Poisonous Parenting

Toxic Relationships Between Parents and Their Adult Children

Shea M. Dunham, Shannon B. Dermer, Jon Carlson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136976391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

How does the toxicity associated with particular parenting styles affect attachment? How do the contaminated views of themselves that children of poisonous parents have affect their relationships into adulthood? Like physicians, clinicians do not want to amputate, but theysometimes find it necessary in order to preserve the health of the larger system. Poisonous Parenting shows clinicians how to recognize the effects of poisonous parenting in adult children and how to heal the scars created by parents' toxic attitudes and behaviors. Readers will come away from the book understanding ways to counteract the effects ofpoisonous parenting so that clients can recover and lead a healthy life. They'll also learn techniques fordetermining when a relationship can be salvaged, when to proceed with caution, and when to disconnect in order to keep the poison from spreading.

CHAPTER 1

Poisonous Parenting

SHEA M. DUNHAM and SHANNON B. DERMER

Parents are the ultimate teachers. They teach their children what to think about the world, what is important or unimportant, and about their own self-worth (Hughes, 2009). Whether overtly or covertly, children learn from their parents about who to love, how to love, how to be loved, and how (or even if) they should love themselves.

In the professional field of teaching, a person’s view of how to teach is called pedagogy. Whether parents realize it, this applies to them as well—a systematic way of disciplining and shaping their children’s lives. Practices deemed harmful to children and contrary to supporting healthy emotional development into adulthood have been referred to as poisonous pedagogy (translated from Rutschky’s 1977 “black pedagogy”; as cited in Miller, 2002).

At first, poisonous may seem overly harsh in describing a parenting style. Yet, upon further reflection, poisonous parenting styles are analogous to poisonous substances. Poisonous substances are complex in that they are not always harmful and, given certain circumstances and uses, can even be helpful. Similarly, parenting behaviors can be innocuous or helpful in certain circumstances and doses, and those same behaviors can have long-lasting, detrimental effects when not administered properly. In chemistry, a poison is a substance that obstructs or inhibits a reaction; for purposes of this book, poison is a relational style that inhibits the formation of a secure attachment between two people. A poisonous parent is one whose ways of teaching children about life and styles of interaction damage children’s abilities to form healthy connections with family members, friends, and eventually romantic partners and offspring. While every parent makes mistakes, it is the frequency and intensity of certain interactions that make them “poisonous.”

The poisoning of a relationship can be chronic (happening over long-term, repeated exposure), or it can be acute (occurring immediately after exposure). For example, the poisonous effects of criticism may accumulate in the lifeblood of the relationship over years, or the effect of an action on the relationship could be immediate, as when a parent severely beats a child. Whether chronic or acute, poison sours a relationship that should be warm, supportive, and enjoyable.

Definition of Poison

Paracelsus, a 16th-century physician who is considered the father of toxicology and who dedicated much energy to defining what is poisonous, once wrote, “While a thing may be a poison, it may not cause poisoning … [and] every cathartic is a poison if not administered in the proper dose” (Deichmann, Henschler, Holmstedt, & Keil, 1986, pp. 210–211). In other words, the amount of a particular substance may make something harmless, curative, or poisonous depending on the dose and circumstance. The same can be said for parenting. Doses of a particular behavior may be healthy for a child at particular levels, stage of development, and context. For instance, showing affection to a child is a beneficial way to express caring, warmth, and love. Moderately excessive affection can feel intrusive and stifling to children, and extremely excessive affection can step into the realm of sexual abuse. However, the same kinds of behaviors (e.g., touching, stroking, kissing, intercourse) that would constitute sexual abuse (poisonous) in an inappropriate relationship may be perfectly healthy and healing (cathartic) in a romantic relationship. The toxicity (the level of harmfulness) varies based on many factors: level of exposure, recurrence of exposure, preparation, purpose, and the particular sensitivities of the person absorbing the substance. Parents and their systematic style of interacting with their young and adult children may be medicinal or poisonous to interpersonal relationships (Mikulincer, Shaver, Bar-On, & Ein-Dor, 2010). Particular behaviors such as competition, teasing, humor, control, and punishment can all have healthy or harmful effects depending on the intensity of expression, the number times they occur, the context in which they are expressed, and the psychological and interpersonal needs and sensitivities of the child.

