Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents
Ratings106
Average rating4.3
A lot of interesting ideas here, though listening to it as a child of a parent with undiagnosed Autism, an adult who myself was undiagnosed until I was 35, and an now a parent of kids with Autism, I have to wonder if a lot of these "emotionally immature" parents aren't simply neurodivergent. Not that it excuses crappy parenting - it doesn't. But it might be an explanation for why there are so many of these types of parents.
Was a little monotonous at times, but overall very insightful and I learned a lot from it.
this is a good book if this is your first time looking into this topic. if you've already looked into this then you wont find yourself learning anything new (hence why i'm not finishing it)
The content of the book wasn't absolutely new to me. I discovered the term “Emotional Abuse” when I was 22 and was shocked and relieved to finally have a vocabulary to describe the wide range of behaviours I had encountered. (found it here if you're interested - http://eqi.org/eabuse1.htm)
Words have power. They are greater than the sum of what they stand for - they can capture and convey a collection of experiences and at the same time inspire the understanding of something deeper, something far more profound, so that you can begin to heal (if required).
And by giving us this vocabulary, Lindsay is doing God's work (partly because, let's face it, the entity doesn't exist).
Can we even begin to understand something until we know what to call it?
If you can name it, you can tame it. So I guess now I'm just gonna spend the rest of my life taming it.
Thank you Lindsay. I hope something truly fantastic happens to you today.
WHOAAA, Great book..Great Factos..Just perfecto. I will diffinetly go over this book again in the future, I will also try to apply all the mature people paterns & point out any immaturity patern I find. My only concern is that it got really boring near the ends of the book.
Other reviews really hit the mark but the one thing I didn't see mentioned is how that the author doesn't really provide insight for those that are on the spectrum of inner focused vs externally focused. There were some insightful things, but I wouldn't say this is a must read for anyone looking to understand themselves and family/generational trauma.
Eye-opening and mind-blowing. I couldn't put this one down. There are so many concepts in this book that seem obvious, but when you're stuck in one mindset for your entire life the obvious becomes hard to see. I now feel like I have more self-awareness and a larger capacity for self-forgiveness so I can continue to build my emotional future in the healthiest way possible. I'd recommend this book to anyone looking for a primer on how to pick a part their childhood to be a better human, find some form of inner peace, and understand how to identify and handle their parents.
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!
I read this as a client told me they found it useful. I see a lot of overlap/different languaging with codependency but I can see it as a useful framework especially for understanding some of the roots of codependency and perhaps a bit more...‘bite-size' in a way. I'm yet unsure whether it poses the work as more simplistic or if there's something I read into that from the audiobook reader's tones and inflection. Either way, it's nice to have another language for clients who may not resonate with codependency as much. Frequently there's benefit to hearing the same thing 10 different ways when it's something we need to grasp, and validating the experience. I do think the two work well hand in hand together, as one client told me her takeaway from this book was “create distance”...it can be more complex than that. This is one I will keep referring to clients, though.
This book was extremely helpful for me. It helped me understand why my parents are the way they are, why I think and act the way I do, and what a healthy relationship looks like. I am truly grateful I listened to this book (I listened to the audiobook).
I found a lot of the advice in this book helpful in maintaining my own mental well-being in my relationship with my mother, but I'm giving this book three stars because a decent chunk was just not applicable to me as an autistic person, an autistic parent, and an autistic child of undiagnosed neurodivergent parents. In the list of traits of an emotionally immature person, several were autistic traits. Autistic traits may make socializing difficult, but they don't inhibit the ability to have equitable relationships with others. My relationships to other autistic people have had far less emotional immaturity than my relationships to non-autistic people.
The section describing different types of empathy—cognitive empathy being ability to know what others are feeling, and emotional empathy being the ability to resonate with or feel others' feelings—makes the argument that low emotional empathy produces tendencies to be entitled, controlling or cruel. The book fails to say that cognitive empathy is something that is learned—we aren't born with the ability to figure out others' emotions. It has also not been shown that emotional empathy can't be learned. My low emotional empathy has never caused me to see myself as entitled to other people's time, energy or love. I felt like the author was
identifying the wrong causes—entitlement is about your deeply held values, not about your brain's abilities.
The assumption that these types of empathy are innate and unchanging muddles the determination of moral culpability: if someone could not have acted otherwise, they aren't morally responsible. Though it's beyond the scope of the book to rehabilitate them, the fact remains that emotionally immature parents could have acted otherwise, and that is the only way we can say they did things that were wrong.
I found the sections on how to be firm with my boundaries very helpful. Overall, I think this book will potentially help a lot of people! But it does a small contribution to the misunderstanding and harm of autistic people.
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.