EI parents and EIPs approach life and relationships in a me-first way that makes others feel disregarded. But once you understand their personality traits, you won’t take their rejections so personally, and you won’t feel as pressured by their emotional needs. So before we go any further, let’s assess the EI characteristics of your parent.
In your journal, note which of the following statements describe one or both of your parents (Gibson 2015).
My parent often overreacted to relatively minor things.
My parent didn’t express much empathy or awareness of my feelings.
When it came to deeper feelings and emotional closeness, my parent seemed uncomfortable and didn’t go there.
My parent was often irritated by individual differences or different points of view.
When I was growing up, my parent used me as a confidant but wasn’t a confidant for me.
My parent often said and did things without thinking about people’s feelings.
I didn’t get much attention or sympathy from my parent, except maybe when I was really sick.
My parent was inconsistent—sometimes wise, sometimes unreasonable.
Conversations mostly centered on my parent’s interests.
If I became upset, my parent either said something superficial and unhelpful or got angry and sarcastic.
Even polite disagreement could make my parent very defensive.
It was deflating to tell my parent about my successes because it didn’t seem to matter.
I frequently felt guilty for not doing enough or not caring enough for them.
Facts and logic were no match for my parent’s opinions.
My parent wasn’t self-reflective and rarely looked at their part in a problem.
My parent tended to be a black-and-white thinker, unreceptive to new ideas.
Because all these behaviors are typical of EI personalities, even checking a few of these traits strongly suggests the presence of emotional immaturity.
Types of EI Parents
There is a broad spectrum of emotional immaturity, from the very mild to the frankly psychopathological. Being emotionally immature isn’t the same thing as being mentally ill, but many mentally ill people are also emotionally immature. Emotional immaturity is a broader concept than a clinical diagnosis and therefore is more useful and less pathologizing. It can underlie many psychological problems, especially personality disorders such as narcissistic, histrionic, borderline, antisocial, or paranoid personalities, among others. What all EIPs have in common are self-preoccupation, low empathy, a need to be most important, little respect for individual differences, and difficulties with emotional intimacy.
EI parents can be extraverted or introverted. Extraverted EI parents demand attention and interaction, making their egocentrism easier to spot. Introverted EI parents may seem less showy, but underneath, they are just as self-involved as the noisier ones. They too show limited empathy or interest in your experiences and offer a one-sided relationship that keeps the focus on them, albeit in a quieter way.
Let’s now look at the four basic types of EI parents (Gibson 2015):
Emotional parents are dominated by feelings and can become extremely reactive and overwhelmed by anything that surprises or upsets them. Their moods are highly unstable, and they can be frighteningly volatile. Small things can be like the end of the world, and they tend to see others as either saviors or abandoners, depending on whether their wishes are being met.
Driven parents are super goal-achieving and constantly busy. They are constantly moving forward, focused on improvements, and trying to perfect everything, including other people. They run their families like deadline projects but have little sensitivity to their children’s emotional needs.
Passive parents are the nicer parents, letting their mate be the bad guy. They appear to enjoy their children but lack deeper empathy and won’t step in to protect them. While they seem more loving, they will acquiesce to the more dominant parent, even to the point of overlooking abuse and neglect.
Rejecting parents aren’t interested in relationships. They avoid interaction and expect the family to center around their needs, not their kids. They don’t tolerate other people’s needs and want to be left alone to do their own thing. There is little engagement, and they can become furious and even abusive if things don’t go their way.
Next, we’ll learn how to identify the personality characteristics that reveal emotional immaturity.
How They Reveal Their Emotional Immaturity
In addition to the relationship problems we saw in chapter 1, EI parents have particular psychological characteristics. Now, we’ll examine the personality traits and behaviors that are classic indicators of emotional immaturity in EI parents, as well as in EIPs in general.
How EI Parents Approach Life
EI parents have a very self-absorbed orientation to life and deal with other people in me-first ways.
EI Parents Are Fundamentally Fearful and Insecure
As we saw in the last chapter, many EI parents have probably suffered emotional deprivation, abuse, or trauma in their childhoods. At the deepest level, they act like they don’t feel truly loved, making them fearful of losing status and ceasing to matter. Anxieties about abandonment and fears of being shamefully inadequate fuel their discomfort. With these deep fears about being unlovable, they must control others in order to feel safer.
They Need to Dominate and Control
Emotional, driven, and rejecting EI parents try to control others, while passive EI parents go along with whatever the dominant one does. All types do whatever it takes to give them a sense of security.
EI parents dominate you most effectively by taking advantage of your emotions. They influence your behavior by treating you in ways that induce fear, shame, guilt, or self-doubt. Once EI parents elicit these negative emotional states, you’re the one with the problem, not them. They feel better once you’re the “bad” one, but only temporarily because nothing makes them feel secure for long.
