If You Had Controlling Parents (6 page)

Strikingly, more than half of those people interviewed, not just those raised by Depriving parents, wondered as children if their parents really loved them. Such deprivation can make children feel so unworthy that by the time they reach adulthood they expect abandonment in relationships or find commitment terrifying. They may become hypersensitive to signs that a partner might leave.

Self-Assessment

My parent(s):

• Played “take away” with their love and approval
  
• Gave me scarce praise or physical affection
  
• Threatened to disown or disinherit me
  
• Viewed good fortune as scarce or unattainable
  
• Seemed cold or unfeeling
  

Next: Perfectionistic Parenting

The next style of parents, Perfectionistic parents, endlessly drive themselves and their children to be the “best.”

Key Characteristics of Perfectionistic Parents:

• Control through pressure to be perfect and the best
  
• Mortally afraid of flaws, disorder, or uncleanliness
  
• Driven and compulsive
  
• Emphasize appearances, status, material goods, or what others think
  

Potential Consequences of a Perfectionistic Upbringing:

• Emotional “bottled-upness”
  
• Feeling valued for what you
  do
  instead of who you
  are
  
• Compulsivity
  
• Second-guessing and self-doubting
  
• Depression
  

Twenty-eight-year-old Will is a teacher, but thirteen-year-old Will, his sandy hair cropped close for speed in swimming, was a sure bet to make his school's junior varsity swim team. His father was insisting that Will bypass junior varsity and try out for varsity two years earlier than the
normal age. On tryout day his dad drove him to school, unleashing a barrage of pressure and coercion. During tryouts, Will failed to make the team. Afterward, he recalled, “I got a two-hour lecture, with me in tears being grilled about why I let that happen
.”

The next year Will did make varsity and became a champion swimmer. But when he barely missed qualifying for the nationals, his dad berated him for his shortcomings rather than acknowledging what he had accomplished
.

 

Will's father bore a trademark of Perfectionistic parents: the conviction that life is a performance and that anything short of perfection is failure. While most parents want good things to happen to their children, Perfectionistic parents insist that their children
make
good things happen: Will is convinced that, “My father's life was filled with regrets. He felt he hadn't become enough. He was trying to beat the game of life through me.”

As a child, Will played his father's game devotedly: “I'd start out every school year saying, ‘I'm going to do it perfectly, twenty-six hours a day, and make them proud.'” By his teens, Will felt numb. “I had nobody I could talk to. I didn't know what I wanted or what I felt. I remember looking at the mirror and feeling that the reflection had my soul.”

As an adult, Will has had problems with authority figures and has carried a hard emotional edge that has nearly precluded intimate relationships. A combination of twelve-step programs and martial arts has helped him begin to recover his soul from the mirror.

Pressure to Perform

Perfectionistic parents often pressure the most when their children most need support, such as during sporting, cultural, and academic contests or performances.

 

Elizabeth, a thirty-one-year-old travel agent, is haunted by an event that happened when she was ten. Clad in black leotards for a gymnastics competition, she was standing on the balance beam when she heard her mother say to her father, almost in a stage whisper, “God, she's so awkward.” Within moments, Elizabeth fell from the beam
.

“
I knew how not to fall off but I lost my concentration after hearing her,” she says. “I have a picture of me that day. I looked so sad. After that, I didn't compete
.”

Just as Elizabeth suddenly lost her balance, children of Perfectionists often grow up feeling like physical, mental, or emotional klutzes. There are several reasons for this: They get little praise or constructive guidance from their self-involved parents; they are shamed for their failures, which makes it harder to try again; they live with anxiety, which makes it harder to feel at ease and perform well; and, for some children of Perfectionists, being less capable than their parents is a form of loyalty, allowing the parent to always be the one who looks graceful, brilliant, and in charge.

Elizabeth's Perfectionistic, Using mother demanded perfect obedience: “When my parents had company, my sister and I had to come curtsy good night to guests. We could help serve dinner but never be a part of it. It was like parading out pets. We were not valued for ourselves, but for being hers.”