Definition of Poisonous Parenting

For purposes of this book, the authors of this chapter are defining poisonous parenting as chronic toxicity at a dose level that will eventually severely impair the parent–adult child relationship. Poisonous parents are those whose ways of teaching children about life and styles of interaction damage children’s ability to form healthy connections with family members, friends, and eventually romantic partners and offspring. While every parent makes mistakes, it is the frequency and intensity of certain interactions that is damaging. In addition, not only does poisonous parenting have negative effects for the long-term relationship between parent and child; it also has implications for the self-worth, friendships, and romantic relationships of their adult children (Mikulincer et al., 2010). The parent– child relationship, whether healthy or unhealthy, serves as a template for all other relationships. Based on these interactions persons create an internal working model of what to expect from relationships.

The Secure Bond: The Glue That Holds Relationships Together

Although necessary, meeting children’s basic physical needs is not enough to sustain them and to foster healthy relationships. Certainly the groundbreaking studies of John Bowlby and Harry Harlow demonstrated the importance of a physical and emotional connection to a comforting figure who is a responsive caregiver. Bowlby demonstrated the deleterious effects on infants who did not have stable, caring, affectionate relationships. Harlow experimented with rhesus monkeys to show the detrimental effects of maternal deprivation and of not having a caregiver available to soothe the baby monkeys in anxiety-producing situations. Bowlby and Harlow looked to nature and instincts to learn about human emotional needs. So what does nature teach us about healing the human heart? We need only look, with an open mind, to the relationships between animals and humans and their offspring. The basic nature of healthy relationships is reflected in instinctual caretaking.

Over time, parents’ level of attentiveness, ability to soothe children’s anxieties and fears, tendency to enhance children’s feelings of security, and willingness to accept their children’s vulnerability helps determine a child’s future relational patterns. The parent–child relationship is supposed to be one of security, soothing, love, and closeness. The focus of the parent–child relationship is on fulfilling the physical and emotional needs of the child to form a secure bond between child and caretakers. The secure attachment of the child to the parent means that the child trusts that the parent will be available and responsive to needs in a warm, caring manner and that the child feels valued (Greenberg, 2002). The securely attached relationship is one in which there is closeness and, as the child develops, freedom and space for the child to grow and explore the world without resentment from the parent. Although parents certainly gain things from the relationship, in healthy parent–child relationships the onus for fulfilling needs is on the parents, not on the child, to fulfill the needs and desires of the parents.

Parents who are physically near, emotionally responsive, and able to soothe with touch and vocalizations are likely to create a safe, comforting connection with an infant. Over time, these experiences accumulate to provide children “with a core sense of worth, of being loved, and of being able to love in turn” (Hughes, 2009, p. 8). Consequently, parents are seen as valuable and caring by the children. The developing children create internal working models of themselves, others, and relationships based on repeated interactions with caregivers (Mikulincer et al., 2010).

Sometimes children do not have caregivers attuned to their needs and form an insecure relationship with caregivers. Without an intervening secure relationship, whether it be a parent or another stable presence in the person’s life, children insecurely attached to parental figures tend to develop into adults who construct insecure attachment strategies.

When children are trained, they learn how to train others in turn. “Children who are lectured to, learn how to lecture; if they are admonished, they learn how to admonish; if scolded, they learn how to scold; if ridiculed, they learn how to ridicule; if humiliated, they learn how to humiliate; if their psyche is killed, they will learn how to kill—the only question is who will be killed: oneself, others, or both” (Miller, 2002, p. 90).

The secure bond and attachment of the young child to a parent sets the stage for other relationships as the child matures into adulthood. People’s attachment orientation, developed based on close relationships, creates relational expectations, emotions, and behaviors congruent with a person’s unique attachment (Fraley & Shaver, 2000; Mikulincer et al., 2010). Children who trust a parent usually become adults who trust others. Appropriately compassionate and responsive parents cultivate adults who are trusting, comfortable with affection, have clear boundaries, are able to identify and express emotions, and maintain a sense of spontaneity and playfulness along with a responsible, caring nature. These are the types of adults who are good spouses or partners, parents, friends, and coworkers. Compassionate parents are like fertilizer—helping a seedling get the nutrients it needs to grow strong and healthy.

