Toxic Parents (9 page)

As we explored some of the roots of his obsession with saving money, it became apparent that his father’s voice, even twelve years after his death, still resounded in Eli’s head:

My parents were poor immigrants. I grew up in total squalor. My folks, particularly my father, taught me to be afraid of everything. He would say, “It’s a savage world out there, if you don’t watch your step you’ll get eaten alive.” He made me feel that I had nothing to look forward to except danger, and he didn’t stop even after I’d gotten married and made a lot of money. He’d always be giving me the third degree about what I was spending on things and what I bought. And when I made the mistake of telling him, his standard response was, “You idiot! You waste money on luxuries. You should be saving every penny. Hard times will come, they always do, and then you’ll
need
that money.” It got to the point that I was terrified to spend a penny. My father never thought of life as something that could be enjoyed, he just saw it as something we had to endure.

Eli’s father projected the terrors and hardships of his own life on his son. When Eli went on to success, he heard his father’s admonitions every time he tried to enjoy the fruits of his labor. His father’s
catastrophic predictions formed a never-ending tape loop in Eli’s head. Even if Eli could bring himself to buy something for his own pleasure, his father’s voice would prevent him from enjoying it.

His father’s general mistrust of the future carried through to his thoughts on women. Like success, women would inevitably turn on you someday. He had a suspicion of women that bordered on paranoia. His son internalized these views as well:

I’ve had nothing but bad luck with women. I’ve just never been able to trust them. My wife divorced me because I kept accusing her of extravagance. It was ridiculous. She’d buy a handbag or something, and I’d start thinking bankruptcy court.

As I worked with Eli, it became clear that money was not the only issue that came between him and his wife. He had a very hard time expressing feelings, especially tender ones, and she found this increasingly frustrating. This problem persists in his single life. As he expressed it:

Every time that I take out a woman, I hear my father’s voice saying, “Women love to trick men. They’ll take you for all you’ve got if you’re stupid enough to let them.” I guess that’s why I’ve always gone for inadequate women. I know they can’t outsmart me. I always make lots of promises about taking care of them financially or setting them up in business, but I never follow through. I guess I’m trying to trick them before they trick me. Will I ever find a woman I can trust?

Here was a bright, perceptive man who allowed powerful forces from beyond the grave to control him, even though he understood intellectually what was happening. He was a prisoner of his father’s fear and mistrust.

Eli worked extremely hard in therapy. He took risks and pushed himself to adopt new behaviors. He began to confront many of his
internal terrors. Ultimately, he bought a luxurious condominium—a big step for him. He still felt guilty about it, but he learned to tolerate the guilt.

The voice inside his head will always be there, but he has learned to turn down the volume. Eli is still struggling with his mistrust of women, but he has learned to see this mistrust as a legacy from his father. He is working hard to trust the woman he’s currently dating, using that trust as a weapon to gain control of his life.

I’ll always remember the day he came in and told me that he’d fought off a wave of jealousy the night before and come away with a particularly warming sense of victory. He looked at me with tear-filled eyes and said, “You know, Susan, there is simply nothing in my current reality to justify my being as afraid as I was.”

“I F
EEL
L
IKE
I C
AN’T
B
REATHE
”

Barbara, 39, a tall, slender composer of background music for television shows, came to see me in a devastating depression.

I wake up at night, and there is an emptiness, almost like a death inside of me. I was a musical prodigy, played Mozart piano concertos at age five, and had a scholarship to Julliard by the time I was twelve. My career is going great, but I’m dying inside. I was hospitalized for depression six months ago. I think I’m going to lose myself. I don’t know where to turn.

I asked Barbara if something specific had happened to precipitate her hospitalization, and she told me that she had lost both her parents within three months. My heart ached for her, but she was quick to try to dissuade me from empathizing:

It’s okay. We hadn’t spoken in a few years, so I felt like I’d already lost them.

I asked her to tell me what had caused this separation.

When Chuck and I were planning to get married a little over four years ago, my parents insisted on coming and staying with us to help with the wedding. That was all I needed . . . for them to be breathing down my neck like they did when I was a kid. I mean they were always meddling . . . I was always getting the Spanish Inquisition about what I was doing, who I was doing it with, where I was going.. . . Anyway, I offered to put them up in a hotel since Chuck and I were under enough stress before the wedding, and they really got crazy. They told me that unless they could come and stay with me, they would never speak to me again. For the first time in my life, I stood up to them. What a mistake that was. First, they didn’t come to the wedding, then they told the entire family what a bitch I was. Now none of them talk to me.

A few years after my marriage, my mother was told she had inoperable cancer. She made every member of the family swear not to tell me when she died. I didn’t find out until five months later, when I ran into a family friend who expressed condolences. That’s how I found out my mother had died. I went straight home and called my father. I don’t know, I guess I thought we could patch things up. The first thing he said was: “You should be happy now, you’ve killed your mother!” I was devastated. He went on to grieve himself to death three months later. Every time I think of them I hear him accusing me and it makes me feel like a murderer. They’re still strangling me with their accusations even though they’re both six feet under. What does it take to get them out of my head, out of my life?

Like Eli, Barbara was being controlled from the grave. She spent several years feeling responsible for killing her parents, which devastated her mental health and almost destroyed her marriage. She became desperate to escape her sense of guilt.

Since they died, I’ve been very suicidal. It seemed like the only way to stop those voices in my head that kept saying, “You killed your father. You killed your mother.” I was so close to killing myself, but you know what kept me from doing it?

