Hand-Me-Downer

Posted by fxckfeelings on February 13, 2014

If you could ask Mary Cheney or A.J. Soprano, they’d tell you that inheritance, be it material or psychological, is always tricky. That’s because it’s easy to hate yourself when you can’t get rid of an inherited personality trait, like constant anger or depression, which makes it hard to ever feel happy or express love and affection. What life teaches you, however, is that many people find ways to take care of one another and contribute to the world, even when they’re not fully functional or in full control of their dark thoughts and sharp tongues. They deserve respect for whatever good they do when their feelings give them no relief or reward, and their genes don’t give them much of a choice.
–Dr. Lastname

I grew up in a horrid family. My father worked long hours at a couple of jobs leaving my (very young) mother alone with my brother and me. My mother had no clue about parenting and raising children. My home was a miserable cesspool of put-downs, depression, negativity, and yelling. I get that my mother probably grew up herself with a “Mommy Dearest”/”Carrie” mother, but as we all do, I vowed to myself never to torture my children as my mother had done to me. But guess what, I now find myself yelling and haranguing my daughter (but not my son…hmmm?). I think the yelling and disrespectful attitude toward my daughter has been programmed into my DNA. It is my default reaction when I get angry (or when my daughter does anything–wrong– pretty much). I’ve done the anger management, self-help books, etc. I can’t stop. Please give me some advice on how I can stop the “bad psycho mother” cycle. I already see the signs of damage in my daughter.

It’s painful to grow up with an angry, critical parent, but it’s even worse to grow up with a parent who can’t provide for his/her family or care enough to try. Despite the pressures on your immigrant parents, they were able to survive and provide you with a home. Even if it was horrid, it beat the alternative.

So, even if you see yourself as a bad psycho mother, you’re also a caring, providing mother, and you need to remember that. That’s why you need to respect what you do right before picking at what you do wrong, because if you can’t see the big picture, you can’t get at the big issues with your parenting.

For one thing, if you don’t respect your good contributions as a parent, you’ll have a much harder time controlling your anger. Unjust, unmitigated guilt and self-criticism will feed your dark side, not help you manage it. So begin by giving yourself a reasonable assessment.

It seems like you’ve got good values, are doing well with your son, and, since you haven’t mentioned divorce, I assume you’ve got a working partnership. You’ve tried hard to improve your irritability with your daughter, knowing that mother-daughter emotionality is often hard to manage. Your heart is in the right place, so you’re off to a good start.

Instead of trying to change your basic mother-daughter chemistry, consult a coach/therapist who can help you select the issues that require limits and give them your full focus. There’s nothing wrong with giving yourself a time-out to avoid immediate confrontation, and still deliver judgments and levy penalties later, if necessary. There’s also nothing wrong with delegating limit-setting to your partner when possible.

If you’re depressed (and you do show signs of the negative thinking that often accompanies depression), irritability and reactiveness may be symptoms that will improve with medical treatment. Certainly you should learn to confront the kind of bitterly negative thinking you’ve been doing, and medical treatment, if it works on other symptoms, will also reduce your anger.

Just because you’ve been helpless to stop your anger doesn’t mean you’re doomed to follow in your parents’ footsteps and be a bad mother. It also doesn’t mean you haven’t also been a good mother, or that you can’t get better at managing anger, even when the anger itself won’t go away.

Once you’ve learned how to manage negative thinking and become selective in your confrontations, you can do a good job as a mother and give your daughter a new set of footsteps to follow.

STATEMENT:
“I hate feeling as angry as my daughter makes me feel, but it hasn’t stopped me from caring for her and I can see good things about her and our relationship. I can improve the way I manage our conflicts, even if I can’t stop the fact that it’s hard, painful work.”

I wonder how I can help my eighteen-year-old depressed son, given all the depression that already exists on his father’s side (he’s got a depressed father, uncle, and grandmother). I’ve told him he needs to learn to live with depression, but my words just seem to make him more irritable. His father is in a good place right now, but he still doesn’t work, and he was in and out of the hospital for years. He tries to help, but he’s really not too functional, and our son has no patience for him and thinks he’s a deadbeat, which isn’t really fair, given how sick he’s been. So my goal is to help my son deal with his depression, even if his family paints a pretty bleak picture of what his illness means.

Many people, your son probably included, get depressed about depression, particularly when they know someone who’s struggled with it for years, and if that someone is in his family, he’s even more worried about encountering the same genetic doom. So I know you’re not surprised that your son dislikes the topic, but you also can’t be surprised that the idea of learning “to live with depression” seems unlikely to him, given his family’s success rate.

He may also regard his father’s lingering disability as a personal and family failure which leaves him feeling helpless and doubtful about his father’s motivation and the ability of your family to nurture him and protect him from stress. And if the family can’t protect dad, he must feel like his fate is twice as grim.

What you can gain, however, from talking about your family’s experience with depression is not just a chance to advise your son on symptoms and coping strategies, but to give a positive meaning to a life spent with chronic illness. Not that your son’s experience with depression is likely to be as bad as his father’s, but, even if it is, you can assure him that depression need never diminish his accomplishments or self-respect.

For instance, instead of focusing on your husband’s symptoms, talk about the values that have allowed your family to stay together, watch out for one another, and survive hard times. Yes, everyone wants to be happy and happiness is often regarded (by the ill-informed) as a measure of success, but what you want him to know is that, in spite of hardship and pain, you’re proud of what you and your husband have accomplished, the most important part of which was raising your son.

Certainly, you’re aware that treatments for depression are getting better and it’s reasonable to hope that he will have access to more treatment options in the future, regardless of how bad his depressive illness turns out to be. Regardless of his symptoms, however, you’re more interested in what he does with depression than whether he has the condition, and you are confident he can find a way to go on with his life and be the person he wants to be, genetics be damned.

STATEMENT:
“I hate to talk about depression, knowing how much my son hates to hear about it, but I know that, sooner or later, he needs to fight negative thinking about this chronic illness and the way to do it is to take pride in what our family has accomplished in spite of it. I will not be shy about my beliefs or the optimism they give me about our future.”