If you get calls from an EIP who goes on and on, voicemail is a self-protective solution. Responding to phone calls by text or email (“Missed your call. What’s up?”) is another way of keeping contact time-limited and to the point. People don’t have the right to access you any time it suits them. You can return a call when it’s convenient to you—preferably when you soon have to be somewhere else.
When an EI parent or EIP uses your ear as a dumping ground for their unhappiness or complaints, you can say, “Oh, you’re having a hard time. Listen, I’ll call you later when you’re feeling better.” Remember, it doesn’t have to make sense; it just has to get you off the hook. If the EIP becomes accusatory or argumentative with you, you can say noncommittally, “Oh. I didn’t know that,” or “I hear you. We’re different, and that’s okay. I’m gonna let you go now.”
It’s a good idea to set limits when you first pick up the phone: “Oh, hey bro. Nice to hear from you. I got about ten minutes. What’s up?” If the EIP tries to guilt you by saying something like, “You’re always in a hurry. We never get to talk anymore,” the proper response is, “I have ten minutes now. What’s up?”
By the way, the phrase “What’s up?” cues a person to get to the point, instead of encouraging longer responses by asking solicitous, open-ended questions such as, “What’s going on?” or “What did you want to tell me?” This is not being rude; it is actually polite to let a person know up front what you have time for.
You Can Refuse Certain Topics
Lexi hated it when her mother, Joanne, talked about other family members. One day Lexi told Joanne she would no longer listen to gossip about them. Joanne was offended and defensive, and told Lexi, “Well, if I can’t tell you, who else can I talk to?” Lexi realized this was not her problem to solve and told Joanne she would be happy to have conversations on other topics. After that, whenever Joanne started complaining about the relatives, Lexi broke in, said, “Gotta go, Mom,” and hung up without further explanation. Sometimes Lexi just hung up or pretended the connection was breaking up. After a while, her mother would start to complain, and then say, “Oh yeah, you won’t talk about this…” before going on to something else. This was another example of how effective persistence can be with EIPs.
Use a Style That Works for You
Lexi gave herself permission to call a halt and get off the phone abruptly. No long good-byes, no gentle wind-downs. She just hung up. On the other hand, Audrey was a person who felt more comfortable being nicer. For instance, when Audrey felt drained by her mother, she broke in and said in a kind voice, “Mom, I’m as sorry as I can be, but I need to go now. I’ll talk to you later.”
Abruptly or kindly, both women were successfully safeguarding their energy and declining their mother’s control. Both Lexi and Audrey accomplished their goal of getting off the phone, but they did it in their own ways.
Abrupt endings may seem rude or mean, but they aren’t. The EIP’s lack of empathy makes them oblivious to more roundabout signals that you have had enough. You have just as much right to end the conversation as they have to continue it. Plus, you’ll feel much more like listening later if you know you can end it whenever you want. Your limit is a good thing for the relationship. It’s all part of being an active participant rather than a passive audience.
Just Leave
Most adult children have been trained to wait until an EI parent is finished with the interaction or else risk being called impolite or disrespectful. EI parents often refuse to let their children have emotional space. (“Look at me when I’m talking to you!”) The child is certainly not allowed to say when they’ve had enough. This is part of the passivity training that children of EIPs get. They are supposed to stay put—perhaps dissociate—until the EIP is finished. In situations where an EIP won’t give you room to say when you’ve had enough, leaving is not cowardice or rudeness. It is just another way of setting a boundary in a way that hurts no one.
Unless we are a physical prisoner, we can always leave, and it doesn’t have to be socially graceful. In fact, it doesn’t hurt to cultivate a little unpredictability that way.
Sam’s Method
Sam trained his family to expect that he would come late and leave early. He was in a good humor while he visited, but then he would suddenly stand up from the table and say, “Well, this has been great, but I gotta get going,” followed by a friendly hand wave and “Bye, everybody!” Sam found that he actually enjoyed his visits more once he knew he could leave when he was ready.
When he first started doing this, his startled family members demanded to know why he had to leave so soon. He used to offer excuses like, “I’m really beat,” or “I ate too much.” After a while, he stopped the excuses and just said good-bye. He didn’t treat it like a big deal, and because he stayed in good humor as he did it, his family eventually accepted it. If they ever complained about his being late, he agreed, saying, “I know, I’m late for everything.” After a while, his family just rolled their eyes as he left, and someone usually remarked, “That’s Sam.”
You Can Cut Off Contact
If EI parents won’t respect boundaries or are too harmful in their behaviors, you can choose to cut off contact for as long as you need to. Sometimes we need a break from EIPs or parents who have become too draining or toxic (Forward 1989). If interactions are invariably painful, keep some distance until you feel strong enough to not be dragged down by them. When EIPs have been abusive, keeping distance might be the only option that feels protected enough. In rare cases, for good reasons, some people decide to break off contact altogether.
