Toxic Parents (40 page)

Sandy was truly transforming the destructive interaction between herself and her parents. She set reasonable limits on their intrusive, controlling behavior while at the same time making no attempt to change their attitudes and beliefs.

One of the most difficult parts of letting go of the struggle is letting your parents be who they are. You don’t have to lie still while
they ride roughshod over you, but when they try, you do have to learn to tolerate your anxiety and control your reactions.

As Sandy expected, her parents were very upset with her new behavior. They didn’t acknowledge that they had been intruding in her life and treating her like a child, but Sandy didn’t need their acknowledgment. She had taken control of her life. Over time, her parents grudgingly accepted her new ground rules.

Sandy had been expending a lot of energy on her struggle with her parents. Now that she had let go of the struggle, she could redirect that energy toward her marriage and her personal goals. She and her husband actively set aside time to talk, to make plans, to make love, and to give their relationship the attention it needed. She also started to work toward her goal of someday owning a florist shop. About two years after she left therapy I was delighted to receive a flyer announcing the opening of Bouquets by Sandy.

You may continue to behave as if you were little or helpless because you are waiting for your parents to give you permission to be an adult. But the permission is within
you
, not them. When you truly let go of the struggle, you will find that you no longer have a need to sabotage your life.

Redefining Love

Love involves more than just feelings. It is also a way of behaving. When Sandy said, “My parents don’t know how to love me,” she was saying that they don’t know how to behave in loving ways. If you were to ask Sandy’s parents, or almost any other toxic parents, if they love their children, most of them would answer emphatically that they do. Yet, sadly, most of their children have always felt unloved. What toxic parents call “love” rarely translates into nourishing, comforting behavior.

Most adult children of toxic parents grow up feeling tremendous confusion about what love means and how it’s supposed to feel. Their parents did extremely unloving things to them in the name of
love. They came to understand love as something chaotic, dramatic, confusing, and often painful—something they had to give up their own dreams and desires for. Obviously, that’s
not
what love is all about.

Loving behavior doesn’t grind you down, keep you off balance, or create feelings of self-hatred. Love doesn’t hurt, it feels good. Loving behavior nourishes your emotional well-being. When someone is being loving to you, you feel accepted, cared for, valued, and respected. Genuine love creates feelings of warmth, pleasure, safety, stability, and inner peace.

Once you understand what love is, you may come to the realization that your parents couldn’t or didn’t know how to be loving. This is one of the saddest truths you will ever have to accept. But when you clearly define and acknowledge your parents’ limitations, and the losses you suffered because of them, you open a door in your life for people who will love you the way you deserve to be loved—the real way.

Trusting Yourself

When you were young, like all children, you used your parents’ approval or disapproval as a gauge to determine whether you were good or bad. Because the approval of your toxic parents was so distorted, that gauge often required you to sacrifice your own version of reality in order to believe in something that didn’t seem right to you. As an adult, you may still be making that sacrifice.

However, through the exercises in this book, you are shifting the source of your gauge from within your parents to within yourself. You are learning to trust your own perception of reality. You will discover that even when your parents don’t agree with you or don’t approve of what you’re doing, you will be able to tolerate the anxiety because you don’t need their validation anymore. You are becoming self-defined.

The more self-defined and independent you become, the less
your parents are going to like it. Remember, it is the nature of toxic parents to be threatened by change. Toxic parents are often the last people in the world to accept your new, healthier behavior. That’s why it is so important that you trust your own feelings and perceptions. In time, your parents may accept the new you. You may even develop something resembling an adult-to-adult relationship with them. But they also may dig in even deeper and fight to maintain the status quo. Either way, it’s up to you to free yourself from the destructive rituals of your family behavior patterns.

Becoming a true adult is not a linear process. It will take you upward, downward, forward, backward, and inside out. Expect to falter; expect to make mistakes. You will never be totally free of anxiety, fear, guilt, and confusion. No one is. But these demons will no longer control you. That is the key.

As you gain more control over your past and present relationship with your parents, you will discover that your other relationships, especially your relationship with yourself, will improve dramatically. You will have the freedom, perhaps for the first time, to enjoy your own life.

Suggested Reading

Beattie, Melody.
Codependent No More.
New York: Harper/Hazeldon, 1987.

Black, Claudia.
It Will Never Happen to Me.
Denver: M.A.C. Publishers, 1982.

Bowen, Murray.
Family Therapy in Clinical Practice.
New York: Jason Aronson, 1978.

Bradshaw, John.
Healing the Shame That Binds You.
Pompano Beach: Health Communications Inc. 1988.

Clarke, Jean Illsley.
Self-esteem: A Family Affair.
Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1978.

Forward, Susan, and Craig Buck.
Betrayal of Innocence: Incest and Its Devastation
(revised edition). New York: Viking Penguin, 1988.

Fossum, Merle A., and Marilyn J. Mason.
Facing Shame: Families in Recovery.
New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1986.

Halpern, Howard M.
Cutting Loose: An Adult Guide to Coming to Terms with Your Parents.
New York: Bantam Books, 1978.

Herman, Judith.
Father-Daughter Incest.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Kempee, C. H.
The Battered Child.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Miller, Alice.
For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child Rearing and the Roots of Violence.
New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1983.

Miller, Alice.
Prisoners of Childhood.
New York: Basic Books, 1981.

Weissberg, Michael, M.D.
Dangerous Secrets: Maladaptive Responses to Stress.
New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1983.

