tiny sparks, big changes

Welcome back, book club read-a-long friends! This week, we are diving into chapters 8 and 9 of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents! It’s hard to believe we’re almost finished with this book - it’s truly been such a wonderful exploration. Our live meeting will be Saturday, August 30th, at 10 am Eastern Time (New York). What book should we choose next?! The front runner right now is Unlocking the Emotional Brain, but feel free to cast your vote for what you’re curious about!

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Welcome back, book club, to our read-along of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. It's hard to believe we're getting near the end of this very rich book, but this week we will be going through chapter 8, and hopefully chapter 9, and then our last meeting live together will be Saturday, August 30th at 10 a.m. Eastern Time. If you can't make that time, not to worry, it will be recorded, but I'm really excited to get together and talk about what we learned, what we explored, and what we've noticed with this book, and to answer any final questions.

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So you will get that link the week before. Just once more, that live meeting will be August 30th at 10 a.m. Eastern Time on Google Meet. So as we've spent the book learning a little bit about what emotionally immature parents are like and how they affect us and play out in our adult relationships, these two chapters talk a little bit about, now that you know, what do you do? How do you not get hooked back into the pattern? How do you live from a place that is truly yours? And we know because of those predictive patterns in our brain that are always trying to predict what's coming next, based on what's happened in the past, those well-worn neural pathways and emotional learnings that are deeply embedded in there, especially from our childhood experience, that are, we will, we will get hooked back in.

And maybe you've experienced that. Maybe you go home for the holidays and you notice you feel like you're back to being your 10-year-old self, or a five-minute conversation with a parent, and your body feels like you just jumped off of a 500-foot water tower. It's a full thought, emotion, and body sensation experience when we get hooked into these patterns, that we might feel that collapse, that activation, that confusion, that looping.

All of those are signs and signals that we have gotten hooked back into one of these old patterns. Remember, that is our brain working as designed, so it's so important as we explore some of these tools to know these tools are not foolproof. Your brain will, not if, but will get hooked back into these patterns, and that is okay.

That doesn't mean it feels good, but it means it's very, very important to name and notice that we may find ourselves feeling that pull, but over time the pull will be less, and it will shift, and it will feel less like panic, and more like a little present-day stress. And so that is the work of being curious, and noticing, and observing. And if you listen to me all this time, you know that I'm always talking about observing, observing, observing, becoming aware.

What road are we on in our neural pathway atlas map? Are we in an old pathway covered in tigers, or are we in the present day of what's happening right now? When we are hooked into these patterns, and we feel the panic, and the collapse, our brain isn't reacting to what's happening here in the present. It's reacting to past patterns that are landing onto the present, because we're expecting what's going to happen. So we're just waiting for the moment we're going to be criticized, or punished, or love is going to be withdrawn from us.

And so we're very slowly teasing apart old patterns versus what's happening in the present. That's not easy to do. It does take time, and it does take this practice of observation, just like Gibson talks about in this chapter.

(3:26 - 6:50)

So as Gibson talks about stepping out of that old fantasy that we've talked about, that one day if we could just say the right thing, and do the right thing, our parent will become the person we need them to be. As we come out of that more and more, a process that's often called separation and individuation, what that means is over the course of our life really, starting from around age two, we are learning that we are separate and individual from our parents. And we are building our separate and individual identities from them.

And that is what allows us to have a healthy relationship. You can think of two-year-olds saying, no, I want to dress myself. And you can think of teenagers who are like, I never want to be anything like my parents.

That's normal. They're building their identity. They come back around as their own individual, as they have finished that sort of completion of separation and individuation.

When you have emotionally immature parents, you don't get a chance to complete those phases, especially because emotionally immature families are often very enmeshed, meaning no one gets to be separate. And if you try to be separate, and you try to be your own person, have your own feelings, emotions, experiences, you will be punished in some way, through actual punishment, through criticism, or through withdrawal of care and love. And sometimes it's very overt, but sometimes it's much more subtle.

But that separation and individuation is what we're curious about building as we build these new neural pathways in the present. The first thing Gibson talks about to forge a new relationship with our families is that detached observation. You've heard me talk about this many times as the neutral observer or the wildlife documentarian.

It's a practice where instead of being hooked in to the past patterns playing out in the present, we are the ones noticing the hook. We see the hook dangled in front of us. Because we know that emotionally immature people subconsciously will want to hook us back into their patterns, because that's their homeostasis.

That's what feels comfortable and familiar for them. It's very often not intentional, but it's for us to be curious and observe. My wildlife documentarian Gibson calls an anthropological field study, where you're just noticing what's happening both for yourself and for the other person.

And when you start to feel those little flags that you're getting hooked back in, that is the time to pause. So Gibson talks about kind of like repeating to yourself, detach, detach, detach. I would say that's different for everyone.

If that works for you, that's fantastic. For many of us, we may not yet be in a place where that feels good. Because saying detach, detach, detach can really activate that protective child consciousness part of us that is saying it's not safe to detach.

And your adult part saying, but I want to detach. I don't want to be hooked into this. And the child consciousness protective parts of us saying, no, if I detach, I'll lose my relationship.

So I don't necessarily jump to those behavioral sort of cognitive shifts of saying detach, detach, detach to yourself. But you can try on what works for you through a series of mini experiments. Is it walking away? Is it taking a break? Is it looking around the room and find what lets you feel safe in that moment? Is it putting boundaries on how much time you'll be there or whether you'll talk on the phone or actually visit? So it's not a passive process.

(6:50 - 8:17)

It's very, very active. She also talks about relatedness versus relationship. And so staying related to them, where we're not trying to have a satisfying emotional exchange, but we're staying in contact with whatever limits work for us.

Why? Because we know that that person right now, in this moment, doesn't have the capacity for emotional reciprocity and a true, depthful relationship. And trying to get them to that place is part of that fantasy role. Maybe one day they could get there, but that's through their own work.

We can't try to make them get there. In this chapter, Gibson also talks about this maturity awareness approach of different ways to relate to a parent or caregiver who is exhibiting emotional immaturity in the moment, expressing what you want to say and not trying to control the outcome. So not needing the other person to hear you and meet you in an adult way, even if a part of you wants that, focusing on the outcome rather than the relationship.

And so we're looking very specifically at, I want to express myself to my parent, even though I'm nervous, rather than trying to be depthful in the relationship and have that person meet you and explore with you and have a really adult interaction. We know, again, that's not possible. So we're focusing on what we want for ourselves.

(8:17 - 10:56)

And then Gibson also talks about managing not engaging. Maybe you've heard the term jade before. It's often talked about when relating to people who are emotionally immature and not in their adult consciousness.

And it stands for justify, argue, defend, and explain. So when we're engaging with someone who is in an emotionally immature state and they are not in their adult consciousness place, they are not in a relational place, there isn't any use in trying to justify, argue, defend, or explain in trying to engage with them in that way. Because they are in their patterns, and they are in this protective old young state, they aren't going to be able to engage with you in that way.

So being related and managing versus trying to engage in a depthful relationship. Now, what I want to say about this chapter is it's very behavioral. And there are some strategies in here that you might find incredibly helpful.

