Leaving Home: The Art of Separating from Your Difficult Family

Not only are the external challenges formidable, but our own internal world will also oppose change. Both of our defensive selves will try to thwart the decision to give up the struggle with the family: our hopeful self will continue to spin fantasies of future love and our wounded self will find comfort in hopes for revenge, thus keeping us attached to our rejecting parents. The simple and painful truth is that if a parent (or new partner) has not expressed freely given love after five, ten, or even fifteen years, then love is not available from that person, despite the continuing optimism of the hopeful self. Conversely, our wounded selves will try and convince us to be content with revenge on (or reform of) our rejecting parents or new partners. Defeating the person who refuses to support us will not help in our own personal development as an individual. Neither reform nor revenge is a fulfilling substitute for the consistent love and support that would have allowed us to develop into mature adults. If we are to survive and prosper as adults, we must give up our loyalty to failed parents and rebuild—or build for the first time—our identity by involving ourselves in healthy relationships with supportive others. If we fail, then we will remain trapped by our hopes for illusory love and our equally futile desire for revenge on those who have wronged us.

Most of my patients are fearful of the prospect of facing life without the dubious comfort of their failed families. At the beginning of therapy, many of my patients feel that they will cease to exist without constant contact with their families. The whole idea of giving up on one’s family is foreign to human nature, as the following quotation from a patient in treatment with Joan Raphael-Leff from Narcissistic Wounds illustrates:

These are powerful words that illustrate this patient’s dawning awareness that she is not condemned to a lifetime of frustration—an awareness that is both rare and unusual in our culture. We are pressured by our dependency needs, by our guilt, our unexpressed rage, and finally by our unrealistic hope into remaining with our families, no matter how badly we were and continue to be treated. The absolute first step on the path to an independent adulthood is to accept the reality that separation is indeed possible and desirable. Many patients fantasize that the family they leave will seek revenge if they begin a separate life of their own. In reality, the source of strength in all unloving families comes from our own unmet dependency needs, guilt, and self-created illusions. Once we flee, we will discover that the family that we feared is completely impotent, and worse, they may appear to be pathetic when viewed from the “outside.” There are no “family police” to come and arrest us if we decide to separate and move on in life. The only police we have to fear are our defenses against seeing how bad life in the family has been, and our guilt about our failed parents.

The absolutely best advice I received as a young man came from my high school guidance counselor, who was commenting on my frustration in a class that I had absolutely no interest in. He simply said, “go where you are wanted and do what works.” This is wonderful advice—assuming that you can carry it out. Most of my adult patients suffering from loyalty to their failed families need a great deal of support to follow this sage advice. Year after year, they go where they are not appreciated and try to force others to love them—often with no success at all. Before we begin discussing the positive avenues to take for change, I must warn the reader about three futile strategies that have derailed and delayed improvement in many of my patients. These strategies are seductive, dangerous, and can often seem like the “natural” or “right” thing to do, but they can only end up making the attempt at separation that much more difficult or futile. The following rules regarding what not to do when beginning to break with failed parents must be kept in mind.

At first glance, this looks like a bold and healthy course of action. However, upon careful inspection, it is just another reappearance of that old trickster, the wounded self. The wounded self is absolutely dedicated to the false notion that we can get revenge, and that the revenge we obtain will somehow satisfy us—a compelling but entirely false proposition. It is also a venture that will demean us, regardless of the outcome. If we “win,” we will probably be faced with the reality of just how sad and unfulfilled are parents are, which can provoke our guilt. What possible good is a victory over such obviously incompetent and pathetic people? On the other hand, if we lose, then we expose ourselves to self-loathing for being intimidated by the powerful tyrants that we still imagine our parents to be. Not only is there nothing to gain from such a victory, but the very act of going back to members of our family to tell them how “bad” they were (and are) is a statement of their continuing importance to us.

Second, achieving a moral victory over failed parents is often a harder task than many of my patients think it to be. Many parents, for whatever reason, simply could not do the job of parenting that they took on but are absolute masters of self-deception. They are absolutely blind to the reality that they are responsible for impeding their child’s development. One of my patients described his overtly charming mother as “a mile wide and an inch deep.” She could converse with anyone on any topic, and managed to look as if she was a competent and caring mother. Behind closed doors, however, she was crass, arrogant, and abusive. This common type of parent is a formidable opponent, because they are practiced actors whose false and self-serving roles do not produce self-doubt or guilt in them. During confrontations with their wounded children, their confidence makes them impossible to defeat. Today, many of these same parents embrace the popular notion that biological or chemical imbalances, which are clearly not their fault, are the source of all of their children’s emotional problems. Arguing with a parent like this is akin to arguing against the existence of God at a conference of preachers.

