Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents

by Lindsay C Gibson

  For instance, if you have a demoralized, exaggerated thought like, I’ll never finish this work, stop yourself and think something more realistic like, If I keep doing one piece at a time, this job will eventually be done. If you think, I really screwed that up; I can’t do anything right, stop and ask yourself whether that’s really true (it’s not), and then think more supportively, like, I made a mistake because I was brave enough to try; now I can fix it and try something else. If an upsetting event occurs, instead of thinking, It’s the end of the world; I’ll never get over this, you can say to yourself, This is not the end of the world, but it is a huge shock. I will find a way to deal with this a little bit at a time.

  Anxiety and Worry Are Types of Mental Clutter

  Mental clutter are thoughts that didn’t originally belong to you. They cause feelings like shame, fear, obsessive worry, hopelessness, helplessness, pessimism, and self-criticism. I call these thoughts clutter because they were not originally a part of you and have nothing to do with the natural functioning of your mind. They just create disorder and distortion. Think of these thoughts as debris left over from EI parents’ emotional coercions. EI parents often promote demoralized thinking in their children because it makes them easier to control.

  It is important to distinguish whether your thoughts are your own or family hand-me-downs. Consider that some of your most anxious thoughts might be multigenerationally transferred fears, originally designed to protect a long-ago ancestor from a hostile environment. Think of these demoralizing and inhibiting thoughts as dusty, rickety furniture that has been passed down in the family for generations. Maybe it’s up to you to be the first person to say you don’t want it.

  Obsessive worry is another type of thought that comes from being the child of EI parents. This comes about because these children have to be so hypervigilant to their parents’ moods. When your emotional security feels threatened by a parent’s upheaval, you learn to obsess over why someone is upset and what could happen as a result. You worry about what you should do to make things right for them.

  Unfortunately, worrying about others’ moods prevents you from focusing on how you feel and what you think. It would be much more productive to drop the worry and consider what it’s like to be interacting with them. You could ask yourself, How do I wish they’d treated me? How is this affecting me? Did I really deserve their behavior? You then would be thinking freely and considering yourself as important as they are.

  Whenever you find yourself obsessing over whether someone is unhappy with you, shift into your own viewpoint and write about how their behavior makes you feel. Get back in your own shoes and come up with your own opinion about the situation instead of accepting their criticisms at face value. Thinking your own thoughts lets you see what you want out of the situation, allowing you to plan the outcome you want. Using your mind in this active, purposeful way lets you pursue your own personal happiness instead of fruitlessly worrying about how to placate EIPs.

  Self-Talk Is Your Ticket to Mental Clarity

  Talking to yourself within the privacy of your mind is the primary way you can change your mood and thinking. You can use self-talk to specify your desires, come to grips with disappointment, and determine your goals. Just make sure what you are saying to yourself helps you focus on what you want and what really matters to you.

  Constructive self-talk helps you guide yourself out of emotional domination. Just as an effective GPS voice shows the way, so can your inner voice. Self-talk helps you clarify your intentions and set desirable goals. If EIPs have subjected you to emotional takeovers by putting their interests ahead of yours, you can now reverse this by talking yourself through new responses and behaviors.

  Self-Talk Makes It Impossible to Disconnect from Yourself

  Self-talk is how you stay in touch with yourself when EIPs are trying to take over. Let’s say you are visiting your parents, and they react negatively to something you do. This could trigger a childlike reaction, making you feel helpless and immobilized by their criticism. But if you are ready for such predictable domination from them, you could stand there, look them in the face, and still think your thoughts. You wouldn’t be surprised by their behavior, nor would you renounce your adult mind and let them take over. You would just stay in touch with yourself and observe.

  If others show disapproval, you could talk to yourself and remind yourself that you have the right to your own thoughts and desires. If they lay a guilt trip on you or criticize your values, you could remind yourself of your unassailable worth as a person. You would be able to stand firm in your own thoughts, regardless of what they were saying and know that their displeasure means nothing about your self-worth. Your self-talk is your bridge back to trusting and reconnecting with your real self.

  Self-Talk Reverses Brainwashing

  EI parents feel justified in trying to brainwash you into their point of view. They first shut down your rationality by getting you upset and defensive. Under these conditions, you become more vulnerable and ultimately susceptible to what they tell you to think.

  To counteract an EIP’s mental and emotional domination, you tell yourself to keep your analytic mind sharp. You can fight the urge to shut down and go foggy when they are upset with you. Instead, you can mentally narrate observations on their behavior, as if you were an anthropologist taking notes. This analytical self-talk will anchor you in the objective, adult part of your brain that can see through their attempts to control you.

  As you accurately label their behavior with your self-talk, their attempts at emotional takeovers will fail. Maintaining loyalty to yourself and thinking analytically are exactly the skills that prisoners of war and other victims of totalitarian regimes use in order to hold on to their integrity and beliefs over years of abuse or imprisonment.

