You might feel like an imposter in relationships as well, finding it hard to understand why others love you. For example, one woman was shocked when her friends surprised her with a big birthday party. She didn’t feel important enough to be celebrated in this way and said, “I don’t understand this, but thank you.”
Many adult children are protective of their family members’ narcissism and feel uncomfortable challenging their entitlement to center stage. Such adult children will downplay their success as soon as the spotlight hits them. Instead of feeling proud, they think, This isn’t really me. They stop themselves from feeling successful because they feel bad for diverting attention from their egocentric family member.
The imposter sensation—obviously distorted because you did do the work, it was your party—makes perfect sense if you grew up believing you were not as interesting as a more entitled EI family member.
As an example of such entitlement, consider the father who attended his daughter’s award ceremony, but sat there and steamed about how there were too many people, how it was taking all night, and how he was missing the ball game on TV. Then there was the mother who kept huffing about how unbelievably inconsiderate it was for the college to hold her son’s graduation on Mother’s Day weekend. These parents communicated that their comfort was much more important than their child’s success.
Just because EIPs don’t support your moments of success, it doesn’t mean you have to discount your adult accomplishments. In fact, with parents like this, you need to be even more self-supportive. Don’t be distracted when they try to hijack all the attention. Cherish every bit of your success and incorporate it into your self-concept.
Protect Your Adult Self from Your Parents’ Distortions
EI parents look at their children through their own projections. As a result, they can give their children a warped image of who they are. Sometimes this distortion is nearly unbelievable.
For instance, Lily had struggled her entire adolescence from anorexia, abetted by her mother’s pathological obsession about food and weight. Even when Lily was dangerously thin, her mother kept commenting on anything that could be a fattening food choice. Even after Lily had healed her self-image and regained a normal, healthy weight as an adult, visits home to her mother could reactivate her anorexic thinking. Her mother continued to make veiled comments about Lily’s thighs or other weight-related issues. After being around her mother’s preoccupation about weight, Lily found herself obsessing again about dieting and exercise. Lily ultimately decided that her continued adult health depended on not seeing her mother very often.
How to Update Your Self-Concept
An accurate self-concept allows you to appreciate your complexity and what you bring to the world as a unique person. To update your self-concept, start with the following:
Establish your worth.
Identify your values and life philosophy.
Fill in the blanks in your self-concept.
Define your own self-characteristics.
Find role models and mentors.
By working your way through these sections, you’ll be surprised at how much you learn about yourself, making your future self-concept much clearer and stronger.
1. Establish Your Worth
The quality of your relationship with yourself and others depends on how much you esteem yourself and your value.
Exercise: How Do You Feel About Yourself?
To find out how you feel about yourself, first sit quietly and try to enter into your deepest feelings. Answer these questions in your journal with the first thing that pops into your mind. Try to respond from your heart, not your intellect.
Am I good?
Am I capable?
Am I enough?
Am I important?
Am I lovable?
Now consider your responses. If you had EI parents, you might have answered one or more of these questions with a no. If so, that’s because doubts about self-worth are common results of receiving EI parents’ shame and guilt in childhood. The good news is that you can plan to update your self-concept and beliefs about what makes people worthy.
2. Identify Your Values and Life Philosophy
The quality of your life will be determined by your underlying values and your understanding of how life works. What would you say are the factors that create a happy, meaningful life? You probably know this subconsciously, but it helps to articulate it. Let’s explore some of your beliefs and values.
Exercise: Clarify What You Believe In
There are no right answers in this exercise; just respond with whatever you think. The purpose here is to reveal your underlying personal philosophy and thereby help you know yourself better. Complete the following statements in your journal.
The purpose of life is…
The secret to good relationships is…
Success comes to those who…
You can’t have a meaningful life unless you …
The best source of self-esteem is…
I value…
A happy life includes…
It’s important to believe…
To get ahead in life, you have to…
It’s very wrong to…
The guiding principle I live by is…
People improve themselves by…
These statements get at the heart of how you see yourself and the world, as well as the quality of your relationship with yourself. Once you’ve completed these sentences, ask yourself how your philosophies may have affected your life course, for better or worse.
3. Fill in the Blanks in Your Self-Concept
Sadly, when a parent doesn’t recognize their child’s positive qualities, the child doesn’t build a self-concept in those areas (Barrett 2017). It’s as if a big blank exists where a part of the self should be. For instance, my client Francine could accept praise about her work, but as soon as the compliments were about her and her positive personal qualities, she recoiled. She didn’t see herself that way, so she immediately made self-deprecating remarks or laughed and made a joke of it.