But it's really important to know that it's very, very common for these approaches to bring up all kinds of things within us. And that is where the work is right now. So what I will often say to people is, yes, this book is great.

It's a self-help book. It's everything crammed into just a few pages. What is very difficult to get through in a book like this is to say, getting from knowing this to doing these steps can be quite a process.

And if we try to rush it, and we try to do it too quickly, we're going to shut ourselves down and put ourselves back into that deep survival response, and go right back into the patterns, both with our parents and with ourselves. So if you read My Five Steps to Change, what I would suggest and offer to you is to do experiments with this book, to do experiments with these things. What is it you're wanting for yourself? And you might say, I want to be less triggered by my parent, or I want to be able to be around my family and not be in fight or flight for days afterward.

Okay, that's where you're wanting to go. What roadblocks come up? What parts of you from an IFS perspective or child consciousness from a NARM perspective get activated when you think about being related but not in relationship? Because that's going to give you a clue to all the old pathways, all the old protective parts of you. If you think about being related but not in relationship and managing versus engaging, it's very likely to be very activating to some parts of you.

Because those are the parts of you that still feel that it's unsafe. Because you have decades of patterning, of feeling that. Because as a child, you rely on your caregivers to keep you feeling safe and alive.

(10:56 - 11:02)

You might feel guilty. You might shame yourself. You might tell yourself, this is impossible.

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Or you might try it on and then feel even worse afterward and completely overwhelmed. You might also come up with all these thoughts about how you're actually the bad, horrible person and not them. Those are roadblocks to be explored.

Those are old roadways in the atlas of your brain to notice and explore and then to come into what's happening in the present. And so going back to those five steps to change, you get that practice to notice what's happening now versus what's happening in the present. As a child, it felt like my safety was at risk.

(11:40 - 14:15)

It felt like I had to, for survival, stay in these patterns. Right now, in this exact moment, when I'm feeling so guilty and anxious about changing these patterns, am I actually safe in this moment if I look around the space I'm in right now? And that is how we build the new pathways, the new roadways. So jumping into these behavioral, cognitive tactics before the road is finished is like saying, well, I'm going to go ahead and drive on this new road.

And a construction person comes up to you and says, the bridge isn't finished yet. You can't drive on this road. And you said, oh, I don't care.

I think I'm ready. Well, how are you going to get across the gorge? Right? It's just the same in our brain. And so even though I know a part of us wants it to be better now, we want to be to the other side of things now.

This is an iterative process. And the more we can stay in the process and take it in those five steps at a time, bringing it back to safety, the more quickly we can actually see change and step into that adult consciousness. So we're always looking for those little pause points, those little moments where we can notice the old story and what's happening in the present.

And that mismatch is one of the strongest ways that we can update the routes in our brain and reconsolidate these old emotional learnings, these survival learnings, those little tiny experiments are what let us make those changes. So moving into chapter nine, this chapter is talking about living free of those old rules and fantasies. And so we think about those survival strategies, those adaptive strategies, those parts of us, managers and firefighters and the exiles that hold all of our deepest pain, just like we read about in No Bad Parts.

They're all a part of us. We're not trying to get rid of them. But we're seeing if maybe, possibly, potentially, they would consider letting us drive this bus, since we are the adult, and we have the capacity to live in the present.

So it's so important that we know we're not trying to push those strategies or adaptive, protective parts of us away. We are just asking if they might want to rest, if those pathways might want to, you know, sort of be closed for maintenance now, and that we can start to come into our adult selves, where we can connect into all of the wonderful things and the hard things, but the wonderful things about being able to be an adult and choose ourselves. So remember some of these strategies that comes up that Gibson has talked about in this book.

Hello, substack pals and lovers of learning! This week, I have a special deep dive for you into my five steps for long-lasting change. This is for all humans, but especially those of us intellectualizers, people pleasers, and perfectionists who get stuck in endless loops of analysis without being able to move forward.

Some of us grew up learning to survive by reading the room before we even knew how to read words. We became skilled at softening our voice, scaling back our needs, scanning for cues, and staying a few steps ahead. We got used to managing other people’s emotions before they even said a word. And often, that kept the peace. It helped people like us. It made things feel a little more predictable, a little less dangerous.

But over time, those strategies became so familiar that we started to lose touch with something quieter inside us. We stopped checking in with what we actually felt, needed, or believed because that’s what our system learned to do in order to stay safe and make those around us happy.

Knowing became easier than feeling, and shifting ourselves around others became easier than staying grounded in who we were and our authenticity. And those survival strategies, practiced again and again, laid down entire roadways in the brain. They became the default routes. Congruence, that subtle alignment between our thoughts, emotions, sensations, and actions, didn’t always feel available. It might have felt risky, unfamiliar, or like something reserved for other people.

This is a chance to experiment with something different.

You don’t need to force yourself to change or become someone new overnight and you don’t even need to feel totally ready (thank goodness). You don’t need to buy another book or make another list. We’re going to find curiosity, we’re going to explore, together. We’re going to slow down enough to notice when you’re about to take a familiar road, and gently ask whether a new path might be possible.

This is what we call a self-remapping experiment. A way to observe your own patterns with neutrality. A chance to make a small shift and see what happens, an experiment (and you can’t mess up an experiment!). Maybe it’s a longer pause before explaining yourself. Maybe it’s a moment of softness after sharing something vulnerable. Maybe it’s just a breath, taken without urgency, before you decide what to say next.

Each of those moments is a construction zone. Your brain takes note, and your system begins to register a new possibility (maybe, possibly, potentially this could be safe). And with enough of those quiet experiments, something begins to shift and you start to feel the map updating beneath your feet.

That’s what this practice is for - to notice and observe, and without pressure, a slightly different route, one small experiment at a time.

In this session, I walk you through the entire process of self-remapping, which involves mapping out the destination, identifying roadblocks, and mapping out the old route that has prevented change in the past.

We’ll talk about the importance of observing and tracking our thoughts, emotions, and body sensations throughout this process and finding a non-judgmental and curious approach, similar to that of a wildlife documentarian.

First, we identify the old pattern and how it makes us feel. Then, we pause and think about the story behind this pattern and where we may have learned it. Next, we build a sense of safety and presence in the present moment. Finally, we conduct a small experiment, either real or imagined, to start constructing new, healthier patterns.

Here’s the guide - can’t wait to hear what you think!

Welcome, new book club friends! So glad you’re here. We’re diving into Chapter 7 today, but remember, you have full access to the archive, too! So feel free to go back and begin at Chapter 1. Also - it’s already time to start thinking about our next book - please drop any titles you may be curious about in the comments or reply and send them straight to me!

00:00

Welcome back to our book club and read-along together. We have quite a few new people here this week so I'm just going to briefly recap what we're doing. Together we are reading books and some of you are reading along with me and some of you are just listening to my recaps which is perfect.

00:16

You're welcome whichever way you would like to engage with this material. Right now we're reading adult children of emotionally immature parents. In the past we've read No Bad Parts, a book on internal family systems, and The Practical Guide for Healing Developmental Trauma, a book on the model called the Neuroeffective Relational Model.

