Toxic Parents (17 page)

All my life I felt like I’ve been living a lie. It’s horrible not being able to talk freely about something that affected my life so strongly. How do you get over the pain of something if you can’t talk about it? Sure, I can talk about it in therapy, but I still can’t talk about it to the people who held all this power over me all those years. The only person I could ever talk about it with was the maid. I felt she was the only person in the world I could trust. Once, after my dad beat me, she said, “Honey, your dad’s very sick.” I never understood why he didn’t go to the hospital if he was so sick.

I asked Kate what she thought would happen if she confronted her father and mother about her childhood. She stared at me for a few moments before replying:

As for my father, I’m sure he’d fall apart . . . and then we’d be in big trouble. My mother would probably get hysterical. And my sister would be furious with me for dredging up the past. She won’t even talk to
me
about it!

Kate’s allegiance to the “family secret” was the glue that was holding the family together. If she broke the bond of silence, the family would fall apart.

All of this is just welling up inside me. Every time I’m with them . . . I mean nothing ever changes. My father still gets very nasty with me. I feel like exploding and telling them how angry I am, but I sit there and bite my lip. When my father gets mad at me today, my mother pretends she doesn’t hear what’s going on. I was at my high school reunion a few years ago and I felt so hypocritical. My classmates all thought I had such a great family. I thought, “If they only knew.” I wish I could tell my parents how they ruined my high school years. I want to scream at them that they hurt me so much I can’t love anyone. I can’t have a loving relationship with a man. They’ve paralyzed me emotionally. They still do. But I’m too scared to say anything to them.

The adult in Kate was crying out to confront her parents with the truth, but the battered, frightened child in Kate was too terrified of the consequences. She was convinced that everyone would hate her for letting the cat out of the bag. She believed the entire fabric of her family would unravel. As a result, her relationship with her parents had become a charade. Everyone pretended that nothing bad had ever happened.

K
EEPING THE
M
YTH
A
LIVE

I was not surprised when Kate told me that her high school classmates thought she had a great family. Many abusive families are able to present a very “normal” facade to the rest of the world. This apparent respectability is in direct opposition to the family’s reality. It forms the basis of a “family myth.” Joe’s family myth was typical:

It’s such a goddamned farce whenever I get together with my family. Nothing’s changed. My father still drinks, and I’m sure he’s still hitting my mother. But from the way we all act and talk, you’d think we were
Leave It to Beaver.
Am I the only one who remembers what it was like? Am I the only one who knows the truth? It doesn’t really matter because I never say anything anyway. I’m just as phony as the rest of them. I guess I can’t let go of the hope that maybe someday things will be different. Maybe if we pretend hard enough, we
will
be a normal family.

Joe was caught in the same terrible conflict between wanting to confront his parents and fearing that he’d rip the family apart. When he was in high school he had written letters about how he really felt:

I really poured my heart out in those letters, stuff about being beaten and ignored. Then I’d leave them out on my dresser, hoping my folks would read them. But I never knew if anyone did. No one ever said a word about them. I tried a diary for a while when I was in my late teens. I left that lying around, too. To this day, I don’t know if my folks ever read any of it, and honest to God, I’m still too terrified to ask them.

It was not fear of another beating that prevented Joe from asking his parents about the diary or the letters. By high school, he was too
grown-up for that. But if they had read his pleas and hadn’t responded emotionally, he would had to have given up his fantasy that some miracle might someday give him the key to their love. After so many years, he was still afraid to find out whether they had invalidated him yet one more time.

At an Emotional Crossroads

Abused children have a caldron of rage bubbling inside them. You can’t be battered, humiliated, terrified, denigrated, and blamed for your own pain without getting angry. But a battered child has no way to release this anger. In adulthood, that anger has to find an outlet.

Holly, 41, a stocky, stern-faced housewife with short, prematurely gray hair, was referred to me after being reported to the Department of Social Services by a school counselor for abusing her 10-year-old son. Her son was living temporarily with her husband’s parents. Even though her therapy was court-mandated, she proved to be a highly motivated client.

I’m so ashamed of myself. I’ve slapped him in the past, but this time I really went berserk. That kid makes me so damned angry.. . . You know, I always promised myself that if I had kids, I’d never raise a hand to them. Christ, I know what that’s like. It’s horrible. But without even realizing it, I’m turning into that crazy mother of mine. I mean, both my folks hit me, but she was the worst. I remember one time she chased me around the kitchen with a butcher knife!

Holly had a long history of acting out—that is, translating strong emotional impulses into aggressive action. As a teenager, she was in constant trouble and several times was suspended from school. As an adult, she described herself as a walking powder keg:

Sometimes I have to just leave the house because I’m afraid of what I’ll do to my kid. I feel like I can’t control myself.

Holly’s anger exploded onto her young son. In other extreme cases, repressed anger can express itself as violent criminal behavior, ranging from wife beating to rape to murder. Our jails are filled with adults who were physically abused as children and never learned to express their anger appropriately.

Kate, on the other hand, turned her anger inward. It found physical ways to express itself:

No matter what anybody says or does to me, I can’t ever stand up for myself. I just never feel up to it. I get headaches. I feel lousy most of the time. Everyone walks all over me, and I don’t know how to stop them. Last year, I was sure I had an ulcer. I had stomachaches all the time.

