If You Had Controlling Parents (20 page)

BOOK: If You Had Controlling Parents
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PART THREE
Solving the Problem

Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself
.

—G
LORIA
S
TEINEM

In the Introduction I wrote:

  1. You aren't responsible for what your parents did to you, they are
    .
  2. You are responsible for what you do with your life now, your parents aren't
    .

The remainder of this book is about what you do with your life from now on.

Solving the problem of growing up controlled has three steps:

Step One:
Emotionally leaving home
by separating from the hurtful aspects of your upbringing, parents, and family role.

Step Two:
Bringing balance
to your relationship with your parents.

Step Three:
Redefining
your life.

Emotional healing is like physical healing. If you cut your finger, you clean the wound and protect it from infection with a bandage. If you break your leg, you set the bone and wear a cast to protect it from further trauma. This allows your body's natural healing process to work.

It's the same with emotional healing. When you're emotionally wounded by a controlling childhood, “cleaning” the wound means facing your true past and speaking about it. And the “bandage” or “cast” that protects these wounds from further injury is
emotionally leaving home
. This doesn't necessarily mean a physical separation from your parents, but it may entail letting go of counterproductive links with them and your upbringing.

You cannot mend a broken bone faster by telling it to “heal more quickly.” Healing a broken leg means wearing a cast, which can make walking difficult. Similarly, emotional healing may mean changes in habits that at first feel awkward.

Like physical healing, emotional healing can happen twenty-four hours a day without conscious effort. You may not know exactly how a cut heals; you just notice that each day it gets a little better. Similarly, people who begin emotionally separating from a controlled upbringing frequently notice over time that they develop more positive values and a greater sense of freedom, often without knowing precisely how.

Emotional separation opens the way for you to
bring balance
to your relationship with your parents, whether they are living or dead. Emotional separation also permits you to
redefine
your life and yourself in terms of who you really are and where you really want to go, not in terms of your parents or your past.

16
SEPARATING FROM UNHEALTHY FAMILY TIES

Honor thy father and thy mother
.

—E
XODUS
20:12

Why isn't there a commandment to “honor thy children” or at least to “not abuse thy children
?”

—B
EVERLY
E
NGEL

E
motionally leaving home means emotionally separating from any hurtful or counterproductive links with your parents, your past, or your family role. In so doing, you discover new aspects of yourself and recover nuances of your personality long obscured by a controlled upbringing.

Family therapist Murray Bowen wrote that the level of emotional separation among family members, which he termed “differentiation,” is one of the key determinants of emotional health (409). As Bowen pointed out, you had little choice about how differentiated your family was. Yet you have great choice in your adult years as to whether you attain a greater degree of differentiation and emotional separation than your parents did.

Emotional separation is comprised of three elements:

  1. Observing
  2. Declaring your independence
  3. Mastering the challenges of separation

In healthier families, emotional separation takes place naturally and gradually, accelerating as children reach their teens. In controlling families, this emotional separation, if it is allowed at all, takes place unevenly. Controlling parents often lack the skills to help their children separate; young adults from controlling families often leave home
with overwhelming emotional baggage because a natural separation couldn't take place.

Emotionally separating from your parents is a major step in adult development. You may not know how big a blot a controlled upbringing is on your life until you begin to differentiate. Those I interviewed described how energizing it was to gain perspective about their painful pasts and take the reins of their lives. Many described feeling as if the “fog” had lifted. Others testified that, by just stepping back, they began to focus more on their own needs and less on their parents.'

Remember, you grew up under controlling-family brainwashing and it can take time and effort to free yourself. Remember, too, that there are many paths and a range of paces to emotional separation—there is no single right way or best speed. Often separation starts slowly, with baby steps over the course of many months. It can be enhanced by cultivating an internal ally—the strong part of you that is always there, watching—as well as by relying on external allies such as supportive friends, family members, therapists, teachers or mentors, self-help groups, or literature.

As a child, you may have tried to distance yourself from the pain of being controlled by complying, rebelling, distracting, dissociating, or outdoing your parents. While these methods helped you survive, they kept you emotionally tied to your parents and may still do so today.

Do one or more of these five coping strategies describe a posture you still find yourself taking with your parents?

Complying
: You seek the path of least resistance, doing what your parents want or what you think they would want, even when it means forgoing your own best interests.

