Toxic Parents (25 page)

Compliant Behaviors:

• —— I often give in to my parents no matter how I feel.
  

• —— I often don’t tell them what I really think.
  

• —— I often don’t tell them how I really feel.
  

• —— I often act as if everything is fine between us even when it isn’t.
  

• —— I am often phony and superficial when I’m with my parents.
  

• —— I often do things in relation to my parents out of guilt or fear rather than out of free choice.
  

• —— I try very hard to get them to change.
  

• —— I try very hard to get them to see and understand my point of view.
  

• —— I often become the peacemaker in any conflict with them.
  

• —— I often make very painful sacrifices in my own life in order to please them.
  

• —— I continue to be the bearer of the family secrets.
  

Aggressive Behaviors:

• —— I am constantly arguing with my parents to show them that I’m right.
  

• —— I constantly do things that I know they don’t like to show them that I’m my own person.
  

• —— I often scream, yell, or curse at my parents to show them they can’t control me.
  

• —— I often have to restrain myself to keep from attacking them physically.
  

• —— I blew my stack and cut my parents out of my life.
  

If two or more of these behaviors fit you, then enmeshment with your parents is still a major issue in your life.

It is not difficult to see how compliant behaviors keep you from
being independent. But enmeshment through aggressive behaviors is less clear. These behaviors would appear to separate you from your parents. They create the illusion that you are fighting back rather than capitulating. In reality, aggressive behaviors still indicate enmeshment because of the intensity of your feelings; the repetitiveness and predictability of your reactions; and the fact that your behavior is not determined by your free choice, but rather by your defensive need to prove how separate you are.

Compliance and aggression are merely two sides of the same behavioral coin.

Reacting to the Checklists

Carol, the model-turned-interior-designer who had been verbally abused by her father, was astounded when she added up the results of her checklists. She discovered that at age 52 she was still highly enmeshed with her parents.

I’m so ashamed. I’m middle-aged, been married three times, have a grown son, and my parents are still pulling my strings. Can you believe . . . I checked off nearly every belief and feeling on the lists. And talk about Ms. Compliant. . . When am I going to get it through my thick skull that my parents aren’t ever going to change? They’ve always been cruel and unsupportive, and I guess they always will be.

I told Carol that feelings of shame and embarrassment are common for someone who considers herself an adult but suddenly sees that she’s still controlled by her parents. We would all like to believe that we are independent adults making our own decisions about our own lives.

Carol probably was right: her parents weren’t going to change. But she was. The first step in shaking off the destructive bonds is understanding what makes them so strong.

Like many of my clients, Carol reacted angrily to the realization that she was still enmeshed. She wanted to rush right out and challenge her parents. If you have that impulse, resist it. This is not the right time. Impulsive action almost always backfires.

Avoid taking confrontative action when your emotions are at fever pitch. Your perspective and judgment will be clouded.

There is plenty of time to integrate your new awareness into your life. But first you’ve got to map out a plan of action.

Remember, this is the beginning of a process, not an overnight cure. The preceding lists are just the beginning of your exploration. There are some very complex and often bewildering issues ahead. You don’t want to dive into the water until you’ve checked for rocks beneath the surface. You can’t change lifelong patterns overnight no matter how self-defeating they may be. What you
can
do is start to challenge your constricting beliefs and self-defeating behaviors and eventually discard them to allow your true self to emerge. But before you can recover your true self, you’ve got to know who you are.

11 | The Beginnings of Self-Definition

E
motional independence doesn’t mean that you have to cut yourself off from your parents. It means that you can be part of the family while at the same time being a separate individual. It means you can be who you are and let your parents be who they are.

When you feel free to have your own beliefs, feelings, and behaviors, apart from those of your parents (or others), you are “self-defined.” If your parents don’t like what you do or think, inevitably you will have to tolerate some discomfort. And you’ll have to tolerate
their
discomfort with
you
when you don’t rush in to change yourself for them. Even if some of your beliefs are identical to those of your parents, or your behavior meets with their approval, it is essential that you make your own choices and that you feel free to agree or disagree with them.

This doesn’t mean I encourage you to ride roughshod over other
people’s feelings or to ignore the impact that your behavior may have on them. But neither can you allow them to ride roughshod over you. We all have to find a balance between taking care of ourselves and being concerned about the feelings of others.

No one can be self-defined 100 percent of the time. We are all part of a larger society. No one is totally free from the desire for approval from others. No one is completely free from emotional dependency of some kind, and very few of us would want to be. Human beings are social animals, and open relationships demand a certain amount of emotional
inter
dependence. For this reason, self-definition must be somewhat flexible. There’s nothing wrong with making a compromise for your parents, as long as it is something you’ve chosen to do of your own free will. What I’m talking about here is maintaining your emotional integrity, being true to yourself.

