You can divorce an abusive spouse. You can call it quits if your lover mistreats you. But what can you do if the source of your misery is your own parent?
Post a Comment on the Well BlogGranted, no parent is perfect. And whining about parental failure, real or not, is practically an American pastime that keeps the therapeutic community dutifully employed.
But just as there are ordinary good-enough parents who mysteriously produce a difficult child, there are some decent people who have the misfortune of having a truly toxic parent.
A patient of mine, a lovely woman in her 60s whom I treated for depression, recently asked my advice about how to deal with her aging mother.
"She's always been extremely abusive of me and my siblings," she said, as I recall. "Once, on my birthday, she left me a message wishing that I get a disease. Can you believe it?"
Over the years, she had tried to have a relationship with her mother, but the encounters were always painful and upsetting; her mother remained harshly critical and demeaning.
Whether her mother was mentally ill, just plain mean or both was unclear, but there was no question that my patient had decided long ago that the only way to deal with her mother was to avoid her at all costs.
Now that her mother was approaching death, she was torn about yet another effort at reconciliation. "I feel I should try," my patient told me, "but I know she'll be awful to me."
Should she visit and perhaps forgive her mother, or protect herself and live with a sense of guilt, however unjustified? Tough call, and clearly not mine to make.
But it did make me wonder about how therapists deal with adult patients who have toxic parents.
The topic gets little, if any, attention in standard textbooks or in the psychiatric literature, perhaps reflecting the common and mistaken notion that adults, unlike children and the elderly, are not vulnerable to such emotional abuse.
All too often, I think, therapists have a bias to salvage relationships, even those that might be harmful to a patient. Instead, it is crucial to be open-minded and to consider whether maintaining the relationship is really healthy and desirable.
Likewise, the assumption that parents are predisposed to love their children unconditionally and protect them from harm is not universally true. I remember one patient, a man in his mid-20s, who came to me for depression and rock-bottom self-esteem.
It didn't take long to find out why. He had recently come out as gay to his devoutly religious parents, who responded by disowning him. It gets worse: at a subsequent family dinner, his father took him aside and told him it would have been better if he, rather than his younger brother, had died in a car accident several years earlier.
Though terribly hurt and angry, this young man still hoped he could get his parents to accept his sexuality and asked me to meet with the three of them.
The session did not go well. The parents insisted that his "lifestyle" was a grave sin, incompatible with their deeply held religious beliefs. When I tried to explain that the scientific consensus was that he had no more choice about his sexual orientation than the color of his eyes, they were unmoved. They simply could not accept him as he was.
I was stunned by their implacable hostility and convinced that they were a psychological menace to my patient. As such, I had to do something I have never contemplated before in treatment.
At the next session I suggested that for his psychological well-being he might consider, at least for now, forgoing a relationship with his parents.
I felt this was a drastic measure, akin to amputating a gangrenous limb to save a patient's life. My patient could not escape all the negative feelings and thoughts about himself that he had internalized from his parents. But at least I could protect him from even more psychological harm.
Easier said than done. He accepted my suggestion with sad resignation, though he did make a few efforts to contact them over the next year. They never responded.
Of course, relationships are rarely all good or bad; even the most abusive parents can sometimes be loving, which is why severing a bond should be a tough, and rare, decision.
Dr. Judith Lewis Herman, a trauma expert who is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, said she tried to empower patients to take action to protect themselves without giving direct advice.
"Sometimes we consider a paradoxical intervention and say to a patient, ‘I really admire your loyalty to your parents - even at the expense of failing to protect yourself in any way from harm,' " Dr. Herman told me in an interview.
The hope is that patients come to see the psychological cost of a harmful relationship and act to change it.
Eventually, my patient made a full recovery from his depression and started dating, though his parents' absence in his life was never far from his thoughts.
No wonder. Research on early attachment, both in humans and in nonhuman primates, shows that we are hard-wired for bonding - even to those who aren't very nice to us.
We also know that although prolonged childhood trauma can be toxic to the brain, adults retain the ability later in life to rewire their brains by new experience, including therapy and psychotropic medication.
For example, prolonged stress can kill cells in the hippocampus, a brain area critical for memory. The good news is that adults are able to grow new neurons in this area in the course of normal development. Also, antidepressants encourage the development of new cells in the hippocampus.
It is no stretch, then, to say that having a toxic parent may be harmful to a child's brain, let alone his feelings. But that damage need not be written in stone.
