Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents

by Lindsay C Gibson

  They Undercut Your Decisions

  Although EI parents see thoughtfulness as pointlessly dilatory, once you make your decision, they often shoot holes in it. This is one of those crazy-making incongruities of an EI parent. You should quickly make a decision, but it should be in agreement with them. Taking thoughtful action toward your own goals is evidence of your individuation from them, and that makes them insecure.

  They Invalidate Your Dreams, Fantasy Life, and Aesthetic Sense

  Fantasy, imagination, and aesthetics originate in the inner world, so many EI parents consider these functions a waste of time. EIPs often dismiss fantasy as pointless woolgathering. They fail to see its role as the essential precursor to invention and problem solving. It’s ironic that EIPs disregard the benefit of imagination, because everything in the man-made world was first invented in someone’s fantasy life.

  EIPs can be especially contemptuous of other people’s aesthetic sense of awe or beauty. When EI parents critique or make fun of what their children find beautiful or meaningful it can really hurt the child’s self-esteem.

  Here are two examples of spoiling a child’s aesthetic experience. As a teenager, Mila saved her money and bought what she considered a fabulous faux-fur jacket to wear to school. When she wore it the first time, her mother laughed and told her she looked like a mangy bear. When Luke plastered his bedroom walls with posters of his favorite bands, his father told him the musicians looked like losers. Both Mila and Luke could never see their cherished objects quite the same way again.

  Because kids fall in love with what they find beautiful and inspiring, such parental ridicule is devastating. When the child’s deep attraction to a desirable thing is mocked, it shakes a child’s emotional self-confidence. Over time, these children become alienated from their inner world and can suffer from demoralization, depression, emptiness, and even addictions.

  They Mock Your Inner Experiences

  If your feelings or opinions differ from an EIP’s, they are likely to shame, ridicule, or tease you. EIPs are well known for mocking anyone’s inner experience that doesn’t match theirs. Their derision suggests you’re naïve and don’t know what’s right to think.

  Their mockery can be expressed in many ways, such as “Don’t be ridiculous,” “Don’t be silly,” or “That doesn’t make any sense,” all of which say your thoughts are not worth considering. A look or sigh can also send the message that you don’t know what you’re talking about or that your ideas are absurd. These put-downs sow the seeds of self-doubt and self-consciousness. You start to feel embarrassed about your own thoughts.

  Why EIPs Are So Hostile Toward Your Inner World

  Often EIPs don’t just disagree with your ideas; they react contemptuously and angrily. When one fifty-year-old woman told her father she had voted for a candidate he opposed, he jabbed his forefinger at her and said, “Don’t you ever do that again!” The intensity of his hostility suggested he was not only offended but also threatened by the fact that she had her own preferences.

  Let’s look more closely at why EIPs can become hostile and attacking when you express your unique thoughts and feelings.

  Your Inner World Threatens Their Authority and Security

  EIPs don’t like your inner world because it interferes with their emotional takeovers and threatens their authority. Remember, EIPs seek emotional control over you so you’ll prop up their self-esteem and emotional stability. No wonder they get upset when you turn your attention from worrying about them to having your own thoughts and plans instead.

  Because many EIPs need to be dominant to feel secure in a relationship, they find your individuality alarming. They rightly sense that once you trust your inner experience, you may slip the collar of their control.

  EI parents may also worry that expressing your individuality could threaten their social standing. If your EI parents grew up in a community in which a person’s social status depended upon rigid conformity, they may fear that your uniqueness could lead to social shame for them.

  Your Self-Connection May Remind Them of What They’ve Lost

  Hearing about your hopes and dreams can remind them of their own disowned inner lives. They may mock and criticize you to keep emotional distance and avoid triggering their own painful memories.