Estrangement takes a toll, however, so you have to weigh the costs of separation. The goal of taking a break is to get stronger so that even if you have some contact, you can stay free of their takeovers and dominance. If you decide to have only limited contact, very brief calls, emails, texts, or short visits may be all that can be managed for a long time.
When considering cutting off contact, ask yourself whether you might regret it later. That is the real test to base your decision on. Sometimes contact is just too painful. Sometimes the best possible relationship you can have is from a distance.
5. Stop Them
Let’s look at what to do when EIPs act abusively. If their behavior is disrespectful but not an actual safety threat, you can be ready with a new “rule.” Knowing their typical kind of disrespectful behavior, you can rehearse your planned response until it reaches the speed of an impulse. Abusive behavior catches most people by surprise, so if you’re not ready with a response, you might freeze into paralysis. Responding immediately also has the element of surprise, which breaks up the EIP’s intent to overpower. You stop them and declare the rules for future interactions.
Let’s look at an example of limit-setting with a bullying parent who was not likely to escalate into further violence.
Lisa’s Story
Lisa continued to invite her parents for family holidays in spite of her father’s short temper. Then one Thanksgiving, her father slapped the back of her eight-year-old son’s head for taking treats from the pantry without asking permission. Lisa saw red as she experienced a flashback of her own abuse. She shouted at her father, “Dad! I swear, if you ever do that again, you’ll never see us again!” She could also have said something like, “Dad! We don’t hit in this house. If you do that again, you won’t be invited back. Tell Bobby you’re sorry.”
Lisa’s strong reaction was necessary for setting a limit with a father who not only thought he was entitled to rule his own roost, but everyone else’s as well. Lisa would’ve been within her rights to tell her parents it was time for them to go home. However, if Lisa feared real violence by her father, she should not confront him. Instead, she should try to de-escalate things and keep the situation safe, including privately calling the police if necessary. Later she could safely explain to him in a phone call or an email why she was not invit
ing them back.
Be Mindful of Safety When Dealing with Violent EIPs
With potentially violent EIPs, setting firm limits or demanding they stop may might things worse, depending on their emotional state in the moment. Standing up for yourself when someone is in a rage may endanger you. It’s best to ask for advice from experts and follow your own intuition about how to best get through moments of danger in order to obtain a safe distance later. Your proper goal in such circumstances is to get through the situation without getting hurt. Once you’re away from them, you can create a more comprehensive plan to keep yourself and others safe.
Respond in the Moment the Best Way You Know How
Sometimes EIPs endanger others because they lose emotional control, such as breaking things or driving a car while upset. This feels like being held hostage because anything you do could make things worse.
Sometimes in such situations, all you can do is breathe, stay aware, try to soothe the EIP, and look for opportunities to calm things down or get out of the situation. This doesn’t mean you are weak; it means you are dealing with a dangerous situation in the only way you can.
However, you can plan what you will do in the future. You could agree to meet with them only in public spaces or always arrange for your own transportation. If they ask you why, tell them.
Your skill with these methods will grow steadily as you practice. You will become increasingly authentic and free from emotional coercion. After a while, you will feel a peaceful strength growing inside. To make these changes stick, keep encouraging and praising yourself for remaining aware and being able to spot emotional coercion before it works its way into you.
Highlights to Remember
You have the right to decline being taken over by EIPs. Any frustration caused by EIPs can be used as a signal to switch gears and think about the outcome you want. Take your time and create room for yourself instead of feeling pushed by the EIP to react immediately. Effective methods of sidestepping, disengaging, leading, and setting limits can stop their emotional control attempts. Watch out for your safety with potentially violent EIPs, and get expert advice for how to respond if they become abusive.
Chapter 6: EI Parents Are Hostile Toward Your Inner World
How to Defend Your Right to Your Innermost Experiences
It’s hard to be yourself with EI parents. Some children of EI parents act out their distress by defying their parent, but if you are a thinker and internalize things, you may be more self-inhibiting. Around your parents, you may hide your individuality a bit and interact in ways that keep things smooth between you. You may always feel a little nervous around your EI parent, censoring and thinking twice before you speak.
What makes you so cautious about expressing yourself? It’s because EIPs are so quick to judge and ridicule other people’s inner experiences. To them, your inner world is unnecessary, a needless distraction from what they consider important. They expect you to agree with them, so whenever you express a different opinion or say how you feel, they take it as disrespectful. They act as if anything going on inside you has no merit unless they approve.
In this chapter, we are going to see how EI parents’ hostile attitude toward your inner world can teach you to mistrust and even feel ashamed of your inner experiences, thereby undermining your self-confidence. EIPs instinctively don’t want you to rely on your inner guidance because then you’ll be much harder to control. Our goal here is to see through their demoralizing judgments to support your own feelings and point of view.
