This is the second book in the Emotionally Immature Parents series. It is wonderfully written and has some incredible information. Below are the quotes/learning points that I enjoyed the most: 

As an adult child of Emotionally Immature parents, you may have learned to shut yourself down in order to not upset your parent’s emotional applecart when growing up. 

Emotional immature (EI) parents can turn out children who then later fall prey to extremism, exploitation, or even cults. 

As an adult now, it is important to know that valuing your inner world is crucial to reestablishing a solid relationship with yourself. 

It’s unlikely that EI parents would’ve helped you develop an accurate, confident self-image. Instead, they’re more likely to have taught you to be submissive, leading you to see other people’s needs and feelings as more important than your own. 

It is a goal to live your life from a new place of self-connection and self-understanding. Your parents gave you life and love, but only of the sort they knew. You can honor them for that but cease to give them unwarranted power over your emotional well-being. 

It’s so important to be loyal to yourself around them and how to resist their urgent demands and emotional coercions. 

You care about your parent, but you can’t get close enough to have a real relationship. 

Do any of these statements describe one of both of your parents?

• 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 was inconsistent- sometimes wise, sometimes unreasonable. 
• Conversations mostly centered around my parent’s interests.
• If I became upset, my parent either said something superficial and unhelpful or got angry and sarcastic. 
• Even polite disagreements could make my parent very defensive.
• 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. 

Because of all these behaviors are typical of EI personalities, even checking a few of these traits strongly suggests the presence of emotional immaturity. 

How EI Parents Approach Life

EI parents are fundamentally fearful and insecure. They are egocentric, not self-reflective. Because their own inner world is unexamined, they seldom question their motives or reactions. They don’t feel the need to be logically consistent with their past statements or actions. Instead of analyzing their mistakes, they think, That was then; this is now and other forms of not processing the lessons of the past. 

When empathy is required, pure logic is an emotionally inappropriate response. 

Shame comes from feeling rejected by other people. You might be especially vulnerable to shame if EIP’s call you selfish. There is no accusation more hurtful to a sensitive person than to be told they don’t care about others. What EIP’s and parents usually mean by selfishness is that you are pausing to think about your needs instead of automatically giving in to their demands. 

Writing down your fears of shaming and exposing them exactly as they are. Write down the most embarrassing things they could imagine happening. And ask yourself, and then what? until you have reached the absolute worst possible outcome of your feared shame. Then realize nothing bad happens; it’s just a feeling. 

Your needs for emotional connection were normal, not repellant nor unlovable, and would not have been overwhelming to an adequately mature parent. Write in your journal about a time when you felt emotionally coerced by your parent or other EIP. 

The personality defenses and fears of EI parents make it nearly impossible for them to tolerate closeness for long.

As an adult child of an EI parent, you probably didn’t get enough childhood emotional connection, intimate communication, or parental approval- all the things that make you feel loved by your parents. You can see your parents, but the sensation of their emotional presence is missing. Your desire for a better relationship with them partly originates in this inner child that is still looking to be seen and responded to. They unfortunately have a refusal to engage at a deeper level. The EI parent’s nervous avoidance of deep emotions- their affect phobia makes them pull back from such intimacy. Effective communication can only work when the other person is willing to participate. EI parents are uncomfortable with emotional connection. They may feel they’re being thrown into the deep end of something they can’t swim in. 

It’s always best to initiate deeper conversations by first asking for a short amount of their time, say five or ten minutes, and then asking only specific questions or sharing one or two feelings with them at a time. 

Think about a time when you tried to get your parent to listen and talk with you at a deeper level. How did they respond? How did you feel after opening up to them? Write about this memory in your journal. If their reaction wasn’t emotionally satisfying, do you think- given what you’ve read so far- that the problem may have been their difficulty in relating at a deeper level? Write down your conclusions. 

