Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents

by Lindsay C Gibson

  Identify what you need.

  Daydream about your life purpose and where you belong.

  1. Pay Attention to Your Internal Physical Sensations

  Like Mallory, you may have been raised to tell yourself things like, That doesn’t make any sense; that’s crazy; I’m exaggerating; I shouldn’t be feeling this way. But sometimes physical sensations are more insistent. Your physical cues can give you a tremendous amount of valuable information about situations and other people.

  One of the best ways to strengthen your inner guidance is to pay close attention to all physical sensations. Your inner self speaks through the body, with your well-being as its primary mission. Your body is constantly giving you a “state of the union” update, letting you know how your psychological and physical needs are being met, neglected, or threatened.

  To build a better relationship with yourself, sometimes you have to relearn how to pay attention to your physical sensations. Many adult children of EI parents get so wrapped up in their thoughts that they can’t feel their body’s messages. They literally don’t notice that they’re tense, stressed, uncomfortable, or even afraid. Nor do they fully experience moments of joy because they have gotten out of touch with their feelings. With their hostility toward the inner world, EI parents tell you that paying attention to physical sensations is a waste of time. But they’re wrong. Here are some physical cues that are excellent sources of guidance.

  Pleasurable Sensations

  When you’re going in a good direction, you may feel a fullness, warmth, or blooming in your chest, along with a weight being lifted from your neck and shoulders. The world seems lighter, brighter, and freer, and so do you. You feel energized and have a sense of physical ease and capability, as if your body were ready to do anything. Psychotherapy researcher Diana Fosha (2000) has identified these core, uplifting experiences as times when transformative emotional healing is most likely to take place.

  Physical Warnings

  Your inner self also uses body sensations to warn you. For instance, a clenched stomach, tight neck and shoulders, an aching back, or tension in your arms might warn you when you’re doing too much or are being subjugated. Or you might feel revulsion or skin-crawling in the presence of someone who wants to violate your boundaries. Sensations of fatigue, irritability, restlessness, and even nausea are additional ways your inner self tries to alert you to life-draining people and situations.

  Energy Shifts

  Your inner self reliably uses sensations of being energized or depleted to guide you. As you encounter certain people, situations, or even ideas, your energy level either rises or sinks. An increase in energy indicates you’ve found something enlivening to you. However, if your energy level sinks, chances are that situation or person is not good for you.

  However, anxiety is the exception to this rule. If you grew up with EI parents, you might have learned to feel anxiety toward things that are good for you. For instance, if you grew up feeling ignored or rejected, you may have generalized that anxiety to all social situations. Fortunately, you can desensitize yourself to interpersonal anxiety by practicing repeated exposures to safe and welcoming people and social situations.

  Depressed feelings also use energy levels to tell you when there’s nothing in your current situation that is feeding the real you. It would seem almost unnecessary to mention this, but it’s astounding how often we feel our energy level drop and yet proceed anyway because we tell ourselves it’s the right thing to do. This usually turns out badly in the long run.

  2. Figure Out the Meaning of Your Feelings

  An EI parent’s idea of sympathy is to tell their child there’s no reason to feel bad. EI parents dismiss their children’s feelings so much that often the child decides to cope alone. For instance, EI parents tell their frightened children, “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” rather than listening to what’s frightening them. Just about the most self-alienating thing you can tell anyone is that there’s no reason for what they’re feeling.

  When a parent teaches you to disregard your feelings, it’s another way of telling you that your inner world doesn’t count. This undermines your relationship with yourself. But rejected feelings don’t go away; they go underground instead. If enough feelings are suppressed, they will ultimately come out in classic symptoms of depression, anxiety, or acting out.

  Therefore, it always pays to look for the cause of your feelings. Trust that there’s a reason and think about what happened just before you started feeling that way. When you treat your feelings like they make sense, you show your inner self that it can talk to you and you will listen.

  3. Refuse to Judge and Criticize Yourself

  Growing up with EI parents can make you very self-critical because they think that criticism is the only way to turn you into a responsible person. You end up feeling like you never measure up and constantly need to improve yourself. You evaluate yourself to a point that’s destructive, not constructive.

  Like your parents, you may think that self-criticism will make you a better person. But criticizing yourself won’t improve you any more than attacking a child’s self-esteem makes them more confident. Self-criticism is no way to have a relationship with yourself. It sentences you to a life of anxious dependency in which no power is greater than someone else’s opinion of you.

  Instead of judging yourself, why not think about what you’d like to change, figure out the steps to get there, and seek support? Even regrets about your past behavior don’t have to turn into judgments. If you know what you wish you’d done differently, you’ve already learned your lesson and can forgive yourself in light of your new understanding.

  Exercise: Expose Self-Criticism

  Notice every time you think something derogatory or harsh toward yourself. How would it feel to hear that from another person? Pause to emotionally experience that self-criticism, and then write down how it feels. By catching yourself in mid-attack, you can immediately change it. For instance, “What a stupid thing to do!” could become, “I’ll try not to do that again.” Take pleasure in seeing how many of these old habits you can translate more positively.

