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March 15 - March 24, 2022
Unfortunately, the lack of self-questioning in EI leaders can make them seem strong and confident, enticing followers to support agendas not in their best interests and almost solely for the benefit of the leader. 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.
Learning about emotional immaturity will help you understand and deal with all manner of EI behavior, regardless of its source. The EIP in your life might be a parent, significant other, child, sibling, employer, customer, or anyone else. 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.
EI parents and EIPs are hostile toward your inner life by mocking and invalidating your perceptions, thoughts, and feelings.
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. As
parents insist you put them first and let them run the show. To this end, they coerce you with shame, guilt, or fear until you do what they want. They can flare into blame and anger if you don’t toe the line. Many people use the word manipulation for these kinds of emotional coercions, but I think that word is misleading. These behaviors are more like survival instincts. They do whatever’s necessary to feel more in control and protected in the moment, oblivious to what it might cost you.
Instead of talking about their feelings, EI people express themselves nonverbally through emotional contagion (Hatfield, Rapson, and Le 2009), 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 (Bowen 1985), while in structural family therapy it is called enmeshment (Minuchin 1974). This is the process by which EI family members get absorbed into each other’s emotions and psychological issues.
EI parents also don’t respect your individuality because they don’t see the need for it. Family and roles are sacrosanct to them, and they don’t understand why you should want space or an individual identity apart from them. They don’t understand why you can’t just be like them, think like them, and have the same beliefs and values. You are their child and, therefore, belong to them. Even when you’re grown, they expect you to remain their compliant child or—if you insist on your own life—at least always follow their advice.
Instead of amends or apologies, EI parents often make things worse by projecting blame, accusing others, and disowning responsibility for their behavior. In a situation where it would seem easier just to go ahead and apologize, EI parents can be adamant that it was something you did—or failed to do—that warranted their hurtful behavior. If only you had known better and done what they asked, this problem never would’ve occurred.
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.
They don’t respect your emotional autonomy, your freedom and right to have your own feelings.
Because your thoughts should reflect theirs, they react with shock and disapproval if you have ideas that offend them. You are not free to consider certain things even in the privacy of your own mind. (“Don’t even think about it!”) Your thoughts and feelings are filtered through their comfort level as either good or bad.
They also are famous for deflating their children’s dreams by reminding them about depressing realities of adult life.
When EIPs and EI parents get upset, their distress worms its way into your mind and takes center stage. You worry obsessively about how to make things right with them, and you can’t get what they said or did out of your mind. Even while you are doing other things or perhaps trying to sleep at night, their discomfort hovers over you, prompting constant thoughts like, What did I do wrong? What can I do to make it better? or Have I done enough to help them?
Frank’s divorced father, Robert, frequently called him in the middle of the night after drinking heavily. Robert often locked himself out of his apartment and called Frank to come get him. When Robert became ill, he asked Frank to stay at the hospital with him “because I don’t have anyone else.” Frank couldn’t say no because his father sounded so pitiful. Frank’s family and work began to suffer as he became increasingly preoccupied with Robert’s problems. Frank had become so identified with Robert’s troubles that it didn’t occur to him that his father might have some responsibility to get
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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. Once their EIRS gets under your skin, the threat of their next mood shift looms over you and keeps you on red alert. This involuntary, nonstop monitoring of their mood is incredibly draining.
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.
EI parents dominate you most effectively by taking advantage of your emotions. They influence your behavior 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. This gives them license to tell you what to do and how to be. Such overcontrol can be especially destructive to a child’s sense of efficacy and confidence. EI parents also hold their children back by foreseeing dire happenings if the parent’s advice isn’t followed.
Roles are central to an EI parent’s security and self-identity. They certainly expect others to stay in clear-cut roles. They categorize people into either dominant or submissive roles because equal
relationships make them uneasy, uncertain who’s really in charge.
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.
Their coping mechanisms are flexible, and instead of trying to rigidly control everything, they look for the most adaptive, least stressful solution that takes all factors into account.
To get through tough times, they might use humor, creativity, deliberate suppression of unhelpful thoughts, and altruism.
EIPs and EI parents have intense, all-or-nothing emotions, like the unmodulated feelings of little children. They oversimplify people and situations into categories of all good or all bad. Their black-and-white thinking prevents them from experiencing conflicting emotions at the same time, so there is little balancing or tempering of their emotions.
Appreciating how life events are hooked together on a timeline is crucial to understanding how cause and effect works. However, EIPs live in the immediate emotional moment and can be oblivious to the chain of causation over time.
Instead of analyzing their mistakes, they think, That was then; this is now. They are famous for their philosophy of “moving on” and “getting over it” and other forms of not processing the lessons of the past. They don’t connect the dots to see the overall trajectory of their lives. Therefore, they don’t notice when they are repeating past mistakes, nor can they steer themselves toward a different future.
The future isn’t a real consideration for them, so they feel free to deceive others, burn bridges, or create enemies. In seeking immediate gratifications, their future is left to take care of itself, often with predictably negative results.
