Go at Your Own Pace

In the last two chapters, the work we did was primarily intellectual. I asked you to explore, to perceive, and to understand. In this chapter and the ones that follow, we'll be working on a far more emotional level. Because of this, it is especially important that you take your time. Emotional work can get pretty heavy and before you know it you may be looking for excuses to avoid it.

I wish you had a happy childhood, but I can't change the past. What I can do is help you make a major shift in your beliefs about who is responsible for the pain of your childhood. This shift is essential, because until you honestly assess who owns this responsibility, you will almost certainly go through your life shouldering the blame yourself. And as long as you're blaming yourself, you'll suffer shame and self-hatred, and you'll find ways to punish yourself.

If you begin to feel off balance, it's okay to slow down and put the work aside for a few days. But if you find yourself continuing to put it off, set a time limit for when you're going to come back to it, and then stick to it.

You must let go of the responsibility for the painful events of your childhood and put it where it belongs.

It Is Their Responsibility

You may find it useful to enlist some outside support as you begin this work. When you bring strong emotional material to the surface, a support group or therapist can be a valuable guide. A loving friend, partner, or relative can offer encouragement, but may feel intimidated by the intensity of your emotions. You may want to ask this person to read this book along with you. He or she can be much more supportive with a better understanding of what you're going through.

I know I have said this many times by now, but I can't emphasize enough how important this message is and how hard it is to internalize:

To help you let go of the responsibility, I have designed a list of many of the things my clients have wrongly blamed themselves for. To use this list most effectively, set aside a quiet, private time for yourself to talk to the child within you. To help you visualize how little and helpless you were, you might want to use a childhood photograph. Say out loud to that child, "You were not responsible for…" and finish the sentence with every item on the list that applies to your life.

their cruel or thoughtless teasing

their choice not to do anything about their problems

the bad names they called you

their unhappiness

the way they made you feel unloved or unlovable

their drinking

the way they neglected or ignored you

their problems

their molesting you

The second part of this exercise involves assigning the responsibility where it belongs -- to your parents. To bring this more sharply into focus, just repeat each item on the list, but precede it now with the words, "My parents were responsible for…" Again, add anything that is relevant to your personal experience.

In the beginning you may understand, on an intellectual level, that it wasn't your fault, but the little child inside you may still feel responsible. It takes time for your feelings to catch up to your new awareness. You may need to repeat this exercise several times.

Add any other painful, repetitive experiences that you have always felt responsible for.

their hitting you

what they did when they were drinking

"You were not responsible for…":

"I DON'T THINK THEY MEANT ANY HARM"

LES: Since I was eight.

You may feel especially reluctant to assign responsibility to your parents if they were inadequate, ill, had overwhelming problems of their own, or appeared to have good intentions.

Les -- who, at the age of 8, had to take care of his younger brothers following his mother's breakdown -- clearly exemplifies this dilemma. I told Les that many of his struggles with women in his adult life were directly connected to the burdens of guilt and responsibility he had assumed as a child. Les remained unconvinced, despite the fact that he had gone through his responsibility list earlier in the session.

LES: But I am responsible. My mother was so miserable. She still is. She needs me. I just want to make things better for her.

SUSAN: And who was responsible for you?

LES: I guess I've always felt responsible for everybody, including myself.

SUSAN: What would it mean, Les, if you began to hold your parents responsible for themselves?

SUSAN: How long have you been taking responsibility for her life?

SUSAN: That still doesn't make it your responsibility. What about your father? How come he gets off the hook so easily? When is it his turn to start acting like an adult?

LES (after much thought): You know something, I never thought about it that way. I guess he's just weak.

LES: How can you do that with someone who is depressed, pathetic… who's never had a pleasurable day in her life. It wasn't her fault. She went to doctors. She tried to get better. She didn't want to be sick.

SUSAN: I recognize that with parents like yours, who weren't overtly abusive, it's a lot tougher to see how hurtful they were. But there was a lot of benevolent violence here. There was a lot of emotional neglect. No one ever cared about your life. You never got to have a childhood. The important thing here is not how much they were responsible for, but for you to realize that you weren't responsible for any of it.

Les allowed this to sink in. He worked on his new awareness for the rest of the session. From that day on, his progress was much more rapid.

You may recognize that your parents were inadequate, depressed, ill, or unavailable, but you may still sympathize with their struggles. Your parents had very limited resources, after all; most people didn't feel free to enter therapy thirty or forty years ago. Your parents may be so passive that they seem helpless. You may be convinced that they intended no harm.

