Parents

[Rachael]

So having been obviously doing very well in my life for some time, I naively had thought that my mother had grown past her program thinking. I had only very lightly experimented w/ drugs prior to being institutionalized and haven't used at all since. I'm very clearly successful, and none of it has anything to do w/ program (ran after 6 months having not moved off "step one"). I thought that my mother had moved past all that bs and assumed she'd been clear of the program for years.

I experienced pretty severe abuse while there and my mother knows it. Anyway, I mentioned last week the potential of a lawsuit and asked if I would have her support. I specifically stated that I wasn't asking from a legal standpoint - just if I had her emotional, motherly type support. And she says - Well I'll have to think about it. I have friends there that I don't want to get hurt.

WTF?!?!?


Her program parent friends are more important than her daughter??? Her "friends" who supported/encouraged various abuses perpetrated by their kids deserve my mother's support more than I do.

This totally threw me for a loop (specifically, after explicitly stating how I was abused, I went into a complete disassociative fugue state and don't remember the next couple hours I spent curled up rocking on the floor), as I've had a fairly decent relationship w/ my mother for the last couple years.

So my question is, how do you all deal with parents or other family members who still accept the program or justify how you've been abused? Do you maintain contact, or lose even the somewhat good aspects of these relationships?


Rachael

[try another castle]

I don't talk about the program with any of them. I tried a few times. It sucked. Ironically, even though my mom is somewhat dismissive of anything I have said regarding it, she confided in my aunt that they never should have sent me there and it never did any good. (I don't know if my dad and stepmom feel that way, however, since they were more instrumental in my placement.)

I think it's just one of those uncomfortable topics in which there is a mutual understanding that none of us should ever mention it again.

[Froderik]

Rachael- How long has it been since you've been out of there? Just curious.

[Rachael]

almost 5 years

[Froderik]

Not very long, in the scheme of things. It's been over 20 years for me. It's taken my mom a while to come around. Give it time. Be as patient with her as you can. You lost a battle but not the war, so to speak. If not talking to her works for you, then don't talk to her for a while. Try her again after a spell and tell her that you don't like how she dogged you on that issue. She may eventually come around.

[hanzomon4]

Have you tried this,,,

Take your time and write a letter detailing what you went through in  program and afterwards. Include your questions like this one and any others you can think of. The reason why I say use a letter is because they can't hang-up, cutoff, or runaway from a letter. It may not get you the answers you want or any at all, but you both will know that she knowns how here continued support of the program(parents?) effects you.

I have other suggestions but they're mostly violent, it just pisses me off when parents, of all people, re-victimize their own kids. All of you who don't go postal are much better people then I would be in a similar circumstance.

[69]

Who said kids are supposed to get along with arents. Fuck em.

[Anonymous]

My friend's mom was irresponsible and thoughtless before, she's irresponsible and thoughtless now.

You have to figure that a parent has to be pretty screwed up to become a Program Parent in the first place.

Some screwed up people realize the problem is in them, get help, and get better. The "help" I'm talking about here can be professional, spiritual, supportive friends who end up doing the exact same thing as a good therapist.

Anyway, far more screwed up people, whether they get half-assed sporadic help or none, stay screwed up.*

So if you had parents screwy enough to put you in a Program in the first place, and leave you there instead of coming and getting you with choruses of "oh my god" and "mea culpa", then chances are your parents are still screwy.

Chances are, they're gonna be screwy for life.

Some people get help; far more don't. It's like alcoholism. Some get sober and stay that way; far more don't.

This is one of those "things [you] cannot change" as it says in the AA Serenity Prayer.

Bottom Line: You have to have healthy boundaries to stay healthy. That means you have to set boundaries and limits restricting how much contact your parents have with you, and what you do and don't allow from them. Your parents have very poor psychological boundaries, so you have to be very clear to yourself about yours, and you have to enforce them.

Read up on Borderline Personality Disorder. Many Program Parents have a lot of features of BPDs, including bigtime control issues and boundary issues. Program Parents tend to be splitters from hell.

Whether your parents are diagnosable with BPD or not, the similarity to Program Parents means that studying that disorder may help you build your own insights into your parents, how to handle them, and how to protect yourself so that they don't continue to disrupt your life.

Julie

[exhausted]

It's like listening to myself reading these posts

I've done the letter writing, tried the conversations face to face, via telephone, through mediation, I've been trying for 30 years now

once my mother shut up while I told her what she'd realy done to me and how it affects my life to this day (via telephone), she was silent for a whole hour and a half while I just poured my heart out over the whole thing, I amazed mysel;f at how level and calm I was (I wanted to ring her neck)

Normally she'd speak over the top of me, the favourite phrase is "oh you do talk crap" total denial that any of it ever happened (yer, like I made the whole fucking thing up? I have a memory)

So after teing her all this I felt so relieved that she listened for the 1st time in probably 27 years and finished up by saying "aren't you going to say anything?"

She said "about what?"

I asked her if shed listened to anything I said and she told me that she'd had to go see to her dinner.

