Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents LifeFeeling
Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD
Praise for the Book
Louise B. Lubin, PhD: Offers a practical understanding of how EI parents impact feelings and behavior and provides specific examples and exercises.
Dan W. Briddell, PhD: Sheds light on understanding and provides keys to healing from emotional wounds inflicted by insensitive, self-absorbed, and controlling parents; a must-read for students of human behavior and mental health professionals.
Kenneth A. Siegel, PhD: Defines and explains what EI parents look like and how their behaviors affect their children, empowering individuals to reclaim their authentic selves.
Gretchen LeFever Watson, PhD: Offers translations and applications of therapeutic concepts to real-life experiences, broadening self-concept and strengthening self-confidence.
David Gordon, PhD: Provides a complete look at what clients need to know about EI parents, offering clear explanations and helpful exercises.
Kathy Nguyen Li, PsyD: Helps readers feel seen and known, understand their pain, and build emotionally fulfilling relationships.
Pamela Brewer, MSW, PhD, LCSW-C: Teaches that who you are today is different from what you were taught to believe, freeing you from ownership of their issues.
Laurie Helgoe, PhD: Goes beyond self-help and provides true therapy, breaking through emotional isolation and providing gentle guidance.
Sarah Y. Krakauer, PsyD: Conveys the dynamics that leave children burdened by emotional imperatives, guiding readers to autonomy, authenticity, and vitality.
Mary Ann Kearley, CNS, LPC: Contains wisdom, thoughts, and tools for searching one’s inner experiences and feelings from growing up with EI parents, along with a Bill of Rights for Adult Children of EI parents.
Lynn Zoll, EdD: Grounds suggestions with the fallout of family dynamics, showing that change is best served by self-connection over self-correction.
Kathrin Hartmann, PhD: Encourages the use of practical therapeutic exercise tools to break long-formed habits and foster a true self-view.
Kim Forbes, MEd, LCSW, ACSW: Guides the reader toward reclaiming their sense of Self and empowering relationships with themselves and others.
Publisher's Note
Case examples are from people who gave permission and were chosen for their universality; identifying data has been disguised.
The book is not a substitute for psychotherapy but an adjunct to it; readers who feel the need should seek out a therapist.
Contents
Introduction
Part I: What You’ve Been Up Against: Dealing with Emotional Immaturity
Chapter 1: Your Emotionally Immature Parent: What It’s Like to Be Involved with Them and How They Got to Be That Way
Chapter 2: Understanding Emotionally Immature Parents: Their Personality Traits and Emotional Takeovers
Chapter 3: Longing for a Relationship with Your EI Parent: Why You Keep Trying
Chapter 4: How to Resist Emotional Takeovers: Recognize Others’ Distortions and Don’t Disconnect from Yourself
Chapter 5: Skills to Manage Interactions and Evade Coercions: Actions That Empower You
Chapter 6: EI Parents Are Hostile Toward Your Inner World: How to Defend Your Right to Your Innermost Experiences
Part II: Emotional Autonomy: Reclaiming the Freedom to Be Yourself
Chapter 7: Nurturing Your Relationship with Yourself: How to Trust Your Inner World
Chapter 8: The Art of Mental Clearing: Making Room for Your Own Mind
Chapter 9: Updating Your Self-Concept: How to Correct Distortions and Enhance Self-Confidence
Chapter 10: Now You Can Have the Relationship You’ve Always Wanted: Just Focus on One Interaction at a Time
Epilogue: Bill of Rights for Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents
Acknowledgments
References
Introduction
EI parents have the impetuosity and egocentrism of a young child.
EI parents are psychological infants armed with rigid authority and a powerful adult body.
EI parents can be aloof and rejecting, causing children to feel emotionally lonely.
EI parents can be pleasant but betraying, absenting themselves when a child has a real problem.
EI parents lack empathy, are self-involved, and cannot sustain a satisfying emotional connection with their children.
Clients grew up in a family atmosphere characterized by conflict, mockery, and a lack of emotional intimacy.
EI parents can behave like real adults in other ways, functioning well at work or in their social group, which makes it hard to believe they cause such misery at home for their children.
