EIPs get increasingly single-minded and stubborn as situations become more complicated or stressful. Their one-track mind prevents them from taking individual differences or unanticipated consequences into account. Proud of being unyielding, they call their judgmental rigidity “moral fortitude” or “having a backbone.”
Frieda’s Story
Frieda’s EI father was furious when she got engaged to a man from another race. Her father had zero interest in seeing her side of things because she had broken one of his rules. When he couldn’t intimidate Frieda into changing her mind, he disowned her. After Frieda left, she felt like a ghost because no one was allowed to welcome her as a family member.
They Become Obsessive
Like Frieda’s father, when EIPs or EI parents feel hurt, embarrassed, or like their authority is disrespected, they get stuck in obsessive anger. They see the world as made up of good guys and bad guys, and they dwell obsessively on anyone who they think has wronged them. They lack the mental flexibility or emotional willingness to see things another way.
They Use Superficial Logic to Shut Down Feelings
Instead of offering empathy, EIPs inappropriately apply logic to minimize other people’s problems. EIPs get highly upset about their own troubles, but they oversimplify your problems and ignore deeper emotional factors. They typically offer platitudes instead of considering your unique dilemma. In their mind, your problems should yield to their simplistic, overly rational advice. When empathy is required, pure logic is an emotionally inappropriate response.
EI parents often use inappropriate logic when their child comes to them for comforting by explaining why they shouldn’t let things get to them. They like to suggest clever things children should’ve said to the person who hurt them (“Well, you should’ve told him...!”). They tell the child not to be upset, to rise above the distress, and to just stop worrying about it. Of course, this is impossible. What the child really needs is a listening, empathic parent to help them process their distress until they get a handle on it.
When children make mistakes, EI parents also use logic inappropriately by making it seem that the child should’ve avoided the mistake in the first place. They promote the unrealistic logic that if everyone just thought ahead far enough, there need never be a mistake. For such children, they learn that not only should they feel bad for making a mistake, but they are inadequate as well.
Now that you have a good understanding of your EI parent’s personality characteristics and behaviors, let’s see how they make you feel bad in order to control you. They use your feelings against you so you feel responsible for supporting their emotional security, stability, and self-esteem. Here’s how they dominate you through emotional coercions.
EIPs’ Emotional Coercions and Takeover Tactics
Emotional coercion occurs when an EIP controls you by inducing fear, guilt, shame, and self-doubt. I know it’s popular to say that nobody can make you feel anything, but for most of us that simply isn’t true. In fact, EIPs are masters at getting you to feel things that are to their advantage. Children can certainly be made to feel things by powerful adults upon whom they are dependent, and the same goes for us in adulthood whenever there is a power imbalance between people. The achievable goal is not to pretend that you’re immune to their influence, but to catch it early and quickly separate yourself from their attempted domination.
Ultimately, as you become skilled at spotting and refusing emotional takeovers, you may no longer be vulnerable to anyone’s attempts to make you feel anything. But in the meantime, let’s work on getting free from emotional coercions when they occur.
Next, we will look at how EIPs arouse toxic feelings that make you willing to give in and let them take you over.
Self-Doubt Undermines Your Autonomy and Self-Worth
EI parents punish you by withdrawing emotional connection if you express thoughts or feelings they don’t like. The fear of this alienation makes you doubt yourself and creates uncertainty about your thoughts and feelings.
Once you are taught to doubt yourself, you start looking to others for direction, trusting other people’s perspective over your own. Instead of knowing what you really think and feel, you become preoccupied with just being accepted. Ambivalence undermines your confidence, and you lose contact with your gut feelings and intuitions. You realize that self-doubt brings parental acceptance, while feeling autonomous causes tension. If you want to be accepted and loved by an EI parent, it helps not to be too sure of yourself.
But when you doubt your deeper instincts, you lose clarity of mind. Your thoughts are clouded by polluted waters of self-doubt and fears of rejection. It gets harder and harder to think clearly in the face of their coercive tactics.
We tend to give in to emotional coercions because it’s too painful to face that we hate what our parents are doing to us. But hate is just a signal that we are being controlled, and none of us likes to be guilted or held hostage by someone’s mood. Your unavoidable emotional reactions may make you worry that you aren’t being good or loving enough. But as you doubt your goodness and self-worth, the further you fall under their influence.
Fear Makes You Easier to Control
Fear is perhaps the EIP’s simplest, most straightforward tactic for emotional takeovers in which they push you into a psychological state that makes you tractable. EIPs and EI parents are geniuses when it comes to instilling fear and making you feel unsafe. Whether it’s a violent outburst or an emotional meltdown, EIPs instinctively use whatever will scare you into the kind of behavior they want. Once you feel afraid, you’re much more willing to put them first.
Physical abuse is the biggest fear tactic. Physical fears go deep and must be consciously worked at in order to unlearn their effects. But threats of emotional withdrawal, abandonment, or even suicide can be just as damaging.
