Toxic Parents (22 page)

Glenn railed against his blind obedience, but he couldn’t seem to free himself.

They never gave a damn about me when I was a kid, but somehow I have to take care of them. It makes me sore as hell. No matter what I do for them, it doesn’t change anything. I hate it, but I just don’t know any other way to do it.

T
HE
O
BEDIENCE
T
RAP

The kind of obedience I’m talking about is not a matter of free choice; it is rarely the result of a conscious decision. Jody—who became her father’s drinking buddy when she was 10—left therapy abruptly because her growing awareness was forcing her to challenge the belief that she was the bad one. She was breaking the rules that said, “don’t tell the truth”; “don’t grow up and leave Daddy”; and, “don’t have healthy relationships.”

On paper, these rules seem ridiculous. Who would obey a rule like “don’t have healthy relationships”? Unfortunately, the answer is, most adult children of toxic parents. Remember, these are mostly
unconscious
rules. No one sets out to have a bad relationship, but that doesn’t stop millions of people from doing it over and over again.

When I asked Jody to examine her family beliefs, and what her obedience to the family rules was doing to her life, her anxiety caused her to leave therapy. It’s as if she were saying, “My need to obey my father is more important than my need to get well.”

Even if both parents are dead, their adult children continue to honor the family system. Eli—the rich man who lived like a pauper—realized after several months of therapy how his father was still controlling him from the grave:

It’s so astounding to me that all the fear and guilt I feel whenever I try to do something nice for myself is my way of not betraying my father. I’m doing well. I
don’t
have to worry about my world collapsing. But I still have trouble getting that through my thick skull. My father’s voice keeps coming back from the grave to tell me how my business success can’t last, every woman I date is out to make a fool of me, every business associate is out to cheat me. And I believe him. It amazes me. It’s like being miserable is my way of keeping his memory alive.

The payoff for Eli in living a narrow, unfulfilling life was the comfort of remaining loyal to the family by embracing his father’s beliefs (“life is meant to be endured, not enjoyed”) and obeying the family rules (“don’t spend your money” and “don’t trust anybody”).

Blind obedience forges our behavior patterns early in life and prevents us from escaping those patterns. There is often a huge gap between our parents’ expectations and demands and what we really want for ourselves. Unfortunately, our unconscious pressure to obey almost always overshadows our conscious needs and desires. We can discard destructive rules only by turning a light on the unconscious and bringing those rules to the surface. Only when we can see the rules clearly can we exercise free choice.

I Don’t Know Where You End and I Begin

The single most dramatic difference between healthy and toxic family systems is the amount of freedom that exists for family members to express themselves as individuals. Healthy families encourage individuality, personal responsibility, and independence. They encourage the development of their children’s sense of adequacy and self-respect.

Unhealthy families discourage individual expression. Everyone must conform to the thoughts and actions of the toxic parents. They promote fusion, a blurring of personal boundaries, a welding together of family members. On an unconscious level, it is hard for family members to know where one ends and another begins. In their efforts to be close, they often suffocate one another’s individuality.

In an enmeshed family you pay for intermittent feelings of approval and safety with your selfhood. For example, you may not be
able to ask yourself, “Am I too tired to see my folks tonight?” Instead, you may have to ask, “If I don’t go, will Dad get angry and hit Mom? Will Mom get drunk and pass out? Will they stop talking to me for the next month?” These questions arise because you already know how responsible you’ll feel if any of these events occur. Every decision you make becomes intricately interwoven with the rest of your family. Your feelings, behaviors, and decisions are no longer your own. You are not yourself, you are an appendage of your family system.

T
O
B
E
D
IFFERENT
I
S TO
B
E
B
AD

When Fred decided to go skiing instead of spending Christmas with his family, he was trying to be an individual, trying to free himself from his family system. Instead, all hell broke loose. His mother and his siblings treated him like the Grinch who stole Christmas, shoveling guilt by the trainload. Instead of skiing with his lover down the idyllic slopes of Aspen, Fred sat alone in his hotel room, nervously cradling his telephone, desperately seeking forgiveness for the misery his family blamed him for causing.

When Fred tried to do something healthy for himself—something that the rest of the family disapproved of—his family formed a united front against him. He became the common enemy, the threat to the system. They attacked with anger, blame, and recriminations. Because he was so tied in to the family, the guilt he felt was enough to bring him back into line.

In families like Fred’s, much of a child’s identity and his illusions of safety depend on feeling enmeshed. He develops a need to be a part of other people and to have them be a part of him. He can’t stand the thought of being cast out. This need for enmeshment carries right into adult relationships.

Kim fought this need when she ended her marriage:

Even though the marriage wasn’t that great, at least I felt part of somebody. And when it ended and he suddenly wasn’t there, I felt terrified. I felt like I was nothing. I felt like I didn’t exist. I guess the only time I feel okay is when I’m with a man and he tells me I’m okay.

When Kim was little, her enmeshment with her powerful father created a precarious security for her. Whenever she attempted to separate from him, he found ways to stifle her independence. As an adult, she could not feel safe unless she was part of a man and a man was part of her.

Enmeshment creates almost total dependence on approval and validation from outside yourself. Lovers, bosses, friends, even strangers become the standins for parents. Adults like Kim who were raised in families where there was no permission to be an individual frequently become approval junkies, constantly seeking their next fix.

