If You Had Controlling Parents: How to Make Peace with Your Past and Take Your Place in the World [Hardcover]

Dan Neuharth (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 9, 1998

Do you sometimes feel as if you are living your life to please others? Do you give other people the benefit of the doubt but second-guess yourself? Do you struggle with perfectionism, anxiety, lack of confidence, emotional emptiness, or eating disorders? In your intimate relationships, have you found it difficult to get close without losing your sense of self?

If so, you may be among 15 million adults in the United States who were raised with unhealthy parental control. Too much or the wrong kinds of control in childhood can cause lasting problems in adulthood, and these connections are often subtle and hard to spot. If you have problems or habits that stubbornly resist change, they may be symptoms of unresolved issues with a controlling parent or upbringing.

In this groundbreaking book, accomplished family therapist Dr. Dan Neuharth offers a self-test to help you identify whether you are facing problems in adulthood caused by unhealthy control in childhood. You will understand both how and why your parents may have overcontrolled you and find dozens of practical suggestions that can help you solve your problems at the very root.

This book will enable you to quiet your "inner critics," bring more balance to your moods and relationships, increase your optimism and assertiveness, and achieve greater autonomy. It offers a variety of ways to deal with stressful family holidays, parents who still control, and parental aging and mortality. It will help you to make peace with your past and break the cycle of control so you can avoid overcontrolling your own children and other loved ones.

Based on extensive interviews and research and packed with thought-provoking insights, If You Had Controlling Parents also includes engaging profiles of a richly diverse group of adults who grew up overcontrolled. These inspiring examples of how others have come to grips with the detrimental consequences of early control will provide you with a road map for accelerating your own growth and healing. If you have felt driven to pursue your parents' values and dreams ahead of your own, this compassionate book explains that no one is to blame and reminds you that unhealthy control is a generations-old cycle that can stop with you.

If your parents controlled you in unhealthy ways, they may have unwittingly planted land mines in your psyche. As a result, you may tiptoe through life expecting buried danger, not treasure, in your path. You may wait...and wait...for permission to love, succeed, and feel content. Permission you're not sure how to get. Permission you may have difficulty granting to yourself.

This book is packed with features to help you thrive even if you had far too little permission to be yourself as a child. Knowledge is power, and powerful growth and healing come from understanding, not blaming, your parents or upbringing. You'll discover:

Fifty reasons why people control in unhealthy ways--and how recognizing these reasons can help you cope with controlling mates, friends, family members, or work associates

How overcontrol of your eating, dress, privacy, social life, speech, and feelings in childhood may still hamper you in adult life

How controlling families use "Truth Abuse" to cement unhealthy loyalties that last for years--and how to gain autonomy

The eight styles of controlling parenting--Smothering, Depriving, Perfectionistic, Cultlike, Chaotic, Using, Abusing, and Childlike

If you or someone you love grew up with unhealthy control, this book offers discovery and resolution. With the guidance of accomplished family therapist Dr. Dan Neuharth, discover what may lie underneath some of your most stubborn and troubling habits, patterns, or problems and resolve your relationship with your parents, whether they are living or dead. If your childhood felt like a scene from Mommie Dearest or The Great Santini--or if you simply feel confused about how you were raised--make peace with your past so you can truly take your place in the world.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

As Edmund Burke said, "The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse." This is sometimes excruciatingly true with parents. There are the typically anxious ones who get a little uptight about letting their teenagers borrow the car, and then there are the rigid kinds who won't even let their kids leave the house when they want to--or even eat or go to the bathroom when they need to.

Written for the 14 million adult children who've survived an upbringing with the latter type of parents, If You Had Controlling Parents takes the classic Toxic Parents to a new level. Author Dan Neuharth, Ph.D., a family therapist, knows his subject thoroughly; he survived a childhood with a father who has the candor to refer to himself as "an S.O.B."

Neuharth says, "If your parents controlled you in unhealthy ways, they may have planted land mines in your psyche." Research shows that behaviors and traits exhibited by adult children of controlling parents include the following: depression, low self-esteem, distorted self-image, eating disorders and other addictions, stress-related health problems, inability to sustain an intimate relationship, and more. While this may seem like a heavy lot to handle, Neuharth maintains there's always hope of overcoming the past and changing yourself--even if it means making the drastic move of cutting off contact with one or both of your parents.

He gives a lengthy self-test to determine if your parents were controlling; gives profiles of eight typical styles of controlling parents to help you better recognize how you may be presently affected by your upbringing; and then delves into the process of understanding why your parents acted the way they did in order to start healing emotionally. This is especially important, he says, if you now have children of your own and want to stop the damaging cycle of parental control. He doesn't give a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all recovery plan, but rather suggests several "paths to healing" and exercises to help you, as he terms it, "emotionally leave home." The book's subtitle--"A Guide for Letting Go of Anxiety, Self-Blame and Perfectionism and Improving Assertiveness, Boundaries and Confidence"--says it all. This is self-help at its best.

