Idealizing Our Parents: Fear and the Loss of Autonomy

Excerpts from "Forgiving Our Parents, Forgiving Ourselves" by Drs. Stoop and Masteller.


From pages 197 - 201:

If we accept these notions about our parents – as children, we really have little choice – then we have to conclude that they know what is best for us, and that they are always right. This tendency to always view our parents as all-good is called idealization.

Idealization often occurs in families that are very religious, especially in those kinds of religious homes that draw very strict boundaries to define acceptable and unacceptable attitudes and behaviors. The high value that is placed on family, and on respect for parents, makes it almost impossible for children to integrate their parents’ failings and weaknesses....

Adult children who have practiced this degree of splitting and idealization tend to be driven by fear. First, there is a fear of being abandoned. “I was always afraid my mother was going to leave us,” one woman remembered. “When we did something bad, she threatened to walk out and never come back. I remember many afternoons when I ran home from school, afraid that the house would be empty when I got there. She never actually left, but I always feared she would.

Such [adult] children also fear loss of control or loss of autonomy. For children growing up in a dysfunctional family, control is all-important. It is the only answer to the chaos that surrounds them. The problem, of course, is that none of us can control life completely, and the more we try, the more out-of-control we feel. But the fear of losing control drives us to try all the harder, despite the suffering and frustration it causes...
The blame for this has to land somewhere. If children idealize their parents, they become the only available targets. Children grow up thinking they are the bad ones. Even if others try to tell them they are good, inwardly they don’t believe it. How could it be true? Other people just don’t realize how awful they are. “I have trouble whenever anyone says, “I love you,” one woman explained. “In our family, whenever I hear those words, it meant I was about to be taken advantage of.”

The normal reaction to these kinds of injury should be anger. But since children in hurtful environments are often forbidden to express anger – or are too young even to realize what is happening to them – they repress their feelings and they deny their memories of what happened.

But even when denial shuts out the source of pain, the feelings of anger, helplessness, despair, suspicion, fear of rejection, abandonment, anxiety, and pain are still present. They may find expression in psychological disorders or in such self-destructive behaviors as substance abuse or suicide. When these adult children become parents, they may take revenge on their own children for the mistreatment they received in childhood. Or their unresovled negative emotions may find expression in destructive acts against others, even leading to criminal behavior.

When denial is allowed to continue into adulthood, it opens the door to many problems. The answer to those problems is never to “forget.” It is remembering that makes healing and freedom possible.



[Read more on "splitting" by Stoop and Masteller HERE.]

Excerpt from
Dr. David Stoop & Dr. James Masteller's
"Forgiving Our Parents, Forgiving Ourselves:
Healing Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families"
Regal/Gospel Light, 1996 (Servant, 1991)

Psychological “Splitting” (and Idealizing Parents)

Excerpts from "Forgiving Our Parents, Forgiving Ourselves" by Drs. Stoop and Masteller.


From pages 193 - 199 [Please Buy This Book!]:


What often happens with children from dysfunctional families is that the integration process gets short-circuited. They do not develop the ability to see that their parents have both good and bad qualities [psychological splitting]. They continue to operate from an unconscious belief that things must be either all good or all bad. As we will see in a moment, this results in either outright rejection of the parents, or – what is far more likely – unhealthy idealization of the parents.



Three Types of Mothers

Typically, when the process of integration has been blocked in a child’s development, we find that the mother in the family was one of three types. (This isn’t meant as an attack on motherhood, by the way – heaven forbid ) But our experience shows it to be true more often than not. [I would also suggest that this role is not limited to mothers but can be applicable to fathers as well.]



1. The Intrusive Mother. She has to be in control at all times, because she is the only one who really knows what is best for everyone.

2. The Abandoning Mother. This kind of mother doesn’t always literally run away from her children – though some do. More common is emotional abandonment, simply neglecting the kids because Mom is too busy with other things, such as her job or friends.

3. The Unpredictable Mother. Sometimes she is warm and nurturing, holding her children and whispering words of love in their ears. At other times – and with no warning – she is cold, indifferent, and critical. Her children grow up in the land of inconsistency. They survive by expecting the unexpected, never sure of what life is going to bring their way next, distrustful of others, and robbed of basic scrutiny.


BLACK AND WHITE

Children raised by one of these kinds of mothers became stuck in their emotional development. The intrusive mother makes all our decisions for us, so we never develop the ability to judge things for ourselves. The abandoning mother and the unpredictable mother make life feel unsafe. But in all these cases, children aren’t able to recognize the harmful effect stemming from the mother’s dysfunctional behavior. The attribute the “badness” they experience in their mother to themselves.
This helps illustrate something called “splitting,” which is one of the earliest defense mechanisms that develops in children. It is more or less the opposite of integration: the inability to see that good and bad qualities can co-exist in the same person...

As we have seen, one of the first things we do in life is to divide reality into all-good and all-bad. If we are able to mature emotionally, we will come to see that life is not so easily categorized. We are albe to integrate seemingly contradictory experiences. When we are prevented from maturing emotionally, we continue to force everything into one of two categories: all-good and all-bad. When our parents are in question, the pressure is almost overwhelming to consider them “all-good” despite their problems.



It’s not hard to see why, when we look at parents through the eyes of a small child:
Adults are bigger.
Adults are smarter.
Parents have power.
Parents can hurt children.

[Make sure that you read this post on “Idealizing Our Family.”]

Excerpt from
Dr. David Stoop & Dr. James Masteller's
"Forgiving Our Parents, Forgiving Ourselves:
Healing Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families"
Regal/Gospel Light, 1996 (Servant, 1991)

Intergenerational Enmeshment

Excerpts from "Forgiving Our Parents, Forgiving Ourselves" by Drs. Stoop and Masteller.


From pages 120 - 121:


The main thing we saw was a problem with intergenerational boundaries in both families of origin. In each case, the children had become entangled in the parents’ problems: both Pete and Amy found themselves fused with their mothers in an attempt to survive the negative aspects of life with their fathers. As a result, each of them found themselves locked into the patterns they had learned growing up; it was almost impossible for either of them to break away and develop any other style of marriage or family life...

[Following a discussion of real-life examples of a married couple (“Pete” and “Amy”)]

Pete and Amy learned some common lessons from their families of origin. Both of them learned, for example, that Mother is the source of nurture and that Father, as the material provider, is allowed to be emotionally distant most of the time and openly domineering when on the scene. Both also learned very clearly the rule, “We don’t talk about our problems.”

They also learned some lessons that turned out to be contradictory. For example, Pete learned from his upbringing that a marriage and a family could function with very little shared time. Amy, on the other hand, learned from her family that no mater how bad the problems got, you still got together, did things as a family, and acted as if everything was just fine.


From Paul Meier and Frank Minirth in “Free to Forgive: Daily Devotions for Adult Children of Abuse”:

About 85 percent of us end up marrying someone very similar in personality dynamics to our parent of the opposite sex... We continue what we got used to in childhood. (June 21 devotional)

Excerpt from
Dr. David Stoop & Dr. James Masteller's
"Forgiving Our Parents, Forgiving Ourselves:
Healing Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families"
Regal/Gospel Light, 1996 (Servant, 1991)

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