Adult Children Secrets of Dysfunctional Families

by John Friel

  Our two-year-olds toddle off to explore things by themselves. They exert their will. They get into power struggles with us. And because they are still so vulnerable and dependent upon us, they need to be able to do this and still know that they can run back to us for comfort if their independence leads them into things that are scary or hurtful.

  Imagine your two-year-old running into the house in tears, crying that “a big dog walked through the yard and growled at me!” The dog represents a threat to our sense of autonomy: “I can’t go out into the world by myself because it’s too dangerous,” we feel. If a parent simply affirms us and our feelings by saying, “Boy, I’ll bet that was scary,” and makes us feel safe again by giving us a hug and letting us have our feelings without being judgmental, then soon we will be ready to go back into the world again.

  If, on the other hand, our parents shame us (“Big boys don’t cry,” “I told you not to go outside by yourself ”), or simply aren’t available enough to us during these times (by not being there enough or by ignoring us), then we will begin to internalize shame and doubt.

  Likewise, we can experience shame and doubt if we are too restricted in our attempts to be separate individuals. Parents who mean well but who are overprotective of us, never give us the chance to separate from them. Also, if our parents are too permissive, giving us few guidelines on how to behave in the world outside of our homes, we can wind up feeling shame and doubt. Parents who let their children climb on the furniture, break things a lot, and generally tyrannize the household produce children who get shamed a lot when they go to other people’s homes or when they go to school.

  Again, the rule of thumb here is one of balance. We need to set limits and boundaries on our children at this age, but we also need to allow enough freedom and safety for our children for them to want to begin separating from us.

  3. Initiative versus Guilt

  This stage has a lot to do with our ability to start things, make things happen and stretch beyond our current capabilities. Those of us who are “stuck,” who can’t get out of a rut, who can’t make decisions, have issues with this stage.

  Between three and six years of age, we begin to want to be more like adults. We want to go into the kitchen and cook something the way Mom and Dad do. Or we want to go into the garage and get the saw and build something. We want to initiate things. This has much to do with self-expansion, of going beyond. If you think about it, anytime we try to initiate something on our own, there is always the possibility of someone else feeling put out, let down, disappointed or “hurt.” When they let us know about it, we feel guilty.

  Dad gets a bee in his bonnet and decides to tear out the wall in the kitchen and do some remodeling while Mom is on a business trip. Mom comes home, doesn’t like it and says, “How could you begin such a major change in my kitchen without first consulting me?” Dad feels some shame, but he will also feel guilt. He has “done something wrong,” violated a moral principle of some kind.

  The task at ages three to six is to begin internalizing principles of right and wrong, but not to the detriment of our ability to initiate things.

  If my children try to rebuild the engine of my car at this age, I need to convey to them that this is inappropriate behavior because they aren’t old enough to do it properly, and besides, it’s “my” car, not “theirs.” It’s how I convey that message that is so important.

  If I say, “You really let down Dad. I am surprised that you would do this. You really hurt me by doing it,” my children will indeed not do it again.

  But if I use this method of discipline on a regular basis, I will produce very well-behaved children who won’t be able to get themselves out of a wet paper bag when they are adults. They will be “nice,” but that’s about it. They will be filled with guilt and indecision. They will always focus on who will be affected by their actions without ever considering their own needs or feelings. They will become over-focused on not violating all of these rules they internalize. Big rules, middle-sized rules and pointless tiny rules.

  4. Industry versus Inferiority

  This stage involves developing a sense of competence and confidence around those skills necessary for survival in our culture. These skills include the three R’s, but go well beyond them.

  Certainly, we need academic skills to get by in this world, but all too often the range of skills that are reinforced in our schools and at home is painfully narrow. Not every child will be a whiz at math, English or physics. Not every child will become another Picasso or Beethoven. Some children will become excellent mechanics, if allowed to be. Others will become well-adjusted accountants. Others, plumbers. These school-age years are critical for a child’s sense of worth. They are also critical for a child’s ability to identify with, and bond with, older people who know how to do things. So it is a compliment to us, and to our child, if he forms an attachment to a friend’s Dad, who is showing him how to work on cars. It is okay if our daughter likes her English teacher, and gets excited about what the teacher is teaching her.

  It is not okay if our children have no room to feel good about themselves during these years. It is not okay to compare one child to another one in the family. It is not okay to feel jealous or possessive of our children just because they like a friend’s Mom or Dad. If we feel jealous, we need psychotherapy to work through the dysfunction that we are experiencing.

  It is okay if one child excels at math, another excels at drawing, and another excels at auto mechanics. It is okay if our children feel good about themselves, even though they haven’t got straight A’s or a B-average or whatever our criteria for success happen to be. We know many wealthy successful people who never finished high school or college. We know many happy successful “non-wealthy” people, too. Some of them have high school diplomas, some have college diplomas and some have Ph.D.’s.