Self-centered and self-righteous parents get their sureness from rigid and absolute views of themselves. This rigidity in their personality structure also prevents them from being sensitive to the needs of others, as all their psychological energy is focused on meeting their own needs. Winning an argument with this type of opponent is simply impossible. I encountered an example of this type of personality in a parent a number of years ago during one of my jobs in a public mental health agency. I was assigned to be the therapist for Brett, a morbidly obese and very depressed sixteen-year-old man who had deliberately cut down twelve of his mother’s prized rosebushes at the height of their bloom. One of the most discouraging aspects of working in a public mental health agency is that the parent, who has done the damage to the young person, is often taken more seriously by the agency than is the child. This is because adults can complain and have far more social, legal, and political power and credibility than do their children.

Such was the case with this unfortunate young man, whose mother was the widow of a physician and who was both well-liked and well-known in the community. She presented herself in a dramatic and self-important manner, and ordered the staff to “fix” her son as fast as possible. I was directed to help Brett reconcile with his overbearing and rejecting mother. During my interview with the angry young man, I learned that he had been called a “lazy stuffed sausage” by his mother ever since he could remember. His identity was so damaged and incomplete that he dropped out of high school and spent his days at home working on computers and eating his mother’s endlessly offered meals. Like Sheldon Kopp, he was exposed to the emotionally debilitating combination of extreme rejection and constant indulgence. He begged me to intervene on his behalf and implore his mother to stop calling him names. Not surprisingly, the years of deprivation he suffered left him severely psychologically damaged and he had no desire to separate from his mother. His use of the moral defense, along with his hopeful self fantasies, had convinced him that with time and effort he could transform his verbally abusive mother into the parent that he desperately needed. This intense fixation caused him to reject enrollment in a program at the mental health center that was designed to help people like himself develop greater independence. His personality was that of a young child—a child who could not imagine giving up the only mother he knew. All he wanted was to go home to a loving mother who appreciated him.

I recognized that there was no possibility of a healthy reconciliation between this parent and child. The young man’s intense dependency (and the extent and power of his wounded self, which caused him to cut down the rosebushes) spoke clearly to me about his history of deprivation. His wounded self was also an experienced revenge plotter, and he described his many strategies for unmasking and defeating his mother, which included hacking into the Web site of the medical society of which his late father was a member and posting hostile statements about his mother’s behavior—a very sad way of trying to retaliate against her. Ironically, my position as the young man’s therapist required me to interview his mother and inform her of his condition. It seemed to me that reporting to his mother was not in my patient’s best interests, but in years past, the rules in public mental health agencies placed considerable emphasis on parental rights. During my interview she demanded to know why her “crazy” son cut her rosebushes down. I diplomatically and vaguely responded that it was a possible indication that he was angry at her. She jumped out of her seat and began to bellow, “Angry at me? Angry at ME? What right does he have to be angry at me? I have been his servant since he was born!” I could see that I was going to get nowhere with this destructive and self-serving parent. Like many of the parents of my patients, her view of herself was so completely at odds with reality that it was impossible to make any headway. Her absolutely self-centered and rigid view of herself as a “good” parent explained why her desperately dependent son was unable to communicate his frustration using words, finally resorting to cutting down her roses as his only way of indicating his anger and despair. I developed an strategy to deal with Bret within the context of his major interest in life, computers—a strategy that will be detailed later in this chapter.

This example, coupled with literally hundreds of examples from my own practice in which patients tried to confront their parents, has led me to coin the phrase: “Don’t complain, and don’t explain.” That is, don’t complain about your emotionally impoverished history to your parents, because they will never validate your perspective of your childhood. Second, don’t explain your quiet withdrawal from the family scene. Simply slip away as gracefully as possible and concentrate your efforts at developing relationships with people who support and embrace you.

Many adults who remain home with their elderly parents rationalize their behavior by saying that they can save money by paying little or no rent, like my patient William, who lived in the basement. Frequently, dysfunctional parents indulge their now-adult children (whom they previously neglected) as a way of keeping them at home. As time passes, the emotionally empty yet superficially indulged adult becomes less motivated to seek success in the outside world. Parental indulgence crushes ambition and stalls the young adult somewhere in middle adolescence. One young woman patient, who had a truly frightening and deprived childhood, returned to her parent’s home every weekend (with her dependent husband in tow) to do her laundry, despite the fact that the apartment they lived in had a laundry room. When I asked about her reasons for the weekly trip, during which her mother poured out her woes about being married to an insensitive husband, she claimed that her mother’s washing machine did a better job cleaning the clothes! In fact, she could not give up her lifelong efforts to rescue her mother from her aggressive and abusive father. She, like so many other patients, was looking backward to her childhood, instead of forward. Not surprisingly, her neglected marriage dissolved.

