Immature parents are the biggest trap in a child’s life

“It’s really scary to think that I can become a parent without having to pass a test.” This statement is not alarmist. If parents do not have mature personality and interpersonal communication models, a healthy value system or stable emotions, then a child living in such a family will have his self-perception and behavior patterns severely distorted, forming a vicious cycle. But is there no way out of this cycle? of course not. Dr. Lindsay Gibson, an expert on immature parenting, gives practical solutions in her book \”The Immature Parent.\” The author of this book, Lindsay Gibson, is a Ph.D. in psychology and a senior clinical psychologist in the United States. For more than 20 years, he has specialized in studying and solving the problems of immature parents and providing psychotherapy to adults who have immature parents. The author wrote this guide based on his years of research and clinical cases to help adults who were injured in childhood recognize the source of pain in their lives, discover their true thoughts and feelings, and rebuild their personalities, relationships, and lives. At the same time, it helps parents examine their own parenting styles, become more mature parents, and provide their children with a healthy and happy growth environment. Let’s take a look at the highlights of this book. Emotionally Immature Parents and Their Children \”Emotional maturity\” refers to a person\’s ability to think objectively and maintain deep emotional connections with others. They are kind, compassionate, have good emotional control, and have high emotional intelligence. Emotional immaturity weakens people\’s ability to cope with stress and develop emotional intimacy with others. This makes them often self-centered and weakens their ability to perceive the needs and feelings of others. Emotionally immature parents are not comfortable with close relationships with others and cannot give their children the emotional exchange they need. Being neglected by their parents for a long time, these children\’s self-confidence has been severely damaged. After adulthood, they usually think that others will treat them in the same way, and thus become shy, introverted, lack self-confidence, often suppress their inner desires, close themselves off, and even become depressed. Some children will become irritable, irritable, violent, and even have antisocial tendencies. The behavior and emotions of emotionally immature people are quite different from those of ordinary people. Such people generally have poor stress tolerance, are stubborn, lack empathy, are self-centered, cannot self-reflect, and are used to self-reference. Based on these characteristics, emotionally immature parents are generally divided into four types: emotional parents, driven parents, negative parents and rejecting parents. Although each of these four types of emotionally immature parents manifests their emotional insensitivity in different ways, they all make their children feel insecure. Parents who are self-centered and insensitive to the emotions of others. As a result, their children will be emotionally helpless. The influence of emotionally immature parents on children. In order to cope with the neglect of emotionally immature parents and to gain their attention and attention, children often unconsciously and instinctively adopt corresponding coping patterns in behavior and personality. The first is \”healing fantasy\” children, who often imagine that their emotional needs will be met in the future. As adults, they typically look forward to the most intimate relationships to make their healing fantasies come true. heThey believe that if they stick with it, they can eventually make people change. Always trying to impose one\’s own fantasy on others. For example, one girl believes that if only she could make her chronically decadent and depressed father happy, then she could do whatever she wanted. She didn\’t realize that even though her father was always in pain, she could live a free life. The second type is children with \”role selves\”. Because their true selves are not accepted by others, they adopt role-playing selves to gain a place in the family. As they grow up, they will gradually deviate from their true selves. In order to get more attention, care and communication from their parents, they will unconsciously hide their true selves to adapt to the emotional limitations of their immature parents. The transformation of the role self is unconscious and no one does it intentionally. You won\’t be able to build deep, satisfying relationships with people if you stay wrapped up in your role-self. In the long run, a person usually cannot play the role self all the time because it cannot completely mask the person\’s true desires. Sooner or later their true needs will emerge. When people decide to stop playing roles and become their authentic selves, they can move forward with greater ease and energy. The book tells a case like this: Teddy was born into a family of an unmarried mother. In order to create a better life for her, her mother took her from Switzerland to the United States and supported her mother and daughter by doing housework. Teti studied very hard and lived up to her mother\’s expectations, eventually earning an advanced degree in graphic design and a scholarship. Years of hard work made Teddy\’s mother become more and more irritable and complaining. Every time she talked to Teti, her mother would complain about physical ailments and people who had wronged her. This made Teddy a little exhausted, as