Why You’re Still Controlled By Your Family of Origin

Welcome to the Overcoming Sexual Abuse podcast where you get the tools and inspiration to help you overcome childhood sexual abuse. I’m your host Christina Enevoldsen, certified coach, author, and incest survivor, and I’m here to help you heal and live your very best life. 

Even if you’ve developed boundaries in other relationships, it can be especially difficult to set boundaries with your family. They may still see you as a child and might even feel entitled to have a say in your life. Though it can feel frustrating and even shameful to revert to childhood roles, I share powerful tools for finally asserting yourself so you’re free to live life on your own terms. 

This topic was inspired by an email. And by the way, you’re welcome to email me with questions or topics that you’re interested in. And in the email I received, the writer describes feeling empowered in most relationships that she has but when it comes to her family of origin, she’s easily triggered and doesn’t feel like she can fully be herself. She also expressed feeling shame about not being more assertive and standing up for herself. 

So let’s dig into this. 

So, I want to talk about the shame first, and I can really relate to this. Shame for not standing up for myself popped up a lot for me over the years. And this is very common when you’re learning to assert yourself and expressing what you want and what you need. And I talk about this in Episode 6, “Guilt Over Setting Boundaries.” 

There’s the old system, the abusive family system, where your boundaries were not only not affirmed but they were violated. It’s not only the sexual violation but the right to your own space and thoughts and emotions and opinions and desires and preferences and all of those things. And preferences is a big one because when you’re treated as though your preferences are invalid they’re irrelevant, that it’s self-centered to have preferences, that your preferences are wrong, that makes it really hard. 

And when you’re acclimated to this way of living, it takes time to adjust to a new way. And it’s important to validate that, to acknowledge it. And the process of this adjustment, it’s really important to have compassion for yourself and to allow for the process. 

So I had a tiny experience with this recently when we visited St. Croix. Here in the States, I’ve been driving on the right side of the road as long as I’ve been driving, which is over 40 years now. And in St. Croix, they drive on the left side of the road. And that was a struggle for me even though I was just a passenger in the car. I wasn’t even the driver but you know I was anticipating what other drivers on the road would do and where our car was gonna go and that was really hard so especially when it came to right and left turns it just all felt so so wrong. 

Maybe another comparison might be closer to what it’s actually like when you’re trying to change and assert yourself when you’re used to not being allowed to do that. So maybe you could compare it to if you’d been in prison for 18 years of your life. And in prison, you know, you’re confined to this small space and you don’t have a whole lot of privacy, your identity is stripped, you’re limited in where you can go and what you can do. Everything is permission-based. You’re told when and where and what to eat and just compliance is a way of life. And then you’re released. And instead of everything being dictated to you, now, you have choices and not only options available to you, but you’re responsible for making those choices. And you haven’t been exercising that decision muscle and it’s exhausting just to make even the tiniest decisions. 

And in the same way, freedom from control is completely disorienting. It’s just unfamiliar. And how does the brain respond to unfamiliar things? It thinks it’s a threat. And so freedom actually feels threatening. And what do you want to do when you feel threatened? You seek comfort in what’s familiar to you. And so there’s this added layer that makes it even more challenging then to break free from this way of reverting to childhood roles and just complying. And that’s because there’s a difference between, “This is the way that we do things here” in, you know, this culture and “This is the way we do things and if you don’t comply your life is in danger.” 

In my abusive family, it helped me to survive to see things from my parent’s perspective, you know, to argue with them, to stand up to them, to resist them, as though I didn’t, as though I thought that they were the ones in the wrong. But if I had, that would have put me in more danger, mentally, emotionally, and physically. And I took responsibility for their feelings, for making them happy. I was cheerful because they didn’t like uncomfortable emotions. And I became helpful because they liked a clean house. 

And so basically my job was to be like them and to do what they wanted. And that meant then I was orienting myself to them, and their needs, and their wants instead of my own. And so this discounting myself, squishing myself, that was taking care of myself. That was keeping myself safer. That was self care, because to do otherwise would have led to very possibly worse consequences. And though I did eventually have better options for caring for myself, I carried those same patterns throughout my life. 

And everything about childhood abuse teaches you to discount yourself. Someone hurts you and you believe that they have a right to hurt you. That being abused means you’re less valuable, you’re deserving of those bad things, you’re unworthy of protection. 

And when you’re neglected, the neglect might be extensive. But at the very least, if you are sexually abused and you’re still living with the effects now, you were neglected in, at the very least, two ways. You were unprotected and you were unsupported. Because it wasn’t your job to keep yourself safe. It was your parents’ job. And when something then bad happened to you from being unprotected, you should have been able to go to them and to get the emotional support that you needed. And if they didn’t create a space for you to share your experience with them or to get the follow-up care that you needed, that was on them. Or even if they didn’t communicate to you that they were a safe place to go with that when you were hurt, then that was neglect. 

