Lindsay C. Gibson Live Q&A - Adult Children Of Emotionally Immature Parents

in one person's eyes they might look at your life and say oh you've been so successful look you've done this this and this and the schema will say yeah that's all well and good but you didn't do this other thing and remember yeah you did it but you were terrified while you're doing it so that doesn't really count um it always has a reason why it wasn't good enough and when you're working with a schema particularly one that has to do with any kind of self-criticism or um kind of putting yourself down I always look for what is the emotion behind it you know what drives the schema emotionally not not trying to dissuade it through logic because that you know virtually never works or it works as long as you're thinking it and then it you know evaporates When You're In the Heat of the Moment but if you think

about what is the feeling that's associated with it I always think of it as I'm not worthy I'm not powerful I'm not enough um I didn't do it well enough those are sort of the the feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness that are in the schemas that cause us the most problems in life so I might instead of arguing with you about whether your schema is objectively true or not um although you know it's a good thing to cover that at least but I'm just I'm just saying it's it's a bucket with a bunch of holes in it it doesn't hold water very long long you have to get at the emotion underneath and if it's an emotion like feelings of

helplessness um inadequacy uh low worth those really need to be faced full on and acknowledge because that's where you want to ask yourself the question where did I learn to feel this way and then you ask yourself what purpose did this serve in my growing up years you know like what was the purpose of feeling this way within my family system and it probably has to do with something that kept you safe if you were powerless and inadequate someone else got to feel powerful and competent if you didn't feel like you ever did things well enough you might consider that maybe there was somebody around you who needed to look down on somebody even if it happened to be their

own child so you have to get at the feeling first to identify it and then you just have to assume that you're feeling that way within that schema within that that understanding of life that little pattern you're feeling that way for a very good reason you're feeling something that's served you at a time in your life when you were very small and when you felt very unsafe okay and you need to go back and trusting that idea find out how in the world was it to your advantage to make yourself so small yeah um I think we all have to be scientists we all have to have the Curiosity of a scientist and the courage of an

experimentalist so experiment take a risk I mean the worst that can happen is that maybe it wouldn't go well and you know question answered you can if if it keeps coming up for you what I would do is talk with someone that you trust about it but also to write down why it could be that you're feeling this urge to reconnect right now and we're not doing that to you know kind of put you in a court of law under cross examination where you have to you know tell the whole truth and we're going to get to the bottom of this matter and they're going to be guilty or you're going to be no we're just trying to get our feelings on paper and our wishes and hopes you know is there a healing fantasy in there are we perhaps hoping that now that we're feeling a little bit

stronger that we might be able to handle it differently this time I mean whatever it is we want to approach this kind of question question consciously and in full awareness of our emotional state and our fantasies about what will happen so when you approach the question in those ways you begin to get a sense of you know I'm scared to do this but I want to do this so I think I will do this or it might go to you know I'm feeling pressure to do this I'm feeling like I ought to do this I'm feeling like you know gosh it's been six months it's been a year you know whatever the sort of little uh flag is that comes up in your mind you know that the little flag on

the calendar that says H you know it's been 18 months since you've spoken to them but when that comes up maybe that is not necessarily a good reason maybe that is some kind of you know left brain sort of um you know counting out the the days and months and it's it's saying uh don't you think it's about time but you answer that with I'll decide what time is enough I'll decide when I feel like it because if I go into something this delicate after all this time you know of estrangement and I'm not feeling it then I'm going to be off balance I have a higher likelihood of being defensive um and that's not a good way to go into any kind of uh encounter like that so I would never recommend that

just because of the amount of time that's passed or because um you know they a person thinks that uh you know it's okay to do that for three months but somehow it's not okay to do that for a year I mean if there's that kind of madeup rule because there are no rules about estrangement um but if you find one of those little madeup rules in the back of your mind then you bring it out into the daylight and you question it like is that true do I feel ready to do this yes it's been a year yes it's been 18 months yes it's been six years uh but how am I feeling about this now has my life been going well without this contact what will this contact bring me how will it serve my purposes in life in terms of my recovery from you know whatever it may be that

has that has troubled you like anxiety or feelings of inadequacy or you know depression uh any of that or maybe you just find that you have more joy in your life when you're not dreading the next holiday where you have to have forced contact so um I encourage you to think all of this through in a very conscious way and then go into it the way you go into a cold swimming pool you know kind of one toe at a time decide given the situation and given your feeling uh actually given your feeling of strength how strong do you feel going into this how connected are you to yourself because if that's all in good shape and you think that you can stay connected to yourself if you go back into the relationship then you may decide that

