“Velociraptor Parents” - Total Control and No Responsibility
Part 2 of 3 - Labeling and defining a pattern of parent behavior
Velociraptors are burned onto my brain.
I was at exactly the right age (11) when the original/best Jurassic Park (1993) film came out. My younger brother and I were just aware enough of science and death to understand the possibilities of “Di-no DNA”, while also retaining that ‘magical realism’ brain that makes everything seem plausible.
And sitting in that dark theater, those dinosaurs felt real. Real, and actually dangerous. That scene with the kids hiding in the kitchen had us squirming in our seats so much that my brother pulled a muscle in his neck.
Damn you, Velociraptors. Even through the safety of a movie screen, you caused injury.
Velociraptors came back into my consciousness as a mental health therapist a few years ago. When I began specializing in ‘caregivers’ at the beginning of my counseling career, I didn’t realize that many of these caregivers would have parents with troubling and traumatic boundary-crossing behaviors. Parents who get emotionally and verbally abusive if their offspring don’t respond for requests for attention quickly enough. In these relationships, all of the responsibility for the parent-offspring relationship is put upon the offspring regardless of what else they’ve got going on in their life.
The best analogy I can come up with for this pattern of behavior is Velociraptors. These abusive parents are often intelligent, unpredictable yet relentless, and brutal in their contact with their adult offspring. They feel entitled to their offspring’s lives the way a hungry dinosaur might - you belong to it, and it doesn’t think twice about doing what it wants with you. The Velociraptor has no doubt that you owe it your life.
And just like the Velociraptors systematically looking for holes in that electric fence, a Velociraptor Parent is constantly looking for ways to bust through your boundaries. They need to feel like they can access your attention at any time. They want total control and no responsibility.
I get the sense that for some people, receiving a text from this kind of parent inspires a similar panic to what my brother and I experienced watching Velociraptors hunt children on the big screen. Yeah, part of you knows that you’re safe, but you also know that the creature on the other side of the screen doesn’t want you to feel safe. It knows it has more control if you panic.
You might think that I’m getting this wrong. You might think that a parent acting like a vicious Velociraptor is beyond belief. And if you were raised by someone who delivered calm companionship like a Brachiosaurus, or were easily fooled like the Tyrannosaurus Rex, I understand how unlikely this ‘Velociraptor Parent’ behavior might sound.
I’m used to that attitude. So are the adult offspring of Velociraptor Parents. Trying to tell someone that your parent’s text messages are harming you can be just as unbelievable as telling someone that you’re being stalked by a blood thirsty extinct predator: they only believe you if they’ve experienced it themselves.
So let’s say that you believe me. You believe me because you’ve seen it, or I have succeeded in poking a little hole in your doubt. If so, keep reading for more information on what this control looks like, the function it serves to the Velociraptor Parent, and how one might begin to break away from this control.
(This is part two of a 3 part series.)