Unfortunately, the lack of self-questioning in EI leaders can make them seem strong and confident, enticing followers to support agendas not in their best interests and almost solely for the benefit of the leader. Our vulnerability to self-centered authority starts in childhood when EI parents teach us that our thoughts are not as worthwhile as their thoughts and that we should accept whatever our parent tells us. It’s easy to see how EI parenting could turn out children who later fall prey to extremism, exploitation, or even cults.
Learning about emotional immaturity will help you understand and deal with all manner of EI behavior, regardless of its source. The EIP in your life might be a parent, significant other, child, sibling, employer, customer, or anyone else. The interpersonal dynamics will be the same, whether inside the family or outside. All the methods that work with EI parents will work with other EIPs as well.
Overview of Topics
The first half of this book, part I, will focus on what you’ve been up against, describing what it’s like to grow up with EI parents—or to be in a relationship with any EIP—and what you can do about it.
In chapter 1, we’ll explore what it’s like having a relationship with your EI parent. You’ll learn about their hallmark emotionally immature relationship system (EIRS) and how they seek to make you responsible for their self-esteem and emotional stability. You’ll also find out possible reasons why they turned out as they did.
Chapter 2 describes EI personality characteristics in detail. You’ll also learn to spot EI emotional coercions and emotional takeovers, and how EIPs use self-doubt, fear, shame, and guilt in you in order to maintain their central role in the relationship.
In chapter 3, we’ll explore what it’s been like for you to try to have an emotionally satisfying relationship with your EI parent. We’ll look at different types of EI parents and why they pull back from closeness. You’ll learn how to see your EI parents more objectively, mourn what you didn’t get, and move toward a more compassionate and loyal relationship with yourself, as well as others.
Chapter 4 shows you how to avoid emotional takeovers by EIPs by questioning their reality distortions and emotional emergencies. You’ll learn how to set appropriate boundaries, as well as when and how to respond to their demands for help. You’ll see how their interpersonal pressure can disconnect you from yourself, making you take responsibility for their happiness in spite of knowing better.
In chapter 5, you’ll learn exactly what to say and do as the most effective responses to classic EI behaviors. You’ll learn how to sidestep their pressure, lead the interaction, and stop them from taking over.
Chapter 6 shows the countless little ways that EI parents and other EIPs undermine your self-confidence and trust in your intuitions. EI parents and EIPs are hostile toward your inner life by mocking and invalidating your perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. In this chapter, you will learn how to be immune to this shaming by staying loyal to your inner experience.
In the second half, part II, of the book, we will shift from understanding and dealing with EIPs to strengthening your individuality in spite of them. As you focus more on your own growth, you’ll be reversing the effects of growing up with EI parents.
In chapter 7, you’ll see why valuing your inner world is crucial to reestablishing a solid relationship with yourself. With new loyalty to your inner self, you’ll trust yourself and welcome your feelings as invaluable information about what needs your attention.
Chapter 8 shows you how to renounce EI-indoctrinated thinking to make room for your own mind. You’ll learn to undo the self-doubt caused by critical EI parents who dismissed any viewpoints different from theirs. As you clear your mind of mental clutter from old EI influences, you’ll have fewer obsessive worries and less self-criticism.
In chapter 9, you’ll update and broaden your self-concept. It’s unlikely that EI parents would’ve helped you develop an accurate, confident self-image. Instead, they’re more likely to have taught you to be submissive, leading you to see other people’s needs and feelings as more important than your own. As you update your self-concept, you’ll start appreciating the full spectrum of what you bring to the world. You’ll also learn how to dismantle any distorted or outdated self-concepts you may hold.
In the last chapter, you’ll put together all you’ve learned. You’ll review the secret terms of your implicit EIP relationship contract and see if you’re ready to put your relationship on a more equal footing. Your ultimate recovery goal is to build a loyal, committed relationship to your own inner self and well-being. You’ll also learn how to transform your EI relationship into the best it can be, without sacrificing your integrity or blaming them.
Finally, in the epilogue, you’ll be given a new bill of rights for all adult children of emotionally immature parents. These rights express the book’s main ideas and can be used as quick reminders of what you’ve learned.
My Wish for You
I hope you come away from reading this book feeling understood and empowered to live your life from a new place of self-connection and self-understanding. Your parents gave you life and love, but only of the sort they knew. You can honor them for that but cease to give them unwarranted power over your emotional well-being. Your mission now is for your own growth: to become an individual who is fully engaged with both yourself and other people. It would be my dream come true if you find this book useful in that quest.
Part I: What You’ve Been Up Against
Dealing with Emotional Immaturity
In the first part of this book, you’ll learn how it feels to be involved with emotionally immature (EI) parents, how they got to be that way, their personality characteristics, and why it’s hard to have a satisfying, close relationship with them. You’ll learn tools and interactional strategies to protect your healthy limits in spite of their emotional distortions and attempts to dominate. You’ll understand why it’s so important to be loyal to yourself around them and how to resist their urgent demands and emotional coercions.
