Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents

by Lindsay C Gibson

  Another challenging situation might be when people talk about committing suicide. Is it distortion, panic, or the real thing? When the stakes are that high, you should act to save their life by calling the police or other professionals to intervene. They will then know that if they ever call you again in such a situation, you’ll protect them by calling the police to keep them safe. Suicide threats are the most chilling form of emotional takeover. You cannot allow yourself to get cast in the role of the only person who can save their life through your efforts alone. Suicide threats should be treated like hostage situations where someone could really get hurt. You wouldn’t try to deal with it yourself; you would call in law enforcement specialists.

  You Might Have an Innocent Third Party to Consider

  Sometimes you may choose to go along with an EIP’s demands because of an innocent third party. After looking at the situation carefully, you might discover you want the same thing they want, but perhaps for different reasons. For instance, Stan’s adult daughter Layla had begged money from him numerous times and spent it irresponsibly. However, Stan agreed to help her buy a newer car with airbags for the safety of his ten-year-old grandson.

  Why You Become Vulnerable to Emotional Takeovers

  We can be reluctant to set limits because EIPs stir up emotions that get us to do what they want. You might give in to an emotional takeover because

  you feel bad about yourself for saying no

  you are afraid of their anger

  you fear being judged and punished.

  Let’s look at each one of these fears, and what to do about it in order to preserve your emotional autonomy when EIPs put on the pressure.

  1. You Feel Bad About Yourself for Saying No

  If normal standing up for yourself feels selfish, your self-esteem is probably being held hostage by an EIP. With EIPs, you can’t say no to a request and still be seen as caring. Only in the distorted world of the EIP could thinking things over or setting a limit be construed as mean or uncaring. But their hurt reaction can be quite effective because no one wants to be a villain, and no decent person likes to be seen as uncaring.

  However, you can correct their distortions by saying something nonthreatening like, “I’m not intending to be mean. Do you think it’s unloving to have a different viewpoint from yours?” Or you could say, “You and I see this differently, and that’s because we each have responsibility for our own lives.”

  2. You’re Afraid of Their Anger

  You may also allow emotional takeovers because you fear the EIP’s temper. They make us nervous with their emotional reactivity, much like people tiptoe around a sleeping baby or hesitate to say no to a volcanic toddler. Very controlling or narcissistic EIPs can get enraged if you don’t conform to their wishes. The EIP may not act it out in physically harmful ways (or they might), but you will feel the anger radiating off them like a furnace. You feel like they might explode any minute.

  With volatile EIPs, it’s always a good idea to set limits with them under safe circumstances, such as speaking on the phone instead of in person or talking in places where other people are nearby for support or protection. When you talk to them, set your limits without being critical, judgmental, or getting in their face. You can try saying something like, “I know, I wish I could give you what you want, but I’m not going to be able to do that this time,” or “Yeah, I don’t blame you for being mad. It’s just more than I can do right now.”

  Of course, if there is any question of potential physical violence, you must consult with experts to figure out how to handle the situation safely.

  3. You Fear Being Judged and Punished

  When you incur an EIP’s judgment, it’s sometimes hard to figure out exactly what was so bad about what you did. They act appalled, but you don’t see how what you did was so horrible. Remember that EIPs think in emotional absolutes, which means that if you aren’t completely on their side, they may see you as the enemy.

  Many adult children of EI parents suffer from intense, irrational fears about being judged and punished. These fears of punitive judgment can come from EI parents, older siblings, teachers, or any authority figure. When this childhood fear resurfaces, it feels terrifying, as if there were no hope and your downfall were imminent. When these fears of punishment get triggered, you start thinking things like, This will be the end of me. It’s never going to get better. I’m totally screwed.

  For instance, my client Betsy sometimes woke up in the middle of the night with a pounding heart, feeling like something dreadful was about to happen to her. She lived in constant fear that someone in authority, perhaps a boss, was watching her like a hawk and waiting for her to fail. In her childhood, her moralistic parents had been so scrupulously judgmental and punitive that she never felt safe at home. They frequently punished her for things she didn’t even know she had done wrong. Betsy remembered as a little girl she only felt truly safe when she could hear her mother vacuuming or talking on the phone because then she knew she wasn’t about to be punished.

  The good thing about judgment is that you have to agree with it in order to feel bad. They may judge you, but you alone determine whether you feel guilty or not. You can step out of any EIP’s distorted judgments as soon as you feel free to disagree with their opinions. You can decline to accept their criticism and make a distinction between what they’re saying about you and what you know to be true about yourself. Remember, just because an EIP feels something is true, doesn’t necessarily mean it is. You get to define yourself, not them. Decline their judgment if you don’t think it’s fair.

  All of us can sometimes fall into EI takeovers that make us feel so bad that we emotionally disconnect from ourselves in order to stop the hurt or fear. Unfortunately, this self-protective disconnection just makes it easier for the EIP’s negative distortions to take over our minds and hearts.