  The basic skills that are learned during this stage are how to work, how to get along with other people, how to be social and political people, how to get what we need out of life without alienating everyone around us, and how to feel good about what we do. The specifics of how we do that are not nearly as important as doing it somehow. In rigid dysfunctional families, there is only one right way to do it. In healthy families, there are literally hundreds of ways to do it.

  Identity versus Identity Confusion

  As we said earlier, the above four stages bring us to the first adult stage of our development, which is called Identity versus Identity Confusion (also called Identity Diffusion) somewhere between the ages of 18 and 29, depending upon how much formal education we get, economic factors and family system factors. Erikson and researchers, who have studied his theories, believe that there are two key parts to achieving a clear identity: crisis and commitment.

  Erikson felt that it was not possible to be a healthy adult with a clear sense of self without going through a psychosocial moratorium, which is just a fancy way to say a period of questioning and rebellion.

  We must question our religious beliefs, the values with which we were raised, career choices that our parents may have overtly or covertly made for us, lifestyle preferences, and the like. We may come back to those childhood beliefs after this period of questioning, but we won’t be children when we do and we won’t be doing it “just because someone told us it was the right way to live or think.” Or we may not come back to our childhood beliefs, choosing other ways to think and act than the ones that were given to us by our parents.

  One fact remains: if we don’t go through this crisis period of rebellion and questioning, we won’t get through the Identity Stage. It is this fact that causes dysfunctional families so many problems when their children near adulthood.

  The commitment part of identity means that we must make clear choices about our beliefs and lifestyles eventually, and that our choices must be more than just verbal ones. We must act on them.

  A person who chooses monogamy but has extramarital affairs all the time is not committed to monogamy
as a lifestyle. A person who claims to be a Christian but who treats his family and employees like dirt is not living his beliefs—he is only talking about them. This kind of empty rhetoric is a double message and a double bind for the members of the family, and it will eventually backfire.

  Children whose parents say one thing but do another eventually lose all respect for their parents.

  Based on the depth of the crisis we have had, and the strength of our commitment, Erikson has delineated four possible identity types or outcomes during this stage. (For an extended discussion of these types, and how they are related to co-dependency, see Friel, Subby and Friel, 1985.) These four types are:

  1. Identity Achieved

  We have been through an identity crisis with regard to work, religion, sexuality, political beliefs and lifestyle. We have also made clear commitments to our current choices, so that our feelings, beliefs and actions are congruent. That is, they match. Do we have to have a clear commitment to all parts of ourselves and our choices? No, but the fewer we have, the less likely it is that we are identity achieved.

  2. Moratorium

  We are in the crisis period. We are actively searching. We are trying on different hats. We are dating different people. We are trying out different careers or college majors. But there is something systematic and directed to our search. We have not made clear commitments yet.

  3. Foreclosed

  Our hunch is that probably close to 50% of us are in this state. If we are Adult Children who have not broken through our denial yet, then we are most likely in this state or in the last one, below. Foreclosure means that we seem to have a clear set of commitments, but we never really went through a crisis period to get there.

  We go into adulthood wearing the same childhood hats that we’ve always had on but the hat is on an adult body. We wear adult suits and ties and dresses and we say adult words, do adult things and tell ourselves that we believe adult beliefs—but we are not truly adults because we have not yet grown up.

  Why? Because growing up is scary. It hurts. It is sometimes lonely. It means saying goodbye to childhood and making peace with whatever childhood fantasies, as well as demons, we may have grown up with. We Adult Children have so many demons that getting out of foreclosure is very hard to do. Actually, denial and fear are what keep us stuck.

  “My husband is not like my dad,” we assert. “Dad was a drunk. My husband is a hardworking, responsible man!” (Adult Child Translation: “My husband is an unavailable workaholic, but because he’s not a drunk, it must be better.”) That’s how our denial works.

  Later in the marriage we may say, “My husband’s not available to me emotionally, but what else can I do? He’s a good provider. I have all the things a woman could ever want. And besides, I don’t know how I would ever provide for myself.” That’s how the fear works against us.

  Getting out of foreclosure is like standing on the edge of a cliff on a pitch-black, moonless night, and then jumping off without knowing whether the cliff is three feet high or 100 feet high. It is not something we should be doing without a strong support system in place beforehand.

  Making this kind of change is also risky because what usually happens is that we get a lot of flack from those around us. Translation: We get guilted and shamed. “She’s crazy. That’s all there is to it. Any woman would just die to be married to him!” (And she is dying, emotionally.)

  “How could you dare to go back to college. What about me and the kids? Who will be there to do the cooking and the laundry? Who will be there to make love with me every night?” Translation: Dad may be sexually addicted, or at the very least, female-dependent and the children have been spoiled to the point of not knowing how to run the washer and dryer or cook a meal.

