If You Had Controlling Parents (8 page)

Key Characteristics of Chaotic Parents:

• Control through mystification and unpredictability
  
• Extreme difficulty setting consistent limits
  
• Use double binds, mixed messages, and bizarre reasoning
  
• Radically changeable behavior
  

Potential Consequences of a Chaotic Upbringing:

• Confusion about emotions
  
• Hypervigilance
  
• Reduced trust in others
  
• Life becomes an emotional roller coaster
  

Brittany, a twenty-three-year-old sales representative, can't put out of her mind the time she came home ten minutes past her curfew when she was sixteen. Her Chaotic, Abusing mom sprang from her chair and grabbed Brittany by the arm, wrenching and twisting, then digging her long fingernails into Brittany's flesh. Screaming that her daughter was a “tramp,” she sent Brittany to her room. Forty-five minutes later her
mother knocked on Brittany's door, and wearing a big smile carried in a gourmet dinner she'd cooked for her, complete with a rose in a bud vase. Brittany's childhood was full of such about-faces. It wasn't unusual for her alcoholic mother to ground Brittany, then within an hour tell her to go visit friends
.

When Brittany was seventeen, her mother got her a prescription for birth control pills and proclaimed her progressiveness by letting Brittany's boyfriend spend the night with Brittany at their house. When the couple came down to breakfast the next morning, her mother called Brittany a “slutty whore” and threw the boyfriend out
.

 

Brittany's mother bore a key trait of Chaotic parents: an inability to maintain an emotional middle ground. Unlike Smothering parents, who are too close, and Depriving parents, who are too distant, Chaotic parents encompass both extremes. “She'd go from babying me to practically kicking me out,” Brittany exclaims.

Chaotic parents often mete out harsh punishment, then pander. In their effort to stay afloat in a churning emotional sea, Chaotic parents counterbalance their most recent emotional excess by racing to embrace its opposite. Out of desperation, they often solicit outside authorities for help. Brittany's mother once called the police after she had pulled Brittany's hair and her daughter had in turn scratched her. When her mother demanded that the police arrest Brittany, they refused. One of the officers took Brittany outside and gave her his card in case she ever again needed help with her mother.

When Brittany was three, a car accident put her in a coma. Doctors told her mother that Brittany had only a 25 percent chance of survival. Yet her mother insisted on every test possible and never left her daughter's bedside. Now Brittany wonders, “After such a close call, you'd think she'd be happy I lived. So why did she abuse me so?”

Brittany articulates the fundamental, terrifying question that haunts many controlled children:

If they love me, why do they hurt me
?

The answers, too scary for young minds to contemplate and young hearts to accept, include:

Maybe they don't love me
.

Maybe they don't want me
.

Maybe they are not in control
.

Maybe they hurt me for no reason
.

Maybe they will hurt me no matter what I do
.

Rather than face these thoughts, children adopt other answers, still discomforting but less terrifying:

They hurt me because I am bad
.

They hurt me because I deserve it
.

They hurt me because they love me
.

Such answers allow children to grasp inexplicable events. If a child feels responsible for parental behavior, then he or she can control something by trying to change. Yet these rationalizations take a toll. Brittany still finds it extremely hard to tell when people are being duplicitous. She struggles to find solid emotional ground and suffers depression and low self-esteem.

Confusing Messages

Ina, a fifty-three-year-old social worker, was fourteen when she looked into her mother's taunting face, knowing chocolate cake was missing and that she, of all six children, was being called the thief. As Ina denied it and began to cry, her mother triumphantly said, “See, I knew you took it. If you weren't a thief, I wouldn't get a rise out of you
.”

Ina's childhood was saturated with no-win situations. Through bullying and crazy reasoning, Ina's mother put her children in constant binds. She warned Ina to watch out for “kidnappers,” then gave her daughter adult-strength sleeping pills when Ina developed night terrors about being kidnapped. Her mother ordered Ina to be smart and pretty, with top grades and lots of dates, yet discouraged her from acting smart or feeling pretty around the house
.

