Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents
How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents
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4.6 • 859 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times bestseller—with more than one million copies sold!
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• The rejecting parent is withdrawn, dismissive, and derogatory
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Nobody chooses to be raised by emotionally unavailable parents, but in this revealing study, psychologist Lindsay C. Gibson offers choices for how to deal with them in adulthood. Understanding that parents’ neglectful actions spring from their own issues, not their children’s behavior, is key. She breaks down four problematic parenting types—emotional, driven, passive, and rejecting—with concrete examples of the harm each causes. The offspring of ill-equipped caregivers fall into two categories: internalizers and externalizers. (Basically, either cautious or impulsive.) Gibson’s advice offers that recognizing parents’ shortcomings frees their adult children to adjust the relationship—even if that means, in severe cases, no longer having one. She also gives advice on how to make potentially daunting changes such as limiting contact and how to recognize emotional maturity in others so the cycle of disconnect can be broken. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents delivers practical advice for healing from the harm that can come from these types of familial relationships.
Customer Reviews
A Lifesaver
I feel like I’ve just woken up after an entire lifetime of feeling alone. It is so refreshing to have an author write a step by step guide on how to take back your life and not just reference vague ideas. Thank you!
Life altering
Eerily relatable. Thank you.
Very enlightening
It brought so much clarity about how my dysfunctional past ruined some relationships