00:36

Right now we're beginning chapter 7 of adult children of emotionally immature parents. Every two weeks I provide you with a recap with interpretation from a therapist who works with complex and developmental trauma point of view and occasionally I drop in little meditations or journaling exercises for you too.

00:54

Twice we meet live, once halfway through and once at the end which for this book will be at the end of August. And if you're here you also have full access to the archive so you can go back and listen to all the other chapters and all the other books whenever you'd like.

01:08

It also gets pushed through to all the podcast software so if you would like to listen on your phone, on your walk, you can listen on Spotify and Apple Music. So thanks for being here. I love getting to do this work and let's dive into chapter 7.

01:27

So this is a huge chapter and as always I will add in my little reminder to take things little bits at a time. All this time we've been kind of taking things in from an intellectual perspective but as we've been doing that we've been noticing ways that this might have impacted us in our childhood and ways that it might be impacting us now in our adult lives.

01:46

But what we're coming upon now is what really happens when we integrate all of this information. When we start to connect into the emotions, patterns, behaviors, thoughts, and body sensations that have been tied into to these roles that were foisted upon us, not because of our choice, but in these emotionally immature homes where we had no choice but to adapt, to stay in connection to our caregivers,

02:12

who themselves were not able to show up as parents, caregivers, and adults. In this chapter, Gibson is diving into what happens when we start to become aware of and observe these roles, these patterns that we've been in for a long time.

02:29

And this can create in many of us a sense of being out of control, a sense of failure, a sense of anxiety. There can be major grief and anger and fear that comes up with this because we are starting to recognize that we are not our patterns.

02:47

We are not this role that we have been thrust into. And if that is true, which part of us might feel like is a very good and exciting thing, another part of us can feel terrified. And so Gibson is exploring this idea of what is the true self.

03:03

And if you've been along with me for the other two books, you know that in NARM, this is referred to as the adult consciousness. In IFS, it is referred to as the self with a capital S. And we can think of it as the observer of everything that's happening, our true selves.

03:21

And this is an idea that has its core in many cultures, many therapeutic models, many ways of relating to the world of who we really are at our core. This is a huge shift and a huge question because what we're really asking is, who am I?

03:38

Who am I? If all of these thoughts and patterns and behaviors that I have done my whole life are not me, then who am I? And that can be incredibly earth shattering. And again, it's a push and a pull and a bind because of course, many of us are doing this work because we know we don't feel good.

03:55

We know we want something differently. But at the same time, a part of us desperately does not want something different. And that is why so many people will come into therapy talking about quote unquote self sabotaging when what they really mean is, I started to move toward what I want for myself or my true self or my true feelings.

04:15

And that was terrifying because a part of my brain encoded doing that as being a tiger. And so my brain protected me by using an old pattern of behavior to get me back into alignment. And that is not you self sabotaging because you think it's fun or because you just can't let yourself want anything.

04:34

That is a deeply protective road in your brain that all of these neural pathways have been created to keep you safe and keep you in connection with your emotionally immature parents and caregivers. So this question of who am I really is the ultimate question because we are ready to shed off these roles.

04:53

A part of us is, but the other part of us is still terrified. So what I want to tell you before we go. any further into this chapter is we can think of this not as creating a new us or not having to figure out from scratch who we are but more like we're taking off layers of armor.

05:13

So many of us since we were young children have been walking around wearing 10 or 15 suits of armor and it's heavy it's so heavy and we can't fully move and we can't be ourselves we can't play we can't be silly we can't do a cartwheel or whatever we might want to do but over time we could become so accustomed to wearing the armor that we don't even realize we're wearing it and so starting to take it off is like oh huh it's lighter maybe I kind of like that maybe I can walk a little more easily but another part of us is like oh absolutely not this is terrifying I feel so unprotected and unsafe because what we've learned is all along we must wear those protective suits of armor,

05:53

the perfectionism, the people pleasing, the internalizing, the intellectualizing, we must wear those to keep connection and make sure that our parents and those around us are okay. So many people when they come to this point and you may be here in real time feel an incredible bind and I want to reassure you that is normal, that is the old patterns in your brain mashing up with the new patterns you're creating,

06:17

the new questions that you are asking yourself. So please know this is not something you jump into in one chapter or one week or one month, this is a back and forth curiosity of who am I in this one tiny moment and then going back to the protective pattern.

06:36

And honestly this can be as small as, I use this example a lot because a lot of people can relate, you go to a coffee shop, you order a drink with milk because you have a dairy allergy, you watch them make it with dairy and then it is so terrifying to consider letting them know that you cannot drink that drink that you paid seven dollars and fifty cents for.

06:57

And that is a moment and if you haven't yet you could go back and read last week's written sub-stack, that is a moment where we get to practice something called a congruence experiment and when we are coming into our true self it's going to be a series of these experiments where we try on what do I want for myself versus what was safe in the past.

07:18

So in the past it wasn't safe to state your needs, it was terrifying, it was dangerous, it could upset the whole apple cart, your parent might withdraw from you for days or they might go off on you or a whole variety of things could happen in that slot machine effect of emotionally immature parents.

07:33

And so having needs now in the present, even something as quote unquote simple as letting them know they didn't make your drink correctly, sets off that survival pattern in the brain that makes it feel like our life is at stake.

07:46

When we're being curious about who am I really, what we call could do in that moment is try on a little experiment to say, well, I want to be a person who could say, you made my drink wrong, would you mind remaking it?

07:59

But right now it feels deeply unsafe. Could I pause in this moment in real time for 15 seconds or 30 seconds and notice that even though this feels deeply unsafe right now, as I look around the coffee shop and I feel my feet on the ground and I see what's happening, I can feel, maybe, that I actually am safer than I thought.

08:19

You don't have to jump to letting them know they made your drink wrong, though you can. What we're doing is we're building up the pathway that says, oh, it used to be true that I wasn't safe to have needs, but it's not true right now.

08:31

And that's just one little piece of armor off, one little piece of light coming in and shining onto the real you who gets to choose in real time whether you want to say it or not say it. It doesn't matter whether you actually say it to the barista, what matters is that you have the choice in the moment because you are connecting to that true self, that self with a capital S, and not the self who is trying to keep your emotionally immature parent okay.

08:58

So Gibson has a little exercise in this chapter that I'm going to talk you through about awakening to your true self. And what she offers is getting a pen and a piece of paper, folding the piece of paper in half down the middle.

09:10

So, on one half you write my true self, and on the other half you write my real self. And under your true self, you think back to yourself as a child, and what you might have been like before you started trying to make things okay for those around you, before you learned to criticize yourself instead of criticizing your parents, before you learned that having fun and playing and feeling good wasn't the right thing to do.

09:35

If you could be that person right now, what would your life be like? What would be different? How would you show up in your life if you had free time? Who would the people you engage with be and what would they like to do?

