Dear Dr. Norquist:
I’m having a problem with my mother. I’m seventeen years old and a senior at my High School. In the past, my relationship with my mother has been strained because I used to lie to her a lot about stupid kid things like where I was going and what I was doing, etc. Recently, things have been getting better. Although I know she won’t approve of certain things, I feel like I’m able to be more honest with her about the things I used to lie about. However, at the beginning of this school year I got a car. Along with the car came certain responsibilities and certain freedoms. I abused these freedoms and I had had the car for less than two weeks when I got pulled over on the Palisades Parkway. Now, I wasn’t driving, I had allowed one of my friends to drive because I’m not allowed to have more than one passenger in the car and there were four of us. The police searched my car and found nothing. They searched one of my friends and found marijuana in her bag. She (a year younger than I) was arrested. Another one of my friends was also arrested because he was mouthing off to the cops. My friend who was driving and I got away unscathed. We were lucky. In the weeks following, I was definitely acting weird. Obviously, there was a lot of extra stress. I asked my guidance counselor and school social worker how they thought I should tell my mother. They told me that if she didn’t have to know, then I shouldn’t tell her. I asked my therapist the same thing, she gave me the same answer. They knew and I knew that my mother would skin me alive if she found out. Days turned into weeks and weeks into months and my mom still hadn’t found out. Throughout the days following I’d gotten in trouble for a ton of stupid things (getting a flat tire, coming in past curfew, being “high” when I wasn’t, etc.) and I felt less and less comfortable telling my mother the truth. So I began lying again, and of course, I almost always got caught. Up until last night, things were calming down. The light at the end of the tunnel was visible, but as luck would have it the department head of special education is the mother of one of the kids who had been arrested. My mom heard the whole story. My mother told me that I was a disgrace and that she was ashamed of me. She told me to get out of her sight because I made her sick but then followed me to continue screaming at me. I can’t listen to that. When she screams at me like a lunatic, nothing she says registers, I just try to tune it out. She called me a drug addict and threatened to have my friends arrested if I ever went near them again. She kept saying that they were people I hardly knew when the week before she had said how nice my friends were and they could come over to dinner anytime. I know that what I did was wrong and I deserve to be punished for lying to her, but my friends aren’t bad kids and we’re not drug addicts. How can I make her see that she’s overreacting just a little? How can I communicate that I want to be open and honest with her but I feel like I can’t because I’m afraid? How can I make her understand that just because she doesn’t know my friends, doesn’t mean I don’t know them? She sets such high standards for me, she makes me feel like I can’t mess up. How can I make her see that the only way I’m going to learn anything in life is by experiencing it? How can I make her realize that locking me up in the house until I go to college isn’t going to fix anything? And most importantly, how can I fix my relationship with my mom?
Dr. Norquist responds:
Thank you for writing. I appreciate your openness, and the trust you show through your candidness. The question seems to be, how can you and your mother re-establish trust in each other. She doesn’t trust that you are being truthful with her. Not knowing the truth can lead your mom to imagine all kinds of fearful things that aren’t remotely true. You don’t trust that she can hear the truth without “screaming at you like a lunatic” and saying hurtful things. This results in lies, to avoid her out of control, hurtful emotional outbursts. Fear is dominating both of your responses.
As a fellow mother of teenagers, I can venture a guess regarding your mother’s behavior. Please bear with me. I never understood this until I became a mother. Once you become a mother, your heart is always vulnerable – extremely vulnerable. This is particularly anxiety producing when parenting teenagers, because we have less and less control over the safety of our children as they move through the teenage years. And yet, our hearts are as vulnerable as ever. To the extent and depth that we love, we are all vulnerable to pain and loss that feel unbearable. Your mother’s sense of your safety is dependent on her sense of your judgement, and her ability to trust you. If she doesn’t trust you or your judgement, then her impulse may well be to lock you up in the house (where you are safe). Not that this is healthy for you – I’m just trying to give you a glimpse of a mother’s point of view. Perhaps your mother would agree with this view – I don’t know.
It is to your heart’s credit that you really want to fix the relationship with your mother. It’s an extremely important and powerful relationship for both of you. Yes – I agree, we all learn through experience. What have you learned through this mother-daughter loss of trust experience? What can you take from this as wisdom you can carry with you into future relationships? We discover and develop our sense of integrity through how we react to situations that arise in our lives. Experiencing ourselves as trustable and truthful enhances our self-esteem. Lying erodes our self-esteem as much as it erodes our relationships. Now, I know you can’t always tell your mother everything. But, if you can’t tell her the whole truth, tell her the heart of the matter without lying? Your mother needs to respect that you cannot always tell her everything. As you practice showing good judgement, and refrain from lying, you provide your mother with the opportunity, over time, to trust you again.
She, on her part, needs to practice refraining from screaming and saying hurtful things. She needs to work at providing you with enough of a sense of emotional safety for you to trust telling her the truth. See if the two of you can sit down together and make a pact regarding the behavior you each are going to change. If (and when) either of you falls short, apologize and move forward. None of us are perfect. What’s important is that you both love each other dearly, and want to mend the broken trust and move forward.
(Dr. Sallie Norquist is a licensed psychologist (NJ #2371) in private practice and is director of Chaitanya Counseling and Stress Management Center, a center for upliftment and enlivenment, in Hoboken.)
Dr. Norquist and the staff of Chaitanya invite you to write them at Chaitanya Counseling and Stress Management Center, 51 Newark St., Suite 202, Hoboken, NJ 07030 or www.chaitanya.com or by e-mail at drnorquist@chaitanya.com, or by fax at (201) 656-4700. Questions can address various topics, including relationships, life’s stresses, difficulties, mysteries and dilemmas, as well as questions related to managing stress or alternative ways of understanding and treating physical symptoms and health-related concerns. Practitioners of the following techniques are available to answer your questions: psychology, life coaching, acupuncture, therapeutic and neuromuscular massage, yoga, meditation, spiritual & transpersonal psychology, Reiki, Cranial Sacral Therapy, and Alexander Technique Ó 2004 Chaitanya Counseling and Stress Management Center