The regressive cost of accepting “free” rent can be catastrophic to the already developmentally challenged adult who tries to compensate for past deprivation by selling out his future. Indulgences from parents are extremely seductive precisely because they represent the love that was absent during the child’s developmental years. Many of my patients feel that their parents “owe” them a free ride because their childhoods were filled with pain. Sadly, indulgences keep the childlike adult dependent and loyal to their frustrating and failed parents, which further reduces the possibility of separation as time goes on.

A dramatic example of the catastrophic consequence of remaining indulgently attached to a frustrating parent was Jason, a middle-aged patient who led a colorful life as an environmental reporter. His freelance articles were highly regarded and brought him considerable fame. He had become well-known in the environmental movement because his personal resources allowed him to investigate water pollution on his own, without being a member of a governmental agency. He was able to pay, out of his own pocket, for tests of samples that he took from industrial wastewater that emptied into public waterways. Jason would then interview the company spokesperson, who most frequently would deny all culpability for polluting. He would then present his results of the testing to the unsuspecting spokesperson, with predictable results. His articles were both pointed and humorous, describing corporate attempts to elude obvious truths. His unconventional tactics would not have been tolerated by establishment newspapers, but his personal resources allowed him a great deal of freedom, and he successfully made a mockery of a number of pompous corporations in the underground press.

Jason came to me for therapy because his personal life was chaotic and unsatisfactory. Most notably, he complained about his weekly telephone “brawl” with his elderly widowed father in Florida. His father had inherited great wealth and had completely abandoned Jason to the care of nursemaids during his childhood, but kept him attached in adulthood by paying most of his bills. Jason’s history of being indulged continued on into adulthood, and he rationalized that working at a “normal” job would compromise his creativity, even though his journalistic exploits only took up a fraction of his time. He spent most of his time spinning fantasies of future success with a band of admirers who lived partially off of his largess.

Jason’s wounded self displaced his rage away from his powerful and autocratic father and focused it on high-handed corporations who damaged the environment. This served as an outlet for some of the hostility that might have undermined his continuing dependency on his father. Not surprisingly, his history of unmet needs reappeared in his relationships with women. He would become excessively clinging and dependent on one girlfriend after another, most of whom fled because they were not willing to put up with his shrill and demanding behavior.

The focus of my work in therapy with Jason was on the quality of his life at the moment, as well as on the time he was losing because of his insistence on remaining like a child while waiting for his inheritance. He repeatedly told me that his life would change abruptly when his father passed away and he became the inheritor of the family wealth. His fantasy ignored the fact that his damaged identity would remain damaged, even if he did become wealthy. As his therapist, I had hopes for the type of slow, long-term improvement that I have seen in many similar patients. These hopes were dashed by a sudden and unexpected stroke which completely and permanently incapacitated him. His sad fate highlights the dangers of endlessly accepting the role of the dependent “cheated” child who deserves to be indulged as repayment for a failed childhood—our time is short, and interminably waiting around for your problems to be solved is never a good idea.

The loss for all adults who remain loyal to ungiving parents is the loss of time. Living with the attitudes and identity of a child in an adult body is a guaranteed way of wasting time that could be used toward developing a more mature and satisfying way of life. The lost time is simply that—lost—and every passing year reduces the probability that the adult child who remains attached to failed parents will be able to emerge into adulthood.

When individuals from unsupportive families begin anew, they face the danger that their unmet dependency needs will be indiscriminately poured out on everyone. As I have noted in chapter 4, an empty, deprived childhood leaves the young adult painfully needy and self-centered—characteristics that often come out in inappropriate ways. Peer relationships that are normally based on mutual interests and shared sensibilities cannot take the strain imposed if one member approaches the other for endless sympathy and support. Often, middle-aged patients who enter the dating scene after divorce report that a large percentage of the people they meet come at them with excessive and burdensome needs that are completely inappropriate. This can happen on the very first date. The individual who holds out an enormous empty basket of needs expecting them to be met is eliminating the possibility of a relationship with a healthy partner. Healthy individuals are not interested in rescuing desperate peers, nor do they feel guilty about leaving or avoiding excessively demanding acquaintances.

I have seen a number of patients who attempt to cure themselves by becoming self-help “junkies.” They become fascinated with one self-improvement book after another. Many attend experiential workshops year after year, and use the latest and trendiest words including “trauma,” “recovery,” and “heal” in every other sentence. Despite their voluminous reading, many do not seem to improve because nothing seems to “stick.” The missing link between reading a self-help book and actually achieving positive personality growth is a network of long-term give-and-take relationships with concerned others. Human beings simply cannot develop into mature adults (regardless of their chronological age) without the love and support of people around them. When I say “love,” I am speaking in the general sense of the word meaning those who appreciate, enjoy, support, and show interest in others.

