By J. Bailey Molineux

How do you feel when you're with your parents these days? Are you often uncomfortable with them? Do you find yourself becoming angry or tense, or feeling guilty over specific incidents with them? Or even when just thinking about these incidents?

Do all these reactions seem familiar to you, as if they have been going on for a long time? Do you feel as if you're a child again with Mom and Dad? If you have answered "Yes" to any of these questions, maybe you are locked into some unhealthy behavior patterns with your parents no matter how old you are now or how much you consider yourself to be an adult. Maybe you and your parents are involved in what Dr. Howard Halpern calls "an old song and dance" which dates back to your childhood and perhaps even beyond to your parents' relationships with their parents.

Maybe you have not fully emancipated yourself from your parents and so are still controlled by them as much as you would hate to admit this. The truth of the matter is, though, that few people ever do break completely free of the influence of their parents.

Parents (Simon & Schuster), Dr. Halpern describes some typical but unhealthy parent-child interactions which may last a lifetime; and suggest ways they can be modified or eliminated altogether.

The first step in changing any behavior pattern, especially if it is unconscious, semi-automatic or of long-standing, is to become aware of it. You can't change something if you don't know exactly what it is that needs changing. If you are uncomfortable with your parents, it is probably because two or three inner children - yours and theirs - are relating to each other, and not mature adults. Your parents may not really want you to grow up and leave them. By making you feel guilty, threatening the withdrawal of their love, becoming angry or doing too many things for you that you can do yourself, they may be trying to bind you to them for fear they will be alone and unloved if you leave them.

It is not the adult part of your patents that is trying to do this, however, but the insecure, frightened inner child in each. And it is that inner child whom you must understand but ignore, and the healthy adult part of them to which you must respond, if you are going to make a lasting change in your relationship with your parents.

In effect, you must quit relating in outdated ways to your parents and respond to them instead in an adult-to-adult fashion.

I realize that what Dr. Halpern advises may be easier said than done. Most advice given by mental health professionals usually is.

But consider this: you cannot fulfill your parents' needs. Although they brought you into the world, raised and nurtured you, you don't really owe them anything except your love and appreciation. That would make for an unfair, unhealthy role reversal: children meeting the needs of parents rather than parents meeting the needs of children.

If you feel you must repay your parents, do so by raising your own children as well as you can,but without making any excessive demands upon them to meet your needs and expectations.

Consider this also: you're an adult now, even though there may be an inner child within you crying out for nurturance, and don't need your parents to the same degree that you did when you were younger. Not that you should discard them as having outlived their usefulness. That would be ungrateful. ­But you should be aware that you have sources of support now - family, friends and job – other than your parents.

Your parents' first reaction to your new tactic may be to increase their by saying, in effect, to your parents, "Mom and Dad, I love you but I want to relate to you as an adult now, not as a child. We can have a much more comfortable and secure relationship this way."

Most parents will respond to this approach, although a few won't. In that event, you may have to keep your contacts with your parents as brief, infrequent and superficial as possible.

It's always better in the long run, according to Dr. Halpern, to maintain a relationship with your parents than to break all ties with them.

By J. Bailey Molineux

It's not always easy for our parents to let us go or for us to break away from them. Sometimes, we may be locked into uncomfortable behavior patterns with them, which are difficult to change because they are so familiar.

We may react to our parents now, or to others who remind us of them, the way we did when we were younger. And they may continue to treat us as if we were still children.

In his book, Cutting Loose: An Adult Guide to Coming to Terms with Your Parents (Simon & Schuster), Howard Halpern makes the interesting point that there is within all parents a desire to see their children grow up to be strong and independent, and a competing desire to keep them weak and dependent. If their desire to see us weak and dependent is stronger -- which, fortunately, is not the case with most parents -- we may have emotional problems in our adult lives.

There is an inner child in all of us struggling with problems from the past which we were unable to solve back then. It is this inner child in our parents, claims Dr. Halpern, who wants us to remain dependent and attached. Insecure and afraid of being left alone, the child within our parents may cling to us as we once clung to them.

