How We Learn to Be in the World

Finally, children have a right to be children. They have a right to spend their early years being playful, spontaneous, and irresponsible. Naturally, as children grow older, loving parents will nourish their maturity by giving them certain responsibilities and household duties, but never at the expense of childhood.

Children soak up both verbal and nonverbal messages like sponges -- indiscriminately. They listen to their parents, they watch their parents, and they imitate their parents' behavior. Because they have little frame of reference outside the family, the things they learn at home about themselves and others become universal truths engraved deeply in their minds. Parental role models are central to a child's developing sense of identity -- particularly as he or she develops gender identity. Despite dramatic changes in parental roles over the last twenty years, the same duties apply to parents today that applied to your parents:

Children also have the right to be guided by appropriate parental limits on their behavior, to make mistakes, and to be disciplined without being physically or emotionally abused.

Children have basic inalienable rights -- to be fed, clothed, sheltered, and protected. But along with these physical rights, they have the right to be nurtured emotionally, to have their feelings respected, and to be treated in ways that allow them to develop a sense of self-worth.

They must provide for their children's needs for love, attention, and affection.

They must provide for their children's physical needs.

They must protect their children from physical harm.

They must provide moral and ethical guidelines for their children.

When a parent forces parental responsibilities on a child, family roles become indistinct, distorted, or reversed. A child who is compelled to become his own parent, or even become a parent to his own parent, has no one to emulate, learn from, and look up to. Without a parental role model at this critical state of emotional development, a child's personal identity is set adrift in a hostile sea of confusion.

They must protect their children from emotional harm.

Clearly, the list could go on much longer, but these five responsibilities form the foundation of adequate parenting. The toxic parents we'll be discussing rarely get past the first item on the list. For the most part, they are (or were) significantly impaired in their own emotional stability or mental health. They are not only often unavailable to meet their children's needs, but in many cases they expect and demand that their children take care of the parents' needs.

My marriage went to hell because I never did anything but work. I was either gone or I was working at home. My wife got tired of living with a robot, and she left. Now it's happening again with the new lady in my life. I hate it. I really do. But I just don't know how to loosen up.

Les told me he had trouble expressing emotion of any kind, particularly tender, loving feelings. The word fun, he told me with considerable bitterness, wasn't in his vocabulary.

Les continued for the better part of a half hour trying to convince me of how badly he messed up his relationships:

I wish I knew how to make my girlfriend happy, but every time we start to talk, somehow I always steer the conversation back to work, and she gets upset. Maybe it's because work is the only thing I don't screw up.

The women I get involved with are always complaining that I don't give them enough time or affection. And it's true. I'm a lousy boyfriend and I was a really lousy husband.

Les, 34, the owner of a sporting goods store, came to see me because he was a workaholic and it was making him miserable.

It's something I know how to do… and I do it well. I work about seventy-five hours a week… but I've always worked my tail off… ever since I was a kid. See, I was the oldest of three boys. I guess my mom had some kind of breakdown when I was eight. From then on, our house was always dark, with the shades drawn. My mother always seemed to be in her bathrobe, and she never talked much. My earliest memories of her were with a cup of coffee in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and glued to her goddamned soap operas. She never got up until long after we were off to school. So, it was my job to feed my two younger brothers, pack their lunches, and get them to the school bus. When we got home, she'd be lying in front of the tube or taking one of her three-hour naps. Half the time while my buddies were out playing ball, I was stuck in the house cooking dinner or cleaning up. I hated it, but somebody had to do it.

I stopped him and said: "And you've got a lousy self-image. It sounds as if the only time you feel okay is when you're working. How come?"

Dad traveled a lot on business, and he basically just gave up on my mother. Most of the time, he slept in the guest room… it was a pretty weird marriage. He sent her to a couple of doctors, but they didn't help, so he just threw in the towel.

I asked Les where his father was in all of this.

I had too much to do to feel sorry for myself.

I told Les that I ached for how lonely that little boy must have been. He dismissed my sympathy with the reply:

Robbers of Childhood

As a child, Les was often weighed down with responsibilities that rightfully belonged to his parents. Because he was forced to grow up too fast and too soon, Les was robbed of his childhood. While his friends were out playing ball, Les was home performing his parents' duties. To keep the family together, Les had to become a miniature adult. He had little opportunity to be playful or carefree. Since his own needs were virtually ignored, he learned to cope with loneliness and emotional deprivation by denying that he even had needs. He was there to take care of others. He didn't matter.