From Library Journal

Although the term "controlling parent" most often brings to mind a domineering parent, there are actually several ways in which a parent may use control. Labeling the types as smothering, cultlike, abusing, using, depriving, perfectionistic, chaotic, and childlike, Neuharth describes the characteristics of each, giving examples. The emphasis is on understanding parenting behaviors and their effects, as the author asserts that understanding is the key to future therapeutic success. The final section describes some steps, e.g., emotionally leaving home and writing down one's experiences, as coping techniques. These ideas are not innovative, but, as self-help materials are always in demand, this would be a beneficial purchase for most public libraries.?Susan McCaffrey, Haslett H.S., MI
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1st edition (September 9, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060191910
• ISBN-13: 978-0060191917
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (48 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #213,460 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

76 of 79 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars fantastic book, May 20, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: If You Had Controlling Parents: How to Make Peace with Your Past and Take Your Place in the World (Paperback)

This book was written for those of us who grew up in an unhealthy environment, and had parents who controlled us in unhealthy ways. The author emphasizes working through our issues as adults, not playing "blame games." Interviews with people from all walks of life are liberally quoted throughout each chapter.

What makes this book exceptional is that the author is advocating education and change, not revenge. He shows how examining your parents' history in detail can help you heal and move forward as a fully functioning adult free to make decisions based on something else than what your parents' would say.

Controlling parents don't have to be outwardly abusive nor do they always have malevolent intentions towards their children. However, trauma stays with a person and its after-effects can be passed on to the next generation.

The author clearly contrasts unhealthy with healthy parenting and offers checklists to help the reader. He explores why people overcontrol, and he provides exercises to help the reader work through his or her feelings. Most helpfully, he reiterates that it was not the reader's fault, and it is not required that the reader change - but if he or she begins to explore that possibility, it can lead to great rewards.

67 of 70 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book to understand sibling rivalry in "adult children"ÿ, November 20, 1999

By 

Carol Huston, Ph.D. - See all my reviews

This review is from: If You Had Controlling Parents: How to Make Peace with Your Past and Take Your Place in the World (Paperback)

I am a fifty-one year old single parent and college professor who, on the outside, appears to have a successful life. My career goals have been met--twice--and my appearance is one of a confident female in her field. My two children are in college and doing well in this age of disconnectedness between parents and children,

What my friends and colleagues do not see is my inner life of poorly chosen relationships, broken dreams, self-hate, and fear of failure. After years of therapy, I knew that there was something not right in my original family--sibling agression, phobias, etc.--that I feared confronting. Through Dr. Neuharth's book, I targeted the problem and now know I am not unique in being a child of controlling parents, and that my siblings are struggling with their own self-doubt and fear. This book takes a simple approach to understanding a complex problem by explaining why so many of us are still struggling with just trying to grow up. What a revelation!

I recommend this book to anyone who feels there is a problem with themselves but are not able to put their finger on the reason and who would like to finally do so. The format of checklists with dialog cuts to the chase without having to read through volumes of related literature.

I have sent copies to my brothers and sisters and can now feel 'okay' about my decision to put space between my parents and me while I learn to deal with the situation. This was the best book I have ever read to sort out the "whys" of my feelings: a definite 'MUST-READ'!

105 of 115 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A spark of hope has entered my life........, January 7, 2000

By 

"lovinlife8" (Washington) - See all my reviews

This review is from: If You Had Controlling Parents: How to Make Peace with Your Past and Take Your Place in the World (Paperback)

This book is one of the best self help books I have read in a long time. It dealt more with the emotional than the physical abuse in childhood. I have always had a hard time because to me emotional abuse specially when mixed with religion can be so easily justified in your mind. You can feel like "something is really wrong here", but then in the same breath say "well they love me so much and are just obeying God and what he requires of parents". I have been eaten up with guilt for the rebellion against my parents that I displayed as a teenager. Now though I realize I rebelled against their control, not against them inorder to hurt them or make them miserable. I read this book, started seeing a therapist and confronted my parents and let me tell you how much freedom I feel for the first time in life. I actually feel happy, and a great sense of hope. What do I owe my parents? Why am I so fearful of hurting their feelings? Why can't I just do what is healthy for me? The book answered these questions and the exercises were wonderful. We need more books like this one because obviously there is a problem in parenting that needs to be looked at and changed fast! Kids are becoming more violent, less respectful of authority, and completely losing any conscience what-so-ever. So if I can break the generation sin that has been passed down for generations, then I am thankful I was put in the home I was put in and strong enough to SURVIVE!