Curfews and other household rules were ignored one day, rigidly enforced the next: “I never knew what the rules were until I broke them. Sometimes I'd do something and get no response. The next time I'd do it, my mother would explode.” If Ina disagreed with her mother, she was labeled a “paranoid schizophrenic”; her mother even invited neighbors over to watch her daughter “act crazy
.”

 

Ina walked on eggshells because she never knew the rules, just as Brittany never knew her mother's next mood. “For years I thought I was nearly crazy, but since my mother labeled me a paranoid schizophrenic I was ashamed to ask for help,” Ina confesses. “It took years before I realized I was not crazy. I grew up in a crazy home. When she'd ridicule me, I'd tell her I didn't think she loved me. Then she'd say, ‘How can you say that? I told the neighbors the other day how wonderful you are and how much I love you.' It left me feeling totally confused.”

Chaotic parents like Ina's mother don't experience their inconsistent limits and mixed messages as erratic because their sense of who they are tends to vacillate. When they're sending a mixed message or enforcing a double standard, their actions are consistent with their momentary sense of self. As that sense of self changes, their actions change. Children of Chaotic parents can grow up thinking crazy things are normal because, for their parents, they were.

One major bind facing children of Chaotic parents is how to negotiate their needs for autonomy and intimacy. If a son or daughter wants to visit friends instead of staying home, Chaotic parents often act rejected and hurt. If the child stays home, Chaotic parents often become critical or rejecting. As a result, children of Chaotic parents feel guilty desiring either independence or closeness.

Chaotic Lifestyle

A similar sense of chaos can exist in some families with a parent who is mentally ill. While these parents are not to blame for their chaotic actions—they are ill, not bad—their controlling behavior can leave their children overwhelmed by chaos.

 

At ten, Celina, now a thirty-seven-year-old teacher, stood at the edge of the living room gathering up the courage to ask her mother a question, knowing requests often sent her mother into a panic. The family apartment was steadily accumulating stacks of flyers and newspapers and degenerating into chaos, and Celina needed a spot where she could practice her clarinet. Finally, she meekly asked for practice space. This time, unaccountably, her mother said yes. Many other times she had said no
.

Celina's mother was a paranoid schizophrenic who had emerged, ostensibly stable, from a psychiatric hospital two years earlier. Estranged from Celina's father, she raised her daughters on her own, and although earlier considered mentally stable, signs of her mental illness soon reappeared. She neatly stacked and labeled Celina's toys, but didn't allow Celina to play with them. She would buy three sizes of each item in Celina's wardrobe because she was paranoid about Celina's trying on clothes in the store. Celina and her brother couldn't go in certain rooms of the house because their mother feared that exotic diseases lurked there. The family often dined out because their mother was afraid to eat at home. Celina spent much of her childhood doing homework in restaurants
.

Summertime threw Celina's mother into a panic over planning what to do with the kids when school was out. Fall upset her because she had to go to the store to get new school clothes. When Celina was thirteen and asked for her first bra, her mother flew into a rage. “Bras? We can't have bras in this house,” she screamed. Celina only got a bra when it was required for gym class
.

 

The chaos took an early toll. Celina recalls being four years old, playing on the floor, when her mother and father began a vicious screaming match: “I remember taking some part of myself and burying it in the wood floor, pretending I was an innocent child and didn't notice the chaos. It's as if a part of me is still buried away in the floor.”

Celina's mother was desperately trying to control a world in which, because of her mental illness, she felt in free fall. “It was scary that she could change from an incredible yumminess to being a terrifying creature,” Celina recalls.

Her mother also stressed that Celina not draw attention to herself, which further confused Celina. Once, after enrolling Celina in an acting class, she warned her daughter to “be inconspicuous” in the class. At times the older woman seemed to think her children were parts of her. When people asked Celina how she was feeling, her mother would say, “We're tired.” As a result, Celina had difficulty in individuating. As a grade-schooler answering a question in class, Celina would begin, “My mother says…”

When Celina's mother's condition worsened, she threatened to turn on the gas and kill herself and her children if Celina's father returned and tried to take them away. Petrified, Celina would wait until her mother was asleep, then tiptoe to a window and open it. She did this even during frigid Minneapolis winters in case her mother decided that that night was the night to turn on the gas. Still, Celina didn't tell anyone about her chaotic home life for fear that she would be put in foster care.