And maybe the neglect went even further than that. Maybe you were treated like a burden. An inconvenience or too much trouble, too needy. Maybe you were accused of wanting too much attention. And maybe on top of that, your physical needs weren’t met either. 

So even if your parents had the best intentions. Maybe they were overburdened emotionally or financially and couldn’t give you what you needed. That was still neglect. 

And the result of all of that is that you take on roles where you support your family instead of your family supporting you. Try not to need too much. Don’t ask for too much. And in a healthy functional family, a child just gets to be a child. You don’t have to navigate landmines and you don’t have to feel constant stress about where your needs are coming from. And you just get to be carefree and you can play and learn and grow. And that’s it. That’s your job as a child. And that feels very unfamiliar to me, how about you? 

And when you have to take care of your family, when their needs and their desires and their preferences come first, when it’s survival to make sure they’re happy, when it’s survival to discount yourself and who you are and what you want, when are you supposed to stop that? What exactly is the date that’s supposed to happen? 

Because as a child, it’s survival to comply when the threat, whether it’s this overt threat, this warning that you’re told, “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about” Or if it’s just covert, it’s something that you just know intuitively, no, our family doesn’t do that. It’s not safe to do that here.

And so when the threat, whether it’s over to covert, is that you’re less loved. If you don’t think and feel and behave like us, that’s a serious threat. Because a child isn’t able to survive on their own. It’s literally a matter of life and death to comply. 

And then you grow up and you become an adult and you earn money and maybe you move away from them and you have more resources and choices available to you. However, just because you don’t require them for day-to-day survival, each of us has a built-in biological attachment to family. And that’s supposed to be a lifelong support. It’s not about dependence on them or independence from them, but interdependence. It’s supposed to be mutually supportive that they’re there for you and you’re there for them. It’s not all on one person to take care of everybody or keep the family together. And it’s not on a few people to take care of the rest of the family. And it’s not all for one or two family member’s benefit. The family unit is supposed to be for everyone’s benefit. And that’s what healthy relationship is. It’s mutually beneficial. 

And of course, you don’t have any control over the family that you were born into. You don’t have any control over how they started, and if they want to change and grow with you now, if they want to heal with you now. And you might be working really hard at changing the patterns that you’ve lived with, and they may not have any interest in coming alongside of you and doing this journey with you. And they may feel entitled to keep receiving the benefit of your compliance. And they might even view you as a threat to their system and their way of doing things. And they might see your growth as a rejection of them, as a criticism of them, as a judgment that they didn’t do everything right, that they were inadequate, that they’re wrong, that you don’t respect them or love them, that you wanting to be different from them feels like you’re saying they aren’t good enough. 

And just notice if they think those things and feel angry or sad, maybe they feel a little bit guilty or ashamed or any other uncomfortable emotion, it’s not your job to take care of their emotions. It’s not your job to make them happy. That’s taking care of them instead of letting them take care of themselves. 

They might want to control you but to frame it as love. They might be concerned about some financial decisions that you’ve made or the type of career you’ve chosen or the people that you’ve chosen to date, the weight you’ve gained or how you’re expressing spirituality. 

And they absolutely do have a right to be concerned. And that’s because their concern is their emotion. And they can feel whatever they choose to feel. But their concern isn’t yours to fix. It doesn’t become your obligation. 

My parents used to use this as a way to control me. They would say things like, “I’m just saying this because I love you.” And they thought their love gave them a right to decide what was best for me. But love isn’t about ownership or control. 

Now, it feels very uncomfortable to stop this pattern of compliance and pleasing them. And it’s really awkward to get used to that and it feels wrong. And remember, it was survival to comply, and your brain wants you to be safe, so it sends this message that, “Hey, there’s a threat happening here if you stand up for yourself.” So if you assert your boundaries, then that means you’re in danger. If you represent yourself accurately, if you are your true self, if you’re authentic, according to the growth you’ve experienced, that feels really dangerous. 

And so part of you wants to assert yourself and another part of you wants to fit in and be loved and approved of. And just notice what kind of relationship it is that you’re only loved and approved of and you belong if you shrink yourself, if you pretend to be somebody else, if you have to agree with them or be like them, do things the way they do things. And that’s not at all what love is and I get it because in childhood we’re forced to settle for this version of love because that’s the only option and so we take it. But you know what that’s not what love is. That’s not real love.

