Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

“funny yes, but not funny haha”

Oh god. Read this twice.

This was a helpful and well written guide, but I wished for a bit more nuance in some places. I would especially like to have seen more about parents who don't talk all the time about themselves or try to make themselves the center of attention, which is how Gibson generally characterizes self-absorption. There are parents who barely talk about themselves at all, and can appear extremely interested in and caring of their children, but only on a deeper look is this revealed to be interest in seeing the child not as they really are, but as who the parent wants and needs them to be. Not talking about themselves is a sort of negative self-centeredness, as harmful as the more overt kind or maybe even more so. Definitely it can be very difficult and confusing for the child whose parent appeared to be always selfless and giving, but who was really only serving their own needs for security in the guise of caring for a child.

I also thought the division of child coping strategies into “internalizing” and “externalizing” was too simplistic, and that the dismissal of externalizers was rather curt (saying they wouldn't be interested in this book anyway, and mainly talking about them in negative terms). As an extreme internalizer, I'd be interested to know what I could learn from the externalizers to become more balanced myself, and I'd like to understand them better to be able to relate to the ones in my life. I'd also be interested to know of stories where an externalizer turned around and did develop self-reflection. Surely that must happen sometimes!

Aside from the personal relevance, I was quite struck by how many political leaders these days are clearly suffering from emotional immaturity. In the US at least, it seems like there are a few grownups involved and the rest are a bunch of screaming toddlers who want to twist reality to suit their own feelings, just like the EI parents in this book. It's unfortunate that they have so much power, but some of the strategies in the book (notably detaching, exercising calm observation, and not getting pulled into their emotional contagion) may help with dealing with this mess as well as with family troubles. I'll be trying them anyway!

Far be it for me to Air my family's dirty laundry in the public sphere, but this book gave me peace and validation. Just a note here that this book is more geared towards “internalisers”, a style of coping some children of emotionally immature parents adopt. The author explains that this is because internalisers tend to be the one eager to change themselves while externalisers, due to the nature of their coping style, refuse to. So internalisers will be the ones that are reading this book.

Truly a life changing book.