09:50

What would be your perfect day? On the other side, you can write my real self, and you can think about those things you had to develop as armor, maybe things that you notice in yourself now as you've been listening to this and doing your own work, the ways that you please others instead of yourself, the ways you say yes to everything even when you're exhausted, the way you take on more and more and more work to keep yourself busy,

10:17

the way you shove your own needs to the side, the way you intellectualize everything and analyze everything but never get to actually live in your life. Once you're done, you can place that paper somewhere safe and come to it a few days later and compare the two sides, and you can look at where are the ways you are connecting to your true self and where are the ways you notice the real self showing up.

10:43

map. I like to do a similar activity, but instead of different roles, I like to create a map of my brain, my own personal atlas. What are some of the major highways that I drive down in my brain? What are some of the things I do consistently and repeatedly?

10:58

And what are the little side roads that come off of that? Do I say yes all of the time when I mean no? What's happening down that road? What do I believe to be true? From that's that role self or that child consciousness self.

11:13

If I say no, what will happen? What is the body sensations that I feel like when I think about saying no? What are the emotions? When I start to flesh that out, I can see how deeply formed these roadways are and they all lead to safety.

11:29

And then I start to create a couple of new roadways, things I'm being curious about. Maybe something I'm being curious about is having a need. I draw that roadway and I consider what would it be like?

Hi, tiny sparks readers and listeners! Two quick notes for you: first, a gift! I created this free ritual guide for another area of my work, Field Day, where I create tools and practices to help you engage more deeply with the world around you. As a supporter of my work, you can find it free here. Second, I started a Patreon! For years, people have asked me to create longer-form video, and I really have such a passion for teaching and helping people get unstuck from old patterns. If you’d like to join me (it’s free!), you can do so here. Thanks for being here!

(0:00 - 1:06)

Welcome back to our book club and read-along of adult children of emotionally immature parents. This week we're going to be diving into chapter six that goes further into that concept of internalizer and I'm really excited to dive into this chapter a little more because I bet a lot of you listening can relate to this chapter. I know that I certainly can and especially if you found me through my work talking about intellectualizers and how often they can get missed in therapy, you probably will really relate to this chapter.

So this chapter really explores what it's like to grow up in an emotionally immature home and to turn inward. So we know that our protective survival strategies are our brain, nervous system, and body working together subconsciously, biologically, to determine what is going to keep us safe when there is a threat. And remember in this situation we're not talking just about physical safety but about a felt sense of safety which means maintaining connection with our parents and caregivers and those around us.

(1:07 - 1:35)

It's so important to remember that these are all protective strategies to keep us safe. It's hard to conceptualize as an adult because of course we want to say well I was safe but I always want to is our biological imperative to stay safe, to stay alive because we rely on them to keep us alive. So staying connected and feeling like we belong with them is our biological imperative.

(1:36 - 6:46)

So that is what our brain and nervous system are doing when they create these protective strategies and so it's not something that we get to consciously choose. We don't get to decide if we're going to be an externalizer or an internalizer. It's very similar to fight, flight, fawn, or freeze.

When we're in an emergency situation, like we're in a dark alley and someone walks in behind us, we don't pause and think cognitively and intellectually. Should I fight this person? Should I run away? Should I try to make everything okay by being nice and sweet? Should I freeze? We're not deciding any of that consciously. It's decided in milliseconds subconsciously by our brain.

So just remember that these strategies are similar in that regard and so if you are listening and you're thinking I don't really relate to the internalizer. I partially do but sometimes I'm an externalizer. Just know that all of this is your brain and nervous system wiring.

It doesn't mean anything about you and what we're curious about is how they show up here in the present because that is where we have an opportunity to make a change because what happens for many of us who grew up in homes with adult emotionally immature caregivers is we become that person for ourselves. We become, we internalize that emotionally immature parent and then we treat ourselves the same way. We abandon our needs.

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We abandon our boundaries because we are criticizing ourselves all of the time because we don't feel like we can handle the emotions so we need to shut them down because we feel like we're not good enough and so we take care of everyone else's needs to make us feel like we are good enough. We do that as adults because those are the neural pathways that are laid down as children but that's what we're wanting to change and so that's what we're being curious about when we observe this. Not to criticize ourselves for noticing these behaviors but to say well I can really understand how these developed and I feel sad and I feel angry and I can be with the part of me that was afraid but I don't have to do those things anymore.

Little bits at a time I can start to change my neural pathways. So Gibson defines internalizers as those of us who learn to turn our distress inward. So instead of acting out, you may remember from the last chapter, we withdraw, we overthink, we intellectualize, we manage, we go internal and try to manage everything all at the time.

So we will appear very mature, very capable, very thoughtful. We're often told that we're literal little adults as children but what we don't see is that maturity is actually a part of the survival strategy. If we have emotionally immature parents and that feels dangerous to us then we will develop this sort of faux sense of maturity beyond our needs to try to manage, beyond our age is what I meant to say, to try to manage an environment that feels unmanageable and that feels unsafe.

So when we grow up in these families where our emotional needs are not met, we don't just give up on that connection, we double down on trying to earn it, right? So we will become whatever our parent needs, we will become the most helpful person with no needs, we're very low maintenance, we're responsible, we're self-regulating because this is what is safe. This is how we're trying to get our needs met and stay in connection and then we don't just do this with our parents, we do this with our teachers, we do this with our peers and our friends. This is how we learn to navigate the world.

We learn subconsciously and then eventually consciously that connection is very, very fragile, very, very fraught, that we're always at risk of kind of being voted off the island and thus we must earn it. We must do something to keep it. We must perform lovability.

So again in NARM and in parts work, we recognize this the same way that these are protective parts of us, these are adaptive survival strategies. When we develop these, it's because we're actually very, very perceptive. Some part of us senses what other people need and so we learn to become hyper-vigilantly over-attuned.

You've heard me say that word before, of sensing every single little shift in a room. And so as an adult, you might say to your partner, what's wrong? And they might say, nothing's wrong. And you might say, well, your tone of voice changed a little bit and now it seems like you're upset.

And they're like, no, everything's totally fine. I don't think my tone of voice changed. But you were responding to some tiny little shift because you're so over-attuned and now your nervous system is saying something must be unsafe.

You need to make it okay. Something must be unsafe. You need to make it okay.

So our atlas in our brain is made up of all of these roads that say, here's how you minimize your needs. Here's how you minimize your emotions. Here's how you be as lovable as possible.

And those are the pathways that are available to our brain, that our brain goes down most frequently. The other pathways of having needs, having boundaries, communicating, feeling emotions, being authentic, going after what we want, feeling that anything is possible. Those roadways either are very, very underdeveloped.

(6:47 - 11:57)

They're like little back rocky roads, or they're not developed at all. So it feels terrifying to us. Remember, if we try to go somewhere where the neural pathway doesn't exist, or the road is encoded as unsafe, our brain says, that's way too dangerous.

I can't let you do that. And it will want to get us back to these other pathways. And it'll often do that by making us feel overwhelmed.

We'll criticize ourselves to shut ourselves down. We'll turn our back on our needs. We'll tell ourselves we're not good enough, whatever we have to do to get us back to those safe pathways.

That is how our brain is wired when we grow up in homes with a... So you could imagine that if you're an internalizer, the name of your atlas, all the maps and neural pathways in your brain would be entitled something like, if I want love, I need to be good. If I want love, I need to not have emotions. Connection is dangerous, and this is how I stay safe.

