The Fantasy Parent

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From “Silently Seduced” by Kenneth Adams. Exploring the dynamics of covert (emotional or non-sexual but gender-related) incest.

From page 46:

[Following a case study of a young woman named “Vickie”]

Vickie had kept [her pain and rage] behind her illusion that her daddy was “all good and loving.” Children who are abused have no choice but to create a false illusory image of the abusing parent. This enables them to believe they are loved. Children need to believe they are loved at any cost, much as they need food and water. For this reason, children who are severely abused are always willing to follow and love the abusing parent.

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From page 56:

Playing the role of a surrogate spouse to both parents is devastating, perhaps the most tormenting of the situations presented so far. The result is a loss of clear identity. One's inner life feels empty and agonized. Awareness of feelings, choices, preferences, wants and desires is lost under a deep sense of worthlessness and inadequacy. Outwardly, these women seem to be able to do it all. They also are capable emotional caretakers of others. They leave the impression that they have few cares of their own, and if they do, they handle them just fine. Yet there is great pain in the experience of self for these women. They have contempt for their own femininity and fear men as well.

Excerpts from

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

Adult Children Learn to Assume the Blame

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


From pages 246 - 247:

We regularly see an interesting phenomenon occur among adults who were abused as children. Thy experience an overwhelming need to cast blame somewhere. Because of the dynamics of childhood – where adults are bigger and more powerful, and therefore perceived as “always right” – abuse victims invariably place the blames on themselves.

But they soon start accepting the fact that they were only children, innocent, unable to either chose or prevent the things that were happening to them. “For the first time I realized that I wasn’t to blame for all the problems that existed in the world,” one woman said. “I felt I had to blame someone. I couldn’t blame the adults, because after all, they were adults. So the only one left to blame was me.”

Once this realization hits, they often start blaming others with a vengeance. Some are simply programmed to blame others for everything. One man named Jerry, remembers growing up in a family where everything was regarded as someone else’s fault. He can remember times when they hoped for a sunny day and it rained. His father would say, “Even God is against us today.” Jerry grew up very confused about the matter of responsiblity. If he himself didn’t bring about the wrong, then he had to point an accusing finger at someone else.

A more mature understanding of the world tells us that sometimes things just don’t work out the way we hoped. There are disappointments, unexpected developments, changes in plans, that are no one’s fault in particular... Being able to accept this reality, without always having to point the finger of blame, is an important component of personal maturity and emotional health.

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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Denial, Forgiving and Forgetting

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


About Denial

From page 29:

Lydia’s parents sat silently through her presentation. [A woman confronts her parents about having been abused by them when she was a child.] When she finished, they stoically denied everything – both of them They were quite calm and matter-of-fact about it. The only emotion they showed was irritation that Lydia had accused them of “such terrible things” in front of a stranger.

From pages 203 - 204:

The power lies in the fact that we forgive even as we remember...

Forgiveness begins with remembering and accepting what has happened in the past. Acceptance is an act of integration. It is a movement towards wholeness. It is how we incorporate the past into the present, and build for the future.

A word of warning. Once we accept that “it happened,” we begin a process that will not be without its share of pain. It hurts to get in touch with how deeply we were hurt as children, to realize how those who should have loved us and protected us actually caused us harm. But as an old saying puts it, “You have to feel in order to heal.”...

Adult children of dysfunctional families often pass through the classic stages of grief: anger, denial, despair, and so on. We mourn over who we might have been, over what we didn’t get out of childhood, what we didn’t get from our parents. We may feel cheated, and stripped of self-worth. But it is important that we let ourselves feel these emotions, work our way through them, and then move on past them. Mourning is therapeutic. It is healing. It is letting go of our bitterness, canceling the emotional IOUs we are holding, so that those who hurt us no longer dominate our lives as they once did.

We can never change what has happened to us in the past. But we can change the way we respond to it in the here and now. That is the point of remembering: we remember so that we can accept and forgive. “Forgetting” is not the answer. It’s just another dead-end street. We feel regret over what happened and we wish it hadn’t happened. But it did. Now we can accept it, and let it go.

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)

Recognizing Anger: Essential for Forgiveness?

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

From pages 223 - 225:

Would you agree or disagree with the following statements?

• Without anger, most forgiveness is superficial.
• Genuine forgiveness almost always includes anger.

Long experience helping people deal with dysfunctional family issues lead us to agree with those statements. However, many people are bothered by them. They tend to have a certain amount of mistrust concerning anger, and are especially uncomfortable connecting it with something like forgiveness. But the fact that anger and forgiveness tend to be intimately connected. In most cases, we cannot really forgive until we have dealt with our anger. To put it another way, working through anger is often a crucial step in the process of forgiveness.

A lot of confusing ideas circulate about anger. Many of us were brought up to believe that all anger is wrong, even sinful. But anger is a fact of life. It happens to us. We experience it. What do we do then? Many of us play word games with it. We say we are “a little irritated,” or “out of sorts,” or “a bit upset.” We go to great lengths to avoid coming right out and saying, “I’m just plain mad.”

