Toxic Parents (27 page)

In the beginning you may understand, on an intellectual level, that it wasn’t your fault, but the little child inside you may still feel responsible. It takes time for your feelings to catch up to your new awareness. You may need to repeat this exercise several times.

“I D
ON’T
T
HINK
T
HEY
M
EANT
A
NY
H
ARM
”

You may feel especially reluctant to assign responsibility to your parents if they were inadequate, ill, had overwhelming problems of their own, or appeared to have good intentions.

Les—who, at the age of 8, had to take care of his younger brothers following his mother’s breakdown—clearly exemplifies this dilemma. I told Les that many of his struggles with women in his adult life were directly connected to the burdens of guilt and responsibility he had assumed as a child. Les remained unconvinced, despite the fact that he had gone through his responsibility list earlier in the session.

LES:
But I
am
responsible. My mother was so miserable. She still is. She needs me. I just want to make things better for her.

SUSAN:
How long have you been taking responsibility for her life?

LES:
Since I was eight.

SUSAN:
And who was responsible for you?

LES:
I guess I’ve always felt responsible for everybody, including myself.

SUSAN:
What would it mean, Les, if you began to hold your parents responsible for themselves?

LES:
How can you do that with someone who is depressed, pathetic . . . who’s never had a pleasurable day in her life. It wasn’t her fault. She went to doctors. She tried to get better. She didn’t want to be sick.

SUSAN:
That still doesn’t make it your responsibility. What about your father? How come he gets off the hook so easily? When is it his turn to start acting like an adult?

LES
(after much thought): You know something, I never thought about it that way. I guess he’s just weak.

SUSAN:
I recognize that with parents like yours, who weren’t overtly abusive, it’s a lot tougher to see how hurtful they were. But there was a lot of benevolent violence here. There was a lot of emotional neglect. No one ever cared about
your
life. You never got to have a childhood. The important thing here is not how much they were responsible for, but for you to realize that you
weren’t
responsible for any of it.

Les allowed this to sink in. He worked on his new awareness for the rest of the session. From that day on, his progress was much more rapid.

You may recognize that your parents were inadequate, depressed, ill, or unavailable, but you may still sympathize with their struggles. Your parents had very limited resources, after all; most people didn’t feel free to enter therapy thirty or forty years ago.
Your parents may be so passive that they seem helpless. You may be convinced that they intended no harm.

In many cases, I’m sure that no harmful intent existed, but speculating on intent is a waste of time. It’s the results that count. If harm was done by inadequate parents, the intent is irrelevant. Inadequate parents are responsible both for what they did do and for what they didn’t.

To help Les begin to see how true this was for him, I used an empty chair to symbolize his parents and played the role of Les myself. I wanted him to hear verbalized the things he had never been able to say for himself.

SUSAN (as Les):
Mom and Dad, when I was a little kid, I felt like nobody was ever there for me. I felt scared and I felt lonely, and I didn’t understand why nobody was looking out for me. I don’t understand, Mom, why I had to take care of you and why Dad didn’t do it. I don’t understand why I didn’t get to be a kid. I always thought it was because nobody loved me. I still feel that way! When are
you
going to stop draining me? When are
you
going to grow up? I’m so tired of feeling responsible for the whole family. I’m tired of being on call for you all the time. I’m tired of taking responsibility for the whole world. I’m tired of blaming myself for everything that went wrong. Mom, I’m sorry you were sick and unhappy, but it wasn’t my fault!

LES:
Everything you said was true. I’ve felt all those things. But I could
never
say those things to them.

SUSAN:
Never is a long, long time, Les. Right now it’s only important that you say them to yourself. Later, when we’ve done more work on this and you feel stronger, you might want to make a different choice.

Les began to see that his parents were adults and, as such, had certain basic responsibilities toward their children. By failing to attend to the physical and emotional needs of their children, his parents,
like all inadequate parents, created a cockeyed version of the parent-child relationship.

Once Les could truly see, believe, and feel these basic truths, he could rid himself of much of the self-blame that fueled his work-aholism and impaired his ability to be loving.

“H
E
W
AS
S
O
O
UT OF
C
ONTROL
”

Adults who were severely abused as children also have difficulty putting the responsibility where it belongs. Remember, accepting blame is a survival tool for abused children. They keep the myth of the good family alive by believing that they—not their parents—are bad. This belief lies at the core of virtually all self-defeating behavior patterns in adults who were abused as children. But, it is a belief that can be reversed.

Joe—the graduate student in psychology who had been horribly battered by his violent, alcoholic father—eventually came in for therapy with me. In his first session, he offered a good example of how tenacious self-blame can be.

JOE:
I can look back at my childhood and know that my father had a mean streak. But I still make excuses for him because maybe he really did believe that what he did to me was for my own good. In my head, I know what he did was horrible and that no child deserves to be treated like I was treated. But in my gut, I still feel like a rotten kid who deserved what he got. And I still feel so damned guilty that I couldn’t protect my mother.

