A few years ago when I did The Hoffman Process, one of the facilitators described [intlink id=”480″ type=”post”]my mother’s behaviour[/intlink] as “crazy-making”.

I thought, “Wow, that’s a fantastic description.”

And it wasn’t just my mother; it was the whole family dynamic that she and my passive father helped establish. Take a perfectly normal infant child, bring them up in a crazy-making emotionally disconnected family and you’ve pretty much got a recipe for insanity.

But how do you know if you’re living in a crazy-making family? Well, I’m glad you asked.

So here’s the top 10 signs that your family is crazy-making:

1. Denial of Feelings

Everyone’s got feelings, but in a crazy-making family everybody’s pretending that they don’t.

We’re all walking around like emotional robots pretending that we don’t have feelings, while actually our whole behaviour is totally dominated by the feelings that are going on inside us; just without ever acknowledging them.

As a child growing up around people that were pretending the whole time that they’re a robot, that was pretty confusing because I knew that I had very strong feelings inside but I didn’t know how to manage them or even what they were because the other humans around me were pretending that their own feelings didn’t exist. Yet they acted in really weird, volatile ways that suggested that actually they did. Talk about crazy-making. So that’s my number 1.

2. Complete Avoidance of Conflict

Crazy-making people also pretend that there is never any conflict in their relationships. When there is conflict, they run away and they hide because they’re very, very scared of it. They don’t want to face it. So they avoid conflict at all costs. Now, obviously humans living in the same environment, like a family, are going to get into conflict over time. In the long run, avoiding conflict just causes more conflict because disagreements never get truly resolved.

If your parents don’t know how to deal with conflict and don’t model it for you and your siblings don’t know either, then you end up in a scary situation whenever there’s any kind of conflict. People who don’t know how to deal with conflict either respond by becoming very aggressive or by becoming very passive, either of which is going to really mess with your head over time.

3. Fear Instead of love

As human beings, we’re always acting out of one of either fear or love; they’re our two main driving motivators. In a crazy-making family, everything is dominated by fear. Love is kept on the back seat, on the back shelf, and rarely even talked about. This withholding of love is typical of emotionally unavailable parents.

You can recognise emotionally unavailable parents because they never express their own feelings clearly, including never saying “I love you”; because that would be an expression of a feeling. This messes with a child’s head because in the absence of love, we tend to feel fear. This is completely crazy-making in the end and a total recipe for massive amounts of anxiety down the track.

4. Treating Family Members Worse than Strangers

This is a weird one; it really kind of fucks with your head. The family I grew up in, my parents were really quite kind to other people, did a lot of community service, helped a lot of other people out, were always doing good work that made them look and feel good. But the way they treated each other and the other people in their family, particularly when they were upset, was shit. You’d think it might be the other way around, that you would treat the people who are closest and dearest to you better than you would treat strangers because, after all, family comes first, right?

Well, not if it’s a crazy-making family.

In that case, you treat other people outside the family really well and you treat the people inside the family kind of like crap because they’re there all the time and the truth is you’re still annoyed with them about all the things they’ve done that you didn’t like but have never actually talked through with them because you’re afraid of conflict. So, yeah, that’s my number 4.

5. Religious Escapism

Obviously living in a family where there’s a denial of feelings, avoidance of conflict, fear instead of love and people are being treated worse in the family than outside, it’s going to get stressful after a while; you need a means of escape. Well, what better escape than an made-up belief system.

Fantastic. All you have to do is take off every Sunday to church and sit in the pews and learn stuff about beliefs that have been made up by other ancient people thousands of years ago. It gives you a nice little stress relief from the demands of living with real live human beings at home.

I remember many times my parents would come home from sermons at our local church where the minister preached about love and they’d have a screaming argument. What’s with that? Talk about crazy-making.

6. Criticism Instead of Encouragement

If you really want to fuck with your child’s head, what you do is you criticize relentlessly every opportunity that you get. No matter what your child does, you respond with criticism, negativity and put-downs. Yeah, that’ll make your kid happy. Then belittle them for their lack of self-confidence. Definitely a recipe for some crazy-making behavior down the track.