  Leaving foreclosure behind brings censure from others simply because it is a time of turmoil, too. We even see professional therapists labeling clients as “dysfunctional” or “neurotic” when in fact, they are simply entering a healthy moratorium stage in their lives. Translation: They are taking the big risk of becoming adults. More power to them!

  4. Identity Confused (Diffused)

  When we are in this state, we are in constant crisis but it is different from when we are in a moratorium. The crisis goes in circles. There is no direction to it. We jump from one lover to the next, from one job or career to the next, from one set of beliefs to the next and from one lifestyle to the next. We are lost souls, wandering the earth looking for a sense of security in a way that we never got it. Some of us here are offenders and addicts who hurt a lot of people in the process of wandering.

  In college we may have been the Party King or Queen, but we never quite get out of that role. Or we are the rigid, religious fundamentalist whose entire identity is defined and controlled by something outside of ourselves. While some of us here may speak of being easygoing free spirits, we are far from that. We cannot tolerate differences of opinion because any other opinion would threaten our very sense of self and that is not tolerable. When we are identity achieved, a good chunk of our sense of self is comfortably inside of us, and cannot be threatened by someone else’s point of view.

  People ask us how so many people could follow Jim Jones to Guyana and then commit mass suicide with him at his command. We believe that they were identity confused, and that they needed Jim Jones so much for their own self-definition that they were willing to give up the very essence of their self-definition—their own lives.

  Getting beyond foreclosure or confusion requires that we have strong, healthy building blocks when we reach adolescence. It also requires that we look at our childhoods, have our feelings about our childhoods, re-evaluate both the “good“ and the “bad”, and take our parents off the pedestals that we had them on as children. Our parents are neither saints nor ogres—they are human beings.

  To take our parents off those pedestals and “let” them be human is tremendously painful if we are Adult Children because we are strongly enmeshed with them. We are enmeshed if they were over-indulgent with us, and we are enmeshed if they were abusive and neglectful. In the latter case, we are enmeshed because we keep going back to an empty well for water but there is none there. We keep hoping and praying that it will be there, but it never is. What we are going back for is something that perhaps our parents will never be able to give us because their childhoods were abusive and neglectful.

  As Alice Miller so aptly stated (Miller, 1987), the pain of admitting that our parents were not capable of loving us (in perfect healthy ways) is much greater than the pain of believing that we were “bad” and didn’t deserve love. And so we remain foreclosed, until the pain becomes so great that we must change.

  In other words, our symptoms, our addictions and our pain are really our allies. They tell us when the Little Child Within has had enough and wants some help to grow up.

  14

  Intimacy

  and Beyond

  Erikson’s next stage is called Intimacy versus Isolation, and it is in the arena of intimacy that so many of us Adult Children experience our most painful crises.

  We like to define intimacy as the ability to be in relationship with someone without sacrificing our identity in the process. It is the last part of this definition which is so crucial. While there are many types of intimacy, such as physical, sexual, intellectual, social, spiritual and the sharing of play and hobbies, intimacy in any of these domains with loss of self on a regular basis is not intimacy—it is dependency.

  Loss of self during sex is normal and okay, but always deferring to another’s wishes and never asking for what we like is not okay and it is not healthy. If we really don’t care what movie we go to, then letting someone else choose the movie makes sense. If we do care deep down inside and still rarely state our preference, then we are being overly dependent.

  The best way to truly evaluate the health of our relationships is to identify how we truly feel, which requires that we are in enough of our own recovery to let those feelings come to the
surface. We have listed below how intimacy feels compared to dependent relationships.

  Intimacy Dysfunctional Relationships

  (Interdependent) (Dependent/Isolated)

  whole desperate

  joyful fearful

  competent anxious

  interested rejected

  strong angry

  clear confused

  comfortable abandoned

  peaceful exhausted

  fulfilled invisible

  grateful controlled

  happy used

  excited manipulated

  trusting empty

  alone-ness loneliness

  together-ness identity-less

  Believe it or not, we know of several marriages and long-term friendships that can best be described by the list on the left.

  Below we have outlined some of the issues and problems that seem to crop up the most in relationships between Adult Children.

  Objectification

  With our cups running on “empty,” we have a strong tendency to make our friends and lovers into “things” that are designed to make up for our deficiencies. We objectify each other by trying to make our friends into our therapists, moms and dads or saviors.

  We make each other into sex objects who are designed to make us feel momentarily better and intimate, but we lack the ability to be intimate in the much broader terms necessary for a healthy relationship. As therapists and human beings, the authors sincerely believe that true intimacy is made up of the little day-to-day actions that many of us view as “boring” until we get into recovery.

  The Owe-Pay Syndrome

  Another form of objectification is to do a lot of things for others to the point of burnout in the hope that they will then be indebted to us and be nice to us in return. We then proclaim loudly or softly that the other person “owes” us. We say, “Look at all I’ve done for you!” That statement is a red flag indicating that we are in an addictive relationship, and that we have compromised our identities and our dignity.