Kate learned to be a victim early in her life and never stopped. She had no idea how to protect herself from being used or victimized by others. In this way she perpetuated the pain she had experienced as a child. Not unexpectedly, her enormous accumulated rage had to find a way out, but since she was afraid to express it directly, her body and her moods expressed it for her: in the form of headaches, a knotted-up stomach, and depression.

L
IKE
F
ATHER
, L
IKE
S
ON
?

In some cases, the abused child unconsciously identifies with his abusive parent. After all, the abuser looks powerful and invulnerable. Victimized children fantasize that if they possessed these qualities, they would be able to protect themselves. So, as an unconscious defense, they develop some of the very personality traits that they most hate in their toxic parent. Despite fervent promises to themselves to be different, under stress they may behave
exactly like their abusers. But this syndrome is not as widespread as most people assume.

For many years it was commonly believed that almost all battered children became battering parents. After all, this was the only role model they’d had. But current studies challenge these assumptions. In fact, not only have a good many formerly abused children grown into nonabusing adults, but a number of these parents have great difficulty with even modest, nonphysical methods of disciplining their children. In rebellion against the pain of their own childhoods, these parents shy away both from setting limits and from enforcing them. This, too, can have a negative impact on a child’s development, because children need the security of boundaries. But the harm done by overpermissiveness is usually far less significant than the damage done by a batterer.

The good news is that the adult victims of abusive parents
can
overcome their self-loathing, fusion to their parents, unresolved anger, overwhelming fears, and inability to trust or to feel safe.

7 | The Ultimate Betrayal

The Sexual Abusers

I
ncest is perhaps the cruelest, most baffling of human experiences. It is a betrayal of the most basic trust between child and parent. It is emotionally devastating. The young victims are totally dependent on their aggressors, so they have nowhere to run, no one to run to. Protectors become persecutors, and reality becomes a prison of dirty secrets. Incest betrays the very heart of childhood—its innocence.

In the last two chapters, we have looked into some of the darker realities of toxic families. We have met parents who have an extraordinary lack of empathy and compassion for their children. They batter their children with every weapon from degrading criticism to leather belts, and they still rationalize their abuses as acts of discipline or education. But now we enter a realm of behavior so perverse that it defies rationalization. This is where I must leave behind strictly psychological theories: I believe that sexual violation of children is a genuinely evil act.

What Is Incest?

Incest is difficult to define because the legal and psychological definitions are worlds apart. The legal definition is extremely narrow, usually defining incest as sexual intercourse between blood relations. As a result, millions of people did not realize they were incest victims because they had not been penetrated. From a psychological point of view, incest covers a much wider range of behaviors and relationships. These include physical contact with a child’s mouth, breasts, genitals, anus, or any other body part, that is done for the purpose of sexually arousing the aggressor. That aggressor does
not
have to be a blood relative. He or she can be anyone whom the child perceives as a family member, such as a stepparent or an in-law.

There are other types of incestuous behaviors that are extremely damaging even though they may not involve any physical contact with the child’s body. For example, if an aggressor exposes himself or masturbates in front of the child, or even persuades the child to pose for sexually suggestive photographs, he is committing a form of incest.

We must add to our definition of incest that the behavior has to be kept secret. A father who affectionately hugs and kisses his child is doing nothing that needs to be kept secret. In fact, such touching is essential to a child’s emotional well-being. But if that father strokes the child’s genitals—or makes the child stroke his—that is an act that must be kept secret. That is an act of incest.

There are also a number of far more subtle behaviors that I call psychological incest. Victims of psychological incest may not have been actually touched or assaulted sexually, but they have experienced an invasion of their sense of privacy or safety. I’m talking about invasive acts like spying on a child who is dressing or bathing, or repeatedly making seductive or sexually explicit comments to a child. While none of these behaviors fits the literal definition of incest, the victims often feel violated and suffer
many of the same psychological symptoms as actual incest victims do.

T
HE
I
NCEST
M
YTHS

When I first began my efforts to raise public awareness about the epidemic proportions of incest, I met with tremendous resistance. There is something particularly ugly and repellent about incest that keeps people from wanting even to acknowledge that it exists. In the last ten years, denial has begun to give way in the face of overwhelming evidence, and incest has become an acceptable—if still uncomfortable—topic for public discussion. But another obstacle still remains: the incest myths. They have long been articles of faith in our mass consciousness, beyond challenge. But they are not true, and they never were.

MYTH
:
Incest is a rare occurrence.

REALITY
:
All responsible studies and data, including those from the U.S. Department of Human Services, show that at least one out of every ten children is molested by a trusted family member before the age of 18. Only as recently as the early 1980s did we begin to realize just how epidemic incest is. Prior to that time, most people believed that incest occurred in no more than one out of a hundred thousand families.

MYTH
:
Incest happens only in poor or uneducated families or in isolated, backward communities.

REALITY
:
Incest is ruthlessly democratic. It cuts across all socio-economic levels. Incest can occur as easily in your family as in the back hills of Appalachia.

MYTH
:
Incest aggressors are social and sexual deviants.