Toxic Parents (28 page)
Anger is also frightening. You may be afraid that you’ll destroy someone with your anger or that you’ll lose control. Or, like Joe, you may be afraid that you’ll never be able to turn off your anger. These fears are very real for all of us, but the fact remains:
The things we’re afraid will happen if we get angry are the very things that have a good chance of happening if we don’t!
When you repress your anger, you may become depressed or abrasive and other people may reject you as surely as they would if you were openly angry at them. Repressed anger is unpredictable—it can explode at any time. When it
does
, it is often uncontrollable. Anger is always destructive unless it is managed, especially if it has been allowed to fester beneath your conscious awareness.
D
EALING WITH
A
NGER
Adult children of toxic parents have an especially difficult time with their anger because they grew up in families where emotional expression was discouraged. Anger was something only parents had the privilege of displaying.
Most children of toxic parents develop a high tolerance for mistreatment. You may have only a vague awareness that anything out of the ordinary happened to you as a child. Chances are, you don’t even know how angry you really are.
You probably deal with your anger in one of several ways: you may bury your anger and become sick or depressed; you may divert your anger into suffering and martyrdom; you may deaden it with alcohol, drugs, food, or sex; or you may blow up at every opportunity, letting your anger turn you into a tense, frustrated, suspicious, belligerent person.
Unfortunately, most of us rely on these old, reliable, ineffective
methods to deal with our anger. They do nothing to help free you from the control of your parents. It is far more effective to channel your anger in ways that help you define yourself and your limits.
Let me show you some effective new ways to manage your anger:
Give yourself permission to
be
angry without making any judgments about your feelings. Anger is an emotion just as joy and fear are. It is neither right nor wrong—it just
is.
It belongs to you; it is a part of what makes you human. Anger is also a signal, telling you something important. It may be telling you that your rights are being trampled, that you are being insulted or used, or that your needs are not being taken care of. Anger always means that something needs to change.Externalize your anger. Pound pillows, yell at photographs of the people you’re angry at, or have imaginary dialogues with them in your car or alone at home. You don’t have to attack or verbally assault someone to express your anger—talk to people you trust about how angry you feel. Until you get your anger out in the open, you can’t deal with it.
Increase your physical activity. Physicalizing your anger can help release a great deal of tension from your body. If you’re not able to play tennis or run or ride a bike, clean out that overflowing closet or take a dance class. Physical activity also increases the production of endorphins—brain chemicals that enhance your sense of well-being. You’ll find that acknowledging your anger will increase your energy and productivity levels. Nothing is more draining than repressed anger.
Don’t use your anger to reinforce your negative self-image. You are not bad because you’re angry. Guilt over feeling angry, especially at parents, is to be expected. Say out loud: “I feel angry. I have a right to feel angry. It’s okay to feel guilty about feeling angry if that’s what it takes to deal with that anger. I’m not wrong or bad to feel this way.”
Use your anger as an energy source for self-definition. Your anger can help you learn a great deal about what you are and are not willing to accept in your relationship with your parents. It can help you define your limits and your boundaries. It can go a long way toward freeing you from old patterns of submission, compliance, and fear of your parents’ disapproval. Your anger can help you refocus your energies back to yourself and away from the impossible battle of trying to change your parents. Turn “I’m angry because my father has never let me live my own life” into “I will no longer permit my father to control me or devalue me.”
Use these techniques as guidelines to help you gain some mastery over your anger. You’ll have plenty of time to express your anger directly to your parents once you’ve done this. This mastery will be important to the success of your eventual confrontation with your parents, as we’ll see in
chapter 12
.
Everyone has a tough time with anger, and you won’t get this mastery overnight. Women especially have been socialized not to show their anger. Women are allowed to cry, to mourn openly, to get depressed, and to show tenderness, but anger is considered unbecoming to women in our society. As a result, many women are attracted to partners who can act out their anger for them. In this way, they can discharge some of their repressed anger vicariously. Unfortunately, however, many of these men who get angry easily are also controlling and abusive.
It is essential to your well-being to learn to deal with anger effectively. When you first contact your anger, you may feel shaky and guilty much of the time. Be patient and hang in there. You won’t stay angry forever. The only people who do are the ones who won’t admit their anger or who use it to gain power by intimidating others.
Anger is a normal human reaction to mistreatment. Adult children of toxic parents obviously have more than their share of anger. Perhaps not so obvious is the fact that they also have more than their share of grief.
G
RIEF AND
M
OURNING
“Whaddaya mean I have to grieve?” said Joe. “Who died?”
Grief is a normal and necessary reaction to loss. It doesn’t have to be loss of life. Like Joe, you’ve probably experienced tremendous losses in your childhood:
loss of good feelings about yourself
loss of feelings of safety
loss of trust
loss of joy and spontaneity
loss of nurturing, respectful parents
loss of childhood
loss of innocence
loss of love
You need to identify your losses in order to experience your grief. You must work through these feelings to release their hold over you.
Without realizing it, Joe began to grieve when he contacted his anger. Grief and anger are tightly intertwined. It’s almost impossible for one to exist without the other.