  Your hopes for the future may remind them of their own lost opportunities. For example, one EI father ridiculed his son’s dreams of being an artist because it reminded him of his own thwarted ambitions. This father never got to follow his dreams because he had to drop out of school to help support the family. He couldn’t stand to hear his eager son express his excitement; it was too painful a reminder of what he never got to do.

  How You Learn to Turn Against Your Inner World

  It’s bad enough that EI parents invalidate your inner world, but you may also internalize their negative voices. As a result, you could start dismissing your inner experiences and treating yourself with contempt. Here are some self-betrayals to look out for.

  You Turn Against Your Inner Experiences

  EI parents may be dismissive, but it’s especially harmful when you turn against your own thoughts and feelings. As you reject your inner experiences, it will feel like other people wouldn’t want to listen to you either. This is because you have adopted contempt for your deepest feelings. Once you side with an EI parent’s disdain for your inner world, it’s like putting yourself into emotional solitary confinement. Self-neglect and self-criticism take over.

  You don’t have to do this to yourself. Instead of scolding yourself with, I shouldn’t feel this way, you could think, I’m having this feeling. I wonder why? Every time you accept your feelings and feel curiosity instead of self-rejection or shame, you are defending the idea that your inner world makes sense and should be listened to.

  You Learn to Build a Facade and Become More Superficial

  A child won’t grow up feeling like a person of substance if parents aren’t interested in what they feel or think. It’s difficult for children to stay genuine when it feels like their parents are about to lose interest. To avoid feeling overlooked, many children build an impressive facade rather than expressing themselves honestly. As a result, they might often feel inauthentic with others.

  Born out of emotional desperation, facades help manage how others see us so we don’t feel ignored or judged. But even as the facade protects us, it makes our connections more superficial. Tragically, the more skillful our facade becomes, the more likely we are to hang out with cynical, judgmental people (because they live through a facade too).

  If you sense you’re living through a facade, try showing your true reactions a bit more. Ease up on the ideal self-image and turn your attention to what you’re really feeling. Every bit of self-awareness diminishes superficiality. Every time you are a little more authentic, your loyalty to yourself increases. Your facade was probably the best you could do to win the approval of EI parents, but it may no longer serve you for optimal emotional closeness with others.

  You Minimize Your Feelings and Shut Yourself Down

  EI parents often react as if your normal emotions are too extreme, as if there were something wrong with you for having a heartfelt reaction. They thus teach you to downplay your feelings because they are uncomfortable with these strong emotions. They convince you that many of your emotions are unwarranted or excessive.

  Mia’s Story

  When Mia felt sad or hurt as a child, her parents told her, “Don’t be upset,” or “You shouldn’t feel that way.” Yet, when Mia was really happy, excited, or looking forward to something, her parents would still warn her, “Don’t get your hopes up.” Their overall message to her was “Don’t feel.” Whatever Mia experienced, she always got the message that it was too much. Mild emotional arousal was all her parents considered acceptable. To avoid embarrassment, Mia learned to disconnect from her strongest emotions, whether posit
ive or negative. This resulted in chronic depression as an adult.

  “I think they wanted me to be happy,” Mia told me, “but in a very shallow, let’s-not-get-too-deep kind of way.” Mia recalled that her parents accepted her happiness only about tangible, outer-world things they approved of, such as Christmas gifts, new clothes, or a good report card. Mia hid her true reactions because her parents often judged her feelings as excessive, weak, or oversensitive. Because of their rejection, Mia began to minimize and hide her feelings from herself too. She gradually lost her emotional freedom, her right to feel whatever she felt.

  Fortunately, Mia reclaimed her right to her full emotional autonomy. She learned to stop playing it cool when she was excited or shrugging it off when she was deeply disappointed. She practiced staying open to her emotions and letting her feelings reach full form.

  You can do the same. Don’t kill off your true feelings. It’s not right for you to feel fear and shame about feeling too much. You can reverse these self-betrayals by accepting your feelings just the way they want to be felt. The next time you feel excited, just let the feeling go through you uninterrupted. As an adult, you can let yourself experience your feelings in their unvarnished intensity. It’s the best way to get to know yourself.