Her mother drilled Elizabeth in every social detail. After rehearsing with Elizabeth how to say hello when answering the phone, her mother would leave and call her daughter, hanging up and ringing back repeatedly until Elizabeth's hello was sufficiently “ladylike” and “friendly.” Insisting that to be a good cook Elizabeth had to develop a keen sense of taste, her mother allowed her only one taste of each dinner item, after which Elizabeth had to name correctly every ingredient in the dish before she could go on eating.

Elizabeth's father practiced a different form of food control. He encouraged Elizabeth to cook desserts for him in home economics class, inviting her to eat the desserts with him. At the same time, he told her she was fat and that no boy would want to date her.

Elizabeth's father rarely seemed to have time for her, and when he did, he was impatient. Once, while her father was building a deck, nine-year-old Elizabeth asked if he would teach her how to pound nails so she could help him. When she tapped too gently on the first nail and it fell over, he grabbed the hammer from her and told her to leave him alone.

Pressure to Excel

Perfectionistic parents apply heavy pressure on their children when it comes to choices of schools, hobbies, and careers. When I was sixteen, on the morning of my first college interview, my father was up early, sternly finding fault with everything I did: how I tied my tie, how long I took in the shower, how quickly I ate. By the time I arrived at the interview, I was a wreck.

My father, a man of great wit, ambition, charm, and self-discipline, had always run our family much like his large corporation. At home, as at work, he valued winning, discipline, and the absolutism of his authority. From outward appearances, we were a successful, happy—even model—family. But inside, we were troubled. My father's love seemed of a strange sort, encrusted with tirades without warning, searing criticism, perfectionism, and ironclad rules. My mother, a sensitive soul, acquiesced to his domineering early on, and I was left confused about love, life, and myself. Like many controlled children, I second-guessed and self-blamed.

By the college interview, I'd had years to get used to my father's withering criticism. But you never get used to it; it always hurts. I was able to cope, even perform during the interview—children of controlling parents learn this well—and I was admitted to that college. That was all that mattered to my father. But to me, his behavior was cruel and confusing. I remember being puzzled, one of countless times I was puzzled in my youth. What had I done wrong? Why was he so upset? I was the one being interviewed, not him. More than anything, I wanted to hear my father say what children of Perfectionistic parents most yearn for but rarely hear: “Just do your best. I'll be proud of you no matter what.”

Like many Perfectionistic parents, my father launched into tirades to discharge
his
anxiety about my performance. His behavior also reflected his lack of thought as to what I needed or wanted. Perfectionistic parents intermingle their own dreams with their children's lives and lack the perspective to acknowledge the difference.

Status Worship

Many Perfectionistic parents worship beauty, status, power, or money to the point where the coveted item takes on a near religious quality, revered beyond reason.

 

Brenda, now a fifty-four-year-old homemaker, is a frizzy redhead who grew up in Los Angeles, where her father had a small shop for which her mother kept the books. She recalls being aware even at age ten that her “Barbie-doll parents” were obsessed with the “look of Hollywood.” But Brenda was born looking completely different from her second-generation Italian-immigrant parents: “I came out looking very Irish. Though some of the relatives lauded my red hair, pug nose, and freckled face, and endearingly call me ‘Brick Top' or ‘Rusty,' I felt ugly and worthless in my parents' eyes
.”

Brenda remembers having a hearty guffaw until her father said disgustedly, “Don't you have a different kind of laugh
?”

 

One of the most costly traits of Perfectionistic families is that they dictate that not only their children's appearance and performance, but also their emotions, must be “perfect.” “Imperfect” feelings like sadness, doubt, grief, anger, or fear are not tolerated. Perfectionistic households are grimly serious; Brenda cannot recall a time when her Perfectionistic, Depriving parents laughed. Today Brenda finds it hard to relax, laugh, or be spontaneous: “When someone takes away your laugh, they take away your soul.”