When a young adult patient comes to a therapist because he or she is living an unfulfilling life at home, the process of becoming independent begins by allowing the patient to shift his or her enormous reservoir of unmet childhood needs away from the failed family and on to the therapist. This is a way of breaking the thrall of dependency that has blinded them for so long. It is simply impossible to physically or emotionally separate from failed parents if you lack a trusted alternative “family” that offers real, rather than illusory, support. This is a task that takes real courage and requires enough trust in the outside world (often in short supply when your own family has failed you) to make the leap. Seeking out the needed support will allow physical separation to occur at a natural and relaxed pace sometime in the future.

Individual therapy is not the only way to shift dependency needs away from the family. Self-help groups, particularly those based on the twelve-step model, do the very same thing. They are able to extend enormous support to all who join while simultaneously demanding very little in return. These groups, though originally only concerned with alcohol abuse, have expanded and cover the effects of faulty parenting as well. They understand the turmoil, fear, and anger that is aroused when one leaves their disappointing family of origin. In either individual therapy or self-help groups, the goal is to seek out and replace our misplaced loyalty and attachment to our failed parents with attachments to healthier peers.

I have emphasized the role of our defenses in keeping us unaware of the damage that our family has done to us. It is important to be clear as to how the process of therapy or membership in a self-help group repairs the damage done to our identities. For most individuals, the real change comes about when they gradually shift their unmet dependency needs away from their frustrating family and onto the therapist or the self-help group. Therapy allows and encourages this shift, as dependency on the therapist is a natural consequence of revealing yourself to another who is in the role of expert and “helper.” This is also true of self-help groups, many of which encourage daily attendance of meetings. Group members shift their frustrated dependency needs away from their families and on to the group, and it becomes in effect a new, better functioning family. Self-help groups can be particularly effective, since they introduce the individual to a community with awareness of and experience with the very issues in which the individual is embroiled. Self-help groups show us that we are not alone, that our reactions to our families are “normal,” and that our sense of inferiority is a consequence of the way we were treated and not from personal failure. Groups also allow us to look into the lives of others, some of whom are ahead of us, and some who are behind us in terms of identity development. In effect, they allow us to gauge where we are, how far we have come, and what lies ahead. Another essential property of both personal therapy or self-help groups is that the common problems many immature adults from unloving families display (hypersensitivity to criticism, excessive neediness, and cynicism) will not destroy the relationship to either the therapist or the group.

Once the grip of the patient’s dependency on his or her family is broken, the splitting defense can be challenged. Originally, my patients need both their unrealistic hopeful self and their repressed wounded self to maintain the attachment to their families. As dependency needs lessen, the influence of the hopeful self fades. The parent no longer has to be protected by false hopes, because the patient now has access to a better, “parent-like” figure who accepts him as he is and willingly supports his needs. The relationship helps the patient assess the merits of his family without the distorting optimism of the hopeful self. Almost every family supported some aspects of their children’s development, and it is important that the patient develops a reality-based view of what his or her family did and failed to do during his or her developmental years.

Once the illusions of the hopeful self have dissipated, its counterpart, the wounded self, can be addressed. Chapter 4 cautioned the reader about blindly accepting the intense emotions of the wounded self as being valid. The therapist’s (or the group members’) acceptance of the truths contained in the wounded self help it emerge from the unconscious, and once it is consciously available, it can be “recalibrated.” By that, I mean that a realistic discussion of the actual neglect that the patient experienced will allow the individual to reassess just how bad their childhood really was. It might have been better or worse that the wounded self “thought.” This new view can reduce the need to act on the emotions that were repressed alongside the memories of parental failures. In some patients, the emotions of rage and terror that occur when a child is abandoned might involve a wish to kill the neglectful parents. These emotions, though appropriate for the time, remain dangerous if unchanged over years. Discussion of these extreme emotions will often tone them down and allow the patient better access to his wounded self. Now, he or she no longer has to fear the loss of his or her family, nor be victimized by the emotions that it contains. This process results both in a more realistic view of the extent of the parent’s original failures, as well as of their original goodness. This process also breaks the spell of the moral defense, as the young adult becomes more realistic about what was and was not his or her fault.

The integration of the two once separated selves also goes on in self-help groups, where individual group members tell the story of their lives in the privacy of a group meeting. Members get used to the reality that many of them were abused or neglected, and accept that the shame and the desire to blame oneself is a normal (though unhelpful) reaction to their histories. The integration of the wounded and hopeful self into a single secure identity results in a clear view of the original family that gives the individual a basis for action. This is very different from the extreme and shifting views of the family produced by the unstable selves that prevented change by contradicting any clear action with a sudden opposite view of the family.

The new integrated view often helps patients become realistically aware of how self-centered and insulated from reality their parents really were. This knowledge can be a powerful lever that allows the young adult to separate from his or her family. The following history of Nancy describes a woman whose separation from her mother was so incomplete that she serves as an general example of a typical young adult who failed to differentiate from her neglectful parent.

