Healing Your Emotional Self (23 page)

Action Steps for Healing

Whether you were overprotected, emotionally smothered, or emo- tionally incested, there are specific things you need to do in order to emotionally separate from your parent and raise your self-esteem:

1. Determine your comfort level in terms of how often you wish to see your parent. You and you alone need to determine the frequency and conditions. For example, some people are more comfortable visiting their parents at the parents’ home, because they can leave when they become uncomfortable and they don’t like their parent invading their personal space. While you may feel obligated to see your parents on holidays and other special occasions, you need to do so only if you can maintain your personal boundaries.
   

2. Set limits around an invasive parent. Personal boundaries include how close you allow your parent to get to you physi- cally, what you wish to share with him or her about your per- sonal life, and what you are willing to listen to about your parent’s personal life. Spend some time determining what your comfort level is around these issues and then reinforce these boundaries when in your parent’s presence.
   

3. Figure out your role in the continuing boundary violation. For example, do you have a misplaced sense of guilt? Do you feel overly responsible for your parent? These are common reac- tions when a parent has made it abundantly clear that he or she made huge sacrifices for a child. And a child who was trained to take care of a parent’s emotional needs will have a hard time letting go of this role. But it is very important that you stop buying into this guilt. You are an adult who deserves her own life separate from your parent. You do not owe your parent so much that you need to sacrifice your own life for that person.
   

4. Don’t continue to ask for help from a smothering parent. If your parent already feels he or she has a right to tell you what you should do, do not encourage this behavior by asking for advice or assistance. You need to let your smothering parent know that you are a capable and competent adult. You do not convey this message if you periodically look to your parent to rescue you emotionally or financially.
   

5. Speak up the moment your boundaries are violated. State your position calmly and clearly. For example, “Dad, I want you to call me before you come over,” or “Mom, please don’t call me at work. Call me at home instead.”
   

   13
   

   If You Were Overly Controlled or Tyrannized
   

   Healing the “I Am Powerless” Mirror
   

   You were once wild here. Don’t let them tame you!
   

   —I
   SADORA
   D
   UNCAN
   

   Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.
   

   —J
   EAN
   -P
   AUL
   S
   ARTRE
   

   I
   N THIS CHAPTER I WILL HELP
   those of you who were overly controlled or tyrannized to break free from your parent’s domination, discover your own power, and take it back. This begins with telling your story. Although sharing what happened to you in childhood is important for anyone who was emotionally abused or neglected, it is particularly meaningful for those who were overly controlled or tyrannized. By telling your story you will make it more real and thus rid yourself of any lingering denial, air long-suppressed feelings, and come to better understand your behavior and beliefs. Since you probably had a child- hood of not being able to speak up or defend yourself, doing so now can also validate your experience and help to empower you. And by telling your story you are giving yourself what you did not receive in childhood—the chance to talk without interruption, the experience of
   

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   being seen and heard as you really are, and the opportunity to be val- idated. Here are some suggestions for finding safe ways and safe envi- ronments in which to tell your story:
   

   1. Find a therapist or lay counselor you trust and tell her or him about your abusive childhood.
      

   2. Ask your partner or a trusted friend if he or she would be will- ing to hear your story. Set a time when both of you have at least an hour to devote to this, uninterrupted. Ask your friend just to listen and not make any comments until you are finished. Tell this person that you don’t need to have your problems solved for you, just a loving and sympathetic ear.
      

   3. Write down your story or record it on audio- or videotape. Don’t censor yourself, just tell the truth and how it made you feel. Later you can read or listen to your story for even more healing. Make sure you read or listen without judgment and with compassion for yourself.
      

Make Sure You Aren’t Still Being Controlled

In order to raise your self-esteem and take back your power, you also need to make sure you are not still being controlled by your parents, or anyone else for that matter. While it is completely understandable that you would be susceptible to allowing others to control you, you will never feel good about yourself as long as you allow it. You will lose respect for yourself each time you allow someone to control you, and if you continue, you will eventually feel nothing but self-loathing.

In order to take back their power from controlling parents, adult children must emotionally separate from those parents. Sometimes this means confronting them; other times it means setting healthier boundaries. Setting appropriate boundaries today can provide empow- erment by balancing childhood boundary violations. It may also involve reducing contact with parents. Controlling parents chose when they had access to their children. Altering that access can empower you by

showing you that you now have control over when you see your parents and what kind of interaction you are willing to have.

Another act of empowerment is being able to see parents for who they are today. Often adult children of controlling parents continue to see them as larger-than-life characters who still have the power to con- trol them. By beginning to see your parents more accurately, you can begin to take away some of the power they have over you. This may include standing next to a parent and noticing how much smaller he or she is than the picture you have in your mind. It also helps to have someone take a picture of you with your parent so you are confronted with the fact that you are now physically as big as or bigger than your parent.

Equalization also comes from letting go of needs and expectations concerning your parents, including the false hope that they will finally accept you as you are or give you what they didn’t provide for you as a child. As you give up your emotional attachment to what your parent should have been, you may find you are left with a relationship with a mere man or woman instead of the monster or the icon you had per- ceived your parent to be.

How to Take Back Your Power

The best way to take back your power is to confront your parents about their abusive behavior. Although you still may be afraid to do this directly, you can do so by imagining that you are confronting your parents and telling them how you really feel.