If our dealings with our parents then seem strained or painful, it is because two inner children are reacting to one another, and not two mature adults.

Dr. Halpern describes some of these unhealthy parent-child relationships which can be so uncomfortable. In reading about these relationships, bear in mind he is talking about extreme cases. But if you see yourself and your parents in these examples, you may want to consider therapy to help you better understand and deal with your parents.

The Martyred Mom is the mother who binds her children to her through guilt because the child within her is afraid no one would ever lover her unless forced to do so. Her tactics leave her children caught between guilt for failure to meet their mother's needs an impossible, unfair task and anger at being trapped in a web of unwanted responsibility.

The inner child of the Unavailable Father has so many personal problems he can't be much of a parent to his children, leaving them to search for other, stronger father figures for much of their lives.

The Despotic Father rules by the force of absolute, unquestioned authority because the little boy in him is afraid others will find him weak and ineffectual. Children of such fathers tend to spend their adult lives fighting or submitting to authority, or become authoritarian themselves.

Rather than ruling by guilt or anger, Moralistic Parents raise their children by shame. The price their children have to pay for failure to live up to their high standards is the withdrawal of parental respect.

Unloving Parents usually leave deep scars on their children because they may grow up feeling worthless and crippled in their own ability to love. These children should realize, however, that they were not loved, not because they were un-loveable, but because the inner child in each of their parents was unable to love anyone in a healthy manner.

Seductive Parents can create intense rivalry between their children and the same-sexed parent, and may impair their children's ability to later form satisfactory heterosexual relationships. Unless they can cut loose from their parents, these children may not be able to attach themselves to someone else in a marital relation­ship.

Dr. Halpern discusses ways we can break away from our parents, and quit our painful interactions with them, but a lack of space forces me to postpone present­ing his ideas until my next article.

By J. Bailey Molineux

How did your parents treat you as you were growing up? What techniques did they use to raise you?

Do you feel, perhaps, they were too permissive with you? Or by contrast, too authoritarian? Doyou sense they might have expected too much of you, or spanked you too much?

And how do you treat yourself today? Are you too permissive with yourself? Or too strict? Do you demand too much of yourself. Are you too self-critical? Dr. W. Hugh Missildine, co-author of the book, Your Inner Conflicts - How to Solve Them (Simon & Schuster), believes we tend to treat ourselves today the way we were treated or raised by our parents back then. In our present lives, we may recreate the family atmosphere of the past.

Dr. Missildine also believes there are certain ways of raising children what he calls parental pathogens - which if used consistently or excessively can result in later problems.

Over coercion. Over coerced children are given constant instructions, directions and supervision but are allowed little leeway to pursue their own interests. As adults, they tend either to rely too much on others for direction, be too coercive with themselves or resist all efforts to control their behavior.

Over submission. Children whose parents submitted to their every wish tend to become impulsive and undisciplined adults. Since their parents rarely said "No" to them, they rarely say "No" to themselves.

Perfectionism. Perfectionism may be found in outwardly successful people whose parents accepted them only if they lived up to certain high standards or achieved certain high goals. Since they tend to demean their adult accomplish­ments - no matter how worthy to others - they are often depressed or dissatisfied with themselves.

Overindulgence. Overindulged children are constantly given presents, privileges and services, even though they don't always ask for them. As adults, they are frequently bored or tired but unwilling to do anything except criticize others for not catering to their needs as their parents did.

Punitiveness. Excessive punishment of children is often combined with Over coercion and perfectionism and may lead to frequent self-criticism and an excess of angry, vengeful feelings which may or may not be acted out directly.

Neglect. Neglect can occur in the homes of the prominent and successful, in which little attention is paid to the children, as well as in homes over­whelmed by the problems of poverty, alcoholism, divorce or death. People from such homes often have trouble forming close, lasting relationships because they learned early to rely upon themselves for the satisfaction of their needs.

These parental pathogens may result. in two flaws in the adult personality: a tendency to self-belittle and a failure to control behavior. Adults exposed to these pathogens may grow up lacking sufficient self-esteem or self-control, or both.

