The Family Passenger
My friend Alan was talking about his brother. Vance, at 40, is a year younger than Alan and still lives with their parents, but he isn’t grateful for the shelter. On the contrary, he constantly criticizes and blames them: If it weren’t for them, he could have become a champion chess player. If they had only done what he asked when he was fifteen, he would be a success now…
His parents absorb the vilification and try one scheme after another to help him get started in life: paying tuition at various schools, giving him start-up funds for unlikely businesses. For a while they paid his rent in a nearby apartment, but Vance was so miserable they invited him back home. He returned and resumed his blaming. “People get ahead in life through their connections. I’m a failure because you didn’t put me in touch with people who have power. What’s wrong with you, anyway?”
The parents, far from protesting this mistreatment, make excuses for him. His father insists, “Vance just can’t make it on his own.” When Alan remonstrates, their father says, “We need to help him just one more year.” Alan has heard all these excuses many times. Disgusted with the drama, he calls these self-deceiving handouts “lessons in being an emotional cripple.”
This recital opened my eyes. I have a relative who operates the same way. On learning that my relative was not unique, I began to tell other therapists about this pattern at conferences, case groups, and marketing visits. Often another therapist would say, “I know someone like that,” “I have a client whose sister is like that,” or, poignantly, “My brother is like that.”
What’s going on here? Are these just a few ne’er-do-wells that I encountered by strange coincidence? In fact, I found them everywhere: in the professional practices of therapist colleagues –or in their families; in stories by Arthur Conan Doyle and O. Henry; in the literature of alcoholism; and in the news headlines. I found there were several kinds of dependent children: some were angry, some were passive, some were self-destructive. All of them found family members willing to go along with their scripts.
In this country, we expect young people to grow up, learn to take care of themselves, leave the family nest, and create a home of their own. They might go to work for Dad or Mom, but they pull their weight. By contrast, the people I’m studying can’t-or won’t–make it on their own. They become the family passengers.
The refusal to grow up is not a charming Peter Pan story, nor does it take place in a vacuum. Take Joe, 28. His best friends are cocaine and gin, and he drifts from one situation in life to another, blaming his mother Phyllis for his troubles. He amasses huge medical and psychiatric bills, which she pays. Phyllis is worried, and seeks the opinions of friends, brokers, and therapists, but she doesn’t take their advice about setting limits with Joe. A gullible person, she is exploited by contractors and merchants. Her stock-broker makes frequent purchases and sales in order to generate commissions for himself. Her son is just one of many who bend her to their will. Until she gains some backbone, he will continue to have a free ride.
Another passenger, Al, was born with a small neurological disability and was always given extra help. Though his disability responded well to treatment, his mother, Joanne, recalls: “I wasn’t sure he could make it on his own, so I tried to compensate for his difficulty. I was always trying to fix it.” It’s as if the memory of his early impairment made his parents continue seeing him as unable. Then their marriage fell apart and Al became the battleground, in the way family therapists know too well. He threatened suicide at 14 when his mother remarried a man he didn’t like, and he sought refuge in drugs and alcohol during high school. A stint in the military seemed to signal a turning point, but since discharge he has not taken any steps to create a life. He lives with his sister, sitting on the sofa drinking and watching television. This precipitates arguments between this tolerant sister and her husband. Al doesn’t know how to budget money, and doesn’t contribute to household expenses. Joanne has finally seen the situation clearly, and comments, “Al always has a thousand excuses why he shouldn’t grow up.”
Joe and Al are versions of the family passenger. They live off the people around them and never get started with their own lives. They do not have serious physical disabilities which would justify such extended assistance, nor are they in a momentary crisis, returning home temporarily after a divorce or during an economic downturn. And I’m not referring to subcultures with a strong clan identity, in which family members work and live closely together with more or less healthy interdependence. I am referring to children of normal capabilities, who, for reasons of their own, do not develop into mature autonomy. These adult dependents receive unending financial and emotional support- money, cars, tuition, clothes, housing–everything you give children or teenagers, except they are “on an allowance” until they are in their 30s, 40s, and beyond. Their styles range from simple passivity, to insistent demands and persuasive pleas, through ruthless manipulation and deceit. In my family’s case it includes lies, a religious cult, alcohol, and lawsuits. Some other cases include child abuse, drugs, and crime. In many instances huge sums of money are involved. There are thousands of these families.
Family therapist Jay Haley identified two types of passenger, the apathetic and the troublemaker, and proposed strict behavioral-systemic treatment. Ten years later Stockman and Graves identified three kinds of parent that contribute to this problem:
* the authoritarian parent, whose child becomes submissive or who rebels against the excessive expectations by failing;
* the overprotective parent , whose continual rescue missions prevent the child from facing the consequences of his or her actions;
* the permissive-insecure parent , who is terrified of losing the child’s love.
This problem can go on indefinitely – for decades, even a lifetime. Haley remarked, “The therapist must be willing to go to the mat with a family until either the offspring is functioning normally or the therapist is eighty-five years old, whichever comes first.”
If you have someone like this in your family and would like advice, check out Stockman and Graves , Adult children who won’t grow up (Rocklin, CA: Prima, 1990). I have studied quite a few families with this pattern and would love to hear from you.