Francine explained that praise pointed to an inner void she felt in herself: “I don’t think of myself as valuable or important. I don’t think I matter to people, and I don’t think I’ll ever be convinced.” She recognized that her boyfriend treated her as if she mattered to him, but she couldn’t quite believe it. She feared that any minute he would discover she wasn’t so great, and then he would see her as “too much trouble.” This feeling came from Francine’s cold father, who made it clear he didn’t have time for her as a little girl. When I asked Francine if she could see herself as a lovable person, she reflected for a moment and then said: “Nope, it’s like I’ve got a hole there. A complete vacuum.”
Another client, Caitlyn, was shocked when a member of her church group told her that she “gave the best hugs and was such a good listener.” This baffled Caitlyn because, as she told me, “I’m not really a giving kind of person.” Caitlyn had learned this distorted self-concept from her depressed and angry mother who was too bitter about life to appreciate Caitlyn’s qualities. Caitlyn was a giving person, but her mother never saw it.
Although lacking in parental recognition of their best qualities, both Francine and Caitlyn eventually owned their real, but previously unrecognized, good qualities. Francine accepted that she was lovable just for being herself, and Caitlyn realized she was often warm and giving. Both women felt awed and grateful as they accepted being “lovable” and “giving” as real aspects of themselves. Just because their parents never acknowledged those qualities didn’t mean they weren’t there.
If you got little parental feedback, you too probably have more good qualities than you realize. But like Francine and Caitlyn, if you don’t claim these traits in yourself, you might deny your potential with limiting thoughts like: That’s not me. I’m
not like that. I’m not the kind of person who… After a success, you might even say, “I don’t know how I did that.” But just because you don’t recognize something about yourself doesn’t mean it’s not there. Perhaps it never sank in because nobody ever named it.
With EI parents, you should question any limiting thoughts about yourself; qualities you think you lack, or things you would never try. Is that limitation really true of you, or did it come from the EIPs in your life?
4. Define Your Own Self-Characteristics
EI parents have a poor vocabulary for specific, positive inner attributes. They rarely use descriptive words for the inner psychological world, so they fail to articulate their children’s unique qualities and characteristics. Instead, they use vague, generic terms for their children’s behavior, such as “good,” “bad,” “stupid,” “smart,” or “nice.” Consequently, you don’t learn enough words for describing yourself or talking about your feelings. This could be a drawback later in life when the ability to articulate your qualities might help you land a job or attract a mate.
Exercise: Put Yourself into Words
Let’s start building your more realistic, enhanced self-concept. To get words for describing yourself, you can go online and find a complete list of descriptors for personality characteristics, such as http://www.ongoing worlds.com/blog/2014/11/a-big-long-list-of-personality-traits. You will probably use only a small fraction of these, but it will give you a vocabulary to choose from.
Instead of writing in your journal this time, you may want to use loose sheets of paper so you can write as much as you want on each page and spread the sheets out on a table so you can stand back and see them all at once.
Your family’s view of you. Think about yourself as a child from your family’s point of view, including parents, caretakers, and siblings. Write down how you think each person saw you as a child growing up. What adjectives would they use to describe you?
What you now know about yourself. On a separate piece of paper, write down as many of your current characteristics as you can. Include all your inner qualities and outer attributes.
What you want to become more of. On another sheet of paper, describe how you want to be in the future. Which characteristics do you want to strengthen, and which tendencies do you want to reduce? What sort of person do you aspire to be as you get older?
Compare these three sheets of paper and write your impressions in your journal. Can you see your trajectory of growth of who you are from past to present to future? Putting yourself into words like this is a great way of appreciating all that you’ve become and are becoming.
As you go about your day, try on some new words from the online list that capture your characteristics. Look up synonyms of those words and see whether they fit you too. Over time, you will build a better vocabulary to describe yourself. You can also ask friends to contribute: tell them what you’re doing, and ask them for words they would use to describe you. Discovering new self-concept words can be an exciting self-validation process for the rest of your life.
5. Find Role Models and Mentors
Role models and mentors can help expand your self-concept. If you want to develop yourself, find people you admire and learn from observing them. Spend time with people who have qualities you want to cultivate in your own self-concept. Think of every relationship as an opportunity to become a better version of yourself, and choose companions accordingly.
You might be surprised by how many people are willing to be role models or mentors and pass along their wisdom. If you are enthusiastic about becoming more than you are, look for a mentor who would love to be a part of your journey. For example, take a class with a teacher you like or contact interesting people in local news stories who have inspired you. Figure out what you would like to learn from them so that your requests can be specific.
Call or write those you admire and ask whether they would be willing to answer three specific questions about how you could develop more in their areas of strength. If that goes well, you can see whether they would be willing to give guidance and encouragement again sometime when you need it. If you are respectful, specific, and time-limited in your approach, many people will be receptive.
Identify and Challenge Distorted Self-Concepts
It’s crucial to uproot and replace distorted self-concepts that you may have gotten from EI parenting. Pay attention to any roles or feelings about yourself that hold you back and challenge them. Here’s how to deal with some of the toughest ones.