Children blame themselves, feeling not lovable or interesting enough, and minimize their parents’ behavior.
Childhood with EI parents can lead to long-lasting emotional loneliness and ambivalence about relationships.
Emotional loneliness is the result of feeling unseen and unresponded to, no matter how hard you try to communicate and connect.
Children are often attracted to unsatisfying partners and friends who seem familiar in their self-involvement and refusal to connect at a deeper emotional level.
Seeing parents’ limitations more objectively allows individuals to no longer be prisoners of their parents’ immaturity.
It’s not just actual abuse that’s harmful; the whole parenting approach is emotionally unhealthy, creating anxiety and untrustworthiness between parent and child.
EI parents treat children in superficial, coercive, and judgmental ways, undermining their ability to trust their own thoughts and feelings, thereby restricting the development of their children’s intuition, self-guidance, efficacy, and autonomy.
Children of EI parents may learn to shut themselves down to not upset the parent’s emotional applecart, leading to being inhibited, passive, and acquiescent instead of nurturing their individuality and trust in others.
In the long run, children end up burdened by obligation, guilt, shame, and feeling trapped in their family role.
This book aims to help readers see what they’ve been up against while understanding their parents in the deepest possible way.
The book gives the reader a language for everything that goes on in EI relationships, both between them and their parents, and inside themselves as they try to cope.
The impact of emotionally immature persons (EIPs) doesn’t have to rule one’s life; you can figure out their effect on you and neutralize it.
Writing exercises are included to strengthen self-awareness and gain insight into experiences with EI parents and other EIPs.
EI behavior is widespread, and EIPs cause enormous suffering in all walks of life.
EIPs insist on dominating and being the center of importance, not leaving room or resources for others to be fully themselves.
Their me-first entitlement and self-justifications negate the rights of other people, giving them free rein for abuse, harassment, prejudice, exploitation, and corruption of all types.
Lack of self-questioning in EI leaders can make them seem strong and confident, enticing followers to support agendas solely for the leader's benefit.
Our vulnerability to self-centered authority starts in childhood when EI parents teach us that our thoughts are not as worthwhile as their thoughts and that we should accept whatever our parent tells us.
EI parenting could turn out children who later fall prey to extremism, exploitation, or even cults.
Learning about emotional immaturity will help you understand and deal with all manner of EI behavior, regardless of its source.
The interpersonal dynamics will be the same, whether inside the family or outside; all the methods that work with EI parents will work with other EIPs as well.
The first half of the book will focus on what you’ve been up against, describing what it’s like to grow up with EI parents—or to be in a relationship with any EIP—and what you can do about it.
Chapter 1 explores what it’s like having a relationship with your EI parent, learning about their hallmark emotionally immature relationship system (EIRS) and how they seek to make you responsible for their self-esteem and emotional stability.
Chapter 2 describes EI personality characteristics in detail, learning to spot EI emotional coercions and emotional takeovers, and how EIPs use self-doubt, fear, shame, and guilt in you to maintain their central role in the relationship.
Chapter 3 explores what it’s been like for you to try to have an emotionally satisfying relationship with your EI parent, looking at different types of EI parents and why they pull back from closeness.
Chapter 4 shows you how to avoid emotional takeovers by EIPs by questioning their reality distortions and emotional emergencies, learning how to set appropriate boundaries and respond to their demands for help.
Chapter 5 teaches exactly what to say and do as the most effective responses to classic EI behaviors, sidestepping their pressure, leading the interaction, and stopping them from taking over.
Chapter 6 shows the countless little ways that EI parents and other EIPs undermine your self-confidence and trust in your intuitions, mocking and invalidating your perceptions, thoughts, and feelings.
The second half of the book will shift from understanding and dealing with EIPs to strengthening your individuality in spite of them.
Chapter 7 focuses on valuing your inner world as crucial to reestablishing a solid relationship with yourself, trusting yourself, and welcoming your feelings as invaluable information about what needs your attention.
Chapter 8 directs towards renouncing EI-indoctrinated thinking to make room for your own mind, undoing the self-doubt caused by critical EI parents who dismissed any viewpoints different from theirs.