What makes this doubly sad is that in addition to having been the primary caretaker of his brothers, Les also became a parent to his mother:

When Dad was in town, he would leave for work at seven and lots of times he wouldn't get home till nearly midnight. On his way out the door, he would always tell me, "Don't forget to do all your homework, and be sure to take care of your mother. Make sure she has enough to eat. Keep the other kids quiet… and see if you can do something to get a smile out of her." I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make my mother happy. I was so sure there was something that I could do and everything would be okay again… she'd be okay again. But no matter what I did, nothing changed. It still hasn't. I really feel rotten about that.

In addition to his housekeeping and childrearing responsibilities, which would have been overwhelming for any child, Les was expected to be his mother's emotional caretaker. This turned out to be a recipe for failure. Children who are caught in these confusing role reversals are constantly falling short. It's impossible for them to function as adults because they're not adults. But they don't understand why they fail; they just feel deficient and guilty because of it.

Les didn't see that his parents continued to wield their toxic power over him in his adult life. A few weeks later, however, the connection between his adult struggles and his childhood moved sharply into focus.

Boy, whoever said "the more things change, the more they stay the same" really knew what he was talking about. I've been in L. A. for six years now, but as far as my folks are concerned, I'm not supposed to have a life. They call me a couple of times a week. It's gotten to the point where I'm afraid to answer the phone. First, my father starts in with: "Your mom's so depressed… couldn't you just take a little time off and come visit? You know how much it would mean to her!" Then she gets on and tells me I'm her whole life and she doesn't know how much longer she'll be around. What do you say to that? Half the time, I just jump on a plane… it beats dealing with the guilt of not going. But it's never enough. Nothing is. I might as well save the plane fare. Maybe I never should have moved away.

When Does It Ever Stop?

In Les's case, his driving need to work many hours beyond what was necessary served a dual purpose: it kept him from confronting the loneliness and deprivation of both his childhood and his adult life, and it reinforced his long-held belief that he could never do enough. Les's fantasy was that if he could put in enough hours, he could prove that he really was a worthwhile, adequate person, that he really could get the job done right. In essence, he was still trying to make his mother happy.

I told Les that it was typical for children who were forced to exchange emotional roles with their parents to carry into their adult lives tremendous guilt and an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. As adults, they often become trapped in a vicious cycle of accepting responsibility for everything, inevitably falling short, feeling guilty and inadequate, and then redoubling their efforts. This is a draining, depleting cycle that leads to an ever-increasing sense of failure.

Driven as a little boy by the expectations of his parents, Les learned early that his goodness was judged primarily by how much he did for the rest of his family. As an adult, his parents' external demands were transformed into internal demons that continued to drive him in the one area where he could feel some sense of worth -- work.

Les had neither the time nor the appropriate role model from which to learn about the giving and receiving of love. He grew up without nourishment of his emotional life, so he simply turned off his emotions. Unfortunately, he found that he couldn't turn them back on again, even when he wanted to.

Dear Abby:

"It would be like expecting yourself to play a piano concerto when you didn't even know where middle-C was!" I told him. "You can learn, but you've got to give yourself time to pick up the basics, to practice, and maybe even to fail once or twice."

-- Hopeless

"If I Don't Take Care of Their Needs, Who Will?"

I'm in a crazy family. Can you get me out of here?

I assured Les that I understood how frustrated and bewildered he felt about his inability to open up to anyone emotionally, but I urged him to go easy on himself. He hadn't had anyone to teach him those things when he was young, and they're pretty tough to pick up on your own.

This was written by one of my clients, Melanie, when she was 13. Now a 42-year-old divorced tax accountant, Melanie came to see me because of severe depression. Although she was extremely thin, she would have been quite pretty if the recent months of erratic sleep hadn't taken their toll. She was open and talked easily about herself.

I feel utterly hopeless all the time. Like my life is out of control. I just can't get on top of things. I feel like I'm digging myself deeper and deeper into a hole every day.

There's such an emptiness inside me… I don't think I've ever felt connected to anybody in my whole life. I've been married twice, and I've lived with several guys, but I just can't find the right one. I always pick either lazy bums or total bastards. Then of course it's up to me to set them straight. I always think I can fix them. I lend them money, I move them into my house, I've even found jobs for a couple of them. It never works, but I never learn. They don't love me, no matter how much I do for them. One of these guys hit me in front of my kids. Another took off with my car. My first husband played around. My second husband was a total lush. Some track record.