No matter what your upbringing, you are responsible for what you are today.

Next, don't blame your parents or yourself for what they did or failed to do. You have more important tasks to occupy your energies.

Third, become a more knowledgeable parent to yourself than your parents were with you. This means you will have to treat yourself with more respect and awareness than you have before, but with greater behavioral restraint.' By disciplining yourself more, you will come to respect yourself more.

By J. Bailey Molineux, Ph.D.

Although he's only 12 years old, Johnny was recently arrested for shoplifting. He's a bright youngster but failing in school. His arrest was the culmination of years of disobedience and misdeeds that had become progressively worse. Johnny has a younger sister, Suzy, whose behavior is the opposite of his. She's a well-behaved, quiet child who earns straight A's in school. Why, his parents frequently wonder out loud, can't he be like her?

Johnny's parents' marriage has not been very good. For years, they've squabbled and have separated on two occasions.

Johnny's family is a not uncommon example of the type of families who have one or more problem children. Despite all their fighting, family members care about each other - else they wouldn't fight - but just can't seem to pull together as a smoothly functioning unit.

What usually happens in these families is that family members become entangled in self-reinforcing patterns of behavior from which they cannot disengage without outside help. The more Johnny's parents pressure him to be like his sister, for example, the more he rebels and becomes determined to be the opposite of her. As a result, the more they pressure him to behave.

Another pattern seen in these families is that there is usually one child, like Suzy, who is the good child, Her good behavior is usually motivated by fear. Her brother's misbehavior and her parents' fighting may frighten her, so she may feel she has to be good to offset his trouble-making and their fighting. She may also believe she can retain her parents' approval only by maintaining her good behavior.

There are usually marital problems in these families with problem children which are severe enough to interfere with effective discipline. Mom and Dad together to help all of them decide on household rules and consequences.

In effect, I ask parents to give up some of their rule making authority and to be willing to negotiate and compromise to settle parent-teen conflicts. I believe this method encourages teenagers to be more responsible for their behavior and to follow the family's rules.

I don't ask parents to give up all of their rule making authority, however, for there are always areas in which they simply cannot compromise with their offspring and still remain conscientious parents.

It may seem that I'm somewhat contradictory encouraging parental authority with young children and the sharing of authority with adolescents - but I don't see it that way. I believe, instead, that parents who have been firm disciplinarians with their young children have built into them a sense of responsibility and self-control. As a result, they can give their offspring more trust, freedom and responsibility when they become teenagers.

By contrast, parents who don't effectively discipline their children when they're young have less grounds to trust them when they become older. In a panic, they may try to crack down on their adolescents, but they may be fighting an uphill battle. The more they come down on their teenagers who are unaccustomed to consistent discipline, the more their teenagers rebel. It's a sad thing to witness, but the experience of these families provides a clear lesson to recent parents: the time to begin enforcing firm discipline is when your children are young. If you do this, later on you can grant them more freedom and responsibility. The so called storminess of adolescence may simply consist of a few brief showers.

About the Author: J. Bailey Molineux, a psychologist with Adult and Child Counseling, has incorporated many of his articles in a book, Loving Isn't Easy, Isbn 1587410419, sold through bookstores everywhere or available directly from Selfhelpbooks.com. Copyright 2002, J. Bailey Molineux and Selfhelpbooks.com, all rights reserved. This article may be reprinted but must include authors copyright and website hyperlinks.

Solving Family Conflicts

By J. Bailey Molineux

There's been a lot of tension in the A's home recently. Mr. And Mrs. A want to take a family vacation to the seashore but their two children want to stay home unchaperoned in order to be with their friends. It seems to be an impossible conflict to solve. Whatever is decided, someone will be disappointed or angry.

According to Dr. Thomas Gordon, author of Parent Effectiveness Training (New American Library, 1975), there are three methods that could be used to resolve this or a similar family conflict.