you want to experiment and see how it goes but you want to do it like I said like one toe at a time you don't go on a a two week um vacation uh with them with no Escape uh for your first time out you would think of what would make you comfortable and we run through that by asking literally how would you initiate the contact would you feel more comfortable with chat uh would you feel more comfortable with an email a handwritten letter phone call I mean you get to decide how you want to contact the person and if it progresses well enough that you want to see the person why not try a very short visit and people say well you know if I'm going to travel all that way I need

to stay at least a week like no you don't you can do something else for the rest of the week you you can pick the amount of time that you think you can stay connected with yourself because that's what really makes these visits um so so painful is that feeling uh that I not only am not enjoying being with this person but I find myself feeling like I have to be something other than who I really am okay and when you start feeling that that means that your connection to your own self is slipping away and you need to figure out how you're going to get yourself out of that situation and into a space it may just be sitting in your car in a parking lot um or it may be going back to your hotel room but someplace where you can reconnect with

yourself uh until you can feel like yes I can be me again and then try again um you know this is all within one very short visit uh but yeah someone's saying do a full inner check absolutely that full inner check is allowing you to see am I still able to hear myself inside am I still able to know what it is that I'm feeling the narcissistic personality is very interesting because they really seem to enjoy conflict now I don't know if they do or not I maybe that person is miserable doing that but they sure seem to create a lot of um tension conflict um criticism uh

control and when you're on the receiving end of that it's very hard not to get reactive but not only with these personality types but with any kind of unpleasant personality type you you really want to try to stay in a in a observing objective mode you want to narrate to yourself inside oh this person just made fun of something that's very important to me or um this person uh just actually didn't even respond uh when I ask them a question huh I'm observing this you know it's like I'm an anthropologist I'm visiting this strange tribe you know this is what these people do interesting I can remain objective and I can stay centered Within Myself and connected to myself while this is going

on and I can get through this visit or this encounter um and you know my life My Life Will Go On um I don't have to uh you know keep hoping that I will find the magic answer because what's the magic answer to someone who doesn't want to listen to you what's the magic answer to someone who wants to fight what's the magic answer to someone who doesn't even notice or care that you're there is there a magic answer to that I don't think there is I think it is what it is okay and you have to be okay with that um but you can't be okay with it of course as long as you are emotionally reacting as if hey I don't like this reality I don't like the way you always looking for conflict I don't like the way you're not paying attention

to me you're not being responsive I want this situation to change well you know go for it do everything you can to make the situation change if that's what you want to do uh you can tell them how you feel you can express yourself you can ask them what is going on that every conversation turns into an argument you can try that and see what happens be an experimentalist take a risk of course do that but if you've already done that and the writing's on the wall please turn back to yourself and please turn back to your own life with people who really are safe and they are people who will respond to you and make you feel glad that you made the effort beautiful thank you so much uh I'm gonna bring hna up to speak now she had a question and then Jennifer if you still have a question

I'll bring you up next and anybody else you would like uh just put your hand up and you will bring you up how might one reconcile the constant grief that seems to come up when memories resurface if anybody uh has not seen the movie Wind River they're two fathers um both of them have lost uh their daughter their young women daughters and the one who lost his daughter a long time ago is you know kind of counseling his friend who just just lost his daughter under tragic circumstances and it's just the most beautiful advice uh I don't know if I can paraphrase it well enough but he in effect says something and you know my apologies to Taylor sherid and the director if I and screenwriter if I get this wrong but his advice was he said something like you know you're going to feel like pushing

this down so far away from you to stop the pain and you have to be aware of that that that's a normal response to to push it down and push it away he said but if you push it too far down then and you let the uh the anger and the resentment and the um you know the the tragedy of it uh he said if you don't feel that he said you know like feel it all you're going to lose the good memories too and he said you'll never he said you will lose her twice when you get rid of your grief and and your um uh your pain you know by not feeling it by deadening it you also will get rid of your emotional memories of her as well and lose or twice and like you know like almost