Without realizing it, Melanie was describing the classic behavior of a co-dependent personality. Originally, the term co-dependent was used specifically to describe the partner of an alcoholic or drug addict. Co-dependent was used interchangeably with the term enabler -- someone whose life was out of control because he or she was taking responsibility for "saving" a chemically dependent person.

I asked her to be more specific. She bit her lip, then turned away from me as she replied:

Melanie was attracted to very troubled men. She believed that if she could just be good enough -- give enough, love enough, worry enough, help enough, cover up enough -- and get them to see the error of their ways, they would love her. But they didn't. The kind of needy, self-centered men whom she picked were incapable of love. So, instead of finding the love she so desperately sought, she found emptiness. She felt used.

But in the past few years the definition of co-dependency has expanded to include all people who victimize themselves in the process of rescuing and being responsible for any compulsive, addicted, abusive, or excessively dependent person.

I discovered that the term co-dependent was not new to Melanie. She had first come across it when she attended a meeting of Al-Anon (a Twelve-Step program for family members of alcoholics) during her marriage to her alcoholic husband. She was certain that she wasn't a co-dependent but just had bad luck with men. She certainly had done everything she could to get Jim to stop drinking. She had finally left him when she learned he had spent a night with a woman he'd met in a bar.

Melanie once again had begun looking for Mr. Right. She blamed her problems on the men she'd been with, but she saw each one as a separate Mr. Wrong. She didn't see that the overall pattern stemmed from the way she chose her men. She thought she was looking for a man who could appreciate a giving, caring, loving, helpful woman. Surely there was a man out there who would love a woman like that. She thought co-dependency was noble.

Melanie had no idea that what she called "giving and helping" was wiping her out. She was giving to everyone except herself. She had no idea that she had actually perpetuated the irresponsible behavior of the men in her life by sweeping up behind them. When she talked about her childhood, it became clear that her pattern of trying to save troubled men was a compulsive repetition of her relationship with her father:

I had a really weird family. My father was a successful architect, but he used his damn moods to control everybody. He'd come unglued by the slightest thing… like if somebody parked in his parking place or if I had a fight with my brother. He'd just go into his room, shut the door, throw himself on the bed, and cry. Just like a baby! Then my mother would fall apart and go soak in the bathtub, and I was the one who had to go in and deal with my dad. I'd just sit there, with him sobbing, trying to figure out what I could do to make him feel better. But it didn't matter what I did, it was always just a matter of waiting it out.

My good feelings depend on approval from him.

I handed Melanie a checklist I had made up and asked her to tell me which points described her feelings and behavior. It was a list of the major characteristics of co-dependency. I've found it very useful over the years in helping clients determine whether they are co-dependent. If you think this term may apply to you, please go through the list.

CO-DEPENDENCY CHECKLIST

I try very hard to get him to do things my way.

I use "him" as a universal pronoun to refer to a troubled person of either gender. I realize that many men are in co-dependent relationships with deeply troubled wives or lovers.

Solving his problems or relieving his pain is the most important thing in my life -- no matter what the emotional cost to me.

I will do anything to avoid getting rejected by him.

I don't pay any attention to how I feel or what I want. I only care about how he feels and what he wants.

I protect him from the consequences of his behavior. I lie for him, cover up for him, and never let others say anything bad about him.

I experience much more passion in a relationship that is stormy and full of drama.

I am a perfectionist and I blame myself for everything that goes wrong.

I pretend that everything is fine when it isn't.

I will do anything to avoid making him angry at me.

The struggle to get him to love me dominates my life.

I feel angry, unappreciated, and used a great deal of the time.

At first it really scared me because I thought Daddy was dying and then who would be my daddy? Then I started feeling ashamed to see him that way. But mostly I felt this terrible guilt -- that it was my fault because I had picked a fight with my brother or whatever. Like I'd really let him down. The worst of it was that I felt so helpless because I couldn't make him happy. What's amazing is, he's been dead for four years, I'm forty-two years old, I've got two kids of my own, and I still feel guilty.

Melanie answered "yes" to every statement! She was astounded to see how truly co-dependent she was. To help her begin to break out of these patterns, I told her it was essential that she make the connection between her co-dependency and her relationship with her father. I asked her to remember how she had felt when he cried.

