Having EI parents doesn’t mean you will be an emotionally immature parent yourself. In fact, you might be the one in your family tree to finally stop the multigenerational transfer of emotional pain. All you have to do is notice how your child is feeling, listen to them with empathy, and let them know that they are securely held in your heart. Apologize when you’re wrong, take them completely seriously, forego sarcasm and mockery, and treat them with respect. When a child knows you are present, respectful, empathetic, and fair, they won’t feel the emotional loneliness you may have felt.
Why You Keep Hoping and Trying for a Relationship
Given how hurtful and lonely relationships with EI parents can be, why would their adult child keep trying to connect with them? Why do adult children still hope that they can get their parents to be sensitive and respectful, even when those parents are frequently hurtful or domineering? The answer is that they give you occasional reasons to keep hoping, and it can take a long time to adjust expectations. Let’s look at why an adult child of EI parents might keep trying.
Sometimes EI Parents Do Meet Your Needs
Children will stop hoping for connection only if a parent is consistently disengaged and rejecting. Such parents are closed doors, and their children know it. But parents who are sometimes emotionally available will keep you hoping for more. Once in a while, on good days, they drop their guard and connect enough for you to enjoy them. These fleeting pleasant experiences keep hope alive in children of all ages that one day they will have a nourishing bond with their parent.
For example, you may have shared special times with your parent and enjoyed affectionate and lighthearted moments. In such unguarded moments, your EI parent might have been less rigid and shown a tenderness or camaraderie that made it all worth it. When they were feeling good, they might have been playful, taken you along for the ride, and drawn you into their fun. During these good times, your parent might have enjoyed getting to be a child again with you. As long as you were excited about doing what the EI parent enjoyed, all was good.
But when an EI parent has to think about their child’s feelings or make an effort for the child’s benefit, the fun may stop. They make it clear that you should want what they want if good times are to continue. They may guide you into compliance by saying things like, “Isn’t this fun?” or “You don’t want to do that, do you?” coaxing the answer they want. EI parents cool off fast when the child’s desires conflict with their own.
EI parents can also be very generous at times, but with a catch. They often think of their own tastes first and give the child what they themselves would like to get. Their gifts often reflect the parent’s interests, not the child’s preferences. It’s as though they were subconsciously giving to themselves by proxy. Other times, EI parents pick out generic childhood gifts without considering their child’s unique interests. But of course, sometimes they do get it exactly right, and your hopes about being known and loved spring up again.
Other times EI parents lower their defenses and open up when under duress, such as in extreme adversity or even while dying. Under these extraordinary conditions, some EI parents reflect on their behavior and express remorse. These glimpses of deeper relatedness can feel precious, but if the child were to try to go further, the parent might shut down again. Unfortunately, the EI parent’s defensiveness makes it impossible for them to sustain that deeper openness.
You Feel a Bond and Think a Relationship Is Possible
Bonding and relationship are two separate things (Stern 2004). Bonding is a sense of secure belonging created through familiarity and physical proximity (Bowlby 1979). Bonding gives a sense of family and tribal community, but a relationship satisfies the emotional urge to know and be known by another person. You can feel very bonded to a person, even if they show little relational interest in your subjective experience (Stern 2004).
Adult children of EI parents can feel bonded to their parents and assume it is the same thing as being loved, which it isn’t. Yet when the bond feels strong, it feels like a satisfying relationship should be possible. Unfortunately, this doesn’t necessarily follow. To distinguish between bonding and relationship, ask yourself whether the person to whom you feel bonded is aware of your inner emotional states and subjective experience. Without that interested, empathetic component, your relationship may be based more on bonding than relational love.
As part of your recovery from emotional takeovers by EI parents, you may have to reeducate yourself that bonding is not the same thing as a close relationship. As an adult, you might be better off investing in a deeper relationship with yourself, while lowering your expectations for the kind of relationship you can have with an emotionally unresponsive parent.
You Project Your Maturity and Strengths onto Them
Most of us know about projection as a negative psychological defense, such as projecting our faults onto others or fearing unrealistically that someone’s out to get us. But erroneously projecting our own positive qualities onto other people is almost as big a problem. Adult children of EI parents are especially likely to assume others are psychologically similar, seeing too much maturity or potential in people. It’s okay to give someone the benefit of the doubt, but not to the point where you expect them to show behaviors they are incapable of. This overoptimism is a habit formed early in life when a child needed to believe in a parent’s goodness.
Whether it’s with an EI parent or another adult relationship, it’s crucial to be discerning about the differences between EI personality characteristics and your own qualities. You don’t want to get these mixed up by projecting your strengths and sensitivities onto them. You want to see them as they are so you can make informed choices about the kind of relationship that’s possible.