The Family Balancing Act

As we saw in Michael’s case, an enmeshed family can maintain an illusion of love and stability as long as no one attempts to separate and as long as everyone follows the family rules. When Michael decided to move away, to marry, to begin his own family, and to lead a life separate from his parents, he unwittingly upset the family balance.

Every family creates its own balance to achieve some sort of stability. As long as family members interact in certain familiar and predictable ways, this balance, or equilibrium, is not upset.

The word
balance
implies serenity and order. But in a toxic family system, maintaining balance is like a precarious high-wire act. In such families, chaos is a way of life, becoming the only thing they can depend on. All of the toxic behaviors we’ve seen so far—even battering and incest—serve to maintain this precarious family balance. In fact, toxic parents often fight the loss of equilibrium by
increasing
chaos.

Michael is a perfect example. If his mother could create enough uproar in the family, Michael’s guilt would drag him back to settle things down. He would do anything to restore the balance in the family, even if he had to surrender control over his own life. The more toxic the family, the less it takes to threaten it, and the more any imbalance seems like a threat to survival. That is why toxic parents may react to even minor deviations as if their lives were at stake.

Glenn upset his family balance by telling the truth. He explained:

One day when I was about twenty, I decided I was going to confront my father about his drinking. I was terrified to do it, but I knew something was wrong. I decided to tell my father that I didn’t like the way he acted when he was drunk, and I didn’t want him to do it anymore. It was amazing what happened. My mother jumped to his defense, making me feel guilty for even bringing it up. My father denied everything. I looked to my sisters for support, but they just tried to make peace. I felt terrible, like I’d done something awful. The fact is, I’d exposed a truth: that my father was an alcoholic. But I just ended up feeling crazy for even trying.

I asked Glenn whether his attempt to expose the truth had had any lasting effect on family interactions.

It was amazing. I was like a leper. Nobody wanted to talk to me. Like, who was I to make accusations? They treated me like I didn’t exist. I couldn’t take being ignored by my family anymore. So I shut up about the drinking. I didn’t talk about it for another twenty years . . . until now.

In Glenn’s family, everyone had a role designed to perpetuate the family system. Dad’s role was to drink; Mom played the co-dependent; and, in a reversal of roles, the children played parents.
This was predictable and familiar and therefore felt safe. When Glenn tried to challenge these roles, he threatened the balance. His punishment was exile to an emotional Siberia.

It doesn’t take much to kick off a crisis in a toxic family system: Father loses his job, a relative dies, an in-law moves in, a daughter starts spending too much time with a new boyfriend, a son moves out, or Mother gets sick. As Glenn’s family did when he tried to confront his father’s drinking, most toxic parents respond to crisis with denial, secrecy, and, worst of all, blame. And that blame always targets the children.

H
OW
T
OXIC
P
ARENTS
C
OPE

In a relatively well-functioning family, parents tend to cope with life pressures by
working out
problems through openly communicating, exploring options, and not being afraid to seek outside help if they need it. Toxic parents, on the other hand, react to threats to their balance by
acting out
their fears and frustrations, with little thought for the consequences to their children. Their coping mechanisms are rigid and familiar to them. Among the most common:

1. Denial.
   As you’ve seen throughout this book, denial is often the first coping mechanism to which toxic parents resort to regain equilibrium. Denial has two faces: “nothing is wrong” and “something was wrong but it won’t happen again.” Denial minimizes, discounts, jokes away, rationalizes, or relabels destructive behavior. Relabeling—a form of denial—takes a problem and hides it behind euphemisms. An alcoholic becomes a “social drinker”; a batterer is a “strict disciplinarian.”
   

2. Projection.
   Projection also has two faces: parents may accuse the child of the very inadequacies they suffer from, and they may blame the child for the toxic behaviors that result from their inadequacies. For example, an inadequate father who can’t hold down a job will accuse his son of being lazy and shiftless; an alcoholic mother will blame her daughter for causing the unhappiness that drives her to drink. It is not unusual for toxic parents to use both kinds of projection to avoid taking responsibility for their own behavior and their own deficiencies. They need to find a scapegoat, and it’s often the most vulnerable child in the family.
   

3. Sabotage.
   In a family with a severely dysfunctional parent—crazy, drunk, ill, or violent—other family members will assume the roles of rescuers and caretakers. This creates a comfortable balance of weak/strong, bad/good, or sick/healthy. If the dysfunctional parent starts to get better or enters a treatment program, this can severely threaten the family balance. The rest of the family (especially the other parent) may unconsciously find ways to sabotage the dysfunctional parent’s progress so that everyone can return to his or her familiar role. This can also happen if a troubled child starts to improve. I have seen toxic parents pull their child out of therapy when the child shows signs of becoming healthier.
   

4. Triangling.
   In a toxic family system, one parent will often enlist the child as a confidant or ally against the other parent. Children become part of an unhealthy triangle in which they are being pulled apart by the pressure to choose sides. When Mom says, “I’m miserable with your father,” or Dad says, “Your mom won’t sleep with me anymore,” the child becomes an emotional dumping ground, allowing the parents to relieve themselves of some of their discomfort without having to face the source of their problems.
   

5. Keeping secrets.
   Secrets help toxic parents cope by turning their families into private little clubs to which no outsiders are admitted. This provides a bond to pull the family together, especially when the family balance is threatened. The child who hides abuse by telling her teacher that she fell down the stairs is protecting the family club from outside interference.