  Unfortunately, if you’ve been made to feel foolish about your feelings, you may have learned to withdraw from people when you’re upset. You may brush off others’ sympathy by saying the equivalent of “I’m fine.” But withdrawing from comforting is very bad for you because you biologically need it. Normal human beings are soothed by touch and emotional connection with other people (Porges 2011). A caring person’s touch, voice tone, and proximity have a physically calming effect on us. Open yourself to this whenever you can. Don’t give the message that you can handle your distress without any help. Appreciate people who show empathy to you, don’t withdraw from them.

  You Learn to Second-Guess Your Creativity and Problem-Solving Ability

  The inner world is where all new ideas originate, so if you are self-accepting and playful with your thoughts, you will come up with more creative solutions. But once you are trained to doubt your inner world, your creativity and problem-solving ability will decline.

  To reverse this, on your next tough problem, hold your mind open for new ideas and practice brainstorming without any self-criticism. When you are tempted to shoot down your ideas, keep asking yourself, “But what if I could? What might happen then?” Resolve to make ten mistakes for every good idea you get, and your mind will start talking to you again.

  You Start Questioning Your Instincts for Happiness

  Perhaps the saddest thing about dismissing your inner world is that you stop admitting to yourself what really makes you happy. Like Mia, you might become self-conscious about your joy and believe that a modulated response is more appropriate. You might even lose your sense of what’s enjoyable and exhaust yourself with activities that are supposed to be fun.

  However, once you reconnect with your inner world, you will naturally gravitate toward things that lift your spirits. By appreciating happiness when it occurs, you can amplify it and keep it going longer (Hanson 2013). By welcoming all your feelings, positive and negative, you reach out to yourself and feel more whole and less alone (O’Malley 2016).

  How to Protect Your Right to Your Inner World

  In this section, you’ll gain some ideas about how to protect your inner world from an EIP’s scorn. Your right to your inner world should be defended because in any relationship, both people have the right to have their inner experiences treated with respect. In fact, the idea of universal human rights is based on honoring the importance of people’s inner experiences (United Nations 1948). Human rights defend people’s rights to feel valuable and good inside, not just safe on the outside.

  Let’s look at ten responses to use when an EIP invalidates, mocks, or attacks your innermost experiences. All these responses defend your right to protect your inner world, by claiming your emotional autonomy and defending your right to self-expression. Once you give yourself permission to be loyal to your thoughts and feelings, you can respond in ways that change the whole interactional dynamic.

  Response #1: Claim Your Right to Ignore Them

  Sometimes not responding is the best way of responding. By ignoring them or moving your attention elsewhere, you put an end to their dismissal of your viewpoint. Ignoring is a great stopgap measure. Disregarding unwanted behavior is an effective way of decreasing its frequency.

  Response #2: Suggest Other Ways to Connect

  Sometimes EIPs mock or tease you because they don’t know how to make contact any other way. For instance, at a family reunion Samantha’s older brother, Rick, tried to connect as if they were both still in fifth grade. When he walked by her table, he thumped her on the head like he used to when they were kids.

  Instead of accepting his behavior, Samantha got up from the table and followed him. Touching Rick on the arm, Samantha said, “If you’re glad to see me, how about telling me that instead of hitting me on the head? That’d be much better.”

  Later when Rick overheard Samantha talking about her new car, he entered the conversation by asking, “What color is it?” “White,” she replied. “Oh, like a toilet!” he said with a mischievous grin. When he made the crack about her car, Samantha looked thoughtful, then said: “I think you’re trying to connect with me, Rick. I’m really happy about my new car. Do you have some real questions about it?” Rick was caught off guard, there was an uncomfortable silence, and then Samantha turned her attention to someone else.