  The Dissociation Reaction: Why You Can’t Think of a Thing to Say

  Let’s shift gears now and look at how a loss of connection with your own feelings facilitates emotional takeovers by EIPs. Dissociation is when you psychologically separate from yourself. It can make you freeze up or shrivel inside, or even make you feel like you’re detached from your body.

  Most people have heard about dissociation only from dramatic stories about people with “multiple personalities.” But dissociation is a natural defense and can be any form of distancing from your conscious experience of yourself. It’s a primitive type of emotional escape and a very common psychological defense against threat or danger, especially for children in an unsafe environment. Think of it as an automatic shutdown valve; it doesn’t fix what’s wrong, but it stops you from being emotionally overwhelmed by it.

  Dissociating—or separating—from your self-connection makes you passive and lets you get sucked into an EIP’s emotional takeover. Unfortunately, this self-disconnection can become so automatic that you might not know when you are sliding into it.

  The Disconnection State and Its Roots

  Slipping into a dissociated, disconnected state is one of the ways we instinctively cope with imminent danger. It’s related to the play-dead or freeze response in animals that occurs when they realize a predator is too close for escape. You might have personally experienced dissociation as a stunned feeling, a kind of trance-like state accompanied by a feeling of blankness and loss of initiative. You can’t think what to say or do. Everyone is familiar with this shutdown state: we call it the deer-in-the-headlights reaction.

  Under the most extreme stress, dissociative disconnection sometimes can make people feel like they’ve exited their bodies, as if they are outside themselves or hovering above, watching what’s happening to them. This is a common trauma response and shows how easily anyone can disconnect to the point where they remain aware but can no longer act.

  Dissociation saves us from overwhelming levels of traumatic pain, injury, and loss. Some
times it is a blessing to step away from yourself and feel nothing. For instance, some forms of self-disconnection can help an injured person keep fighting to survive without the distraction of pain. Likewise, a bereft person can face inconceivable loss by going into a numb, shutdown mode. People who overuse intoxicants induce dissociated states in an artificial way, setting aside their ordinary consciousness to not be aware of their feelings.

  This same dissociative mechanism can cause you to go blank and let an EIP emotionally control you. When you can’t think of what to say in response to a hurtful remark or unreasonable demand, dissociation may be happening on a small scale. You’re in a little state of shock and can’t think.

  We can learn dissociative practices early in life by being around emotionally reactive EI parents. You may have needed to disconnect from your feelings in order to cope with parents who had a short temper or emotionally abandoned you. Once children discover how self-disconnection takes away pain, they can use it for increasingly minor threats. After a while, they can become strangers to their own inner experience; instead of just cutting themselves off from fear or hurt, all emotion gets so dulled that life itself feels a little unreal.

  Why It’s So Important Not to Disconnect from Yourself

  Once you shift into self-disconnection, you can no longer make choices in a situation. Therefore, learning to recognize and prevent dissociation is crucial. The steps in preventing dissociation are to

  stay in touch with yourself no matter what

  snap out of it when you start to zone out

  keep thinking of active ways to deal with the situation.

  When escape from EIPs is hard, such as during family events, it can be tempting to unhook from your self-awareness and just float along until you can get away from them. But disconnecting from yourself affirms that you are powerless when it comes to them—which is just not true. It also makes you feel more helpless and ineffective in the long run.

  Brendan’s Story

  Brendan dreaded his widowed mother’s yearly visits. He told me he had learned to “put himself away” as soon as she arrived. Growing up, this passive solution felt like the only way to preserve his individuality around his critical, intrusive, and controlling mother. It felt better to disconnect from his real self than to be picked apart by her criticisms. As a child, expressing his feelings to her had only resulted in mockery, rejection, or getting him thrown out of the house.

  However, Brendan’s withdrawal and detachment came at a price: he felt like he entered a state of suspended animation while his mother was visiting, followed by intense cravings for junk food and alcohol as soon as she left. Brendan’s self-defeating solution was to make himself “empty” so he would be less of an emotional target for her and then use bingeing to refuel after her visits. Eating and drinking were experiences under his control and, unlike his mother, guaranteed to give him something back.

  Brendan’s first step in changing things with his mother was to stop dissociating from himself and allowing her to be the center of attention. I encouraged him to stay connected with his true thoughts and feelings and be active rather than passive when it came to handling her self-centered behavior. Brendan started interrupting her one-sided “conversations,” rather than listening to her to the point of numbness. When he felt himself start to drift, he abruptly changed the subject, stood up, walked outside, or otherwise physically interrupted their interaction. Brendan was learning to actively take breaks from her, rather than from himself.

  As Brendan stopped disconnecting from himself, he became more active on his own behalf. When his mother made unwanted suggestions about his job, Brendan explained he didn’t want advice and asked her just to listen sympathetically. When she planned to stay a week, he cut it down to two days. Brendan also used a different response to his mother’s critical comments; instead of zoning out, he would immediately say, “Wait a minute…wait a minute…let me think about what you just said.” He thus interrupted his own dissociative habit, giving himself time to realize how she was making him feel, and telling her about it. He may have curtailed his mother’s own dissociative traits too, because many times EIPs’ excessive verbiage is a dissociative way of keeping themselves separated from deeper feelings they don’t want to be aware of.