if no matter what she said, she couldn\’t help her mother. Feeling guilty for not being able to make her mother feel better, Teddy felt like a bad daughter. Teddy has lived with her mother\’s expectations since she was a child, and she is addicted to her role and cannot extricate herself. In fact, it is obvious that Teddy does not need to feel guilty about her mother\’s bad current situation, because this is the life her mother chose. Teddy only needs to listen to her true inner desires and take responsibility for her own life. In order to please immature parents, many children will hide their true selves and suppress their natural nature, which will lead to serious distortions in these children\’s self-perception and behavior patterns. This damage will not stop in childhood, but will continue into adulthood. . The desire to value one\’s true self, away from the influence of immature parents. Emotionally immature people lack awareness of their past and refuse to take responsibility for past actions or future consequences. Because they lack empathy and overemphasize role obligations, genuine communication with them is nearly impossible. Instead, they focus solely on whether others make them comfortable. For them, eliminating inner anxieties is far more important than developing deep relationships with other people, including their children. Therefore, as children of these emotionally immature people, when they discover that their emotions and personalities have not been valued by their parents for a long time as adults, they will have strong failures.sense of powerlessness. As a result, we become low self-esteem, sensitive, depressed, anxious, insomnia… These symptoms all remind us that we need to return to ourselves, pay attention to our own feelings, and avoid overdrawing ourselves. How can we get rid of the shackles of our original family and find our true self? 1. Awakening of the true self Children of emotionally immature parents cannot reveal their true selves, because showing their true selves will be criticized, blamed and humiliated by their parents. They have no choice but to pretend to be what their parents like in order to win their parents\’ love. They will choose to keep their true selves silent and listen to the guidance of their role selves and healing fantasy types. When role egos and healing fantasies cause a person more pain than benefit, it becomes difficult for the person to remain emotionally numb and collapse—our fight to deny our emotions has failed, and we Discover your true self in all your experiences. When the true self begins to come into play more and more, people are often awakened by sudden emotional symptoms. Virginia awakens from her panic disorder when she feels criticized by her overbearing and judgmental brother. She has always cared about what others think of her, so that for her, social interaction has become an exhausting game of observing people\’s emotions, and she is always worried about being rejected by others. She still does the same at work. Through psychotherapy, Virginia realized that it was her brother\’s and her late father\’s negative attitude toward her that made her feel incompetent and unworthy of others\’ love. She began to understand that her social anxiety was a reflection of the roles she had played in her childhood. At that time she was always trying to win the love of her critical and contemptuous father, but she always failed to do so. If she hadn\’t awakened from the panic attack, Virginia might still be acting with self-deprecating anxiety based on other people\’s faces. She gradually learned to pay attention to her true heart and find her true self. 2. Awakening Anger Anger is an expression of personality, and emotionally immature parents often punish their children for this emotion. But anger can sometimes be good for people, because it can make people change their behavior and let them know that their persistence is worth it. When overly responsible, anxious, and depressed people begin to experience real anger, it\’s a sign that their true selves have returned and they\’re starting to care about themselves. Jade\’s parents\’ chronic neglect left her with years of pent-up anger. When Jade realized that her emotional needs were ignored by her parents, she gained new insights into her anger: \”Now if I\’m not angry, there\’s something really wrong! There are so many reasons why I could be angry. My anger comes from who I am inside. I don\’t want to kid myself. It\’s disappointing to have to deal with my parents. When I\’m with them, I\’m completely alone.\” Jade accepted her anger and for the first time I saw her healing fantasy clearly for the first time. No longer wants to have too much contact with people who are distant and unsupportive of her. 3. People who care about themselves and have self-mastery never know how to take care of themselves. They always feel that all problems have to be solved by themselves. When they are busy with things they don’t have to do, they often ignore physical pain.Pain and fatigue ultimately affect your own health. In addition to her fanatical work, Lena\’s life is to constantly meet the needs of others. She even takes great care of the pets she keeps in the yard. She strives to make everything perfect and ends up wearing herself out. Lena had long ignored physical fatigue, and her demanding mother helped her develop the habit. As a child, her mother would scold her for being lazy if she didn\’t do something fast enough or hard enough. As a result, she never did anything at her own pace and had no regard for her physical limits. Lena\’s