'Fess Up



In my blog post of June 2, 2010, Step Up to the Plate, I encouraged members of families plagued by repetitive troublesome interactions, as well as histories of domestic abuse and child abuse, to quit beating themselves up about it and do something to fix their family relationships in the present.  No matter how terrible what you did was, you can make things better for yourself and everyone else from this point in time forward. 

As I said in that post, "Hating yourself and/or feeling guilty about everything not only makes you miserable, it makes the rest of your family miserable as well, and can cause problematic, repetitive family behavior patterns to be passed down from one generation to another."

Nowhere is this more important than for parents who had physically, verbally, or sexually abused their children, or severely neglected them, when they were growing up.  You know who you are.  All the denial in the world will not change the fact that both you and the person or persons you abused know exactly what you did. 

Parents who push their adult children away through cruel or unpleasant behavior (because of a sense that their children are better off without them), not only punish themselves, but do their children no favors either. By the same token, trying to make your children hate you through constantly accusing them of lying or by minimizing the significance of what you did will not make them feel better, but far worse. It accomplishes nothing but making them feel invalid and almost subhuman.

And you know, down deep, how much you really want them to love you and forgive you. And your children really do, deep down, want to forgive you. Please let them.

'Fess up to what you did directly to them and stop making excuses. Tell them how sorry you are even if that seems to make them angry or if they refuse to accept your apology. Tell them that you would like them to forgive you but you know you may not deserve it and you will certainly understand if they feel they cannot do so.   

Try to explain to them the experiences that you had growing up that may have led you to do the foul deeds, but without using those explanations as a justification for your actions. There is no justification. Perhaps, in order to do this right, you will need a therapist to act as an arbiter between you and your adult children.

You always have three choices. First, you can deny what you did and continue to lie to everyone including yourself, but you will always know that it is true. Second, you can continually beat yourself up about it as if your shortcomings are written in stone and any harm you may have inflicted on your children is unforgivable and irreversible. The result of this course of self-damning action is continued guilt, which leads to more and more unpleasant feelings, which in turn lead to desperation, despair, and hopelessness.

Those two choices will not only make you feel worse, they will not help your children feel any better about you, your relationship with them, or their childhood. As I mentioned, it usually makes them feel much worse. If they have children themselves, the after-effects of what happened to them as children will continue to poison, in one way or another, their relationship with their own kids.

A much better course of action is to forgive yourself for your human frailties, learn from your mistakes so that you do not repeat them, and talk openly with your offspring as best you know how about what had happened and why you felt and acted the way that you did.

It's time to 'fess up. If you decide to do this, do not procrastinate. You might change your mind. There will never be a better time than right now. The transmission of dysfunctional family patterns from one generation to the next can be stopped.

Does One Need to Forgive Abusive Parents in Order to Heal?

One of the most frequent questions I get when I start working with patients on altering ongoing dysfunctional family dynamics with previously abusive parents or other primary caretakers is, "Do I have to forgive them?"

"Well, no, you do not have to...," I answer,"...but if this goes well you will probably want to." Forgiveness is not an end in itself but a byproduct of the process of reconciliation.

My patients also tell me, when I am encouraging them to re-establish contact with abusive parents, that they do not want their parents in their lives.  I reply, "That's because of the way that they treat you now. I don't blame you.  However, if they stopped treating you like that, you probably would want them in your life."  Having no loving family to call our own is not a predicament that we are naturally built for.

As I described in my June 11 post, How Can You Be Empathic With a Child Abuser, the most difficult and time-consuming part of doing the type of psychotherapy I do, called Unified Therapy, is convincing my patients that it is in their interest to find a way to metacommunicate with their family of origin members. That means attempting to get past everyone's formidable defensiveness, denial, and resistance and talk about their family dynamics.  This reluctance is especially acute - and understandable - if the parents had been severely abusive to the patient when the patient was a child.