sobbing I mean it was so beautiful but it was so true right so so what you're saying hna is that when you went down and kept going down into uh the TR your true feelings which is is what the true self is made up of is these feelings the the real experiential side of yourself when you go into that you will feel what's there and just like in the movie if there's grief there you'll feel that but if there is goodness there if there's happiness there if there were good memories you'll find that too you just don't get to pick and choose you know this is not the dollar store you're not shopping for the feelings that you want to have you are EX accepting that whatever it is that you feel is legitimate and it's important and you ignore it at your own risk

because when you ignore your feelings sooner or later you're going to get symptomatic because the true self will not stand for that now sometimes people say I can't stand the feeling it's too much I feel like I'm going crazy and of course you do because at that moment the feeling is bigger than you are and that's why you need to have someone in your corner who can allow you to visit those places visit that grief who's not going to pressure you at all about how long are you going to stay down here um how uh how long is this going to be a thing for you when are you going to get better okay okay when you can go to someone who can let you fully feel it at the time it doesn't feel like you're getting better very fast because there's so much

grief and pain to process and it can take a long time but let's look at what it looks like after you have processed it because I think there's a lot of conception about this it doesn't look like everything is tidy and put away and uh you can look at these um memories and you know not flinch not shed a tear that's not what we're after what we're after is expanding your true self to be large enough to hold hold all of this now when we're little children if we have an emotionally mature parent the parent steps in and holds that for you you can fall to pieces you can be overcome as a little kid it can be too much for you but man if you've got an

emotionally mature parent who wraps their arms around you or looks you in the eye with a face that lets you know that you are not alone that they get it that they understand and they're holding you in their heart when that happens the grief is shared with another person and it makes it bearable meanwhile you are growing and that child is growing they getting a little bit better each time at visiting that grief and integrating it into uh the personality or into the really it's into the mind and into the heart so if we arbitrarily decide that we've spent you know 3 years in therapy breathing this and that ought to be enough it's like how do you know what's

enough you don't yeah so so um let's see there was one there was one other uh oh yeah about about expanding yourself uh one of the ways that we expand ourselves in grief is through crying um I think it's Daniel seagull in a um let's see it was a was an anthology of healing through emotion um he wrote a an article or a chapter in that book um and what he said was that he's convinced that there is a neurological hookup in the brain between brain integration and tears that when we're trying to take something in and we're trying to come to grips with it and grief is certainly you know

a huge EXP experience and it's often too big for us so we have to you know keep making you know sort of running running passes at it but as we are integrating it coming to grips with it the tears are the sign of the integration so you know when people who are grief stricken um feel like maybe they shouldn't be crying so much it's like they're saying well maybe I shouldn't be letting my brain integrate this so much uh I don't think any of us want that I mean that's not a that's not a good end goal um the idea is that we are going to expand ourselves to be large enough uh to hold all the big feelings that we have and people who grow up with uh adequate emotionally mature parents learn from the parent that it's

possible to let go find a a safety net or maybe we should say find a safety net then let go um and we can return to ourselves having visited the grief you know as as deeply as is affecting us and we can return from that enlarged bigger more able to uh deal with what's go what's what's happened to us and also closer to our truer self which is a huge bonus but you you just don't get a choice in terms of whether or not you deal with it you deal with it consciously or you deal with it unconsciously and of course you know as a therapist I just invite everybody to consider uh taking the conscious route in parenting if you if you had an immature parent and then

you become a parent to sort of have this phenomenon over and over again as your children grow and then you have this kind of overwhelming evidence um that oh my gosh you know my mom wasn't there for me in that way and it's so clear that I have to be there for my kid in that same way I know that so many people experience that um you know here you are with these uh young people uh and you are you know you have a front row seat to their um their emotions their needs how things affect them how incredibly sensitive children are um how big of an impact parents have on them you know anybody but you know parents are special and so they have a huge impact um on their children and you also know

firsthand how much attention children really need I mean it's unreal uh they need that interaction they need that interest they need that attention like we need a you know that Mom look at me uh that is them building a self that is them becoming a person and if you resonate with that in an empathic way uh you want to respond to it because they are so genuine about all of that and they're they're also you know in in their um best sort of way so Shameless you know about reaching out for the attention that they want and so of course as you're having that experience with your child and you are maybe giving them something that you

didn't get of course that is going to take you back to your own experience you know that especially if you feel good about it like if you're conscious of um your child's need and you give it to them and then you see how uh positively your child responds to the attention then you are going to feel good about that and then right on the heels of that you're going to feel like wow that's not the response I would have gotten from my mother or you know my dad would never stepped in to help protect whatever uh when I was growing up that all of that travels together so I think we just need to really accept that