Reality May Be Too Painful to See
EI parents can be so disappointing in their emotional unavailability that children can’t bear to see them as they are. Children often protect their developing psyches by holding on to illusions of connection with their EI parent. They magnify their parent’s good qualities so it seems they do have a connection, even if that parent might be emotionally destructive or distant toward them. I’ve seen this with psychotherapy clients who initially describe their childhood and parents in glowing terms, only to realize later how little they received emotionally.
Fantasies about a good, close relationship are often preferable to facing how little empathy you got and how illusory your connection may have been. Some of the most productive moments for people in psychotherapy are when they face the emotional truth of what they never received. They may become sad and angry, but then they become more interested in seeking connection with other people. You can begin this process in the next exercise, but please consider psychotherapy or support groups to help you with any strong feelings that might come up.
Exercise: What You May Have Lost
To start this process, get your journal and take some quiet time to reflect on what you may have lost in childhood as a result of having EI parents. (Looking at a childhood photograph of yourself as you do this exercise can make it especially meaningful.) Next, complete these sentences and follow up with thoughts on what you wrote.
I lost the chance to be…
I didn’t have the opportunity to feel…
It hurt, but I learned to accept...
I wish I’d never been made to feel.…
If I had had a magic wand, I would’ve made my mother more…
If I had had a magic wand, I would’ve made my father more…
I just wanted someone to…
After completing your reflections on what you wrote, let your inner child self know that you will now give yourself the attention and acceptance you may have lost and will look for more interested, reciprocal people to be close to.
Why Can’t They Change?
Adult children of EI parents are prone to healing fantasies (Gibson 2015)
in which they secretly hope that they can change their parents and have a rewarding relationship with them. Remember Gina from chapter 2, whose elderly parents wanted to move near her? Gina confessed that one of the reasons she even considered their demand was the fantasy that one day her critical, explosive father might open up to her, finally giving them an opportunity to connect. She worried that she might be shutting the door on that last chance for closeness if she didn’t let them do what they wanted.
These healing fantasies should be questioned because they prolong an improbable hope for parental change. Instead, you are more likely to be healed by your own efforts than anything your parents might do. Whatever does improve in your relationship with EI parents will likely be caused by a shift in your outlook, not a change in them.
It’s understandable that if you crave your parents’ interest and connection, you might think they’d want the same thing. But any attempts by you to change your EI parents are unlikely to work because they are easily destabilized by the emotional intensity of such encounters. When you attempt emotional closeness with an EI parent, their instinct is to pull back. You think you’re trying to give love, but it may feel uncomfortable to them. They have already formed a personality style that protects them. They don’t want to change.
Having suppressed so many of their own deeper needs for connection, EI parents just don’t get what all the fuss is about. They may not understand why this is so important to you because they don’t realize how crucial their relationship is for their child’s emotional security and self-esteem. Many EI parents have such low self-worth that they can’t imagine that their presence and interest would matter so much to their children. It is nearly impossible for these parents to believe how much they have to offer just by being there for their children.
Sadness About Giving Up Your Healing Fantasy
Accepting your EI parent’s limitations can help you have more realistic expectations, but it can be hard to give up the dream that they could change and become the loving parent you needed. That fantasy has probably helped you through tough times with them, hoping that one day they would make up for the emotional loneliness and self-doubts they caused. But instead of wishful thinking, perhaps it would work better to come to grips with what is.
The Need to Grieve
Releasing hopeful fantasies feels like a real loss. You can’t give up something so important without allowing room for grief.
As you grieve the loss of illusions about your parents, you may also feel sad for what you had to sacrifice in yourself in order to adapt to your EI parent. Allowing sadness about your own self-repression will put you back in touch with lost parts of yourself that didn’t get to be heard before. I hope you will listen to them now because working through the grief of these suppressed parts will make you free to be your whole self and feel complete.
When you stop hoping that your EI parent might one day change, you can finally face how hurt, alone, and frightened you felt as a child. Awareness of the cost of these emotional injuries probably had to be suppressed in childhood so you could complete the business of growing up. It was healthy for you back then to hope that your EI parent might one day care about your feelings and seek a deeper connection. But now as an adult, it is healthier to give up hopes for your parent’s change. When you stop longing to be rescued by them, you can connect with your own emotional needs and thereby bond more securely to yourself, your future development, and your future relationships.
Choose Your Active Self over Your Suffering Self
As a child with EI parents, some part of yourself may have figured out that the best way to get along was to suffer in silence and not rock the boat. This suffering self (Forbes 2018; Perkins 1995) adapts to a dominating parent by staying powerless in life and passive in relationships. Rather than feeling anger or knowing what it wants, the suffering self stays stuck in chronic unhappiness and feelings of helplessness. It had to relinquish assertiveness as it tried to adjust to a difficult childhood situation, but it shouldn’t be allowed to keep running the show (Schwartz 1995).