Nancy was the mother of a six-year-old daughter. She came to see me because of her daily drinking habit, boredom with her limited life, and fear that she was taking too many anti-depressants. Nancy was raised by her mother and stepfather. Her mother was a successful businesswoman and president of the local Chamber of Commerce, who spent a lifetime looking “good” to her friends and neighbors. However, behind closed doors Nancy was the focus of a constant barrage of hostility and aggression from her mother, while her brother was treated with indulgence. When angered, her mother would slap her face until it became numb and then keep Nancy home so the neighbors would not see the swelling. She found no comfort from her stepfather, a man who did nothing to contradict or upset his wife.

Nancy was actively discouraged from applying to college, despite the fact that her mother, stepfather, and brother were all college graduates. The anger and alienation in her wounded self emerged in high school, where she became sexually promiscuous. Her behavior was both a rebellion against her abusive mother and a desperate search for someone who would love her. Not surprisingly, she became pregnant and married hastily. She and her husband moved to a town two hours away from her family home, and Nancy became severely depressed. She displayed the typical paradoxical response of the undernurtured, dependent young adult: despite the animosity she felt for her mother, she could not tolerate living far away from her, as her childhood needs still cried out for satisfaction. Nancy pressured her husband to return to her hometown, and they found a house just blocks away from her abusive mother. As in so many other cases, Nancy remained dependent on the mother who thwarted her emotional development. They spoke several times a day and her mother’s opinions dominated her life. At times, it seemed that her entire identity was being taken over by her intrusive and omnipotent mother.

When we began our work, Nancy appropriately felt that life was passing her by. The world outside the narrow confines of her home seemed exciting, but it also frightened her. Her first attempt to venture out was as a door-to-door sales person for beauty products, but the large number of rude rejections discouraged her and she ended up keeping most of the stock herself. As she progressed in therapy, she recognized that even her home was not safe, since she invited her mother over frequently. Nancy often felt that her mother wanted to control all aspects of her life. Despite her best attempts to separate during the first year of work in therapy, she continued to call her mother morning and night to report the day’s events.

Nancy gradually became more emotionally attached to me and this allowed her to slowly pull away from her mother during the second year of therapy. She no longer called her mother daily, maintaining a reasonable distance while simultaneously developing her own resources. The emotional support that she gained from our work allowed her to take a part-time job in retail sales, and she found (much to her surprise) that she often won the store’s monthly sales contest because of her ebullience and ability to respond warmly to a wide variety of customers. Her job became full-time, which made child-care a far more important issue, and Nancy reversed her attempts to avoid her mother, because she needed help watching her daughter. This brought her back into daily contact with her mother, which was a temporary negative setback that was paradoxically prompted by positive growth in her personality.

There was a clear difference in Nancy’s view of her mother when they resumed contact, as therapy allowed her hopeful and wounded selves to merge in a stronger, more realistic, and confident identity. She became more and more aware of just how much of her mother’s hostile behavior she had learned to excuse or ignore. Finally, at Christmas dinner she could no longer keep up the charade. She and her family were seated at a card table in an alcove while her mother, stepfather, and brother entertained their friends at the main table. Her work with me had given her courage to see and to voice her pain when she was ill-used. The crisis came the next day when she dropped by her mother’s house with her daughter to retrieve a serving plate. Her mother remarked that Christmas dinner had been a complete success. Nancy uncharacteristically responded that it was a complete waste of time for her, because she had been treated as second-class citizen. She also vowed to celebrate all future holidays with her own family to avoid any possibility of similar future humiliations.

This was the first time in her adult life that she told her mother directly how she felt about being demeaned. It was made possible by her attachment to me as a “new” parent which allowed her to risk losing her frustrating one. Her newly integrated identity no longer relied upon a wounded self that repressed all of her mother’s insults or a hopeful self that urged her to try and win her mother’s (assumed) love. Not surprisingly, her mother became enraged, as she was not used to being challenged by a daughter toward whom she had spent a lifetime expressing contempt. Her mother immediately counterattacked, saying that Nancy was an ingrate and a “spoiled brat” who was lucky to be invited for the holidays. Instead of backing down, Nancy reminded her mother of the many incidents of abuse that she remembered from her childhood. This made her mother more enraged and the commotion in the living room attracted her brother, who came racing to his mother’s rescue. Nancy’s brother had no steady job and lived in an apartment in the basement of the house. He stormed up the stairs to see his desperately needed mother in a verbal battle with his low-status sister. He shared the family contempt for Nancy, and the fact that she had the nerve to upset their mother threw him into a rage. He began pushing her out the door, and as a gesture intended to completely demean her, spat on her in front of her child.