because you know it's it's like we're talking about with how these memories get linked um you know and if we if we push down the bad memory we also push down the good memories and so when we realize how important this is to children and then we like I say right on the heels so that we realize how we didn't get it that's one complex situation emotionally and again the idea is that self enlargement like yes to both of them yes to your feeling of I'm able to give this to my child I feel wonderful about that you know it's like Yay mom um and oh my God imagine what would happen inside them if they got a response like I got which you know might actually not have been a

response it might have been neglect imagine what that would do to them you could just you know imagine their little faces if if they didn't get treated with the kind of love that you're giving them and it's a huge emotional thing you know but the important thing is that we're not throwing away parts of our s that get very complex very contradictory we try to say yes to this and yes to this and enjoy the fact fact that we are large enough beings that we can contain it all because it's all you know like part of your truth it's part of your life and you may not have realized exactly how incredibly um painful what you went through or what

you didn't get has been for you until you have this other life to compare it to so uh yeah I I think that the the most important thing is that you want to be observing your own process enough and feeling all of it so that it can be integrated in a a real kind of way because that's that's what growth is all about I mean I neglected to say that on the last question but what integration is all about is growth you know um there was a a child psychologist um uh Jean P who looked at how children learn things um and how they advance in their development and of course there's learning there's taking stuff in right

right but then the child has to um take apart what they already learned that isn't complete of course they have to kind of take it apart to let there be room for the new stuff to come in and then they integrate it put it all back together and now they've got a more complex more integrated understanding of life but that's the way it goes it's like take it in um deconstruct yourself enough so that you have room to put the new stuff in go through a little period of discombobulation while you're doing that and finally you integrate it at a higher level that's what the integration does now you have the new thing you are the new thing through that process of integration so that's that's the way I look at it is if you can feel it and

integrate it then you hopefully can take pleasure in the difference that you exper between what you experienced and what your children are being uh given by you perfect thank you so much uh we only have about 10 minutes left anybody has any uh last minute questions please put them in chat you know when I hear people identify themselves as a rebel I think of it as a person who has a lot of energy um and who is willing to be active and they don't yet have the skills to work with people in ways that get them to want to help them or want to um contribute to their success which is a tremendous loss to

that company or to that family because people who are Rebels are you know they're independent thinkers um they they spot uh stuff that's that's probably really going on uh they have a a you know acute sense of fairness I mean all these are wonderful qualities and they're wonderful qu qualities that uh can um you know be used in any kind of job but I think it's important in whatever we do to see it from the other person's point of view not because you are capitulating to them but because you want to get as much of what you can get as you possibly can and part of that a lot of the time not all the time but a lot of the time is that you uh want the other person to want to help you or want to support you and a

lot of times uh where that comes in is that they experience you as a safe person that is that they experience you as someone who is uh you know fair and kind and um willing to see things from their point of view and that that kind of getting along with a person or trying to find common ground or trying to work out something where they end up being a supporter of yours uh instead of someone who is you know kind of of uh squaring off with you those kinds of skills are tremendously helpful I mean if you were a rebel in your own family system and that was the best way that you found to um deal with the

dysfunction then of course you may see yourself in that way in your job you know that that if you notice the same dysfunction you're Li ble to reach for the thing that made you feel like at least you had a a a handle on yourself you know at least you knew who you were you would reach for that again of course but I'm just encouraging you Jason to also um look at uh learning some ways of working with people in a noncon excuse me in a non-confrontational way that gets you more of what you want and I don't look at that as playing the game I look at it as I don't look at it as a sellout I look at it as being um very realistic about what is going to work to get you more of what you

want um let's see uh the other thing is that when call out dysfunction it tends to make other people much more defensive and much more dug in against us so if you have an opportunity uh not to learn how to you know kind of get more power but learn how to work around and communicate non-confrontation but directly you know by stating what it is that you want asking for for help which Rebels sometimes have a hard time doing um then you get to uh become more skillful in how you direct your action you want to be a guided missile in your life tra trajectory you you don't want to just be moving to be moving you want to know what you're going after and use

the most emotionally skillful way to get there awesome thank you everybody I know um there's other questions but I'll make sure to get that uh answered next time thank you Dr Gibson uh such a pleasure always and uh we'll take a couple weeks break and then we'll be back with you for two more workshops at the end of the month so yeah see you guys then