“He’s Lying On Your Lawn, It’s Indecent” - Why Does His Mother's Words Bomb Us For Three Days?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Not everyone who has bullied their child is a toxic parent

- Recently, the term "toxic parenting" has become popular. It usually refers to the traumatic relationship between parents and children, including between grown-up children and older parents. Where is the divide between normal relationships and toxic relationships?

- Any close relationship can be toxic. These are not only relationships between parents and children, but also relationships in a group, at work with colleagues.

Relationships are always about balance. We get in them closeness, trust, a sense of security, we get the opportunity to be ourselves, emotional support. And we invest in them ourselves. We can take care of another person, be open or show vulnerability, we always exchange resources, take into account each other's needs. This is the meaning of any relationship.

But the more we take into account each other's needs, the more we lose freedom and independence, because we associate our expectations, plans and feelings with other people. We can no longer live without looking back at our loved ones. Everything has a price.

In any relationship, someone hurts and hurts someone, does not live up to expectations, or cannot empathically respond. Therefore, "good": nourishing, profitable, functional relationships are those in which there are more pluses than minuses, supporting, developing, giving more peace than hurting and limiting

This balance, of course, cannot be calculated on a calculator, but we can all feel it.

Not all parents who did something not quite right with their children and somehow offended them are toxic. In toxic relationships, bad things prevail, evil is caused many times more than good is brought, and even if there is care, love and support, it is so burdened with a lot of humiliation and fear that a person cannot evaluate these relationships as resourceful. He perceives them as hurting and debilitating.

Toxic parents are those who, due to personality traits or serious traumatic experiences, use their children, cannot take care of them, are not sensitive to their needs, and do not love them. This is not about how these parents feel emotionally, there are options, but about how they behave. Often the cause of their toxicity is a combination of their own dysfunctional childhood with personality traits (reduced empathy, undeveloped moral sense, psychopathies). Such families are found, of course, but statistically it is still a separate percentage.

It seems to me that the phrase “toxic relationship” is used very broadly today. Many of those who use the term have actually been in such a relationship or worked with clients affected by their parents. But there are also many who, calling their parents toxic, admit that they received warmth, attention, and care from their parents. They use the term because they themselves still speak of resentment against their parents. The offense is completely real, but letting it overshadow all the good is unfair, even not so much to your parents as to yourself.

When a person begins to sincerely believe that he has received nothing from his parents except violence and anger, this is a blow to his own identity, because it turns out that I myself have been made of this rubbish. Who can benefit from this? To realize your grievances - yes, but to hang labels on all your childhood - why?

- When you see almost 30 thousand people in a closed group on a social network, it seems that toxic parents are not such a rare case.

- It is incorrect for every parent who said insulting things to his child or even beat him, did something else that is still painful and offensive for the child to remember, to be considered toxic. This does not mean that in general all relationships were non-resourceful. We can say that the parents are toxic, who destroyed the child, gave the message: "Do not live, do not be." Who used the child, not caring about him, saying: "You are not important to me, you are my thing, I will do with you what I want." But not every parent who spanks a child, stomps his feet, yells and says hurtful things gives just such a message. And vice versa, it may be that no one beats or yells, but “devoted his whole life to the child,” but this concern is toxic, because in fact the child is being used.

For children, different rules are not a problem at all

- "We raised children without diapers", "This hairstyle does not fit your nose", "Why do you let Katya choose the dress herself for a walk." Mum’s comments that devalue our parenting principles and habits often cause strong negative reactions. Is this a sign of infantilism?

- Having matured, we make an important discovery: parents are separate people, with their own ideas and values. They are dear to us as parents. We love them, worry about their well-being, state, but if they think differently than we do, then we do not fall apart from this discovery, we do not think that this is a reproach to us. After all, you never know people who think differently than we do.

If we still react painfully to mom's remarks about our nose, hair, work, marriage, then rather it means that we, for a long time adults, did not have a psychological separation

This is not just about upset or irritation - we all feel uncomfortable when our loved ones are unhappy with us, but about “sinking” into negative emotions, as if we are 5 years old again and are being reprimanded.

“It's on your lawn! This is indecent,”Mom tells you. She thinks so, she's so used to it. In some times, some morals, in others - others. You and your mom are from different generations anyway. Agree, the problem is not that mom thinks differently from you. The problem is why her replica is a powerful trigger for you. Why did she say, “How can you let me choose a dress,” and your mood is ruined for three days? This reaction is a sign of the absence of psychological separation.