  Three Situations for Practicing Self-Talk

  Self-talk brings you emotional strength. However, self-talk can be hard to come up with on your own, so here are some suggested self-talk phrases to use when you feel pressured by the coercive expectations of an EIP.

  When you feel blamed for not doing enough, tell yourself:I haven’t done anything wrong. I can listen, but I won’t accept guilt.

  I’m not bad, and this isn’t all about me.

  It’s not my fault she’s disappointed. Her expectations were truly out of line.

  This will blow over, even if he’s acting like nothing will ever be right again.

  She expects more than I can give. I would never be able to do all that, nor would I want to. What she wants me to do would stress and debilitate me.

  When someone loses emotional control, say to yourself:It’s not my fault that he can’t manage his emotions.

  She’s upset, but I’m still okay. The world is still turning.

  He’s doing his wrath-of-God act, but that doesn’t mean he’s right about this.

  Someone being upset doesn’t mean I have to let them dominate me.

  What’s she’s saying is an overwrought exaggeration.

  She’s trying to convince me this incident is the end of the world. It simply isn’t.

  When someone tries to dominate you and control your thinking, remind yourself:

  My needs are just as legitimate and important as his. As adults, we’re coequals.

  My life doesn’t belong to her. I can disagree.

  I choose my loyalties; he doesn’t get to claim my primary loyalty.

  My worth is not defined by how he feels toward me.

  These are just her opinions; she doesn’t own me.

  By using such self-talk during an interaction, you maintain a strong self-connection that can’t be broken. Realistic self-talk helps you keep perspective, and reminds you that your inner world and needs are equally as important as the EIP’s.

  Once You Clear Your Mind, What Will You Fill the Space With?

  Think of your mind as a box with only so much ro
om for thoughts. If you increase one type of thought, there is less room for anything else. Overall, your goal is to focus on so many pleasant experiences that negative thought-patterns get crowded out.

  Deliberately increasing time spent on thoughts of pleasure, enjoyment, and possibility changes the ratio of pleasurable to toxic thinking. When you accentuate and dwell on positive experiences, you become immune to EIPs who use fear, guilt, and shame to control your mind. Rick Hanson is a neuropsychologist whose book Hardwiring Happiness (2013) explains the brain benefits of amplifying our pleasurable, appreciative thoughts. He says that when you devote even a few seconds at a time to deliberately experiencing more happy thoughts, you can reconfigure your brain’s habitual thought-patterns.

  As Hanson explains, the more time you spend savoring your pleasurable experiences, the more you train your brain toward feel-good mental habits (Hanson 2013). It is no longer up to everybody else whether you have a good day or feel like a worthwhile person. By consciously focusing on what you like and value about yourself, you can intentionally change your mood.

  Diana Fosha (2000) has shown that healing emotional transformations are most likely to occur while we are in an uplifted positive state, rather than when we focus on negative, self-critical experiences. The quest for self-knowledge and positive, self-affirming experiences is not escapism; it is what we need to change for the better.

  By expanding and deepening your moments of happiness, you also strengthen your individuality and autonomy. When you deliberately recall the feelings of happy experiences, you are in control of your mood and self-esteem. All these little moments of intentionally savored happiness and self-approval increase feelings of self-efficacy. This adds up to a rewarding sense of yourself as an active, self-determined person—making you less susceptible to the emotional coercions, takeovers, and distortion fields of EI people.

  The important thing is not just to think happier thoughts, but to bring up autonomous, guilt-free, and warm feelings inside. Once you discover that you can actively change your internal state just by focusing on what makes you feel better, you won’t feel so dependent on unrewarding relationships. You will be able to create your own sense of efficacy, autonomy, and comforting experiences to increase your happiness.

  Highlights to Remember

  EIPs’ emotional demands can make you feel guilty and ashamed for having your own thoughts, thus immobilizing your ability to think for yourself. Clearing your mind of thought-clutter accumulated from a parent’s emotional takeovers will restore your mental freedom. “Should” thoughts can be challenged to help you avoid depressive thinking and make up your own mind. Accepting that your mind is safely private and that thoughts alone can’t cause harm strengthens your freedom of thought. Self-talk also helps prevents self-disconnection and emotional takeovers in the moment. When you focus your thoughts on experiences that confirm your goodness and strengthen your happiness, you’ll feel the pleasure of getting your mind back.

  Chapter 9: Updating Your Self-Concept

  How to Correct Distortions and Enhance Self-Confidence

  Your self-concept is the basis of everything you believe about yourself and what you allow yourself to become. This understanding of yourself was impacted by how people treated you when you were growing up. Their behavior told you a story about who they thought you were. As a child, you had no choice but to learn about yourself through their eyes. But EI parents aren’t much help in developing an accurate self-concept because they often overlook their children’s unique qualities, capabilities, and interests.