Patients think I am asking them to somehow change the past.  That is obviously impossible.  However, we can change the effect the past has on us. The goal of the process is to change how things are right now, in the present.

The problem is, in fact, not in the past at all.  Dysfunctional family patterns, in modified forms, usually keep going on long after children grow up. Unless something is done, they have a strong tendency to go on and on until the parents die, although the patterns often do mellow somewhat as time goes on.

Although we may not want to or be able to forget past misdeeds, most of us could readily find it in our hearts to forgive family members for bad past behavior if only they would let us.

But if the offending family members are still mistreating you, acting as if the abuse never even happened, or are in some other way invalidating you if you even bring it up, how can you possibly forgive them?  If they blame you for their past misdeeds, how on earth can you possibly forgive them?  If they demand you leave your children in the care of an abuser and act as if you are unreasonable for refusing to do so, ditto.  Again, this is a problem not in the past but in the present.

In order to "get over" the abuse and move forward without passing on negative family interactional patterns and conflicts to future generations, I believe it is extremely important to come to a mutual understanding with major family of origin members.  Whether you want to continue having a relationship with them after metacommunication is successful, or whether or not you decide you want to forgive them, is in a way besides the point. But you probably will.

Hitting Denial on the Head

In my post of June 11, How Can You Be Empathic With a Child Abuser? I mentioned the importance for an adult who was a victim of past abuse of finding a way to talk with the perpetrators about, or metacommunicate about, the family dynamics that led to the abuse . I also discussed the secret of getting past their defenses - empathy - but mentioned that empathy alone was not enough.

One of the biggest challenges in any such endeavor is staying cool while an abusive parent systematically denies ever having been abusive. Not only is this denial of the facts - or lying as I prefer to call it - infuriating, but once a person gets through one type of denial with the perpetrator, there are three other types of denial that will likely follow, one after the other.

Barrett and Trepper, in an article in the Family Therapy Networker (now the Psychotherapy Networker) in 1992, pointed out that families have multiple layers of denial, which often come out in the same order. As one breaks through each of these resistances, the next one pops up in its place.

The presence of denial is not a reason to avoid attempting to metacommunicate. The presence of multiple resistances represents multiple problems to be solved, not multiple reasons for giving up. Forewarned is forearmed. Knowing that these maneuvers may be forthcoming from perpetrators helps former or even current victims steel themselves in order to maintain an empathic stance throughout what may be a lengthy process.

Barrett and Trepper’s predictable stages of denial are as follows:

1. Denial of facts (“it never happened; you’re a liar!”), followed by:

2. Denial of awareness (“I was drunk,” or “I didn’t realize I was neglecting you; you should have told me”), followed by:

3. Denial of responsibility (“You were the one who was seductive,” or “If your mother didn’t deny me, I wouldn’t have to have turned to you.”) and finally:

4. Denial of impact (“It only happened a few times,” or “It was only fondling,” or “OK, so I beat you. Why do you always have to dwell on the past? You’re just too sensitive; get over it!”).

The exact words and strategies to use in order to counter these types of statements is different in every family. For many people, attempting to confront an abusive parental figure probably is a not wise thing to do without the guidance of a therapist who is well versed in this type of work. This is particularly true for a highly reactive family in which physical violence or vicious verbal attacks are a distinct possibility. A bad attempt at metacommunication can actually be far worse than no attempt at all.

Barrett and Trepper, in the same article, say that they “…believe that some part of every offender is appalled by his own deeds and desperately yearns for the kind of inner peace and satisfaction found in healthy relationships not based on power, manipulation, and secrecy.” As I discussed in my earlier post, I concur wholeheartedly, although many other therapists may disagree.

How Can You Be Empathic with a Child Abuser?

