Adult Children Who Cut Off Their Parents an Interesting Variation on This Theme

My posts on this blog (May, 27,2014) and on my Psychology Today blog (November 17, 2014), Are Parents Who are Cut Off by Their Adult Children Really That Clueless, generated more comments than almost any of my other post (37 and 163 respectively). Additionally, the post itself on this blog has had more hits than any of the others.

In the posts, I reproduced letters to newspaper advice columnists from parents who had been cut off by their adult children, and who claimed to have no idea why their adult children felt the need to do this. I also printed one letter from the adult child of one of those letter writers telling the other side of the story. Without addressing the issue of who's "fault" it was that the cutoff took place, or who was "wrong" and who was "right," I opined that the apparent cluelessness of the parents was in most instances feigned. They usually knew to a greater or lesser extent exactly why what had happened had taken place.

Well the comments from readers came fast and furiously from family members on both sides of this divide, and they were very predictable. Adult children who had cut off a parent generally wrote about all the bad things their parent had done to them and how the parent would never admit to any of it. Parents came back with a vengeance saying, in so many words, "I didn't do anything wrong," and they accused me of parent bashing.

Here's a typical exchange:

Anonymous: Yes, you are correct. Virtually all of the time, when people cut off parents, or anyone else in their immediate family, you can bet there's a damn good reason. The parents will act like the poor victims. Don't believe them. There's actually a forum on the Internet where they can all get together. At first they maintain their innocent victim stance, but you will soon see their vicious hatred expressed toward their children.

Emelu: Not so. I have done nothing wrong. I've been in counseling. Been open to understand if I did wrong. Been totally honest with myself. And there is nothing I've done wrong.

I always find it interesting that whenever I write posts - particularly on the family dynamics of borderline personality disorder - adult children with the disorder who make comments often seem to accuse me of blaming them, while the parents of such children often accuse me of exactly the opposite: blaming the parents.

In most of these cases, I think the reason for these opposite reactions has to do with selective reading of the posts. This, in turn, is triggered by guilt and defensiveness. Or, occasionally, some of these folks just hate it when I give away their secrets.

In general, both of the positions "It's all my fault" and "I had nothing whatsoever to do with this" are, equally, both irrational and cowardly for any of the involved parties. 

In cutoffs, however, can it sometimes be that the parents really are completely clueless about why their children are avoiding them? That they are absolutely at a loss to understand what has happened? Some commenters said their cut-off children even accused them of things that they know they did not in fact do. Is that always denial?

As everyone was taught in school about true-false tests, beware of any question containing the words "always" or "never." I do think that, in a very limited proportion of these cases, the letter-writing parents are indeed genuinely flabbergasted at their adult children's negative responses to them and the phony accusations. In these cases, IMO the adult children are hiding their real reasons for the cutoff.

So why would a child cut off a parent who was not guilty of any significant abuse, neglect, or invalidation?

One common reason occurs in situations in which the parents feel tremendously overburdened and overwhelmed by the responsibilities of child care, or feel that the child's needs are preventing them from doing other things that they really badly want to do. They feel guilty when they admit this, even to themselves, and they always take care of their children when they are supposed to, and do so appropriately for the most part. They do not usually take their internal frustrations over being exhausted directly out on the children to a major extent, and genuinely love them.

They think that somehow their children are not aware of how tired and frustrated they are, but they are kidding themselves. The attachment theorist John Bowlby theorized that children observe their parents very carefully, without attracting too much attention when they do, and become experts on what their parents are all about and what motivates them by the time the children are just two years old.

In videotapes of family therapy sessions with small children in the room that I have seen, as the therapist speaks with the parents, one may observe the child playing with a toy in the corner. The child seems to be oblivious to the adult conversation. But then, when something concerning them comes up in the conversation, the child suddenly makes a comment about it. Without even looking up. Clearly, they are listening the whole time.

Parents in the situation under discussion in this post do in fact give a lot of clues as to how burdened they feel. They might for instance constantly and compulsively complain to their friends and anyone else who might listen, saying something along the lines of, "I'm always there for my kids! They're my #1 priority. I respond to everything they need, even though I have to work full time. I so wish my boss would understand this better. There's just never enough time. And I'm sooooo tired. I used to have hobbies I really enjoyed, but I've had to put them aside. I sure do miss those days!"

Even after their children reach adulthood, parents like this may have a very hard time trying to not cater to their adult child's every need - or even his or her every whim. While still complaining about it to everyone else.

In such cases, children may get the impression that the parent really wants to be free of them, but just cannot admit it. In response, they sacrifice their own desires for a good relationship and make themselves scarce. They cannot tell their parent the real reason for their doing that, because they know that this will make the parent even more miserable than he or she already seems to be. 