You Are More Than a Role: Stay Out of the EIP’s Dramas
Instead of relating to others as individuals, EIPs lump people into distorted, exaggerated roles. They tend to see every situation as a story populated by victims, aggressors, or rescuers. As they reduce reality to these story lines, EIPs jump to conclusions about who’s bad, who’s innocent, and who should step in to save them. This distorted role-playing is called the drama triangle (Karpman 1968), which is illustrated in the diagram below.
For instance, as a child, Julie frequently got caught up in her mother’s drama triangles. She felt guilty for not being able to rescue her mother from her stepfather, whom her mother portrayed as the villain to her role as victim. Julie felt it was up to her to save her mother because no one told her that her adult mother wasn’t helpless and could have helped herself.
The drama triangle
In another example, teenaged Carla tried to tell her mother that she felt overcontrolled and needed more freedom. Instead of talking with Carla about it, her mother blew up and called her cruel and disrespectful. Her mother portrayed Carla as an aggressor, while she saw herself as the victim. She then expected her husband to rescue her from Carla’s “attack” by punishing her.
Seen through a drama triangle, the EIP’s distorted narrative of relationships is one of endless conflict: the strong exploit the innocent, who then suffer and deserve to be rescued by someone else. These roles are so easy to fall into, you may not notice it happening. Anyone can get temporarily drawn into these compelling story lines, but EIPs live in them.
The drama triangle feels familiar to us because it is the basis of both children’s fairy tales and adult dramas. Good guys and bad guys make riveting plotlines, but in real life, these simplistic, highly emotional themes generate unnecessary conflict and defensiveness. As people polarize into opposing roles, real communication and emotional intimacy stop (Patterson et al. 2012). Look for these story lines whenever EIPs aren’t getting their way; their outraged view of events will be straight out of the drama triangle.
If you’re not alert to it, drama triangle roles can undermine your relationship with yourself. Think what it would do to your self-esteem if you always saw yourself as a victim. Think how limited your future would look if you always had to be everyone’s rescuer. Imagine how you might doubt yourself if you were repeatedly cast as the villain.
The way out of a drama triangle is to see people as responsible for their own behavior and well-being. When you feel pulled into the triangle, you can shake yourself awake and refuse to think of yourself in those roles. You don’t have to let your self-concept be defined so one-dimensionally. You aren’t limited to being the bad guy, powerless victim, or heroic rescuer. Instead, you can be yourself, think about the overall outcome you want, and look for ways to lead the situation in that direction if possible.
Once you stop being fooled by drama triangles, you will be able to relate to people more effectively with less fear or anger. For instance, if an EIP tries to dominate or guilt you, you don’t have to accept being their victim. You can take action on your own behalf instead. You can determine what’s best for you instead of being blown around by other people’s emotional dramas.
Refuse to Be Dominated or Subjugated
If you’re okay with others telling you what to think, feel, or do, you are accustomed to being subjugated (Young, Klosko, and Weishaar 2003). Bu
t subjugation undermines your emotional autonomy and mental freedom and should not be tolerated. Your life isn’t theirs to direct, plus it’s illogical to think that an EIP knows what’s best.
Once you claim your right to make your own decisions and choices, others’ attempts at domination will stand out to you as starkly inappropriate. When you have a clear and self-respecting self-concept, your integrity and dignity will no longer allow emotional takeovers and coercions.
There’s no need to take someone’s attempted dominance seriously; you can simply assert your autonomy by saying things like, “You and I have different opinions on that one,” “That’s not the choice I want to make,” “While that would work for you, that’s not my style,” or “Thanks, but I can’t do that.” If the EIP still pressures you, you can say, “I don’t have a reason. I’m just not going to.”
Any interaction with an EIP that makes you feel disempowered or subjugated is a golden opportunity to strengthen your adult self-concept. If you are tempted to give in to a pushy EIP, remember that you have the right to protect your boundaries. Whenever you feel pressured to give in, take a breath and enjoy the fact that you are free to say no to anything you don’t like. You don’t have to explain; your preference is good enough. “I don’t care to,” “No thanks,” or “Not for me” can be the absolute end of the conversation.
Question Any Interaction in Which You Feel Inferior or Lacking
Feelings of inferiority can show you exactly where you are mistaken in your self-concept. It’s fine to admire other people, but there’s something wrong if you see someone as superior to you in worth. Try not to idealize or idolize anybody. You can enjoy them more if you stay their equal.
Feeling inferior or unworthy is like a flashing red light letting you know an EIRS or a drama triangle may be sucking you in. If you learn to interpret inferiority sensations as warnings that someone is trying to use you for their own self-esteem needs, you can step back and maintain your autonomy and positive self-concept.
Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents Page 17