And so a part of you wants to assert yourself and another part of you wants to fit in and be loved and approved of. And one of the keys is to recognize that those are two separate parts of you that you need to work with. And one is the child self that feels vulnerable. And her main drive really is to seek out love and connection. She views asserting yourself as dangerous because that’s what she’s used to, that’s what she’s learned and she’s sure it’s true, that it really is dangerous. And that need for love and connection is a very valid, real need that we all have as humans. So she’s not wrong. 

But there’s this other part of you. And this other part is the inner teen self, and she craves boundaries and authenticity. She wants to be herself. And this part of you wants to assert your truth. She’s done being kicked around, so she’s really ready for boundaries. But this part of you, though, she has really good intentions, and these are very, again, these are very valid needs, this need for authenticity. But though she has good intentions, it’s the part of you that judges you for not standing up to your family. 

And that’s why it’s such a struggle because you have both the need for connection and the need to be authentic. And both are so, so important. We’re supposed to be able to experience those things together. We’re supposed to be loved by our family while being real. 

And when you don’t have that from your family, you can still offer that to yourself. That’s where the loving parent part of you comes in, because just because your needs were dismissed or invalidated or ignored or unmet in childhood, that doesn’t mean those needs went away. They’re still every bit as important now. It’s you who’s equipped to meet them now, And that’s the loving parent part of you that needs to affirm those different parts and those different desires and those different needs that you have in you, even when they conflict with each other. 

And even if you feel inadequate or resent caring for your needs now, that’s because your needs were neglected in childhood. Because people whose needs were met who were treated well, they find it easy to care for themselves. And so if you struggle with resistance to stepping into care for yourself, that’s a sign of just how much you need your own loving care. 

And one of the ways you can know that you have that ability within you is by the way that you care for other people. Who have you offered comfort to and nurturing and guidance and protection and support. It was likely it just flowed out of you. It was easy because that’s what’s in you. 

And the thing to know about stepping into the loving parent role is that your nervous system has to be regulated because when you’re in a dysregulated state, you’re not accessing your loving parent, you’re still reacting out of those child-like roles, you’re still in survival. And if you’re not sure how to regulate yourself, listen to episode 10, “Soothing the Pain While You Heal.” 

The loving parent is calm and brings calm to the other inner family members. The loving parent is the part of you that’s equipped with compassion and strength and can guide both the inner child and the inner teen. 

And the loving parent needs to first comfort the child’s self. So acknowledge the pain and the fear that she feels with the threat that she’s going to be rejected, that she’s not going to be loved. 

And something that I found in my own life is that it was so much easier to set boundaries. It suddenly became possible with my parents when I looked after my inner child. And I kind of compare it to when you’re starving, you’ll eat anything. And my inner child was starving. She was willing to, because she was desperate, you know, she was willing to run back to the abuse of my family of origin out of just that desperation. And so when I filled her up with my love and acceptance and approval and attention, then she wasn’t starving anymore. She was quite full. And then she could afford to be picky. She could afford to be more particular about who she wanted to be around. And she didn’t need to settle for the so-called love of my parents that came with just so many strings attached and was never actually love in the first place. 

And when your inner child feels safe and loved, you can direct your attention then to your inner teen. And remember, she’s the one who wants her freedom and she wants boundaries. And she wants you to be honest and authentic. And she’s also the part of you that really needs boundaries because she’s an activist and she’s willing to just burn it all to the ground. And this part of you, if she is left without guidance, then she gives your power away because as long as she’s in charge, she can say and do things that will escalate the conflict. She’s very reactive. And so many of her desires are healthy, but she does need boundaries and how to express them and meet them. And the loving parent from the regulated state, that’s that calm state that’s present and non-reactive, is equipped then to strategize the appropriate boundaries and how to communicate those boundaries. 

If you’re with your family and you realize that you’ve reverted to the roles that they wanted you to play, recognize, okay, that’s the inner child wanting to stay safe, wanting to feel loved and accepted. And before the inner teen reacts with shaming accusations for complying or angry reactions toward your family, make sure you’re regulated and step in as your loving parents telling your inner teen that you’ll handle the situation and then reassure the inner child that you’re there for her no matter who is or isn’t. 

And if you assert your boundaries and your family doesn’t adjust then your loving parent can step in and offer the comfort to the wounded and fearful child that’s inside of you. She’s never abandoned because she has you. 

I’ve created a simple worksheet for processing your fears around standing up for yourself. To get that, go to the show notes page at overcomingsexualabuse.com/33. 

Thanks for joining me today. I’m bringing you lots more on healing and boundaries and self-care and family dysfunction and so much more. So be sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss any of it.