Why Do We Mimic Behaviors We Despise in our Parents?

When you were a child, you probably remember swearing that you would never grow up and treat your children the way your parents treated you.  You promised yourself that you would be better.  But many years later, you find yourself behaving towards your children in similar ways.  This behavior is called mimicking – but why would you mimic a behavior that you so greatly despised?

One reason we become like our parents is to punish ourselves and relieve our guilt for hurting them since as children, we blame ourselves when our parent continually acts badly.  If you are unhappy, suffer, are disappointed, or out of control, then you have paid yourself back for the suffering you feel you caused them.  And it seems that our conscience wants to punish ourselves exactly in the way we feel we’ve made our parents or siblings suffer.

Does this sound self-destructive?  Of course it does, and it is!  Surely you’d prefer to not fly off the handle and rail at your children, and you’d surely rather not suffer when they don’t submit to you.  But since you feel you caused your parents or siblings to suffer, then you feel that you deserve to suffer in the same way.  This self-blame is central to why we behave in ways we hate.

Another reason for mimicking is to relieve your bad feelings over possibly being better off than your parents.  At a talk I gave, a woman told me that she would sit with her obese mother during meals and snacks and mimic her overeating because she thought that this would comfort her mother since they would be “in it together.”

Another person may mimic parental behavior in order to stop thinking about the past traumatic experience and try to remove it as far as possible from his or her memories.  In order to do this that person may become the one who mistreats, instead of the one who is mistreated.  For example, as an adult dominating your children, you may forget that you yourself submitted to domineering parents.

The last reason for mimicking is that by doing so you hope to meet others who can show you how to better cope with the behavior that harmed you.  These new people that you meet become role models for you in learning new ways of dealing with behavior that was painful or difficult for you in the past.  If you’ve ever wondered why many couples have extreme opposite personalities that often clash, this is why – each one is learning from the other how to improve on his or her own shortcomings.

These four reasons help explain why, in spite of your best intentions, you may have acquired those qualities of your parents that you hated the most.  Now, think of yourself.   Take out a pad of paper and write down situations where you have seen your parents’ behavior coming out in you.  Do any of these explanations apply to you?  Try to think of ways in which mimicking has been the root of the behavior you wish you could stop.

If you have any questions about this post, or if you have any personal questions or comments you would like to share, please comment and I will get back to you.

Rebellion: A Way to Survive Your Parents

Rebellion is a refusal to comply with parental demands or needs and the restrictions they impose.  A certain amount of rebellion is normal and healthy in the development of a child’s independence and control.  But when a parent’s expectations are extreme, that child will rebel against accomodating his or her parents in order to fight their attempts to limit the normal goals we set for ourselves.

Rebellion is the child’s way of communicating to the parent(s) that their specific actions are not only distressing, but that they need to STOP.  And that would be fine if not for one problem: Parents have their own hidden self-defeating motivations from their own childhoods which cause them to behave badly and prevent them from receiving their child’s message in a mature way.

When children fight against excessively accommodating the flaws of their parents and siblings, they suffer so much guilt for their rebellion that they resume accommodating in order to relieve their guilt.  This leaves them shifting back and forth between accommodation and rebellion, never finding relief.  These behaviors will carry forward into relationships in the child’s adult life.

So how can you get past this self-defeating behavior?  Through therapy and introspection, you can learn to understand the reasons behind your accommodation and rebellion and you can learn to tell the difference between reasonable and unreasonable requests and behaviors on the part of others.  In this way, you will be better able to gauge when it is healthy for you to accommodate others wishes and needs and when it is not, you will learn how to stop the rebellious behavior when you feel resistant to accommodating, and you will learn to not feel guilty when you have made the decision to not accommodate others.

If you have any question, please post them and I will respond.

Accomodation: A Self-Defeating Motivation

You have developed mechanisms to survive your family.  These mechanisms are behind the behaviors that you have and don’t like.  The big three mechanisms are: accommodation, rebellion and mimicking.  Once you understand why you use these mechanisms, you can figure out how to stop using them, and your behaviors – the ones that seemed impossible to change – will change.

In this post, I will address the mechanism of accommodation.

To maintain the important ties to our parents or siblings, to feel loved by them, we may accommodate to or comply with their reasonable and unreasonable expectations.  When we comply with their reasonable expectations we are okay.  But what about when we comply with their serious flaws and damaging expectations?  Not so okay, huh?  Too much accommodation causes us to ignore our own interests, goals and destiny.  So why do we do this?  Because their guilt provoking words and deeds show us that they’re hurt when we don’t comply or accommodate.  Maybe they become agitated  – he screams, she loses control, maybe they become violent.  Their insults, screaming and other such behaviors are evidence that your parents are fragile and that you have wounded them.

They will often pout, withdraw, reject you as a sign of having been hurt by you.
Often they will tell you directly, “How could you do this to me?” “Just wait until you have kids.”  “I hope that your kids do to you what you have done to me.” These manipulations are designed to get you to accommodate to their expectations no matter the cost to your best interests. If you don’t go along you feel guilty about hurting them and therefore continue to repeat a pattern of behavior that you don’t like in yourself.

In my next posting, I will discuss the mechanism of rebellion.  If you have any questions about this post or any others, please feel free to ask.  I will try to get back to you speedily.