Toxic Parents (21 page)

The Healthiest Member of the Family

Many people are shocked when I say that the incest victims I’ve worked with are usually the healthiest members of their families. After all, the victim usually has the symptoms—self-blame, depression, destructive behaviors, sexual problems, suicide attempts, substance abuse—while the rest of the family often seems outwardly healthy.

But despite this, it is usually the victim who ultimately has the clearest vision of the truth. She was forced to sacrifice herself to cover up the craziness and the stress in the family system. All her life she was the bearer of the family secret. She lived with tremendous emotional pain in order to protect the myth of the good family. But because of all this pain and conflict, the victim is usually the
first to seek help. Her parents, on the other hand, will almost always refuse to let go of their denials and defenses. They refuse to deal with reality.

With treatment, most victims are able to reclaim their dignity and their power. Recognizing a problem and seeking help is a sign not only of health but of courage.

8 | Why Do Parents Behave This Way?

The Family System

W
e are all forged in a crucible called family. In recent years, we have come to recognize that “family” is more than a collection of related people. It is a system, a group of interconnecting people, each of whom affects the others in profound and often hidden ways. It is a complex network of love, jealousy, pride, anxiety, joy, guilt—a constant ebb and flow of the full range of human emotions. These emotions bubble up through a murky sea of family attitudes, perceptions, and relationships. And like the sea, very little of the inner workings of a family system is visible from the surface. The deeper you dive, the more you discover.

Your family system constituted your entire reality when you were young. You made decisions as a child—about who you are and how you’re supposed to interact with others—based on how your family system taught you to see the world. If you had toxic parents, you probably made decisions such as: “I can’t trust anybody”; “I’m not worth caring about”; or, “I’ll never amount to anything.” Those
decisions were self-defeating and need to be changed. You
can
change many of these early decisions, and with them your life scenario, but you must first understand how much of what you feel, how you live, and what you believe has been shaped by your family system.

Remember, your parents had parents too. A toxic family system is like a multicar pile-up on the freeway, causing damage generation after generation after generation. This system is not something that your parents invented; it is the result of the accumulated feelings, rules, interactions, and beliefs that have been handed down from your ancestors.

Beliefs: There Is Only One Truth

If you want to begin to make sense of the confusion and chaos of a toxic family system, you need to look first at family beliefs, especially those beliefs that determine how parents interact with their children and how children are supposed to behave. One family, for example, may believe that a child’s feelings are important, while another may believe that a child is a second-class citizen. Such beliefs determine our attitudes, judgments, and perceptions. They are incredibly powerful. They separate good from bad and right from wrong. They define relationships, moral values, education, sexuality, career choices, ethics, and finances. They mold family behavior.

Reasonably mature and caring parents will have beliefs that take into consideration the feelings and needs of all family members. They will provide a solid basis for a child’s development and subsequent independence. Such beliefs might be: “children are entitled to disagree”; “it’s wrong to deliberately hurt your child”; or, “children should feel free to make mistakes.”

A toxic parent’s beliefs about children, on the other hand, are almost always self-centered and self-serving. They believe things like, “children should respect their parents no matter what”; “there are only two ways to do things, my way and the wrong way”; or, “children
should be seen but not heard.” These types of beliefs form the soil from which toxic parental behavior grows.

Toxic parents resist any external reality that challenges their beliefs. Rather than change, they develop a distorted view of reality to support the beliefs they already have. Unfortunately, children lack the sophistication to discriminate between true reality and distorted reality. As children of toxic parents grow up, they carry their parents’ distorted beliefs unchallenged into their own adult lives.

There are two types of beliefs: spoken and unspoken. Spoken beliefs are expressed or communicated directly. They are out there. You can hear them. Spoken beliefs are often disguised as words of advice, expressed in terms of “shoulds,” “oughts,” and “supposed to’s.”

These overtly expressed beliefs have the advantage of giving us something tangible to wrestle with as we become adults. Although these beliefs may have become a part of us, the fact that they are stated makes them easy to examine, and perhaps to discard in favor of beliefs that are more relevant to our lives.

For example, a parental belief that divorce is wrong might keep a daughter in a loveless marriage. But the belief can be challenged. The daughter can ask herself, “What’s ‘wrong’ with divorce?” And her answer to that question may lead her to reject her parents’ belief.

It’s not as easy to reject a belief that you don’t even know exists. Unspoken beliefs can dictate many basic assumptions about life. They exist below the level of awareness. These are the beliefs that were implied by the way your father treated your mother, or by the way either one of them treated you. They are an important part of what we learn from our parents’ behavior.

It is a very rare family that will sit down to dinner to discuss beliefs such as: “women are second-class citizens”; “children should sacrifice themselves for their parents”; “children are bad by nature”; or, “children should stay inadequate so their parents can stay needed.” Even if the family knew that they held these beliefs, few would admit to them. Yet these negative unspoken beliefs dominate
many families with toxic parents, disastrously affecting their children’s lives.

Michael—whose mother threatened to have a heart attack when he moved away—provided a telling example of unspoken parental beliefs:

For years I felt like a bad son because I moved to California and got married. I really believed that if you don’t put your parents above everything else in life, you’re a rotten kid. My folks never came out and said that, but I got the message loud and clear. No matter how terribly they treated my wife, I never defended her against them. I really believed that children are supposed to take whatever their folks dish out. I was supposed to crawl to them to make amends. I was their little sap.

