Contact with Toxic Parents: Ambivalence Reigns

 

There are a plethora of self-help books out, including the one I wrote (pictured above), advising adult children of toxic parents on what to do. Some recommend cutting them off, some recommend keeping them at a distance, some recommend trying to set better boundaries, some talk about whether reconciliation is possible or not, and a few of them say it depends on the nature of the problems.

My own view, as most of my readers know, is to solve the problem of ongoing toxic parental behavior by researching the family history to identify shared internal conflicts, the reasons for them, and the effect of ambivalent double messages throughout at least three generations on everyone involved. Then, the object is to confront the issue head on by developing various strategies to empathically get past parents’ formidable defenses and come to some mutual understanding of why everyone is so miserable and what can be done to stop repetitive dysfunctional interactions. The goal is not reconciliation  per se but problem solving. Reconciliation and forgiveness is, however, however, a typical byproduct.

The psychotherapy research literature has had very little to say about this. It does come up in opinion pieces in such magazines as Psychology Today or The Psychotherapy Networker.

I think this whole question is a much bigger issue than it appears to be, and is a major cause of self-destructive or self defeating behavior, anxiety and unhappiness. How do I know? Well, a few years ago I started reading newspaper advice columns on the internet from four different advisors: Carolyn Hax, Amy Dickerson, Annie Lane, and Dear Abby. In order to maintain their readership, these columnists have to identify which letters are going to lead to a lot of public interest. If subjects pop up a lot, one might conclude that the problems discussed are very common.

And letters about this issue are exceeding common. People are constantly asking how to solve ongoing behavior from parents that is driving them crazy, whether they should reconcile with parents that have been already been cut off, whether to cut off toxic parents, guilt over a decision already made regarding a cut off, how to set boundaries, whether to reveal a history of child abuse to siblings and children, and how to stand up to parents without being disowned. My count of letters like this in the four columns was 28 in 2021 and 12 through April of this year. And I’m not even counting all the letters from parents who have been cut off by their children for “mysterious” reasons as I described in two previous posts.

Some writers are writing to justify their decisions on this matter, but their ambivalence about whatever decision they have made is just blaring. If they think their decision was so good, why are they writing about it? Some even want to warn people to watch out for therapists who recommend reconciliation, shouting the benefits of cut-offs from the rooftops. Do they think every situation is the same? And why do they feel the need to shout this out by writing to an advice columnist.

As I have said many times, cutting off an abusive parent is better than continued abuse, but those are not the only two options. My book discusses the third option for cases that do not involve significant physical or sexual abuse, and my psychotherapy model is for therapists to help all kinds of cases no matter how severe. The methods are not quick fixes, and the therapy is long term and often either not paid for by insurance or just flat out unavailable, since this therapy model has unfortunately not caught on. So the best solution can be very out of reach.

However, the danger of ongoing cut offs AND continuing abuse and toxicity is that the interpersonal and intrapsychic (in the mind) issues are not resolved but continuously reinforced by ANY family contact and consequently are seldom sufficiently repaired. Not to mention that the risks of passing them on to your own kids is quite high. 

The high degree of ambivalence about making or having made these decisions regarding ongoing contact shows how important family really is to just about everyone

Older Siblings and Neglectful Parents

I have lately been coming across another interesting pattern of family dysfunction. It takes place in families characterized by having several siblings and in which the parents were severely neglectful of them when they were growing up. This pattern is particularly likely when the adult who neglected the kids was the mother.

The neglect might have stemmed from any of a number of factors: parental depression, parental alcohol or substance abuse, mothers who had been bullied by demanding and violent husbands, husband who had made sure that their wives were perpetually pregnant, parents who were overly-enmeshed with their own families-of-origin, families subject to religious strictures against birth control and/or mothers working outside the home, and probably a host of others.

In many of these families, childcare duties fell on the oldest of the siblings, who was pressed into service to take care of the younger ones. This situation is a setup for disturbed sibling relationships after everyone has grown into adulthood.  There are three reasons for sibling discord in such a situation that I would like to focus on and describe:

1. The siblings are angry at the neglectful parents, but they protect their parents from those negative feelings by displacing them onto the older, mother-substitute sibling. 

2.  The older sibling, having no real power in the family and being ill-equipped to be a parent, becomes verbally or even physically abusive to the younger siblings. 

3.  When the oldest sibling is a male and the younger ones female, and when there is no parental supervision as there often is not in such cases, the boy sexually molests the girls. (Occasionally, older sisters will also molest younger sisters).

Problems #1 and #2 frequently occur together, although not always, leading the younger siblings as adults to isolate or even completely exile the older one from the rest of the family. As the parents age, the younger siblings may get together to keep the eldest away from the parents, and to make sure that he or she is disinherited in one way or another. Vicious gossip about the eldest may make the rounds. The children of the eldest siblings are often gossiped about and/or exiled as well.

Whenever I hear about incest between siblings, I find that, at least among my patients, parental neglect is nearly ubiquitous.  Sometimes the unsupervised children are literally never taught that there is anything wrong with doing this. When the elder sibling grows up, he (or she) becomes totally ashamed of what he had done. Usually the siblings, as adults, will never even discuss what happened. They may go on and act like nothing at all untoward had ever happened. They may avoid one another, but sometimes they may even become quite close!

Patients that grew up in such families often report that everyone in the family stuffs their feelings when in one anothers’ presence, and that no one speaks up when someone else displeases them. Family members are also highly prone to giving one another the “silent treatment” when upset with one another, or cutting off contact for years at a time.

I have often heard patients who were severely neglected as children opine that they would rather that their parents had been abusive rather than neglectful if they had to choose between the two.  At least then they would seem to matter to the family. There are few feelings worse than having your whole family act like you just don’t count for anything and that your very presence is a big bother.