To justify being in charge, EI parents treat others as lacking in judgment and competence. This gives them license to tell you what to do and how to be. Such overcontrol can be especially destructive to a child’s sense of efficacy and confidence. EI parents also hold their children back by foreseeing dire happenings if the parent’s advice isn’t followed.
Because their focus is on gaining control, EI parents lack the genuine warmth of more mature people. They may act warmly, but it feels staged. Instead of real warmth and openness, EIPs are limited to charm and charisma. They’ve got their eye on interpersonal dominance, not relational connection.
They Define Themselves and Others by Roles
Roles are central to an EI parent’s security and self-identity. They certainly expect others to stay in clear-cut roles. They categorize people into either dominant or submissive roles because equal relationships make them uneasy, uncertain who’s really in charge.
EI parents often use their parental role to take liberties with your boundaries. In this way, they keep you in a position they are comfortable with. They are likely to disallow any individuality that could threaten your family role.
They Are Egocentric, Not Self-Reflective
EI parents put their desires first. They assume they are entitled to what they want and rarely look at themselves objectively. Because their own inner world is unexamined, they seldom question their motives or reactions. For instance, they would rarely wonder whether they were causing any of their own hardships.
Personal growth is not a concept they relate to, and they are usually derisive of it. Lacking self-reflection, they’re not interested in learning about themselves or improving their relationships, other than how they can get more of what they want. In general, growth is threatening to them because it means unpredictable change and more inse
curity.
Because they aren’t self-reflective, EI parents have poor filters and say things without thinking. They can leave people stunned by their inappropriate comments. If confronted with their insensitivity, they might say things like, “I was only saying what I thought,” as if speaking all your thoughts out loud were normal behavior.
They Blame Others and Excuse Themselves
Many EI parents are mistrustful, seeing the world as against them. It often seems to them that other people are making them unhappy for no good reason. Their mistrust makes them blame others when things go wrong, making their relationships highly conflictual and unstable. They excuse themselves from responsibility because their brittle self-esteem can’t take criticism. Their self-esteem is based on whether or not things have gone their way, feeling inflated if they do and desperate if they don’t.
They Are Impulsive and Don’t Tolerate Stress
EI parents don’t handle stress well. They have a hard time waiting and often impatiently rush their children and other people. Their low tolerance for stress makes them feel that all is lost when life hits a bump in the road. They don’t know how to soothe themselves other than to make problems go away as quickly as possible. They grab at the next action that makes them feel better. Sometimes this works; sometimes it doesn’t. Often the solution they hit upon makes things worse. They are known for doing impulsive things that backfire on them. Their attempts to avoid stress usually end up causing much more stress.
How They Deal with Reality
Instead of adapting to reality, EI parents try to remake reality. Although reality is a blooming, buzzing, evolving mass of stimulation, EIPs cope by oversimplifying reality into streamlined parts that make sense and seem manageable to them.
They Use Coping Mechanisms That Resist Reality
George Vaillant (1977) is a researcher who became famous for his thirty-year participation in Harvard’s Grant Study of Adult Development, a research project that followed men’s lives for decades to identify the factors that correlated with health, successful functioning, and happiness. He developed a rating scale to assess how successfully and adaptively a person deals with life, a kind of index of emotional maturity. Vaillant concluded that we adapt best to life when we are aware of our own feelings and motives and can assess reality objectively.
Adaptive, emotionally mature people have balanced lives and emotionally satisfying relationships. They can comfortably relate to the inner experiences of themselves and others. They accept reality on its own terms, adapting to it and mostly not fighting it. Their coping mechanisms are flexible, and instead of trying to rigidly control everything, they look for the most adaptive, least stressful solution that takes all factors into account. To get through tough times, they might use humor, creativity, deliberate suppression of unhelpful thoughts, and altruism.
In contrast, the most immature EIPs try to alter reality by denying, dismissing, or distorting facts they don’t like. At the lowest level of maladaptive coping mechanisms, a person might lose touch with consensual reality and become psychotic.
Some EIPs can be realistic about objective reality, but can’t deal with feelings. They use defenses like rationalizing, intellectualizing, and minimizing to dodge unpleasant emotions or keep them at a distance. They might also indulge substance abuse or other forms of acting out to hide from painful feelings, even though their awareness of factual reality may be intact.
Reality Is Determined by Their Emotions
Because EIPs and EI parents approach life emotionally rather than thoughtfully (Bowen 1985), they define reality based on how it feels to them. Perceiving reality as identical to the way one feels at the moment is called affective realism (Barrett 2017; Clore and Huntsinger 2007). We all do this—when we feel good, things look good—but EIPs take this to an extreme. The way it feels to them is the way it is.
For example, Darcy’s mother used to make pronouncements about things that simply were not true, just because they occurred to her. Darcy wasn’t sure why this so infuriated her, but then she realized that it was emblematic of her mother’s pathological egocentricity: everything and everybody should be what she thought they should be.