Method I is the authoritarian method in which the parents win and the children lose. Parents use their superior power to dictate a solution to the conflict - in our example, the entire A family will go to the seashore, period. The parents' needs have been satisfied while the children's needs have been ignored.The trouble with this method, according to Dr. Gordon, is that child­ren are not motivated to abide by a decision they have had no part in making. As a consequence, parents have to apply pressure or threats of punishment to make their offspring accept their decision, but such force often results in the children's becoming resentful, negative, generally unhappy and certainly no fun to take along on a family vacation!

Bear in mind that the growing up process usually generates resentment in children simply because many of their primitive desires have to be frus­trated and curbed if they are to become civilized beings. In an authoritar­ian home, perhaps more resentment than usual is generated in children because of their greater frustration and helplessness and because of their parents' greater use of force to obtain obedience.

As a result, children from authoritarian homes might either become more rebellious and defiant as they grow older or more prone to passivity, dependency, depression or psychosomatic illness, depending upon whether they choose to act out their feelings or bottle them up.

In addition, Method I dots not help children to develop self-reliance and self-discipline because they have been given little opportunity to make their own decisions and control their own behavior.

Perhaps the most serious flaw in Method I is that authoritarian parents eventually run out of power. Most children grow to be physically larger than their parents, so can no longer be spanked, and eventually leave home to live their lives as they see fit. If an authoritarian upbringing has not taught them to be fully responsible for their behavior, then woe to them and the soc­iety with which they will conflict if they decide to act out their resentments. Method II is the permissive method. The children win and the parents lost. The parents, wishing to avoid open conflict, give into their children's demands. n our example above, Mr. and Mrs. A would either stay at home or go on vacation without the children. Their needs would have been ignored while their children's needs would have been satisfied.

Needless to say, Dr. Gordon dislikes Method II as much as he dislikes Method I.

Method II products children who are spoiled, manipulative, self-centered, demanding and unpopular. Moreover, they art often wild, uncon­trolled, and unmanageable and so in frequent conflict with school and law enforcement authorities.

In short, these children are "spoiled brats. However, the major draw­back to permissive parenting is that these children art not completely sure of their parents' love. They probably recognize that discipline means love - that rules say we love you - and so wonder why their parents don't discipline them. Does it mean that their parents don't love them?

Perhaps so, argues Dr. Gordon, because their uncontrolled, selfish be­havior makes it so hard not to resent these "spoiled" children.

Finally, Method III is what Dr. Gordon calls the "no lost" method of conflict resolution in which the needs of both parents and children art met. Unfortunately, the limitations of space forces me to postpone a discussion of that method until next week's article, raising responsible children.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

J. Bailey Molineux, Ph.D. is a licensed Clinical Psychologist and author of the book Loving Isn't Easy
Copyright 2003 J. Bailey Molineux and Selfhelpbooks.com, all rights reserved. This article maybe reprinted but must include author's copyright and website hyperlinks to SelfHelpBooks.com.

Take Time to Embrace

By Allen Johnson, Ph.D.

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I used to love the feeling of waking up from a nap. My eyes half opened, I would shuffle into the living room and find my mother sitting in the big, brown Lazyboy rocker.

“Hello, Sunshine. Did you have a good nap?” she would ask. I never said anything; I was always too sleepy. I simply fell into her lap as if I had just been shot. When I was older, I draped over her like a blanket, all limbs suddenly boneless. My mother enfolded me in her arms, smoothing the cowlick that sprouted from my crown like a carrot stalk.

During those moments, the sense of tranquility was absolute. It was a feeling of love, security, reassurance. I felt totally at peace with myself and the world-vulnerable, yet fully protected. I am convinced that we require those moments of reassurance-what I call a sanctuary of love and protection-our entire lives; it is a longing we simply do not outgrow. The question is how do we satisfy that need as adults? True, mothers still remain a good source of sustenance. My mom occasionally reminds me of that fact.