It is clear that not always everything is so simple. The older generation can do things that create serious problems for us. For example, a mother-in-law (mother-in-law) is unhappy with the marriage of her son or daughter and allows herself to tell the child nasty things about his father or mother. Now that's a bad story. For the sake of their own personal goals and interests, the child is harmed.

- What is this harm?

- It is important to distinguish. From the fact that the grandmother just grumbled at mom, nothing will happen to the child. It would be nice for the older generation to understand that there is no need to do this, that any child will be calmer when all the adults in the family are “blowing the same tune”. Not in the sense that everyone always commands and prohibits the same, but in the fact that all adults do not doubt each other as caring, loving people.

The child quite calmly perceives that different adults allow different things and do not allow different things. What is possible with mom, grandmother is not allowed. You can eat ice cream with your dad before dinner, but you can't with your mom. Children are adaptive creatures. For them, different rules are not a problem at all. Over time, after a short period of disorientation, they remember how someone's life is arranged, and simply move from one mode “me with dad” to another, “me with my mother,” or “me with my grandmother,” “with a nanny.” And he will be fine with everyone, albeit in different ways.

It is bad and scary for a child if adults who are significant for him begin to doubt each other as caring loved ones, give moral assessments of the adult's attitude to the child. “Yes, your father doesn't need you,” “Yes, your mother doesn't care about you,” “Grandmother, having fed you with this food, does not think about healthy eating, ruins your health.” Speaking badly about mom, dad, and other loved ones who are “not caring and want harm,” a person, to please his desires “to be right,” “to have power,” harms the child. This can be done by grandmothers, and mothers, and fathers - anyone. This creates a conflict of loyalty in the child's soul - a condition that can be deeply traumatic. The children's psyche cannot stand this. In terms of the consequences, the conflict of loyalty is akin to acute forms of violence, although no one physically touched anyone, just the background sounded "dad is a moral monster", "your mom (grandmother) cannot be trusted with children."

A child must trust their adults. This is his basic need, a condition for normal development. That his beloved adults want him to harm, the child is not able to realize. An inner painful conflict arises. The child begins to close off from all relationships.

Often couples come to my lectures and meetings who try to use a psychologist in their wars. “Tell him what he does wrong, says, does …” - says the wife. “No, tell her that she misbehaves with her son,” he retorts. I try to explain to people that it doesn't matter at all, who acts and how, what does and says, what rules it sets. Children are adaptive. They will learn how to behave with whom. The main thing is that doubts about each other do not sound in the background, so that there is no constant statement "You are not caring enough for an adult." It is this that completely disorients the child.

It is important to believe that everyone who loves our child and is dear to him gives him something very valuable, irreplaceable, and even if he does something differently from what we would do, the child needs him and is important. Of course, it happens that a person is unhealthy, inadequate, but in these cases it is simply not necessary to leave the children with him.

Shot from the movie "Bury Me Behind the Skirting Board"

If the child decides that he is the parent of his parents

- In general, the generation of today's thirty-forty-year-olds has a lot of problems in relations with their parents. More than once you have written in your articles, books, spoke at lectures about the trauma of generations. Do you have an understanding of what is special about the generation of forty years old, what is the reason for the complexity of their relationship with their parents?

- The peculiarity of this generation is that the phenomenon of parentification, “adoption of parents” is widespread in it. Having reached a certain age, children were forced to change their emotional roles with their parents, while maintaining social ones. In other words, they bore an uncharacteristic burden of responsibility for the emotional state of their parents, who could not find other sources of support.

Today's seventy-year-old people themselves often lacked parental attention, acceptance, because their own parents were wounded by the war or repression, became disabled, lost their spouses, were extremely tired, worked unrealistically and led a difficult life, were ill, died early.

For a long period of their lives, their adults were in a state of complete mobilization and functioning on the verge of survival. Our mothers and grandmothers grew up, but their children's need for love, peace, acceptance, warmth, care was not satisfied. Nobody dealt with their problems, and they didn't really know about them.

As adults, they were emotionally and psychologically disliked children. When they had their own children, they were loved, raised, cared for (buying clothes, food), but on a deep emotional level they passionately awaited love, care, and consolation from the children.

Since the child has nowhere to go in relations with the parent, this is a very close connection, he inevitably responds to the feelings of an adult, to the need presented to him. Especially if she understands that my mother is unhappy without it. It is enough to hug her, tell her something pleasant and affectionate, please her with her successes, free her from homework, and she begins to feel clearly better.

The child gets hooked on it. He forms in himself a hyper-caring little adult, a little parent. The child, both emotionally and psychologically, adopts his own parents, while maintaining his social role. He still has to obey adults. At the same time, in difficult times, he emotionally nurses them, and not they him. He maintains his composure, giving the older generation the opportunity to be hysterical, panic, or angry.

As a result, the child grows up as a parent to his own parents. And this parental position is preserved and transferred throughout life, to the attitude to your children as to children, and to your parents as to children.

- Growing up, we still reconsider our attitude to many things and people. Is not it so?

- You can stop being a husband or wife, boyfriend or girlfriend, neighbor, student, employee, you can grow up and stop being a child, but you cannot stop being a parent. If you have a child, you are his parent forever, even if the child has left, even if he is gone. Parenting is an irrevocable relationship.

If a child internally, emotionally and seriously decides that he is the parent of his parents, then he cannot get out of this relationship, even as an adult, even having his own family and children. Functioning normally in their new family, such adults continue to babysit their parents, always choose their interests, focus on their condition, and wait for their emotional assessment. They are waiting not just for emotions, but in the literal sense of the words: "Son, you did me well", "Daughter, you saved me."

Obviously, it's hard and it just doesn't have to be. Normally, children should not think so much about their parents. Of course, we must help our parents: help them, provide treatment, buy food, pay receipts. It's great if we want and can communicate to mutual pleasure.

But children should not devote themselves to serving the emotional state of their parents. They must raise their children and take care of their condition

This is very difficult for people with parenchity to accept. After all, they are psychologically in this pair - not children.

Why we often make claims to mothers

- Looking back on the past, we often make claims to mothers. Why exactly are they the targets of accusations?

- As we said, empathic support is what we value most in a relationship. Imagine sharing something that touches or impresses you with a coworker. He answered something like that, but it is obvious to you that he does not care about your feelings, discoveries and impressions. Unpleasant, but not terrible, after all, he has a life of his own.

It's another matter if you told something important about yourself to your husband or wife, and he, for example, continues to sit on the phone. Either he answers with a stupid joke, or begins to lecture instead of sympathy. Agree that the last situation will be much more painful than the first. Psychologists call this "empathic failure."

The child needed comfort, and they barked at him and accused him. The child needed attention, and the parent was tired and worn out, he was not up to it. The child shared his innermost, and they laughed at him. This is empathic failure. It is this state that we experience especially painfully from close people and, first of all, from our mother.

The way of life in Soviet families assumed that the woman was mainly engaged in children, in addition to taking care of her everyday life and working. Dads by many children were generally perceived rather distantly. Accordingly, the children developed close relationships with their mothers. That is why we present the main claims for the wrongs, first of all, to mothers.

I know people who had close relationships with their fathers, and they make more claims to their fathers, even if my mother did not do the best things. But the resentment was not against her - she was "like that", but against her dad - why didn't she protect her, didn't he console? We always make more claims to those from whom we expected more. To those who are more important to us.

Photo: unsplash

- What role does the fact that for the most part this generation was brought up either by grandmothers, or by a kindergarten, a school, or pioneer camps, plays a role in the parent-child relationship between forty-year-olds and their parents?

- A big role here is played by the feeling of abandonment and abandonment, which many experienced then. No, this is not about the fact that the parents did not love their children. They could even love very much, but life in the USSR often offered no other way out: “Have you given birth? Go to work, and let the child go to the nursery. " But if a teenager still somehow can understand that a mother needs to go to work and nothing else, then a small child will consider: "Once they have given me to the garden, camp, grandmother, then I am not needed."

In addition, there is a second factor. Returning from work, parents were often so exhausted, including everyday life, standing in lines, transport, a difficult climate, general uncomfortableness and disorder of life, that those one and a half hours of free time that remained for the children were reduced to remarks: “I did my homework, washed your hands?"

If, in such a state, any parent would be given a rest, take a breath, and then ask: “Do you generally love your child?”, In response we would hear: “Yes! Sure!" But the manifestation of this love more and more often boiled down to "I washed the floor - I did my homework - how much can I say." Children heard it as “I'm not like that, my parents don't like me”.

The son lives with us and does not move out

- Has parenting changed today? Is it different?

- Sure. Children today are much more in the center of attention of adults than it was in the 70s and 80s of the twentieth century. There was no such childcentrism then. Today's parents have much more reflection on the topic of upbringing. They care not only whether the child is full or dressed, but how he develops, what happens to him, how to build communication with him, what his experiences are.

- Is this also a consequence of parentification?

- Partly yes. They carry the usual parental roles and therefore are hyper-caring, too involved in the child's life, think too much about children. I often use the term parental neurosis to describe this condition. Quite a common phenomenon that has its consequences.

- Which for example?

- If earlier there were complaints that “my parents will not leave me alone”, “well, that they always climb into my life”, “they even made the keys to our apartment for themselves”, “they care about everything”, then now a new trend. There are a lot of complaints about grown-up children: "Why does the son live with us and does not move out?"

People in relationships, like puzzles, are adjusted by life to fit each other. If one person has some hyperdeveloped functions, then the other, with whom he lives, with a high degree of probability, these functions will drop out. The smaller the family composition, the more this is manifested

If a family consists of 10 people, then everyone neutralizes each other. If a mother lives with her child alone and she is hyperfunctional, then everything that she does well, the child does not do at all. Not because he is bad, but because there is no opportunity to prove himself. After all, Mom had already taken care of everything.

But one day such a mother (and she is also developing, changing, working on problems with a psychotherapist) wants the child to move out of her house somewhere, but he does not need it, and it’s hard.

He does not understand that her mother has changed, that she does not have the same needs, for example, to have a son or daughter with her all the time, so that she feels needed. She wants freedom, new relationships, wants not to support her son, but to spend money on herself, yes, maybe even walking around the house without clothes, in the end, has the right. But her son says to her: “I'm not going anywhere, I feel good here too. I will always live here!"

Living together is not just a psychological problem

- In Italy, it is normal for a son to live with his parents until he is thirty. Nobody drives him out of the house. Why do we have this problem?

- Yes, Italians are also hyper-caring and child-loving. But do not forget about the economic component of any relationship. In the same Greece and rural Italy, if the son leaves the family, the parents are obliged to allocate him a share in the household, in the store, in the family business. It is always difficult and fraught with conflicts, not to mention the fact that there is always a risk of losing this share. It is much more profitable to leave the child in the family, in the family business, together with his share, so that the whole structure remains stable. It is easier for parents to transfer the whole matter to their children at once, when they themselves go on a well-deserved rest. There are unspoken rules and an exchange of non-freedom for comfort.

The child, in a sense, "belongs" to the parents. He cannot just say: “I don’t want to deal with your hotel, but I want to go to study as a programmer”. Naturally, if he has a strong desire and expressed abilities, then the parents will allow and even help. We do not live in the Middle Ages. But if there are no such desires, then it is expected that the child will still continue the work of the parents. For such a prospect to be an incentive for him, he receives many benefits, love, lives like Christ's in the bosom, paying at the same time with his separation and individuation.

Photo: Anna Radchenko

- Do you want to say that there are other historical and cultural foundations in our overprotection?

- In our overprotection, the notorious housing issue is also loudly heard. Since there has always been a shortage of housing, there was neither the ability to freely dispose of it, nor the rental market. In such a situation, it is exhausting and expensive to separate from your parents. And yet we had privatization with the obligatory share of children. It was wise so that the children were not left without a roof over their heads. But when they grow up, it has consequences.

The parents have lived in this apartment all their lives, they have done everything for themselves and do not want to move anywhere, but they simply cannot buy out the share from the child. Maybe it's better to continue to support and take care of him so that everything remains as it is? In other words, living together and delayed separation is far from just a psychological problem.

The fact that in today's Russia a person who works, whose wife works, is often forced to live in a one-room apartment of a grandmother with two children and together with a grandmother is not a question of family psychology.

But it is unpleasant for us to ask ourselves the questions: “Why is this the case with us? Why our salaries do not even allow us to rent a house, let alone buy something? Why should people, who have been plowing all their lives, have to worsen their conditions in old age?"

Since it is unpleasant to ask these questions, and it is not clear to whom, and most importantly, they require action on our part, it is much easier to talk about heartless parents or idle children. This is called psychologizing reality, and with this activity you can pleasantly while away more than one evening.