Brenda's father frequently called her a “whore” and “damaged goods.” At sixteen, as she waited outside a movie for her father to pick her up, a group of boys began sexually harassing her. She ran inside the lobby to escape, so her father drove past several times before Brenda saw him. He was furious at the delay and after she told him what had happened, he slapped her face and yelled, “You know why, don't you? You look like a little slut. I don't even want to look at you.”

Disdain for “Flaws”

Sometimes a parent's silent disapproval of a child's “imperfections” can be as painful as scathing criticism.

 

Chip, twenty-nine, is finishing his junior college degree. His wealthy parents, mainstays of the Boston philanthropic scene, adopted him when they were physically unable to have children. But when Chip was diagnosed with learning and physical disabilities at age six, his father pulled away
.

Each time Chip's accomplishments fell short of other children's, he felt like damaged goods. To this day, he wonders whether his parents' inability to have a child, compounded by adopting one who turned out to be “flawed,” wounded his father's ego
.

 

Because Chip felt as though his Perfectionistic father never believed in him, he has found it hard to believe in himself. At age twenty-nine, Chip is finishing a junior college degree. His ten-year path to get his degree has been studded with dozens of menial jobs, aimless travel, and drug use.

In recent months Chip has tried to make up for lost time. When he told his parents he hoped to go to a top-notch university and major in
anthropology, both parents tried to dissuade him: “My dad told me, ‘You're just setting yourself up for disappointment.'” But in our interview, Chip proudly told me of the letter of acceptance to the University of Michigan he'd received a few days earlier.

Obsessions

Many Perfectionistic parents seem obsessed with order and cleanliness.

 

Deirdre is a thirty-six-year-old office manager. When she was eleven, she and her brother went to live with her father and stepmother in Arkansas. Her stepmom immediately set down the rules. Clothes on hangers had to face the same way, buttons buttoned, zippers zipped. The pockets on Deirdre's clothes were sewn shut so they wouldn't get dirty or torn. Drawers were labeled, their contents organized by size. On the TV lay a pair of white gloves that the children had to use when they changed channels so they didn't get the TV dirty
.

Deirdre recalls seeing her stepmom break down in tears when finding a single hair in a sink. Deirdre also remembers waking up at three
A.M.
more than once to the sound of her stepmother vacuuming, often following a marital spat
.

Deirdre's father, a preacher, could not tolerate “downtime” among the children: “Dad would walk through the living room when we were watching TV and grumble, ‘What are you going to do, watch that all day?' It got so when we heard him come home we'd turn off the TV and scramble to start housecleaning
.”

 

A certain amount of order is necessary in any home, but Perfectionistic parents, particularly those who also have Cultlike tendencies like Deirdre's stepmom's, have routines for eating, sleeping, cleaning, and talking that children disrupt at their peril. These parents seem panicked or enraged when something isn't where they expect it to be. They cannot bend with the innate disorderliness of children and life. By demanding excessive order, controlling parents act as if their children are furniture—which needs to be cleaned occasionally, but which doesn't make trouble and is always exactly where you left it. Controlling parents don't like their children to be too bubbly or rambunctious.

Deirdre still struggles with her own compulsive neatness: “Last week I found myself walking around after my boyfriend, straightening up each time he touched something.”

Self-critical parents who see their children as extensions of themselves can't help but judge their children harshly. Perfectionistic parents may focus on children's failures and “flaws” as an excuse to withhold love. In so doing, they sidestep the vulnerabilities inherent in loving another. Yet because perfectionists find fault with everyone, they are always disappointed. They try to be perfect so others will love them, yet they can never succeed. They try to make their children perfect so they can love their children more, but both they and their children are destined to fail.

Self-Assessment

My parent(s):

• Pressured me to perform
  
• Demanded unrealistically high standards
  
• Did not tolerate flaws or mistakes
  
• Seemed obsessed with cleanliness and organization
  
• Seemed fixated with status, appearance, or prestige
  

Next: Cultlike Parenting

In their quest to escape flaws by demanding the best, Perfectionistic parents share similarities with the next style, Cultlike parents. Cultlike parents seek to escape uncertainty by always having to be “right” and “in the know.”