A truthful statement would make the parent feel even guiltier for wanting to be free of any family burdens. The parent would probably deny these feelings anyway, because the parent is under the mistaken impression that admitting this would drive their children even further away.

In order to avoid causing their parent to feel this way, the adult child may in difficult cases volunteer to be the villain in the piece. They may purposely make it look like they are cutting off the parents because they are selfish or narcissistic. If that does not work, they can escalate. They up the ante by making what they know are false accusations about parental misdeeds. That way, the parent can easily maintain the belief that he or she had nothing to do with the cut off. 

As an alternate strategy, or in addition, they may influence their spouse to make it look like the spouse has taken control over them and is domineering and purposely creating trouble with the parent and enforcing the cut off. For more on this, see the post, Your Spouse's Secret Mission.

Anything to help parents avoid looking at their own conflicts!

This is a sad state of affairs because, ironically, if the parents could admit to their ambivalence and negative feelings, any problematic resultant family conflicts can in most of the cases be fairly easily resolved through metacommunication and negotiation. The children's efforts to "help" the parents to deal with their guilt backfires and prevents a solution.

I know that many readers react to these kinds of formulations by thinking I am giving people too much credit, and that most of them do not operate with this level of sophistication. When it comes to fitting in with one's kin, church, or ethnic group, I strongly believe that they not only can, but they do. 

Dependency Conflicts in People Who Practically Raised Themselves

In my post of December 17, 2013, Older Siblings and Neglectful Parents, I described one interesting pattern of family dysfunction that I have been seeing in my practice. It developed in families in which the parents had abdicated their responsibilities as parents in one way or another. I showed how an older sibling would sometimes step into the void thusly created to take the parental reins, so to speak, and the younger siblings would later displace their anger at the parents on to the “substitute.”

This post is about a different (or at times additional) pattern that may develop in families in which the parents are not doing their job.

In this particular situation, the parents were emotionally unavailable to their kids most of the time as they grew up. To complicate matters further, they did not set any limits on their child’s behavior during his or her teenage years. Teens from such families would be allowed to come and go as they pleased. They might start skipping school or not doing homework - and the parents would do nothing about it. They might come home drunk or stoned, and the parents would not seem to even notice. They might start getting into minor trouble with the authorities.

One might say that children in this kind of environment pretty much raise themselves. Some continue to get into trouble and do poorly, while others may settle down and make something of themselves. In either event, when it comes to their romantic relationships, anyone who might be interested in them eventually finds themselves in a very specific damned if you do, damned if you don’t bind.

Children who had been neglected in this way are missing something important, and they want it. They secretly long for someone who will love them and show an interest in them and take care of them and even set limits with them in all the ways that their parents did not. And from the outside they seem to other people to need those things desperately. They often seem out of control in some way, and seem to be in need someone to give them the proper guidance.

So what happens when someone tries to take care of them? They get angry or even rageful! The logic behind this goes something like this. “I had no one in my life who parented me the way I needed. I had to take care of everything myself and make all of my own decisions. How dare you tell me how to live my life???"

In therapy speak, this is one form of a classic dependency conflict:  I desperately want someone to take care of me and guide me, but I resent it when anyone tries to do that. It’s like they are asking, “Where were you when I really needed  you? No Johnny-come-lately is going to question me about my own decisions!”

Add to this another and additional family system issue: The neglectful parents often had been neglectful because deep inside they felt themselves to be too inadequate to parent well. They secretly feel guilty about what their children had to do to survive. If their child seems to be independent and self-sufficient, they feel less guilty. 

On the other hand, seeing someone do for their child what they did not makes them feel even guiltier, so there is pressure on the child to be self-sufficient and to not depend on others. If they are not independent, their parents may become depressed on act out self-destructively.

Rather than having a “Dependent Personality Disorder,” as the DSM might suggest, these "adult children" are actually counter-dependent. They are deathly afraid of their own dependency needs, and continue to try to manage their lives all by themselves, just like they always had to.

In a way, this type of family situation is the polar opposite of the intrusive helicopter parenting which is also a common occurence in todays's American culture. Despite being the seeming opposite of neglectfulness, helicopter parenting can also lead to a situation in which its victims looks like they need someone to take care of them but then resent it when anyone tries. 

This follows from something I call the principle of opposite behaviors - opposite family behavior leads to the same or very similar result. It occurs because the extreme polarized behavior of the parents represents opposites poles of the exact same conflict - or two sides of the same coin if you will. 

In a future post, I will show how an internal conflict in parents such as these can lead to a situation in which two brothers or two sisters develop characteristics that seem like extreme opposites, or how one generation of family members can go to one extreme with a particular behavior, the next to the other extreme, and the third back to the first extreme. That phenomenon would be next to impossible to explain if behavior were primarily determined by ones's genetic propensities.