And it's just an atlas full of these survival pathways. And it's incredibly heartbreaking to do this work, because oftentimes when we are children, we don't have the capacity to feel these emotions, to understand what's really happening. And we're often not supported in our homes to feel the emotions.

And so we don't know that what's happening could make us feel angry, or sad, or afraid. Instead, it's just sort of this like, it's normal. This is what's normal.

This is what my family does. So this must be what love is like. So when you are coming to terms with this as an adult, and this is why I always say to take this work so slowly, is that oftentimes all of those emotions that you didn't get to feel as a child, the anger, the fear, the sadness, and grief, will come up now.

Welcome back to week 5 - so glad you’re here! Here’s my little reminder, as always, that it’s okay (and recommended!) to take this material slowly. Your brain might say, no, go faster, learn it all, do more! But in reality, making change requires us to titrate, i.e., take things one small step at a time. You have all the time you need. Wishing you tiny sparks of goodness this week!

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Hello and welcome back to Book Club, where this week we're going to be diving into Chapter 5 in Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. So I'm curious how you're finding things so far. If you want to leave a comment or reply to me here, I'd love to hear any of the things that you're learning and thank you for all the comments you've left and shared with me so far.

I really love when this gets to feel like a community of us learning together. Because so much of healing from things like having emotionally immature parents requires us to have co-regulation. And for many of us, we may not have that.

We may not have a person in our lives who can truly understand what it's like to grow up in an environment like this. So while we might not see each other, I hope we can feel the energy that we're all holding as we do this depthful exploration together. So you may remember from last time that we talked about the different ways that emotionally immature parents can show up.

In Chapter 5, we're going to talk about two concepts that I find so important as we are learning to heal and rewire our brain after growing up in environments with these environmental failures. And that is the healing fantasy and the role self. So let's dive in.

If you have been with me for a while through some of the other book clubs or some of my classes, you've heard me use the term survival strategy, protective mechanism, or parts. Specifically, protective parts. Those are all words for what happens when our environment can't meet our needs in a way that feels good to us.

So whether our parent needs us to be perfect so that they can feel safe, they need us to not feel emotions because they don't know how to be with emotions, they need us to take care of their needs because they can't meet their own needs. All of those things create an environment where, as you've heard me say many times, it feels unsafe for a child. And I can't emphasize that enough that to our child brain, these environments create a bind where we have to choose between our caregivers or ourselves.

And we rely on our caregivers to keep us safe and alive as children. So we will always choose our caregivers and we will split away from ourselves. In this book, she talks about it as coping.

And I have nothing wrong with the word coping, of course, but I think a lot of times we hear the word coping mechanism and it can get used really negatively. Like, well, this is just a coping mechanism. You know, you're just coping and you need to stop doing that.

And it's a little bit different from coping, so that's why I like to use the word survival strategy or protective mechanism. Maybe you've heard before of like pro-symptom therapy models. And what that means is we understand that all symptoms, all behaviors, all ways of talking to ourselves and treating ourselves that are negative are as a result of keeping ourselves safe and protecting us.

It means they served us at some time in our life. So as we delve into this chapter, I invite you to hold that concept not of coping, but of safety and protection, that these neural pathways got laid down in your environment, in your life, to keep you safe, to help your brain and your nervous system make you feel safe, either by shutting things off, by pushing you into perfectionism, by pushing you into externalizing behaviors, which we'll dive into more. But all of this was in pursuit of trying to create safety in a situation where there were none.

We know we can rewire these pathways, but it's really important that the language we use reflects the truth, which is that it was protective. So it's not just coping. It's actually a very, very smart setup by our brain and our survival system to keep us safe.

Coping can make people think that it's a behavior that they should just be able to change. Rather than understanding, these are encoded as survival pathways in your brain. And your brain always values survival pathways over happiness or presence or whatever the other thing is.

So just keep that in mind as we go further. So the author talks here about this concept of healing fantasy. And we can think about a healing fantasy of this subconscious belief or daydream or story that one day, somehow, we will finally get what we didn't get in childhood.

Maybe that means we'll find the perfect partner. Maybe it means if we just work hard enough, we'll get the perfect job and we'll prove ourselves through success. We'll achieve enough that finally we'll be loved, cared for, and seen as good enough.

And we can really see how protective this is, right? We are trying to make a story about what is happening and to protect ourselves from the terror, rage, and grief of what we don't have right now. And part of that healing fantasy involves us changing ourselves into something that people will finally love. So these healing fantasies, these stories that are all part of these protective survival strategies always start with this idea of, if only.

If only I was beautiful enough. If only I was successful enough. If only I was funny enough.

If only I was wealthy enough. And so it's very typical and common that children who grow up in environments like this will spend a lot of time in this healing fantasy space. And as part of the healing fantasy is where this role self develops.

And this role self develops as a way to try to get attention or to try to find your place in your family. And remember, this is not manipulative. Children are not able to be manipulative.

They are trying to get their needs met. So you can almost think of the role self as us trying to figure out our space in the game of our family. So we're constantly trying to figure out what are the roles? What are the roles? What do I need to do to get my needs met and stay safe in the situation? But remember, when you're in an environment with developmental ruptures and environmental failures, the roles are constantly changing and the rules are constantly changing.

(6:41 - 7:43)

So this role self is an identity that we're constantly trying to build to secure our place in the family. And that's where those protective survival strategies come from. If we figure out that our game piece is the caretaker, then we're going to develop a series of strategies, including shutting down our own needs, shutting down our own emotions, becoming hyper vigilantly over attuned and over aware of other needs, and really just creating a whole role where we convince ourselves that if we never have needs and we take care of everyone else's needs all of the time, then we will finally be loved.

So we have the role self and we have the healing fantasy that if I fulfill this role, I will be loved. From an IFS perspective, and for those of you who are here for No Bat Parts, you may already be putting this together. These fantasies and these roles are often held by exile parts and the protector parts, the manager and the firefighters.

(7:44 - 9:55)

So that exile part that holds all of that emotion of what wasn't and what was too much that carry the memory of their unmet needs and that pin their survival on the someday solution. While the protective parts kind of build out around that of earning and fixing and performing of anything to kind of avoid that core wound. So we can see that same story here with the healing fantasy and the role self.

And in NARM, again, we will frame this as survival strategies that develop into a survival style based on disconnection from ourself to build this sort of compensatory identity, right? So it's the 15 layers of armor that you don't even know th…

Hi, tiny sparks reader! This week’s book club read-a-long is free to listen to (or read the transcript). I had some feedback that timestamps are useful, so I’m trying that out this week, let me know if that’s helpful or not! Thanks for being here and making this work sustainable for me. It truly means so much to me to get to do this work. Have others things you’d like to see me explore? Leave a comment below or reply to this email and let’s get into it!