Rebelling
: You seek the path of greatest resistance, automatically opposing your parents to avoid being controlled, even when rebelling harms you.

Distracting
: You make light of or change the subject, rather than directly face your parents' control even though it reduces your stature in your own or others' eyes.

Dissociating
: You daydream, sleep, seek out an addiction, or virtually avoid your parents rather than face the threat of parental control even though it costs you awareness and aliveness.

Outdoing
: You compulsively try to control yourself or your parents when you are around them, even though it heightens your stress.

As an adult, you have more options than complying, rebelling, distracting, dissociating, or outdoing. A valuable first step is observing.

Observing

Emotional separation begins with stepping back and observing. This means observing your parents, the effects they have on you, and your responses to them. Despite the “do something” orientation of many controlling families, often the best thing to do initially in a troubled relationship is simply to observe.

Observe how you feel before, during, and after contact with your parents. As one woman put it, “When I go home, I have to play the good daughter and be polite. I become part of this machine. My body is there but not my heart and spirit.”

After contact with your parents, do you feel valued or devalued? Content or irritable? Trusted or betrayed? Optimistic or hopeless? Accepted or judged? Confident or flustered? Energized or fatigued? On a scale of one to ten—ten being the biggest—what size do you feel in relationship to your parents? How does that compare to how you want to feel?

Ask yourself whether you have contact with your parents because you want to, or out of obligation, as Ellen Bass and Laura Davis suggested in
The Courage to Heal
. Your answer can tell you volumes about what the relationship both provides and costs you.

In addition to observing how you act and feel around your parents, notice how your parents act around you. A turning point in my relationship with my father came some years ago when I went to his house for my nephew's christening. I wasn't looking forward to being around my father because our relationship had grown icy and tense, but I did want to be there for the christening. A colleague suggested I use the visit to observe how my father controlled.

During my two-day visit I took my colleague's advice and mentally counted each controlling thing my father said or did. The total was in the dozens: He dictated when we ate, where we ate, when we got together, when we could approach him, when we had to halt other conversations to listen to him, even what we touched in his house. I was nearly forty and my father's control, as pervasive as it was, was infinitely milder than it had been when I was a child. Yet I still found myself hesitating and wondering what I had done wrong. I was receiving only a taste of what had been my steady emotional diet, but it was enough to dispel any doubts about how my father's control had haunted me as a boy.

By emotionally detaching myself in order to observe, I didn't have to fight anything my father did; everything he did was data I could learn from. Through observing, I realized his fundamental operating principle: Avoid domination by others. This helped me to see why he had raised me as he did and why he continues to control. Perhaps most important, I could appreciate how his fears and operating principle might prohibit our having the kind of relationship I wanted.

Contact with parents can become bearable, even a growth opportunity, by your becoming an information gatherer—a sort of family anthropologist. Observe how your parents control and what sets them off. Observe how you feel around them and whether your behavior changes in their presence. You may notice how like children controlling parents can be; in many ways, they have children's resources, views, and emotions. Their tantrums are children's tantrums; their attempts at control are children's attempts.

Observing means embarking on a research project. Rather than a “decision project” in which you have to know all the answers so you can act, a research project involves a transitional period of time in which you don't have to have instant answers. Everything that happens provides information that helps you to better meet your wants and needs. You don't have to be in a hurry; in fact, observing is best done when you don't feel pressured.

Of course, observing your parents won't work if the contact is too destructive or costly, but the benefit of observational experiments is that nothing can really go wrong. Everything that happens is data for you to synthesize in your own way, in your own time, for your own purposes.

Exercises for Observing

  1. Count the control moves
    . In your next conversation or visit with your parents, count each controlling thing they say or do. You might notice which of the Dirty Dozen methods they use (control of food, body, boundaries, social life, decisions, speech, emotions, and thoughts, along with bullying, depriving, confusing, and manipulating). Notice what precedes or seems to trigger their efforts to control. Notice how their control makes you feel. Your method of counting can be silent or overt. Keep a mental tally or take notes. Use a golf-score clicker or cough each time they do something controlling. Don't tell them what you are counting.
    Then ask yourself what it must have been like for a child to grow up around such control.
  2. Imagine that you are a
    60 Minutes
    reporter building a story about your parents
    . Use a tough-minded
    60 Minutes
    reporter's eye to see their apparent motivations, quirks, and inconsistencies.
  3. Visualize your parents in an imaginary shrunken terrarium that duplicates their living room
    . Imagine you are wearing a “Far Side” cartoon-style white lab coat as you observe their habits. Replay key incidents from your childhood, and study how your terrarium-dwelling parents controlled. When you stand at a distance, you'll see a lot about their styles.