  EI parents expect you to grow up according to their assumptions. With parents like these, it’s hard to know yourself in a way that reflects your strengths accurately. Instead, you might judge yourself only by how well you’ve met their expectations. Sadly, EI parents often discourage their children with negative feedback that makes them feel like less than they are. It’s crucial to correct these erroneous self-beliefs so you can live more authentically, pursue your personal development, and deepen your connections with yourself and others.

  EI parents disregard others’ individuality, so they won’t teach you much about yourself. They lump people together, seeing them as much more similar than they really are. Individual complexities are ignored as they say things like, “You’re just like your father!” or “You’re like my side of the family.” They think they know you because you remind them of someone. As a result, they give you a typecast self-concept that doesn’t really fit you. With EI parents, you were told what to be, not helped to discover who you are.

  But now as an adult, you can expand your self-concept to include all your potential and complexity, even if EIPs still pigeonhole you in an oversimplified or childlike identity. You don’t have to go through life feeling like less than you are. Thankfully, your self-concept no longer has to be held hostage by your parents’ opinions. You are now free to discover who you are and what you want to become. You can update your self-concept to fit who you really are.

  First, however, let’s briefly explore the childhood emotional climate that influenced your concept of yourself. This will shed light on how you now see yourself, and help you free yourself from an outdated identity based on how you were treated as a child.

  Exercise: Reviewing Your Childhood Self-Concept

  Give yourself some time to think and use your journal to write down your answers to the following questions.

  •What was your self-concept as a child?

  •How did you see yourself around other children?

  •Did your parents help you identify and develop your potential strengths?

  •Did you have a clear identity, or were you just one of the kids?

  •Did they encourage you to think ahead and imagine your best adult life?

  •Did they ask you about the kind of impact you wanted to have on the world?

  •Did they treat you like you going to be a successful and loving person?

  Next, read over and reflect on what you wrote. What are your reactions? How do you think your childhood may have affected your self-­concept in your adult life?

  The good news is that you now have the ability to counteract and repair negative childhood effects on your self-concept. If EI parents couldn’t help you know yourself accurately in childhood, you can do it for yourself now in adulthood.

  Make Sure You Protect Your Adult Self-Concept

  As we’ve seen, EI parents see qualities in their children that serve the parents’ needs. Therefore, you may have been told things about yourself in childhood that simply weren’t true. But now as an adult, you can consciously build a more accurate and supportive self-concept.

  This is especially important because as an adult how you see yourself affects every part of your life. Have you allowed yourself to grow into a self-affirming adulthood? If you don’t see yourself as worthy, you won’t take charge when you need to. If you don’t find yourself interesting, how will you promote yourself or have close, rewarding relationships with others? If you aren’t self-protective, how can you feel safe with anyone?

  Now let’s look at how to correct some adult distortions in self-concept that are caused by EI parents.

  Realize You Are Now an Adult with Authority

  Many EI parents never acknowledge their grown children as full adults. These parents undermine their adult children’s dignity by making them feel silly or presumptuous for taking themselves seriously. Their adult children end up feeling sheepish about claiming their adult authority and independence. Without their parents’ blessing to grow up and be their full equal, these adult children wear their adult authority uneasily.

  Jonelle’s Story

  Jonelle loved her executive job and was good at it, but her assistant Todd slowed her productivity by asking unnecessary questions and talking about personal matters whenever he got the chance.

  The need to set limits was
obvious, but Jonelle felt sorry for Todd and tried to listen when he wanted to talk. In fact, she made it worse by often asking him how he was doing. She couldn’t seem to stop herself, although she was already thinking about replacing Todd.

  The real problem was that Jonelle didn’t feel her adult authority. She still saw herself as the rescuer child in a family of five who comforted her unhappy and unfulfilled mother. This old self-concept showed through as she explained why she tolerated Todd: “It’s because he has to stay behind in the office while I get to travel and have fun. I actually feel bad about being his boss and making so much more money than him. I feel bad about shutting him out; I want him to feel I’m available to him.” The idea that Todd would be offended by his boss’s requests or feel “shut out” was straight out of Jonelle’s relationship with her mother.

  However, once Jonelle realized that her outdated self-concept was undermining her success, she gave up the guilt, claimed her adult authority, and set appropriate limits with Todd.

  Look at your own life now and see whether there are situations where you hesitate to assert your legitimate authority for fear of alienating someone. Fortunately, you can change this because it’s within your power to overcome childhood influences and continue developing yourself (Vaillant 1993). Through your natural capabilities and mentoring from others, you can build a stronger self-concept and be an effective leader even if your parents didn’t see you that way.

  Know You Are Not an Imposter

  The imposter syndrome (Clance and Imes 1978) makes it hard to fully own your accomplishment because it doesn’t feel like it came from you. You secretly fear being exposed as a fraud, like a child playing dress-up. Yet the real problem may be that you haven’t consciously updated your self-concept beyond who you were in childhood.