Self-Care for Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: Honor Your Emotions, Nurture Your Self, and Live with Confidence

Both Tibetan Buddhism and cognitive therapy challenge distorted thinking and extreme beliefs, especially those all-or-nothing thoughts that make us feel inadequate or unworthy.

EI parents effectively said that your instinctual reactions were illegitimate until approved by others.

you might tell yourself not to get a swelled head. Even worse, you may tell yourself that because you feel so good, something bad might happen, just to even things out. The brain then puts the brakes on that new outlook or behavior because your mind senses anxiety, not pleasure.

Stating a boundary makes you a little bit vulnerable and is therefore a relational gift; you are telling the person you like them enough to be genuine with them. Someone who wants to get to know you will appreciate this.

Whenever you restrain yourself from the urge to act, you are doing as much work—often more—as if you had actually said or done something.

It makes you waste copious amounts of time and mental energy, trying to get yourself to think the right way and feeling bad when you fail. You become the perfect host for a virus that says you can never be good enough.

The real payoff of any addiction, whether a substance or a superhuman level of responsibility, is that it anesthetizes you to your deep doubts about your own worth and lovability. Love feels very conditional to any addict, and stressaholics use very busy and overcommitted lives as a subconscious way of finally being good enough. But ultimately, you

Why is our essential voice so quiet and why does it take up so little room in our lives? Originally, this voice was anything but still and small. Ask any parent of a two-year-old. Most of us start out with definite knowledge of what we like and do not like, where we want to go, and whom we want to be with. Back then, we could tell when people were

The negativity bias has serious implications for parenting. Uninformed parents often believe that amplifying a punishment will make the child more likely to learn not to misbehave. Harsh corrections, like spanking or yelling, are thought to make the lesson stick. But thanks to the negativity bias, what gets imprinted on a child’s mind is not the im