  Samantha no longer felt obliged to be a “good sport” about her brother’s teasing. Whenever Rick tried to connect that way, she expressed her right to respectful treatment by not playing along. If Samantha had felt Rick was really trying to hurt her, she could’ve used more forceful responses. But she knew he was glad to see her; he just had no skills to say so.

  Response #3: Use Questions to Block Their Disrespect

  As Samantha demonstrated, using questions is a good way of letting disrespectful EIPs know that you won’t participate in the banter of being teased. It interrupts old patterns and turns the attention back on them.

  By questioning put-downs in a matter-of-fact—not challenging—tone, it makes the EIP’s behavior stand out. Possible responses to teasing are “Now, what exactly are you saying?” “Could you tell me what you mean?” “I’m not sure I understand. Could you say that another way?” These questions should not be asked sarcastically, but calmly, with genuine curiosity. (Take a moment to practice saying these same three sentences in both hostile and curious tones to feel the difference.)

  These questions show you heard the mocking subtext, but you’re not going along with it. You’re letting them know that if they are intending to put you down, they’ll have to spell it out; you’re not agreeing to read between the lines.

  When exposed in this way, EIPs will often downplay their attacks by saying they’re just joking or fooling around. To this, you could say, “Huh…I guess that seemed funny to you, but it didn’t feel very good,” or “Okay, I’ll think about that. Maybe you didn’t intend to make me feel bad.” Whatever you say, you are clarifying their behavior instead of emotionally reacting. When you respond with neutral honesty and curiosity to a hostile swipe, there is no place for the interaction to go. Be ready to actively change topics after the awkward silence. It’ll make both you and them feel better. Uncomfortable moments are a positive sign that old patterns have been interrupted.

  Response #4: Deflect Instead of Reacting

  Deflecting derails an unpleasant interaction by changing the tone. For instance, if someone tries to make you feel guilty or dominates you, you can deflect their negative energy by keeping things light and upbeat. You respond as if they had said something positive.

  For instance, as Jayden was leaving to go to work, his father started lecturin
g him about wearing nicer clothes at his job. Jayden put a big smile on his face and kept repeating, “Bye, Dad! Love you, Dad!” as he picked up his things and went out the door. Jayden chose to deflect instead of feeling victimized.

  Response #5: Roll Past Their Envious Putdowns

  When EIPs feel envious of people, they often make fun of them. Here’s an example. Alice had an important art opening in her parents’ city. At the gallery reception, her mother introduced Alice to her friends as, “Here’s my fancy-schmancy artist daughter!” Alice momentarily cringed: that was not how she saw herself and certainly not how she wanted to be introduced.

  EIPs do this kind of attention-getting mockery in front of others so you feel like a terrible sport if you object. The most effective response to this behavior is to roll past it and hold on to your happiness. Alice defused her mother’s jab by smiling and saying, “Yep, here I am!” as she shook their hands.

  By responding with equanimity and humor, Alice didn’t allow her mother to embarrass her or become the center of attention. By not reacting, Alice kept the focus on herself, where it should have been in a celebration of her success.

  Response #6: Defend Your Right to Be Sensitive

  When you express your feelings, EIPs often react as if you’re overly sensitive and have no sense of proportion. After years of being told they make mountains out of molehills, many adult children of EI parents learn to preface their true feelings with “It’s just that…” They anticipate humiliation, so they downplay the emotional importance of what they are about to say.

  If an EIP says you are too sensitive and tells you not to take everything so personally, instead of feeling stung you could be curious and say, “Sure, what would be another way to take it?” or you could also clarify by saying, “Let me understand. You don’t want me to take what you say to me personally?”

  Another way to respond to “You’re too sensitive” is to say with calm honesty, “Actually, I’m just sensitive enough.” A deeper answer might be, “If I can’t share my feelings with you, then I guess I’ve misunderstood the nature of our relationship.” More simply, you could say, “Actually, I think mine was a fair reaction.”