Chapter 9 will update and broaden your self-concept, appreciating the full spectrum of what you bring to the world and dismantling any distorted or outdated self-concepts you may hold.
The final chapter puts together all you’ve learned, reviewing the secret terms of your implicit EIP relationship contract and seeing if you’re ready to put your relationship on a more equal footing, building a loyal, committed relationship to your own inner self and well-being, and transforming your EI relationship into the best it can be, without sacrificing your integrity or blaming them.
The epilogue presents a new bill of rights for all adult children of emotionally immature parents, used as quick reminders of what you’ve learned.
The book aims to leave readers feeling understood and empowered to live their lives from a new place of self-connection and self- understanding.
The mission is for your own growth: to become an individual who is fully engaged with both yourself and other people.
Part I: What You’ve Been Up Against: Dealing with Emotional Immaturity
Learn how it feels to be involved with EI parents, how they got that way, their personality characteristics, and why it’s hard to have a satisfying close relationship with them.
Learn tools and interactional strategies to protect your healthy limits, resist their urgent demands and emotional coercions, and be loyal to yourself.
Chapter 1: Your Emotionally Immature Parent: What It’s Like to Be Involved with Them and How They Got to Be That Way
EI parents are frustrating and demoralizing, expecting honor and special treatment while trying to control and dismiss you.
A relationship with an EI parent is characterized by not getting your emotional needs met, feeling uncomfortable with emotional intimacy.
There might be a fleeting desire glimpse in them for real connection, which keeps you reaching out to them.
The more you reach out, the further they recede, wary of real intimacy, resulting in a push-me, pull-me relationship that leaves you unsatisfied and emotionally lonely.
Understanding them helps you deal with your EI parents in ways that free you from their emotional coercions and create a more genuine relationship based on knowing what you can and can’t expect from them.
Keep a journal to process what you read and give yourself vital emotional support and validation.
Exercise: Why You Picked Up This Book
Write down what intrigued you when you saw the title, what you hoped to find out, and how the person has made you feel.
How do you wish your relationship with this person were different?
What It’s Like Being Involved with Them
EI parents and other EIPs have a recognizable interpersonal style.
Ten Experiences to Expect in a Relationship with Them
You Feel Emotionally Lonely Around Them
EI parents like to tell their children what to do but are uncomfortable with emotional nurturing.
EI parents may take good care of you when you’re sick, but they don’t know what to do with hurt feelings or broken hearts.
As a result, they may seem artificial and awkward when trying to soothe a distressed child.
Interactions Feel One-Sided and Frustrating
EI parents’ self-absorption and limited empathy make interactions with them feel one-sided.
Although EI parents require your attention when they’re upset, they rarely offer listening or empathy when you’re distressed.
Instead of sitting with you and letting you get it all out, EI parents typically offer superficial solutions, tell you not to worry, or even get irritated with you for being upset.
Their heart feels closed, like there’s no place you can go inside them for compassion or comfort.
You Feel Coerced and Trapped
EI parents insist you put them first and let them run the show, coercing you with shame, guilt, or fear.
They can flare into blame and anger if you don’t toe the line.
You can also feel trapped by their superficial style of relating.
Because EI parents relate in a superficial, egocentric way, talking with them is often boring, sticking to conversation topics they feel safe with, which quickly become stagnant and repetitious.
They Come First, and You Are Secondary
EI parents are extremely self-referential, expecting you to accept second place when it comes to their needs.
Without a parent willing to give your emotional needs a high priority, it can leave you feeling insecure.
Wondering if a parent will think of you or have your back can make you vulnerable to stress, anxiety, and depression.
They Won’t Be Emotionally Intimate or Vulnerable with You
Although they’re highly reactive emotionally, EI parents actually avoid their deeper feelings, fearing being emotionally exposed.
They even avoid tenderness toward their children because this might make them too vulnerable.
They also worry that showing love might undermine their power as parents because power is all they think they’ve got.
However, these one-sided eruptions of emotion are merely releases of emotional pressures, not the same thing as a willingness to be open to real emotional connection.
Their poor receptive capacity prevents them from taking in any comfort and connection you try to offer.
They Communicate Through Emotional Contagion
Instead of talking about their feelings, EI people express themselves nonverbally through emotional contagion coming across your boundaries and getting you as upset as they are.