In many cases, I'm sure that no harmful intent existed, but speculating on intent is a waste of time. It's the results that count. If harm was done by inadequate parents, the intent is irrelevant. Inadequate parents are responsible both for what they did do and for what they didn't.

To help Les begin to see how true this was for him, I used an empty chair to symbolize his parents and played the role of Les myself. I wanted him to hear verbalized the things he had never been able to say for himself.

SUSAN (as Les): Mom and Dad, when I was a little kid, I felt like nobody was ever there for me. I felt scared and I felt lonely, and I didn't understand why nobody was looking out for me. I don't understand, Mom, why I had to take care of you and why Dad didn't do it. I don't understand why I didn't get to be a kid. I always thought it was because nobody loved me. I still feel that way! When are you going to stop draining me? When are you going to grow up? I'm so tired of feeling responsible for the whole family. I'm tired of being on call for you all the time. I'm tired of taking responsibility for the whole world. I'm tired of blaming myself for everything that went wrong. Mom, I'm sorry you were sick and unhappy, but it wasn't my fault!

SUSAN: Never is a long, long time, Les. Right now it's only important that you say them to yourself. Later, when we've done more work on this and you feel stronger, you might want to make a different choice.

Les began to see that his parents were adults and, as such, had certain basic responsibilities toward their children. By failing to attend to the physical and emotional needs of their children, his parents, like all inadequate parents, created a cockeyed version of the parent-child relationship.

"HE WAS SO OUT OF CONTROL"

LES: Everything you said was true. I've felt all those things. But I could never say those things to them.

Adults who were severely abused as children also have difficulty putting the responsibility where it belongs. Remember, accepting blame is a survival tool for abused children. They keep the myth of the good family alive by believing that they -- not their parents -- are bad. This belief lies at the core of virtually all self-defeating behavior patterns in adults who were abused as children. But, it is a belief that can be reversed.

Once Les could truly see, believe, and feel these basic truths, he could rid himself of much of the self-blame that fueled his work-aholism and impaired his ability to be loving.

Joe -- the graduate student in psychology who had been horribly battered by his violent, alcoholic father -- eventually came in for therapy with me. In his first session, he offered a good example of how tenacious self-blame can be.

JOE: I can look back at my childhood and know that my father had a mean streak. But I still make excuses for him because maybe he really did believe that what he did to me was for my own good. In my head, I know what he did was horrible and that no child deserves to be treated like I was treated. But in my gut, I still feel like a rotten kid who deserved what he got. And I still feel so damned guilty that I couldn't protect my mother.

SUSAN: You managed to survive by taking all of the badness onto yourself. If you saw your father as bad when you were little, it would have been overwhelming and terrifying for you. But you're not a little kid anymore, Joe. You have to start telling yourself the truth. And the truth is your father was one hundred percent responsible for abusing you, for his violence, and for his drinking. He was also one hundred percent responsible for making the choice to do nothing to resolve his problems and save his family. And while it's more comforting for you to see your mother as an innocent victim, she was one hundred percent responsible for not protecting her children and herself. She permitted the abuse to continue. You've got to start putting the responsibility where it belongs. How are you ever going to be a counselor and help other people if you refuse to deal with reality in your own life?

JOE: I hear everything you're saying, Susan, but it's just a lot of words to me.

SUSAN: It may be your business, but you just about destroyed your family with it. You abused and terrified your son, and you abused and terrified your wife. Do you have any idea what that was like for Joe? Do you care how he felt?

Joe's defenses seemed rock-solid. So, instead of talking to him directly, which seemed to stir up a lot of resistance, I asked Joe to play the role of his own father.

JOE (as Father): First of all, what went on inside my family is none of your goddamned business. If I hit him, it was just to toughen him up. And my drinking is my business.

JOE (as Father): I couldn't care less. All I care about is myself.

SUSAN: I want to talk to you about some of the things that happened in Joe's childhood. Joe has told me that you were pretty violent and beat him up a lot. He also told me that you're an alcoholic.

SUSAN: I think you're a horrible father. You've done nothing but cause a lot of people a lot of pain. I'm sure you were in pain yourself, but you were an adult, and he was a little boy. You could've done something to help yourself instead of hurting other people. You were responsible for your alcoholism then and now. I think you're a coward who can only feel powerful by beating up on women and kids. All these years, Joe has felt he was to blame, when in reality, you were.

Joe came out of character at this point.

SUSAN (interrupting): There was nothing Joe did or could have done to justify what you did to him.

JOE: You know, I hate to admit it, but it felt really good for you to tell my dad off. I started to feel how angry and uptight he is… and I just didn't want to hear anything you were saying to me. And you're right, he did almost destroy the family. What a bastard he is. But I think he's more scared than I am. At least I'm trying to deal with this stuff. He's just been running away from it all his life. He really is a coward!