  Like Brendan, you too can intend to stay conscious and connected with yourself during interactions with an EIP or EI parent. It’s worth ­practicing because once you stop dissociating and stay connected with yourself, you will no longer be susceptible to emotional takeovers. In chapter 7, we will look at more methods and skills for regaining your self-connection.

  Highlights to Remember

  In this chapter, we looked at how to spot and resist tactics used by EIPs for emotional takeovers. You learned about EIPs’ distortion fields and how they use their sense of urgency as entitlement to your help. You now can claim your right to take time to think your way through situations when you feel pressured to do more than you want to. You can now recognize an EIP’s exaggerations and consciously and actively refuse any request that makes you uncomfortable. You also hopefully realize how an EIP’s intimidating pressure, anger, and judgments can disconnect you from yourself to the point of dissociation. You learned about the importance of taking charge and acting on your own behalf in any situation that might threaten to separate you from yourself.

  Chapter 5: Skills to Manage Interactions and Evade Coercions

  Actions That Empower You

  Interactions with EI parents can leave you feeling inarticulate, controlled, and powerless. If you grew up with EI parents, you probably didn’t learn skills for handling emotional coercion and exploitation. But now as an adult, you’ll be able to respond in new ways. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to establish boundaries and evade an EI parent’s takeover tactics.

  However, please be sure to adapt these new skills to fit your personality style so they’re within your comfort zone. Some assertiveness skills can feel so extreme they seem to require a whole new personality. Overly blunt assertiveness can be uncomfortable to the point that even if you could do it, you wouldn’t want to do it more than once or twice. For example, flat refusals and just saying no may work for some people, but it might not be your style. You may be more comfortable apologizing, demurring, and pleasing your way forward. The following skills will still work even if you’re hesitant, accommodating, or sweet by nature. If you end up with the outcome you intended in an EIP interaction, that’s all that counts.

  Guidelines That Will Make Your Skills More Effective

  First, let’s first look at a few basic reminders that will make these skills more effective.

  You Can Take Your Time

  You may have noticed how rushed you feel around EIPs, as if you are irritating them by taking a moment to think. They are always hurrying their children and making everyone tense and uncomfortable with their low tolerance for delay. Because they are so self-preoccupied and have such low empathy, they can’t see why others can’t instantly give them what they want.

  It’s easy to succumb to their urgency. Most people get flummoxed when rushed, which then opens the door wider to the EIP’s emotional takeover. Before you know it, you will be pressuring yourself to do everything for them quickly. Once you start hurrying yourself, EIPs easily gain control of your emotional state.

  Taking your time prevents emotional takeovers because you stay in touch with yourself. One of the most self-preserving things you can say to an EIP is “I need some time to think about that.” EIPs hate that phrase because, in their mind, there’s no need to waste time thinking. They don’t see why they can’t speed things along by telling you what to think.

  Don’t agree to do things according to their time frame. You need time to consider what you’re willing to engage in and what you aren’t. If you rush yourself, you will be moving forward without benefit of your own self-awareness. Then it’s a sure bet that y
ou will end up serving the EIP’s needs, not your own.

  Figure Out the Exact Outcome You Want

  Focus on how you want each interaction with an EIP to turn out. Aim your actions toward your preferred outcome, rather than worrying about what the EIP wants. If you don’t have a clear outcome in mind, the EIP will take over by default with their more rigid and single-minded approach.

  Setting the outcome you want gives every interaction much-needed structure and direction. Structure keeps your goals in sight so an EIP’s insistence doesn’t make you lose track of what’s important to you.

  To identify the desired outcome for an interaction, ask yourself the following questions.

  If I got what I wanted from this interaction, what would that look like? (Perhaps you set a limit with them and only agree to what you really want to do.)

  Is the outcome I’m considering within my control, or is it up to them? (Try picking a goal that you can make happen.)

  Am I fixated on needing them to act differently? (If you’re looking for them to change, how about picking a different outcome that is within your power.)

  Is my goal for this interaction my internal growth, acting differently, or both? (You could promote your growth by staying aware of your feelings or try new behaviors by speaking up when you disagree.)

  Reviewing this checklist in advance keeps you focused so you don’t come out of interactions agreeing to something you didn’t want. Avoid any regret by making your preferred outcome a priority in the first place.

  Don’t Take Immature Behavior So Seriously: Just Be Persistent

  EIPs like to tell you what you should do, even when the decision is clearly yours. To evade this inappropriate pressure, here’s what to do. Acknowledge their objections if you want (“Uh-huh,” “I hear you,” “Mmmm”), but don’t take them seriously. Vaguely listen for a minute, keep a light tone, smile pleasantly, and then repeat what you want or what you are planning to do (Smith 1975). If you encounter resistance, don’t make a big deal out of it: just keep restating what you said before. It’s not a dramatic technique, but like a river carves rock, it works.