Today Celina is trying to heal through therapy, support groups, and friendships. “I've always felt as if I have a Swiss bank account about learning, loving, and intimacy but nobody has given me the account number,” she shares. “I want the number that will open my Swiss bank account.”

Celina's case is, of course, an extreme example, since schizophrenia is at one extreme of the mental illness spectrum. Yet the common thread among Chaotic parents is communication rife with double binds and mixed messages. Chaotic parents are bandied about by feel
ings, fears, and needs, and that mercurialness envelops their children in a cyclone of confusion.

Self-Assessment

My parent(s):

• Had trouble finding an emotional middle ground
  
• Put out confusing and erratic rules and messages
  
• Applied discipline in ways that were too harsh, too loose, or inconsistent
  
• Showed abrupt about-faces in behavior and feelings
  
• Alternated between blind acceptance and total rejection of me and others
  

Next: Using Parenting

The next group of controlling parents, Using parents, actively take from their children in order to satisfy their own needs.

Key Characteristics of Using Parents:

• Control through demands for loyalty, admiration, and obedience
  
• Terrified of losing or feeling one down
  
• Emotionally immature
  
• Insensitive to others' needs and feelings
  

Potential Consequences of a Using Upbringing:

• Feeling used
  
• Poor self-image
  
• Mistaken ideas about love
  
• Difficulty in developing good emotional self-care habits
  

When Ellen, a forty-nine-year-old volunteer worker, was nine, she stood at the vanity mirror putting curlers in her mother's hair. Next, she plucked her mother's eyebrows and painted her nails. Later, Ellen sat next to the tub while her mother took a bath and talked about life. Finally, she brushed her mother's hair and told her how beautiful she looked
.

For another mother and daughter, such a scene might bring the coziness of mutual sharing and intimacy; for Ellen there was nothing cozy or reciprocal about the evening ritual. If she put a curler in wrong she'd get a tirade or a slap in the face. Other than her scripted comments about how beautiful her mother looked, Ellen was expected to be silent while her mother complained about real or imagined slights
.

 

Using parents tend to see life in terms of what they can get out of it. When children's needs conflict with parental needs, the children are seen as nuisances, problems, or threats. Like Ellen, children of Using parents spend their lives feeding their parents' hunger for attention, approval, and love.

Ellen's Using, Abusing mother used her daughter as servant, listener, and emotional punching bag. She called Ellen a “mistake” and often told her, “I gave up a good life for you.” She frequently blamed Ellen for the C-section scar she received in giving birth to her. This is a classic Using-parent bind: Ellen was made to feel that her very existence had hurt her mother, an act over which Ellen had no control and one that she could do nothing to remedy.

When Ellen was eight, her mother, embarrassed and furious because Ellen swam poorly in a swim meet, dragged her home and forced her to take off her swimsuit, walk naked to the garage, and throw the suit in the trash. She often punished her daughter by backing her in a corner and forcing her to drop her hands so that she could slap her. The slaps hurt, but making Ellen drop her hands added a deeper injury because it blocked her instinct for self-defense. By teaching children not to defend themselves, Using parents increase the risk that their children may end up in unhealthy relationships or may develop self-abusive behaviors.

Ellen's father had died when she was two and her mother had quickly remarried. Claiming Ellen's dad had been unfaithful, her mother destroyed all pictures of him. As Ellen grew up, she hungered to know more about her father, but her mother would never discuss him. After an aunt told Ellen she looked like her father, she asked her mother, begging, “Do I look like Dad?”

To which her mother coolly replied, “I don't know. I never noticed.”

Using parents' self-esteem rises a notch when they put someone else down. Even today, when Ellen wears a dress her mother likes, the older woman angrily demands, “Why didn't you buy me that?” When Ellen wears a dress her mother dislikes, her mother snidely asks, “What's that you're wearing? You look like a clown.”

When Using parents feel slighted, they often become enraged. Many a child of Using parents can tell stories of going into restaurants or stores and watching, petrified, as their parents fumed over perceived bad service, bullying waiters or clerks whom they saw as too slow or not sufficiently deferential.