Declaring Independence

Emotionally leaving home means declaring independence, but declaring independence in and of itself doesn't make you free. The American revolutionaries found that out in 1776 when they declared themselves free but had to fight to prove it. In the Declaration of Independence the American revolutionaries said to the world:

a. All people have inalienable rights.

b. The British misused their power and violated American rights.

c. That after unsuccessfully trying to work it out with the British, the Americans felt their only choice was to sever relations and declare themselves free.

It is a beautiful, ground-breaking document for human rights. Declaring their willingness to have the world judge the truth, the revolutionaries asked for nothing, threatened nothing, and declared that they needed nothing.

Emotionally separating from controlling parents may feel like a revolution: life-threatening, yet exhilarating. It's a bit like learning to walk. As a toddler you were so intent on walking that if you fell or bumped into things or looked awkward, you didn't care, because it felt so good to join the world of upright creatures and steer under your own power. Emotionally separating is like this; you may fall, bump into obstacles, or feel awkward, but autonomy brings joy and, oh, the places you can go!

Declaring your desire for independence, even silently, can empower you. It breaks the trance induced by growing up controlled and initiates the powerful process of separation. Declaring independence allows you to see how different you are from the others with
whom you identified. It can pave the way to stunning new perspectives about yourself and the world.

Declaring independence from your parents is different from denying their emotional impact on you. They are, after all, your connection to hundreds of ancestors, each of whom had a part in who you are today. You'll always have parents; their voices are present in your psyche even after they die. In denying your parents' role in shaping you, you risk denying a part of yourself. In acknowledging their role, you reclaim part of your heritage.

Exercises for Declaring Independence

  1. List the ways in which you have already achieved independence
    . Note the ways in which you have broken from parental practice and dogma—how you are fundamentally different from your parents.
  2. Write your own Declaration of Independence
    . Read the 1776 Declaration of Independence, list your rights (the “Bill of Rights for Those Who Grew Up Controlled” on page 239 may help stimulate your thinking), then consider how one or both of your parents violated them, what those violations cost you, and what you have tried to do about it. For many, declaring independence is an internal, private step never discussed with parents. For others, it may include some communication with one or both of them. (Chapter 18 will explore the issue of confronting parents who control.) You may even want to send your Declaration of Independence to your parents. If you do, sign it boldly, like John Hancock. Remember: You are doing this for you, not for them. That's what independence means.
  3. Independence Day
    . Take your birthday or other significant day as your personal Independence Day holiday. It might be the anniversary of the day you said no to controlling parents, literally left home, or turned a corner in emotional separation. Celebrate your Independence Day as one of your most special holidays.
  4. Channeling Dad/Mom
    . If you find yourself acting as your parents did, lightheartedly acknowledge that you are temporarily “channeling” Dad or Mom. Such actions are, in fact, like being possessed by a ghost from the past: Now, when I act bullheaded like my father, my friends chime in, “He's channeling Al.”

Another way to externalize your parents' influence is to see yourself as having a “Dad Attack” or “Mom Attack,” since the experience is like being overtaken with a coughing or a sneezing fit. Be assured that it will pass.

Mastering the Challenges of Separating

Emotional separation nearly always begins with pain. During the course of healing the pain may intensify, just as a cut or bruise hurts more in the early stages of mending.

Emotional separation accelerates when you give voice to the recognition that your parents controlled you in unhealthy ways. This can be hard to acknowledge because, if you grew up controlled, disagreeing with your parents may have had severe consequences. As a child, when you realized that something was wrong in your family you may have felt helpless to do anything about it, and grew frightened when you perceived your parents' limitations. This is a distressing recognition. After all, if the people you measured yourself against for so many years acted unhealthily, what does that say about the reliability of the lessons they taught you.

Yes, separation does bring losses, but these are necessary losses. You may have to give up the hopes or fantasies that your parents will protect you or be your “best friend.” But controlling parents probably judge you and love conditionally, so protection and closeness aren't realistic goals anyway.

BOOK: If You Had Controlling Parents
11.32Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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