They just aren’t all that interested in their children’s accomplishments, unless it gives the parent bragging rights. Bragging to others allows EI parents to keep emotional distance while still claiming your accomplishments as social currency. Due to their low empathy and preoccupation with their own concerns, they seldom show interest in anything beyond what immediately matters to them.

Children who grow up with overly busy parents know that their parent’s real interests lie elsewhere and that they come in second to the parent’s outside pursuits. 

Envious parents are more likely to discount and minimize their child’s abilities and achievements. 

If you are reading this book, you are probably acutely aware of how you may have suffered from a lack of connection with your parents. This self-awareness probably means you’ll think about your effect on your children, and you likely won’t pass down the same kind of emotional pain in your parenting.

You might be the one in your family tree to finally stop the multigenerational transfer of emotional pain. Apologize when you’re wrong, take them completely seriously, forego sarcasm and mockery, and treat them with respect. When a child knows you are present, respectful, empathetic, and fair, they won’t feel the emotional loneliness you may have felt. 

Children stop hoping for connection only if a parent is consistently disengaged and rejecting. Sometimes emotionally available will keep you hoping for more. 

Their gifts often reflect the parent’s interests, not the child’s preferences. Unfortunately, EI parent’s defensiveness makes it impossible for them to sustain that deeper openness. 

To distinguish between bonding and relationship, ask yourself whether the person to whom you feel bonded is aware of your inner emotional states and subjective experience. As an adult, you might be better off investing in a deeper relationship with yourself, while lowering your expectations for the kind of relationship you can have with an emotionally unresponsive parent. 

EI parents are easily destabilized by the emotional intensity of such encounters. They have already formed a personality style that protects them; and they don’t want to change. 

Would you pick your parent as a desirable new friend you’d be happy to have? 

Even if you are a model adult, they may still be critical, demeaning, or dismissive toward you.

You might be too willing to put a lot of one-sided effort into your adult relationships. Your job now is to question any one-sided relationship and look for something more satisfying. 

Once you start relying on your adult mind and listening to your own heart, you’ve got all you need inside you for the guidance and support you wish you’d had years ago. You will no longer feel so hurt by parents who can’t see you for who you are. 

EIP’s make it seem that their issues are more important than anything that could possibly be going on with you. 

Enabling weakens the resourcefulness of the other person because you continue to make yourself the answer to their problems. 

The good thing about judgment is that you have to agree with it in order to feel bad. 
Disassociation is a natural defense. It’s a primitive type of emotional escape and a very common psychological defense against threat or danger, especially for children in an unsafe environment. Think of it like an automatic shutdown valve. 

5 EFFECTIVE SKILLS FOR DEALING WITH EI PARENTS

 

1.STEP OUR OF YOUR RESCUER ROLE

Many adult children of EI parents feel they have to be their parent’s rescuer or protector. 

2.BE SLIPPERY AND SIDESTEP

Slipperiness is effective because no friction is created, and your minimal feedback makes you a less desirable opponent. Turn sideways (figuratively) and watch their emotions flow past you. “I guess you’re pretty upset with me, Dad” or “I know you think I’m making a mistake”. 

3. LEAD THE INTERACTION

You are dealing with people who are lacking in flexibility, empathy, and frustration tolerance. As a child, it felt like your role was to be the audience for whatever they wanted to talk about. 

Make sure you have a place to retreat to: {There is a story about attending a family reunion out of state and they made sure to plan daily walks, drives in the country, movies, and shopping trips with their partner so they could get away from the family dynamics and decompress. They looked for the humor in the relatives’ behavior and joked about the situation to keep things in perspective. They sneaked eye contact whenever someone did something particularly insensitive, knowing they could gossip about it later. Emotional coercion can’t take hold if you don’t take it seriously and give yourself frequent breaks. 

The fact is, being around self-preoccupied and emotionally oblivious EIPs is tiring. 

People don’t have the right to access you any time it suits them.

The phrase, “What’s Up?” cues a person to get to the point, instead of encouraging longer responses.

