LETTING GO OF OUR ADULT CHILDREN
Chapter 6: The Velcro Syndrome
Page 17
BY ARLENE F, HARDER, MA, MFT
Note: This online edition is reprinted with permission. A paperback version is available for purchase from Learning Place Online.
Our Success Reflected in Our Child's Achievements
The success or failure of our children in the arena of work is a Velcro issue for many parents. This Velcro is more than the typical assumption by most parents that their children will do at least as well as they have done, or better. It arises when we are disappointed that our children don't seem to be ambitious enough to achieve what we think they can achieve. We can commiserate with a recession layoff and with disruption in the job market when plants close. And if our child is unable to handle more than he does, we know he is doing as well as he can. However, when our child is capable, but lacks the ambition to be "successful," doesn't even want to get there, we can be very disappointed.
And what is this success for which we want our child to strive? For many it is not unlike the King of the Mountain game we enjoyed as children. Getting to the top. Being the best. But notice that the winner is on top only because he has been tougher and more capable of outwitting opponents. He will stay there only until someone stronger and smarter comes along. Being on top is like building houses on the sand. Permanence is impossible. The one who makes it to the top must keep scrambling to stay there, never quite able to relax and enjoy the prize, always needing to look over his shoulders to see who is catching up.
Not all parents view success in this way, of course. Some did the best they could in their job, and if things gradually evolved so that they ended up at the top, all the better; but they would have been satisfied with less. They don't ask more of their children. Many other parents have been quite happy in jobs that asked far less of them than they were capable of doing. After graduation from high school or college they may have taken a job that did not challenge them, but because they enjoyed what they did and didn't feel a need to scramble for a higher position, they have been satisfied with their careers. When their child also seems to follow a less challenging path than he is capable of handling, they tend to accept the situation fairly easily.
How we parents react to our child's level of "success" or "failure" in the world of work will depend in large part on how we ourselves define success and on whether we see ourselves as having met those standards.
If we believe we have "failed," the reason for our failure can keep us focused on our child's success, or lack of it. Did we fail despite conscientious effort and determination because our job required more technical training than we had received? Or did we not make the grade because we didn't put in the effort, and are still kicking ourselves for our lack of ambition? Until we come to terms with what it means that we have failed, or succeeded, we are unlikely to let our child succeed or fail in his own right. When our child's success needs to be a vicarious victory for us, we deny our child the right to succeed on his own terms.
Family Patterns that Prevent Conflict Resolution
Our communication and conflict resolution skills have much to do with our ability, or inability, to resolve issues between us and our children. In many ways these patterns, often handed down from parent to child in that multi-generational transmission process I talked about in the third chapter, can be thought of as another form of Velcro.
If you and your child have been taking turns jerking that rope back and forth across your differences of opinion; or if you pretend you've dropped the rope but keep it close at hand; or if the rope has gotten so entangled you don't know where it begins or ends, the examples below may provide a context in which you can understand how you learned ineffective approaches to conflict.
Emotional and Physical Cutoff
Have you and your child not spoken for years? If so, then there is a good chance that members in your family resolved conflict by simply cutting themselves off, emotionally or physically, from those with whom they disagreed. This is a version of the childhood game of see-things-my-way-or-l'll-take-my-marbles-and-leave. This method of resolving conflict doesn't resolve the conflict, of course. The participants simply act as though there is no problem, or as though they aren't bothered by the disagreement that caused the cutoff. Certainly cutting off a family member is a powerful anesthetic that can reduce emotional pain. It can also leave a huge hole in the fabric of the family.
If this is your style, you might want to ask yourself what you gain by refusing to communicate with your child. Do you get to feel righteous as long as your child is viewed as stubborn and wrong? Or has your child cut you off because you have insisted she view her childhood as you see it, not as she sees it? Have you set it up so the only way your child can return into the family graces is to agree with you and so lose face?
On the other hand, you may not be in contact with your child despite your best ability to work through your differences. Further contact at this juncture may be pointless and only embroil all of you in unending turmoil. If you have given your child every opportunity to work things out amiably, then your cutoff may not be a Velcro issue. However, you will still need to deal with your grief, if you have not all ready done so, and to bring closure to your relationship as you move on with your life.
Physical or Emotional Illness
Does your family always have someone "sick" who needs to be cared for? And does that person often manage to get ill at those times when he could get maximum attention? Is there an alcoholic or drug abuser on whom the family has focused much of its energy?
The struggles necessary to resolve differences of opinion are avoided in some families by shifting focus from the conflict that needs attention to a person who needs attention, poor thing. For example, the mother of a client of mine always got a headache when my client wanted to talk about serious family matters. The pain of the headache may have been real. The inability of the family to resolve their issues was also real.