You don’t want to encourage your kid too much because then they might actually start learning to think for themselves, become an independent human being and might go off the rails doing things that you don’t really like. So much better to criticize and kind of fuck with their head a bit.

7. You Mustn’t Feel Good About Yourself

This is a powerful belief that runs endemically through my extended family. I don’t think any of us really feel good about ourselves. In fact, I had one of my family members say to me the other day, “Graham, I think you’re only doing this because you want to feel good about yourself.” As if feeling good about yourself is a bad thing. Talk about crazy-making.

Even as adults we’re still walking around with these fucked up beliefs in our heads. So, yeah, this one really messes with yourself. The idea that you don’t want to have a big head, you don’t want to feel proud, you don’t want to feel good about yourself; yeah, that’ll really fuck with your head.

8. Getting Punished For Being Assertive

This is a beauty. One of the most valuable skills a human being can have in the modern world is assertiveness, which is basically the ability to say what you want and how you feel to other people, which gives you a much greater chance that you will get what you want from other people and that your feelings will be validated and that you’ll feel like a real life human being instead of that emotional robot you were trained to in step number 1.

When you get punished for being assertive, you learn to be very passive or you just go completely off the deep end because you start going completely mental. So if you’re a parent and you want crazy-making kids, then definitely punish them any time they stand up to you and say what they want and just make that bad, evil and wrong, and that’ll be a real beauty.

9. Crushing Your Confidence

If you’re in a family that crushed your confidence, that’s going to be real crazy-making. And, once again, this is an effect that tends to last a lifetime unless you wake up one day and go, “Hey, actually, this is a crazy system and I don’t want to be part of it any more.”

I recently had a mother whose rather controlling say to me, “I don’t want my son to have self-confidence. I want him to have confidence in God.” That’s a real beauty. Now, sure enough, this kid has grown up completely lacking self-confidence, has no idea what he wants to do with his life and is basically very, very timid. Well, that’s sort of understandable given a mother whose attitude is “I don’t want you to have self-confidence”. What the hell are you thinking?

10. Control and Manipulation Instead of Freedom and Exploration

If you’re a parent and you want to really screw with your kid’s head, then just try and control and manipulate their behavior all the time rather than encouraging them to actually go and explore the world, find out what they like, find out what’s real, what’s true, go explore and treat life as a big adventure.

No. Crazy-making families instead use control and manipulation to try and make you do what they want rather than allowing you to learn what you want or giving you the skills to work out how to make what you want happen.

I recently had another controlling mother say to me recently, “My job as a parent is to tell my kids what to do.” And I thought, “Well, I wonder how your children’s experience of life would be different if you thought that your job as a parent was to love them rather than to just tell them what to do all the time?”

You’ve got to wonder.

This person basically tries to tell me what to do a lot, and I really don’t like that. So, yeah, it’s just another symptom of a crazy-making family that hasn’t really been dealt with, which leads to the question:

How do you deal with growing up in a crazy-making family?

Well, you’ve got pretty much Buckley’s chance of changing the family that you grew up in, and that’s probably years ago now if you’re an adult anyway. But you may still be carrying some of the scars. So if you grew up in a crazy-making family and you want to bust out of your box that they put you in and you want to actually have a life that you enjoy rather than one that’s kind of shit, then I highly recommend that you get onto The Confident Man Project.

Grab a copy of The Confident Man Program, read it, implement it, start taking action and you can actually bust out of the crazy-making situation that your family indoctrinated you into when you were a kid. If you need help with this, contact me and let’s talk about how you can bust out of your crazy-making family.

Build your self-confidence faster with The Confident Man Program


Graham Stoney

I struggled for years with low self-esteem, anxiety and a lack of self-confidence before finding a solution that really worked. I created The Confident Man Program to help other men live the life of their dreams. I also offer 1-on-1 coaching via Skype so if you related to this article contact me about coaching.