As painful as it was for Joe to acknowledge these things about his father, it was also very liberating. He was beginning to put the responsibility where it belonged and was ready to start absolving himself.

JOE (as Father): Like hell! The little bastard used to mouth off at me all the time. He didn't do his chores…

Joe had told me in a previous session that he loved working with children; he often did volunteer work at a children's hospital. I asked him to visualize one of the children he worked with. Then, I asked Joe to imagine that this child was living through a childhood similar to his own. I put an empty chair in front of him and asked what he would say if that child were sitting there now.

Joe was uncomfortable with the suggestion, but after a bit of prompting he took a deep breath and began talking to the imaginary child:

Joe's whole body shook with rage. I asked him who he had really been talking to. "Myself!" he shouted. "Jesus Christ, myself!"

Joe's long-held rage was beginning to surface. He could finally start to assign responsibility to his parents for the pain and self-hatred he had borne all his life.

I understand that there's some bad stuff going on at your house. I'm really sorry. I hear your old man gets drunk and beats you up a lot. And he calls you bad names. And he tells you you're no good. I know how scared you must feel. See, the same thing happened to me. And I bet you feel like it's all your fault, too, but it isn't. You're really a good kid, and nobody has the right to do those things to you. Nobody! Your father's mean. He's sick. And he's a coward because he won't face any of his problems. I think he really enjoys beating you up; it makes me want to kill him!

I asked Joe to imagine that his father was now in the chair. I reminded him that he was safe, he could say anything he wanted to. This time, Joe didn't hesitate:

You bastard! You fucking son of a bitch! Do you have any idea what kind of misery you caused me? What kind of misery you caused the whole family? Must've made you feel like a real big man to beat up on a little kid! I've spent my whole life feeling like a worthless piece of shit, like I deserved getting my ass kicked. But I'm tired of hearing your put-downs. So, fuck you!

Fear of Anger

I wasn't surprised by the intensity of Joe's anger. Once you start putting the responsibility where it belongs, you are going to experience powerful anger at the things that were done to you and at the people who did them. But Joe was frightened by how much anger there was inside him. Like many adults who were beaten as children, he was afraid he might lose control and hurt someone, might fall apart, or might feel angry forever; he was afraid he might even go crazy.

Anger is an upsetting emotion. You may associate anger with abuse from your childhood. You may associate anger with people you saw out of control with rage. You may worry that you'll seem ugly if you get angry and that other people will reject you. You may believe that good, loving people don't get angry, or that you have no right to get angry at the parents who gave you life.

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.

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.

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:

DEALING WITH 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.

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.

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.

Let me show you some effective new ways to manage your anger:

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.

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.

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.

loss of trust

GRIEF AND MOURNING

"Whaddaya mean I have to grieve?" said Joe. "Who died?"

loss of good feelings about yourself

loss of feelings of safety

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.

You need to identify your losses in order to experience your grief. You must work through these feelings to release their hold over you.

loss of innocence

loss of joy and spontaneity

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 childhood

loss of nurturing, respectful parents

loss of love

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

THE INTENSITY OF GRIEF

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.

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.

YOU CAN'T STOP YOUR LIFE

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.

GRIEF DOES COME TO AN END

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.

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.

Taking Personal Responsibility

Putting the responsibility where it realistically belongs -- squarely on your parents -- does not give you license to excuse all your self-defeating behaviors by saying, "It was all their fault." Absolving the child that you were does not in any way absolve the adult you from assuming your responsibilities.

having the courage to acknowledge the connections between events of my childhood and my adult life

This next list will help you focus on some of those responsibilities as they apply to your relationship with your parents. Say out loud, "As an adult, in relationship to my parents, I am responsible for…" and then follow it with each item on the following list:

becoming a separate individual from my parents

looking honestly at my relationship with them

confronting and diminishing the power and control that they have over my life, whether they are alive or dead

gaining the courage to express my real feelings to them

facing the truth about my childhood

changing my own behavior when it is cruel, hurtful, critical, or manipulative

finding the appropriate resources to help me heal my inner child

It's important to recognize that the items on this list are goals to strive toward, not things to expect yourself to do overnight. As you work toward these goals, you will have setbacks. You may fall back on old behaviors and patterns of thinking, and you may even decide to pack it all in. Don't be discouraged. In fact, you should expect to be thrown off course. This is process, not perfection. Some of these goals may be easier than others, but they are all attainable; you can free the child within you from perpetual punishment.

reclaiming my adult power and confidence