The drama symbolized the way that Nancy was regarded by the whole family, and it was exactly what she needed to convince her to separate once and for all from her family. This event was only able to occur because her integrated identity no longer hid from reality. Instead of using the moral defense and accepting the “bad” label that her family tried to place on her for causing the commotion, she used the event to explain to her daughter that it was the reason that they were no longer going to visit. This event focused her emotional needs on me and the AA group that she attended. Her resolve to separate, supported by her attachment to me and to her group, allowed her to remain independent.

The second part of the process of individuation begins when the dependency issues have been somewhat resolved and the individual is ready to work on improving his or her social skills and expanding his or her interpersonal network. This requires each individual to assess his or her talents and interests in topics, issues, or movements that are larger than themselves and join a “special interest” group that shares those interests and requires nothing more from the patient than enthusiasm. I often help patients in this process by asking them about the magazines they read. Every specialty magazine, from body building to politics, from cameras to motorcycles, from rock-climbing to gardening, has both local and national organizations staffed by people who are similarly focused on that specific interest. Special interest groups allow us to become personally involved and invested in relating to the world in a less self-centered manner. Membership in specific interest organizations also tends to diffuse our selfish concerns and replace them with concerns about larger issues and also, with concerns about the other members of the group. These new groups are not intended to replace the self-help group or personal therapy. Rather, they should continue to serve as a relational foundation that supports the individual during his or her exploration of the larger world. The more interpersonal networks one has, the better and richer life will be. The new relationships with healthy peers will support and sustain us long into the future.

This was the tactic that I took with Brett, the overweight young man who cut down his mother’s roses. Brett had developed computer programming skills and was an accomplished hacker. He also repaired computers and wrote software. Despite these interests, he was firmly attached to his destructive mother. Brett’s history with his mother made him a wary and difficult patient, one who resisted therapy to the point where he often wore me down. However, I noticed that his interests in computers vitalized him in a way that nothing else had the power to do. I changed my therapeutic strategy from psychotherapy to a form of “occupational” therapy. First, I suggested that he join a local computer interest group, but I soon learned that there were none that met face to face. His computer peers were psychologically similar, socially isolated hackers, with whom he communicated on the Internet and never met in person. I then asked Brett to help me learn about various aspects of the computer, as I was a complete novice. This request surprised him—it was a role reversal and no one of any importance had ever asked him for help. I was joined by another member of the staff who was as computer illiterate as I, and Brett became our teacher. We paid him a nominal fee, and he successfully introduced us to the world of word processing. He was then asked to help our publicity and information specialist, who also paid him. Within several months, he had expanded his “customer base” to include the computer needs of other parts of the mental health center, including its two halfway houses and its supervised apartment network. He spent more and more time away from his mother and began earning money for the first time in his life. One of the outreach workers found a storefront and helped Brett rent it from the owner, in which he set up a computer repair shop, while continuing to work for the mental health center. In effect, the mental health center served as a new family, one that appreciated his talents and accomplishments. He eventually moved out of his house and into an apartment and continued to succeed in his small business venture. Brett’s success attracted a number of younger, similarly neglected young men who began spending time at his shop and he moved from the position of a “help receiver” to a “help giver.” He served as a model for these young men and over a few years his interpersonal and social skills matured remarkably. Brett is an example of an individual whose damaged identity (specifically, his wariness of anyone in a parental role) prevented him from accepting help from conventional therapy, but who improved greatly by developing his interests and skills in the benevolent atmosphere of a new family. He developed enough confidence to separate from his mother, and now leads an independent life of his own making.

Brett didn’t join a special interest group; he created one around himself, and the positive effect was the same. It is absolutely necessary for each of us to reach out to others with similar interests as a way of developing a healthy network of friendships. Every group or club, be it political, social, environmental, musical, or recreational contains healthy individuals. The task of the adult who is separating from his family is to bring his enthusiasm and interest to the organization, while leaving his wounded self in the past, letting the natural course of relating to others unfold.

I will return to a number of patients that I have described in previous chapters, and note how they managed to accommodate their need for independence along with their sense of obligation to their family of origin. Terry, my patient from chapter 1 who owned the wine and specialty food shops, made slow and constant progress over a three-year course of therapy. As a young adult she had allowed her mother to become her sole support, and her work with me altered that relationship dramatically. Terry and I spent a great deal of time trying to develop a realistic picture of her mother as a parent, as Terry felt obligated to behave toward her mother in a manner that was morally appropriate. Our discussion revealed that Terry and her two brothers (who were estranged from their demanding and infantile mother) were raised under conditions of “benign neglect.” They were fed and clothed, but their mother simply was too preoccupied with her own needs to pay any attention to her children’s needs for tenderness, comfort, or support. Terry and I discussed, over and over again, the “right” thing to do. Over the years in therapy, Terry’s two brothers, who had ignored her in the past because she and their mother behaved as a single unit, came to rely on Terry to mediate the family obligations toward their mother. She negotiated a plan for her mother to be placed in a nursing home with the financial assistance from her brothers, who were relieved that Terry had become a responsible agent in her own right. These negotiations opened up lines of contact between her brothers and herself and she regained parts of her family that she had previously lost. She no longer tolerated her mother’s infantile behavior and became increasingly protective of herself around her mother. This had the unexpected consequence of bringing her closer to her brothers and their families. Terry treated her increasingly elderly mother as the child she had always been. She visited her mother occasionally in the nursing home, but focused her energy on management of her mother’s care, rather than attempting to involve herself emotionally, echoing the way that she herself was raised. She maintained her new relationship with her brothers and expanded her two businesses. Her increased availability and her reduced fear of friendships expanded her social network as a natural consequence of her business contacts, though at our termination the “man problem” remained.