In family systems theory, this absence of healthy boundaries is called emotional fusion, absorbing family members into each other’s emotions and psychological issues.
Like small children, EI parents want you to intuit what they feel without their saying anything.
They feel hurt and angry when you don’t guess their needs, expecting you to stay constantly attuned to them.
They Don’t Respect Your Boundaries or Individuality
EI parents don’t really understand the point of boundaries, thinking boundaries imply rejection.
This is why they act incredulous, offended, or hurt if you ask them to respect your privacy.
EI parents also don’t respect your individuality because they don’t see the need for it.
They don’t understand why you can’t just be like them, think like them, and have the same beliefs and values.
You Do the Emotional Work in the Relationship
Emotional work is the effort you make to emotionally adapt to other people’s needs, comprised of empathy, common sense, awareness of motives, and anticipating how someone is likely to respond to your actions.
But because EI parents lack interest in relationship repairs, reconnection efforts may fall to you.
Instead of amends or apologies, EI parents often make things worse by projecting blame, accusing others, and disowning responsibility for their behavior.
You Lose Your Emotional Autonomy and Mental Freedom
Because EI parents see you as an extension of themselves, they disregard your inner world of thoughts and feelings.
Instead, they claim the sole right to judge your feelings as either sensible or unwarranted.
Your thoughts and feelings are filtered through their comfort level as either good or bad.
They Can Be Killjoys and Even Sadistic
EI parents can be awful killjoys, rarely resonating with others’ feelings and not taking pleasure in other people’s happiness.
Sadism goes beyond being a killjoy and takes actual pleasure in inflicting pain, humiliation, or forced restraint on a living being.
Sadistic EI parents enjoy making their child suffer, whether by physical or psychological means.
Sadistic parents like it when their child feels powerless enjoying making their children feel desperate by giving them extreme physical punishments, refusing to interact with them for long periods of time, handing down unfathomably long restrictions, or making them feel trapped.
The Emotionally Immature Relationship System (EIRS)
Emotionally immature people don’t regulate their self-esteem and emotional stability well on their own, needing others to keep them on an even keel by treating them just so, often through complex, extremely subtle cues.
This EIRS draws you into being more attentive to the EI parent’s emotional state than to your own self.
It feels imperative to pacify the EI parent’s moods at all costs, putting their needs and feelings above your own emotional health.
This unhealthy overconcern with keeping them calm focuses you on them and their reactions, to the point where you can become obsessed with the status of their moods, which is an emotional takeover.
The EIRS is a normal arrangement between babies and their caretakers, requiring loving adults to be attuned to their needs and soothe them when they’re upset.
With normal children, the need for constant engagement and soothing lessens as they mature.
But for EI parents, their emotional self-regulation didn’t fully develop, still expecting others to make them feel better immediately by knowing just how they want to be treated.
Like little children, they need a lot of attention, compliance, and positive feedback to keep them stable but don’t grow from the attention.
Their early emotional wounds and deprivations promote psychological defenses that keep them stuck in the same old defensive patterns. no matter how much nurturing they get.
You have to be alert and prepared in order for it not to take you over.
How Their EIRS Affects You
You Feel Responsible for Their Feelings
The EIRS is convincing you that their happiness is your responsibility, and the same is for their anger and bad moods.
As you are infiltrated by their unhappiness, you feel like it’s up to you to make everything all right, losing sight of your own feelings and needs.
Once their EIRS takes you over emotionally, their problem feels like your problem, even if rationally you know better.
You Feel Exhausted and Apprehensive
Getting caught up in someone’s EIRS is exhausting because you are doing so much emotional work on their behalf.
Also, you’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop because you’re chronically apprehensive about what their next emergency is going to be.
This involuntary, nonstop monitoring of their mood is incredibly draining.
You Feel You Can’t Say No
EI parents dump their problems on you in such an agitated, victimized way that it seems you can’t refuse, forfeiting your emotional autonomy.
You are branded a selfish, unreliable person for anything less than making their issues your most important concern.
In a family, an EI parent’s EIRS creates an atmosphere of emotional totalitarianism, in which all eyes are on that parent’s moods and needs.