If this is the kind of problem-avoidance that was used in your family, perhaps you have unintentionally passed this trait on to your son. Perhaps he gets sick and becomes unable to function whenever you start to insist he has to get a job or find his own apartment. Or perhaps you feel tightness in your chest when your daughter wants to go on vacation and asks you to baby-sit. While you love your grandchildren, their bad manners get on your nerves. Your pain may be the only method you know that allows you to get out of unpleasant chores. You haven't yet learned how to say simply, "Sorry, Sue, I don't want the responsibility of caring for your five children for a week."
Manipulation
It is very hard to resolve conflicts with our child if we are unwilling to directly address the issues that divide us. And in some families being indirect is a way of life. If you were raised in a family in which confrontation was anathema and indirect manipulation was the modus operandi, you may find it terribly difficult, if not impossible, to make any real progress in getting past disagreements with your child.
It was many years before I realized that my mother frequently got what she wanted from my father by using a maneuver I call going-all-around-the-barn-to-get-in-the-barn-door, a technique I also used before I discovered it is much easier to head straight for the door. And a friend of mine said that in her home you couldn't ask directly for another piece of bread. You had to ask others at the table if they would like to have one and then, as the plate was being passed around, you could take a slice.
Edith, the mother of Jill, a client of mine, is a master of the art of manipulation. When driving in the car she will ask others if they are cold. If they then ask her directly if she wants the heater turned on, she will respond, "If you do, dear." When the family discusses which restaurant they want to go to, Edith will say, "I don't care. You all choose." Later, she will wonder with a sigh of disappointment why the others didn't select such-and-such a place.
Individuals who are afraid of face-to-face conflict may hide behind a facade of sweet innocence, but they are masters at getting others to give them what they want. They are also masters at playing "yes-but" with every potential solution that is offered directly. And, like Edith, they expect others to read their minds.
There is no doubt that having others read our minds protects us from the discomfort of having our requests rejected openly if we were to state our views outright. On the other hand, mind reading is a terribly inefficient system for getting our needs met and contributes to half-hearted discussions that lead nowhere. It can also give rise to a lot of resentment when others fail to interpret our needs correctly.
Unsatisfying Relationships
A Velcro issue for some parents can be observed when they pay undue attention to an adult child's problems as an avoidance of dealing with marital issues or as a handy distraction from the loneliness of being single. If you are a parent who looks for problems in your child's life because you don't know how to straighten out problems in your love life, this is the time to do something about it.
Until now you may have avoided taking action because you fear an honest appraisal will mean either that you and your partner will have to split up (which seems a horrendous prospect) or that you must stick together in misery (which may seem equally horrendous). But your catastrophic ruminations are, most likely, fears that will not materialize. A careful analysis of your situation — and even a decision to stop living a life of dissatisfaction — will almost certainly lead to a conclusion far less disastrous than you expect. You may well be better off and happier apart!
Studies of life after divorce do not paint nearly as pessimistic a scene as our myths would have us believe. After an initial period of adjustment, even older women are discovering their lives are much fuller and more satisfying when they are no longer in deadening marriages. Those who were previously defined by how well their husbands succeeded discover who they are in their own right. In small incremental steps they can rekindle desires and occupations put away with their wedding dress. With new freedom comes a different, exciting view of the world. New and expanded friendships provide a wonderful base of support. Consequently, while deciding to leave a miserable marriage is not, obviously, a piece of cake, it is frequently a tremendous change for the better. Life does not need to be spent in a miserable marriage until the bitter end.
On the other hand, it is never too late to learn how to communicate effectively with your spouse and to enjoy your remaining years together.
Start by making a thorough list of what you like and don't like about your relationship. An objective appraisal of your life together may very likely uncover more pluses than minuses. You may be surprised to discover that "desirable" and "undesirable" traits (both yours and your partner's) have complemented each other nicely over the years. As one woman told me, "I may not have a perfect marriage and often don't feel close to my husband. But I have decided to be satisfied with what I have. I don't confront him because it has never worked to do that. We agree on religious issues that are important to us both and he still goes out with me on Friday night dates, as we've been doing for twenty years, so it's not as though everything is wrong."
Her statement illustrates how we all make compromises. Not many of us can have everything the way we want, or even the way we deserve. Some people, like this woman, consciously choose not to confront their partners about what bothers them.
And if not having a partner has caused you to focus on your child, this is a good time to expand your social network. Friends of both sexes can offer distraction from expending energy on noticing how well, or poorly, your child is doing.
So if you suspect that your focus on issues in your child's life derives some of its energy from your avoidance of marital or couples issues, you can kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. When you work on whatever it is that bugs you about your partner, you will not be as bugged by what your child does.
We Sacrificed for Our Child and Now We Don't Get No Respect
When we consider the amount of time, money, and effort we have put into child rearing, it is not surprising we sometimes feel let down when a child doesn't turn out as expected. We may wonder what practical use our child will ever make of the opportunities we gave him (opportunities many uf us did not have as children). Nevertheless, most of us don't expect our child to "pay us back."