Conversely, when parents careen off the path of creating a secure bond and attachment they can be poison to their children and their children’s future relationships. Rather than becoming securely attached to an unresponsive or unpredictably responsive parent, children may become avoidant or ambivalent about the affectional bond. Being insecurely attached to a parent creates a relational template wherein adult children are less likely to form secure, trusting, stable, affectionate relationships with others. Insecurely attached adults tend to show extreme patterns in their relationships (Mikulincer et al., 2010). They show disturbances in their abilities to trust or be trustworthy. A parent’s lack of responsiveness, abandonment, betrayal of trust, or inability to comfort and soothe children in times of distress creates, over time, an attachment injury that is not easily healed (Johnson, Makinen, & Millikin, 2001). The injury, like scar tissue, may be minor and relatively unnoticeable or, with repeated trauma, may become large and interfere with functioning. Attachment injuries, when left unattended, can be gangrenous and create an impasse in current and future relationships that is not easily escaped (Johnson et al.).

The Insecure Bond: The Foundation for a Poisonous Relationship

Typical parents may face the birth of a child with intermingled excitement, hope, fear, and anxiety; the helplessness of an infant can trigger both caretaking behaviors and resentment in parents. For many people the instinct to care for and emotionally bond with an infant is instinctual. On one hand, for typical parents, babies enhance adults’ predisposition for nurturing through genetically programmed behaviors that have evolved to elicit responses from caretakers and enhance the emotional bond between parent and child (e.g., prolonged eye contact, smiling, crying, babbling, clinging). On the other hand, what evokes caring, attentive, affectionate responses from most parents may be experienced by poisonous parents as annoying, frustrating, selfish, and demanding (Laing in Firestone, 1990, p. ix). Alternatively, some poisonous parents have an insatiable craving for the attention and affection of their children to the point where the relationship becomes about meeting the parents’ needs and desires for love and security rather than about the child’s needs. Regardless of whether adults are abdicating the parental role, resenting it, or craving it, the needs of the child evoke the unmet needs within the parents (Firestone, 1990; Miller, 2002).

It is the pursuit of trying to heal or avoid one’s own unmet needs that partly makes some parents destructive to the emerging psyche and relationships of their children. The term attachment describes children forming a bond with their parents or caretakers, not vice versa. Poisonous parents try to get their own needs met by attempting to repair their injuries through childbearing and child rearing. They see their children as a means to an end—helping them to feel loved, worthy, virile, important, or competent. They seek healing through a means that can never heal them. Parents have an affectional bond with a child, but they are not attached to the child (Hughes, 2009). Being securely attached to a parent, the child will turn to the parent for support and feelings of safety. It is not appropriate for the parent to turn to the child for those same things. Adults should seek feelings of support, warmth, and safety, from partners, friends, or their own parents but not from children.

Poisonous parents behave as they do for one or more of several reasons: as a means of expressing their anger and resentment toward their own parents, to restore their belief in love, or simply because they have never learned the skills for accurately perceiving others’ needs or the ability to express loving behaviors in an attuned manner. They may display ambivalence toward their children—wanting to nurture their children but stunting their growth, stifling their joy, and altering their desires. Whether it is through emotionally or physically abusing, smothering, or deserting their children, poisonous parents repeatedly act in unloving and destructive ways. Regardless of how damaging these patterns may appear to others, poisonous parents may be oblivious to the effect they have on their children or adult children. One of the reasons it is difficult to intervene in these relationships is that parents may be blind to their malevolence or even perceive their actions as benevolent. For example, absent parents may believe their presence has no impact on a child’s life or parents who are harsh and criticizing may believe they are preparing their children for a cruel world.

As children of poisonous parents develop and experience damage to their emotional connection to parents, a multigenerational legacy of poison is created. There are multiple people with attachment injuries trying to get their needs met. As children develop, the relationship between parents and adult children may become increasingly reactiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Foreword
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 Poisonous Parenting
• CHAPTER 2 Compassionate Parenting: The Antidote to Poisonous Parenting
• CHAPTER 3 Parental Presence: An Interpersonal Neurobiology Approach to Healthy Relationships Between Adults and Their Parents
• CHAPTER 4 A Brain-Based Understanding From the Cradle to the Grave
• CHAPTER 5 Creating Secure Attachment: A Model for Creating Healthy Relationships
• CHAPTER 6 Couples Relationships
• CHAPTER 7 Father–Son Relationships
• CHAPTER 8 Disconnection and Parenting: A Relational–Cultural Perspective
• CHAPTER 9 Addressing Poisonous Parenting Within the African American Community: A Systems Approach
• CHAPTER 10 Honor Thy Parents? A Religious Perspective on Poisonous Parenting
• CHAPTER 11 Saving Oneself Forgiving the Poisonous Parent as an Act of Kindness to Oneself and Future Generations
• CHAPTER 12 Helping Clients Become Compassionate Parents, Partners, and Friends
• Index