The immature personality structure of EIPs results in oversimplified, black-and-white thinking and rigid moral categories of all good or all bad (Kernberg 1985). The complexity of nuanced or ambiguous situations is boiled down to simplistic judgments that disregard crucial elements. EIPs’ thinking tends to be literal, based on a few favorite concepts and well-worn metaphors. They dislike the uncertainty of an evolving reality, so they can irrationally defend what is familiar. Abhorring complexity, they will cast off facts in order to jump to a quick conclusion that agrees with their
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Proud of being unyielding, they call their judgmental rigidity “moral fortitude” or “having a backbone.”
Instead of offering empathy, EIPs inappropriately apply logic to minimize other people’s problems. EIPs get highly upset about their own troubles, but they oversimplify your problems and ignore deeper emotional factors. They typically offer platitudes instead of considering your unique dilemma. In their mind, your problems should yield to their simplistic, overly rational advice. When empathy is required, pure logic is an emotionally inappropriate response.
When children make mistakes, EI parents also use logic inappropriately by making it seem that the child should’ve avoided the mistake in the first place.
We tend to give in to emotional coercions because it’s too painful to face that we hate what our parents are doing to us. But hate is just a signal that we are being controlled, and none of us likes to be guilted or held hostage by someone’s mood.
Your unavoidable emotional reactions may make you worry that you aren’t being good or loving enough. But as you doubt your goodness and self-worth, the further you fall under their influence.
Guilt should be a brief corrective signal, not a chronic condition. Its healthy purpose is to prompt apologies in order to keep good relations with others.
Guilt for not self-sacrificing. EI parents often ask for more than you can give. But if you ever say no, they act like you don’t really love them. As an adult child of EI parents, it can feel like the only way to be a good person is to sacrifice yourself.
My answer was a firm no. Just because her
parents wanted Gina to handle things, she wasn’t obligated to ignore her situation to give them whatever they wanted. It wasn’t Gina’s responsibility to endanger her mental and physical health just because her parents preferred her as caretaker. Gina’s parents were financially secure and had two other children near them they could turn to, along with a supportive community of friends. Realistically, Gina could recuse herself from her parents’ demand without a shred of guilt, but she still felt troubled and obligated. Gina’s parents hadn’t considered for a moment how their wishes might place a
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Fortunately, Gina realized what was happening and was able to see that she was not a bad person because she didn’t want to sacrifice her health for her parents’ whim. In the end, Gina told them no, and after some hurt feelings and angry withdrawal, they decided to move near her sister instead.
Shame comes from feeling rejected by other people (DeYoung 2015). Shame is much deeper than mere embarrassment because you believe your goodness as a human being is in question.
Shame is a powerful, primal experience that says not only have you done something wrong but there’s something wrong with you as a person.
You might be especially vulnerable to shame if EIPs call you selfish.
But what EIPs and parents usually mean by selfishness is that you are pausing to think about your needs instead of automatically giving in to their demands.
A child’s dependency often irritates the self-involved EI parent. Preoccupied with their own issues, EI parents can be short-tempered and react to their child’s needs as if the child had done something wrong. These parents make their children feel bad for having needs and thereby making the parent’s life harder. If you were treated this way as a child, you may still feel ashamed for having problems or needing help.
Such powerless anguish impels children to do something—anything—to make their parent see and respond to them. That’s why young children so often have meltdowns over seemingly insignificant things. When their subjective experience isn’t recognized or understood by their parent (Stern 2004), their inner cohesion comes apart, and they feel like they’re falling into the void. They can’t keep themselves together in the absence of a supportive parental attachment (Wallin 2007).
Fear of shame controls us long past childhood because we haven’t been taught that it’s just an emotion.
However, if parents help their children recognize and label shame as just another feeling, they won’t end up with such sweeping self-condemnation. However, EI parents have so much buried shame themselves, they can’t help their children understand it. Exercise: Rescue Your Shamed and Fearful Self Shame and feelings of worthlessness are rooted in fears of not mattering and being abandoned.
When you know that feeling bad about yourself comes from emotional rejection in early childhood, you will see yourself differently. You can understand that feeling unlovable probably came from your parent’s incapacity for emotional intimacy and is not a fundamental flaw in yourself. Your needs for emotional connection were normal, not repellant nor unlovable, and would not have been overwhelming to an adequately mature parent.
Watch young children and parents together, and you’ll see how many times the children look to their parents for eye contact and meaningful interaction (Campbell 1977). This isn’t just attention-seeking; children get emotional refueling from these moments of connection with their parent (Mahler and Pine 1975). Children need their parent’s emotional engagement and affection in order to grow stronger, more secure, and eventually more independent. No wonder a parent’s love feels so crucial.
When George was a kid and had friends over, his father made George the butt of numerous jokes and put-downs. He drew the other boys into siding with him, disrupting the boys’ friendship bond, even though it obviously made George feel bad.
EI parents have a poorly integrated personality structure that leaves them emotionally fragmented and compartmentalized, resulting in very contradictory, inconsistent behaviors.
