TOXIC PARENTS AREN’T THE ONLY ONES TO BLAME

Sigmund Freud figured everything out in the late 19^th century: if a person is troubled, neurotic, psychotic, insecure, maladjusted, unfulfilled, sexually unstable, troubled, depressed or unhappy, they probably had a parent who neglected, spanked, withheld love, had overly high expectations, intimidated, lacked consistency, and so on.

While it’s true that parents exert a powerful influence over their children, blame the parent has become the go-to explanation for troubled children. Blaming our parents frees us from responsibility for our own insecurities, inadequacies, and poor choices. A spate of books in the last seventy-five years or so, have assured us that we are victims of our parents’ failures, selfishness and cruelties.

Here’s a sample.

• Toxic Parents: Overcoming their hurtful legacy and reclaiming your life Dr. Susan Forward

I want you to proceed with a great deal of hope. Not the deluded hope that your parents will magically change, but the realistic hope that you can psychologically unhook from the powerful and destructive influence of your parents.

• Your Inner Child of the Past – Dr. Hugh Missildine

The parent who is overly coercive, constantly directs and redirects the child’s activities in an anxious, nagging, and pushing way, leaving little or no opportunity for the child to initiate and pursue his own interests and activities.

Other titles:

• Breaking from the grip of toxic parents: How to recognize and escape from toxic people, narcissistic abuse, bad parenting and manipulation.

• Help Your Inner Child to Heal it’s Wound: Discover How to Become Your Best Adult Self, Learn to let go of Your Past Hurts and Traumas

• Adult Child of Borderline Parents: A Trauma-Informed Guide to Recovery from a toxic Childhood…

At least fifteen books on Amazon deal with Narcissistic Mothers

• You’re Not Crazy, It’s Your Mother

• Break Free from Narcissistic Mothers : Ending Toxic Behavior, Setting Boundaries in Reclaiming Your Life

Substack Sidebar

Another book on Amazon, Daughter of a Narcissistic Mother: Surviving the Trauma, assures us the book will arrive before Mother's Day

What better way to say, “I love you,” to mom, than to accuse her of being the narcissistic witch that caused of your misery.

Make no mistake, these books are sincere, informative and interesting; studies are cited, statistics provided, anecdotes recorded, conclusions drawn, and solutions suggested. However, this decades-long trend to blame parents has a downside: 1) It absolves adult children from accepting responsibility for their actions and disappointments, 2) it often unfairly, simplistically and wrongly blames parents for the character flaws of their children and 3) in a greater sense, it has been one of the nails in the coffin of the deterioration of the American family. [A subject for another time].

One particularly egregious example is autism. In the 1940s and fifties, psychologist, Leo Kanner proclaimed that autism was caused by “refrigerator parents” who exhibited “parental coldness.” Bruno Bettleheim piled on by cruelly observing that disturbed children would benefit from a “parentectomy.” How disheartening it must have been when influential gurus blamed parents for their children’s problems. To be told they were failures as parents. To be told that if they had not been cold and neglectful, their children would have been “normal.” Talk about laying on guilt trips.

Left unanswered by the of mid-twentieth century gurus is this: since they were raised by the same “refrigerator parents,” why were the autistic children’s siblings not also autistic? This “blame the parents” explanation for autism has long since been abandoned as not credible. Nevertheless, blaming parents for children’s pathologies has led us down the path to burgeoning, misguided, ineffective and counterproductive therapies.

Millions of adults wrote Abigail Schrier about her generation reaching adulthood in the eighties

…explored our childhoods and learned [in therapy] to see our parents as emotionally stunted. Emotionally stunted parents expected too much, listened too little, and failed to discover their kids’ hidden pain. Emotionally stunted parents inflicted emotional injury, instead of producing happy and well-adjusted kids. Instead, with the help of mental health experts, we have raised the loneliest, most anxious, depressed, pessimistic, helpless and fearful generation on record.

Many counselors and psychiatrist are good listeners, wise, experienced, knowledgably and honest, but others are just sounding boards mirroring (a common practice) the patients’ words. The therapist often takes the side of the patient against the people and circumstances around them. A competent and honest therapist can be a friend while helping the client deal effectively with uncomfortable truths. Other therapists sympathize with the patient with the message, “Bad things were done to you in your formative years; do not blame yourself for your problems. You are a victim.

As Dr. Susan Forward wrote:

You are not responsible for what was done to you as a defenseless child.

True, but within normal limits, victimization is not absolution. The current zeitgeist of childrearing – to understand and negotiate rather than laying down the law and punishing – is one of the causes of the current “fearful generation.” Thus, in that regard, parents are to blame – for following the conventional wisdom and the toxic culture surrounding it.

This message has been developing for a long time.

During the 1960s, the idea spread like wildfire that whatever you were lacking was someone else’s fault – society’s fault. If you were poor, whether at home or in some third world country, you were one of the “dispossessed” – even if you had never possessed anything to dispossess you of.”

- Dr. Thomas Sowell -

Life is unfair. You are a victim of a toxic society. Or selfish capitalism. Or systemic racism. Or your parents. Or bad schools and ineffective teachers. Or oligarchs. (Thanks to Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders for this trenchant observation] Or inequality. Or class struggle. Or swashbuckling psychologists [Freud’s term]. It all kinds of swirls together into a toxic brew, boiling over, poisoning the land.

In 1798, Thomas Malthus understood the elemental appeal and power of defense mechanisms that protect us against facing the truth of who we really are.

When the wages of labour are hardly sufficient to maintain two children, a man marries and has five or six. He, of course, finds himself miserably distressed... He accuses his parish...He accuses the avarice of the rich. He accuses the partial and unjust institutions of society...ln searching for objects of accusation, he never alludes to the quarter from which all his misfortunes originate. The last person that he would think of accusing is himself. [Emphasis added]

Today, the first people he would think of accusing are his parents.