Ever wonder if what your NParent(s) did to you was really abusive? That wonderful paper entitled Emotional Abuse, Practice Guidance for Children’s Services1, referenced in my last blog entry had another very interesting section about identifying emotionally abusive parental behaviour. I am certain you will find familiar parallels between the examples contained in the paper (below) and your own experiences with narcissistic parents and authority figures. My comments appear in violet.
3.1 It is
possible to identify examples of emotionally abusive parental behaviour.
Rejecting
the child.
This may be active rejection, telling children they are unloved, and
unwanted, or passive rejection, which is ignoring or failing to communicate
with the child in any way and the absence of any demonstration of affection.
Example from CP Listing of passive rejection: ‘the children, aged six months and two years, have to sit in darkness
and when anyone visits they are always ‘asleep’. The mother ignores them until
it is time for her to feed or dress them as if she were taking them out of a
box.’
Active rejection—telling you that you are unloved
or unwanted (or a mistake or an accident or a burden)—is hard to take but easy
to grasp. Passive rejection, however, can be a little more difficult to
recognize and easier to wish away with denial. People who habitually ignore
you, walk away when you are talking to them, who turn away from affectionate
gestures (like refusing an embrace or kiss), are rejecting you no less than
those who tell you bluntly that you are not welcome in their lives.
With children the forms of passive
rejection can be legion: discarding a child’s artwork (especially if another
child’s is displayed), forgetting important things with respect to the child
like dental or medical appointments, birthdays and other special events. A
rejection can be as simple as repeatedly not attending events that are
important to the child like sporting events or awards ceremonies or
performances like school plays, choir or band concerts, awards ceremonies.
Passive rejection is manifested more through failure to act than overt
behaviours that clearly hurt. The parent who cannot be bothered to pick a child
up from the bus stop, provide adequate supervision or bestir himself to do
something supportive of the child is, by definition, passively showing
disinterest in the child: rejection.
Denigrating
the child.
The child is repeatedly told they are bad, worthless and is blamed for
the problems in the family. The child may be humiliated and ridiculed both in
isolation and in front of others, in particular, peer groups. Survivor
statement: ‘I was well-built as a child
and my father would say “you’ve a backside like a cow”. Once he took me to a
potato weighing machine for a public weighing and subjected me to ridicule.’
The denigration does not have to be directly
spoken. In fact, narcissists love “plausible deniability,” so it is not
uncommon for the child of a narcissist to learn about how her parent is
denigrating her through third parties. It is not uncommon for a parent to mount
a smear campaign against the child, even a young child. Ascribing negative
motives to a child’s age-appropriate behaviour and continuing this behaviour
over the years creates an image in the minds of others of a child who is a sore
trial to parent and elicits sympathy and admiration for the long-suffering
parent.
There are, of course, children who
are more challenging than others to raise. A compassionate, loving parent,
however, will not denigrate the child to others. Except in appropriate
circumstances (parent-teacher meeting, psychological assessment, etc.) such a
parent will focus on the child’s strong points and positive aspects. He is artistic
or likes to read or knows everything about dinosaurs, for example. A child need
not be present to be affected by parental denigration because the parent’s
negativity about his child creates an expectation in the minds of others, an
expectation that will be transmitted to the child through the way he is
treated.
Denigration of a child to his face,
however, is devastating. My late husband, Charlie, grew up believing he was
stupid because his mother told him he was. Charlie was, in fact, dyslexic and
his dyslexia had never been appropriately addressed. Because he believed he was
stupid, he made little effort in his life. I noticed that anything he
heard—like on the news—he was capable of having an intelligent discussion about
but he didn’t seem to like to read. It didn’t take long to discover the source
of the problem and before long Charlie was understanding that he was not
stupid, he simply had a treatable condition. I bought him books written at his
reading level to get him reading, and began to teach him things like critical
thinking and deductive logic—he grasped them quickly and became an erudite
critic of political gamesmanship.
And then one Christmas Day we were at
his brother’s house for dinner and his mother waved a bunch of legal papers he
needed to sign with respect to an inheritance. He declined, saying he would
take it to a lawyer for review. She went ballistic (he was no longer blindly
compliant with her wishes and she didn’t like that at all) and told him “You
are stupid! If you don’t sign these papers right now, you are stupid! Stupid!”
He went white. The shock on his face
was obvious—he was stricken. He was 44 years old and his mother was calling him
stupid in front of the assembled family and his fiancée (me). He just sat
there, mouth agape, saying nothing. So I said “He’s not stupid and don’t call
him that!”