You Feel Defeated When You Try to Solve Their Problems
EI parents are usually not receptive to any ideas about solving their problems, getting impatient with your problem-solving, and often use the phrase: “Yes, but…”
They rarely ask politely for help, rather infect you with their anxious urgency as though it’s your job to take over and make their problems go away.
Problems are the currency that keeps you locked into their EIRS.
You Feel Accused of Letting Them Down
It’s likely that EI parents unconsciously project their own unsatisfying early mother-child relationship onto their relationship with you.
You Have Overly Intense Emotional Reactions to Them
EI parents can draw you into reacting to them with unusual emotional intensity.
They offload their unpleasant emotional states by acting in ways that stir up the same emotions in you called projective identification.
With EIPs, get some perspective on your reactions by asking yourself: Is this coming from me or them?
How EI Parents Got to Be This Way
EI parents may have had difficult childhoods of their own, including histories of abuse and emotional deprivation.
Earlier generations lacked parenting classes, psychotherapy, school counselors, and cultural norms that protected the rights of children.
Neglected or traumatic childhoods can cause people to be overly preoccupied with their immediate needs, like someone who is always checking an unhealed wound.
Did they grow up without a deep enough connection?
EI parents lack the calm depth that emotionally nourished people have.
They don’t show the security and deep self-acceptance that come from connecting with a sensitive caretaker in childhood.
They behave as if they are terrified that they don’t really matter.
Without a secure attachment in childhood, EI parents can grow up feeling defensive, wary of their deeper feelings, and unable to forge warm connections with their children.
Could they have internalized unresolved family traumas?
Family traumas tend to be passed down and reenacted between parent and child creating generations of emotional suffering and immaturity until someone in the family finally stops and consciously processes their painful feelings.
Were they allowed to develop a sense of self?
It’s likely that EI parents were not helped to develop enough emotional awareness to feel a sense of self.
Without this, we don’t feel whole, worthy, or genuinely self-confident and must depend upon external definers for identity.
Developing a sense of self is also necessary for the self-awareness and self-reflection that allow us to observe ourselves and how our behavior affects other people.
Highlights to Remember
You learned their emotionally immature relationship system (EIRS) and how it makes you feel responsible for their self-esteem and emotional stability.
You saw how they monopolize interactions with their own issues and tell you how you should think and feel.
We explored how EI parents’ childhoods might’ve influenced their personality and behaviors and how your parents may carry unresolved family traumas of their own.
You are now in an excellent position to question these family dynamics and take care of your own development despite anyone’s emotional coercions.
Chapter 2: Understanding Emotionally Immature Parents: Their Personality Traits and Emotional Takeovers
EI parents and EIPs approach life and relationships in a me-first way that makes others feel disregarded.
Assessing EI Characteristics of Your Parent(s)
My parent often overreacted to relatively minor things.
My parent didn’t express much empathy or awareness of my feelings.
When it came to deeper feelings and emotional closeness, my parent seemed uncomfortable and didn’t go there.
My parent was often irritated by individual differences or different points of view.
When I was growing up, my parent used me as a confidant but wasn’t a confidant for me.
My parent often said and did things without thinking about people’s feelings.
I didn’t get much attention or sympathy from my parent, except maybe when I was really sick.
My parent was inconsistent—sometimes wise, sometimes unreasonable.
Conversations mostly centered on my parent’s interests.
If I became upset, my parent either said something superficial and unhelpful or got angry and sarcastic.
Even polite disagreement could make my parent very defensive.
It was deflating to tell my parent about my successes because it didn’t seem to matter.
I frequently felt guilty for not doing enough or not caring enough for them.
Facts and logic were no match for my parent’s opinions.
My parent wasn’t self-reflective and rarely looked at their part in a problem.
My parent tended to be a black-and-white thinker, unreceptive to new ideas.
Types of EI Parents
There is a broad spectrum of emotional immaturity, from the very mild to the frankly psychopathological.
Being emotionally immature isn’t the same thing as being mentally ill, but many mentally ill people are also emotionally immature.
What all EIPs have in common are self- preoccupation, low empathy, a need to be most important, little respect for individual differences, and difficulties with emotional intimacy.
