Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

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.