And she replied “I am his mother, I
will call him anything I want!”
Parental denigration of a child
hurts, whether the child is still small or an adult, whether the child actually
hears it or picks up on it from the way others treat him, whether it is true or
not. It harms a child’s sense of self, it makes him feel incompetent as a human
being, a feeling that hampers a child’s ability to succeed in life.
And parents who do this do it for
their own gain, whether it is to excuse suspicions against them (are the
child’s grades poor because he is stupid or because the parent gives no
academic support or interest? If the child is stupid, the parent is off the
hook) or to garner sympathy from those who feel badly for the parent of such a
difficult child. But in no case does denigration of a child benefit that child.
Inducing
fear/promoting insecurities.
The child is exposed to activities engineered for adults or adolescents
of an older age, e.g. frightening funfair rides, horror films, fearsome adult
computer games. Terrorising the child by holding them hostage, killing or
injuring a loved relative or pet in front of the child and making severe
threats. Creating insecurities by, for example, frequently leaving young
children with different, strange carers. Encouraging children to believe that
ghosts and monsters exist and then putting them to bed with the light off with
comments that the ghosts/monsters will get them. Locking children in
cupboards/dark places. Threatening to abandon the child. Survivor statement: ‘My father would make stabbing movements
towards our eyes saying “I could kill you”. He stuck cigarettes into himself
and cut himself in front of us saying he was indestructible.... He would sit
there with a knife waiting for one of us to move.’
Parents induce fear and insecurity in children two
ways: overtly and covertly. Some parents do it consciously and with full
awareness, others do it without consciously realizing that their actions can
emotionally cripple the child. When faced with the result of their actions,
many of these parents will shield themselves with denial and blame the child. A
few will acknowledge the harm of their actions and actually change.
The examples above show overt and
conscious behaviours that can induce fear and insecurity in a child but the
covert ways are no less damaging. Moving frequently so a child cannot put down roots,
develop friendships, and become a part of a community of peers can create
insecurity. Forcing a child to dress differently, to look different from his
peers—keeping a teen girl in childish dresses or not allowing a teen boy to
wear his hair in the latest teen fashion—alienates the child from his peers and
creates social insecurity. Threats need not be overt to create fear—a chaotic
home environment can spark both insecurity and fear. A substance-abusing parent
or other household member can invoke fear and insecurity, as does a member
whose lifestyle leaves him prone to visits from the authorities.
Even homes that look perfect from the
outside can foster fear and insecurity in children. Some parents ascribe to
rigid and punitive disciplinary beliefs while others are so laissez faire that the children are not
secure in the knowledge that their parents will protect them. All of these
situations are abusive because they create fear and insecurity in the child,
and insecurity inculcated in the child early in life stays with the child.
Tormenting.
Deliberately creating mental anguish, especially by maliciously denying
the child something others in the family have, or vicious teasing/bullying. Survivor
statement: ‘when it came to birthdays and
Christmas, the other two (his brothers) had presents and parties. I was lucky
if I got a card.’
I remember, one Christmas, finding a sealed white
envelope among my Christmas gifts. My brother was excited about his fishing
gear and gasoline-powered model airplane while I sat morosely with plastic bags
of cheap cotton socks and tacky, ugly underpants. I opened the envelope and
found an odd bit of money, like $1.42. This, my mother explained, was the
difference between what she spent on him and what she spent on me—she was
giving me the difference in cash to be “fair.” I sat there looking at my pile
of cheap and sleazy Kmart undies and a few other equally disappointing gifts,
then at my brother joyfully playing with exactly what he had requested for
Christmas, and it didn’t feel fair to me at all.
Then my mother put her hand out for
the money, saying she would keep it for me until I needed it, and I knew I
would ever see it again. Did she do this deliberately to torment me? I will
never know. Did it have that effect? Yes. I felt picked on, singled out, and
unloved.
Some parents torment a child
deliberately because it amuses them or because they think they are teaching the
child some kind of lesson. Withholding dessert from an overweight child while
giving it to her sisters is a form of torment in which the parents think they
are doing the right thing: withholding calories from an overweight child and
demonstrating to her that if she loses weight, she can then have dessert like
her slimmer sisters.
