One of the primary roles of a parent
should be preparing their children to be safe, protected, and secure
in adulthood, preparation that begins in childhood, encouraging the
child's growth into maturity. When successful, parents prepare
children who become adults who are able to care adequately for their
own basic needs and are also responsive to the needs of others
without compromising their own self-care in the process. In
dysfunctional homes, children derive too much of their identity and
sense of self from within the family or specifically from another
family member. When they enter the world of adults without having
adequately shaped
their identity, they have much difficulty in relationships when
they move on from the family of origin.
How Parents Fail to Provide for
Dependency Needs
Many types of abuse result when parents
fail to respect their child's dependency needs and balance those
needs with gradual preparation for their child's independence from
the family. Children learn the lessons and skills of self-care in
adulthood through the ways in which their parents meet (or fail to
meet) their needs, as well as the habits they observe in their own
parents who model their own self-care.
- Degrees of Neglect
Obviously parents who neglect their
children fail to provide for their needs, be they material,
psychological, intellectual, emotional or spiritual, but there are
other more subtle ways in which a parent can abuse a child's
dependence and limitations.
A parent may have a false idea or
expectation that children should not be needy or may become
frustrated with the needs that they have. They will meet the child's
physical needs, but they will communicate to the child in some way
that their duty to responsibly care for them is a great hardship.
They may fail to keep adult matters private and may inappropriately
share details about finances or other concerns with the child in a
way that is appropriate and understandable. The parent may also
directly or indirectly convey an attitude of resentment towards the
child because of their responsibilities to provide for them.
Children are very perceptive and emotionally aware in most cases
because they look to the parent as a mirror for themselves so that
they can learn to be like the parent as they grow. In extreme
manifestations of parental resentment, the parent may become
aggressive or predatory with the child, punishing them for their
dependency.
When the parent communicates resentment
or fails to adequately shield the child from their adult concerns
involved in providing for them, the child absorbs the message as one
of shame for having any needs. The literature on addictions refers
to this experience as the “shame-existence bind,” a type of
Pharisaical
type of double bind that creates a no-win situation for the
child. The child may also be told that they are selfish
for having needs or that their common, basic needs are unusual or
unreasonable. The parent may have their own misconceptions about
their own needs and wants, viewing the care of their own basic needs
as optional, or they may behave as though all of their wants are
synonymous with their basic needs. They can only model for and give
to the child that which they have themselves, so they may convey
their own misguided feelings about guilt over needs to their children
who will follow the parent's example and will tend to adopt their
ways of thinking about wants and needs.
In these cases, the child not only
learns shame for having basic needs, they also learn that being
interdependent with others in a healthy way as they seek to meet
their needs is an unsafe and painful process that also produces
shame. The parent either fails to realize for themselves or fails to
teach their child that individuals must be interdependent and that
this interdependence is a healthy, normal, and often pleasurable part
of daily life and is necessary for survival.
- Over-protection
Though Jim
Fay (co-founder of the Love
and Logic Institute) identifies these traits as a part of a
parenting style, they also describe a manner by which parents show
disrespect to the dependency needs of a child. Fay describes this
parent as one who “hovers over children
and rescues them from the hostile world in which they live”
in a set of predictable ways.
The Helicopter Parent [with Blog Host notes added]:
- Provides messages of weakness and low personal worth
- Makes excuses for the child, but complains about [how the child has] mishandled responsibilities [which sends a confusing and shaming mixed message to the child]
- Takes on the responsibility of the child
- Protects the child from any possible negative feelings
- Makes decisions for the child
- Provides no structure, but complains, “After all I've done for you...”
- Whines and uses guilt: “When are you ever going to learn? I always have to clean up after you.”
- Whines and complains about having an irresponsible child who causes “me” much work and responsibility
- Uses lots of words and actions that rescue or indicate that the child is not capable or responsible
- Protects child from natural consequences, uses guilt [as opposed to consequences] as the teacher
(Here, too, the parent's resentment for
their responsibility to provide for the child's needs presents as a
feature in overprotective parenting, just as it does in patterns of
parental neglect.) In essence, this type of over-protective parent
cannot moderate their own feelings of fear and anxiety. They end up
extraverting and/or projecting their own adult emotions on to their
child who pays the bill for their own deficiency. The child absorbs
the parent's feelings, learning not only anxiety and
passive-aggressive communication as a standard of what is normal but
also that they [as the child] are a great burden that creates intense
stress/pain for their parent. Again, the parent projects this
experience and shame on to the child which they, in turn,
internalize. The child responds by feeling responsible for the
parent.- Enmeshment
Another failure to appropriately honor
the dependency needs of a child occurs when a parent uses a child in
some way to meet their own adult needs, needs that are only
appropriately met by another adult. In healthy parenting, nurture
flows from the mature adult who is rich in resources to the child who
only has the resources that the parent provides for them. The child
lacks information, experience in relationships, rational thought,
boundaries, and a standard of what constitutes good/appropriate
behavior. The primary source of all of those things comes from the
parent upon whom they depend physically for their survival. The
child is not in a position to walk away from the parent and doesn't
have the internal resources or experience to be able to set limits on
the parent if they behave inappropriately.
In dysfunctional families, quite often,
the parent has relationship difficulties with other adults, but they
find in their child an attentive and wonderful little person who
lacks all of the typical friction that they encounter in their
interaction with adults. Their child has no boundaries and accepts
whatever the parent presents to them as trustworthy and good, lacking
those friction-creating factors that the parent experiences with
adults. Failing to honor the dependency needs of their child, they
can reverse the flow of nurture when they begin to use the child as a
source of friendship or as a resource to use in order to meet their
adult needs. (This differs from assigning age-appropriate duties
to a child which help teach them how to appropriately care for their
own needs and to function interdependently within the family.)