Lorraine is the woman from chapter 4 who was humiliated for not getting the scuffs off the floor. Although she was still afraid of her mother, it helped when she finally gave herself permission to express her anger toward her mother during our sessions. “Even though she isn’t going to hear what I am saying, I guess I have the fear that she’ll somehow know. I know it’s stupid. And I feel so disloyal to her when I get angry. After all, I know she was doing the best she could.” Lorraine was eventually able to put aside these unnecessary concerns and express to me how she really felt about her mother’s treatment of her. “I hated her for treating me so badly,” she told me with real anger in

her voice. “She expected too much of me. I was just a little kid. No one should be talked to or treated like that.”

This was the beginning of Lorraine’s ability to separate from her mother. The next step was to confront her mother directly, which was extremely frightening. “I don’t know what I think she’s going to do to me. After all, she’s a little old lady now. She can’t beat me anymore. She probably can’t even yell at me. Why am I so afraid?”

Create a Protector

To help Lorraine face her mother, I encouraged her to create what I call a “protector”—an imaginary person who will stand beside you or behind you when you do difficult things. Creating a protector can give you the necessary courage to stand up to your tyrannical parent. The following exercise will explain this concept further.

Exercise: Creating a Protector

1. Imagine that there is someone standing behind you, some- one who is there to protect you and stand up for you against anyone who criticizes you, attacks you, or puts you down.
   

2. Remember an incident in your childhood when one of your parents (or other caregiver) criticized or shamed you.
   

3. Imagine what your protector would say to this person. Imagine the words he or she would use to push the nega- tive, critical statements away.
   

4. If you feel like it, say those words out loud.
   

Creating a protector helped Lorraine to confront her mother: “I know it seems funny, but it gave me the strength to face her, knowing that I wasn’t alone.”

When I asked my client Stephen to imagine that a protector was standing behind him, someone who would stand up to his emotionally abusive mother, he broke down and sobbed. Normally Stephen had difficulty crying, much less sobbing. I felt deeply moved by his sobs and sorrow—so much so that I went over to the couch where he sat and put my hand gently on his shoulder. Once the sobs subsided,

Stephen said, “I never had anyone like that—I never had anyone who stood up for me or protected me.”

Quiet Your Inner Critic

People who were overly controlled or tyrannized tend to develop a particularly powerful inner critic. Because you were so controlled and tyrannized, you had no choice but to internalize your parents’ critical voices. Therefore, in order to heal and raise your self-esteem you will need to find powerful ways to quiet your critical inner messages.

Start by looking at your self-criticisms. Are you criticizing yourself today the way you were criticized as a child? The themes of your inner critic—those “voice-overs” installed by your parents—are often loudest when you are acting or feeling counter to your parents’ values or rules. By naming these voices—“Oh, that’s my mother’s controlling voice again,”—you can actually take away some of their power. Your goal is not to banish the self-critical messages from your head but to get to know your inner critic and how it works, and to set limits on its influence.

Once you have set healthier limits on both your inner parental voices and your actual parents, you will find that you have a greater capacity to hear another voice inside yourself—your nurturing voice. Following are some suggestions for limiting your inner critic:

• Whenever you hear a critical message, say, “No! I don’t want to hear it!” or “No, I don’t believe you.”
  

• Counter any critical messages with self-praise. For example: “No, I’m not lazy. Look at all the work I’ve done today. I’m a hard worker.”
  

• Don’t allow your parent’s critical assessment or unreasonable expectations to rule you. If you tend to drive yourself compul- sively in reaction to parents who called you lazy or good for nothing, slow down. Ask yourself if you are working so hard because you want to or to please your parents. If you are under- performing as a way to rebel against your parents’ pressure, you may want to push yourself a little more to find some internal motivation. Often those who are rebelling against parents’
  

unreasonable expectations tend to be too easy on themselves. By pushing yourself just a little, you may discover a real desire and sense of accomplishment in creating or completing tasks.

Acknowledge and Feel Your Pain

The judge or inner critic specializes in attacking us for feeling our pain with messages like “What good is it to feel pain? It won’t change any- thing!” “You are such a crybaby,” and “Watch out, you might lose it and then you’ll really be in a mess!” But unless you are willing to acknowledge and feel your pain at being emotionally abused, you will find it difficult to experience compassion for yourself or others.

Remember, self-compassion is a direct antidote to the judge’s poi- son. The soothing warmth of a nurturing inner voice neutralizes that poison. Tenderness dissolves the harshness and rejection. Call up your nurturing inner voice and talk to yourself with compassion and under- standing whenever you are being self-critical or powerless.

Tell Your Story to a Compassionate Witness

Voicing your story to a someone who cares will help you receive some of the empathetic mirroring you may have missed out on in childhood. It also provides a way for you to give yourself other things you missed out on in childhood, namely the experience of being seen and heard as you really are (without your parent’s distorted perceptions blocking your view) and the opportunity to be validated.

How Being in Touch with Your Essence Can Help You Quiet Your Inner Critic

According to Byron Brown, the author of
Soul without Shame
, your inner critic generally recognizes the importance of essential human qualities, but it does not believe that you have them innately. Instead, it tells you that you must acquire them from the outside through

accomplishments and good behavior: “If you are a kind, giving person then perhaps you have some value.”

In order to confront your inner critic’s dominance in guiding and controlling your experience, you must first recognize that your essence is not the result of your accomplishments or effect on others. It is and has always been a part of you. You also need to see how your inner critic continually undermines such an awareness. Then you must call upon specific qualities of your essence or true nature to chal- lenge the way your inner critic operates. As you recognize and develop your contact with these aspects of your humanness, you will discover an alternative guidance and support system that is grounded in a more fundamental sense of reality.