Recovering From Overwhelming Parents

Relational strain, in my view, transpires when children have chaotic and or overwhelming bonds with parents. By this I mean that there are certain aspects of the personality of the parent that over amplify a child's emotional system beyond what their brain and logical faculties are prepared to contain. This tends to lead to a problem for the functioning of the child, and subsequently often for people who come into my office doing things that are hard for them to understand reaction to significant stress. Child of an overwhelming parent often cannot stop to think, and in fact stopping to think can often be dangerous; moreover, when thinking does occur it is a compromised process because there is not the calm environment in which to develop strategies, restraint, formulations, and integrations in the way that one is organizing their experience. The overwhelming parent often requires answers immediately, perhaps to assuage their own anxiety, perhaps because they will punish the child physically or emotionally, or even sexually, if answers were certain behaviors are not demonstrated quickly. 

These types of overwhelming parents, possibly thought of as operating occasionally or consistently in a more primitive realm of relating to others, creating world for the child where survival is experienced as being contingent upon having executive functions that exceed the developmental capacity of the child. an eight-year-old does not know how to organize the emotional impact of a father becoming extremely aggressive or something as innocuous as spilling milk or running too loudly in the house. A five-year-old does not know how to organize the emotional experience of a mother throwing items at the wall because she is upset with somebody, whether it be the child or someone else. 

Yet, despite the fact that the child cannot possibly solve the problem of the parents’ behavior and chaotic/overwhelming tendencies, answers must be furnished, and solutions must be concocted, even if that occurs in no other place than the child's internal world. People often develop the notion, albeit unconscious, that if they kill off some aspect of themselves that their parents will be satisfied and that they will be safe. Sometimes the reaction occurs in a different way, where some sort of anxiously procured solution, way of talking, way of muting oneself, or negating one's desires immediately is used as a behavioral demonstration to the overwhelming parent in an attempt to assuage the parent’s rage. 

One of the effects that this kind of development experience can have on someone trying to heal from early relational strain is that the ability to organize and manage disruptions in emotional experience can have actual deficits were repeated patterns of problems later in life. This can be quite hard for a person to experience, and can lead people to become derisive towards themselves. For example, a young man who grew up with a very domineering and explosive father may find himself making decisions under actual or perceived pressure that are not well thought through. This man might be an attorney who has taken on a case and is in the midst of trial. Perhaps a new piece of evidence has been tendered by the opposing counsel. Because this person had a father who did not allow him a half second of leeway early in his life in order to think and sort through and expand, he may implicitly feel a pressure to come to a rushed way of incorporating the new evidence into the case, as if there was some crime of his that he had committed and not having already known what to do with it. Children of overcharged parents often feel guilty if they have not considered every possible item on the planet in the face of conflict or ambiguous situations. There is a sense that one ought to have known, that one is guilty for not already having possessed an answer to an emergent and complex problem. There is almost sense of oneself being criminal for complex problems emerging in the world, even though those problems emerge any world that is multisystemic, nonlinear, and could not possibly always be predicted. 

There is certainly also a real problem, the central point of this writing, which is that those dealing with an overwhelming parent can actually exhibit certain reactions to the external world that are not as well thought through as they might otherwise. it is in these experiences of the world where compassion is hard to come by. The hypothetical attorney who I referenced above, will likely condemn himself, which results in further anguish. This anguish is often an unconscious identification with the overwhelming parent, where mistakes are treated as markers of a character flaw, rather than opportunities for learning. This often contributes to why patterns occur repeatedly and especially with traumatized people. since experience itself is not viewed as something to incorporate into one's awareness of existence, and rather is viewed as something to banish the face of any mistakes, learning becomes impossible. Registering experiences where one react out of an unconscious emotional pattern is very difficult when one is at the same time trying to beat those experiences out of one's mind. Therefore, the lack of compassion within oneself for one's dissociated self-states as a multipronged effect: that of making reactions to perceived or actual stresses in the world harder to navigate, and also that of making the reaction to the way one has perhaps made mistakes in dealing with problems that arise emotionally very condemning and anguishing. 

People often find themselves having reacted to the situation badly, or at least less optimally than they would otherwise like, and they often are perplexed as to why they did not take more time to think, consider alternatives, why they got themselves into such a flurry in the first place, and so forth. This kind of reflective function comes back after one is somewhat reassured that they are safe in the world and that they are not under imminent threat. There is a shift from a threatened self who is being pressed by both the situation they are facing as well as pressed from the internal domineering parent, and then often there is somewhat of a metaphorical exhale when a feared consequence has not unfolded. 

Recognizing these shifts in oneself across interpersonal and emotional experience is paramount to effective psychotherapy. It is in dialogue, in the process where I am saying to someone what their deepest fears are, that they had hinted at but dare not say out loud, that the legitimacy of those fears is somewhat debunked. Verbalizing and analyzing unconscious beliefs, saying the unsayable, is the job of a psychoanalyst. And observing these shifts across a patient's senses of selfhood and finding ways to contextualize those shifts with actual current experience as well as historical developmental/psychological experience with one's parents and significant others is a way in which patients begin to use their minds to solve the problems of the emotional upheaval… Problems that their overwhelming parents did not allow them to slow down and consider. 

As Leonard Cohen writes in one of my favorite songs of all time….

”I'm slowing down the tune

I never liked it fast

You want to get there soon

I want to get there last”

Lucas A. Klein, Ph.D.

Psychologist and Psychoanalyt

(503) 208-7881