Trisha 00:00:01 Hello and welcome back to our Read Along. So excited to get to dive into chapter four and five. This week together. I think these are really rich chapters and thank you all so much. You could come to our live meeting. And for those of you who watched the recording and sent me your messages, I love getting to hear your experience as we move along. I've had so much depth in this book that is incredibly helpful, because I think they name things that many of us sensed as children, but never were able to have language to, and this book really provides some structure around that, and I think it's so important for those of us, too, that have always sensed something inside of us that didn't feel right, but didn't feel like we actually had trauma. And so understanding these environmental ruptures, environmental failures, these attachment ruptures really helps us understand ourselves more in the present and observe where some of these predictive patterns and survival strategies in our brains may have developed, and it helps us be more curious about our experience versus criticizing ourselves.

Trisha 00:01:07 You know, oftentimes we do want things to make sense. And that's not just an intellectualizing pursuit. Understanding ourselves is a very important part of being able to connect to our agency. And so when we can start to understand how our patterns that we criticize ourselves for here in the present, we're actually survival strategies and adaptive patterns that served us in environments with emotionally immature parents. Then we can start to feel more neutral and eventually, maybe even more compassionate toward ourselves. So we know that not all emotionally immature parents look the same, but what they share is that deep emotional unreliability or inconsistency. And that's actually one of the most challenging things for our nervous system is to have inconsistency and unreliability. It's a slot machine effect, right? You never know when you pull the lever. Which parent you're going to get. And that creates a constant sense of hypervigilance or need to be alert in our system. So whether our parents were volatile or passive and not engaged with us, or whether they were intrusive, trying to be involved in every single aspect and control our lives, or if they were distant and completely uninterested in our lives.

Trisha 00:02:24 What we know is that parents who operate from these places themselves have these deeply unresolved emotional needs and are acting out their survival strategies. And so these things can really often pass generationally as parents who have these unresolved ruptures and attachment failures try to use their children to meet their own needs. So let's talk about the four types of emotionally immature parents we have emotional, driven, passive, and rejecting. And so while they may look different on the surface. Again, we know that these. These parents are operating from their survival strategies that are often engaged in egocentricity. So they have difficulty feeling into the experiences of people around them, especially their children. Low empathy or a really difficult time connecting with other feelings. Blurred boundaries. So either very hard boundaries which keeps them very distant or very enmeshed. Boundaries where you don't get to feel any separation or individuation from your parent at all, which is a key part of healthy development and often an inability to tolerate frustration, you know? So in nervous system terms, they are very often not in their window of tolerance at all, or their window of tolerance is so narrow you can think of it as a thimble.

Trisha 00:03:49 And being a parent requires some level of window of tolerance and a larger capacity. No, not all the time. We're not here to create unrealistic expectations for parents, but children will have big emotions and children's will make mistakes, and children will try on their autonomy in ways that don't make sense. And that's appropriate. That is how children are meant to behave. And so when a parent, for whatever reason, cannot show up for those things, that's where these attachment ruptures get created. And so having a parent who doesn't have the capacity for healthy emotional self-regulation means that they are trying to manage this dysregulation, this distress in these really reactive or shut down ways. So emotional parents, you could guess by the name are often ruled by their feelings. And so they might really swing between being overly involved in their child's life, that enmeshed style where you don't get to feel separate at all, and then a really abrupt withdrawal. Right. So again, there's that instability where you never know which parent you're going to get.

Trisha 00:04:59 And that creates that hypervigilance in our system. And if we're feeling that hypervigilance in our system of never knowing, is our parent going to overreact to this or withdraw entirely? Well, can you see how very quickly you would learn to shut down your emotional experience, because you know that having any need or having any emotion or even making any mistakes is a prime time for your parent to overreact or to pull back from you. And that is the origin for many of us of these protective adaptive strategies of intellectual ization, people pleasing and perfectionism that served us very well with a parent who wasn't able to manage their own emotional experience. They weren't able to stay with their own distress. And so this often also sets children up for the role reversal. So maybe you've heard the term parental ification where the child becomes the one managing the parents experience. They're the therapists, they're a fixer, or they learn to be that ghost. To just disappear and not need or want anything ever. Because they learn. Child learns subconsciously, and then maybe consciously as they grow up, that their safety as a child depends on being hyper attuned or over attuned to their parents emotions.

Trisha 00:06:17 And so when you have to be attuned to your parents emotions all of the time for your safety, of course you would develop this anxiety, this hypervigilance, or even the quote unquote fawn response, right? The people pleasing the peacemaker. But what this does is it cuts us off from our own experience of anger and sadness and grief and needs and fun and all the things we should be experiencing as children. Then we have the driven parent and, you know, driven parents often appear externally as very successful, very competent, very admirable, but they are profoundly disconnected from their own emotional experience and thus their children's as well. and so driven parents are. Often they give their love based on performance. So it's very, very conditional. And so of course we can see from the driven parent how that would develop a child who feels like they constantly need to be performing to get their parents love. And there's a lot of control in this style of parenting, because they are trying to act out their own experiences onto their children.

Trisha 00:07:26 And so they learned as children. Our parents learned as children to get around their own emotional neglect by just trying really hard. And so then they want their children to do the same thing. So they couldn't possibly offer their children unconditional acceptance or love. Instead, they try to control and they hold love as a reward only for only for doing well. And so in another way, this creates a deep hypervigilance and anxiety and frustration in a child's…

Hello and happy Friday! This week, I’ve recorded a little bonus for the book club - a guided visualization to explore what might be coming up as we navigate reading this book together. Please know that visualizations are powerful practices - when we practice them, a part of our brain responds as if they’re actually happening.

So, it’s crucial to honor your instincts as you listen. Honor your experience by taking the time to pause, step away, and take it one little moment at a time. It will be here for you when you’re ready, and there isn’t any rush. Part of how we deal from chronic relational mistattunment and environmental ruptures is by learning to observe, listen, and respond to our experiences here in the present. I know there may be a part of you that wants to rush to the end, and that part is welcome here, too. Maybe, just for this moment, you can invite that part of you to rest, to pause, holding the knowing that while that part has kept you safe in the past, maybe, possibly, potentially, in this moment, it’s okay and safe to slow down.

Be gentle to yourself, be neutral when gentleness isn’t available. Know that if you can’t be gentle or neutral in this moment, it’s okay. Just as soon as you can, return to finding that felt sense of safety, even if it’s small. Gentleness and neutrality will come again.

If you’d like, I included some journaling questions for you to explore after the visualization. Take good care of yourself on the journey 🩵

Happy Friday, book club! My first 2 minutes of intro got eaten by my editing software, but suffice to say, I’m so happy to be doing this exploration with you, and I encourage, as always, to take it slowly (slower than that - soooo slow you start to get annoyed). Please feel free to comment below or reply with any questions, curiosities, or observations! Dive in to the episode or check out the transcript below. Wishing you a gentle weekend ahead!So in chapter one, we started by talking about how emotionally immature parents affect their adult children's lives. And I always really like to emphasize, as you heard me talk about two weeks ago, that sometimes people have difficulty recognizing that this was their experience. And of course, that's just fine. It can take time to come to terms with what happened from an adult place.

