Toxic Parents (13 page)

When Phil first came in for treatment, he made absolutely no connection between his hypersensitivity and his father’s taunting. As a little boy, Phil was unprotected because his father’s behavior was never recognized as abuse. Phil was in a typical “lose-lose” situation: “My dad’s jokes hurt me and I’m weak because I can’t take it.”

Little Phil was the butt of his father’s jokes and struggled to hide his feelings of inadequacy. Adult Phil was no different, but he moved in a much larger world, so he transferred his fears and negative expectations to other people. Phil went through life with his
nerve ends exposed, expecting to be hurt, to be humiliated. His hypersensitivity, his shyness, and his distrust of others was an inevitable but ineffective way of attempting to protect himself against further hurt.

“I’
M
O
NLY
S
AYING
T
HIS FOR
Y
OUR
O
WN
G
OOD
”

Many parents dish out their verbal abuse under the guise of guidance. To justify cruel and denigrating remarks, they use rationalizations such as, “I’m trying to help you become a better person,” or, “It’s a tough world and we’re teaching you to take it.” Because this abuse wears the protective mask of education, it is especially difficult for the adult child to acknowledge its destructiveness.

Vicki was 34 when she came in for therapy. She was an attractive woman who worked as an account manager in a large marketing corporation, but her self-confidence was so low that it threatened her professional advancement:

I’ve been working for this big company for six years, and I’ve done pretty well. I’ve been slowly moving up, you know, from secretary to office manager to account manager . . . moving through the ranks. But last week the most incredible thing just happened. My boss told me he thought I could really go places with an M.B.A., and he offered to pay for me to get one! I couldn’t believe it! You’d think I’d be thrilled, but all I can feel is panic. I haven’t been in school in ten years. I don’t know if I can do it. And I don’t know if I’m up to an M.B.A. anyway. Even people close to me say that I’m getting in over my head.

I remarked that whoever was giving her that assessment wasn’t much of a friend because real friends are supportive. This embarrassed her. I asked her why she seemed uneasy. She replied that by “people close to me,” she was referring to her mother.

When I called my mother to ask her if she thought I ought to do it, she brought up some very good points. You know . . . what happens to my job if I don’t make it. And had I thought about the fact that with an M.B.A., I’m going to scare away a lot of eligible men. And besides, I
am
happy with what I’m doing.

“But one reason you’re happy is that you’re proud that you worked your way up,” I said. “Don’t you want to keep going?” She agreed that she did. I suggested that the advances she’d made at work and the opportunity her boss had offered her were testaments to her worth. The evidence didn’t seem to jibe with her mother’s doubts. I asked if her mother had always been so negative about Vicki’s abilities.

My mom always wanted me to be the perfect little lady. She wanted me to be graceful and elegant, and to speak well . . . when I’d blow it, she’d try to shame me into doing it right. She meant well, she really did. She’d imitate me if I mispronounced a word. She’d make fun of how I looked . . . ballet recitals were the worst. Mom had dreams of being a dancer herself, but she got married instead. So I guess I was supposed to live out her dream for her, but I never danced as well as she could, at least that’s what she always told me. I’ll never forget one recital when I was about twelve. I thought I’d done pretty well, but my mom came backstage and said—in front of the whole class—“You danced like a hippo.” I just wanted to sink through the floor. When I sulked all the way home, she told me I should learn to take a little criticism because that’s the only way I was going to learn. Then she patted my arm, and I thought she was going to say something nice, but you know what she said? “Let’s face it, dear, you don’t do anything very well, do you?”

“B
E A
S
UCCESS
—B
UT
I K
NOW
Y
OU’LL
F
AIL
”

Vicki’s mother seems to have been strongly invested in making her young daughter feel inadequate. She did so through a series of confusing double messages. On one hand, she urged her daughter to excel, while on the other hand she told her how terrible she was. Vicki always felt off balance, never sure whether she was doing anything right. When she thought she’d done well, her mother deflated her; when she thought she’d done poorly, her mother told her she couldn’t do any better. At a time when Vicki should have been building self-confidence, her mother was knocking it down. All in the name of making Vicki a better person.

But what was this abusive parent really doing? Vicki’s mother was fighting her own feelings of inadequacy. Her own dance career was thwarted, perhaps by marriage. But perhaps she used marriage as an excuse because she didn’t have the confidence to pursue a career. By establishing her superiority over her daughter, Vicki’s mother could deny her feelings of inadequacy. Any occasion became fair game, even if it involved humiliating her daughter in front of her peers. It is particularly scarring for a budding adolescent to be embarrassed in this way, but the toxic parent’s needs always come first.

The Competitive Parent

The need to make someone feel inadequate in order to feel adequate oneself rapidly evolves into out-and-out competition. Clearly, Vicki’s mother came to see her young daughter as a threat because as Vicki grew older and became more beautiful, more mature, and more competent, her mother had more trouble feeling superior. She had to keep up the pressure, keep on demeaning her daughter, to defend against this threat.

Healthy parents experience their children’s growing competence with excitement and joy. Competitive parents, on the other
hand, often feel deprived, anxious, even scared. Most competitive parents are not aware of the reasons for these feelings, but they know that the child stirs them up.