Chapter 1: Your Emotionally Immature Parent
What It’s Like to Be Involved with Them and How They Got to Be That Way
Emotionally immature (EI) parents are both frustrating and demoralizing. It’s hard to love an emotionally blocked parent who expects honor and special treatment but tries to control and dismiss you at the same time.
A relationship with an EI parent is characterized by not getting your emotional needs met. They have little interest in experiencing emotional intimacy in which two people come to know and understand each other at a deep level. This mutual sharing of deepest feelings creates a satisfying, deep bond that makes the participants precious to each other, but this is not something EI parents feel comfortable doing.
Sometimes you glimpse a fleeting desire in them for real connection, and this keeps you reaching out to them. Unfortunately, the more you reach out, the further they recede, wary of real intimacy. It’s like being in a dance with someone who is moving away from you in perfect synchrony to your efforts to get close. Their demands for attention, coupled with wariness about intimacy, create a push-me, pull-me relationship that leaves you unsatisfied and emotionally lonely. You care about your parent, but you can’t get close enough to have a real relationship.
Once you understand them, however, your experiences will make perfect sense to you—and so will your emotional loneliness. By comprehending the EI psyche, you will be able to deal with your EI parents—or any emotionally immature person (EIP)—in ways that free you from their emotional coercions and create a more genuine relationship based on knowing what you can and can’t expect from them.
In this chapter, we’ll explore what it’s like to be intimately involved with such emotionally ungiving parents. You’ll learn about the emotionally immature relationship system (EIRS) they use as a substitute for love, and you’ll get to see how EI parents probably got to be the way they are.
As part of your discovery process, it’s a good idea to keep a journal about what you learn as you go along. Throughout this book, you’ll find exercises to help you process what you read about. As you record your self-discoveries—hopefully in a new journal especially for this purpose—you’ll be giving yourself vital emotional support and validation, two things that EI parents have in short supply.
The writing process will help you finally put words on previously elusive and undefined experiences. Be sure to take notes on the feelings, memories, and insights that arise as you read. These entries can be about your parents or any EIP you have known. As you record your experiences and realizations, leave a couple of blank lines after each entry for later insights. It will be invaluable to look back later and see where you began. In that spirit, let’s look at how you came to be reading this book.
Exercise: Why You Picked Up This Book
Take a moment to think about what attracted you to this book. In your journal—or just on some paper for now—write down what intrigued you when you saw the title. What did you hope you would find out and about whom? How has this person made you feel? How do you wish your relationship with this person were different? If this person is no longer living, how do you wish your relationship could’ve been?
Now let’s examine what it is like to be in a relationship with an EI parent or other EIP and how they make you feel. This can stir up old issues, so—as in any self-discovery process—please be sure to seek out a psychotherapist for extra help and support as needed.
What It’s Like Being Involved with Them
EI parents and other EIPs have a recognizable interpersonal style. The following ten experiences describe what to expect in a relationship with them.
1. You Feel Emotionally Lonely Around Them
Growing up with EI parents fosters emotional loneliness. Although your parent may have been physically present, emotionally you may have felt left on your own. Although you may feel a family bond to your EI parent, that’s very different from an emotionally secure parent-child relationship.
EI parents like to tell their children what to do, but they are uncomfortable with emotional nurturing. EI parents may take good care of you when you’re sick, but they don’t know what to do with hurt feelings or broken hearts. As a result, they may seem artificial and awkward when trying to soothe a distressed child.
2. Interactions Feel One-Sided and Frustrating
EI parents’ self-absorption and limited empathy make interactions with them feel one-sided. It’s as if they’re imprisoned in their own self-involvement. When you try to share something important to you, they’re likely to talk over you, change the subject, start talking about themselves, or dismiss what you’re saying. Children of EI parents often know a great deal more about their parents’ issues than the parents know about theirs.
Although EI parents require your attention when they’re upset, they rarely offer listening or empathy when you’re distressed. Instead of sitting with you and letting you get it all out, EI parents typically offer superficial solutions, tell you not to worry, or even get irritated with you for being upset. Their heart feels closed, like there’s no place you can go inside them for compassion or comfort.
3. You Feel Coerced and Trapped
EI parents insist you put them first and let them run the show. To this end, they coerce you with shame, guilt, or fear until you do what they want. They can flare into blame and anger if you don’t toe the line.
Many people use the word manipulation for these kinds of emotional coercions, but I think that word is misleading. These behaviors are more like survival instincts. They do whatever’s necessary to feel more in control and protected in the moment, oblivious to what it might cost you.