Of course, we cannot undo history with therapy. But we can help mend brains and minds by removing or reducing stress.
Sometimes, as drastic as it sounds, that means letting go of a toxic parent.
Dr. Richard A. Friedman is a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/health/20mind.html?em&exprod=myyahoo
I've never understood why anyone tolerates anyone they consider toxic....blood relative or not.
Too bad teens can't just walk away instead of having to run away.
It's hard for a teen but I got emancipated at 16 and moved in with my boyfriend's (now husband) parents. It was the best decision of my life.
Quoting stormcris:
Too bad teens can't just walk away instead of having to run away.
Thank you to the poster of this article. I am unsure of why you posted it but it really hits close to home for me. It actually almost brought me to tears. I just recently went through this. I would like to vent a little and tell my story...
My mother is what you would call a "toxic parent". Growing up I could never figure out what I was doing wrong... she would tell me she loved me one moment and the next she would say she hated me and wished she had had that abortion instead of going through with her pregnancy. (She was going to abort me because she had no clue who my father was). She had my little brother when I was 11 and I practically raised him while she went on dates and focused on her social life. It was rough. Eventually she had one of her "episodes" while my boyfriend's dad was there to pick me up for work and he put me in the car, went back inside and packed my clothes, took me home, and I legally emancipated myself that next week. I wish other teenagers in my position could have people who cared enough to step in and speak up for them. My now in-laws took me in as their own and I love them for it.
Anyways, I didn't speak to my mom for years until my boyfriend (Tom) and I decided to get married. It was 3 years later and I felt wierd not having both of my parents there. So I invited her. She came and everything actually went really well so I decided to try to have a relationship with her. It was long distant but it worked for about a year. And then old habits came back full force. It got extremely bad when I had my son. She would write me letters saying how bad of a mom I was and would be. She would tell me that my kids were going to die because of my lack of parenting skills, my marriage would end in divorce because no one can ever love me b/c I am unlavable and I don't deserve to be happy. She said I didn't deserve to be happy because she chose to have me and in doing so she had to give up buying nice things for herself and she had to give up her social life (she actually said, "no one wants to date someone with a bratty daughter"). She blamed me for all the bad in her life and I put up with it until about 2 months ago. I now have two beautiful children and when I found a 4 page letter hidden in my van after bringing the kids to visit their grandma it was the last straw. I was in tears reading the hateful things she wrote. She said she hated me and she couldn't wait to see me fail in life. She "just knew" I was going to get divorced because I was the worst wife and mom she had ever seen. My children were going to be dumb because I was their mom and she knows they are going to die because I can't care for them like a "real" mom. I was so sick of her comments and her negativity. I realized that if I wanted my kids to grow up happy and healthy then all ties would be cut. I didn't even write a letter back (although my husband REALLY wanted me to). I haven't talked to her since. And thinking of the letters still hurts me and still brings up some emotion but I don't cry anymore.
Thanks for letting me vent. This article was so nice to read. I'm glad I am not alone.
Quoting EireLass:I've never understood why anyone tolerates anyone they consider toxic....blood relative or not.
Maybe for the same reason so many ppl wonder "why does she stay?" in regard to a woman who is in a domestic violence situation.
If you have never experienced either of these situations, be thankful, b/c I have experience with both.
mommy of riley, we have something in common.
"I'll fight for a person's right to speak so long as that person will, in return, fight to allow me to challenge their opinions and ridicule them as the content of their ideas merit."
I have no relatiionship with my mother , she has been abusive negligent and pure hateful my whole life . " I wish abortion was legal back then"
I decided to end our relationship because quite frankly I am not a child without a choice any more.
I hate the fact that almost every person on the planet will say to me
"But she is your mother " No she pushed me out animals do it
Mothering is entirely different
Quote:
At the next session I suggested that for his psychological well-being he might consider, at least for now, forgoing a relationship with his parents.
I felt this was a drastic measure, akin to amputating a gangrenous limb to save a patient's life. My patient could not escape all the negative feelings and thoughts about himself that he had internalized from his parents. But at least I could protect him from even more psychological harm.
I had a therapist tell me this once, too. After I told him that I didn't want to do that (they were my PARENTS, for Pete's sake), he dismissed me. I haven't been to a therapist since, and that was at least 6 years ago.
They still drive me nuts, but to not have a relationship with them...is unthinkable.
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on Oct. 21, 2009 at 4:07 PM