Using parents themselves were generally terribly misused or tormented as children. Because they received little approval, they grew up feeling unworthy and inadequate. As a result, they demand worship from their children—a reflection of their desperate need for self-esteem. Using parents are justifiably angry about their pasts, yet despite their great capacity for gaining access to their rage, they seem remarkably disconnected from most emotions. Ellen recalled, “Sometimes my mother would look really mad and I'd ask her if she was upset. But she'd always deny it, so I could never figure out if my perceptions were true or false.” To Ellen, her mother seemed bitter and self-centered: “She seemed to have no reference for how she treated people and how others saw her.”

Her mother's behavior cost Ellen dearly. In school she was the model student—quiet, obedient, and with good grades—but had no friends: “I never looked up. I had zero personality.” She was afraid to dance, date, or listen to rock and roll. Her childhood was riddled with allergies, sleep disorders, chronic headaches, and eczema, all of which cleared up when she went away to college.

Self-Centered

Magda, a thirty-six-year-old civil servant, recalls her sixth birthday as an occasion for joy—for her father. He bought her a box kite, something he'd always wanted for himself. “He always got me things he wanted. He would play with them until they broke, all the while ignoring me and any questions I had. Afterward, he'd think we'd had a good time
.”

At first, Magda's father had a soft spot for his daughter. “He was quite taken with me as a baby,” she says today. “He'd get down on the floor and do baby talk with me.” But as Magda grew older and began to be more independent, her dad seemed to lose interest: “I was a cute, adorable little pet until I started developing my own opinions.” When Magda was nine, her father left the family
.

 

Magda's father had a classic trait of Using parents: immaturity. By ostensibly choosing toys for her that he played with himself, he reverted to being a child. Using parents give themselves free rein to
have tantrums, expecting others to compensate for their excesses. Children of Using parents rarely have a chance to be children because Using parents take up all the room for childishness in the family.

Like Magda's father, many Using parents see their newborn children as “blank canvases” who are totally dependent on them and on whom they can make their mark. Many derive a sense of mission from the early days of parenting; they see it as a “project” they imagine will fill their unmet needs or distract them from their problems. But when the children begin developing stronger identities and move toward independence, their parents feel angry and betrayed. Feeling rejected by their “creations,” these parents emotionally—and sometimes physically—abandon them.

Magda's adult legacy has been relationships with men in which she has felt little right to voice her needs—and often fears being deserted by partners after even a minor disagreement.

Jealous

Using parents see life as a series of situations in which only one person can win and victory must come at others' expense. The parents don't want to lose, even if it means their children end up the losers. This may explain why such parents often seem jealous of others' success or good fortune and become intent on spoiling others' joy.

 

On her high school graduation night, Robin, now a fifty-three-year-old design artist, proudly clutched her red-and-white tassel as she climbed into the backseat of her parents' car. After the ceremony, her mother grumbled to her father, “Well, I suppose we have to do something special for her.” As they drove around aimlessly, Robin's parents began arguing over what they should do to celebrate. Each parent vetoed the other's suggestions, with her mother and father eventually screaming at each other. Robin cowered in the backseat, tearfully asking to be taken home
.

The evening had been only the latest in a long string of burst bubbles. When Robin brought home an eighth-grade report card with a teacher's note reading, “You deserve all the luck in the world,” her mother snapped, “Luck doesn't just happen; you have to go out and make it happen
.”

Often it seemed that her mother was downright mean. When Robin was twelve, her piano teacher told her she had real musical promise. Within a week, her mother, who seemed jealous anytime her daughter was acknowledged by others, stopped paying for Robin's lessons
.

Her mother seemed jealous of Robin's relationship with her stockbroker father. When Robin would sit raptly listening to him talk about his day, her mother would shoot her dagger looks and would be cool toward her for days after. And, when Robin got engaged, her mother's first words were, “What if you discover something bad about him
?”

 

Robin grew up feeling terribly alone. During our interview, she tearfully told me that when she was ten, she'd take a floor mop out of the closet for solace: “I'd pretend the mop was a twin sister and my best friend. Can you imagine—a floor mop?”