But it's important to remember that it's not always as stark as some of these examples. Sometimes it can be those environmental ruptures that you've heard me talk about many times where you just didn't fully feel seen in your experience. Your parents themselves never got the chance to develop their emotion and And so while you may not have said, I had a traumatic childhood, there was a way in which your child self experienced those ruptures. In this chapter, we're going to talk about recognizing the emotionally immature parent.

And as always, we want to take this topic gently because it can be both illuminating, where we might have moments where it's like, wow, I'm This makes so much sense why I feel the way I do now or why I felt the way I did then or why I developed some of these patterns and habits and relationships that I see in my adult life now. And so it can be really validating and illuminating, but it can also be painful and bring up grief and anger and all that old fear that we might have felt as children if we recognize some of this in our parents. So we remember that we're not here to create blame or place blame because that in itself can be activating to feel that we're here to attack your parents or you may recognize some of this in yourself as a parent, not because you are bad or wrong, but because you are still learning and developing. And so our curiosity here is self-understanding, self-connection, and building a felt sense of safety here in the present with our self, as IFS calls it, or with our adult consciousness, as Narm calls it.

And in that way, we can feel and metabolize some of the experiences we had as children. that may still be impacting us now through that predictive patterning and that data modeling in our brain. And as we metabolize that and let it move through, then we can be more and more present in our lives in an adult way and move more toward what we want for ourselves and feel more connection and have needs and have emotions. And don't worry, we'll take it one step at a time, but that's really what we're curious about.

So as we're diving in, Maybe you can take a moment and just feel your breath or feel where your body is right now in the world and just knowing that this material can be challenging to learn or to take in and that's okay. For many of us, it's hard to see our parents clearly because to a part of our brain, it can feel disloyal to think about our parents this way or to admit that they weren't fully emotionally capable of giving us what we need. And in our brain, when we start to feel that disloyalty, even though we know somewhere in our adult consciousness self that our parents are complex people and it's okay to notice the way that they couldn't meet us where we are, in our predictive patterns, in our child consciousness, in our protective parts... A survival part is going to come up and say, it's not okay to think badly about my parents.

And so we might start to feel some fear or anxiety come in or some distraction come in where we're like, no, don't look away. Or we might feel some of that intellectualization coming in, right? The part might come in that wants to disconnect you from feeling the emotions of recognizing that your parents weren't capable of giving you what you needed fully or feeling the fear of recognizing that. It would make sense that a part of you would want to intellectualize and figure it out logically and distance yourself from the pain.

Or maybe there's even a perfectionist part that wants to come in as you're reading this book or taking this in and say, well, yeah, but you were a difficult child. What could you have done better to make them understand? these are our adaptive protective survival strategies they are patterns and neural pathways in our brain that developed based on the early environments we grew up in not just our caregivers but our teachers and our peers and the world around us so if these strategies come up as we're exploring this it's okay to notice them and notice the way that they might try to protect you from something here in the moment, from the vulnerability and the confusion, as is laid out so well in this book here, that comes from being unseen. So if you notice right in this moment, some internal resistance, maybe it's okay to just name that for yourself right now, a neutral curiosity.

We're just documenting what's happening. We're not trying to do anything with it right now. We are just noticing that. So as this chapter moves forward and encourages us to hold this capacity of being curious, but being with ourselves through the difficult emotions that might come up here, she talks a little bit about the goal of of gaining self-confidence by knowing the truth of your own story and even that word self-confidence or knowing your own story can be activating so again i just want to encourage you to take what works for you from this book and leave the rest for now more of it might come in later there is an exercise here to assess your parents emotional immaturity This is another one of those things that can be deeply insightful, but deeply activating.

So you can take your time and you can have a look if you'd like to. But knowing that you don't have to take this all in right now, but some signs that your parents may not have been able to be with their own emotions or yours. is maybe they overreacted to minor things like you spilling something. Or maybe as you were growing up, when you started having your own ideas or asking questions, they would get irritated by that.

Or maybe your parents were very inconsistent, your caregivers. Sometimes they were there, sometimes they weren't. Sometimes they were connecting, sometimes they weren't. Or they were there for you until you became upset.

And then they tried to shut that down. So these are just some of the things that can demonstrate some emotional immaturity. Why? Because your parents were likely in their own protective strategies too.

And that landed onto you. You know that emotional immaturity or really what we can think of it as is an inability to be with emotions. We don't have the capacity for it. It is a protective survival strategy where when a big emotion comes in, our body and brain just shut it down.

And whether it moves to the intellectual, you know, where they send you away, or they just try to meet your emotions with logic, or the irrational, where they yell and get upset at you, or they go away. What we know is that this experience, this survival strategy, often echoes unmet generational needs. That it's likely that your parents and caregivers maybe had parents or caregivers who also lacked that vulnerability, that emotional connection, that presence, and that self-awareness. So it's likely that these survival strategies pass through in generations until people are able to do the work to recognize them.

which is what you're doing right now. And it's a really brave and courageous thing to do. It's very typical that emotionally immature parents will experience traits like rigidity or impulsiveness or low stress tolerance, and that the way they respond to you or the world is much more subjective rather than it is objective. And again, that is because they are trying to manage their own survival responses at any given time.

But as children, we can recognize as adults, right? We can say, okay, I get that. Maybe I even recognize some of those things in myself. Like maybe I have a lot of rigidity and a low stress tolerance.

We can understand that for us, those are survival strategies. Intellectualizing, like disconnecting from our emotions, it's a survival strategy. And so it's likely the same for your parents or caregivers. But the difference is, as a child, you don't have the cognitive capacity to recognize that.

you rely entirely on your caregivers to be okay to show up for you and to model for you so that you can develop and learn how to do things and when you get this inconsistency this hot and cold or this idea that in some way you are causing a problem for those around you just by being a kid or having emotions or making a mistake That creates this real disconnect in your brain where your brain says, I don't think my parents are taking care of me in a way that feels good. This is all subconscious, of course. Kids don't think at this level. But it's really scary to feel that way.

And so then we have to choose between being on our parents' side or being on our side. And we will choose being on our parents' side nine times out of ten because that is what feels safest to our survival system. And then, of course, those patterns carry through to adulthood as those major survival strategies. Not being able to attune to ourselves and over-attuning to others.

tiny sparks - trisha wolfe is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Not being able to have autonomy or agency, but getting mad when we don't have autonomy or agency. Intellectualism, people-pleasing, we know those things. And there's some stories in here about children who had really unpredictable and volatile parents and whose parents demanded emotional caretaking from her. And so it creates this role reversal.

And maybe you've heard the term parentification, where the child is put into the parental role, where they have to take care of their parents' emotions or they have to be their parents' confidants. And that creates, within a child... A survival response. There's a pattern here, right?

The brain and the nervous system will respond as if something dangerous is happening. And so the nervous system will have this persistent hypervigilance, this watching out for what's going to come next, and I need to make sure to make things okay before my parent gets upset. And that manifests in our adult life, maybe, for example, through anxiety, through needing to make sure everyone else's needs are met and not being allowed to have your own needs, being on edge, even if someone's a little bit upset, even if they're upset in a way that makes sense. But again, it can be really difficult to recognize it because in this story, for example, she's talking about how when she was an adult, her father decided she needed a porch swing, didn't ask, didn't check in with her if she wanted a porch swing.