Whitfield, Charles L.
Healing the Child Within.
Pompano Beach: Health Communications Inc., 1987.

Woititz, Janet Geringer.
Adult Children of Alcoholics.
Pompano Beach: Health Communications Inc., 1983.

A
BOUT
T
HE
A
UTHORS

S
USAN
F
ORWARD
, P
H.
D., is an internationally renowned therapist, lecturer, and author of the number-one
New York Times
bestsellers
Toxic Parents
and
Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them
, as well as
Obsessive Love; Betrayal of Innocence: Incest and Its Devastation; Money Demons; Emotional Blackmail; When Your Lover Is a Liar;
and
Toxic In-Laws.
In addition to her private practice, for five years she hosted a daily ABC talk radio program. She has also served widely as a group therapist, instructor, and consultant in many Southern California medical and psychiatric facilities, and she formed the first private sexual abuse treatment center in California. She lives in Los Angeles and has two grown children.

Susan Forward maintains offices in Sherman Oaks, California. For further information, call (818) 986-1161.

C
RAIG
B
UCK
, a film and television writer and producer, has also written extensively on human behavior for many national magazines and newspapers. He is the co-author, with Susan Forward, of
Toxic Parents, Obsessive Love, Betrayal of Innocence
, and
Money Demons.
He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.

Read on for an excerpt from Susan Forward’s

Men Who Hate Women and the
Women Who Love Them

1
|
The Most Romantic
Man in the World

I
t’s the Rodgers and Hammerstein way to fall in love. You see him across a crowded room, your eyes meet, and that certain thrill surges through you. Your palms grow damp when he stands near you; your heart beats faster; everything in your body seems to be more alive. This is the dream of happiness, sexual fulfillment, and completion. This man will appreciate and be responsive to you. Just being near him is exciting and wonderful. When it happens it’s overpowering. We’ve come to call it
romantic love
.

Rosalind was 45 when she met Jim. She is a striking woman, tall, with auburn hair and a trim figure, which she works hard to keep in shape. She has a distinctive style of dressing that shows off her height and her artistic flair. She owns an antique shop and is a successful dealer, collector, and appraiser of advertising art, which is her specialty. Rosalind was married twice before and has a grown son. She was excited about meeting Jim because she’d heard so much about him from her friends. They took her to hear him play with a local jazz group. Afterward, when the four of them went out for a drink, Rosalind felt very drawn to Jim, who was tall, dark, and extremely good-looking.

Jim and I were very attracted to each other. We talked about kids and music. He told me he’d been married before and that his two kids lived with him. I was impressed with that. He was interested in hearing about my antique shop because he was doing some furniture refinishing and was interested in the market in general. He asked me if he could see me again the next night. When the check came, I could see he didn’t have much money, so I volunteered to make us dinner at my place for our next date. He took my hand and squeezed it and just caught my eyes with his for a moment. I could tell he was grateful that I’d understood his position.

The next day I thought about him constantly, and when he came over that night it was wonderful. After dinner I put on the music to
A Star Is Born
, being the romantic nut that I am, and so there we were, dancing to this music in my living room; he’s holding me so close and the world is just spinning around me. Here’s this man who really likes me, who’s strong, who’s willing to work on a relationship. All this stuff is flashing through my mind while I’m floating away with him, feeling so terrific. It was the most romantic thing that ever happened to me.

Jim was 36 when he met Rosalind. He was as carried away as she was by their romance; she was the woman he’d been looking for all his life. As he later told me:

She was beautiful and had a figure that wouldn’t quit. She had her own business and was making a go of it by herself. She’d raised her son and seemed to have done a good job of that. I’d never met anyone like her. She was outgoing and bubbly and enthusiastic about everything I was doing with my life, even about my kids. She was perfect. I started calling all my friends to tell them about her. I even called my mother. I tell you, I never felt like that before. I never thought about anyone so much or dreamed about them all the time like I dreamed about her. I mean, this was really different.

After their third date, Rosalind started writing her name with his last name to see how it looked. She canceled social engagements for fear of missing his calls; and Jim didn’t disappoint her. Instead of behaving like a “typical man,” he became as involved with her as she was with him. He always phoned when he said he would—no more waiting for weeks for a man to call—and he never put his work ahead of his need to see her. Together, they were on an exciting emotional roller-coaster.

My client Laura’s whirlwind courtship started out literally “across a crowded room.” At the time, she was a successful account executive for a major cosmetics firm, a very pretty woman with light brown hair, dark almond-shaped eyes, and a slender figure. She was 34 when she and Bob first met. She was out one evening with a woman friend at a restaurant:

I had gone to make a phone call and when I returned to our table there was this very handsome man sitting there talking to my friend. He had noticed me and was waiting for my return. There was electricity between us from that first moment. I don’t think I was ever so attracted to anyone before in my life. He had those flashing eyes that I just can’t resist. I was so turned on by him that I couldn’t wait to go to bed with him.

We got together the next night for our first date. He took me to a lovely little restaurant on the ocean, and he took care of ordering. He’s one of those men who knows all about wines and foods and I just love that in a man. He seemed interested in everything about me—what I did, how I felt about things, what I liked. I talked and talked and he just sat there, gazing at me with those electric eyes, absorbing everything I said. After dinner we went back to my place and listened to music together, and then I seduced
him
. He was too much of a gentleman. I loved that about him. Of course, it was terrific with him sexually, and that was it. I felt closer to him than I ever had to any man before in my life.