Terry illustrates a common problem faced by adults who finally separate from their dysfunctional families in middle age, which is to what extent should they become involved in late-life care for their parents. The great temptation for many of my patients is to use this opportunity to finally “get close” to their parent or parents. I often suggest to my patients that the emotionally appropriate response to the care of an elderly parent should be based on the type of childhood that their parent provided for them as a child. Those parents who were sadistic or malicious toward them during childhood are obviously not deserving of special care, though in the paradoxical world of unmet dependencies, this type of parent is often given the greatest consideration. Again, what motivates this behavior is the undernurtured adult’s attempt to get the closeness (even though the closeness originates in them, not in the parent) that was not given to them in childhood. Katherine Harrison’s description of her care of her dying mother in Thicker Than Water illustrates this common psychological scenario. Parents who were inattentive and incompetent rather than actively malicious deserve greater consideration. My experience suggests that most emotionally deprived adults who mistakenly view the situation as an opportunity to get the closeness that they were deprived of in childhood are disappointed with the results. Another factor that further precludes a rational response to the once neglectful elderly parent by the still dependent child is the reality that the self-centered parent who failed to nurture their child most often becomes a more demanding, insistent, and guilt-producing elder than do older parents who were emotionally supportive toward their children. Thus we have a emotionally weaker adult who still craves closeness facing an elderly parent who is that much more aggressive and demanding. Understandably, many of my patients try to make up for a lifetime of deprivation late in their parent’s lives.

William, the failed teacher who lived in the basement of his parent’s home, was a greater challenge as a patient than was Terry, because his transferences (his emotional habits transferred to me from his relationship with his parents) were so severe that they threatened to disrupt our working alliance. Initially, I developed the “baseball scoring” game to reduce the sting of the hostility that William poured out on me. William’s wounded self was developed in relationship to his intellectual but harshly critical European parents, and it was filled to the brim with spite and sadistic pleasure at my discomfort. Naturally, William was only passing on to me what had been done to him in childhood, but this knowledge did little to reduce the anger that I felt when attacked by him. His hostile and cynical style made outside relationships impossible, and so our first goal was to reduce his self-destructive transferences. Interestingly, William had an enormous wounded self, but I could see no signs of a hopeful self; that is, he had no illusions of love in the future from his parents or from anyone else. During our work in therapy, he became coldly cynical toward his parents, saying that he would stay in their house as long as they paid the rent. Much of our work focused on his enormous hostility toward me. He rationalized his behavior by saying that I was a professional who was paid to take abuse. In reality, I found his abuse nearly intolerable, and my skills at reducing defenses were being severely tested. In 1989, I was involved in an auto accident that left me bruised and stiff, but with no broken bones. I continued to see my patients despite moderate to severe back pain. To my amazement, William almost broke down in tears during the first session that we met after my accident. He was absolutely aghast when he saw me and could hardly speak. I realized that he had shifted his dependency needs onto me, but these attachments were deeply hidden behind the thick curtain of his hostility. He felt that I was his last hope (as few peers or friends came knocking on his basement door) and were he to lose me, he would forego the only way out of his dilemma. During that first post-accident session I noted that he was surprisingly short of his normal “patter” and all he could do in response was stare at me with despair in his eyes. This dramatic event broke the endless attacks on me, and we began to discuss the contents of his wounded self. That is, we reviewed the specifics of his parents failures to nurture and support him during his developmental years. This discussion took many months, during which time we also developed a strategy to cope with William’s psychological damage. Luckily for both of us, William had not lost his interest in music—in fact, one of his wounded self’s strategies to get his parents angry was to play jazz on his saxophone late into the night. Not surprisingly, his parents hated jazz, regarding it as more evidence that American culture was inferior to European culture. I was wary of making any overt suggestions to William, as he continued to resist all suggestions—though not with his previously displayed sarcasm. I assumed that over time our relationship would reduce the sensitivity, fear, and hostility in his wounded self, and when that came under control he would be able to take advantage of those few opportunities that came his way. I had guessed that his music would lead him out of the basement, and his “big break” did eventually come in the form of a two-week job as a substitute music teacher in a nearby school. Luckily, it was not the same school in which he had his depressive reaction to the rejection of his teaching program two years before. He was surprised at the warm reception he received from his teaching colleagues, and was invited to go to a Friday afternoon “happy hour.” Prior to our work, he would have rejected the invitation offhand. Now, however, the reduction of his sensitivity and wariness allowed him to accept. As in many of my patients, one thing led to another, and William began substitute teaching on a regular basis and later joined a local jazz trio that played on weekends. Our real focus was on how he could leave home and how to better relate to his parents, whom he viewed alternately with contempt, pity, disgust, and sadness. Over several years and many hours in my consulting room, William worked out a plan of separation from them that involved buying a condo and visiting his parents on holidays. He tried to keep his hostility toward them to a minimum, and he established a rule (that his parents initially ridiculed), which stated that he would leave their house the moment they began to criticize American culture or his life. It only took one instance of his leaving to convince them that he had enough strength to carry out his rule. His reduced dependency on them, along with his relationship with me and his new network of friends, offered him enough support to carry out his promise to leave.