SUSAN:
You managed to survive by taking all of the badness onto yourself. If you saw your father as bad when you were little, it would have been overwhelming and terrifying for you. But you’re not a little kid anymore, Joe. You have to start telling yourself the truth. And the truth is your father was one hundred percent responsible for abusing you, for his violence, and for his drinking. He was also one hundred percent responsible for making the choice to do nothing to resolve his problems and save his family. And while it’s more comforting for you to see your mother as an innocent victim, she was one hundred percent responsible for not protecting her children and herself. She permitted the abuse to continue. You’ve got to start putting the responsibility where it belongs. How are you ever going to be a counselor and help other people if you refuse to deal with reality in your own life?

JOE:
I hear everything you’re saying, Susan, but it’s just a lot of words to me.

Joe’s defenses seemed rock-solid. So, instead of talking to him directly, which seemed to stir up a lot of resistance, I asked Joe to play the role of his own father.

SUSAN:
I want to talk to you about some of the things that happened in Joe’s childhood. Joe has told me that you were pretty violent and beat him up a lot. He also told me that you’re an alcoholic.

JOE (as Father):
First of all, what went on inside my family is none of your goddamned business. If I hit him, it was just to toughen him up. And my drinking is my business.

SUSAN:
It may be your business, but you just about destroyed your family with it. You abused and terrified your son, and you abused and terrified your wife. Do you have any idea what that was like for Joe? Do you care how he felt?

JOE (as Father):
I couldn’t care less. All I care about is myself.

SUSAN:
I think you’re a horrible father. You’ve done nothing but cause a lot of people a lot of pain. I’m sure you were in pain yourself, but you were an adult, and he was a little boy. You could’ve done something to help yourself instead of hurting other people. You were responsible for your alcoholism then and now. I think you’re a coward who can only feel powerful by beating up on women and kids. All these years, Joe has felt he was to blame, when in reality, you were.

JOE (as Father):
Like hell! The little bastard used to mouth off at me all the time. He didn’t do his chores . . .

SUSAN (interrupting):
There was nothing Joe did or could have done to justify what you did to him.

Joe came out of character at this point.

JOE:
You know, I hate to admit it, but it felt really good for you to tell my dad off. I started to feel how angry and uptight he is . . . and I just didn’t want to hear anything you were saying to me. And you’re right, he did almost destroy the family. What a bastard he is. But I think he’s more scared than I am. At least I’m trying to deal with this stuff. He’s just been running away from it all his life. He really is a coward!

As painful as it was for Joe to acknowledge these things about his father, it was also very liberating. He was beginning to put the responsibility where it belonged and was ready to start absolving himself.

Joe had told me in a previous session that he loved working with children; he often did volunteer work at a children’s hospital. I asked him to visualize one of the children he worked with. Then, I asked Joe to imagine that this child was living through a childhood similar to his own. I put an empty chair in front of him and asked what he would say if that child were sitting there now.

Joe was uncomfortable with the suggestion, but after a bit of prompting he took a deep breath and began talking to the imaginary child:

I understand that there’s some bad stuff going on at your house. I’m really sorry. I hear your old man gets drunk and beats you up a lot. And he calls you bad names. And he tells you you’re no good. I know how scared you must feel. See, the same thing happened to me. And I bet you feel like it’s all your fault, too, but it isn’t. You’re really a good kid, and nobody has the right to do those things to you. Nobody! Your father’s mean. He’s sick. And he’s a coward because he won’t face any of his problems. I think he really enjoys beating you up; it makes me want to kill him!

Joe’s whole body shook with rage. I asked him who he had really been talking to. “Myself!” he shouted. “Jesus Christ, myself!”

Joe’s long-held rage was beginning to surface. He could finally start to assign responsibility to his parents for the pain and self-hatred he had borne all his life.

I asked Joe to imagine that his father was now in the chair. I reminded him that he was safe, he could say anything he wanted to. This time, Joe didn’t hesitate:

You bastard! You fucking son of a bitch! Do you have any idea what kind of misery you caused me? What kind of misery you caused the whole family? Must’ve made you feel like a real big man to beat up on a little kid! I’ve spent my whole life feeling like a worthless piece of shit, like I deserved getting my ass kicked. But I’m tired of hearing your put-downs. So, fuck you!

I wasn’t surprised by the intensity of Joe’s anger. Once you start putting the responsibility where it belongs, you are going to experience powerful anger at the things that were done to you and at the people who did them. But Joe was frightened by how much anger there was inside him. Like many adults who were beaten as children, he was afraid he might lose control and hurt someone, might fall apart, or might feel angry forever; he was afraid he might even go crazy.

Fear of Anger

Anger is an upsetting emotion. You may associate anger with abuse from your childhood. You may associate anger with people you saw
out of control with rage. You may worry that you’ll seem ugly if you get angry and that other people will reject you. You may believe that good, loving people don’t get angry, or that you have no right to get angry at the parents who gave you life.