But too often children become, as Elinor Lenz says, "instrumentalities of parental sacrifice — that is, the parents, in making certain 'sacrifices' on behalf of the children, are seeking to fulfill themselves through the children. To construe parental self-denial as a promissory note that must be repaid on demand is like saddling someone with a debt that he or she was unaware of taking on."
This Velcro issue might be called "the Rodney Dangerfield complaint." The parents focus on the fact that their children don't give them the respect they believe they deserve.
Rachel and Harry, whose story I heard several years ago, illustrate what happens when parents fail to recognize that their goals do not automatically translate into the goals of their children.
Rachel and Harry had denied themselves many things so that Julie could take dancing lessons, and they were extremely proud that Julie was a prize pupil. She was about to apply for a dance scholarship when she met John, who swept her off her dancing feet and into a quick marriage. Her parents were angry and told her so, in no uncertain terms.
Julie's response? She stopped visiting them. Eventually the relationship became so strained that she refused even to talk to them any more. Rachel and Harry feel terribly rejected both by her decision to discontinue dance and her alienation from them. They fail to understand that their inability to let go of their ambition for her became their Velcro and got in the way of what could have been a satisfying relationship.
Is What They Say True, or Isn't It?
Today many parents are confronted by adult children who insist their parents were dysfunctional or that one or both were alcoholic. Other children claim they have recently uncovered memories of being sexually molested by a neighbor, grandfather, uncle or, even worse, their parent. Such accusations have increasingly created a wedge between parents and their children.
In other cases parents are forced to look at behavior of their child that has serious physical or legal consequences. For example, their friends try to tell them that the brilliant mind of their talented child has been damaged by drugs. The police insist their son is not innocent, as he claims, of charges that he exposed himself in public, or had sex with a minor, or swindled his girlfriend.
If you have had to face these kinds of accusations, what have you said? Your response would seem a fairly simple matter because, after all, if you have been accused of something, you either did it or you didn't. If you did it, you either remember doing it or you don't. If you remember, you either admit it or you don't. Yet if you are like most people, you will, at first, deny such accusations — whether or not they are true.
Denial Serves a Purpose
If you are heavily invested in protecting your child's reputation, you will deny what others say about him. Unless you see your son shove cocaine up his nose, you will refuse to believe—or at least to acknowledge to others—that he is not the innocent child you once held on your knee. After all, to admit your child would do such terrible things is paramount to admitting that you didn't raise him right; to openly condemn him may seem to be the same as condemning yourself.
If you are heavily invested in protecting your reputation, you will adamantly deny any accusation others make against you. Unless they hold incontrovertible evidence, you will insist they cannot possibly be right. If the accusation is sexual abuse, you may go through several stages of denial—even if you eventually acknowledge you were fully responsible. You may at first deny the facts, claiming the abuse never happened. When you continue to be challenged, however, and if more than one person comes forward to accuse you, this denial may fall away and you may go through several other forms of denial. Denial you knew what you were doing. Denial of responsibility. Denial of the impact your action had on the person you abused.
Denial is especially understandable in cases of incest, for as a Family Therapy Networker article points out:
Denial is a universal human defense against bad news, and almost no news is worse for a family and the individuals in it than the discovery of incest. Of all the problems that can haunt families — alcohol abuse, infidelity, violence, abandonment — nothing evokes as much shame, guilt and fear in family members, and as much disgust, rage and incomprehension in outsiders, as incest. Faced with making a disclosure that threatens to shred every vestige of familial love, security and respect, incestuous families live with cognitive dissonance that almost forces them to deny the abuse.
Even if the accusation is far less serious than sexual abuse, it is not surprising that we deny, at least initially, accusations against us or our child. As Carol Pearson points out, "We give things up little by little. That's the psychological reason for denial — it keeps us from having to confront all our problems at once!" Denial is a protective device that can give you time to take a deep breath before you sort through whatever it is you have been accused of denying.
While incest is viewed as the worst-case scenario, it is also extremely difficult for parents to admit they were guilty of physical or emotional abuse, neglect or abandonment, alcoholism, or chemical dependency. And it often isn't much easier to deal with accusations of parenting mistakes that are of a far less serious nature. It is especially difficult to struggle through such a confrontation if we believe the accusation has absolutely no basis in fact.
And as difficult as an accusation can be for the parent who is accused of a serious offense, the other parent must also deal with ramifications of the accusation. Almost always the question is raised as to why the other parent didn't protect the child. Did the mother know what her husband did in the middle of the night, but feel powerless to stop it? Did the father suspect that his wife was beating the children when he was at work, but do nothing to interfere?
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© Copyright 1994, Arlene Harder, MA, MFT, Reprinted with permission
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