10 Comments

Lynn MacQuarrie · July 2, 2018 at 12:43 pm

Hi Graham,

Stumbled upon “The Confident Man Project” tonight.

Wow! Just “”Wow!!” I am a 57 year old female. It has taken me 57 years to finally accept that my sister is a crazy maker and that I have wasted all this time hoping she would get it. My parents are alcoholics, a perfect scenario for crazy making. Black and white, no grey. After I finally accepted that my sister is a crazy maker it hit me hard that she is just following in my parents footsteps. It’s easier that way than taking the time to have insight. She loathes my emotions and is super manipulative especially with my mom who is her supportive mirror.
Thank you Graham for sharing a problem that is very invasive in this world. May I ask how old you were when you had your epiphany?
I finally have found freedom in my life by detaching from my sister and her husband’s crazy making. I don’t worry about their future as they are made for each other. The speed to which I am experiencing positive changes in my life through moving on is amazing. Letting go of the old negativity makes room for positivity and good people to enter my life. She is trying to pull me back with “Oh whoa is me!” manipulation yet now that I see the truth it has no effect on me anymore. Can hardly wait to read your book.
Take care and continue your important and life changing wisdom.
Best regards,
Lynn

    Graham Stoney · July 2, 2018 at 4:05 pm

    Great question Lynn! I think I’ve always known something wasn’t quite right, but it took a long time to listen to my intuition rather than my programming. I remember the mentor in question was a facilitator on The Hoffman Process I did several years ago, which is aimed at breaking toxic parental negative-love attachments that form during childhood and can end up screwing up our adult lives. That said, it’s an ongoing process breaking the old patterns and to some extent the epiphany recurs every time an interaction with a family member feels less than fully supportive.

    I acknowledge you for detaching from your sister and her husband’s crazy-making. I believe healthy boundaries are an important part of the healing process and stopping the manipulation. We can’t force other people to see what they don’t want to acknowledge, but we can take responsibility for our own lives and stop the craziness continuing to infect our own humanity.

    Drop me a line if I can be of any assistance to you. Cheers, Graham

India Andrews · October 11, 2016 at 8:53 am

Basically, that entire list was my family.

My favorite line from my controlling mom was “don’t be a sheep.” Then, she would tell us exactly who were are supposed to be. WTF? She spent our entire childhoods delivering this contradictory message. She wanted kids who were religious conservatives, dressed like they were going to the office instead of out to play, only watched the news and documentaries on television, didn’t listen to anything other than the most saccharine pop music, and were 100% obedient to her and my dad.

Mom didn’t want any friends in our lives who would question this set-up and as a result I didn’t have any friends growing up and would have to listen to my mom telling me I wasn’t trying hard enough to find appropriate friends. Then, she would suggest I befriend a girl named Jana who had parents who were even more controlling than my mom. I didn’t like Jana. I tried to be friends with her but while I questioned my mom’s decisions internally, Jana didn’t and Jana was angry and resentful of anyone who questioned our religion which I was doing by the time I entered middle school. Jana was home schooled and her only social activities were school related. At least, I was able to attend public school and play little league. That way I had some exposure to children outside of my family unit and their hand picked friends for me.

    Graham Stoney · October 11, 2016 at 5:08 pm

    Wow, that sounds horrendous India. The mixed messages from your mom certainly fit my definition of crazy-making. I’m wondering what you did to recover your sanity and self-confidence?

      India Andrews · October 13, 2016 at 3:01 am

      Both my sanity and self-confidence are a work in progress. I started by insisting on going away to college so that I could move out of the house at eighteen. I deliberately tried to make friends, date and attended workshops and meeting which would expose me to alternative ideas of thinking and people who weren’t a part of my social set. They included meeting LGBTQ people and debates on issues like the death penalty. I also found a low cost therapist on campus and attended workshops on assertiveness to help with my mental state. Then, I took a job as a teacher which helped me expand my social skills further. I had to start learning how to stand up for myself and how to handle manipulative people. I also saw kids who had more than your run of the mill behavior problems which led me to researching personality disorders. That is when I started to really see how dysfunctional my childhood was.