“Give your mom a hug,” she instructs me. “I’m still your mother, Mister Smarty Britches.” (There is something leveling about a 56-year-old man being called “Mister Smarty Britches.”) But moms are not always around. Even if they were, I’m not sure that they would want to accept the full-time position again. Mothers are nurturing, but they also take great satisfaction in seeing their dumpling darlings independent and out on their own. So where do you go to be refueled? For me, my refuge is my home. I know my wife will be there, and I will get my hug, and she will get hers. But sometimes she is not there.

I hit the garage door opener; the panel is two feet off the ground, and I can see her car is gone. I always feel a little sadness when that happens. Not because I think it’s her purpose in life to greet me at the door-she has her career too-but because my hug gets delayed, and when it comes to hugs, I believe in instant gratification.

When my wife is home and we embrace, my whole being is grateful: “Oh, thank you, thank you, great hug-giver; I needed that.” Her warmth radiates through me like a convection oven. Somehow that squeeze reassures me that I’m okay. I know that, but still it’s nice to get confirmation.

“It helps to have my dog to come home to,” she said. “He’s funny; he knocks himself out to greet me.”

“Is that all?” I secretly hoped not. I’ve seen her dog; to me, he looks like a shaggy mouse with a vocal disorder.

“There are my friends,” she continued. “I work very hard at maintaining those relationships. Sometimes I’ll have a couple over for some popcorn and a movie. Or maybe I’ll just call and find out how they’re doing.” My friend is taking care of business. She knows, perhaps instinctively, that she must routinely attend to her need for belonging. At the same time, she is mature enough to enjoy the quiet solitude of her own company.

Single or married, we need those nurturing moments-a time to wake up in the lap of love and security. Generally speaking, Americans embrace entirely too little-we are too hurried or too reserved or too darn politically correct. The heck with that. We need more hugs, more winks, more tender caresses-and we need to be vigilant about making time for it. Think of it as medicine for the soul.

I’ve never thought about it until just now, but I can’t remember my mother ever breaking the hug first; I was always the first to pull away, scrambling off to some childhood adventure. Was she making certain that I was fully charged? Or, could it be that I was her sanctuary too?

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About the Author:

Allen Johnson, Ph.D. is the author of THIS SIDE OF CRAZY: 54 LESSONS ON LIVING FROM SOMEONE WHO SHOULD KNOW BETTER BUT KEEPS MESSING UP ANYWAY available through Selfhelpbooks.com.

© Copyright 2003 by Allen Johnson and Selfhelpbooks.com. All rights reserved. This article may be reprinted but must include the author’s copyright and website hyperlinks.

The Good Enough Family

By J. Bailey Molineux

What's the fact that your grandfather was an alcoholic when your father was growing up have to do with you, your marriage and your children today? Or that your mother was depressed when you were a child? Or even the secret that your great Aunt Tilly had to be institutionalized?

To a family therapist like me, plenty.

The family is the crucible in which are personalities are formed. A tremendous amount of learning takes place from birth through our childhood years, much of which is now unconscious. We learn about love, self-esteem, emotions, conflict, sex, marriage and everything else that is important in human relations. By examining our family experiences, we can learn more about ourselves and so become better spouses and parents.

This will be a new column on families. I want to call it The Good Enough Family from a phrase coined by the British psychiatrist, Donald Winicott, who wrote about the good enough parent.

You've probably heard or read about dysfunctional families lately and may have wondered what this is about. John Friel, author of several books on dysfunction in families, gave a talk in Helena a few years ago in which he argued that only five percent of families are optimally healthy. That leaves ninety-five percent of the rest of us, myself included, as coming from dysfunctional families!

But this still doesn't tell you what the term means.

I'm a multi-generational, family systems therapist. That's a long description but it simply means two things:

• To understand a person, and to help her understand herself better, I examine the family system of which she is a member. To do this, I look at three generations and possibly four, if there is enough information.
• When we're not aware of them, or don't deal with them, psychological patterns and problems pass from generation to generation. As I told one patient, "I suspect your mistrust of men which is affecting your marriage today bean with your great grandmother."