But the fact is, we often are just plain mad – and there is not necessarily anything wrong with that. The emotion of anger, in and of itself, is not wrong. Let me say again, to make sure you get it: the emotion of anger, in and of itself, is not wrong. It just is. It is part of the “standard equipment” that comes with being a human being. It is what we do with our anger that makes it either right or wrong, good or bad, healthy or unhealthy.

We can use our anger wrongly, or express it in unhealthy ways. A simple example is when we “fly off the handle” at someone we love without good cause. Unhealthy anger separates us from people we love and want to be with.

But we can also use our anger for healthy purposes. For example, anger can energize us to overcome some challenge or obstacle. Who among us has not had the experience of “getting good and mad” at some stubborn problem, and finding that the energy produced by the anger gets us over the hump?

Anger can also alert us to the need to set boundaries, or limits, with other people. It is one of the ways we protect ourselves.

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Lewis B. Smeades in “Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve”:

Healthy anger drives us to do something to change what makes us angry; anger can energize us to make things better. Hate does not want to change things for the better: it wants to make things worse. (pg. 21)

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)

Restricted Identity and Controling Feelings by Controling People

“Love is a Choice: The Definitive Book on Letting Go of Unhealthy Relationships” by Hemfelt, Minirth and Meier.


From page 23:


“The Ten Traits of Codependency”


1. The codependent is driven by one or more compulsions.

2. The codependent is bound and often tormented by the way things were in the dysfunctional family of origin.

3. The codependent’s self-esteem (and, frequently maturity) is very low.

4. A codependent is certain that his or her happiness hinges on others.

5. Conversely, a codependent feels inordinately responsible for others.

6. The codependent’s relationship with a spouse or Significant Other Person (SOP) is marred by a damaging, unstable lack of balance between dependence and independence.

7. The codependent is a master of denial and repression.

8. The codependent worries about things he or she can’t change and may well try to change them.

9. A codependent’s life is punctuated by extremes.

10. A codependent is constantly looking for something that is missing or lacking in life.


From page 5:

In its broadest sense, codependency can be defined as “an addiction to people, behaviors or things.” Codependency is the fallacy of trying to control interior feelings by controlling people, things and events on the outside. To the codependent, control or the lack of it is central to every aspect of life.

The codependent may be addicted to another person. In this interpersonal codependency, the codependent has become so elaborately enmeshed in the other person that the sense of self – personal identity – is severely restricted, crowded out by that other person’s identity and problems.

Excerpts from
Robert Hemfelt, Frank Minirth and Paul Meier’s
“Love is a Choice:
The Definitive Book on
Letting Go of Unhealthy Relationships”
Thomas Nelson, 1989

Creating a Diagram of Your Own Relationships

Get a clean piece of paper and chart your own relationships, and possibly those of previous generations in your family. Get creative! Use different colors or special lines and express yourself.

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



From pages 148 – 151:

Charting the triangles is often tricky because, as we have seen, the dynamics of relationships are not always clear and simple, and not always what they seem to be at first glance...

[D]o they help you see more clearly how the dynamics of your family life affected you? Do they point out particular relationships that did not work well, particular individuals whose impact on you was harmful in some way?

If so, your tendency may be to get angry or bitter at such individuals. That would be an understandable reaction. But our goal has not been simply to nail down “who did what to whom” so that our blame and bitterness can be more accurately targeted. Rather, our goal has been to get a clearer picture of where the damage lies so that we can respond to it constructively.

NOW WHAT?

...But the important thing is not just discovering where the problems and who the “villains” are. The important thing is what we do with this information now that we have it. Whatever may have been done to us while we were children, we are now grown-ups who must take responsibility for our attitudes and actions. Whatever others may have done in the past, what matters is what we do today.

It is not enough for us to label others as “villains” and blame them for all our troubles. We need to understand what has been done to us so that we can take responsibility for our lives as adults and find the freedom from our past hurts. We cannot change what has happened to us. But we can learn to respond to what has happened to us in a way that helps us to rise above the negative influence of the past.

How can we learn to respond in such a way that we can begin to experience the freedom of forgiveness? What about those who have hurt us? Can they be released from their pain as well? In Part Two [of Stoop's “Forgiving Our Parents...” the source quoted here –YOU should BUY the book if this resonates with you!], we shall discover that there can be release for ourselves and others if we and they learn the lessons of forgiveness.

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)

Shame Existence Binds

From Fossum and Mason in
“Facing Shame: Families in Recovery”:

The shame-bound family system is fixed in its form and highly resistant to change, even though change is a natural fact of life.

This system is analogous to peanut brittle, with each person fixed in stereotyped, inflexible roles and relationships to one another...

When change exerts enough force all at one moment upon a rigid system, it may break and splinter.

The shame-bound system does not have good capacity to absorb very much stress and still regain its integrity.
(pg. 61)

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)