Michael’s parents’ behavior communicated their belief that they were the only ones with rights and privileges. Without saying it, they infused in Michael the belief that only their feelings counted, and that Michael existed only to make them happy. These beliefs were strangling Michael; they almost destroyed his marriage.

Had Michael not come in for therapy, he probably would have passed these beliefs on to his own children. Instead, he learned to recognize his unspoken beliefs, which enabled him to challenge them. Michael’s parents, like all toxic parents, reacted by being punitive and withdrawing their love. This was a tactic to regain control of Michael’s life. Thanks to Michael’s new understanding of his relationship with his parents, he didn’t fall for that one either.

“W
OMEN
C
AN’T
S
URVIVE
W
ITHOUT
M
EN TO
T
AKE
C
ARE OF
T
HEM
”

Kim—whose volatile father controlled her with his moods and his money—also accepted many of her parents’ unspoken beliefs. As she described it:

My father and mother had a horrible marriage. She was scared to death of him, and I’m sure he hit her, even though I never actually saw him do it. Lots of times, I would go in to comfort her because she’d be sobbing in her bed, and she would tell me how miserable she was with him. I used to ask her why she didn’t leave him, and she’d say, “What do you want me to do? I don’t have any skills, and I couldn’t stand giving all of this up. Do you kids want us to be out on the street?”

Without knowing it, Kim’s mother reinforced the belief Kim had already learned from her father’s behavior: women are helpless without men. This belief led Kim to remain dependent on her powerful father, but the price was her dignity and her chance for a healthy relationship.

There are as many different parental beliefs as there are parents. They form the skeleton of our intellectual perception of the world. This skeleton’s flesh is made up of our feelings and behaviors; the skeleton gives them shape. When toxic parents provide us with distorted beliefs, our feelings and behaviors may become as skewed as the skeleton beneath them.

Spoken and Unspoken Rules

From parental beliefs come parental rules. Like beliefs, parental rules evolve over time. Rules are the manifestations of beliefs. They are the enforcers, the simple “do’s and don’ts.”

For example, a family belief that people should marry only within their religion would spawn such rules as: “don’t date anyone from another religion”; “do date boys you meet at church”; and, “don’t approve of friends who fall in love with someone not of their faith.”

As with beliefs, there are spoken rules and unspoken rules. Spoken rules may be arbitrary, but they tend to be clear: “spend every
Christmas at home,” or, “don’t talk back to your parents.” Because they are out in the open, we can, as adults, challenge them.

But unspoken family rules are like phantom puppeteers, pulling invisible strings and demanding blind obedience. They are unseen, covert rules that exist below the level of awareness—rules such as: “don’t be more successful than your father”; “don’t be happier than your mother”; “don’t lead your own life”; “don’t ever stop needing me”; or “don’t abandon me.”

Lee—the tennis teacher whose mother couldn’t do enough for her—lived by a particularly damaging unspoken rule. Her mother enforced the rule every time she imposed herself under the guise of helping. When she offered to drive Lee to San Francisco, or clean up Lee’s apartment, or bring over dinner, her underlying belief was: “as long as my daughter can’t take care of herself, she’ll need me.” This belief translated into the rule: “don’t be adequate.” Of course, Lee’s mother never said these words, and if confronted she would unquestionably deny wanting her daughter to remain helpless. But her behavior told Lee exactly how to keep her mother happy: stay dependent.

Kim’s father did the same thing. He laid down rules to govern his daughter’s life without ever having to verbalize them. As long as Kim picked inadequate men, as long as she kept going back to her father to bail her out, and as long as her need for his approval dominated her life, she was obeying the unspoken rule: “don’t grow up, always be Daddy’s little girl.”

Unspoken rules have a tenacious hold on our lives. To change them, we must first understand them.

Obedience No Matter What

If beliefs are the bones and rules are the flesh of the family system, then “blind obedience” is the muscle that propels that body.

We blindly obey family rules because to disobey is to be a traitor to one’s family. Allegiances to country, political ideals, or religion
pale in comparison to the intensity of the allegiance to family. We all have these loyalties. They bind us to the family system, to our parents, and to their beliefs. They drive us to obey the family rules. If these rules are reasonable, they can provide some ethical and moral structure for a child’s development.

But in families with toxic parents, the rules are based on family role distortions and bizarre perceptions of reality. Blind obedience to these rules leads to destructive, self-defeating behavior.

Kate—who was beaten by her father—shows how hard it is to escape the cycle of blind obedience:

I really think I want to get well. I don’t want to be depressed. I don’t want to screw up relationships. I don’t want to have the kind of life I’m living. I don’t want to be angry and afraid. But every time I get close to taking some positive steps for myself, I blow it. It’s like I’m terrified to give up the pain, it feels so familiar. Like it’s the way I’m
supposed
to feel.

Kate was obeying her abusive father’s rules: “accept the fact that you’re the bad one”; “don’t be happy”; and, “endure the pain.” Anytime she came close to defying these rules, the power of her loyalty to the family system proved much stronger than her conscious wishes. She had to obey, and when she did, the familiarity of her feelings was comforting, despite the fact that they were painful. Obedience seemed the easy way out.

Glenn, too, was being loyal to his family when he took his alcoholic father into his manufacturing company and gave money that he needed to his mother. He believed that his parents would fall apart if he didn’t take care of them. The family rule was: “take care of others, no matter what the cost to yourself.” Glenn brought the rule with him into marriage. He obeyed it by devoting his life to rescuing his father, rescuing his mother, and rescuing his alcoholic wife.