My mother tried, but she was sick a lot of the time. She was always running to doctors and had to stay in bed when her colitis acted up. They'd prescribe tranquilizers and she'd eat them like popcorn. I guess she got pretty hooked, I don't know. She was always out of it. Our housekeeper really raised us. I mean my mother was there, but she wasn't there. When I was about thirteen, I wrote that letter to Dear Abby. The damnedest thing was that my mother actually found it. You'd think she would've come to me and asked what I was so upset about, but I guess what I felt didn't matter to her. It was almost like I didn't exist.

Melanie's first and most profound emotional relationship with a man was with her father. As a child she was overwhelmed by both her father's neediness and the guilt she felt when she couldn't satisfy his demands. She never stopped trying to make up for her inability to make him happy, even when he wasn't around. She just found substitute needy, troubled men to take care of. Her choice of men was dictated by her need to assuage her guilt, and by choosing the father substitutes that she did, she perpetuated the emotional deprivation she had experienced as a child.

Melanie was forced to be her father's caretaker. Both her parents placed their adult responsibilities squarely on her young shoulders. At a time in her life when she needed a strong father to give her self-confidence, she found herself having to pamper an infantile father instead.

I asked Melanie whether her mother had provided any of the love or attention that she never got from her father.

Parents who focus their energies on their own physical and emotional survival send a very powerful message to their children: "Your feelings are not important. I'm the only one who counts." Many of these children, deprived of adequate time, attention, and care, begin to feel invisible -- as if they don't even exist.

The Invisible Child

In order for children to develop a sense of self-worth -- a sense that they do more than occupy space, that they matter and are important -- they need their parents to validate their needs and feelings. But Melanie's father's emotional needs were so overwhelming that he never noticed Melanie's needs. She was there when he cried, but he did not reciprocate. Melanie knew that her mother had found her letter to Dear Abby, yet her mother never mentioned it to her. The message from both parents was loud and clear: she was a nonentity to them. Melanie learned to define herself in terms of their feelings instead of her own. If she made them feel good, she was good. If she made them feel bad, she was bad.

Unlike many adults with whom I have worked, Melanie was already in touch with some of her anger at her parents when she came to me. Later, we would focus and work through much of that anger and confront her deep feelings of emotional abandonment. She would learn to set limits on how much she would give of herself to others and to respect her own rights, needs, and feelings. She would learn to become visible again.

As a result, Melanie had a great deal of difficulty in her adult life defining her own identity. Because her independent thoughts, feelings, and needs had never been encouraged, she truly had no idea who she was or what she should expect from a loving relationship.

I first met Ken, 22, in a hospital group for young-adult substance abusers. He was a thin, black-haired young man with piercing dark eyes. It was obvious in our first group meeting that he was enormously intelligent and articulate, but he was also very self-deprecating. He had trouble sitting still for the full ninety minutes; he was a bundle of nerves. I asked him to stay after group to tell me a little about himself. Mistrusting my motives, he played the tough, street-smart hustler, but after a few minutes he began to see that I had no ulterior motive, that I was genuinely interested in easing his pain, and he softened as he spoke to me.

The Vanishing Parent

So far we've been talking about emotionally absent parents. Physical absence creates its own set of problems.

I always hated school and I didn't know what the hell else to do so I enlisted in the army when I was sixteen. That's where I got fucked up on drugs. I was always a fuck-up anyway.

It was just my mom and me. She wasn't thrilled with the idea, but I think she was glad to get rid of me. I was always getting into trouble and making her life miserable. She was a real pushover. She let me do what I wanted no matter what.

I asked him where his father had been during this period.

I asked what his parents thought of his enlistment.

My folks got divorced when I was eight. Mom really got bent out of shape from it. I always thought my dad was hip, you know? He always did "dad things" with me. We'd watch sports together on television, and he'd even take me to a game once in a while. Man, that was great! The day he moved out, I cried my fucking eyes out. He told me nothing was going to change, that he'd still come over and watch TV with me, and he'd see me every Sunday and we'd still be pals. I believed him; I was such a dork. For the first few months, I did see him a lot… but then it was once every month… then once every two months… then practically never. A couple of times I called him up, and he told me he was really busy. About a year after he left, my mom told me that he'd married some woman with three kids and moved out of state. It was hard for me to get it, that he had a new family now. I guess he liked them better, because he sure forgot about me in a hurry.