childhood healing fantasy was that one day her demanding mother would begin to understand and appreciate Lena after seeing how hard Lena went to please her. Realizing the damage her healing fantasies were doing to her, Lena began to reexamine her values ​​and consider her own needs. She realized that it was wiser to combine work and rest. 4. Appreciate yourself It is very important for people to consciously appreciate their own strengths. But children of emotionally immature parents usually don\’t know how to appreciate their own strengths, because self-centered parents lack the ability to discover their children\’s strengths. Therefore, thinking about their own strengths often makes these children feel embarrassed. They are used to praising others and worry that if they recognize their own strengths, they will become arrogant. However, it’s important to know your strengths. It helps you understand yourself and makes you happy to contribute something to the world. This kind of self-awareness can improve people\’s enthusiasm and maintain a better mental attitude. Aaron has a typical silent personality and never expresses himself intentionally. When he grew up, he fell in love with drama and performance, but he never actively asked for a role or more scenes. He believed that if he promoted himself, he would appear to be demanding too much, and he also felt that expressing himself was a shortcoming. However, Aaron found that in doing so he often gave others a head start and that others often took advantage of his talents without being grateful to him. He always hoped that authority figures would spontaneously discover his potential. This was his fantasy of healing, but it did not come true. So he decided to establish new values, pursue what he wanted, began to actively look for opportunities, and began to consider changing his job. He finally gained a new understanding of himself. 5. Three-step method to help your new life. The author gives a very practical \”three-step method\” in the book. These three key steps can effectively help those who have immature social relationships to successfully get rid of those bad relationships. Get out of it. These three steps are: 1. Independent observation: You no longer look at your parents from the perspective of a child, but analyze them from the perspective of an outsider. Put yourself into a detached thinking framework of observation, keep your emotions objective and calm, and observe the behaviors of others. At this stage, you need to remind yourself not to be irritated by your parents\’ behavior. Any emotional fluctuations will affect objectivity. Then you will never be able to change and will always be controlled by your emotions. Maintaining the observer\’s perspective is a very positive process and a shortcut to breaking away from emotional entanglements. The more you observe, the stronger and more confident you will become.And you will also have a deeper understanding of emotional immaturity. 2. Maturity awareness: As an observer, consciously remind yourself to observe the emotional maturity of others. Once you determine the other person\’s emotional maturity, it is easier to predict and understand the other person\’s behavior. You can also protect yourself, get rid of pain, and gain emotional freedom in interactions with these people. If you want to maintain a peaceful mind when communicating with others and effectively improve your sense of maturity, you only need to remember three sentences: stop taking things to heart after expressing them; focus on the results rather than the relationship; do not establish a close relationship with the other party Be good at control. 3. Get out of the role self: Avoid emotional entanglements and learn to observe your parents and your role self calmly. Take control of your own thoughts and feelings, retain your own perspective on things, and be free from the emotional contagion of others. Always stay true to yourself, listen to your inner voice, and firmly step out of your role-type self. When you no longer play family roles to please your emotionally immature parents, when you no longer have expectations of your parents, you can stop caring about other people\’s reactions and find your true self and your true thoughts and feelings. By having the freedom to express yourself and act on your own behalf, you can develop a more honest relationship with your parents. Understand your past and start a new life, choose the path of awakening and witness the birth of your new self. Have your own truly happy life – such a life is more valuable. For everyone, family of origin is important. But not everyone is lucky enough to have a mature family system of origin. Learn to understand your parents and learn to accept yourself. Instead of escaping and complaining, it is better to use the responsibility and courage that an adult should have to face, accept, and change yourself and the future. Stop making excuses for being stagnant and refusing to grow and take responsibility. Your “original family” should not be the reason for you to become a “giant baby”. \”Life is fluid, and it is never your family of origin that hinders the flow of life, but your choice.\” \”You don\’t have to be successful, but you must be mature.\” If you unfortunately encounter emotionally immature parents, then \”maturity\” is the biggest issue you must face in this life. People who have become parents, or will eventually become parents, have the responsibility and obligation to become mature and qualified parents. Let the intergenerational harm and tragedy to children stop with you.