New Book Encourages the Abused to Cut Off Toxic Relatives

Source: G.P. Putnam's Sons

In his new book The Power of Parting: Finding Peace and Freedom Through Family Estrangement, Eamon Dolan sets himself a lofty goal: “to write a work that could do for family abuse something like what Melody Beattie’s classic Codependent No More did for its subject.”

The Power of Parting (set for release on April 1) combines research, reporting, and memoir to show that “parting” can be an empowering, effective response to the heartbreak of family abuse. Dolan hopes to “offer a positive, encouraging view of cutting ties with toxic family members.”

Dolan—a book editor for more than 30 years, currently vice president and executive editor at Simon & Schuster—says he wrote the book that he wanted to read and publish: one providing “encouragement and advice on how to estrange without guilt, but instead with confidence, courage and hope.”

Silence enables abuse

Dolan’s personal history of abuse is worthy of a Charles Dickens novel, and he shows how institutions that could have protected him—church, family, and school—instead enabled maltreatment.

He identifies four types of childhood abuse: psychological, physical, and sexual abuse, and neglect. Bystanders—abusers, victims, witnesses—say nothing, tolerating these behaviors. Dolan calls silence the “pervasive mechanism” of abuse; for survivors, tormentors, and society as a whole, “it's a default setting.”

“Codes of silence are bedrock among institutions, as diverse as law enforcement (the so-called ‘blue wall of silence’) and street gangs (‘snitches get stitches’),” Dolan writes. “Silence is built into the world’s smallest institution—the family—and its largest—the Catholic Church.”

In fact, he charges that history, religion, psychology, psychiatry, politics, and popular culture dismiss or condone maltreatment. For example:

• History and religion: A host of traditions and memes, dating to the Old Testament, caution parents not to “spare the rod and spoil the child.”
• Psychology: Dolan says therapy often fails abuse survivors. Therapists, he writes, learn techniques that foster reconciliation among family members, and they know little about helping patients distance themselves from toxic relatives.
• Psychiatry: Complex posttraumatic stress disorder (CPTSD), the most prevalent disorder arising from child abuse, is not in the handbook used by mental health professionals to diagnose mental disorders, even though C-PTSD evokes a tangle of complications, including shame, guilt, impulsivity, memory impairments, and trouble forming relationships. Instead, C-PTSD is lumped in with the broader category of PTSD.
• Politics: Hitting a child—a form of assault—is legal in any American state. Statutes exist to punish perpetrators of sexual assault, but mechanisms to prevent or uncover the crime are inadequate or nonexistent.
• Popular culture and the positive-thinking movement: Dolan says the culture’s “toxic positivity” encourages the abused to stifle sadness, brush off or gloss over problems rather than face them, forgive, and forget. This forces victims to bury painful emotions, which grants protection to abusers and the societal bystanders who tolerate maltreatment.

Psychological abuse and neglect are even more stealthy and difficult to address. “Neglect is the most common form of abuse because it’s the easiest; all the abuser has to do is nothing,” he writes. “A welter of conditions can draw parents’ attention away from their kids: spousal abuse, drug use, poverty, learning disabilities, physical illness, mental health problems, or the parents’ own experience of childhood abuse.”

He identifies four types of neglect:

• Physical: Parents fail to provide food, clothes, or shelter.
• Educational: Children are inadequately prepared for schooling or never receive it.
• Emotional: Parents ignore, intimidate, humiliate, or otherwise deny the emotional support children need.
• Medical: Parents fail to ensure their children’s health by skipping medical check-ups, vaccinations, dental, and other care.

Parting may not be powerful

I found Dolan’s book informative, comprehensive, and illuminating, as it thoroughly explores abuse and how to respond to it. However, it may lack nuance regarding the myriad reasons that many remain in toxic relationships.

"There are situations where a cutoff may be justified," says psychotherapist Ali-John Chaudhary, who specializes in estrangement. "However, when one chooses to cut off, there's the danger of falling into avoidance as a coping strategy, rather than problem solving or emotionally regulating."

Dolan identifies the particularly harmful pattern of emotional parentification, in which a child provides parents with psychological support and emotional regulation. As the child of a Holocaust refugee, I certainly identified with the experiences of people raised by these neglectful parents.

The decision to cut off from a parent is deeply complex, and one size doesn’t fit all. Sadly, in my case, my mother lost most of her family, including her mother, who would have modeled that role for her daughter. At the age of 12, she was sent to America alone—an unaccompanied minor who lived to be 98. For most of those years, she was psychologically arrested by her trauma, stuck in a 12-year-old’s broken heart. She didn’t see her parents’ decision to send her away as a sacrifice that saved her life; she felt rejected, betrayed, and abandoned by her family.

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Personally, I couldn't in good conscience pursue “the power of parting” by abandoning her. I felt a fundamental compassion and responsibility to provide some family to my damaged mother, whose parents had been murdered by the Nazis. Instead of parting, I tried my best—through reading, therapy, and writing—to explore her Holocaust trauma.

Dolan would probably call this the ultimate act of a parentified child. But it was important to me to understand how her early experiences had shaped her and ultimately defined our relationship. As my compassion and empathy deepened, I gained patience, becoming less rigid in my responses to her.

Many readers may find Dolan’s book liberating in its demand that they ask themselves: Why is my abuser doing this, and what does it cost me to keep them in my life? Dolan's guidance may well provide the validation they need to free themselves from relatives who are a toxic presence in their lives.