4. CREATE SPACE FOR YOURSELF: DISENGAGE, SET LIMITS, OR LEAVE

5. STOP THEM

Around your parents, you may hide your individuality a bit and interact in ways that keep things smooth between you. You may always feel a little nervous around your EI parent, censoring things and thinking twice before you speak. 

Because EI parents want to direct how other people should be, their child’s inner experience isn’t relevant to them. They think of children as empty boxes to be filled with what parents want them to know. Lacking in empathy and curiosity, what matters to them is how you treat them, not what you feel or think. EI parents disinterest in other people’s inner experience explains why they don’t listen very well. It doesn’t occur to them that anything of much importance could be going on inside you, so they see no point in trying to grasp your point of view. Their dismissive attitude toward your inner subjective experience in childhood also teaches you to view your inner world as insignificant. 

When the child’s deep attraction to a desirable thing is mocked, it shakes a child’s emotional self-confidence. 

Your hopes for the future may remind them of their own lost opportunities. 

Nothing in the outside world of people and situations will ever feel like enough as long as you dismiss your inner experiences. No amount of external activity can fill the emptiness where there should be a robust fascination with your own interior. This self-betrayal lowers your self-worth and dims your joy in living. Diana Fosha calls these feelings the core state; which is what is recovered if psychotherapy is successful. 

Your inner world determines your most significant beliefs and decisions in life: who you think you are, what you believe in, and the future you desire. Your inner world is the source of solving problems, having aha moments, and figuring out how things work. Your inner world is where all your energy, humor, enthusiasm, and altruism come from. Your ability to be fair and loyal to others comes from inside, as does any interest in coaching, leading, or mentoring. The desire to love others and better the world comes from the inside. The meaning of your life can only be found within. Your inner world gives you resilience. 

What I call the inner self has many common names: soul, spirit, heart, the you of you. The inner self is who you feel yourself to be at the deepest level. It’s your unique individuality. 

EIPs dismiss your inner world as if it were unnecessary and irrelevant. 

EI parents dismiss their children’s feelings so much that often the child decides to cope alone. Just about the most self-alienating thing you can tell anyone is that there’s no reason for what they’re feeling. 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. 

The real problem may be that you haven’t consciously updated your self-concept beyond who you were in childhood.

Cherish every bit of your success and incorporate it into your self-concept. 

In the book it discusses a story about a mother and daughter, and ultimately the story ends with the adult child of an EIP knowing that her continued adult health depended on not seeing her mother very often. 

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. 

Some of us, even in the absence of nurturing relationships, seem to have mysterious inner resources that allow us to be our own conscious companion, enabling us to learn and grow our way out of adverse circumstances. You will cherish your individuality- your interests, your passions, your ideals- plus those new strengths you’re working on. You’re just trying to  fulfill your potential and become more genuinely yourself. 

By being loyal to yourself and your inner world, you maintain your boundaries, emotional autonomy, and right to your own individuality. 

It’s not just how they treated you, it’s also about how you’ve overlooked yourself in order to get along with them. 

When you love yourself as an evolving being, it feels right to protect your energy and interests. 

If a parent gets angry and speaks harshly, you can be a leader by saying, “I expect you to control yourself. We’re two grown adults now. How are we going to have a respectful adult relationship with you talking to me like that? 

Telling EIPs and EI parents how something made you feel is a giant step toward being loyal to yourself. Every time you speak up-in whatever uncomfortable or hesitant way you can manage to do it- you bring about more meaningful communication and pull the relationship out of stagnating in superficiality. 

Tell them you have some thoughts to share and ask if they’ll give you five minutes. (The five-minute is important because emotional intimacy makes them so nervous.)

In each five-minute conversation, talk about only one interaction. Keep a respectful, curious, and non-accusatory attitude as you spell out the feelings you got from their behavior. If they interrupt or want to argue, you can acknowledge them, but ask them to let you finish. Remember– your mission was accomplished as soon as you asked to talk. That act alone reversed your old childhood role. 

EIP’s act like your time belongs to them. 

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