The child merges
with the parent and becomes dependent on them for their sense of
identity and worth. The child internalizes the needs and reality
of the parent and identifies them as their own instead of learning
and growing to develop their independent sense of self and their own,
age-appropriate reality. In some respects, the child gains a sense
of power and specialness, knowing that they are of such importance
and are so intimate emotionally with the parent At the same time,
they also realize that they have
become responsible for meeting the needs and attending to the
welfare of the parent, an overwhelming experience. Their inner life
revolves around the parent's needs and involves a great amount of
fear. Instead of developing worth and a sense of accomplishment
based on their own experiences, they draw that worth and confidence
from the duties that they perform for the parent.
Dependency as a Religious Concept
As mentioned in a recent
post, some aberrant Christian groups which overemphasize
hierarchy and authoritarianism teach that subordinates must endure
any type of treatment from their superiors, and that mistreatment
should not be protested but should be viewed as an experience which
builds virtue. In some instances, such as in Bill
Gothard's ideology of authority and submission, bearing unjust
mistreatment mystically serves as an opportunity to accumulate
God's favor which can be channeled to use as power to accomplish
virtuous acts.
Residents
at Hephzibah House are taught that their moral status which
resulted in their placement at the facility deprived them of status
and relegated them to obligatory abuse, a disrespect of their
dependency needs as teenagers deprived them of physical sustenance
and protection which was reinforced by intense physical and
psycholological abuse. In many groups, Complementarian
theology supports obligatory servitude based on gender, promoting
enmeshment for women as a religious requirement. In Vision
Forum's form of patriarchy which is also taught by the Botkin
Family, the theology requires that all family members deny their
independence, personal needs, and inner personal experience in favor
of their family patriarch's code of conduct and “vision” for the
mission of the family. All of these examples institutionalize
dysfunctional behavior, misrepresenting these requirements as the
minimum standard taught in the Bible and required by God, carrying
eternal, spiritual consequences.
Many religious traditions also teach
the need for a spiritual intercessor putting other people in between
that person's access to God and spiritual things. Complementarianism
and systems that define women as dependent on a male overseer suggest
in various ways that women need men to make spiritual
intercession for them. By teaching that a woman is of lesser essence
in some way (such as Complementarian teaching that women are made
indirectly in or are the derivative image of God) and that women are
created solely and primarily for the purpose of ministry to
men, these ideologies foster and facilitate dependency and
dysfunction. In other traditions such as those followed in the
Shepherding/Discipleship
Movement or in systems of ecclesiocentricty
(the church and pastor as the central element of and authority in a
Christian's life), such systems foster dysfunctional paternalistic
dependency as opposed to healthy interdependence.
Consequences and
Outcomes Experienced by the Adult
For the adult who was neglected in
childhood wherein the parent failed to provide for their needs, the
adult carries over their childhood coping mechanism into their adult
life which manifests as lack of self-care, still affected by the
shame-existence bind they learned in childhood. They've learned to
ignore their needs and have never learned to be aware of them which
usually presents through neglect of self through poor or absent
self-care in different areas of their life.
Though this individual may have a
collapsed social life wherein they fail to attend to their own
emotional care, they may also demonstrate a type of demonstrative
craving for love and affection producing “love
addiction.” Developmental deficits tend to be overcome through
learning and counsel, but love addiction becomes a basic compulsion
which revolves around fear of abandonment and is more intense than a
simple failure to provide for self-care. Those who develop love
addiction seek enmeshment with others in their adult relationships as
an addictive way of dealing with their internal feelings of
emptiness.
Read more about the dynamics of Love
Addiction and Love Avoidance that develop from the abuse of
dependency needs in
these posts at the Overcoming Botkin Syndrome blog. In contrast
to the love addicted, those who develop love avoidance find their
self-worth in caretaking as a consequence of enmeshment, and intimacy
in relationship is replaced by duty and deadness. The drama created
by the dysfunctional dynamics becomes mistaken for passion, intimacy
and love.
Adults who learned that basic needs
were shameful tend to be aware of their basic needs but often fail to
seek to meet them. They've learned that interdependence results in
shame and can involve punishment of some kind, so they avoid their
needs to avoid discomfort. The experience of unmet physical needs in
childhood creates emotional consequences in adulthood, interfering
with the adult's ability to trust. Dependency plays on their sense
of trust and vulnerability, so the building of emotional walls tends
to go hand in hand with this type of denial of needs.
Alternately, an adult can also
extravert their frustration and can become aggressive, particularly
if they never learned the distinction between wants and needs. They
may misinterpret all of their wants and desires as needs, and they
will go to any lengths to meet their desires. This may lead to
self-destructive poor self management and planning. Such problems
often result in financial problems as well as boundary issues in
relationships with other adults.
The child of the over-protective parent
fails to develop effective and appropriate self-care traits and
behaviors which can result in self-care deficits. They were not
encouraged to problem solve or anticipate their needs, so they fail
to attend to them, though they are generally well aware of them. In
relationships, these adults tend to be very needy and helpless and
usually resort to manipulative behavior to get others to meet the
needs that the parent once met for them. These individuals become
prime targets for manipulation by those with poor external
boundaries, religious con men, and other types of exploitation when a
manipulator promises to meet their needs.