I'd been talking to myself all that time, I felt like she'd done those 27 years all over again .. she may as well have stabbed me in the heart - but you know what? Fuck her ... if she can't give me the one thing that would give her own daughter some beginnings of closure, just to recognise what she did, just to be sincere in an apology then who am i destroying by keep running over and over it? Trying to make sense of something so senseless? Me, only me, she obviously cannot or will not take the guilt and is ok with me carrying the weight.

Fine, I have to live with it, now I am at a place where she destroys me, I don't destroy myself, she has to go to her deathbed either in compete ignorance of what she did was wrong, or knowing deep down somewhere that she fucked over her 3 kids, either way it's not going to change, so be it.....but I won't let her hurt me anymore than is possible, one thing I can control is the fact that I am not self destroying anymore, I am in control of that - I will never change her way of thinking, i can't control that, so I'm not wasting my life, time or energy on it.

[try another castle]

Read up on Borderline Personality Disorder. Many Program Parents have a lot of features of BPDs, including bigtime control issues and boundary issues. Program Parents tend to be splitters from hell.

Whether your parents are diagnosable with BPD or not, the similarity to Program Parents means that studying that disorder may help you build your own insights into your parents, how to handle them, and how to protect yourself so that they don't continue to disrupt your life.

Actually, I think my parents are closer to exhibiting narcissism than BPD, but there are similarities between both.

In addition, I think that jewish families are pretty prone to narcissism, since we are taught that what our children do are a reflection upon us. I remember being yelled at a lot as a kid by my mother, saying "Stop it! You're making a spectacle of yourself!"

Far be it for me to pathologize my parents, though. That would be wrong.

[psy]

So having been obviously doing very well in my life for some time, I naively had thought that my mother had grown past her program thinking. I had only very lightly experimented w/ drugs prior to being institutionalized and haven't used at all since. I'm very clearly successful, and none of it has anything to do w/ program (ran after 6 months having not moved off "step one"). I thought that my mother had moved past all that bs and assumed she'd been clear of the program for years.

I experienced pretty severe abuse while there and my mother knows it. Anyway, I mentioned last week the potential of a lawsuit and asked if I would have her support. I specifically stated that I wasn't asking from a legal standpoint - just if I had her emotional, motherly type support. And she says - Well I'll have to think about it. I have friends there that I don't want to get hurt.

Don't trust her with any information that you don't want the program to have.

WTF?!?!?


Her program parent friends are more important than her daughter??? Her "friends" who supported/encouraged various abuses perpetrated by their kids deserve my mother's support more than I do.

This totally threw me for a loop (specifically, after explicitly stating how I was abused, I went into a complete disassociative fugue state and don't remember the next couple hours I spent curled up rocking on the floor), as I've had a fairly decent relationship w/ my mother for the last couple years.

So my question is, how do you all deal with parents or other family members who still accept the program or justify how you've been abused? Do you maintain contact, or lose even the somewhat good aspects of these relationships?


Rachael

I wish I could answer that question.  I maintain contact, but talk to them about program little.  It's too much for my mother.  My dad listens, and agrees the place should be shut down.  Talking about what they did to others is easier.  When my parents ask me "what did they do to you"...  Some things are easy, some things, i haven't told anybody... anybody... and maybe I never will.  Some things would offend them if I told them...  They would say "that's obscene... you didn't have to describe that"...  You do a lot of funny things when you have nothing left to lose.  

I don't trust em anymore.  That much is very plain, and i've told them so.  That has put a distance between us.  We talk about the weather.  Program is a very emotional, volitile, uncomfortable topic...  At the same time as not wanting to hear it, my mom tells me to get over it...  Emotional support?  hah!  They don't want to hear what happened to me because it pains them to hear..  They know I cried out for help and they ignored me.

I imagine, though, that having told them what went on, and having them still support program...  that would bother me.  Having them care about staff... That would bother me.  Having them care about the parents and staff.. and not the children.. that would bother me.  I don't know what to say.  Salvage what you can.

[Truth Searcher]

Of course this phenomenon is not unique to 'program parents'.  The inability (unwillingness) to hear another persons story, POV, is not unique to parents at all.

Rachael, I remember coming to a point in my adult life (about late 20's I think) where I really began to view my parents as the human people that they really are.  I saw the faults, the warts, the pathologies, etc.  I really mourned.  It was kinda scary to think that the people who should have been rock solid ... in fact were more like gravel.  I think this is a normal phase of adult life.  I have found that in our situation there is almost a role reversal.  I refer to it as 'parenting my parents'.  Seems as though I have had to be the rock ... dispense advise, decisions, money, etc.  I mourn this as well.

Now granted some parents are more difficult than others.  Some have inflicted tremendous wounds upon us as children.  Perhaps in your relationship with your mom, your program experience may need to be a closed chapter of discussion.  Or one that you visit only rarely.  She may just never get it as much as you desire her to do so.  I am sorry.  

There is a deep longing in us to be in a healthy relationship with our parents.  Unfortunately for most of us ... the expectation never measures up to our realities.