This doesn't mean I'm in the parent-bashing business or in the business of absolving people from responsibility for their present behavior because of childhood experiences. Most parents tried their best and all adults are responsible for their behavior regardless of what happened to them as children.

Most families have some emotional pain in their histories - depression, alcoholism, untimely deaths, divorce, shame, secrets, business failures, etc. It's built into the fabric of life. To live is to suffer at times.

If dysfunction is the same as emotional suffering, I can easily accept that ninety-five percent of us came from dysfunctional families. In my own family, the death of my grandfather in 1912 when my mother was eight had a profound impact on her and, through her, on me. Similarly, the fact that my great Uncle Roland was convicted but later acquitted of murder was a major source of secret shame in my father's family.

So the good enough family has dysfunction in its background. Most families do. But it is a family that cares. The parents make mistakes but keep trying. They're not perfect, and never will be, but they're good enough.

In the years ahead, I want to write about many topics - marriage, parenting, codependence, shame, the wounded inner child, depression, anxiety, spirituality and joy - but the column will mostly be about love. That's because my profession is about love, or more exactly its lack. People hurt when they didn't receive enough unconditional love growing up, don't now give it sufficiently to themselves and struggle in their present relationships with love. Through this column, I hope you can first learn to be more loving with yourself, and then learn to improve your marriage and relations with your children.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

J. Bailey Molineux, Ph.D. is a licensed Clinical Psychologist and author of the book Loving Isn't Easy
Copyright 2002 J. Bailey Molineux and Selfhelpbooks.com, all rights reserved. This article maybe reprinted but must include author's copyright and website hyperlinks to SelfHelpBooks.com.

The Wounded Woman

By J. Bailey Molineux

Parents have a major influence on the development of their children's personalities. And since all parents make mistakes - none can be perfect - perhaps all of us carry some emotional scars from childhood which is psychotherapy's purpose to heal.

To Linda Scherzo Leonard the pain of hurtful father-daughter relationship has been both personal and professional. A Jungian therapist and daughter of an alcoholic father, she works daily with women who have been hurt in their relationships with their own fathers.

The first type of father is one who was weak, ineffectual or absent physically or psychologically. He never was able to develop a close supportive relationship with his own daughter.

The second type is the opposite of the first in some ways. He was rigid, authoritarian, controlling and critical. Perhaps the chief anger his daughter experienced from him was anger. Like the ineffectual father, however, he too failed to develop a close, supportive relationship with her.

Wounded women tend to develop two different responses to these two types of ineffective fathering, writes Ms. Leonard, what she calls the eternal girl and the armored Amazon.

Typically passive and submissive, the eternal girl sees men as controlling and domineering. She constantly seeks support and acceptance from other people and refuses to recognize the strength within herself.

The armored Amazon, by contrast, sees men as weak and in need of domination. Finding strength and support in herself only, she refuses to seek nurturance from others.

Therapy with the wounded woman is a three step process, writes Ms. Leonard. The first step involves the recognition and expression of the hurt and anger that has been generated by the wounded father-daughter relationship. The pain is within her and must be let out.

The second step involves facing the father of the past. The wounded woman must recognize the effects of his behavior on her. She could also benefit by understanding the reasons why he behaved as he did. She can't change the past but she can change her attitude towards it.

An acceptance and integration of both sides of her personality constitute the third and final step. Those experiences with her father which were positive must be accepted while those which were negative must be rejected of modified. The eternal girl must come to recognize the strength within herself and not constantly seek it in others, while the armored Amazon must be willing to accept care and support from others.

If father is ineffectual or absent, for example, mother must become dominant to makeup for his deficiencies. If he is rigid and controlling, on the other hand, she may be submissive and passive.

In either case, mother does not provide a model of flexible, adaptive behavior for her daughter to follow.

About the Author: J. Bailey Molineux, a psychologist with Adult and Child Counseling, has incorporated many of his articles in a book, Loving Isn't Easy, Isbn 1587410419, sold through bookstores everywhere or available directly from Selfhelpbooks.com. Copyright 2002, J. Bailey Molineux and Selfhelpbooks.com, all rights reserved. This article may be reprinted but must include authors copyright and website hyperlinks.