  4. Identify What You Need

  When you are raised to put others first, you may lose touch with even your most basic physical needs, such as rest, sleep, or recreation. Early training in self-neglect means that it may now take a conscious, deliberate effort to take care of yourself.

  EI parents can disrupt your awareness of healthy social needs as well because they often emotionally isolate their children for their own purposes. When you pay attention to your inner self’s promptings, you might discover that you need more social contact, group activities, or community involvement than you thought. Fortunately, as you build a better relationship with yourself, you will feel increasingly confident and comfortable about seeking social situations you enjoy.

  5. Daydream About Your Life Purpose and Where You Belong

  EIPs are often skeptical and cynical about anyone’s search for a more meaningful and rewarding life. Being so alienated from their own inner worlds, they don’t see how daydreaming could ever be productive. But of course, daydreaming is essential to generating ideas for a more fulfilling life.

  Your inner self urges you to daydream and imagine yourself in new circumstances that fit you better. You may not yet know your life’s purpose or the kind of community you need, but once you start looking within, you’ll feel more energized and hopeful. Daydreams are everybody’s first step toward finding a more meaningful and rewarding life.

  Value Your Inner Experience and Prioritize Your Self-Care

  Adult children of EI parents often neglect their own self-protection and self-care because they’ve been told that goodness comes from putting others first. Perhaps you too may need to reconsider the value of your inner experiences in order to protect and take care of yourself. Following are five ways to prioritize you
rself in your own life.

  1. Determine Your Value

  Have you ever sat down and actually made a decision about whether you and your feelings are valuable or not? Most people haven’t. They might feel valuable or not valuable depending on circumstances, but they don’t make up their mind about the worth of their inner experiences as a human being. EI parents don’t encourage such self-appraisal because they want to tell you what’s worth valuing. But this is an important decision for you to make because if you don’t see your inner experiences as valuable, how will you be motivated to protect yourself or pay attention to your own ideas? How much you value yourself and your inner experiences determines what you will let yourself have in life.

  Exercise: Do You Value Your Inner Experiences?

  In order to have rewarding, reciprocal relationships, you first need to value your own inner experiences. If you don’t find yourself interesting and important, you’re not likely to seek someone who will. Use the following statements to clarify how much you value yourself. Answer spontaneously without overthinking it. Using a zero-to-ten-point scale, assign each statement a number, with zero meaning “I don’t believe it at all” and ten meaning “I totally believe it and live it.”

  I am worth taking care of.

  I am worth listening to.

  I am worth understanding.

  I am worth thinking about my needs first.

  My feelings matter in every interaction.

  By looking at your answers to these statements, you can see where you might be accepting dismissive treatment from others because you feel that way toward yourself. If you had low scores on any statement, it points to where you may need to develop a more supportive attitude toward yourself. If you detect a tendency in yourself to discount your inner world in any area, use that information to get back on your own side and build up a more loyal relationship with yourself.

  2. Value Your Feelings Enough To Be Self-Protective

  If you’ve ever cherished someone—especially a child—you know how you would feel if you saw them being mistreated. You would feel protective anger and a desire to help them. Can you feel the same way about yourself?

  Many people don’t feel entitled to self-protection and instead smolder in resentment. Unfortunately, resentment is a passive reaction and doesn’t help you protect or care for yourself. Self-protective instincts can be scary at first because they come in the form of such strong feelings: indignation, outrage, or even hatred. But these are just emotional signals that someone has tried to control or dominate you. These feelings are telling you your inner experiences matter and must be protected.

  3. Make Your Inner World Matter

  Children learn their value by whether their parents attend to their inner worlds. You feel valuable to the extent that your inner experiences are respected and welcomed. Here’s what to tell yourself for a supportive relationship with yourself.

  Your inner experiences count. Show interest in your thoughts, feelings, and dreams.

  Your inner world is worth defending. Be loyal to how you feel and protect your interests whenever you feel threatened.

  Your feelings and thoughts are just as important as theirs. Put your self-care before other people’s whims.

  Your mistakes are innocent. Don’t turn against yourself if you make a mistake and resist shaming yourself.

  Your inner world is worthy of being attended to. Listen to your thoughts and feelings and take yourself completely seriously.

  You’re worthy of spending time with. Enjoy your own company and do things just because they give you a good feeling inside.

  If you need more proof about the value of a good supportive relationship with your inner world, think about all the accomplished people who got that way by valuing their interests and giving deep attention to their inner experiences. We support that self-valuing in famous actors, Nobel scientists, great musicians, and world-renown artists. Nobody ever asks if such people should be paying so much attention to their inner world. We never question if it’s okay for them to safeguard their time and energy from other people’s demands. We should do no less for ourselves.