The Importance of Your Inner World and What It Gives You
Let’s look at why your inner world is so important. There are five crucial gifts that come from your inner world.
Your inner stability and resilience
Your sense of wholeness and self-confidence
Your capacity for intimate relationships with others
Your ability to self-protect
Your awareness of your life’s purpose
1. Your Inner Stability and Resilience
Your inner, psychological world develops in predictable stages, just like your body. We all start out undeveloped, then gradually form integrated, dynamic personality structures. If inner development goes well, your psychological functions weave into a stable cross-connected organization that allows different aspects of yourself—mind and heart—to work together seamlessly. You develop enough inner complexity to make you resilient and adaptable. You get to know yourself and your emotions; your thoughts are flexible yet organized. You become self-aware.
This is very different from the black-and-white, rigid, and often contradictory personality of the EIP. The inner world of EI personalities is not well enough developed or integrated to produce reliable stability, resilience, or self-awareness.
2. Your Sense of Wholeness and Self-Confidence
When you know your own thoughts and are deeply in touch with your inner world, you gain a sense of inner wholeness and completeness that increases your sense of security. Your inner wholeness also gives you dignity and integrity, and anchors you whenever you face stress or discord. It also gives you confidence that your feelings have meaning and that your instinctual guidance can be trusted.
3. Your Capacity for Intimate Relationships with Others
Emotional self-awareness allows you to share emotionally intimate relationships with others. The better you know yourself, the more compassionately you will feel toward other people. Real intimacy is a shared understanding of each other’s inner experiences. Otherwise, it’s just two people bouncing their needs and impulses off each other. Self-awareness also helps you select friends and partners who will support you and what you value in life.
4. Your Ability to Self-Protect
The ability to sense danger in your surroundings or untrustworthiness in other people depends on how well you listen to your gut feelings. To detect threat, you have to be aware of how situations and interactions make you feel. The primal instincts of the inner world are crucial to your safety.
5. Your Awareness of Your Life’s Purpose
A good relationship with your inner world reveals what’s meaningful to you and directs your life’s purpose. If you don’t form that trusting relationship with your inner world, you will be dependent on whatever your peers, the culture, or authorities tell you to be. In part II of this book, you will learn more specific ways to get to know your inner world and how to engage in this process more deeply.
EIPs’ Attitudes Toward Your Inner World
Now let’s look at how EIPs view your inner world. Understanding EI parents’ attitudes toward your inner experiences will help you trust yourself instead of deferring to them.
They See You as Still Needing Their Direction
EI parents see their adult children as still immature inside, as if you were still their child. Seeing you in this outdated way, it’s no wonder they keep telling you how to be instead of finding out what’s really going on inside you. They feel entitled to assert parental authority long after you’ve become an adult.
Your adult inner world of feelings and opinions challenge their belief that you still need their input and direction. They may preach, criticize, or tell you what to do because they don’t like the idea that you’re now your own person. Ignoring your inner world helps them maintain the old parent-child relationship they are most comfortable with.
They Lack Curiosity About Your Subjective Experience
Because EI parents want to direct how other people should be, their child’s inner experience isn’t relevant to them. They think of children as empty boxes to be filled with what parents want them to know. Lacking in empathy and curiosity, what matters to them is how you treat them, not what you feel or think.
EI parents’ disinterest in other people’s inner experience explains why they don’t listen very well. It doesn’t occur to them that anything of much
importance could be going on inside you, so they see no point in trying to grasp your point of view. Their dismissive attitude toward your inner subjective experience in childhood also teaches you to view your inner world as insignificant.
They Think Staying Busy Matters More Than Your Inner Life
To the EI parent, the important things happen in the outside world. They don’t see why children should be encouraged to become aware of their inner worlds. To them, the inner realm of thoughts and feelings seems vaguely subversive and certainly unproductive. They think it’s best if kids stay busy and focused on activities and externals.
With such a dismissive attitude, EI parents are often unsupportive of activities that develop the inner world. Reading, daydreaming, or art for its own sake can seem like a waste of time to them. To the EIP, everything should result in a tangible payoff, or what’s the point? Even their spirituality tends to be heavily structured and rule-bound, with strict limits on acceptable spiritual beliefs.
They Are Impatient with Thoughtful Decision Making
EIPs want quick results. Consequently, they don’t encourage thoughtful decision making in their children. Their guidance often consists of rules and platitudes, or they might just tell you to do what makes you happy—terrible advice for many situations. For them, thoughtfully consulting your inner world is a source of distraction and delay rather than wisdom. Taking time to think also means you are more likely to come up with something they would not approve of.
Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents Page 11