We Are Not Victims of Our Past

By Allen Johnson, Ph.D.

THIS IS HELEN’S STORY. It begins during the Great Depression. She was the daughter of Greek immigrants, struggling to make a life for themselves in the New World. Helen’s father, Tony, owned a small diner in the heart of Philadelphia. Her mother, Katherine, was a seamstress, working 12 hours a day, six days a week in a dress factory on the other side of town.

Every Monday morning Katherine took her pretty three-year-old daughter to a Greek boarding house where she roomed for the week. That was the routine.

Then, one cold Saturday night, Katherine discovered the child was missing. Incredibly, the house matron told the young mother that her daughter had died during the week. But that didn’t make any sense. Helen was a healthy child, and where was the body? With time the matron’s story unraveled. The woman had actually sold the black-eyed infant to a Greek priest for $200 under the pretense that the child had been abandoned.

When Tony and Katherine learned the truth, they went to court. Two trials and one year later, they had won. It was the child’s 16-year-old brother who turned the case. When he was called to the stand, he called out to his sister in her Greek name. Helen ran to her brother and wrapped her arms around his neck. The reunion was enough to sway the court.

As strange as that story is, it does not end there. Two years later the marriage of Tony and Katherine ended in a brutal divorce. Without a word to her ex-husband, Katherine took Helen and fled to New York. But she soon lost heart and was unable to keep the family together. She began to look for an orphanage for her daughter. Helen passed in and out of three institutions, finally settling in the Kallman Home, a city orphanage in Brooklyn, New York. She was seven years old and would spend the next 11 years at Kallman.

Those were not bad years for Helen. The Lutheran minister who ran the home was strict, but caring. True, it was often a struggle to keep the orphanage solvent; sometimes the children would produce a short play to help raise money for the home. Breakfast was always the same, mush. And Christmas was limited to one new present-a harmonica, a baseball, a small doll-donated by charitable organizations within the city.

But despite that lean existence, Helen always felt accepted and loved. Every second Sunday, on visiting day, her mother arrived, sometimes with candy or Greek cookies, and they would chat in the playroom for two or three hours. But Katherine never spoke about Tony, and that was a sadness for Helen. She had fond memories of her father and yearned to see him again.

When Helen was eighteen, she left Kallman Home. She worked on an assembly line at a Western Electric plant in New Jersey during the war. Every morning she went to the same restaurant for breakfast. On one of those mornings, an amazing thing happened. Helen overheard the waiter talking with another customer.

“I went to a swell party in Philadelphia,” he said. “Great food and plenty of booze. Except the host, this Greek fella, was really sad. For the last 10 years he’s spent a pile of dough searching for his lost daughter.”

“What was the man’s name?” Helen asked.

“Marco, Tony Marco.”

Helen’s head jerked back. “That’s my father.”

That day father and daughter were reunited. It was a tearful and joyous reunion, but not without conflict. Tony was quite wealthy now and had remarried. His new wife, Elsie, was immediately suspicious and jealous of the intruder. Helen quickly recognized that she was a threat to the woman, so she decided to leave.

Ten years later Helen was married and living on the West Coast. During those years she had faithfully written to her father, but never received a single response. She imagined that he no longer cared. What she did not know was that Elsie had intercepted and destroyed every letter. It took 10 years and a private investigator for Tony to discover the truth. When Elsie was found out, Tony divorced her and the second 10-year reunion between father and child was arranged.

With a story like that, you might have expected Helen to have become an embittered woman. After all, the cards were stacked against her. She was shuffled around, raised in an orphanage, blocked from her father. By all rights she should be a miserable woman. Those who whine about being a victim of their unfortunate past would not disagree.

As much as psychoanalysts would like us to believe otherwise, we are not a remnant of our past. Oh, influenced, sure, but not predetermined. That is a big difference. We are all equipped with the human competencies of insight, moral knowledge, imagination, independent will, and self-transcendence-divine gifts that enable us to break away from the tyranny of our past.

