RELATIONSHIPS : Stumbling Into a Hidden Parent Trap : Adults Who Have Their Elderly Parents Living With Them Risk Seeing the Past Come Up in Ways No One Expects

The last thing Cindy expected to feel at age 32 was that uncomfortable sense of defeat and helplessness she experienced as a child whenever she was the subject of her parents’ disapproval.

But when her elderly parents moved in with her about eight months ago, this smart, self-assured, articulate woman, who asked to remain anonymous, found herself regressing.

“All of a sudden, I was an 8-year-old girl again, trying to please my parents,” she says. “You slip right back into the pattern of ‘mommy and daddy and kid’--and it’s a shock.”

She went through so much emotional turmoil in the first month after her parents moved in that she sought help from Susan Scott, a Newport Beach psychotherapist who leads a support group for adult children of aging parents.

Cindy--who had been feeling a volatile mix of anger, resentment and guilt instead of the love and compassion she expected from herself--was amazed to learn that her inner conflicts were all too familiar to Scott.

The therapist has seen many adult children who love their parents but find they can’t stand living with them. Often, the physical needs of the elderly become overwhelming to their offspring, but it’s the emotional friction that tends to catch everyone by surprise, Scott says.

Suddenly, the past starts coming up in ways that no one expects, and impromptu responses tend to reflect roles that adult children thought they had shed long ago.

“In an argument, you revert back to the person you used to be as a kid instead of the person you’ve learned to be as an adult,” Scott explains.

If live-in parents have a good relationship with their adult children, they’ll adapt to their lifestyle--and be grateful they’re not in a nursing home, Scott says.

However, she adds, if there was tension in the relationship before the parents moved in, it’s likely to get worse. While parents fight for control, adult children may end up doing so much to win their approval that they stop taking responsibility for themselves.

With Scott’s help, Cindy is gaining control of a situation that threatened her independence, her marriage and her relationship with her parents.

Cindy hopes that telling her story will help other adult children recognize that living with their parents is bound to be difficult--”no matter how good the relationship is.” And that if it isn’t working, they shouldn’t allow guilt to keep them from seeking help.

An only child who began making decisions for herself early, Cindy moved out of her parents’ home when she was 17. While many of her peers were still trying to decide what to do with their lives, she established herself in a promising career; married, divorced and remarried, and became a homeowner.

If her eagerness to build a life of her own had anything to do with her relationship with her parents, she wasn’t aware of it. She lived near them for a number of years, saw them about twice a month and felt none of the tension that now comes between them daily.

Then, about seven years ago, they moved to a remote part of Wyoming, and she was delighted to see them become more active as they found friends who shared their love of the outdoors.

She didn’t see them much while they were so far away, so when it became clear that they couldn’t handle another winter on their own, Cindy was happy to offer them a room in her Orange County home until they could find a place of their own.

“I really wanted to have some good times with my parents in their later years, and I wanted to show my gratitude for all the things they’d done for me. But very quickly it became something else,” she explains.

Within a couple of weeks after they moved in, Cindy was a wreck.

Her parents, who are in their early 70s, refused to drive in heavy traffic and counted on their daughter to take them wherever they needed to go. It didn’t occur to her to say no. She just fell into a pattern of spending her after-work hours catering to them, even though they were fully capable of taking care of themselves.

Cindy, who has no children, had little time or energy left for her husband, David. Even in their bedroom, they felt inhibited by her parents’ proximity and often spoke in whispers.

David was supportive from the start, but as he saw Cindy become increasingly absorbed in her parents’ needs, he made it clear that he wouldn’t allow her to take their marriage for granted.

“He has hung in there and been honest about his feelings even when it hurt me,” Cindy says.

She admits that concern about her marriage is what motivated her to contact Scott, who helped her see that she would have to set some limits in order to continue living her own life while sharing her home with her parents.

She started by telling them she could no longer drive them everywhere and giving them a bus schedule. They took the “hint” and have been walking or taking a bus without complaint ever since.

She also began going directly to her room after work so she could spend some time by herself or with David before joining her parents for dinner. She signed up for a night class, and she and David began eating out on their own occasionally. They also did some remodeling to make their wing of the house more private.

Those measures helped, but, Cindy found, “the toughest boundaries to set were the emotional ones.”

Almost immediately after her parents moved in, they began to argue with each other and to criticize Cindy and David’s lifestyle.

For example, Cindy explains, her parents still have Depression-era fears about money, and they let her know they didn’t approve of the way she and David were using credit cards. They also clashed over philosophical issues, and Cindy learned to avoid arguments by steering conversation away from sensitive topics such as the Persian Gulf War.

But these differences were easy to handle compared to the friction that was created when Cindy’s mother got into one of her “moods” and began verbally attacking everyone around her.

As a child, Cindy had never associated her mother’s wild mood swings with alcoholism, but she couldn’t avoid the truth when she was faced with it in her own home as an adult.

As she was growing up, Cindy recalls, one minute her mother would be “the most wonderful mom in the world” and the next she’d “throw a tantrum about something I could never figure out. I never knew what to expect.”

That hasn’t changed.

Now, Cindy says, “you can’t always tell she’s been drinking so you don’t know how things are going to hit her. It’s walking on eggshells a lot of the time.”

While her father retreated, Cindy at first made the mistake of trying to reason with her mother, and she’d get drawn into disputes that “would leave me wrung out.”

With Scott’s help, she has learned to walk away. That required her to let go of a role she played in her parents’ lives as a child--and unconsciously reassumed when they moved in with her.

“I grew up feeling that if something was wrong, it was my fault. But the problem was my parents’ relationship. I’m on the road to purging that guilt that was never mine to begin with,” she explains.

Although she’s learned a lot about herself and grown in many significant ways since she started therapy, Cindy says she regrets her decision to take her parents in.

Admitting that was a mistake is a big step for her. She explains: “My worth as a person is being called into question because I haven’t been able to do this the way I wanted to. I wanted my parents to be proud of me, and that hasn’t happened.”

She and David have decided to sell their house and do what they can to help her parents set up a home of their own.

She’s hopeful that she can be closer to her parents when they are once again living apart.

“Maybe then we can enjoy the best in each other,” she says.

Your grown kids were on their own for a while, but now they’re back in your home and your life. How are you getting along? Send your comments to “Relationships,” Orange County View, The Times, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626. Please include a phone number. Your contribution to the “Relationships” column, which appears every Wednesday, will remain anonymous upon request.