You Inhibit Yourself
At first you may just be afraid of an EI parent’s reactions, but pretty soon you may start to fear your own feelings. You start to identify your natural reactions as the problem, as the avoidable cause of conflict with the EIP in the first place. Tragically, you learn to feel anxious as soon as you start to feel anything your parent wouldn’t like (Ezriel 1952). Once you tag some of your feelings as dangerous, you inhibit them as soon as they come up, before your EI parent has a chance to react to them. This self-inhibition shows that you have fallen under their emotional control. You no longer need an external threat to shut yourself down. You know what’s going to happen, so you just don’t go there.
You Often Feel Guilty
Guilt should be a brief corrective signal, not a chronic condition. Its healthy purpose is to prompt apologies in order to keep good relations with others. Guilt should motivate you to apologize, not hate yourself. Mature guilt helps us learn from mistakes, make amends, and try not to do it again.
However, EI parents exploit the coercive potential of guilt. They teach their children to feel horrible about themselves and feel the need to become perfect. Such children are not taught to forgive themselves for mistakes, and they don’t learn that there is a way out of guilt by taking responsibility and making amends. EIPs encourage guilty feelings because then you are more attentive and acquiescent to their needs.
EI parents especially make their children feel guilt over not sacrificing themselves enough, and also survivor guilt whenever they have a happier life than their parents.
Guilt for not self-sacrificing. EI parents often ask for more than you can give. But if you ever say no, they act like you don’t really love them. As an adult child of EI parents, it can feel like the only way to be a good person is to sacrifice yourself.
Gina’s Story
One day Gina’s elderly parents informed her they were planning to move closer to her so she could take care of them in their old age. Gina panicked. She had never felt close to her parents, and they were impossible to please. Gi
na was the eldest child and had always functioned as a surrogate mother to everyone in the family. Gina was also recovering from breast cancer and already felt overwhelmed as a single mother with three teenage boys. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like caring for her parents as well. Gina felt that taking on her self-involved parents might be the final health straw. Although she wanted to tell her parents no, she felt too guilty to do so. She asked me, “But don’t I have an obligation to my parents?”
My answer was a firm no. Just because her parents wanted Gina to handle things, she wasn’t obligated to ignore her situation to give them whatever they wanted. It wasn’t Gina’s responsibility to endanger her mental and physical health just because her parents preferred her as caretaker. Gina’s parents were financially secure and had two other children near them they could turn to, along with a supportive community of friends. Realistically, Gina could recuse herself from her parents’ demand without a shred of guilt, but she still felt troubled and obligated.
Gina’s parents hadn’t considered for a moment how their wishes might place a hardship on Gina. They didn’t ask her how she felt about their idea; they just told her they were coming. Gina rightly feared that her EI parents might accuse her of not loving them if she dared say no to them. But this is a false conclusion: setting a limit doesn’t mean you don’t love somebody. It just means you are claiming the right to think of yourself too.
Fortunately, Gina realized what was happening and was able to see that she was not a bad person because she didn’t want to sacrifice her health for her parents’ whim. In the end, Gina told them no, and after some hurt feelings and angry withdrawal, they decided to move near her sister instead.
Survivor guilt. Sometimes adult children feel guilty around their EI parents simply because of how much better their lives are going. Survivor guilt—feeling guilty for your own good fortune compared to others—can arise if you have EI parents who are not functioning well. EI parents often have multiple problems, both in their work and in their personal relationships. EI parents who stir up survivor guilt might be depressed, mentally ill, addicted, or functioning poorly in adult life. If you have created a life that is happier than theirs, you may actually feel guilty for your success.
Guilt is a conscious feeling that is easily put into words. You can talk about why you feel guilty, citing reasons and describing feelings. Because guilt is familiar and easy to express, sometimes we think we are feeling guilt when we’re really experiencing shame.
Feelings of Shame Make You Easy to Dominate
Shame comes from feeling rejected by other people (DeYoung 2015). Shame is much deeper than mere embarrassment because you believe your goodness as a human being is in question. Shame is a powerful, primal experience that says not only have you have done something wrong but there’s something wrong with you as a person. Shame can be so unbearable that the mere threat of it can coerce you into doing whatever an EIP wants. This feeling of being unlovable and unacceptable can lead to what Jerry Duvinsky (2017) calls a core shame identity, a pervasive sense of unworthiness that persists regardless of your positive qualities.
Shaming can make you lose trust in your own thoughts and feelings. EI parents might shame you with phrases like, “Are you crazy? Are you out of your mind?” “How dare you!” “Don’t even think that!” “You shouldn’t feel that way,” or “I never in my life heard such a thing!” Children conclude from these reactions that there is something deeply wrong with them. By embarrassing and shaming their children, EI parents teach them to knuckle under to other people’s emotional dominations later in adult relationships.
You might be especially vulnerable to shame if EIPs call you selfish. There is no accusation more hurtful to a sensitive person than to be told they don’t care about others. EI parents easily bring sensitive children under control by labeling them “selfish.” But what EIPs and parents usually mean by selfishness is that you are pausing to think about your needs instead of automatically giving in to their demands.