  4. Prioritize Self-Care: Become a Good Parent to Yourself

  Prioritizing your self-care is a great way of restoring a neglected relationship with yourself. Like a caring parent, you can support yourself for a life of thriving, not just surviving. You can appreciate and love yourself just for being alive. By cherishing yourself the way a loving parent would, you erase any old doubts about your value. By being loyal to yourself, you give yourself nonjudgmental, unconditional support and you commit to your self-development just as a devoted parent would.

  By being a good parent to yourself, you reverse multigenerational traumas of low self-esteem and emotional self-neglect. You might be the first in your family to see the difference in life quality that honoring one’s inner experiences can make.

  Be a good parent to yourself and give self-support whenever you feel lonely, demoralized, overwhelmed, or tempted to be self-critical. Instead of just thinking supportive thoughts, try writing them down in your journal as you whisper or say them out loud. There’s something about hearing support in your own voice that really helps.

  Exercise: Comforting Yourself

  Whenever you feel overwhelmed, afraid, or distressed, write down and say out loud every worry and feared outcome, no matter how insignificant. Express bluntly and simply what you’re afraid might happen, just like a child would. Especially be on the lookout for the horror of being exposed as inadequate or bad (Duvinsky 2017). Just by admitting your fears and dreaded inadequacies, they become less terrifying. You might feel a little embarrassed writing down some of these fears, but don’t let that stop you. It works.

  When you’ve recorded all your fears, feel compassion toward that terrified and overwhelmed child self. Then write and talk to yourself as an empathetic parent would. First remind yourself that everybody feels overwhelmed at times and that it’s normal to feel that way. Take your fears completely seriously, and reassure yourself that you are not alone and that you will get the help you need. Giving your inner child such comfort is an excellent way to become more self-accepting.

  5. Find Emotional Renewal from Experiencing Your Inner World

  Fortunately, the world today is much more receptive to inner-world activities, such as meditation, mindfulness, and journaling. Scientists have found health benefits, both physically and psychologically, in such practices that strengthen your relationship with your inner world. Interior-focused activities can lower your anxiety, bring you peace, and give you pleasurable awareness of just being alive. These practices insulate you from EI emotional takeovers and support the idea of honoring your inner life.

  Mindfulness. You can practice mindfulness as you go about your daily life (Nhat Hanh 2011). All it requires is a willingness to stay in the present moment and become immersed in your immediate sensory perceptions. By doing this, you will feel the aliveness of being utterly present and aware.

  Here’s a mindfulness exercise to try. Take two minutes to perceive your hand as if you were seeing it for the first time. Notice everything you can about your hand: its outer shape, smell, texture, direction of lines, curves, shadows, and pale places. Find and squeeze its soft and hard areas, and feel its temperature. How many colors can you identify? Just keep noticing new aspects and experiencing its realness until your time is up. Notice how you feel afterward.

  Meditation. Meditation helps you experience your inner world in a dedicated way that replenishes and relaxes your mind (Kornfield 2008). It has been proven to have many physical, mental, and emotional health benefits (Kabat-Zinn 1990). You could take meditation classes or use online meditation sites and apps (for example, Headspace or Insight Timer). Meditation involves sitting quietly with your eyes closed, relaxing your body, letting go of distractions, focusing on your breath, and letti
ng thoughts float by without attaching to them. Meditation reveals that once you detach from the outer world, there is a spacious inner realm inside you that is uniquely alive and replenishing to experience. Meditation gives you direct confirmation of the inner world’s reality.

  Journaling. Writing down your thoughts, feelings, observations, and night dreams brings you closer to your inner experiences. Writers, scientists, travelers, and explorers have all used journaling to heighten their perceptions and refine their thinking. You could also use a book like Mindful Dreaming (Gordon 2007) to understand how your dreams can guide you in self-development.

  Now that you’ve prioritized a better relationship with yourself, we’ll next look at how to declutter your mind of false programming and update your self-concept.

  Highlights to Remember

  In order to nurture a good relationship with yourself, honor your inner world for what it contributes to your life. You may have neglected your inner experiences to satisfy EIPs’ agendas, but now you can feel free to cherish your inner world as the source of your self-guidance and self-care. You can reverse any self-alienation by once again taking your internal cues seriously; deciding to value and protect yourself; and by improving your experiential connection with your inner world through mindfulness, meditation, and journaling.

  Chapter 8: The Art of Mental Clearing

  Making Room for Your Own Mind

  If you grew up with EI parents, you may have been made to feel bad if your thoughts didn’t agree with theirs. As a result, you might have learned to monitor your thoughts in their presence. Although you may now reject some of their beliefs, you may still be hyperaware of what they considered acceptable. But it is possible to separate your thoughts from EIPs’ influence so your mind is once again free to work for you, serving your own interests and intentions. Mental clearing is the process by which you sort out which thoughts are really yours and which are hand-me-downs from others.