EI parents can be extraverted or introverted.
Emotional parents are dominated by feelings and can become extremely reactive and overwhelmed by anything that surprises or upsets them; highly unstable, frighteningly volatile.
Driven parents are super goal-achieving and constantly busy, perfectionists with little sensitivity to their children’s emotional needs.
Passive parents are the nicer parents letting their mate be the bad guy, will acquiesce to the more dominant parent, even to the point of overlooking abuse and neglect.
Rejecting parents aren’t interested in relationships and want to be left alone to do their own thing; can become furious and even abusive if things don’t go their way.
How They Reveal Their Emotional Immaturity
EI parents have a very self-absorbed orientation to life and deal with other people in me-first ways.
How EI Parents Approach Life
EI Parents Are Fundamentally Fearful and Insecure
They act like they don’t feel truly loved, making them fearful of losing status and ceasing to matter.
Anxieties about abandonment and fears of being shamefully inadequate fuel their discomfort.
With these deep fears about being unlovable, they must control others in order to feel safer.
They Need to Dominate and Control
They do whatever it takes to give them a sense of security by taking advantage of your emotions.
EI parents dominate you most effectively by taking advantage of your emotions, by treating you in ways that induce fear, shame, guilt, or self-doubt.
To justify being in charge, EI parents treat others as lacking in judgment and competence.
EI parents hold their children back by foreseeing dire happenings if the parent’s advice isn’t followed.
Instead of real warmth and openness, EIPs are limited to charm and charisma, concerned with interpersonal dominance, not relational connection.
They Define Themselves and Others by Roles
They certainly expect others to stay in clear-cut roles, often using their parental role to take liberties with your boundaries.
They are likely to disallow any individuality that could threaten your family role.
They Are Egocentric, Not Self-Reflective
EI parents put their desires first, assuming they are entitled to what they want and rarely looking at themselves objectively.
Growth is threatening to them because it means unpredictable change and more insecurity.
Lacking self-reflection, they’re not interested in learning about themselves or improving their relationships, other than how they can get more of what they want.
Because they aren’t self-reflective, EI parents have poor filters and say things without thinking.
They Blame Others and Excuse Themselves
Their mistrust makes them blame others when things go wrong, making their relationships highly conflictual and unstable.
They excuse themselves from responsibility because their brittle self-esteem can’t take criticism.
Their self-esteem is based on whether or not things have gone their way, feeling inflated if they do and desperate if they don’t.
They Are Impulsive and Don’t Tolerate Stress
Their low tolerance for stress makes them feel that all is lost when life hits a bump in the road.
They don’t know how to soothe themselves other than to make problems go away as quickly as possible.
They are known for doing impulsive things that backfire on them.
How They Deal with Reality
Instead of adapting to reality, EI parents try to remake reality, streamlining it into parts that make sense and seem manageable to them.
They Use Coping Mechanisms That Resist Reality
Adaptive, emotionally mature people have balanced lives and emotionally satisfying relationships, relating to the inner experiences of themselves and others.
The most immature EIPs try to alter reality by denying, dismissing, or distorting facts they don’t like.
Some EIPs can be realistic about objective reality but can’t deal with feelings, indulging in substance abuse to hide from painful feelings.
Reality Is Determined by Their Emotions
Because EIPs and EI parents approach life emotionally rather than thoughtfully, they define reality based on how it feels to them called affective realism.
They Deny and Dismiss the Reality of Others’ Feelings
Because of their low empathy, they frequently respond in ways that other people find insensitive or hurtful, lowering their emotional intelligence.
Their Intense Emotions Oversimplify Reality
EIPs and EI parents have intense, all-or-nothing emotions, oversimplifying people and situations into categories of all good or all bad.
They Disregard Reality’s Time Sequence
Instead of seeing reality as a timeline, EIPs experience events as isolated blips unrelated to each other.
Ignoring time’s sequential reality lets them say and do the most dumbfounding things because they don’t feel the need to be logically consistent with their past statements or actions.
Lack of time sequence awareness also makes lying seem like a reasonable solution.