      Before then, I was dissatisfied and angry but didn’t really understand what was wrong with my childhod that led me to feel that way. I have figured out that I had a childhood where I was used to make my parents look good and I was consistently invalidated and told I wasn’t to trust my own judgement. I also was consistently told that I had to be a specific person or my parents would be angry and judgemental even to the point of disowning me. I told my mom that I was dating a secular man who grew up Muslim and my mom told me she never would accept him into our family. I ended up breaking up with him for unrelated reasons but my thought was I have grown up enough to be able to walk away from my family. My brother has left the family. He stood by a girlfriend my mom didn’t like and he came out as trans. My mom and dad actually tried to buy off my brother if he would go back to be straight and would dump his girlfriend. Unbelievable.

      I still have to work on my self-esteem and self-love. I have made a lot of progress when I look back at who I was at eighteen but I still have a ways to go. I am much more comfortable, happy and aware of people who don’t need to be in my life. I also no longer care what my parents think and can walk away from them if they try to manipulate me into a decision I don’t want to choose. My life is so much better now and will only continue to imrpove.

        Graham Stoney · October 14, 2016 at 10:03 am

        Wow, that’s awesome India. I want to acknowledge you for the positive way you’ve dealt with the challenges of your family of origin. Many people in your circumstances self-destruct. It’s difficult to look at our own families objectively since that’s all we knew growing up, and challenging our parent’s behaviour patterns often causes intense inner conflict and fear because we were once dependent on them for our survival. I believe that narcissistic parents breed personality disorders in their children. I’ve come to conclude that assertiveness, healthy boundaries and self-love are the key to breaking the pattern, so I congratulate you on all the hard work you’ve done to build a better life for yourself! Let me know if I can be any assistance in the future. Cheers, Graham

Nancy Kent · February 23, 2015 at 5:30 pm

Thank you do much for sharing Graeme. Read it all the way through. My first family- mum and dad, and my first marriage were like that/ so my concern for my son is quite high.
And now I live a life where my new parents relationship affected me positively and my new marriage is filled with I love you- and appreciation. And my children’s expression of love towards me is really good as is my expression to them.
There is always the lingering anger and fear. I would like to work on it. But prefer you to send me stuff – say ten minutes worth oc reading and doing at a time. Then I can reply .
I have the new job I had hoped for. Up market assistant at workshops. My own workshop for Feb 28 is filled up. And I am. Working on a moon planting guide . So only have moments to work on me till mid March. Warm regards
Keen to do. Just remind me hey?

    Graham Stoney · February 25, 2015 at 9:28 am

    Thanks Nancy; it’s awesome to hear how you’ve outgrown the relationship patterns in your family of origin. I think that lingering anger and fear do dissipate over time each time we express them. The big problem for me has been shame; I was ashamed of the fact that even at age 46, I felt unsafe around my mother. Communicating that to her has helped me overcome it, even though her response was yet more criticism. Cheers, Graham

      Nancy Kent · February 25, 2015 at 12:32 pm

      Dear Graham,

      I am so proud of you. At your age I was still trapped in my own thoughts. Finding Andrew and someone who gave me the time and space and 100% support to first find my mission in life, and then devote tirelessly to seeing my ideas and dreams come to fruition has been amazing. His life has contributed greatly to my success.
      You MUST go to a web sire about Publicity. Headline Hunter is the name of the company.
      I am assisting Tanya to run her fabulous workshops. A new job opportunity that is feeding my love for fine clothing and elegance. If you have ever wondered how your mission could get out there… with free publicity by the media…. come along to her next Sydney one. Not sure of dates…. but I recon you have something that others need to hear about in their hundreds and thousands. Its all so true, and we as humans are trapped until we work our way out. I think you have the key mate…. true….

        Graham Stoney · February 25, 2015 at 3:41 pm

        Thanks so much Nancy! I really appreciate your support and encouragement. Respect! 🙂

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