Ken's tough-guy facade was crumbling fast. He was clearly uneasy about this talk of his father. I asked about the last time he'd seen his father.

"THIS TIME IT'S GOING TO BE DIFFERENT"

It was when I was fifteen, and it was a big mistake. I got sick of just Christmas cards, so I decided I was gonna surprise him. Man, was I excited. I hitched all the way there -- fourteen hours. When I got there… I guess I expected some big welcome. I mean he was friendly, but it was no big deal. After a while I started to feel really shitty. It was like we were total strangers. He was falling all over himself with these little kids, and I just sat there feeling like a complete asshole. Man, did I get loaded after I left his house that night. I still think about him a lot. I sure as shit wouldn't want him to know I was here. As soon as I get out of here, I'm gonna try again. This time it's gonna be different… it's gonna be man-to-man.

When Ken's father abandoned his young son, he left a deep void in the boy's life. Ken was crushed. He tried to cope by acting out his anger both at school and at home. In a sense he was calling out to his father, as if his need for discipline might draw his father back. But Ken's father seemed unwilling to heed the call.

In the face of overwhelming evidence that his father did not want to be a part of his life anymore, Ken continued to hold on to the dream that somehow he could win back his father's love. In the past, his hope had set him up for severe disappointment, to which he'd react by turning to drugs. I told him I was concerned that this chain of events would continue to dominate his adult life unless we worked together to break the pattern.

Ken's father may have been an adequate parent before the divorce, but afterward he was woefully deficient in providing even the minimal contact that his young son so desperately needed. By failing to do this, he significantly impaired Ken's developing sense of worth and lovability.

Unconsciously, Ken was still rationalizing his father's abandonment by taking the blame. As a child, he had assumed that some deficiency in himself had caused his father to beat a hasty retreat. Having arrived at this conclusion, self-hatred was bound to follow. He became a young man without purpose or direction in his life. Despite his intelligence, he was restless and unhappy in school and looked to the army as a solution to his problems. When that didn't work he turned to drugs in a desperate attempt to both fill his inner emptiness and deaden his pain.

It's What They Didn't Do That Hurts

It's easy to recognize abuse when a parent beats a child or subjects a child to continual tirades. But the toxicity of inadequate or deficient parents can be elusive, difficult to define. When a parent creates damage through omission rather than commission -- through what they don't do rather than what they do do -- the connections of adult problems to this sort of toxic parenting become very hard to see. Since the children of these parents are predisposed to deny these connections anyway, my job becomes especially difficult.

There is no such thing as a happy divorce. Divorce is invariably traumatic for everyone in the family, even though it may well be the healthiest course of action under the circumstances. But it is essential for parents to realize that they are divorcing a spouse, not a family. Both parents have a responsibility to maintain a connection to their children despite the disruption in their own lives. A divorce decree is not a license for an inadequate parent to abandon his or her children.

A parent's departure creates a particularly painful deprivation and emptiness within a child. Remember, children almost always conclude that if something negative happens within the family, it's their fault. Children of divorced parents are particularly prone to this belief. A parent who vanishes from his children's lives reinforces their feelings of invisibility, creating damage to their self-esteem that they'll drag into adulthood like a ball and chain.

But you do have a choice. You can begin the process of understanding that you were wrongly forced to grow up too soon, that you were robbed of your rightful childhood. You can work on accepting how much of your life's energy has gone down the drain of misplaced responsibility. Take this first step and you'll find a new reserve of energy that is suddenly available to you for the first time -- energy that you've exhausted on your toxic parents much of your life, but which can finally be used to help you become more loving and responsible to yourself.

Whether it's "they didn't mean to do any harm," or "they did the best they could," these apologies obscure the fact that these parents abdicated their responsibilities to their children. Through this abdication, these toxic parents robbed their children of positive role models, without which healthy emotional development is extremely difficult.

Compounding the problem is the fact that many of these parents are so troubled themselves that they evoke pity. Because these parents so often behave like helpless or irresponsible children, their adult children feel protective. They jump to their parents' defense, like a crime victim apologizing for the perpetrator.

If you are the adult child of a deficient or inadequate parent, you probably grew up without realizing that there was an alternative to feeling responsible for them. Dancing at the end of their emotional string seemed a way of life, not a choice.