10. They Can Be Killjoys and Even Sadistic
EI parents can be awful killjoys, both to their children and to other people. They rarely resonate with others’ feelings, so they don’t take pleasure in other people’s happiness. Instead of enjoying their child’s accomplishments, EI parents can react in ways that take the shine off the child’s pride. They also are famous for deflating their children’s dreams by reminding them about depressing realities of adult life.
For instance, as a teenager, Martin proudly told his father that he had made fifty dollars on his first music gig. His father’s immediate reaction was to point out that nobody can support a family on that kind of wage. Lacking empathy, his father completely missed the emotional point.
Sadism goes beyond being a killjoy and takes actual pleasure in inflicting pain, humiliation, or forced restraint on a living being. Sadism is also a way of claiming the role as the most powerful and important person in the relationship. Sadistic EI parents enjoy making their child suffer, whether by physical or psychological means. Physical abuse is obviously sadistic, but hidden sadism is often expressed in “teasing” and “joking around.”
For instance, when Emily introduced her fiancé to her family, her physically abusive father “joked” that the young man should throw her out if she ever got too mouthy. Her mother and sisters chimed in to “tease” Emily, and they laughed at Emily’s excruciating embarrassment.
Sadistic parents like it when their child feels powerless. They secretly enjoy making their children feel desperate by giving them extreme physical punishments, refusing to interact with them for long periods of time, handing down unfathomably long restrictions, or making them feel trapped. For instance, when Bruce was a little boy, his father would squeeze him tightly on his lap and refuse to let him down. If Bruce started to squirm or cry, his father would send him to his room and beat him with a belt. Later his father would apologize but explain that Bruce brought it on himself by being so “bad.”
In the next section, we’ll look at how EI parents affect other people’s emotions and self-worth. Their relational style has an immediate subconscious impact on your emotions and self-esteem. How they react to you can make you feel bad or good about yourself, depending on whether they want to control you or get you on their side.
The Emotionally Immature Relationship System (EIRS)
Emotionally immature people don’t regulate their self-esteem and emotional stability well on their own. They need others to keep them on an even keel by treating them just so. To accomplish this, they act in ways that make other people feel responsible for keeping them happy. They do this through complex, extremely subtle cues that influence others to feel certain ways. I call this the emotionally immature relationship system (EIRS).
This EIRS draws you into being more attentive to the EI parent’s emotional state than to your own self. Under the influence of this relationship system, you attune to the EI parent’s emotional needs instead of listening to what your instincts are telling you. It feels imperative to pacify the EI parent’s moods at all costs. You find yourself putting their needs and feelings above your own emotional health. This unhealthy overconcern with keeping them calm focuses you on them and their reactions, to the point where you can become obsessed with the status of their moods. Once this happens, they have done an emotional takeover on you. An emotional takeover is when their emotional state has become the center of your attention.
In the early stages of human life, the EIRS is normal. The EIRS is a necessary emotional arrangement between babies and their caretakers. To survive and grow, babies require loving adults to be attuned to their needs and soothe them when they’re upset. A baby’s cries distress normal parents to the point where they will do anything to calm their child. With sensitive parents, the child’s distress instantly becomes the parents’ distress, and they will be just as concerned about the child’s emotional state as the child’s physical comfort (Ainsworth, Bell, and Strayton 1974; Schore 2012). This crucial emotional assistance is critical during infancy and toddlerhood.
With normal children, the need for constant engagement and soothing lessens as they mature. But for EI parents, their emotional self-regulation didn’t fully develop as they grew up. Unable to modulate their own emotions and disappointments, they still expect others to make them feel better immediately by knowing just how they want to be treated. If they aren’t made the priority, they threaten to fall apart. Like little children, they need a lot of attention, compliance, and positive feedback to keep them stable. Unlike children, however, they don’t grow from the attention. Their early emotional wounds and deprivations promote psychological defenses that keep them stuck in the same old defensive patterns no matter how much nurturing they get.
How Their EIRS Affects You
You probably won’t notice when you first are getting caught up in someone’s EIRS. The emotional contagion (Hatfield, Rapson, and Le 2009) in this interpersonal system is so instantly compelling, you are in it before you know it. That’s why understanding their relationship pressure up front is so important for protecting your boundaries, emotional autonomy, and sense of self-worth. You have to be alert and prepared in order for it not to take you over.
You Feel Responsible for Their Feelings
Think of the EIRS as a kind of spell they put on you, convincing you that their happiness is your responsibility. You likewise are held accountable for their anger and bad moods, as though you should’ve prevented their discomfort in the first place.
When EIPs and EI parents get upset, their distress worms its way into your mind and takes center stage. You worry obsessively about how to make things right with them, and you can’t get what they said or did out of your mind. Even while you are doing other things or perhaps trying to sleep at night, their discomfort hovers over you, prompting constant thoughts like, What did I do wrong? What can I do to make it better? or Have I done enough to help them?