It’s Okay to Be Selfish Sometimes

Many people don’t stand up for themselves because they confuse self-definition with selfishness. The word
selfish
pushes all of our guilt buttons. Sandy—the hairdresser whose unforgiving parents continued to punish her in adulthood for the abortion she had had when she was 15—put herself through an emotional hell to avoid being labeled selfish. She explained:

Talk about being between a rock and a hard place. I think I may have just ruined my entire life. My folks are having their house remodeled, and my mother called me last week to tell me that the noise is driving her crazy, so she and Dad want to move in with us until the remodeling is done, which could be weeks. I really didn’t want to say “yes,” but what could I do? I mean they
are
my parents. When my husband found out, he just about died. See, he uses the spare room as an office and he’s in the middle of a big project right now. So he made me call my mother back and suggest that maybe it would be better for her and Dad to go to a hotel instead. Well, she just about went through the ceiling. I got a half hour on how ungrateful and selfish I am, how this is the least I can do, considering everything they’ve done for me. I told her I’d have to discuss it with Bill, but I already know what he’ll say. What can I do, Susan?

I suggested that Sandy use this minicrisis as an opportunity to begin the process of self-definition. It was time for her to take a look at the current uproar and see it not as an isolated incident but as the latest problem in an ongoing pattern in her relationship with her parents. This wasn’t about their moving in with her, it was about her automatic reaction of placating and accommodating them. If she wanted to break that pattern, she had to focus first on what
she
wanted as opposed to what her parents were demanding of her. I asked her if she even
knew
what she wanted.

SANDY:
The first thing that comes to mind is I want my parents to leave me alone. I don’t want them to stay with us. It’ll be horrible. I mean, I feel guilty just even admitting that, because kids are supposed to be there for their parents. Maybe I’ll just tell them they can stay. Then I won’t feel so awful about it. It’s a lot easier fighting with Bill than it is fighting with them. Why can’t I make everybody happy?

SUSAN:
You answer that question.

SANDY:
I don’t know the answer. That’s why I’m here. I mean, I know I don’t want them living with me right now, but I love them—I can’t just turn my back on them.

SUSAN:
I’m not asking you to turn your back on them. I’m asking you to imagine what it would be like to say “no” to them sometimes, to set limits on how much you’re willing to sacrifice for them. Be “self-defined,” Sandy. Make decisions based on what
you
want and what
you
need rather than on what they want or need.

SANDY:
That sounds so selfish.

SUSAN:
It’s okay to be selfish sometimes.

SANDY:
I want to be a good person, Susan. I was raised to believe that good people do things for others.

SUSAN:
Sweetie, if you were as good to you as you are to your parents, you probably wouldn’t need to be here. You’re a very good person—to everybody but you.

SANDY:
Then how come I feel so bad?

Sandy started to cry. It was so important for her to prove to her mother that she was neither selfish nor ungrateful that she was willing to throw both her home and her marriage into near-pandemonium.

Sandy based many of her life decisions on an overdeveloped sense of obligation to her parents. She believed she had a responsibility to bury her needs beneath theirs. She rarely did what
she
wanted to do, and this had led to years of repressed anger and lack of personal fulfillment that eventually expressed themselves as depression.

Sandy, like most of us, reacted to her parents in an almost automatic, knee-jerk way. When we react, we usually act without thinking, without listening, and without exploring our options. People are usually the most reactive when they feel emotionally threatened or assaulted. This reactiveness can take place in a relationship with almost anyone in our lives—a lover, a boss, a child, or a friend—but it is almost always the most intense with our parents.

When you are reactive, you are dependent on the approval of others. You feel good about yourself only when no one disagrees with you, criticizes you, or disapproves of you. Your feelings are often far out of proportion to the events that evoked them. You’ll perceive a small suggestion as a personal attack; a minor constructive criticism as a personal failure. Without the approval of others, you have a hard time maintaining even minimal emotional stability.

When you’re reactive, you typically say things such as, “Every time my mother tells me how to live my life, I go crazy”; “They really know how to push my buttons, I always lose it with them”; or,
“I just have to hear my father’s voice and I see red.” When you allow your emotional reactions to become automatic, you’re giving up control, handing your feelings to someone else on a silver platter. This gives other people enormous power over you.

R
ESPONDING
V
ERSUS
R
EACTING

The opposite of being reactive is being responsive. When you’re being responsive, you are thinking as well as feeling. You’re aware of your feelings but you don’t let them drive you to act impulsively.

Responsiveness also allows you to maintain your sense of self-worth, despite anything your parents might say about you. This is extremely rewarding. The thoughts and feelings of others no longer drag you into a pit of self-doubt. You will see all sorts of new options and choices in your dealings with other people because your perspective and your sense of reason are not being buried by emotions. Responsiveness can put back into your hands a good deal of your control over your life.

Sandy needed to become less reactive and more responsive. I cautioned her that behavioral changes are a struggle for everyone, including myself, but I assured her that she could do it if she was willing to commit to the process. She was.

The first thing I asked her to do was to recognize that most of her opinions of herself really came from things her parents had told her—from
their
definition of her. The negative parts of that definition included labeling Sandy selfish, ungrateful, and bad. It took many years for Sandy to internalize this negative self-image, so we weren’t about to change it overnight. But I showed her some beginning behavioral strategies to enable her to begin the process of replacing her parents’ definition of her with a more realistic view of who she really was.

I asked her to imagine that I was her mother. Through role playing, I wanted her to find a new way of answering her mother’s cricitism, an alternative to her usual capitulation.