With my non-pychotic adult patients who exhibit chronic self-destructive or self-defeating behavior patterns, chronic anxiety and depression, and/or overt family discord, I eventually get to the point in psychotherapy where I recommend that they talk to their parents (or other primary caretakers) about their family dynamics. I tell them we will work on getting past their parents' rather formidable defenses, and finding a way to discuss their long mutual history of dysfunctional interactions. We will figure out a strategy for stopping ongoing, repetitive, and troublesome interpersonal exchanges, which will hopefully lead to reconciliation.

Even if the patients are finally convinced that it might be very helpful for them to do this, the first response I get is usually some variation of, "That's impossible." The patients then go on to describe how their families are the most difficult human beings on the planet, and how there is just no way their parents will ever be approachable like that, let alone alter the way they interact with the patient.

They go on to say that if I knew these people, then I would know this would be a fool's errand. Besides, they've already tried a variety of different strategies to talk to them, and got nowhere. Certainly, I could not possibly have ever seen a worse family.

Actually, after 30 years of doing this sort of work, I probably have seen families that are much worse. Every time I think I have seen family members mistreat one another in every conceivable way, I am in for a shock. Soap operas ain't got nothing on real families.

Nowhere is convincing patients of the need to do what I recommend more difficult than for those cases in which one or both parents had been physically or sexually abusive to my patients when they were children, when other important family members did nothing to protect the abused child, and when the parents refuse to admit than anything untoward ever even happened. Worse yet are the parents who blame the patient for the abuse. One patient, right after a particularly reprehensible act by her father, was given a copy of the book The Bad Seed by her mother. The novel is about a little girl who was born bad.

The task of reconciling seems even more absurd in such cases when I tell the patient that he or she has probably not yet employed the basic secret of being able to get past parental defenses and calmly discuss family dynamics (a process called metacommunication). That secret is showing the parents empathy. Employing attacks and recriminations only leads to the parents exhibiting even more or their defenses, employing fight/flight/freeze reactions, or resorting to nasty verbal attacks and even family violence. (The exact way empathy is used in metacommunication must be different in the case of every family, however. Generic assertiveness skills often do not work. Interventions must be tailored to the family's sensitivities).

Empathy for a child abuser? For a child molester? I have got to be kidding, right? How can you be empathic with someone who has done something so heinous?

First, even parents who do horrible things almost always have redeeming qualities as well. No one is all bad (thinking otherwise is splitting, subject of an earlier post). They were not abusive twenty-four seven. Sometimes they were nice. Many people who were abused as children do not like to think about the times their parents were loving - it is just too confusing and therefore upsetting. It is much easier to focus on the hateful side.

Some take the opposite track and try to make excuses for the parents. All of them really have very mixed feelings about the parents and secretly wish for a healthy connection. Also, they fear that since their parents are monsters and they came from them, then they might be monsters too. Some folks with an abusive background are afraid to have children for fear that they, too, will be abusive.

Second, most people get empathy mixed up with sympathy. There is a huge difference. Abusive parents are not very sympathetic characters, to say the least. Empathy, however, means trying to understand what factors led the offender to do what he or she did without condoning what was done. Sympathy is saying that what happened was sort of OK. Saying that what they did was somehow excusable is, in fact, not empathic at all.

Why? Because abusers know, despite all their denial and verbal nastiness, that what they did was horrible. They are not stupid, and they know wrong from right. Their biggest secret fear is that their children hate them for it, and that they deserve not only the hatred that they receive but eternal damnation. This is why they use denial: not to escape responsibililty, since they and their children know very well what happened, but to make their children give them the hatred they think they deserve! If an abused individual says that what the parents did was all right, the parents know immediately that their child is lying. Lying can never be empathic, because it is phony.

In general, I use genograms, which are sort of the patient's emotional/historical family tree, to try to help patients put their parents' behavior in a more understandable context, so that the patient's justified anger becomes more manageable. Understanding the parents' past experience makes them seem less like monsters.

Also, it is important for patients to understand that getting past their parents' denial is a multi-stage process. There are usually four different types of denial that are employed, one after the other, as each one is confronted and then diffused - but that's a matter for a future post.