Toxic Parents (16 page)

Kate’s father revealed inappropriate, intimate information to a child who was too young to understand. Yet, he expected her to nurture him emotionally. This role reversal confused and bewildered Kate, but it is common among abusive parents. They want their children to give them both relief and absolution; they batter them, then they blame their behavior on someone else.

Instead of dealing directly with his marital problems, Kate’s
father displaced his fury and sexual frustration onto his daughters, then rationalized his violence by blaming his wife. Physical violence against children is often a reaction to stress at work, conflict with another family member or friend, or general tension over an unsatisfying life. Children are easy targets: they can’t fight back, and they can be intimidated into silence. Unfortunately for both the abuser and the victim, displacing anger gives the abuser only temporary relief. The true source of his rage remains, unchanged and destined to build up again. And, sadly, the helpless target of his rage remains as well, destined to soak up that rage and carry it into adulthood.

“I’
M
D
OING
T
HIS FOR
Y
OUR
O
WN
G
OOD
”

Other abusers, instead of blaming someone else for their behavior, will try to justify it as being in the child’s best interests. Many parents still believe that physical punishment is the only effective way to drive home a moral or behavioral point. Many of these “lessons” are delivered in the name of religion. Never has a book been as sorely misused as the Bible to justify beatings.

I was appalled by a letter that appeared in Ann Landers’s syndicated column:

Dear Ann Landers,
I was disappointed in your response to the girl whose mother used to strap her. The gym teacher noticed the bruises on her legs and backside and called it “child abuse.” Why are you against strapping a child when the Bible tells us in plain language that this is what parents should do? Proverbs 23:13 says: “Withhold not correction from the child for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die.” Proverbs 23:14 says: “Thou shalt beat him with the rod and shalt deliver his soul from death.”

These same parents often believe in the inherent malevolence of children. They believe that a harsh beating will keep a child from
going bad. They say things such as: “I was raised with the hickory switch; a licking now and then didn’t do me any harm,” or, “I need to put the fear of God in him,” or, “She’s got to know who’s boss,” or, “He’s got to know what he’s in for so he’ll toe the line.”

Other parents excuse beatings as necessary rites of passage, ordeals to make a child tougher, braver, or stronger. That was what Joe was led to believe:

My dad’s mother died when my dad was fourteen. He never got over it. He’s still not over it, and he’s going on sixty-four. He recently told me that he was tough on me because he didn’t want me to feel. Sick as it was, he theorized that if you don’t feel, you won’t have to go through the pain of life. I honest-to-God believe he thought he was protecting me from being hurt. He didn’t want me to experience the kind of pain he’d gone through with his mother’s death.

Instead of making Joe tougher or less vulnerable, the beatings left him fearful and mistrustful, far less equipped to make it in the world. It’s absurd to believe that severe physical punishment will have any positive effects on a child.

In fact, research indicates that physical discipline is not particularly effective as a punishment even for specific undesirable behaviors. Beatings have proved to be only temporary deterrents, and they create in children strong feelings of rage, revenge fantasies, and self-hatred. It’s quite clear that the mental, emotional, and often bodily harm caused by physical abuse far outweighs any momentary advantages.

The Passive Abuser

So far I have focused almost entirely on the actively abusive parent. But there’s another player in the family drama who must share some of the responsibility. This is the parent who permits the abuse
to happen out of his or her own fears, dependency, or need to maintain the family’s status quo. This parent is the passive abuser.

I asked Joe what his mother was doing while he was being battered.

She wasn’t doing much of anything. Sometimes she’d lock herself in the bathroom. I always wondered why she didn’t stop this crazy bastard from knocking the hell out of me all the time. But I guess she was just too scared herself. It just wasn’t in her nature to confront him. See, my dad is Christian, and my mom is Jewish. She was raised in a very poor, orthodox family, and where she came from, women don’t tell their men what to do. I guess she was thankful that she had a roof over her head and that her husband made a nice living.

Joe’s mother did not beat her children herself, but because she did not protect them from her husband’s brutality she became a partner in their abuse. Instead of taking steps to defend her children, she became a frightened child herself, helpless and passive in the face of her husband’s violence. In effect, she abandoned her son.

In addition to feeling isolated and unprotected, Joe found himself saddled with an overwhelming responsibility:

I remember when I was about ten years old, and my dad had beaten the hell out of my mother one night. I got up real early the next morning and I was waiting in the kitchen when he came down in his bathrobe. He asked me what I was doing up so early. I was scared shitless, but I said, “If you ever beat up on Mom again, I’m going to come after you with a baseball bat.” He just looked at me and laughed. Then he went upstairs to take a shower and go to work.

Joe had made a classic abused-child role reversal, assuming responsibility for protecting his mother as if he were the parent and she were the child.

By allowing herself (or himself) to be overwhelmed by helplessness, the inactive parent can more easily deny her silent complicity in the abuse. And by becoming protective, or by rationalizing the silent parent’s inactivity, the abused child can more easily deny the fact that
both
parents have failed him.

Kate is a case in point:

When my father first started beating us, my sister and I would always scream for Mom to help. But she never came. She just sat downstairs and listened to us screaming for her. It didn’t take us long to realize she wasn’t coming. She never stood up to my father. I guess she couldn’t help it.