How They Think
Maturity in coping isn’t determined by a person’s level of education or social standing; emotional maturity is much deeper than intellectual ability or conventional success.
Their Intelligence Doesn ’t Extend to the World of Feelings
EIPs can be plenty intelligent as long as there is nothing emotional to unsettle them.
Their Thoughts About Life Are Simplistic, Literal, and Rigid
The immature personality structure of EIPs results in oversimplified, black-and-white thinking and rigid moral categories of all good or all bad.
EIPs’ thinking tends to be literal, based on a few favorite concepts and well- worn metaphors.
Abhorring complexity, they will cast off facts in order to jump to a quick conclusion that agrees with their preconceptions.
EIPs’ mental rigidity makes them sticklers for rules and authoritarian values but will break the same rules for their own gain.
EIPs get increasingly single-minded and stubborn as situations become more complicated or stressful.
They Become Obsessive
When EIPs or EI parents feel hurt, embarrassed, or like their authority is disrespected, they get stuck in obsessive anger dwelling obsessively on anyone who they think has wronged them.
They Use Superficial Logic to Shut Down Feelings
Instead of offering empathy, EIPs inappropriately apply logic to minimize other people’s problems, offering platitudes instead of considering your unique dilemma.
When empathy is required, pure logic is an emotionally inappropriate response.
EIPs’ Emotional Coercions and Takeover Tactics
Emotional coercion occurs when an EIP controls you by inducing fear, guilt, shame, and self-doubt.
EIPs are masters at getting you to feel things that are to their advantage, to catch it early and quickly separate yourself from their attempted domination.
Self-Doubt Undermines Your Autonomy and Self-Worth
They punish you by withdrawing emotional connection if you express thoughts or feelings they don’t like.
You start looking to others for direction, trusting other people’s perspective over your own, and self-doubt brings parental acceptance, while feeling autonomous causes tension.
But as you doubt your deeper instincts, you lose clarity of mind in the face of their coercive tactics.
Fear Makes You Easier to Control
Fear is perhaps the EIP’s simplest, most straightforward tactic for emotional takeovers, geniuses when it comes to instilling fear and making you feel unsafe.
Once you feel afraid, you’re much more willing to put them first/Physical abuse is the biggest fear tactic, but threats of emotional withdrawal, abandonment, or even suicide can be just as damaging.
You might start to fear your own feelings resulting in self-inhibition.
You Often Feel Guilty
EI parents exploit the coercive potential of guilt, teaching their children to feel horrible about themselves and the need to become perfect.
EI parents especially make their children feel guilt over not sacrificing themselves enough and also survivor guilt whenever they have a happier life than their parents.
Feelings of Shame Make You Easy to Dominate
They Embarrassing and shaming can make you lose trust in your own thoughts and feelings.
Children taught to knuckle under to other people’s emotional dominations later in adult relationships. You might be especially vulnerable to shame if EIPs call you selfish.
Exercise: Rescue Your Shamed and Fearful Self
Write down your fears of shaming and exposing them exactly as they are, then push the dread up another notch by asking yourself, “And then what?” until you know you have reached the absolute worst possible outcome of your feared shame.
Spell out the awful story about yourself that accompanies this shamed state.
Imagine rescuing this shamed inner self, giving it the comfort and acceptance that it needs to feel good about itself again.
Subtle Shaming Between Peers and Adults
These social behaviors can be extremely subtle, such as not responding to your overtures, dismissing your concerns, or implying that you are a bother, and are often hard to pinpoint because they’re not dramatically demeaning or rude.
Exercise: Reflect on Your Takeover Experiences
Write about a time they used fear, guilt, shame, or self-doubt to make you do what they wanted.
What worked the best on you? What type of emotional coercions are you most vulnerable to?
What physical sensations do you get when someone is trying to make you feel bad for their benefit?
Write down how you might recognize an emotional coercion in the future and prevent it from taking you over.
Highlights to Remember
EI parents’ self-preoccupied approach to life, how they resist reality, and their unique orientation to time affect relationships.
EI parents use your self-doubt, fear, guilt, and shame to emotionally coerce you into shoring up their self- esteem, emotional stability, and security, asserting their dominance and undermining your self-confidence as long as you understand what they’re doing.