.

  After Molly was born, Lucy suffered severe postpartum depression, sobbing constantly. She was also so sensitive that if Molly or her siblings said they didn’t like her cooking, she’d burst into tears. Since Lucy couldn’t deal with disciplining Molly or her brother, and her husband relished inflicting punishment, she turned the disciplining over to him.

  Terrified of strong emotions, especially anger, sadness, fear, and joy, Lucy discouraged Molly from expressing feelings loudly or strongly. Molly never knew whether it was because strong emotions scared her or because Lucy was afraid they would trigger Molly’s father’s explosive temper. Perhaps both.

  Lucy carried her self-effacing ways to her deathbed—succumbing alone in a hospital at age seventy-two after sending Molly away because she didn’t “want to be a burden” to her daughter.

  Fail to Protect Their Children

  By no means is every husband or wife of an abusive parent a Childlike parent. Healthier parents stand up to an abusive spouse and succeed in deflecting the maltreatment, often at their own expense when the abuser turns on them. Others take their children and leave. Some spouses of abusers, while feeling powerless to leave or stop the abuse, at least tell the children that the abuse is wrong. It can make a world of difference to abused children if a parent tells them that they are not bad, that they do not deserve to be hurt, and that the abusive parent is the one with the problems.

  Childlike parents, by contrast, rarely stand up to the abuser or try to undo it. Some even agree with the spouse’s abusive punishment but don’t want to have to deliver it themselves. Others make excuses for the abusive spouse. Still others simply opt out, vanishing in spirit or body, leaving their children alone.

  Coming to grips with the culpability of a Childlike parent can be difficult because it’s often easier to feel anger toward the more dominant parent. When grown children take stock of their upbringing by a Childlike parent, they may feel angry that they weren’t protected but express guilt because of their anger. Childlike parents seem so weak, after all; how can you be angry with them? It is indeed tough balancing compassion for your parents’ limitations with the rec
ognition that you suffered because of their limitations.

  Jack, a thirty-five-year-old salesman, can still feel the flush on his face from his father’s insults and his sore bottom from his beatings. Jack’s dad was an Abusing, Perfectionistic parent who seemed to delight in tormenting his son. But when the boy would seek comfort from his mother, she would invariably tell him, “Your father’s feeling a lot of pressure. He’s under stress and he wants the best for you. He’s just trying to make you understand.”

  Remembers Jack, “I think I knew that my mother could never stand up to him. In a curious way, I didn’t want her to. If she stood up to him, he’d win, and I would risk losing the only supportive person I had.” Jack, like many children of Childlike parents, ended up protecting his protector.

  In abusive families, it can be frightening to speak the truth—that the abuse is wrong. In order to avoid a confrontation, Childlike parents make excuses for their Abusing spouses and the children accept the excuses so they can maintain some kind of lifeline—even an inadequate one.

  Self-Assessment

  My parent(s):

  Lived “under the thumb” of a mate or others

  Rarely stood up for themselves or me

  Feared strong emotions or new situations

  Needed me to take care of them

  Engendered guilt or pity in those around them

  Summary of the Eight Styles

  So long as little children are allowed to suffer, there is no true love in the world.

  —ISADORA DUNCAN

  In reading about the eight styles of controlling parenting and reviewing your self-assessments, you may have found that one or both of your parents have characteristics of several of the eight styles. Most controlling parents are a combination of styles, usually with one, two, or three styles predominating. To review: