Roles That Enmeshed and Abandoned Children Play within Families

From the writings of Pia Mellody on Facing Love Addiction and Love Avoidance (The dynamics of non-sexual covert/emotional incest)

Note: A child can fill both positive and negative roles.

Roles Assigned to Child With Enmeshing Abuse

"Positive Roles":

• Hero or heroine (good child)
  
• Counselor
• Surrogate partners
• Surrogate parent
• Mediator
• Mascot (comedian role)
• Daddy's Little Girl (a ROLE, not a name said in passing)
• Daddy's Little Man
• Mommy's Little Girl
• Mommy's Little Man

In Enmeshment,

In a relationship, this person will be “very good at being good.” Because he/she is so adaptable as a child, when they become an adult, they will seek intensity in order to feel alive and do it in a “positive” but COVERT manner.

They derive both shame and a false sense of empowerment from these roles which imparts a sense of value. They objectify those whom they care for by devaluing their partner while also elevating self.

“Negative Roles”

• Scapegoat (problem child)
• Rebel
  

In a relationship, this person will be “very good at being bad.” This adult will seek intensity in order to feel alive in a “negative” OVERT manner.

Roles Assigned To Child With Abandoning/Neglecting Abuse

“Negative Role”

Lost Child:

In a relationship, this person will act in a dependent, needy manner and try to create intensity inside the relationship itself as he/she perceives that it is the relationship that keeps him/her alive.

Irrelevant Child:

Deeper level of the lost child.

Xenophobia for BOTH SUBTYPES:

• Fear in general.
• Fear of strangers.
• It is a biological imperative and sometimes is necessary for survival, and we then tend to be relational with what is familiar.
• For the person who has been neglected or abandoned, he/she will try to be relational with people who create distance in relationships through the use of walls. (They will naturally be attracted, ironically, to those who are emotionally unavailable to them.)
• For the person who has been enmeshed, he/she will feel compelled to be relational with people who are needy and who believe that they are worthless.
  

From Pia Mellody's writings and lectures,

and professional training with "The Meadows" treatment facility.

And from

“Facing Love Addiction”

by Mellody, Miller and Miller

HarperOne, 1992.

The Terrorizing Father

A Christian perspective on forgiveness ~
From Dr. Stoop’s “Making Peace with your Father”




Pages 181 - 182:




Additional Losses from the Terrorizing Father:


1. The child often experiences deep fear that turns into despair.


2. He or she may lead a life of denial in which all emotions are buried.


3. He or she may surrender to helplessness and adopt the identity and lifestyle of a perpetual victim, constantly immersed in fear, guilt and depression.


4. He or she may become angry and defiant in an attempt to obliterate a deep fear about life.

Excerpt from
Dr. David Stoop in
"Making Peace With Your Father:
Understanding the Role Your Father
has Played in Your Life – Past to Present"
Regal, 2004 (originally Tyndale, 1992)

Identity Problems and the Effects of Enmeshment with a Parent

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From “The Emotional Incest Syndrome” by Patricia Love with Jo Robinson.

The Identity Problems of the Chosen Child

(The child within a relationship of enmeshment with a parent.)

From pages 46 – 51:

(BUY THE BOOK if you find this relevant to you!

This is a gross condensing of the main points of the text!)

A Diffuse Sense of Identity

“I'm never sure who I am or what I want. I keep wanting to know what other people want before I make up my mind. I'm heavily influenced by other people's opinions.”

A parent who is too closely allied with a child invariably interferes with the development of the child's sense of identity. Typically, the parent programs the child to have similar tastes and values. In dozens of ways – sometimes with words, sometimes with smiles and winks – the parent says to the child: “You and I are buddies,” “We like the same things,” or “We are different from the rest of the family.” The parent is looking for an ally, a champion, a soul mate. In most cases, the child will comply, because pleasing the parent – and thereby ensuring the parent's love – is more important than developing a sense of self. Survival comes first; self-expression is secondary.

Enmeshment's Effects on Self Image

--> From “The Emotional Incest Syndrome” by Patricia Love with Jo Robinson.

The Self-Image Problems of the Chosen Child

(The child within a relationship of enmeshment with a parent.)

From pages 38 – 43:

(BUY THE BOOK if you find this relevant to you!

This is a gross condensing of the main points of the text!)

Fluctuating Self Esteem

“There have been times in my life when I've been really full of myself – almost as if I had a superhuman powers, fell as if we were operating in two different leagues. At other times, I've felt completely worthless – almost as if I was an imposter. There seemed to be no middle ground.”

Widely fluctuating self-esteem is a common problem for may adult Chosen Children. For some, the high side of the mood swing can be traced to the euphoria of winning the exclusive love of a parent. Being a parent's favorite can give the illusion of being able to conquer anything or anyone in any setting... This dizzy swing of feelings from invincibility to inadequacy is prevalent in Chosen Children.

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Fear of Rejection

“There are times when I feel worthless – totally unworthy of love. I isolated myself for fear of rejection.”

Some Chosen Children are plagued with the feeling that they're unlovable. At first this may seem a contradiction in terms: How can a child be a parent's favorite and still feel rejected? The answer is that being enmeshed with one parent often provokes the resentment of the other parent. It's a decidedly Freudian equation: to win Daddy's love is to risk Mommy's wrath. The left out parent's anger can take many forms...

Social Isolation

“When I was growing up, I never felt like one of the group. Sometimes I just felt I was better than everyone else; other times I felt inferior. It was a long time before I had a sense of equality or belonging.”

Spending less time with other kids than does the typical child, the Chosen Child has littleopportunity to feel part of a group. The problem is compounded for the only child or for the child who is resented by siblings, for the girl or boy grows up with only a limited sense of kinship and belonging.

As a result of this social isolation, the child is denied the leveling influence of peers. Children are very direct in their feedback; they socialize one another with sledgehammers. While this interaction may be painful at times, it does encourage children to act in socially acceptable ways. A child who is isolated from others may hold on to personality quirks that prove a liability later in life.

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A Feeling of Inferiority

“I feel like a failure. I keep setting goals for myself and failing to achieve them. Nothing I do is ever good enough. Not in my eyes. Not in other people's eyes.”

Children who grow up with an Invasive Parent can have an unnaturally low estimation of their abilities, especially if the parent was critical or abusive. Children believe what they've been told, and if they've been told over and over again that they're in the way or no good, they will take the message to heart.

Surprisingly, children who grow up with adoring parents may also feel that they don't measure up. [The child compares self to the adult and cannot match his skills.] This low self esteem continues into adulthood, and the boy [in the case study] grows into the kind of man who constantly belittles his own accomplishments. No matter what he does, he is never good enough.

Excerpt from
Dr. Patricia Love's The Emotional Incest Syndrome:
What to Do When a Parent's Love Rule's Your Life Bantam Books, 1990

Family Rules That Stifle Expression of Feelings and Expression of Needs

-->About Covert Incest from “Silently Seduced” by Kenneth Adams.

From page 20 - 21:

These rules, practice collectively or singly, make it difficult for people to be close or intimate. The desire to share oneself (i.e., feelings, thoughts, preferences, wants and needs) becomes frightening. The family system's mask of perfection and idealism is threatened. These families, with their codes of silence, suffer from chronic tension and anxiety that lurk below the surface.

Remarks such as, “You could have cut the tension with a knife,” are not uncommon. Family members operating in these systems are unusually relieved no one said anything, for fear of what might happen -- “I'm sure glad I got out of there before someone said something.”

Talking about feelings or problems helps to resolve tension. These families believe, however, that if they don't talk about problems, the tension will go away. Any sort of emotional bonding between family members is impossible as long as these rules are observed.

Although there is no clearly absent parent due to alcohol or drug abuse, families operating under co-dependent rules create the potential for covertly incestuous relationship. Co-dependent families originate from marriages which operate in a code of silence. Even though there is no obvious break, healthy intimacy and sexuality have no chance to grow. One or both partners will feel dissatisfied.

-->Trapped by a set of rules which do not permit the healthy expression of feelings and problems, a parent can easily turn to a child to get needs met. The child lessens the parent's loneliness and helps the parent deny the breakdown inherent in a marriage built on co-dependent rules. It is easy to see how a parent can channel his or her passion and energy into the child and how that child can feel like the parent's surrogate partner. 
For the adult child of a dysfunctional family, the task of seeing the family for what it was becomes difficult due to the family's rigid adherence to the idealistic or perfect image. To name the covert incest that went on is much more difficult. Yet to break the walls of silence and denial is far better than to keep the pain and suffering of being a parent's surrogate partner secret for a lifetime.

Excerpts from

Kenneth A. Adams"Silently Seduced:
When Parents Make Their Children Partners
~ Understanding Covert Incest"
Health Communications, 1991

Perfection Problems and the Effects of Enmeshment

-->

From “The Emotional Incest Syndrome” by Patricia Love with Jo Robinson.

The Perfectionism of the Chosen Child

(The child within a relationship of enmeshment with a parent.)

From pages 43 – 46:

(BUY THE BOOK if you find this relevant to you!

This is a gross condensing of the main points of the text!)

Denial of Needs

“It's really strange, but I didn't realize I had any fears or problems until I was twenty years old. I did have them, of course, but I blanked them out. It's almost as if I were two people – one who was always on top of things, and then an inner one that was terrifyingly needy. I didn't let that inner one see the light of day.”

It's normal for children to be “trouble” from time to time. They need you when you're busy; they ask questions for which you have no answers...they are a constant reminder that you do not have a solution to all of life's problems.

The Chosen Child often has to repress these needs. A client nicknamed Sunny told me that she'd gotten her nickname from her mother, who elected her to be her perfect well-adjusted child. “You're always happy,” she would tell her daughter. “You're always smiling.” The hidden message was, “Don't be unhappy or have any problems.”

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Compulsive Need to Succeed

“I'm one of the most driven people I know. I once dreamed that I was going to be killed unless I was promoted to vice president of my firm. I woke up in a cold sweat. But that nightmare was just an exaggerated version of what I feel every moment of the day.”

Many Chosen Children are burdened by the belief that they count only if they are superior...It took me many years to get a handle on this embarrassing episode. What I eventually realized what that my compulsive drive to succeed was a direct consequence of my mother's high expectations and of my secret fear of inadequacy. I felt I had no choice but to live up to her unrealistic vision of me... [P]art of my legacy as a Chosen Child was the belief that to be average or ordinary is to fail.

Excerpt from
Dr. Patricia Love's The Emotional Incest Syndrome: What to Do When a Parent's Love Rule's Your Life Bantam Books, 1990

Introduction to Love Addiction and Love Avoidance

-->

From Pia Mellody's writings and lectures, and my professional training with "The Meadows" treatment facility.

INTRODUCTION

Love Addiction and Avoidance are not about love at all. It is all about trauma reactions inside a relationship. Love starts with thought which requires an awareness of self or others that allows you to hold both in warm regard. Those who are “hard to love” require “heaving lifting” for the other party because the respect and love are not reciprocated or done so evenly. Respect is a willingness to tolerate others violations, even when you really don't have to do so. All this requires self esteem.

Note that we have three basic human needs that are God given and easily compared: love, sex and food. Just as with any need, we can manage any one of these inappropriately or to extreme. In terms of extremes, we can seek out fulfillment compulsively (like an addiction) or we can avoid and deny our needs compulsively. Both of these unbalanced extremes are self-destructive.

We all face disappointment and shame which Mellody calls “experiencing our humanity.” For the Christian, this would be experiencing our sin nature and the shame and disappointment in our failure to overcome our natural desires that have not yet been transformed to be like Christ. Until our degree and process of becoming like Jesus and our level of sanctification grows, we tend to fall into the same human trappings as everyone else. We tend to confuse love with caretaking. We tend to go about this in predictable pattern.

-->

Two Patterns

Pattern 1: Love Addiction

All about making up a fantasy about another person and falling in love with the fantasy

The fantasy involves

• seeing the other person as god-like
• capable of saving the love addict from his/her fear of not being able to make it on his/her own
• and loving him/her forever.
• They are someone who will “love you into loving yourself.”
• The fantasy objectifies the partner or the counter part in the unhealthy relationship (reducing them to an object of fantasy).
• This actually means that the partner is not acceptable to the love addict, therefore the love addict objectifies them by seeing them in terms of their own fantasy and not as the partner really is.
  

Pattern 2: Love Avoidance

Compulsive relational cycle that appears to be intimate but actually avoids intimacy and vulnerability

The love avoidant

• gets a sense of value from (compulsive) caretaking
• the partner confuses this with love
• They are “allergic to vulnerability”
• Their sense of value comes from caretaking and is a means of avoiding guilt.
  

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Relational Connections in Childhood

Type I: Healthy Relationship

• A relationship of Functional Bonding: Caregiver takes appropriate car of the child (affirming, nurturing, and limit setting)
• Caregiver takes care of the child and uses personal boundaries which protect the child appropriately.
• The care and responsibility for the child rests completely upon the adult caregiver.
  

Type II: Caregiver Uses the Child

• A relationship of Enmeshment: Caregiver uses the child to take care of himself/herself (affirming and nurturing must be earned by the child and must provide these to the parent as well)
• Caregiver is without personal boundaries
• The care and responsibility is partly provided by the parent, but the child is also required to reciprocate for the benefit of the parent)
• Produces a Love Avoidant type adult because the child resents the usury on some level. (Demanded sacrifice as a duty or obligation will always produce some degree of resentment.)
  

Type III: Caregiver Abandons the Child

• A relationship of Neglect/Rejection (Can be a partial neglect or inconsistent abandonment and neglect, or complete abandonment)
• Caregiver is detatched and "walled-in"
• The parent provides no care and bears no responsibility for the child and has no functional relationship with the child at all.
• Produces a Love Avoidant type adult because the child is always seeking the fantasy of love and attention.
  

From Pia Mellody's writings and lectures,

and professional training with "The Meadows" treatment facility.

And from

“Facing Love Addiction”

by Mellody, Miller and Miller

HarperOne, 1992.

How Love Addiction and Love Avoidance Develops and Affects Perception of Gender

-->From the writings of Pia Mellody on Love Addiction and Love Avoidance (The dynamics of non-sexual incest)

Note: The child who experiences this abnormal parenting will associate the issues with people of the same sex as the parent. If a child experiences neglect and abandonment with a female parent, they likely will develop love addiction in their relationships with women. If the child experiences enmeshment with a female parent, they will be live avoidant with women. It is the same with a male parent (or caregiver). The association need not relate to sex but it carries with it an association with gender.

You can also have a combination of the two issues. I had a parent varied greatly based upon the level of depression they felt and the degree of threat that they felt in the relationship with me. For the most part, I was enmeshed with this parent, but when they were in an emotional fugue and withdrawn, I was neglected. So I have both issues with my parent. The enmeshment was most disturbing, but now that I am older, the abandonment implications have presented themselves (for healing).

Neglect and Abandonment

• Neglect or abandonment by a parent sets up a love addiction.
  
• The abuse is about the parent failing to provide the love and support the child needs.
• The parent is essentially "walled in" and distant.
• The parent is giving priority to other people and other issues as opposed to making the child a priority.
• The parent's behavior covertly shames the child causing the child to believe he/she is worthless and unimportant.
• In adult relationships, the person will see himself/herself as “one down” and the
  
  other person “one up.”
• Because the child's needs are neglected, the child experiences a lot of fear about being able to self-care and make it on his/her own.
  

What a child learns from neglect and abandonment:

• As a result, in adult relationships, this person will believe that he/she cannot ma
  
  ke it alone and needs someone to care for them.
• If this is triggered prior to three years of age, the child will be haunted with a sense of disaster.
• Neglect also produces an internalized sense of worthlessness, a lack of learning about relationships and and lack of learning about self care because of a “shame-existence bind.”
• Shame -existence bind: Their existence requires them to care for self but this requires the consumption of resources and they believe that they are not worthy of them and are ashamed of their God-given human need. The shame-existence bind is one of the more problematic issues to heal from after neglect and abandonment.
  
• The child will spend a lot of time daydreaming, reading and being alone.
  

Adulthood:

• As a result, in adult relationships, this person will also associate any distancing on the part of the partner (or friend, etc.) as a threat to his/her survival.
• All relationships become fear-based as well as shame-based.
  

-->

Enmeshment:

• Enmeshment established by the parent creates love avoidance in the child.
• Enmeshment happens when a parent is without boundaries and without boundaries in the presence of the child.
  
• The child will get “used” in some way.
• He/she will learn that value comes from taking care of needy people and if he/she does not do that, he/she will feel guilty and believe that being relational is suffocating and abusive.
• The person will base his/her sense of self-esteem on care-taking of needy people.
• This will confuse love with duty.
• This person will be “loving” to others to avoid guilt and will be allergic to being relational or being vulnerable.
  
• Resentments will likely develop from being the caretaker
• The love avoidant develops a capacity for aggression, if they served as a “scapegoat” for the parent with whom they were enmeshed.
  

What a child learns from enmeshment:

• Relationships are all about duty and deadness.
  
• Requires a shutting down of spontaneity.
  
• Identity comes from focus on the needy instead of understanding self.
• Identity and value come from focus on the needs/wants of others instead of own needs/wants.
• Life's purpose is to do what makes others happy rather than on what satisfies self or provides self with happiness.
  

-->

As an adult:

• This person will need to create a lot of intensity outside of the relationship.
• They do this by “risk-taking,” addictions, extreme sports, risky business style, professions involving heroic care-taking, etc.
• They create intensity to feel alive as opposed to the deadness that they feel in relationships.
• They can become antagonistic or aggressive both inside and outside of relationships, especially if they were “scapegoated.”
  

From Pia Mellody's writings and lectures,

and professional training with "The Meadows" treatment facility.

And from

“Facing Love Addiction”

by Mellody, Miller and Miller

HarperOne, 1992.

Holes In the Argument About Daughters Working Only in the Home

A comment on True Womanhood:


I was chatting with someone this morning about how daughters can work for fathers under the "Botkin Plan." I wonder how this really works and if they have a list of 242 rules that one must follow when a daughter works for dad at his business, that is if it is not actually within the home? (I supposed it's more holy to do it all under one roof, but there are exceptions like Vision Forum, churches, etc.) Let me work out and expose some of these bugs...

The home is a blessed safe-zone for women so there is a "sin cootie free zone" in and around the "sphere of the home." (Note: I understand the "sin cootie free" reference came from the Gothard discussion list, as he was very superstitious about picking up bad spirits and such. You are a sin cootie magnet according to Gothard, attracting evil consequences and spiritual diseases when you are out from under the "umbrella of protection" provided by submission to proper authority. And the "sphere of the home" is language borrowed from Calvin that I am told is not used in context by several people who discussed these matters at length with RJ Rushdoony.) Women who stay within the safe zone have God's protection from harm, corruption, attack, etc. This providential zone of holiness and protection always resides over the Christian home apparently.

It appears that men carry a degree of the sin cootie free zone with them when they leave the home, though the home base sin cootie free zone of protection does not diminish when he leaves. A daughter who does not possess the Spirit of God to as great a degree as any male (sounds like the John MacArthur reference you can find on strivetoenter.com/wim). Boys carry this too, as we see this described for us in the Botkin teachings particularly. The father/husband is the best option for protection, but any male child can be used, such as a brother. So if a woman has to run to the grocery store, theoretically, the woman will be safer if she takes a male child with her. The male carries a sin cootie free zone with him where so ever he goeth.

Now, about daughters. They can work with their fathers outside the home, as they are protected by his very powerful sin cootie free zone of providential protection. (This is supported by all the arguments made about not sending a daughter to college: she faces some physical risk because she is not under the roof with her family or her patriarchal father.) She can do whatever woman appropriate work there needs to be done in her father's workplace. But I wonder how far the sin cootie free zone extends outward from the father? Is there a square footage limitation? If the daughter goes down the street to pick up lunch for the father, does his sin cootie free field of providential protection expand? Does it stretch 500 yards (100 times the number of grace)? Does it extend 5 miles? Does the father, by virtue of sending the daughter out on a special mission, donate or transmit some of his protective duty to his daughter by virtue of the fact that she is doing her father's bidding? Is it okay for her to run an errand down the block or across town or make a 50 mile drive?


I guess it all depends on how you work out the metaphysics of it all. The ontological aspects of all this are just laughable. The first young woman (from the nice Italian family in Louisiana) featured in the "Return of the Daughter's" video travels and does all sorts of errands (the most healthy and realistic family in the film). So the providential protection zone must travel with her.

If that's the case, when a daughter does what her father wants her to do while she works in the employ of another outside the home, why then would this aura of protection and providence not go with her? She does so with her father's blessing in in order to fulfil his desire for her through working at a job that she likes, so long as it does not interfere with the rest of her life and responsibilities. There are no Scriptures that speak of this, as Numbers 30 is about vows and not about a "cone of protection." But I'm sure that they will claim this somehow. They can't explain it from Scripture because it is not from the Bible. It came from the minds of those who believe that women are lesser creatures who can neither bear the Word or the Spirit with the same degree of power, authority and effectiveness as a man. It all boils down to ontology here, whether they admit it or not.

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)