The suffering self convinces you that self-sacrifice makes you a good person or at least more likely to be loved by others. But now this suffering self should be retired as the model for your relationships. Being active on your own behalf is much better than passivity and helplessness as a way of dealing with overbearing parents. As an adult, you can now take action toward what is best for your optimal energy and self-care.
Adjust Your Expectations and Work on Yourself
Now that you have read about healing fantasies, ask yourself whether it’s possible that what you crave is not really a closer relationship with these particular parents but more the feeling that you are lovable and acceptable. Would you pick your parent as a desirable new friend you’d be happy to have? If not, maybe you can feel good about yourself in another way. Maybe you don’t need your parent to love you in order to feel lovable. Is it possible that as an adult, you could give it to yourself through a more caring relationship with yourself?
The second half of this book will focus on how to have a fulfilling relationship with yourself by exploring your inner world, setting fresh intentions, and updating your self-concept. You’ll learn to support your own self-growth, open your heart to better relationships and more fun, while strengthening your unique sense of identity and individuality. Through these practices, your self-development will be pursued for its own sake, not as a secret way to finally win an EI parent’s approval.
In the meantime, your can trade in your longing for a more satisfying relationship with your EI parent for new goals of seeing them more realistically, understanding their limitations, and adjusting your expectations. As long as you hold on to hopes they can’t fulfill, the relationship will be frustrating for both of you.
You can’t change them, and you can’t make them happy. Even if you knock yourself out, the best you will do is briefly lessen their discontent. That’s because even though their emotionally immature relationship system (EIRS) makes it feel like you are responsible for their happiness, their emotional limits don’t allow them to absorb what you try to give them.
Your heart will feel lighter once you accept that you can’t make them happy, fix their lives, or make them proud of you. It’s usually beyond them to think about your feelings, and they can’t sustain reciprocal emotional intimacies. They won’t listen to you for long, and nothing you do may ever be enough. They’ll continue to see you in the role as their child, not a full capable adult. They’ll exert dominance and demand to be the most important person in the relationship. Their interests will always come first, and even if you are a model adult, they may still be critical, demeaning, or dismissive toward you.
Raise Your Expectations for Other Relationships
If you learned in childhood that other people were more important than you, you might carry that over to adult relationships. You may believe that wanting reciprocity is expecting too much and that chronic emotional frustration is normal for relationships. Many adult children of EI parents accept statements like “Relationships take a lot of work” because that was their experience growing up. It doesn’t seem odd to them to have problems requiring couples counseling before they even get married. They subconsciously expect dissatisfaction and poor communication in close relationships.
It can be an alien concept that a mate is supposed to be concerned for your feelings, interested in your subjective experience, and want to get along as much as you do. If you had EI parents, it can feel acceptable to settle for meager attention on another’s timetable and only under certain circumstances. But once you realize that someone is occasionally giving you emotional snacks and never a satisfying connection, it frees you up to look for new sources of emotional nurturing.
If you did not get much emotionally from EI parents in childhood, you might be too willing to put a lot of one-sided effort into your adult relationships. You may not
be happy, but you may feel you should take whatever’s offered. Your job now is to question any one-sided relationship and look for something more satisfying. As you work at lowering your expectations for the EIPs and EI parents in your life, you should simultaneously raise your expectations in order to find friends and partners who put as much effort into reciprocal, empathetic relationships as you do.
Exercise: What You’re Looking for Now
In the spirit of looking for emotional satisfactions now that you lacked in childhood, take some time to think and use your journal to fill out these statements about your new possibilities.
I now have the chance to be…
At last, I have the opportunity to feel…
Some of the behaviors I will no longer accept from people are.…
I’m going to find people who are…
I’m looking for people who will…
Now I see myself as…
In summary, you don’t have to be reparented by your actual parent to become what you want to be now. Once you start relying on your adult mind and listening to your own heart, you’ve got all you need inside you for the guidance and support you wish you’d had years ago. By valuing yourself and exploring your inner world, you will no longer feel so hurt by parents who can’t see you for who you are. You don’t need them to feel lovable and worthy because you can now get that from yourself and from like-minded people.
Highlights to Remember
EI parents leave their children with unmet needs for connection, communication, and approval. Instead of giving their children adequate attention and affection, many EI parents show disinterest, envy, excessive busyness, or emotional agitation. You may wish for a better relationship with them, but their defenses and inconsistencies render them unavailable at an emotional level. However, by finally accepting their limitations, you can turn your attention toward better relationships with yourself and others. Once you release and mourn what you can’t get from them, you will have more realistic relationships with them, other people, and yourself as well.
Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents Page 7