Shame for Having Needs
A child’s dependency often irritates the self-involved EI parent. Preoccupied with their own issues, EI parents can be short-tempered and react to their child’s needs as if the child had done something wrong. These parents make their children feel bad for having needs and thereby making the parent’s life harder. If you were treated this way as a child, you may still feel ashamed for having problems or needing help.
The Annihilating Sensation of Shame
Patricia DeYoung (2015) describes how devastating it can feel when someone refuses to connect with us at the moment of our greatest emotional need. It’s unbearably shaming to have one’s pleas for comfort or connection rejected. When a child’s efforts to engage a parent fail, the child can feel hopeless, like they are all alone in the world. DeYoung explains that when children feel like they don’t matter, their fragile personality structure feels like it’s disintegrating—an experience that feels like dying. No wonder that being unresponded to can feel like the end of the world.
In my work with the adult children of EI parents, many of them have remembered deep, annihilating shame experiences of being emotionally rejected by their parents at their moment of greatest need. They describe this awful feeling as “sinking into darkness,” “circling a black hole,” “being untethered in outer space,” “falling into the abyss,” or “physically dying.” This cessation of existence is what psychological disintegration feels like when an uncaring person witnesses your need but won’t respond to you (DeYoung 2015). These experiences are so agonizing that people often banish the memories and try not to recall them.
Such powerless anguish impels children to do something—anything—to make their parent see and respond to them. That’s why young children so often have meltdowns over seemingly insignificant things. When their subjective experience isn’t recognized or understood by their parent (Stern 2004), their inner cohesion comes apart, and they feel like they’re falling into the void. They can’t keep themselves together in the absence of a supportive parental attachment (Wallin 2007).
We Don’t Recognize Shame as a Feeling
Fear of shame controls us long past childhood because we haven’t been taught that it’s just an emotion. We don’t realize we were treated badly, and instead we think the sensation of shame is a fact of our badness (Duvinsky 2017). As one client said in a moment of insight, “I believe I’m worthless because I feel that way.” Shame feels like reality because it’s such a compelling emotional experience. However, if parents help their children recognize and label shame as just another feeling, they won’t end up with such sweeping self-condemnation. However, EI parents have so much buried shame themselves, they can’t help their children understand it.
Exercise: Rescue Your Shamed and Fearful Self
Shame and feelings of worthlessness are rooted in fears of not mattering and being abandoned. To combat feelings of shame, Jerry Duvinsky (2017) recommends loosening their grip on you by writing down your fears of shaming and exposing them exactly as they are. My own method is to ask worried or anxious clients to write down the most embarrassing things they could imagine happening. Once you identify what kind of shaming you fear most, push the dread up another notch by asking yourself, “And then what?” until you know you have reached the absolute worst possible outcome of your feared shame. Then just sit with it for a few moments and notice that nothing bad happens; it’s just a feeling.
Next, spell out the awful story about yourself that accompanies this shamed state. What is your self-image that goes with the shame? Instead of agreeing that this would be the end of the world, can you feel compassion for how you’ve been made to feel so terrible about yourself? Now imagine rescuing this shamed inner self and giving it the comfort and acceptance that it needs to feel good about itself again.
When you know that feeling bad about yourself comes from emotional rejection in early childhood, you will see
yourself differently. You can understand that feeling unlovable probably came from your parent’s incapacity for emotional intimacy and is not a fundamental flaw in yourself. Your needs for emotional connection were normal, not repellant nor unlovable, and would not have been overwhelming to an adequately mature parent.
Subtle Shaming Between Peers and Adults
Subtle shaming is frequently used to exert social dominance. These social behaviors can be extremely subtle, such as not responding to your overtures, dismissing your concerns, or implying that you are a bother. These subtle shaming behaviors by another person are often hard to pinpoint because they’re not dramatically demeaning or rude. You might think about these incidents for a long time afterward but can’t quite put your finger on why you feel so bad. However, once you see subtle shaming for what it is, you will feel better at once. You will see what’s happening and stop feeding the EIP’s self-esteem by agreeing to feel inferior.
Exercise: Reflect on Your Takeover Experiences
Write in your journal about a time when you felt emotionally coerced by your parent or other EIP. Do you remember a time when they used fear, guilt, shame, or self-doubt to make you do what they wanted? What worked the best on you? What type of emotional coercions are you most vulnerable to? What physical sensations do you get when someone is trying to make you feel bad for their benefit? After thinking about this, write down how you might recognize an emotional coercion in the future and prevent it from taking you over.
Highlights to Remember
In this chapter, you assessed your likelihood of having EI parents and learned about different types of EI parents, as well as the essential personality characteristics of EIPs in general. You also learned about their self-preoccupied approach to life, how they resist reality, and their unique orientation to time. You saw how EI parents use your self-doubt, fear, guilt, and shame to emotionally coerce you into shoring up their self-esteem, emotional stability, and security. These emotional takeovers assert their dominance and undermine your self-confidence—but only as long as you don’t see what they’re doing.
Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents Page 5