Tormenting a child is abusive,
whether it is deliberate or not. My mother used to stick her foot out when I
walked by her chair and when I tripped over it, give me a dirty look
accompanied with “Way to go, Miss Graceful,” as if I had tripped over my own feet
(something she accused me of regularly). We were not allowed afternoon snacks
and my mother was notoriously stingy at the dinner table (plus she was an awful
cook), so I spent a good part of my childhood hungry. One afternoon she took
out a tin that said “Peanuts” on the side and handed it to me to open. When my
brother moved in to take it from me, my mother waved him off—a surprise to me
that should have been a warning. When I finally wrested the cap free a coiled
spring, covered in a reptile-print fabric, leapt out of the can making me
shriek and then cry. Both my mother and my brother got a good laugh about this,
and they both tormented me for my tears, my brother calling me a “big baby,” my
mother saying I had no sense of humour and couldn’t “take a joke.” Nothing was
safe in my mother’s house, not even the cans of food, and I was the family
joke.
Inappropriate/inconsistent
expectations/roles.
The child may be expected to support the parent, care for siblings or
themselves (when they are too developmentally immature to do so), or perform
tasks beyond their developmental ability. E.g. having to stay off school to
look after an ill or disabled parent, change nappies, feed and supervise
younger siblings and take them to school, make hot drinks for parents
unsupervised, clean up after siblings/parents. The child may be given confusing
messages, which they cannot understand because parents have inconsistent
expectations or respond unpredictably. Example from CP Listing: ‘A girl aged six years has to clean herself
up if she is sick or wets herself. She has to look after her parents and is the
household drudge.’
Children often lack perspective and they are, by
nature, narcissistic. As such, a child’s view of her position in the household
is necessarily biased: what an adult would see as a child’s chores that are an
acceptable contribution of labour to the household the child may see as being
made the household servant. Revisiting the situation in later years, when the
child has grown, will more than likely provide the necessary perspective.
That said, there are households in
which the children are taxed with jobs and roles that are inconsistent with
their age and physical development. Expecting a teen-aged child to mind his
smaller siblings after school is an age-appropriate task; expecting an 8 year
old to mind her 6 year old brother is not. Expecting a teen-aged child to do
some meal prep tasks, including baking cookies or cupcakes is an
age-appropriate task; expecting it of an 8 year old is not. Expecting a teen-aged
boy to mow the lawn on a Saturday morning is both age and physically
appropriate; expecting it of a 10 year old is not. And yet there are households
in your town and mine that place the burdens of maintaining a household on the
shoulders of young children. Certainly when both parents are working children
may need to take a larger role in housekeeping but that does not excuse
assigning work the child is too young or physically immature to do.
Worst, however, are the parents who
parentify. They thrust onto young children burdens the parents are unwilling to
take on themselves. In some cases the parents may be stupefied by drugs or
alcohol but in others it is simply entitlement or opportunity: they have a kid
to do it so they don’t have to. This is inherently wrong: children deserve to
have a childhood free of the burdens and anxieties of adulthood and it is the
parent’s job to provide that.
Parentifying can be taken to a
dangerous extreme. When the mother has an abusive ex, for example, and she
sends the children to answer the door when he shows up. Instructing the
children to send him away, to lie and say she isn’t home, to put themselves in
the middle between her and the threat, using them as a shield to protect
herself. This is wrong, it is potentially dangerous for the children in the
moment, and dangerous to the children’s developing minds, causing them to grow
up thinking they are responsible for others even when those others are capable
of being responsible for themselves.
Over-protection.
This is the opposite of the above and taken to extremes, deprives the
child of opportunities to develop friendships, activities and access
experiences that would promote their development. The child is ‘wrapped in
cotton wool’ and is not allowed to engage in messy play or get dirty in case
they catch germs. Case example: A boy
aged eight soils and wets himself in school because he does not know how to go
to the toilet on his own. He is always dressed in very warm clothes, which he
cannot take off even for P.E. He is not allowed to go swimming with the school
in case he catches cold. He cannot stay for school dinners or eat while in
school in case he chokes.
The children of narcissists seldom
deal with over-protection, in its purest form, but many of us deal with
enmeshment, which is its kissing cousin. In both cases the child can grow up
feeling incompetent to care for himself in even small ways because the N parent
is refusing to relinquish sufficient control to allow the child to learn
age-appropriate self-care.
Also peculiar to the narcissistic
parent is a kind of selective “over protection,” in which the child is
prevented from age-appropriate learning opportunities and even denied
age-appropriate social development while, at the same time, the parent
overburdens the child with responsibilities that are beyond the child’s
abilities. For example, I was minding my younger brother when I was only eight,
expected to bake a cake twice weekly and clean the house including mopping and vacuuming.
None of these tasks were appropriate to my age, size, and/or development: my
brother was bigger than me, the cake required the use of a gas oven that had to
be lit with a match (and I singed off my eyebrows more than once in that task),
the mop and bucket were literally too big for me to manage and so was the
clumsy old vacuum. That same parent, however, kept me without a bra until I
wore a B-cup, dressed me in little girl dresses, wouldn’t let me shave my legs
or underarms, or wear make up or high heeled shoes. A year with my father and
step mother took care of the grooming issues but back in my mother’s house at
age 16 she refused to let me learn to drive—and at no time was I allowed to
have money or a bank account. So, basically, she was exploitive where it suited
her and “overprotective” such that I could not successfully become independent.
Because it impeded my age-appropriate development and it was an on-going issue,
it was abusive.
Isolating
the child.
This includes both social isolation and segregation within the home.
Example from CP Listing: ‘the girl, aged
12, has to put her nightdress on straight after school so she cannot play with
friends and is ashamed if anyone visits’.
This means keeping a child from
associating with her peers, like not permitting her to play with friends, have
sleepovers, join her friends after school at the mall or go to the movies with
them. It means isolating the child not only through such restrictive practices
but also by isolating the child by making them “different” so that she is
shunned by her peers. This includes not allowing the child to dress similarly
to her peers but also keeping her culturally ignorant: not permitted to watch
TV shows that are popular amongst her peers or read magazines and websites that
are part of the child’s age-relevant culture.
Isolating within the home not only
means specifically removing the child from the rest of the household by sending
him to his room when he is not engaged in work, but it also means creating an
environment in which the child feels unwelcome amongst the rest of the family
or even fearful of being with the family. If the child is picked on by a
sibling or another member of the household and the parent does not intervene,
if the child’s presence triggers other members of the household to send him to
fetch and carry, like a servant, if the child has not been protected from abuse
by one of the family members, the child may voluntarily withdraw in the
interest of his own safety. This is creating an environment in which a child
becomes isolated due to lack of support.
As a child I quickly learned that the
safest place for me to be was out of my mother’s sight. If she didn’t see me
she wasn’t reminded of me and if I wasn’t on her mind, I wasn’t likely to be
pressed into service or treated to one of her diatribes about my hair, clothes,
weight, posture, grades, or taste in boyfriends. It was just safer all around
for me to stay out of sight.
Not
recognising or acknowledging the child’s individuality or psychological
boundary.
This involves denial of the child’s unique attributes of temperament and
personality. The parents try to actively mould the child into meeting the
parent’s emotional needs. The parent may have complicated misperceptions of the
child and attribute feelings, wishes and motives to the child that belong in
the parent or in their history. If the parent has an enduring, serious mental
illness, they may actively involve the child in their misperceptions of the
world about them. Although fabricated or induced illness falls within the
definition of physical abuse it is a variant of this example.
The biggest incidence of this, I
think, is parental projection. That can work several ways: 1) the parent
projects his tastes onto the child; 2) the parent projects his
behaviours/beliefs onto the child; 3) the parent perceives the child’s
insistence on his individuality as defiance and rebellion.
In the first instance the parent’s
projection can be as petty as insisting a child dislikes a vegetable the parent
dislikes and as weighty as trying to force the child into a career path that
was the parent’s dream. A blue collar worker may insist his child become a
doctor because that is what he wanted to do; a doctor may insist his child
follow in his footsteps or become a sports star because that was his dream.
Regardless of what tastes the parent projects onto a child, whether it is food,
fashion or a career path, the very fact of the projection dehumanizes the child
because it tramples and ignores the child’s own tastes and desires.
In the second instance, the parent
assumes that the child’s beliefs are the same as his are or were at the same
age and therefore imputes onto the child the same behaviours. I experienced
this as a teen when my mother would accuse me—and even punish me—for things
that had never even crossed my mind. Many years later I learned from my uncle
that my mother had frequently sneaked out of the house after her parents had
gone to bed and she went to roadhouses and hung out with a fast crowd.
Recalling her own misbehaviour as a teen, she assumed I was doing the same and
punished me for it.
Other parents may assume the child
shares their political or religious beliefs and values and signs the child up
for such things as religious camps or political volunteer work. It doesn’t
occur to such a parent that the child may hold other views and the child has
either not expressed a contrary belief out of fear of retaliation or the
child’s opposing views are denigrated and not accepted. “Oh, you don’t really
believe that! How could you even think that is okay?”
In the third instance, the parent is
so entrenched in his view of his child is an emotional and psychological clone
that he treats the child’s overt insistence on individuality as a full-scale
rebellion. An artistically-inclined child, for example, is signed up by a
parent for soccer camp and the child’s refusal to cooperate (or simply to
become a “star”) is treated like treason against the parent and possibly even
the family.
What these all have in common is that
they deny the child his actual personhood. The child and his real likes and
dislikes, talents and interests, desires and dreams are trampled by the
parents’ headlong rush into vicariously fulfilling their own ambitions through
the children who are viewed as little more than conduits to the parents’
realization of aspirations heretofore denied them. This obliterates the child
as a separate individual and makes him the extension of his parent(s) and this
is abusive.
Corrupting
the child.
This refers to parents who mis-socialise the child by actively involving
them in criminal activities, or encouraging them to assault/abuse others. Example
from CP Listing: ‘the boys were taught
that they should fight the police and hit girls. They were encouraged to steal
from shops. In the foster-home they were surprised the foster carers were
buying items rather than stealing them.”
When we think of corrupting and
mis-socialising a child we think of criminal activity as noted above. But there
are other ways of mis-socialising and corrupting a child.
Young children are like little
sponges. Whatever you soak them in, they absorb. A parent can corrupt his child
by teaching him to disrespect others through teaching him racism, sexism,
ageism. A parent can corrupt his child by teaching him entitlement so that when
he grows up and joins the real world, he doesn’t know how to compromise and
negotiate with others. A parent can corrupt a child by teaching him cynical and
even untrue views of the world, by inculcating him with beliefs that impede his
ability to integrate with the world he finds when he goes out into it, by
teaching him specious beliefs over science, by teaching him entitlement due to
his colour or nationality or religion or anything
else. Such parents corrupt and mis-socialize their children by failing to give them
the tools they need to succeed in the greater society outside the parents’ own
personal enclave. This is abusive because they fail to prepare the child for
the world as it is, not as the parents want it to be and now the child suffers
because he doesn’t have the tools necessary to compete and succeed.
Exposing
children to domestic violence.
Domestic violence is terrifying to
experience and terrorizing to witness. Even if you, yourself, are not the
perpetrator of domestic violence, by allowing your children to be exposed to it
is still just as abusive as if you were perpetrating the violence yourself. Exposing
children to domestic violence, whether you are the perpetrator, the victim or a
bystander is abusive to the child.
While we do not have control over the
behaviour of others, keeping children in an environment in which domestic
violence occurs is still abusive. If, for example, you live with your parents
and your father hits your mother and your children see this, you are exposing
your children to domestic violence. If you believe an abuser’s promises to stop
and you stay after he breaks that promise, you are exposing your children to
domestic violence. If your partner or some other person abuses you—not just physically
but emotionally as well—you are exposing your children to domestic violence. If
you scream and call people names, throw things at them, threaten them or hit
them, you are exposing your children to domestic violence.
What does a child get from this
exposure? At first the child is frightened. They fear for themselves both
directly and indirectly: will he hurt me?
Who will take care of me if he hurts Mama? As time goes on, children can
become inured to it, an unhealthy attitude in itself. Most of all, however,
children learn that this is what a relationship looks like, sounds like, feels
like. They grow up to become abusers themselves or to choose abusers for
partners because this is what they know.
Any way you slice it, exposing
children to any form of domestic violence is abusive.
It is interesting to read through these behaviours
and see people and incidents from our own lives: with the exception of domestic
violence, in one way or another, I could see my mother in every one of these
behaviours and, if you count her beating me as domestic violence, then she even
exposed us to that. But parental behaviour, to be abusive, does not have to be
physical, it simply has to be detrimental to the emotional development and
well-being of the child and to be a regular feature in the child’s life.
We ACoNs often question ourselves,
wondering if what we endured growing up was normal or whether it was abusive.
We have little experience with normal—indeed, normal is not easily quantified
as normal can manifest in a bewildering variety of ways—and so we may not know
how to recognize it opposite, abnormal. When abusive parental behaviour is
commonplace, we tend to normalize it in our minds and from there, define “abusive”
as anything we think is worse than what we endured. And this makes our
definition of “abusive” very, very subjective.
But there is now an objective
definition of emotional abuse, and part of identifying it involves recognising,
analysing and identifying parental behaviours that result in the abuse of a
child. Emotional abuse if often overlooked or down played but, in truth, it can
be much more devastating to the developing psyche of a child than physical
abuse.
Now you know.
