Adult Children Of Emotionally Immature Parents

If you grew up with an emotionally immature, unavailable, or selfish parent, you may have lingering feelings of anger, loneliness, betrayal, or abandonment. You may recall your childhood as a time when your emotional needs were not met, when your feelings were dismissed, or when you took on adult levels of responsibility in an effort to compensate for your parent’s behavior. These wounds can be healed, and you can move forward in your life. In this breakthrough book, clinical psychologist Lindsay Gibson exposes the destructive nature of parents who are emotionally immature or unavailable. You will see how these parents create a sense of neglect, and discover ways to heal from the pain and confusion caused by your childhood. By freeing yourself from your parents’ emotional immaturity, you can recover your true nature, control how you react to them, and avoid disappointment. Finally, you’ll learn how to create positive, new relationships so you can build a better life. Discover the four types of difficult parents: The emotional parent instills feelings of instability and anxiety The driven parent stays busy trying to perfect everything and everyone The passive parent avoids dealing with anything upsetting The rejecting parent is withdrawn, dismissive, and derogatory

In this important sequel to Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, author Lindsay Gibson offers powerful tools to help you step back and protect yourself at the first sign of an emotional takeover, make sure your emotions and needs are respected, and break free from the coercive control of emotionally immature parents. Growing up with emotionally immature (EI) parents can leave you feeling lonely and neglected. You may have trouble setting limits and expressing your feelings. And you may even be more susceptible to other emotionally immature people as you establish adult relationships. In addition, as your parents become older, they may still treat your emotions with mockery and contempt, be dismissive and discounting of your reality, and try to control and diminish your sense of emotional autonomy and freedom of thought. In short, EIs can be self-absorbed, inconsistent, and contradictory. So, how can you recover from their toxic behavior? Drawing on the success of her popular self-help book, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, author Lindsay Gibson offers yet another essential resource. With this follow-up guide, you’ll learn practical skills to help you recognize the signs of an EI, protect yourself against an emotional takeover, reconnect with your own emotions and needs, and gain emotional autonomy in all your relationships. This is a how-to book, with doable exercises and active tips and suggestions for what to say and do to increase emotional autonomy and self-awareness. If you’re ready to stop putting your own needs last, clear the clutter of self-doubt, and move beyond the fear of judgment and punishment that’s been instilled in you by emotionally immature parents, this book will help you find the freedom to finally live your life your way.

A history of a childhood abuse is not a life sentence. Here is hope, healing, and a chance to recover the self lost in childhood. Drawing on his extensive work with Adult Children, and on his own experience as a survivor of emotional neglect, therapist Steven Farmer demonstrates that through exercises and journal work, his program can help lead you through grieving your lost childhood, to become your own parent, and integrate the healing aspects of spiritual, physical, and emotional recovery into your adult life.

A large segment of the population struggles with feelings of being detached from themselves and their loved ones. They feel flawed, and blame themselves. Running on Empty will help them realize that they're suffering not because of something that happened to them in childhood, but because of something that didn't happen. It's the white space in their family picture, the background rather than the foreground. This will be the first self-help book to bring this invisible force to light, educate people about it, and teach them how to overcome it.

A guide for parents whose adult children have cut off contact that reveals the hidden logic of estrangement, explores its cultural causes, and offers practical advice for parents trying to reestablish contact with their adult children. “Finally, here’s a hopeful, comprehensive, and compassionate guide to navigating one of the most painful experiences for parents and their adult children alike.”—Lori Gottlieb, psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone Labeled a silent epidemic by a growing number of therapists and researchers, estrangement is one of the most disorienting and painful experiences of a parent's life. Popular opinion typically tells a one-sided story of parents who got what they deserved or overly entitled adult children who wrongly blame their parents. However, the reasons for estrangement are far more complex and varied. As a result of rising rates of individualism, an increasing cultural emphasis on happiness, growing economic insecurity, and a historically recent perception that parents are obstacles to personal growth, many parents find themselves forever shut out of the lives of their adult children and grandchildren. As a trusted psychologist whose own daughter cut off contact for several years and eventually reconciled, Dr. Joshua Coleman is uniquely qualified to guide parents in navigating these fraught interactions. He helps to alleviate the ongoing feelings of shame, hurt, guilt, and sorrow that commonly attend these dynamics. By placing estrangement into a cultural context, Dr. Coleman helps parents better understand the mindset of their adult children and teaches them how to implement the strategies for reconciliation and healing that he has seen work in his forty years of practice. Rules of Estrangement gives parents the language and the emotional tools to engage in meaningful conversation with their child, the framework to cultivate a healthy relationship moving forward, and the ability to move on if reconciliation is no longer possible. While estrangement is a complex and tender topic, Dr. Coleman's insightful approach is based on empathy and understanding for both the parent and the adult child.

