Don't Take It Personally: The Art of Dealing With Rejection by Elayne Savage

Author:Elayne Savage
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Family & Relationships, General, Psychology, Personality
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-04-19T06:00:00+00:00

“Hit a Home Run for Me!” (Exploiting)

When parents try to live their lives vicariously through their children, it is a form of exploitation. These parents have some confusion about personal boundaries, they don’t know where they stop and where someone else begins. (More about boundaries in chapter 11.) Vicariousness is often a form of coercion. Children often feel pushed beyond their comfortable limits, but are afraid to say “no” to a parent.

Vicarious parents encourage their children to meet their own unmet goals—vocationally, religiously, or romantically. Or they urge the children to live out their own unfulfilled dreams by being the “performer” the parents never quite became—in school, on the stage, on the playing field.

These parents see their children’s performance in life as a reflection of their own competence. If the children do well, the parents feel like good parents, successful parents. If the children fall below expectations, the parents feel inadequate and shamed. Then the children are often made to feel inadequate and shamed. The children may lose their sense of self, trading “self” for service to the parents.

The children may discover that being in the spotlight is a very lonely place. Bruce recalls how he used to do okay at baseball practice, but he would freeze at bat when his dad showed up at games and yelled out, “Hit a home run for me!” Bruce shudders at remembering the humiliation he felt knowing his dad was up there in the stands, feeling embarrassed that his son would freeze.

What about when parents don’t even show up at games or meets? One man recalls, “Dad kept reminding me what an expensive glove he bought for me, but never once came to see me play.” One client was a championship high-school swimmer whose parents never came to see her compete. The only adult support she got was from her coach. She was so desperate for his attention that she responded to his sexual attention too.

Jay North, the actor who played Dennis in the TV series, Dennis the Menace, described how his aunt behaved when she would accompany him to the set. “She demanded perfection. Everything had to be perfect, and the harder I tried, the more she’d expect of me. It was just such a pressure cooker. Everybody else would congratulate me, and say, ‘Good job, good job,’ and she’d shout, ‘You didn’t play the scene right,’ and slap me across the face.”

I’m familiar with stage moms, too. My mom wanted each of her children to be the star she never became, so she put my brother, Lee, and me in the spotlight from the time we were young. There was always pressure to do poems or skits in front of relatives. My first memory of big-time stardom was when I got a phone call from the Washington Post on my fifth or sixth birthday. The caller informed me that I had just won a contest for writing a poem about a new comic strip, “The Saint.” You’d think I would have been excited, except for one thing—I didn’t write the poem.

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