But of course, there is that sort of self-centeredness that comes from an emotionally immature parent where their feelings are the only ones they can tolerate. And so he shows up at her townhouse with this huge porch swing he made himself and had it delivered to her deck where it took up all the space that she used to have to kind of have her little outdoor space. So you can see how that can be like, oh, well, your dad was doing something nice for you. He made this porch swing.

And I mean, he just really wanted you to have something nice for your house. Why are you being so ungrateful? Maybe you've heard something like that before from your parents or caregivers or your grandparents, or maybe you've even had like an aunt or uncle or a friend say something like that to you. And it's not about the gift itself, but it's about miss attuning to and misunderstanding.

and disconnecting from his daughter's experience rather than his own experience of needing to make this thing for her because she's in her house and she's going to enjoy it. And that's what he wants to do. And so while it may sound simple, that's a big demonstrative act that shows us some of that emotional immaturity where he is not able to connect to his adult self of this is my daughter. What does she want and need? Not just do what I want and need.

Hello and welcome back for our Tiny Sparks read-along.

I'm so excited that you're here.

If you've been here with me for No Bad Parts, the Internal Family Systems book, and Healing Developmental Trauma, the NARM book, then welcome back.

If you're here for the first time, then welcome.

I'm so excited to dive into the book adult children of emotionally immature parents, how to heal from distant, rejecting, or self-involved parents.

If this is your first time here, I'll just give you a little bit of background of how our read-along works.

Many people read the book along with me, and we usually take one chapter every two weeks so that we have time to really dig into it and sit with and be curious and track our responses to it.

While it might seem slow, we know that the nervous system and brain prefer things to go much slower than our quick, quick, fix-everything selves might feel.

So it's normal if a part of you feels like you want to speed up, and I invite you to just be curious and notice those parts of you.

If you read faster than the book club goes, that's wonderful. It gives you an opportunity to come back and review.

Many people also are a part of our read along and don't read the book at all. They listen to these podcast episodes that I create to allow them to have the space to just process what's happening.

So if you feel like you don't have the bandwidth to read right now, or maybe you don't have the space to kind of read as quickly as you might like to, then know that it's perfectly fine to be here and not be reading the book at all.

We have one episode together every two weeks where I dive into the chapter, share a little bit about it, and share my perspective from a therapist.

And often it is a little bit different than the books that we are reading together because I practice from a model that centers around the idea of developmental trauma, relational trauma, and attachment trauma, and agency.

And developmental trauma is going to feature very heavily in this book, where the idea is, this is for people who grew up with parents who were emotionally immature, which oftentimes may not be considered a trauma in our society, but creates significant ongoing environmental ruptures.

AKA the feeling or experience that our environment can't meet us or care for us or provide for us or meet our needs when we are children. And that, no matter what you might think as an adult, is often experienced as a trauma for children.

So while we dive into this book together, we'll be reviewing the book, but we'll also be going a little bit deeper into some of my thoughts and experiences around that. As always, you're more than welcome to send any questions via email.

You can comment on the Substack posts, or you can reply to the posts and that will come to my email as well. I love when you send questions because it gives me an opportunity to know what you'd like to know more about We'll have two live meetings together where we hop on a Google Meet video session and I answer your questions and we talk and we explore and we connect.

It's okay if you can't join those live because they are recorded, so no worries, we're all in different time zones.

Our first meeting will be on Saturday, May 24th at 10 a.m. Eastern Time. So that allows our European folks to join and hopefully our U.S. folks to join. I know it's a little early for Pacific and may not work for some of our Australian friends, but not to worry, it will be recorded. And we'll try to make sure to do the other one at a different time. So 10 a.m. Eastern Time, Saturday, May 24th, will be our first live meeting.

One thing I appreciate about this book is that it's really written at a level for anyone to understand. So it's not as clinically complex as the first book we read, Healing Developmental Trauma.

That being said, it's normal when exploring things like this that it can bring up unexpected feelings. especially if it's describing something that you experienced, or maybe something that you didn't even know you experienced.

So as always, I encourage you to take it slow, to slow down. And if you notice something feels activating or triggering or upsetting, even if you don't know why, it's an opportunity to pause.

Our cognitive brain, and especially those of us who are intellectualizers, may feel like we want to override that experience and push on to finish the chapter or whatever it is.

But know that this is an opportunity to practice tracking and connecting to yourself in a way that maybe your parents or caregivers never tracked or connected to your experience, your emotions, and what you were feeling in your body.

So as we dive into this chapter, the author, Dr.

Lindsay Gibson, gives us this way of understanding what emotional loneliness is and what it's like to experience that in childhood and with parents who aren't able to be aware of us or be with our emotions and it's really important to know that this might be an experience that you had and didn't even know that you had because oftentimes parents who struggle with emotional connection and are emotionally immature may present as very quote-unquote normal They may have taken care of your needs in many ways, like your physical health and meals, and maybe they took you to sports or activities that you wanted to do, but they weren't able to be fully present to you emotionally.

This can be a really confusing experience because oftentimes adults who experience this feel guilty or bad for thinking that they experienced something traumatic.

And a lot of times they'll tell me, well, other people had it way worse than I did.

And I understand that there is a way in which we can be compassionate toward other people that had different trauma.

But it's important to understand that having parents and caregivers who aren't able to be present to our emotions and to be present to our experience and to see us. does feel like life threat to us.

And so as she's describing it here, that there's this gut feeling of emptiness and the sense of shame for having needs or having emotions, that that carries through for us.

And so if you've joined me here because you've heard me talk a lot about intellectualization, people who use intellectualization as a survival strategy or a protective mechanism often had emotionally immature parents or parents who were not able to be present to their emotions.

And maybe that's because your parents' parents weren't able to be present to their emotions.

But imagine you're a person who learned it wasn't safe to have emotions and you stay very intellectualizing and very rationalizing.

And then you have a child and children by their nature have all range of emotions and they look to their parents for regulation and to learn how to be with those emotions.

Well, when you have a parent who's emotionally immature, They're not able to do that.

And so they may pull away when you have an emotion, they may send you away to your room or pull back or punish you, or they may just kind of ignore it.

And what happens is over time, we learn that having an emotion, having an emotional need, Wanting to be connected feels dangerous because we feel our parents pull back from us.

And we perceive that as a child as a dangerous thing because we rely on our parents to take care of us.

This is a theme we've noticed through all the books we've explored, how much our perception as children impacts the way the pathways in our brain works.

None of this is to say you have the worst parent in the world or the best parent in the world, but it's to notice how our parents' patterns impact us. and how those form predictive patterns because our brain works much like a data model.

So it takes in that data from our childhood and then it uses it in the present to predict what's going to happen.

So if we grew up with parents who were emotionally immature, and we form these patterns of intellectualization or not having needs or having deep shame around being seen or having needs, then our capacity to have emotional inti…

join me this week for another guided meditation practice. wishing you a neutral to good week ahead as you take these ten minutes with me to connect to your matrix of support 🩵