I shook my head. She smiled for the first time during our hour together and replied:

I was afraid I might run into my parents again. It was bad enough that they ruined my life here on earth; I wasn’t about to give them a chance to destroy whatever I might find on the other side.

Like most adult children of toxic parents, Barbara was able to acknowledge some of the pain her parents had caused her. But that wasn’t enough to help her transfer her feelings of responsibility from herself to them. It took some doing, but we finally worked through it together and she came to accept her parents’ full responsibility for their cruel behavior. Her parents were dead, but it took Barbara another year before she could get them to leave her alone.

No Separate Identity

Parents who feel good about themselves do not have to control their adult children. But the toxic parents we’ve met in this chapter operate from a deep sense of dissatisfaction with their lives and a fear of abandonment. Their child’s independence is like the loss of a limb to them. As the child grows older, it becomes ever more important for the parent to pull the strings that keep the child dependent. As long as toxic parents can make their son or daughter feel like a child, they can maintain control.

As a result, adult children of controlling parents often have a
very blurred sense of identity. They have trouble seeing themselves as separate beings from their parents. They can’t distinguish their own needs from their parents’ needs. They feel powerless.

All parents control their children until those children gain control of their own lives. In normal families, the transition occurs soon after adolescence. In toxic families, this healthy separation is delayed for years—or forever. It can only occur after you have made the changes that will enable you to gain mastery over your own life.

4 | “No One in This Family Is an Alcoholic”

The Alcoholics

G
lenn, a tall, rugged-looking man who owns a small manufacturing company, came to me for help primarily because his timidity and lack of assertiveness were affecting both his personal and professional relationships. He said he felt nervous and restless a great deal of the time. He had overheard someone at work call him “whiny” and “depressing.” He sensed that people were uneasy when they met him, which made it difficult for him to turn acquaintances into friends.

Midway through our first session, Glenn started talking about another source of stress at work:

About six years ago, I took my father into business with me, hoping it would straighten him out. I think the pressure of the job just made him worse. He’s been an alcoholic for as long as I can remember. He drinks, he insults customers, and he costs me a lot of business. I’ve got to get him out of there, but I’m terrified. How the hell do you fire your own father? It would destroy him. Whenever I try to talk to him about it, all he says is: “You talk to me with respect or you don’t talk to me at all.” I’m going nuts.

Glenn’s excessive sense of responsibility, his need to rescue his father, his personal insecurities, and his repressed anger were classic symptoms of adult children of alcoholics.

The Dinosaur in the Living Room

If Richard Nixon’s White House staff had taken cover-up lessons from anyone in an alcoholic’s family, “Watergate” would still be just a Washington hotel. Denial takes on gargantuan proportions for everyone living in an alcoholic household. Alcoholism is like a dinosaur in the living room. To an outsider the dinosaur is impossible to ignore, but for those within the home, the hopelessness of evicting the beast forces them to pretend it isn’t there. That’s the only way they can coexist. Lies, excuses, and secrets are as common as air in these homes, creating tremendous emotional chaos for children.

The emotional and psychological climate in alcoholic families is much the same as in families where parents abuse drugs, whether illegal or prescription. Though the cases I’ve chosen in this chapter focus on alcoholic parents, the painful experiences of children of drug abusers are quite similar.

Glenn’s experience was characteristic:

My earliest memory is of my father coming home from work and heading straight for the liquor cabinet. It was his nightly ritual. After downing a few, he’d come to dinner with a glass in his hand, and the damned thing was never empty. After dinner, he’d get down to some
serious
drinking. We all had to be very quiet so we wouldn’t disturb him. I mean, for Christ’s sake, you’d think that he was doing something really important, but the son of a bitch was just getting juiced. On lots of nights, I remember my sister, my mother, and I had to drag him to bed. My job was to take off his shoes and socks. The damnedest thing was that no one in the family ever mentioned what we were doing. I mean, we did it night after night. Until I got a little older, I honestly thought that dragging Dad to bed was a normal family activity. Something every family did.

Glenn learned early on that his father’s drinking was a Big Secret. Though his mother told him not to tell people about “Daddy’s problem,” his shame alone would have been enough to keep his mouth shut. The family put on an “everything is fine” face to the outside world. They were united by their need to deal with their common enemy. The secret became the glue that kept the tortured family intact.

The Big Secret has three elements:

1. The alcoholic’s denial of his or her alcoholism in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary and in the face of behavior that is both terrifying and humiliating to other family members.
   

2. The denial of the problem by the alcoholic’s partner and frequently by other members of the family. They commonly excuse the drinker with excuses such as, “Mom just drinks to relax,” “Dad tripped on the carpet,” or, “Dad lost his job because he had a mean boss.”
   

3. The charade of the “normal family,” a facade that the family presents to one another and to the world.
   

“The charade of the normal family” is especially damaging to a child because it forces him to deny the validity of his own feelings
and perceptions. It is almost impossible for a child to develop a strong sense of self-confidence if he must constantly lie about what he is thinking and feeling. His guilt makes him wonder whether people believe him. When he grows older, this sense that people doubt him can continue, causing him to shy away from revealing anything of himself or venturing an opinion. Like Glenn, many adult children of alcoholics become painfully shy.

It takes a tremendous amount of energy to keep the charade going. The child must always be on guard. He lives in constant fear that he may accidentally expose and betray the family. To avoid that, he often avoids making friends and thereby becomes isolated and lonely.