Not only
pleasant people get old
“Child abuse
casts a shadow the length of a life time”—Herbert Ward
My previous blog addressed caring for elderly
parents. This
article discusses the issue of becoming a caregiver for
parents who were abusive or neglectful when you were a
child. Some
adult children choose not to become caregivers. If you have
experienced abuse by a parent, it simply may not be
practical to care for them when empathy and concern are
required.
For adult children who choose to become a
caregiver to a parent who was abusive or neglectful, it
is important to realize that there is no simple formula
for defining one’s obligations to a parent(s) who didn’t
fulfill their own.
The research on adult survivors of childhood
abuse who later become caregivers for their abusive
parent(s) is limited but recent research has indicated
that individuals who report having endured childhood
maltreatment are more vulnerable to depression than
non-abused caregivers when caring for their parents. If you choose
to care for a formerly abusive parent, you need to be
aware of the risk.
Some issues to consider:
Reduce your
risk. One factor
that seems to lessen the vulnerability to negative
outcomes involves the type of coping strategies used. It appears
that coping strategies that involve escape or avoidance
(e.g., denial, using drugs or alcohol, emotional eating)
are more likely to lead to negative outcomes such as
depression than coping strategies that encourage people
to take action to alter a stressful situation. The latter is
called problem focused coping.
Set firm
boundaries. One type of
problem focused coping is to set firm boundaries to
protect yourself from your parent. You cannot control
their behavior but you can stop allowing them to control
yours. It’s
OK to no longer tolerate being treated with meanness or
disrespect.
Self-awareness
is important. It
is important to recognize any abusive feelings that
might surface in yourself after coping with life-long
abuse by a parent and get help before your behavior
carries over into elder abuse. Individual
psychological therapy can be enormously helpful if you
find yourself in this situation or if the abusive parent
dies before there was a resolution to the childhood
abuse or if there was never an apology.
There may be societal or religious pressures to
care for a parent “no matter what”. For outsiders
who only see a very polite, frail, gray haired man or
woman who sits waiting for visitors that never come, it
may be hard for them to imagine that the person was once
a tyrant to their children. In the end, if
you choose not to be a caregiver or to limit your
involvement, it’s important to not see yourself as a
terrible person and to recognize that outsiders don’t
always know the whole story.
“Of all the
judgments we pass in life, none is more important than
the judgment we pass on ourselves.” – Nathaniel
Branden
Dr. Lisa Berg-Kolody, PhD