Exposing My Parents’ Secrets

When your parents are both cruel and hypocritical

Photo by Michael Huh on Unsplash

When parents use their child’s addiction as proof that their child ruined the family, while hiding their own risky past mistakes — these parents think of themselves as spotless — however, all they did was take accountability and replaced it with blame and double standards.

I was picked to carry all the family shame — probably because I was openly-gay living in the Midwest and seen as an easy target

In my family, I became the black sheep. My relatives were told about my drug use when I was 22 (I think — they have been gossiping about me for decades — for some reason), even though my relatives lived nine hours away from us and we never talked to them but once a year. When I first heard of my mother gossiping about my private matters to my relatives, I at first thought she was asking them for help or advice on my struggle — however, that was not the case — my mother just wanted to bad mouth and humiliate her son. My father called me “disgusting” and a “junkie.” My mother called me a “whore,” “slut,” “stupid.” The family story was that my addiction had ruined my siblings’ childhoods and my parents’ lives, and that the support I received — from them — as a struggling teenager and young adult proved how much of a burden I was to the family.

I was picked to be the family scapegoat and identified patient

Family-systems research uses the term scapegoating to describe a process in which a family directs tension, blame, and conflict toward one member. Scapegoating means becoming a container for everyone else’s fear, anger, and shame. Families with an “identified patient,” shows patterns of inconsistent discipline, unresolved conflict between parents, and limited emotional expression or talking about any of the real issues plaguing the family. Calling the child the problem will always be easier than asking the real question: What happened in this house before the negative behavior? [1]

Adults are responsible for how they parent — even when their child is using substances or acting out

My parents' fake narrative did not — of course — account for the fact that I was growing up in an emotionally abusive home. It did not distinguish between a young person in crisis and a defiant, deviant person. It also did not acknowledge that adults are responsible for how they parent, even when their child is using substances or acting out.

Healthy people do not treat addiction or general drug use as a license for abuse

Words such as “junkie,” “disgusting,” and “whore” are identity attacks. They turn a coping crisis into a person’s whole character. Even families that feel frightened, exhausted, or hurt by addiction can speak honestly without treating their relative as contaminated or beyond compassion.

Instead of teaching my siblings compassion and empathy, my parents taught them how to blame and show pity for others — they will carry those abusive patterns into their adult lives with their own kids — and that’s really unfortunate.

All parents have done things in their past — mine are no different

My parents were not strangers to risk, secrecy, or behavior that could have been publicly judged. My father used steroids during his years as a professional bodybuilder in his 20s. My mother, when 19, was posing topless for a man so he could “paint” her, at the same time she dated my father — yet she later used sexually degrading language toward me. My younger siblings drink alcohol and use marijuana — but my parents paid for their college.

My parents provided their children with an uneven moral system — and then condemned them for not knowing “right-from-wrong”

Everyone else’s secrets in the family received privacy, context, money, and forgiveness — mine became family evidence that I was bad. In one study, less favored treatment by parents — even the perception of being less favored — was linked to more delinquent activity and substance use in families seen in households of two types: (1) households with low warmth and low conflict or (2) households with high warmth and high conflict. The warning sign is when one child is given a permanent identity as the defective one, while similar behavior by others is excused, hidden, or treated as normal experimentation. [2]

A family can acknowledge that addiction affected everyone without making one person responsible for every painful feeling in the household. And parents can admit fear and grief without treating their child as shameful.

Seth Jantz | Content creator with a master’s in psychology

Sources

1. Some communication patterns observed in families using an identified patient as a scapegoat
2. Parents’ differential treatment and adolescents’ delinquent behaviors: direct and indirect effects of difference-score and perception-based measures — PubMed