They Deny and Dismiss the Reality of Others’ Feelings
EI parents are thin-skinned themselves, but they are often insensitive to other people’s feelings. Because of their low empathy, they frequently respond in ways that other people find insensitive or hurtful. This lack of emotional resonance with others lowers their emotional intelligence (Goleman 1995), making it harder to get along with people.
Their Intense Emotions Oversimplify Reality
EIPs and EI parents have intense, all-or-nothing emotions, like the unmodulated feelings of little children. They oversimplify people and situations into categories of all good or all bad. Their black-and-white thinking prevents them from experiencing conflicting emotions at the same time, so there is little balancing or tempering of their emotions. This is a serious problem because blended, nuanced emotions are necessary for a richer, truer perception of our multifaceted reality. Emotional maturity allows you to experience a simultaneous mixture of emotions, such as feeling sad yet grateful or angry but cautious. It is only through our own emotional complexity that we can grasp the subtler emotions of other people, as well as the full implications of reality.
They Disregard Reality’s Time Sequence
Appreciating how life events are hooked together on a timeline is crucial to understanding how cause and effect works. However, EIPs live in the immediate emotional moment and can be oblivious to the chain of causation over time. Instead of seeing reality as a timeline, EIPs experience events as isolated blips unrelated to each other. This makes it hard for them to anticipate the future or to learn from errors. Ignoring time’s sequential reality lets them say and do the most dumbfounding things because they don’t feel the need to be logically consistent with their past statements or actions. For instance, they may be blithely oblivious to how their recent behavior has made them unwelcome. They can’t see why things shouldn’t go back to normal when they are ready to interact again.
Instead of analyzing their mistakes, they think, That was then; this is now. They are famous for their philosophy of “moving on” and “getting over it” and other forms of not processing the lessons of the past. They don’t connect the dots to see the overall trajectory of their lives. Therefore, they don’t notice when they are repeating past mistakes, nor can they steer themselves toward a different future.
The future isn’t a real consideration for them, so they feel free to deceive others, burn bridges, or create enemies. In seeking immediate gratifications, their future is left to take care of itself, often with predictably negative results.
Lack of time sequence awareness also makes lying seem like a reasonable solution. They never seem to realize that past actions or lying will likely catch up with them. They concoct something that gets them off the hook but don’t realize others will be suspicious due to past lies.
It can be maddening to try to get EIPs to take responsibility for their past behavior. Because their memories are not meaningfully connected to the present, they don’t understand why things from the past should be such a concern now. It’s over: why haven’t you moved on like they did? They simply don’t understand the persistence of cause and effect, especially when other people’s feelings are involved.
How They Think
In his study mentioned above, George Vaillant (1977) noted that maturity in coping isn’t determined by a person’s level of education or social standing. Emotional maturity is much deeper than intellectual ability or conventional success. EIPs and EI parents tend to show certain characteristics of thought, especially in the world of relationships and emotions.
Their Intelligence Doesn’t Extend to the World of Feelings
Being emotionally immature doesn’t necessarily affect a person’s raw intelli
gence. EIPs can be plenty intelligent as long as there is nothing emotional to unsettle them. Some can be highly intelligent and good at theoretical concepts, working well with abstract ideas or business models. As long as issues are safely cognitive or data-based, they can address the past and future, such as budgets, spreadsheet analyses, and retirement planning. But when it comes to emotionally arousing situations, like relationships or temptations, or subtle empathies, such as sensitivity or tact, they stop paying attention to cause and effect.
Their Thoughts About Life Are Simplistic, Literal, and Rigid
The immature personality structure of EIPs results in oversimplified, black-and-white thinking and rigid moral categories of all good or all bad (Kernberg 1985). The complexity of nuanced or ambiguous situations is boiled down to simplistic judgments that disregard crucial elements. EIPs’ thinking tends to be literal, based on a few favorite concepts and well-worn metaphors. They dislike the uncertainty of an evolving reality, so they can irrationally defend what is familiar. Abhorring complexity, they will cast off facts in order to jump to a quick conclusion that agrees with their preconceptions.
Sometimes people mistake the EIP’s oversimplifications for wisdom. EIPs and EI parents are famous for making statements that sound catchy and decisive. Thanks to their self-involvement, they deliver these pronouncements with authority. However, if you examine their words closely, they have a trite quality that isn’t giving you anything new. This is different from a mature person’s wisdom, in which they say things that feed your mind the longer you think about them.
EIPs’ mental rigidity makes them sticklers for rules and authoritarian values. They love the feeling of being in control so much that they will arbitrarily make up rules just to have a rule. They stubbornly uphold rules even when situations are so complex that hard-and-fast rules fly in the face of good sense.
However, EIPs’ egocentrism also means that they will break the same rules for their own gain. This is why some EIPs can commit such egregious moral misconduct within an otherwise rule-bound culture: if there wasn’t a specific rule about that specific behavior on the books, they might do it. EIPs are famous for behaviors that are so wrong that no one would’ve thought to make an explicit rule against it.
Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents Page 4