As you are infiltrated by their unhappiness, you feel like it’s up to you to make everything all right. Their EIRS has pulled you into their experience to the point that their pain is your pain. You lose sight of your own feelings and needs. Once their EIRS takes you over emotionally, their problem feels like your problem, even if rationally you know better.
John’s Story
John’s elderly mother lived in a nice retirement community, but she frequently called him with problems that the facility’s staff could easily fix. She always sounded so urgent that John felt he had to drop everything and hurry over there to help. Actually, she didn’t need a handyman; she just needed to know she could have access to her son at any time. Even though John knew his mother wasn’t as desperate as she seemed, he found himself unable to rest when she sounded upset.
Frank’s Story
Frank’s divorced father, Robert, frequently called him in the middle of the night after drinking heavily. Robert often locked himself out of his apartment and called Frank to come get him. When Robert became ill, he asked Frank to stay at the hospital with him “because I don’t have anyone else.” Frank couldn’t say no because his father sounded so pitiful. Frank’s family and work began to suffer as he became increasingly preoccupied with Robert’s problems. Frank had become so identified with Robert’s troubles that it didn’t occur to him that his father might have some responsibility to get himself straight.
Healthy and mature people certainly need help sometimes too. But they go about it differently. When they ask for help, they consider the other person’s circumstances. They leave room for the other person to say no. They don’t expect you to drop everything and attend to them, and they are appreciative when you do help them. Conversely, EI parents impose emotional pressure, then imply that you don’t really care about them if you say no.
You Feel Exhausted and Apprehensive
Getting caught up in someone’s EIRS is exhausting because you are doing so much emoti
onal work on their behalf. In relationships with any EIPs or parents, you will expend much more psychological energy on them than you would with other people.
Also, you’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop because you’re chronically apprehensive about what their next emergency is going to be. Once their EIRS gets under your skin, the threat of their next mood shift looms over you and keeps you on red alert. This involuntary, nonstop monitoring of their mood is incredibly draining.
Mature people know you can’t be available at all times. They are sensitive to your circumstances and respect your limits.
You Feel You Can’t Say No
EI parents dump their problems on you in such an agitated, victimized way that it seems you can’t refuse. Before you realize it, your feelings are unimportant, and your mission becomes their stabilization. Once this happens, you have forfeited your emotional autonomy—your freedom to honor and follow what you feel.
EI parents pressure you into whatever role best serves their emotional needs. For instance, when they feel overwhelmed, you find yourself stepping in to fix things. If they feel wronged, you feel vengeful on their behalf. If they feel lonely or unimportant, you might find yourself expressing a level of love and loyalty beyond what you actually feel. Such is the power of the EIRS.
EI parents don’t just act wounded or abandoned if you can’t help. They’ll quickly become angry or outraged if you don’t comply. First they play on your sympathies, then they threaten you with their displeasure. If you don’t jump to make them feel better right away, they act insulted and accuse you of being heartless. You are branded a selfish, unreliable person for anything less than making their issues your most important concern.
In a family, an EI parent’s EIRS creates an atmosphere of emotional totalitarianism. All eyes are on that parent’s moods and needs because if the child doesn’t soothe the parent’s distress, the parent might escalate and go to pieces. This usually brings the child back into line because nothing is more horrifying to a child than to witness a grown parent coming apart emotionally. The same could be said of one’s mate, friend, or boss.
You Feel Defeated When You Try to Solve Their Problems
Even though they complain to you, EI parents are usually not receptive to any ideas about solving their problems. For them, this is not a two-way interaction. They might even act affronted or offended if you offer suggestions. They get impatient with your problem-solving, and often say, “Yes, but…” because clearly you don’t appreciate how impossible their situation is. In fact, they are a little indignant that you would think it could be so simply solved. Don’t you see how thorny, complicated, and special their problem is? Can’t you just be on their side?
EI parents rarely ask politely for help with problems, such as, “Could you help me with this?” or “What steps should I take to fix this situation?” Instead, they infect you with their anxious urgency as though it’s your job to take over and make their problems go away. But it won’t be over when you solve that first problem; it will be just beginning.
Your assistance won’t satisfy them for long. One helpful act will never be enough because their primary goal is to hold on to your attention and concern as long as possible. They don’t want guidance; they want you. Their continuing, insoluble problems are the perfect means to that end. Once you start solving their problems, their issues will proliferate faster than a hydra’s heads. Problems are the currency that keeps you locked into their EIRS.
You Feel Accused of Letting Them Down
It’s likely that EI parents unconsciously project their own unsatisfying early mother-child relationship onto their relationship with you. This may be why they often act like you don’t love or care about them enough. You may feel blamed as if you had reenacted their parent’s betrayal from a childhood trauma. You might feel like a villain from an old family story that has little to do with who you are.
Jill’s Story
Jill’s mother, Claire, became distraught when Jill went ahead on a long-planned trip a week after Claire had had a minor car accident that left her unhurt. She secretly hoped Jill would cancel her trip, but when she didn’t, Claire felt wounded. “I thought you loved me,” Claire cried to Jill, feeling as bereft as she probably did when her own mother sent her away to live with grandparents in her early childhood. As Claire unconsciously projected her early abandonment trauma onto her relationship with her adult daughter, she treated Jill as if she were the abandoning mother from her own deprived childhood.
You Have Overly Intense Emotional Reactions to Them
EI parents can draw you into reacting to them with unusual emotional intensity. That’s because they offload their unpleasant emotional states by acting in ways that stir up the same emotions in you. They pretend they don’t have such emotions, but actually they project them onto you to be contained and processed so that it seems you’re the one having the feeling. For instance, a passive-aggressive EIP might make you furious while they remain unaware of the extent of their own anger. This unconscious way of getting rid of disturbing emotion by making others feel it is called projective identification (Ogden 1982). As with children, you end up saddled with their difficult, disowned emotions. This happens so fast—and so below the level of normal consciousness—that you find yourself in the middle of these feelings before you know it. It’s an extraordinary psychological phenomenon, whereby EIPs cope with unconscious, disowned emotion by arousing it in another person.
Therefore, when you get entangled in anyone’s EIRS, it’s always a good idea to ask yourself: Whose feeling is this? If your reactions seem overly intense, oddly absent, or unlike yourself, it’s possible that the EIP has induced certain feelings in you for you to handle instead. With EIPs, get some perspective on your reactions by asking yourself: Is this coming from me or them? It’s important to step back and ask this because if you can figure out that this transfer has occurred, it will free you from taking a false responsibility for that emotion.
How EI Parents Got to Be This Way
EI parents may have had difficult childhoods of their own, including histories of abuse and emotional deprivation. Earlier generations lacked parenting classes, psychotherapy, school counselors, and cultural norms that protected the rights of children. Back then, physical punishment, emotional abuse, and shaming were commonplace disciplinary tools. If EI parents suffered neglected or traumatic childhoods, they will show signs of that by being overly preoccupied with their immediate needs, like someone who is always checking an unhealed wound. Following are some questions for you to consider about your parents’ upbringing.
Did they grow up without a deep enough connection? EI parents lack the calm depth that emotionally nourished people have. They don’t show the security and deep self-acceptance that come from connecting with a sensitive caretaker in childhood. Perhaps it was their own lack of childhood connection that makes them insist on absolute loyalty and sacrifice from their children. They behave as if they are terrified that they don’t really matter.
Without a secure attachment in childhood, EI parents can grow up feeling defensive, wary of their deeper feelings, and unable to forge warm connections with their children. This limits them to relating at a superficial level. What they never got in love and security they may try to make up for later through controlling others.
Could they have internalized unresolved family traumas? Many of my clients reported family histories of multigenerational traumas, such as losses, abandonments, deprivation, abuse, addictions, financial disasters, health crises, or disruptive moves. Unfortunately, family traumas tend to be passed down and reenacted (Van der Kolk 2014) between parent and child, creating generations of emotional suffering and immaturity until someone in the family finally stops and consciously processes their painful feelings (Wolynn 2016).
Were they allowed to develop a sense of self? In past generations, children were to be seen and not heard. It’s likel
y that in such a social climate, EI parents were not helped to develop enough emotional awareness to feel a sense of self.
This is serious because a sense of self is the emotional basis for our sense of who we are (Jung 1959; Kohut 1971; Schwartz 1995). Without this sense of self, we don’t feel whole, worthy, or genuinely self-confident and must depend upon external definers for identity. Many EI parents disregarded or repressed their inner experiences to the point where external referencing became their only source of security. Without a genuine sense of self-worth and identity, a person has to wrest that from the outside world and other people.
Developing a sense of self is also necessary for the self-awareness and self-reflection that allow us to observe ourselves and how our behavior affects other people. Without a sense of self fostered in childhood, people can’t self-reflect and therefore have no way to grow and change psychologically. Instead, they are limited to blaming others and expecting others to change first.
Highlights to Remember
Now you can see what you’ve been up against with an EI parent. You learned about their emotionally immature relationship system (EIRS) and how it makes you feel responsible for their self-esteem and emotional stability. You saw how they monopolize interactions with their own issues, and tell you how you should think and feel. We explored how EI parents’ childhoods might’ve influenced their personality and behaviors and how your parents may carry unresolved family traumas of their own. Now you are in an excellent position to question these family dynamics and take care of your own development in spite of anyone’s emotional coercions.
Chapter 2: Understanding Emotionally Immature Parents
Their Personality Traits and Emotional Takeovers
Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents Page 3