Up until now you may not have understood how extensive your emotional losses have been. Children of toxic parents experience these losses on an almost daily basis and often ignore or repress them. These losses take a terrible toll on one’s self-worth, but because grief is so painful, most people will do almost anything to avoid it.
Stepping around grief may alleviate sad feelings for a while, but delayed grief comes back to get you sooner or later—sometimes when you least expect it. Many people don’t grieve at the time of a loss because they are expected to be “strong,” or they believe they have to take care of everyone else. But these people invariably fall apart, sometimes years later, often over some minor event. It isn’t until they finally experience their delayed grief that they are able to
get back on their emotional feet. Grief has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And we all have to go through those stages. If you try to avoid grief, it will always be with you, and it will inhibit your good feelings.
T
HE
I
NTENSITY OF
G
RIEF
Carol—whose verbally abusive father kept telling her she smelled bad—had been making excellent progress in therapy. She had become much more assertive in both her personal and her professional life and was on her way to becoming an expert at nondefensive communication. But when she began to contact her grief, she was astonished at how deep and intense her feelings were:
I feel like I’m in mourning. When I think about what a good, sweet kid I was and how horribly my dad mistreated me, and how my mother just let him do it, I still can’t believe it. It makes me feel so sad, even though I know it wasn’t my fault. Why did he have to make me suffer so much? I’m crying one minute and I’m outraged the next.
The grieving process entails shock, rage, disbelief, and, of course, sadness. There will be times when the sadness seems never-ending. You may feel as if you’ll never stop crying. You may become preoccupied with your grief. You may even feel ashamed of it.
Most men are less ashamed of getting angry than they are of expressing grief. Unlike women, men have considerably more cultural support for showing aggression and anger than for showing sadness or pain. Many men pay a terrible price in their physical and emotional well-being for the dehumanizing expectations we have about how to be a “real man.”
Joe, like many men I have worked with, was far more comfortable with his anger than with the sad little boy inside, because that little boy made him feel weak and vulnerable. As a battered child, Joe learned early to keep a tight lock on his emotions. To help him
begin to grieve over what he had lost in his childhood, I asked Joe to do a “burial” exercise. This is an exercise I use often, particularly with adults who were abused as children. I keep a vase of dried flowers in my office, which I placed in front of Joe to symbolize a grave. I then asked him to repeat the following:
I hereby lay to rest my fantasy of the good family. I hereby lay to rest my hopes and expectations about my parents. I hereby lay to rest my fantasy that there was something I could have done as a child to change them. I know that I will never have the kind of parents that I wanted, and I mourn that loss. But I accept it. May these fantasies rest in peace.
As Joe ended this eulogy, tears welled up in his eyes and he said:
God, Susan, it hurts so damn much. It really hurts! Why do I have to go through this? I feel like I’m mired in self-pity. I’m revolted by it. Aren’t I just feeling sorry for myself? A lot of people had it worse than I did.
I answered:
It’s about time you felt sorry for that little boy who was hurt so badly. Who else is going to? I want you to forget everything you’ve heard about self-pity. Grieving the loss of a happy childhood has nothing to do with feeling sorry for yourself. People who get stuck in self-pity wait around for someone else to fix their lives for them. They avoid personal responsibility. They lack the courage to do the work I’m asking of you. Grief is active, not passive. It gets you unstuck. It allows you to heal, to do something real about your problems.
If you’re like most people—like Joe—you’ll go to great lengths to avoid appearing to feel sorry for yourself. You might even cheat
yourself of the right to grieve the losses of your childhood. Until you absolve your inner child through feeling and expressing your anger and grief, you’re just going to continue to punish yourself.
Y
OU
C
AN’T
S
TOP
Y
OUR
L
IFE
Even though working through your grief is essential for the changes you want to make, you can’t stop your life while you’re doing it. You still have responsibilities to yourself and others and you still need to function. Anger and grief can throw any of us off balance, so it’s vitally important for you to take especially good care of yourself during this time. Do everything possible to take part in activities that you find pleasurable and interesting. You don’t need to think about this stuff twenty-four hours a day. Be as nice to yourself as you would be to a friend who was having a difficult time. Reach out for all the support you can get from people who care about you.
It helps to talk about your grief, though some people may not be able to handle listening. A lot of people have not dealt with their own grief from their childhood and your grief may threaten their defenses.
Make a list of ten things you can do each week to help you pull through your grief. Think of this as a “caring contract” that you make with yourself. Your contract should include relaxing activities that give you pleasure. These may be as simple as a long bubble bath or going to a movie; or you may want to get out more often with your softball team or make the time to read an exciting novel. Whatever is on your list, it’s important to
do
these things, not just think about them.
G
RIEF
D
OES
C
OME TO AN
E
ND
Even though it may be hard to believe while you’re in the midst of this work, grief
does
come to an end. It takes time to resolve grief, but it’s not an indefinite process. You’ll need time to integrate and accept the reality of your losses. And you’ll need time to refocus
your energies from the pain of the past to the rebirth of the present and the promise of the future. But eventually, the sharp stabs will become twinges. You
will
feel better when you accept the fact that you were not responsible for the losses you grieve.