No matter how many times I hear statements like, “I guess she couldn’t help it,” they still upset me. Kate’s mother
could
have helped it. I told Kate that it was important for her to start looking at her mother’s role realistically. Her mother should have stood up to Kate’s father, or, if she was afraid of him, she should have called the police. There is
no
excuse for a parent to stand by and allow his or her children to be brutalized.

In both Kate’s and Joe’s cases, the father was the active abuser and the mother was the silent partner. However, this is by no means the only family scenario. In some families, the mother is the active abuser and the father is the passive one. The sexes may change, but the dynamics of passive abuse remain the same. I have had clients where
both
parents were abusive, but the abusive/passive parent combination is far more common.

Many adult children excuse the passive parent because they see that parent as a co-victim. In Joe’s case, this view was intensified because he was in a role reversal in which he felt protective of his passive mother.

For Terry, a 43-year-old marketing rep, the situation was further confused when his passive parent became the sympathetic comforter. Terry, who had been physically abused by his mother through most of his childhood, idolized his ineffectual father.

I was a very sensitive kid, more into art and music than sports. My mother always called me a sissy. She got angry with me a lot and would beat me with anything she could find. It seems like I spent most of my childhood hiding in closets. I was never sure why she beat me so much, but everything I did seemed to piss her off. I feel like she wiped out my whole childhood.

I asked Terry what his father was doing while his mother was terrorizing him.

Lots of times, my dad would hold me while I was sobbing, and he’d tell me how sorry he was about my mother’s fits. He always said there was nothing he could do about it, and that if I tried harder, things might go better for me. My dad was really a nice guy. He worked very hard so his family could live well. He gave me the only real consistent love I got when I was little.

I asked Terry if, since he has become an adult, he has talked to his father about his childhood.

I’ve tried a couple times, but he always says “let bygones be bygones.” Anyway, what’s the point of upsetting him? My problems are with my mother, not with him.

Terry denied his father’s complicity because he wanted to protect the only good childhood memories he had—those loving moments with his father. Just as he clung to his father’s tenderness as a frightened child, so was he clinging to it today as a frightened adult. In trading a dark closet for a false reality, he had done nothing to face the truth.

Terry was aware of how much his mother’s abuse had colored his life but far less aware of how much repressed rage he carried toward his father. Terry had spent years denying that his father had
failed him. To make matters worse, his father had put much of the responsibility on Terry’s head by suggesting that if Terry “tried harder,” he could avoid the beatings.

Learning to Hate Yourself: “It’s All My Fault”

As difficult as it may be to believe, battered children accept the blame for the crimes perpetrated against them just as surely as verbally abused children do. Joe recalled:

My father always told me that I wasn’t worth shit. If there was some way he could hook my name to a swear word while he was beating me, he would do it. By the time he got through, I honestly believed that I was the worst thing that ever lived. And that I was only getting knocked around because I deserved it.

The seeds of self-blame were planted early in Joe. How could a small child withstand this powerful propaganda about his worth? Like all abused children, Joe believed two lies: that he was bad, and that he was getting beaten only
because
he was bad.

Since these lies came from his powerful, all-knowing father, they had to be true. These lies remain unchallenged for most adults who were battered as children, including Joe. As he describes it:

I’m so down on myself . . . I can’t seem to have a good relationship with anybody. It’s hard for me to believe that anybody could really care for me.

Kate expressed a similar theme when she didn’t want people to find out how “bad” she was. These pervasive feelings of low self-esteem evolve into self-loathing and create life patterns of damaged relationships, loss of confidence, feelings of inadequacy, paralyzing fears, and unfocused rage.

Kate summed it up:

All my life, it’s been going through my mind that I don’t deserve to be happy. I think that’s why I never got married . . . never had a good relationship . . . never allowed myself any real success.

When Kate grew up, the physical abuse ended. But through self-loathing, the emotional abuse continued. Except that now, she had become her own abuser.

Abuse and Love—A Bewildering Combination

Abused children are often exposed to a bizarre mixture of pleasure and pain. Joe described intermittent terror coexisting with tender moments:

At times my father could be funny, and sometimes, I swear, he was even gentle. Like this one time I was signed up for this big skiing competition and he got really into it. So he drove me all the way to Jackson, Wyoming, which took ten hours, just so I could practice on good snow. On the way home, Dad told me I was really special. Of course, while he’s saying it, I’m thinking, “If I’m so special, why do I feel so lousy about myself?” But he said it. That’s what counts. I’m still trying to recapture with him what we had that day.

The mixed messages only added to Joe’s confusion, and they made it more difficult for him to face the truth about his father. I explained to Joe that an incredibly strong, perverse parent/child fusion occurs when a parent holds out a promise of love while at the same time mistreating that child. A child’s world is very narrow, and no matter how abusive, the parents still represent the only
available source of love and comfort. The battered child spends his entire childhood searching for the Holy Grail of parental love. That search continues into adulthood.

Kate, too, remembered:

When I was a baby, my father would hold me, love me, and rock me. And when I was a little older, he was always there taking me to dance classes on the weekend or to the movies. He really loved me at one point in his life. I guess my greatest wish is for him to love me again the way he used to.

The Keeper of the Family Secret

Her father’s sporadic benevolence kept Kate yearning for his love, hoping for a turnaround. This hope kept her bonded to him long after she reached adulthood. As part of that bonding, she believed she had to keep secret the truth of her father’s behavior. A “good” girl would never betray her family.

The “family secret” is a further burden for abused children. By not talking about the abuse, the battered child cuts off any hope of emotional help. Here’s Kate: