Maintaining a Relationship with Difficult Parents

Over the years, I have sometimes gotten emails from readers wanting advice on how to deal with controlling and manipulative (if not downright abusive) parents. As my regular readers will know, I have maintained my relationship with my parents in spite of the no good very bad treatment I received from them as I came of age. My parents’ actions—their efforts to control and manipulate and guilt me into being the daughter they wanted me to be—were emotionally abusive. Why did I decided to keep them in my life? How have I navigated my relationship with them over the years?

The pain I suffered the last summer I spent at home was excruciating. When you are in a dangerous situation, your adrenaline spikes, giving you a fight or flight response. Children who live in abusive homes experience this daily—every time their abuser walks in the door. They have to be constantly on guard, constantly ready. My parents never hit me—and never threatened to hit me—but it didn’t matter, the effect was the same. The constant rush of adrenaline, that feeling of being imprisoned with your abuser—it was there. As a society, we have a much better understanding of physical abuse than of emotional abuse, but I would argue that the effects of emotional abuse can be worse and longer lasting.

What made my situation so odd was that I had had a fairly good relationship with my parents up until this point—my mother was always up for baking cookies or working on a crafting project, and my father involved us children in his various carpentry projects around the home and was always happy to play a game of Risk—but things fell apart when I was in college as I exerted a will of my own and began making decisions they disagreed with. It’s not that things were perfect when I was a child—my parents expected immediate obedience, didn’t tolerate “backtalk” (and by that they meant any attempt to explain oneself), and practiced a heavy dose of corporal punishment—but they weren’t like this.

When I left at the end of the summer, I told myself I wasn’t going back. But then, I still had ten younger siblings living at home, all under 18. I had been a second mother to many of them, and I loved them dearly. I went home for Thanksgiving, and home again for Christmas. I tried—so hard, I tried—but it was too much. That Christmas things reached a head when my father yelled at me in front of my siblings, calling me terrible things in an enraged voice that was so unlike my usually quiet father, and all I wanted to do was flee. I was 20 years old.

I didn’t go home after that. That summer, my mother expressed surprise to my next-in-age sister that I had not come home to spend another summer between semesters of college. My sister stared. “Did you really think, mom, that she would come back, after the way you treated her?” she asked. It hurt too much. I couldn’t go back. It hurt to be without my siblings, but what was my alternative, really?

And then I got married. As sad as it is that it has to be this way, I knew that getting married would help. My parents had told me over and over that as an unmarried daughter, I was their responsibility—and that I was bound to obey my father, as a daughter under authority. And so I married. My parents came to my wedding only reluctantly, and my mother told me that we were welcome to visit home. I had wondered if we would be allowed, given what a bad example I presented for my younger siblings—in my parents’ eyes, of course.

The Christmas after I married, we visited home. The entire drive there, adrenaline coursed through my body. I was only able to force myself to go because I had Sean there to support me, and because I knew we could walk out to the car and leave at any time. Being around my parents was incredibly difficult. My fight or flight response was active the entire time, my body sometimes so full of adrenaline that I felt physically ill. Every conversation was a minefield waiting to erupt. I focused on spending time with my siblings and tried to block everything else out.

Over the years, as we continued to visit, I was able to gradually let me guard down. My internal tension lessoned, and I came to genuinely enjoy my visits. The edge of apprehension never completely disappeared, but I could at least relax. I had a baby, Sally, and she made our visits home at once more fun and less stressful as my parents and siblings laughed at her antics and begged to see more of her.

This all came to an abrupt halt three summers after I married, when my mother spent 45 minutes on the phone with me haranguing me for this thing and that. Things that hadn’t come up in years were suddenly front and center. My mother took issue with my decision not to spank Sally and my decision to marry Sean without my father’s blessing, among other things. “I grew up in the Spock generation, don’t you think I know where this leads?!” she demanded. “The Bible doesn’t say a thing about becoming an adult when you turn 18!” she insisted. “If you had obeyed your father, you would have still married Sean, you just would have married him on God’s timing!” And on, and on, and on. I have no idea what brought that conversation on, and I still don’t know why I didn’t hang up on her.

That conversation send me into therapy for the first time. And so as I spilled out the whole long story, my therapist informed me that I needed to “set boundaries” with my parents. I needed to put certain things off limits, and to stand up for myself. And so I set about doing so. It had been three years since my wedding, but all those years of visits rested not on me standing up for myself but on my parents’ voluntary good behavior. And now that good behavior had lapsed. I didn’t know if that lapse would be a one-time thing, but it didn’t matter. I needed to set boundaries.

I wrote an email to my mother, explaining that I was not comfortable discussing XYZ subjects, as I did not feel that such discussion was good for our relationship. I reaffirmed that spanking was not negotiable. (Remember that I grew up in a family where it was considered appropriate for relatives to spank a child.) And then, when we visited, I stood by these things, confidently. It was hard—very hard. It meant standing confidently, eye to eye, with someone you knew had the power to take her heart in your hands and crush it.

And then things got better. That Christmas my mother told me that she’d come to accept my decision not to spank. She said she had a friend whose married daughter had moved back home because of the recession, and that this daughter constantly yelled at her small children, and that it was hard for her friend to watch. This experience, she said, had made her grateful that, whatever disagreements we might have with her over parenting, we treated Sally with obvious love and kindness.

Other things have also gotten better in the years since. Namely, my confidence has grown. The Christmas before last, my father made a disparaging comment about Native Americans, and I talked back. I was angry, and I wasn’t going to let this one go. And you know what? He backed up. He didn’t recant his statement, exactly, and indeed said things that only worse, but he was definitely backing up. I had never seen my father respond to me this way. Last Thanksgiving, we spent time working on a project, and he listened with interest as I explained something in my professional field of expertise. This was new.

Of course, there’s still this thing between myself and my parents.

I know that my mother is frustrated with my life choices on a number of levels, and on occasion she will let that spill out. This happened right before my daughter started public school last year, for instance, as my mother lamented my decision not to homeschool. It happened again last Christmas, when I said something in defense of public schools and it somehow turned into a rather extraordinary shouting match between the two of us in the kitchen in front of everyone. I think we’re both getting better at navigating this thing we call relationship, but we’ve only achieved what we have by ignoring the elephant in the room—and that elephant will always be there.

And as for my father, well, our relationship will never be anything more than superficial. It can’t be, when the rupture that happened during college still hangs between us, unspoken of and unresolved. Sometimes I think about texting him and asking if he realizes that what he did was wrong—perhaps it would help if he could admit that he messed up—but I’m afraid of upsetting the uneasy peace we’ve somehow achieved. This saddens me, as my father and I used to be close.

I have friends who have cut their (controlling, manipulative, abusive) parents out of their lives. This is a perfectly legitimate option. Honestly, if I hadn’t had younger siblings, I might have taken this course of action myself. While I love my parents and have gotten to the point where I can enjoy spending time with them, there was a time when the pain was too great, and too raw. But for my siblings? For them I was willing to try. And then, once I had kids, visiting home meant keeping their grandparents (and aunts and uncles) in their lives.

But even this—the desire to see my siblings and to have my children grow up knowing my family—wouldn’t have been enough if my parents hadn’t been willing to change as well. My mother has become more comfortable with my parenting style, and my father has come to have more respect for me than he used to. These changes matter. If my parents had refused to change—if they had continued to be primarily controlling and manipulative—the price for staying in my siblings’ lives (and the price for having them in my children’s lives) might well have been too high.

I’m not sure I’m the best person to give advice on dealing with controlling, manipulative, abusive parents. If this is your situation, what you do will be determined by your desires and the details of your specific situation. I’ve learned some tricks—for example, responding to attempts to begin a conversation you don’t want to have with “I disagree, mom, I disagree” and then refusing to say more can be very effective—but that’s about it. The biggest advice I can give you is to set boundaries with your parents. And if they can’t respect those boundaries? Well, what you do then is up to you. How much are you willing to put up with to keep them in your life?