You can be authoritarian without manifesting all of the qualities and characteristics that authoritarians often display. Maybe you aren’t filled with hatred and a need to punish; maybe your authoritarian nature is more a function of an intense conventionality and an anxious need to control your environment. That doesn’t mean that harm hasn’t been done.
Here’s Monica’s story:
I have dealt with an authoritarian personality in the person of my mother. There was tremendous love between us, and, for many years, enmeshment also. I didn’t do any adolescent rebellion until my late 20’s. I “did a geographic” repeatedly starting at age 15, always trying to see the world, the world beyond her boundaries which she ruled, from my perspective, with an iron hand and a right way for everything. She was always astonished that I was not afraid to travel, but I loved figuring out the rules and roles in new places without reference to what she thought was correct. I learned to trust my intuition and feelings.
I think my mother was more of an authoritarian follower than a leader because she was always trying to avoid friction and make sure that everybody was happy. All my friends wanted her for their mother and all her students (she was a master teacher from kindergarten to 3rd grade) worshipped her until her death. That always confused me, but years of therapy helped me see that they loved her because she thought they were all bright and wonderful and she provided structure. Most of them joyfully lived up to her orderly standards and expectations, then went home to daily chaos.
I, on the other hand, had to live with her in a “just so” storybook life. For years I could not remember my dreams and figured out that I never was allowed to dawdle in that half-awake state where dreams are accessible. I woke up to her voice, like a gong, with my perfectly matched outfit laid out on the other twin bed: pastel, hand-smoked dress, matching panties, socks with lace trim, grosgrain hair ribbons. That was the role she had cast me in.
I used to think that she also wrote the script. I finally got angry when I noticed that she always ignored me as a child when I talked about something that I was very excited or passionate about, something that she did not comprehend or had not scripted. She loved to watch me saying trite, clichéd chit-chat sorts of things: she loved me when I was her perfect “jewel of a child,” as her friends liked to call me.
Much later, when I was in my 50’s, my mother asked why she always had to hear about my projects and adventures (my travels, my work in independent film) from others. I told her that I had learned long ago that she was not interested in what interested me and I described how she used to talk right through me at the dinner table, just to ask for the salt. She sometimes said that she hated working with adults because they would never just follow the rules and do what they were supposed to, unlike kids. For many years I thought that her rules for everything were commonly held. It took me a while to learn that this was her take on the world and how she managed her own fears.
The personal consequences of this wound were a lack of adult coping skills and severe depression, in spite of an ivy league education and world travel. This made entering the world of work with its blatant racism and sexism hard to deal with. I would hide in my apartment when not at work and finally, I decided to “get married instead of hospitalizing myself.” After having my daughter, I had a surge of insight and energy which took me to therapy in order not to give her “a crazy mama.” Since then I’ve been doing well; had a couple of breakthroughs with my mother, but have continued to have monstrous writing blocks around major projects which is truly debilitating for someone who knew she was a writer at the age of 11.
I built up my skills over the years, but the writing block still stalks me. The bigger the project, the more monstrous the block. There is another consequence that I have become aware of only in the last year: my attachment style and my inability to sustain a relationship with a man. I have truly believed all my life that to give and accept love means that you have to be the part of yourself that the other loves and must give up the rest of yourself. I see now I avoid closeness because I see the choice between being myself in my full, cranky, creative wholeness or being loved by someone else.
A long time ago, I decided to grow up and keep growing, being myself. I’m thinking about returning to therapy to deal with this because, for the first time in my life, I feel lonely. I think this means that I have finally succeeded in getting my mother complex out of my head where she tried to crowd me out of my own mind. Now that I experience a new level of psychic autonomy, I am able to feel lonely. This is an achievement.
What helped? Therapy, workshops, and the serendipitous blessing of friends who really saw me and valued all my stuff that my mother didn’t comprehend or welcome. Most significant was the birth of my daughter which generated the courage to change and grow up without knowing where it would lead. With her, I learned how to love another person and how to accept love.
I did not have a complete break with my mother. We maintained a positive connection, actually improving it after many years, but, except for fifteen years, I maintained the geographical distance that I needed. For those fifteen years, however, I lived next door to her. She was a great help with my daughter when I traveled and they adored each other. Then for two years, I lived with her after I sold my house and decided which way to go — New York City or Los Angeles. One day we re-enacted one of our age-old scenarios and I saw it at the moment. I had disagreed with her and she was walking away with tears in her eyes and her shoulders slumped like “poor pitiful me.” I recognized it and I spoke to it, normalizing the ability to disagree with those you love.
She was astonished! This was a revelation to her, that you could disagree and even get angry without destroying love. Those 15 years next door to her I was very conscious of living my life to my own specifications under her eyes: having men I was involved with in the house without hiding them, writing in my journal in front of her, wearing loud colors and wild hair. She was very literal and concrete. It had been a revelation to me that she thought “writing” meant penmanship (at which she was very good). As I sat writing faster than the speed of light in my journal she commented, “I could never write like that! Nobody would be able to read it.” I laughed and said nobody was supposed to read it, that I was just spilling ideas, feelings, impressions, and images. She was even more astonished.
She had always acted as if she had no inner life and couldn’t imagine that anyone else did either. When I was little, quietly imagining outrageous adventures or reading, she always acted like I was doing “nothing” and encouraged me to go out and play with the other kids. In therapy, I talked about how she seemed to think she had a right to stomp around in my head and re-arrange the furniture — to tell me what to think and how to feel. I am sure that my mother isn’t the worst authoritarian in the world, not by a longshot, but that doesn’t mean that her particular brand of controlling didn’t harm me—and was uncalled for.
If you’ve had the experience of being harmed by a family authoritarian—a parent, sibling, grandparent, aunt or uncle, partner, adult child, etc.—or by someone else close to you—a cleric, teacher, boss, co-worker, etc.—I invite you take the Authoritarian Wound Questionnaire, available here. I also invite you to tell your story, as it is long past time that we got this epidemic of wounding exposed—and ended. Come back each Thursday to read more about authoritarians in the family and please think about taking the Authoritarian Wound Questionnaire and about telling your story.