Sandy, my patient who used the splitting defense so frequently that it disrupted one friendship after another, came to a different conclusion regarding continued contact with her family. Sandy’s treatment involved our working on her use of splitting in the therapy hour. She came in after reading my book The Illusion of Love, saying that she didn’t want to waste any time and was only willing to talk to a “top-notch” person. Whenever a patient idealizes me (that is, when a patient sees me from the hopeful self), I immediately become alert to the probability that they are using the splitting defense. Once I am idealized, I know that a sudden devaluation is just around the corner. Sandy was an intellectual powerhouse, so I approached her as if she were a colleague and explained to her the process of splitting. I tried to preempt a wounded self attack and offered her insights into the ways that her personality operated. I urged her to keep an eye out for her wounded self—particularly in regards to a sudden devaluation of me. I mentioned this possibility while she was in her hopeful self, and she could not believe that she would ever see me in a negative manner—after all I was “top-notch.”

Note that my approach to any given patient varies given their individual characteristics. I would have never taken this approach with Brett, the computer hacker, who resisted all my efforts, or with William, who would have mocked any explanation of personality functions. Sandy, however, was curious and interested in psychological functioning, and we developed a powerful alliance. One afternoon she called my answering service and excitedly reported that she had split into her wounded self because after our session she began to see me as a fraud and charlatan. Rather than taking her sudden devaluation of me seriously, she was observing herself from a distance. She even noted that she wanted to work her new understanding of psychology into one of her screenplays. Sandy’s work with me proceeded rapidly because of her cooperation and willingness to explore the functioning of her personality and because she was able to look at—rather than act out—her defenses. We reviewed her history of flare-ups with her friends and traced the frustrations or losses that provoked her to switch from her hopeful self to her wounded self. She wrote several letters of apology to the friends that she had become suddenly angry with, though (wisely) she did not go into the details of why she got so angry. We spent a good deal of time reviewing her relationship with her abusive mother and exploitative sister, and we discussed how her need of them could so swiftly shift into contempt. Sandy concluded that her mother’s physical and emotional abuse of her as a child gave her the right to drop all concerns for her and simply remain in infrequent phone contact. She was able to follow the rule “never complain, never explain” and much to her surprise, her mother never even noticed the decrease in interaction. Sandy continued to work on integrating her identity and eventually began to date once again.

Finally, Gary, the grandiose undergraduate who sued the university, needed no help separating from his family, since he was already living on his own. His issues (like William’s) involved his overactive wounded self, as he often antagonized others in authority positions. He initially came for therapy just after his graduation because of a severe depression caused by the sudden drop in his status—he lost his self-definition as a student-celebrity who was “fighting” for student rights. We worked well for several years and then terminated. Gary worked for a timber harvesting company and learned to love the forest. He became skilled in the use of chainsaws and learned the principles of good forestry. He was a member of an outdoor club and returned to therapy because he was in considerable difficulty with a number of the most prominent and senior members. Gary related to the club officers in the same way he related to the university—namely, he argued with nearly all the decision they made. Unlike the university setting, where decorum was a way of life, a number of the older men in the hiking club took him aside after a meeting and suggested that he “get lost.” This powerful confrontation faced him with more direct aggression than he was used to. Like most angry young men with large wounded selves, he was used to dishing out abuse but very sensitive when it came back his way. This difficulty was the crack in his defenses that I needed, as for the first time Gary acknowledged that he needed my help. He had developed attachments to the club and enjoyed both the organized hikes and the sense of belonging that he got from being a member. He viewed conservation of the forest as a priority and respected others who shared this view, though he had been unable to control the hostility in his wounded self. He had damaged his reputation quite thoroughly in a short period of time, and we looked at ways that he might regain the goodwill of his fellow members.