You can also feel trapped by their superficial style of relating. Because EI parents relate in a superficial, egocentric way, talking with them is often boring. They stick to conversation topics they feel safe with, which quickly become stagnant and repetitious.
4. They Come First, and You Are Secondary
EI parents are extremely self-referential, meaning that everything is always about them. They expect you to accept second place when it comes to their needs. They elevate their own interests to the point that yours feel downgraded. They’re not looking for an equal relationship. They want blind allegiance to their need to be considered first.
Without a parent willing to give your emotional needs a high priority, it can leave you feeling insecure. Wondering if a parent will think of you or have your back can make you vulnerable to stress, anxiety, and depression. These are reasonable reactions to a childhood environment in which you couldn’t trust a parent to notice your needs or protect you from things that overwhelmed you.
5. They Won’t Be Emotionally Intimate or Vulnerable with You
Although they’re highly reactive emotionally, EI parents actually avoid their deeper feelings (McCullough et al. 2003). They fear being emotionally exposed and often hide behind a defensive exterior. They even avoid tenderness toward their children because this might make them too vulnerable. They also worry that showing love might undermine their power as parents because power is all they think they’ve got.
Even though EI parents hide their vulnerable feelings, they can show plenty of intense emotion when they fight with their partner, complain about their problems, blow off steam, or fly into a fury with their kids. When upset, they don’t look like they are at all afraid of what they feel. However, these one-sided eruptions of emotion are merely releases of emotional pressures. That’s not the same thing as a willingness to be open to real emotional connection.
For this reason, comforting them is hard to do. They want you to feel how upset they are, but they resist the intimacy of real comforting. If you try to make them feel better, they may stiff-arm you away. This poor receptive capacity (McCullough 1997) prevents them from taking in any comfort and connection you try to offer.
6. They Communicate Through Emotional Contagion
Instead of talking about their feelings, EI people express themselves nonverbally through emotional contagion (Hatfield, Rapson, and Le 2009), coming across your boundaries and getting you as upset as they are. In family systems theory, this absence of healthy boundaries is called emotional fusion (Bowen 1985), while in structural family therapy it is called enmeshment (Minuchin 1974). This is the process by which EI family members get absorbed into each other’s emotions and psychological issues.
Like small children, EI parents want you to intuit what they feel without their saying anything. They feel hurt and angry when you don’t guess their needs, expecting you to know what they want. If you protest that they didn’t tell you what they wanted, their reaction is, “If you really loved me, you would’ve known.” They expect you to stay constantly attuned to them. It’s legitimate for a baby or small child to expect such attention from their parent, but not for a parent to expect that from their child.
7. They Don’t Respect Your Boundaries or Individuality
EI parents don’t really understand the point of boundaries. They think boundaries imply rejection, meaning you don’t care enough about them to give them free access to your life. This is why they act incredulous, offended, or hurt if you ask them to respect your privacy. They feel loved only when you let them interrupt you any time. EI parents seek dominant and privileged roles in which they don’t have to respect others’ boundaries.
EI parents also don’t respect your individuality because they don’t see the need for it. Family and roles are sacrosanct to them, and they don’t understand why you should want space or an individual identity apart from them. They don’t understand why you can’t just be like them, think like them, and have the same beliefs and values. You are their child and, therefore, belong to them. Even when you’re grown, they expect you to remain their compliant child or—if you insist on your own life—at least always follow their
advice.
8. You Do the Emotional Work in the Relationship
Emotional work (Fraad 2008) is the effort you make to emotionally adapt to other people’s needs. Emotional work can be easy—such as being polite and pleasant—or deeply complicated, such as trying hard to say the right thing to your distraught teenager. Emotional work is comprised of empathy, common sense, awareness of motives, and anticipating how someone is likely to respond to your actions.
When things go wrong in a relationship, the need for emotional work skyrockets. Apologizing, seeking reconciliation, and making amends are among the strenuous emotional labors that sustain healthy long-term relationships. But because EI parents lack interest in relationship repairs, reconnection efforts may fall to you.
Instead of amends or apologies, EI parents often make things worse by projecting blame, accusing others, and disowning responsibility for their behavior. In a situation where it would seem easier just to go ahead and apologize, EI parents can be adamant that it was something you did—or failed to do—that warranted their hurtful behavior. If only you had known better and done what they asked, this problem never would’ve occurred.
9. You Lose Your Emotional Autonomy and Mental Freedom
Because EI parents see you as an extension of themselves, they disregard your inner world of thoughts and feelings. Instead, they claim the sole right to judge your feelings as either sensible or unwarranted. They don’t respect your emotional autonomy, your freedom and right to have your own feelings.
Because your thoughts should reflect theirs, they react with shock and disapproval if you have ideas that offend them. You are not free to consider certain things even in the privacy of your own mind. (“Don’t even think about it!”) Your thoughts and feelings are filtered through their comfort level as either good or bad.
Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents Page 2