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Dr. Susan Forward's Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them. When you were a child... Did your parents tell you were bad or worthless? Did your parents use physical pain to discipline you? Did you have to take care of your parents because of their problems? Were you frightened of your parents? Did your parents do anything to you that had to be kept secret? Now that you are an adult... Do your parents still treat you as if you were a child? Do you have intense emotional or physical reactions after spending time with your parents? Do your parents control you with threats or guilt? Do they manipulate you with money? Do you feel that no matter what you do, it's never good enough for your parents? In this remarkable self-help guide, Dr. Susan Forward drawn on case histories and the real-life voices of adult children of toxic parents to help you free yourself from the frustrating patterns of your relationship with your parents -- and discover an exciting new world of self-confidence, inner strength, and emotional independence.

From the creator of the popular website Ask a Manager and New York’s work-advice columnist comes a witty, practical guide to 200 difficult professional conversations—featuring all-new advice! There’s a reason Alison Green has been called “the Dear Abby of the work world.” Ten years as a workplace-advice columnist have taught her that people avoid awkward conversations in the office because they simply don’t know what to say. Thankfully, Green does—and in this incredibly helpful book, she tackles the tough discussions you may need to have during your career. You’ll learn what to say when • coworkers push their work on you—then take credit for it • you accidentally trash-talk someone in an email then hit “reply all” • you’re being micromanaged—or not being managed at all • you catch a colleague in a lie • your boss seems unhappy with your work • your cubemate’s loud speakerphone is making you homicidal • you got drunk at the holiday party Praise for Ask a Manager “A must-read for anyone who works . . . [Alison Green’s] advice boils down to the idea that you should be professional (even when others are not) and that communicating in a straightforward manner with candor and kindness will get you far, no matter where you work.”—Booklist (starred review) “The author’s friendly, warm, no-nonsense writing is a pleasure to read, and her advice can be widely applied to relationships in all areas of readers’ lives. Ideal for anyone new to the job market or new to management, or anyone hoping to improve their work experience.”—Library Journal (starred review) “I am a huge fan of Alison Green’s Ask a Manager column. This book is even better. It teaches us how to deal with many of the most vexing big and little problems in our workplaces—and to do so with grace, confidence, and a sense of humor.”—Robert Sutton, Stanford professor and author of The No Asshole Rule and The Asshole Survival Guide “Ask a Manager is the ultimate playbook for navigating the traditional workforce in a diplomatic but firm way.”—Erin Lowry, author of Broke Millennial: Stop Scraping By and Get Your Financial Life Together

The groundbreaking guide to self-healing and getting the love you missed “Years ago, I was on vacation and read The Emotionally Absent Mother. That book was one of many that woke me up. . . . I began the process of reparenting and it’s changed my life.”—Dr. Nicole LePera, New York Times–bestselling author of How to Do the Work Was your mother preoccupied, distant, or even demeaning? Have you struggled with relationships—or with your own self-worth? Often, the grown children of emotionally absent mothers can’t quite put a finger on what’s missing from their lives. The children of abusive mothers, by contrast, may recognize the abuse—but overlook its lasting, harmful effects. Psychotherapist Jasmin Lee Cori has helped thousands of men and women heal the hidden wounds left by every kind of undermothering. In this second edition of her pioneering book, with compassion for mother and child alike, she explains: Possible reasons your mother was distracted or hurtful—and what she was unable to give The lasting impact of childhood emotional neglect and abuse How to find the child inside you and fill the “mother gap” through reflections and exercises How to secure a happier future for yourself (and perhaps for your children).