Robin's Using, Depriving mother was also hypersensitive to real or imagined slights from others: “After interactions with people, my mother would say, ‘Did you see how she looked at me? Did you see how she talked to me? Did you see how anxious they were to leave?'”

Robin dutifully listened to her mother but had nobody to listen to her: “No one noticed my pain. I tried so hard to be good. I always blamed myself for not being perfect and lovable.” Her self-image was so poor that when a junior high counselor announced she was going to be part of a special class, Robin assumed it was for “dumb kids.” After the counselor told her that it was for smarter children, she replied, “No, that can't be. I'm too dumb.”

Recalls Robin: “I was dumbfounded. I had no clue as to my abilities.”

Using parents tend to see life primarily in terms of how it affects them. At a time when Robin was nervously caring for her six-week-old infant, suffering from the flu, and facing a stack of unpaid bills, her mother visited, expecting to be waited on. Seeing her mother giddily playing with the baby, Robin asked, “How come you never treated me like that?” Her mother departed, screaming, and wouldn't talk to Robin for weeks.

Using parents have little ability to see their children's emotional needs because they cannot consistently provide for themselves emotionally. If they were wounded as children and never got help, their wounds developed into an emotional abyss of unfulfilled dreams and unmet needs. Using parents are terrified of exploring this void; instead, they look to others to fill it. Children of Using parents learn that their primary job is to do nothing that will pose a problem for their parents.

Perhaps because Using parents feel empty, they try to accumulate wealth and status—just as some Perfectionistic and Cultlike parents do. They tend to have contempt for others who do or have less than
they do, envy others who do or have more, and possess an underlying fear that if they were to lose their own status or belongings they'd be worthless. Robin's mother, for example, talked longingly of her youth, telling stories of servants, beautiful linens, and being treated like a princess. Yet Robin wonders how much of this was true; an aunt once hinted that Robin's mother grew up with cold, remote parents and was often shuttled off to relatives for months at a time without any explanation.

Just as perplexing to their children, many Using parents often are admired by others from outside the family. The children wonder what's wrong with them because they see a tormentor instead of the charming, witty, attractive mother or father others tell them they are so lucky to have. As we'll see in Part Three, healing from a controlling parent involves, in part, honoring your own experience and perceptions, despite others' views, so that you can have a full-palette view of your parents.

Narcissistic

Although the style of Using parents is most similar to what we think of as unhealthy narcissism, all eight styles of controlling parents share it. Narcissism is a distorted sense of self that leads one to see and treat others as unequal. The American Psychiatric Association's fourth
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(661) describes narcissistic individuals as those who tend to:

• Have a grandiose sense of self-importance
  
• Be preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited power or beauty
  
• Believe they are special and unique
  
• Require excessive admiration
  
• Feel entitled to be obeyed
  
• Take advantage of others
  
• Be unwilling or unable to recognize others' needs and feelings
  
• Envy others or believe others envy them
  
• Act arrogantly
  

Psychiatrist Charles Whitfield, in
Boundaries and Relationships
(134), observed that narcissistic parents tend to:

• See others primarily in terms of whether they can be useful or threatening
  
• Blame others rather than accept responsibility
  
• Try to dominate and control people, places, and things
  
• Be emotionally unaware, numb, or hypersensitive
  
• Project their character defects onto others
  
• Be hypersensitive to criticism or rejection
  
• Inappropriately express or internalize their anger
  
• Be perfectionistic
  
• Lack empathy
  
• Feel draining to be around
  

One of the most poignant moments in all my interviews was at the end of my interview with Ellen, whose mother, you'll recall, was a notably narcissistic parent who blamed her daughter for the cesarean she was forced to have in giving birth to her.

Ellen, twenty-nine years after dropping out, has returned to college to get a degree in art, her lifelong love. As we talked, she sat on her apartment patio by the water, the setting sun painting her profile a rosy orange. During our interview Ellen's forty-nine-year-old face at times looked sixty-nine, creased by exhaustion and grief. At other times she looked twenty-nine, peaceful and calm as she spoke of the strength and peace she has derived from setting emotional boundaries between herself and her mother.