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As a child of an EI parent, you may have learned to shut yourself down in order not to upset your parent’s emotional applecart. This is because your spontaneity might easily offend a thin-skinned EI parent. The intense reactivity of EI parents trains their children to be inhibited, passive, and acquiescent instead of nurturing their individuality and trust in others.
In order to get along with these parents, it’s easier in the short run to tune out who you really are and what you really want. But in the long run, you end up burdened by obligation, guilt, shame, and feeling trapped in your family role. The good news is that once you understand these parents and their effects, your life will be your own again.
Because EIPs insist on dominating and being the center of importance, they don’t leave 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.
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.
When you try to share something important to you, they’re likely to talk over you, change the subject, start talking about themselves, or dismiss what you’re saying. Children of EI parents often know a great deal more about their parents’ issues than the parents know about theirs.
EI 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. You can also feel trapped by their superficial style of relating. Because EI parents relate in a
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For this reason, comforting them is hard to do. They want you to feel how upset they are, but they resist the intimacy of real comforting. If you try to make them feel better, they may stiff-arm you away. This poor receptive capacity (McCullough 1997) prevents them from taking in any comfort and connection you try to offer.
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.
EI parents can be awful killjoys, both to their children and to other people. They rarely resonate with others’ feelings, so they don’t take pleasure in other people’s happiness. Instead of enjoying their child’s accomplishments, EI parents can react in ways that take the shine off the child’s pride. They also are famous for deflating their children’s dreams by reminding them about depressing realities of adult life.
You find yourself 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. Once this happens, they have done an emotional takeover on you. An emotional takeover is when their emotional state has become the center of your attention.
But for EI parents, their emotional self-regulation didn’t fully develop as they grew up. Unable to modulate their own emotions and disappointments, they still expect others to make them feel better immediately by knowing just how they want to be treated. If they aren’t made the priority, they threaten to fall apart. Like little children, they need a lot of attention, compliance, and positive feedback to keep them stable. Unlike children, however, they don’t grow from the attention. Their early emotional wounds and deprivations promote psychological defenses that keep them stuck in the same
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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. Without a sense of self fostered in childhood, people can’t self-reflect and therefore have no way to grow and change psychologically. Instead, they are limited to blaming others and expecting others to change first.
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.
Emotional parents are dominated by feelings and can become extremely reactive and overwhelmed by anything that surprises or upsets them. Their moods are highly unstable, and they can be frighteningly volatile. Small things can be like the end of the world, and they tend to see others as either saviors or abandoners, depending on whether their wishes are being met.
many EI parents have probably suffered emotional deprivation, abuse, or trauma in their childhoods. At the deepest level, 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.
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. Once EI parents elicit these negative emotional states, you’re the one with the problem, not them. They feel better once you’re the “bad” one, but only temporarily because nothing makes them feel secure for long.
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.
Personal growth is not a concept they relate to, and they are usually derisive of it. 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. In general, growth is threatening to them because it means unpredictable change and more insecurity.
Instead of adapting to reality, EI parents try to remake reality. Although reality is a blooming, buzzing, evolving mass of stimulation, EIPs cope by oversimplifying reality into streamlined parts that make sense and seem manageable to them.
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 seeing reality as a timeline, EIPs experience events as isolated blips unrelated to each other. This makes it hard for them to anticipate the future or to learn from errors. 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.
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Lack of time sequence awareness also makes lying seem like a reasonable solution. They never seem to realize that past actions or lying will likely catch up with them. They concoct something that gets them off the hook but don’t realize others will be suspicious due to past lies.
It can be maddening to try to get EIPs to take responsibility for their past behavior. Because their memories are not meaningfully connected to the present, they don’t understand why things from the past should be such a concern now. It’s over: why haven’t you moved on like they did? They simply don’t understand the persistence of cause and effect, especially when other people’s feelings are involved.
The achievable goal is not to pretend that you’re immune to their influence, but to catch it early and quickly separate yourself from their attempted domination.
EI parents punish you by withdrawing emotional connection if you express thoughts or feelings they don’t like. The fear of this alienation makes you doubt yourself and creates uncertainty about your thoughts and feelings. Once you are taught to doubt yourself, you start looking to others for direction, trusting other people’s perspective over your own. Instead of knowing what you really think and feel, you become preoccupied with just being accepted. Ambivalence undermines your confidence, and you lose contact with your gut feelings and intuitions. You realize that self-doubt brings parental
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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.
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.
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.
Feeling love from an EI parent is like trying to experience the mountains by looking at a photograph. You can see the color and shape of them, but you can’t experience the crispness of the air, the rustling tree sounds, or the sheer sense of space and grandeur that fills the atmosphere.
Telling them you want to talk might make them worry they’re about to be blamed for something, increasing their defensiveness. For this reason, 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. If you keep it short and structured at the beginning, they may be willing to respond later to more open-ended questions.
The suffering self convinces you that self-sacrifice makes you a good person or at least more likely to be loved by others. But now this suffering self should be retired as the model for your relationships. Being active on your own behalf is much better than passivity and helplessness as a way of dealing with overbearing parents.
EIPs offer a spectacular relationship deal: if you do what they want, then you will be everything to them. However, the fine print says that you are only as good as the last thing you did for them. In this distorted arrangement, you can be everything one minute and nothing the next. This is because they have an extremely self-preoccupied way of looking at relationships. You are either wonderful or useless to them—with nothing in between.
Questions to Ask Yourself When in the Midst of an Emotional Takeover Attempt What is the reality (not just what they’re telling you)? What are verifiable facts of the situation? What’s the seriousness of the crisis? Is it an emergency? For whom? Is their request the best solution to the problem? Could they solve it themselves once they calm down? Should this be your responsibility? By asking yourself these questions, you can assess whether it is a true crisis or an emotional takeover dressed up to look like one.
Enabling is when you rescue people from the repeated consequences of their own actions or do things for them that they could do on their own. Enabling weakens the resourcefulness of the other person because you continue to make yourself the answer to their problems. You are agreeing with them that their problem is impossible for them to deal with by themselves. Enabling offers the EIP the right to take over your life.
you can correct their distortions by saying something nonthreatening like, “I’m not intending to be mean. Do you think it’s unloving to have a different viewpoint from yours?” Or you could say, “You and I see this differently, and that’s because we each have responsibility for our own lives.”
To identify the desired outcome for an interaction, ask yourself the following questions. If I got what I wanted from this interaction, what would that look like? (Perhaps you set a limit with them and only agree to what you really want to do.) Is the outcome I’m considering within my control, or is it up to them? (Try picking a goal that you can make happen.) Am I fixated on needing them to act differently? (If you’re looking for them to change, how about picking a different outcome that is within your power.) Is my goal for this interaction my internal growth, acting differently, or both?
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To deal effectively with EI parents, there are five things you can do to make you immune to their emotional takeovers and distortions. Step out of your rescuer role. Be slippery and sidestep. Lead the interaction. Create space for yourself. Stop them.
Highlights to Remember You have the right to decline being taken over by EIPs. Any frustration caused by EIPs can be used as a signal to switch gears and think about the outcome you want. Take your time and create room for yourself instead of feeling pushed by the EIP to react immediately. Effective methods of sidestepping, disengaging, leading, and setting limits can stop their emotional control attempts.
There are five crucial gifts that come from your inner world. Your inner stability and resilience Your sense of wholeness and self-confidence Your capacity for intimate relationships with others Your ability to self-protect Your awareness of your life’s purpose