During adolescence, little girls start to become women and little boys start to become men. The child’s adolescence is an especially threatening time for the insecure parent. Women feel frightened that they’re growing old and losing their beauty. They may see their daughters as competitors and feel the need to belittle them, especially in front of their husbands. Men may feel a threat to their virility and power. There’s room for only one man in the house, so they use ridicule and humiliation to keep their sons feeling little and helpless. Many adolescents exacerbate the situation by being openly competitive as a means of testing the waters of adulthood.

Competitive parents have often been victims of deprivation in their own childhoods, whether from shortages of food, clothing, or love. No matter how much they have, they still live in fear of not having enough. Many of these parents reenact with their children the competition they experienced with their own parents or siblings. This unfair competition puts enormous pressure on a child.

Vicki simply gave up trying to accomplish anything:

For so many years, I didn’t do a lot of things, even things I really liked, because I was afraid of being humiliated. After I grew up, I kept hearing her voice, just putting me down. She didn’t swear at me, she never called me dirty names. But the way she was always comparing herself to me, she made me feel like such a loser. It hurt so bad.

Despite what competitive parents may claim to want for their children, their hidden agenda is to ensure that their children can’t outdo them. The unconscious messages are powerful: “You cannot be more successful than I am,” “You cannot be more attractive than I am,” or, “You cannot be happier than I am.” In other words, “We all have our limits, and I am yours.”

Because these messages are so deeply entrenched, if the adult
children of competitive parents
do
manage to excel in something, they often experience tremendous guilt. The more they succeed, the more miserable they become. This often leads them to sabotage their success. For these adult children of toxic parents, under-achievement is the price of peace of mind. They control their guilt by unconsciously limiting themselves so they don’t outperform their parents. In a sense, they fulfill their parents’ negative prophecies.

Branded by Insults

Some verbally abusive parents don’t bother to hide behind rationalizations. Instead, they bombard their children with cruel insults, harangues, denunciations, and derogatory names. These parents are extraordinarily insensitive to both the pain they are inflicting and the lasting damage they are doing. Such blatant verbal abuse can sear into a child’s self-worth like a cattle brand, leaving deep psychological scars.

Carol, 52, is an extremely beautiful model-turned-interior-designer. In our first session, she told me about her latest divorce—her third. The divorce had become final about a year before Carol came to see me. It had been a painful experience, and Carol was left feeling frightened about her future. At the same time, she was going through menopause and seemed on the verge of panic over losing her looks. She felt undesirable. She told me that these fears had been intensified by a recent Thanksgiving visit with her parents.

It always ends up the same way. Every time I see my parents, I get hurt and disappointed all over again. The hardest thing is that I keep thinking maybe if I come home this time and tell them that I’m unhappy, that something’s gone wrong in my life, maybe just this one time they’ll say, “Gee, honey, we’re really sorry,” instead of, “It’s your own fault.” As long as I can remember, it’s always been, “It’s your own fault.”

I told Carol that it sounded as if her parents were still exercising tremendous power over her. I asked her if she was willing to explore the roots of that power with me so that we could begin to change the patterns of dominance and control. Carol nodded and began to tell me about her childhood in a wealthy midwestern family. Her father was a prominent physician and her mother was an Olympic-level swimmer who retired from competitive athletics to raise her five children. Carol was the eldest.

I remember feeling sad and lonely a lot of the time when I was little. My father always teased me, but when I was around eleven he started saying really horrible things.

“Like what?” I asked. She told me it didn’t matter. She started biting her cuticles nervously. I knew she was trying to protect an emotional nerve. “Carol,” I said, “I can see how painful this is for you. But we have to get this stuff out in the air where we can deal with it.” She started slowly:

For some reason, my father decided . . . God, this is hard . . . he decided I . . . I smelled bad. He just never let up. I mean, other people used to tell me how pretty I was, but all he could ever say was . . .

Carol stopped again and looked away. “Come on, Carol,” I said, “I’m on your side.”

He used to say, “Your breasts smell bad . . . your back stinks. If people only knew how filthy and smelly your body is, they’d be disgusted.” Honest to God, I’d shower three times a day. I’d change clothes all the time. I’d use tons of deodorant and perfume, but it wouldn’t make any difference. One of his favorites was, “If someone turned you inside out, they’d see stink come out every pore in your body.” Remember, this is coming from a respected physician. And my mother never said a word. She never even told me it wasn’t true. I kept wondering how I could be better . . . how I could keep him from telling me how awful and smelly I was. When I went to the bathroom, I always thought if I could flush the toilet faster, maybe he wouldn’t think I was so awful.

I told Carol that it sounded as if her father had reacted irrationally to her burgeoning womanhood because he couldn’t deal with his preoccupation with it. It is very common for fathers to react to their daughters’ blossoming sexuality with discomfort and often hostility. Even a father who is kind and loving when his daughter is small may create conflict during her adolescence in order to distance himself from sexual attractions he finds unacceptable.

To a toxic father like Carol’s, a daughter’s sexual development can trigger extreme feelings of anxiety, which, in his mind, justify his persecution of her. By projecting his guilt and discomfort on to her, he could deny any responsibility for his feelings. It is as if he were saying, “You are a bad and wicked person because you make me feel bad and wicked things for you.”

I asked Carol whether any of this rang true for her.

Now that I think about it, it
was
a sexual thing. I always felt his eyes on me. And he was always bugging me for details about what I was doing with my boyfriends, which was practically nothing. But he was convinced I was going to bed with everyone I went out with. He’d say things like, “Just tell me the truth and I won’t punish you.” He really wanted to hear me talk about sex.