How am I convinced? Helen is living proof. She is undoubtedly the kindest, most loving person I know-a woman of gentleness and sensitivity. She is a counselor for the distraught and an advocate for the oppressed. She is also an incredible mother. I should know; this woman, Helen Marco Johnson, graduate of the Kallman Home for orphaned children, is my mom.

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Allen Johnson, Ph.D. is the author of THIS SIDE OF CRAZY: 54 LESSONS ON LIVING FROM SOMEONE WHO SHOULD KNOW BETTER BUT KEEPS MESSING UP ANYWAY

available through Selfhelpbooks.com.

© Copyright 2003 by Allen Johnson and Selfhelpbooks.com. All rights reserved. This article may be reprinted but must include the author’s copyright and website hyperlinks

We Carry Our Parents' Emotional Pain

By J. Bailey Molineux

How we were raised by our parents determined much of who we are today. How they were raised by their parents and what they experienced before we were born determined how they raised us.

This is the gist of the multigenerational transmission of emotional pain and shame I have written about in several articles. Two poignant examples of this process are grandchildren of alcoholics and children of the Holocaust.

Children of the Holocaust are those adult children whose parents survived the Nazi death camps even though their first spouses and children did not. The parents met after the war, often in refugee camps, married, immigrated to the United States, Canada or Israel, and became financially successful. They never spoke about their unimaginably horrible Holocaust experiences to their families. But their children still picked up their deep pain.

Helen Epstein was one such adult child of the Holocaust who wrote about her experiences in her book, Children of the Holocaust . Growing up she knew that something terrible had happened to her parents, but she was not sure what it was. She felt she carried within her a bottomless, black pit of depression she could neither identify nor understand.

A journalist by profession, she set out to find answers about her pain by contacting and interviewing other adult children of the Holocaust. She found they felt as she did. They all carried their parents' deep suffering even though it had never been openly revealed.

Another example of how the unresolved problems of the parents affect the children are grandchildren of alcoholics. Their parents do not drink at all, possible because of the negative example their parents had set, yet alcoholism still affects these children through the behavior of Mom and Dad.

The effects of parental alcoholism on children can be significant, painful and lifelong. When a parent is an alcoholic, his drinking consumes so much of the family's time, worry and attention that little energy is left to meet the emotional needs of the children.

Several characteristics of adult children of alcoholics (ACOAs) have been identified in the voluminous literature on this subject. ACOAs typically suffer from low self-esteem, have difficulty trusting others and tend to be controlling because their parent's drinking was so often out of control.

In addition, they are usually emotionally repressed because they carry so much pain and saw how destructive emotions could be if the alcoholic parent acted out in a drunken rage. Not surprisingly, they often become codependent in that they become caretakers to others and neglect their own needs and emotions.

According to Ann Smith in her book, Grandchildren of Alcoholics: Another Generation of Codependency, ACOA parents are determined to be the best parents they can be, to give to their children what they missed growing up.

There is an unintended trap and burden in this for both the ACOA parent and the children, however. A parent who wants to be a perfect parent to heal his own childhood woundedness must have children who are perfect. The kids can't have normal problem for that would reflect on the ACOA parent in negative ways. It is as if the parent says to her offspring, "You must turn out well so I can feel good about myself and prove I can be a good parent even though I was not well parented myself."

But it shouldn't be the function of any child to raise a parents' self-esteem. This is something the parent should and must do herself.

This is the major message of this column on the Good Enough Family: the mental health of our children depends on our mental health. Their self-esteem is a reflection of our self-esteem. If they appear to be in pain, and are either withdrawing or acting out, we must look to ourselves for their recovery by working on our own recovery.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

J. Bailey Molineux, Ph.D. is a licensed Clinical Psychologist and author of the book Loving Isn't Easy
Copyright 2002 J. Bailey Molineux and Selfhelpbooks.com, all rights reserved. This article maybe reprinted but must include author's copyright and website hyperlinks to SelfHelpBooks.com.