Lindsay C. Gibson Answers Your Questions - Adult Children Of Emotionally Immature Parents

the person said whenever I've tried to talk to my dad about these kinds of things it all almost always turns into an argument slight he refuses to believe that he was that bad but I don't know how else to see it when I was a small child I was getting beat up by a grown man over the most minuscule things on a regular basis and then below that there was another comment where they came back to add I love the man though still he didn't teach me much but he taught me how to be tough um the I think the biggest problem in trying to communicate with emotionally immature people is that they just can't see it from another person's point of view um it's like a learning dis ability uh their minds don't work that way they're pretty stuck in the uh part of

their brain that uh is very like one track mind and so if this person was trying to talk to their dad in hopes that they could elicit an empathic and and perhaps even apologetic response from him it would be sort of like you know handing a kid uh you know a a copy of ulyses and asking them to read it when they have a learning disability I mean it just their mind doesn't work that way so this Dad figures that he is giving his kid a good lesson it may have been the way he got his lessons but he probably feels very justified in what he did you know judging from his angry reaction when he was questioned on it by his adult child and he doesn't think he was that bad you know possibly because

he got worse from his father we don't know of course but but when someone says I wasn't that bad I always think who are you comparing yourself to and what happened to you that made you feel that this wasn't that bad dad um of course um many of us love our parents very much we admire all the things about them that um made them Our Heroes when we were growing up usually and when they say that he taught me to be tough I can see that in two ways you know I can see it in the sense of he put me through adversity and I had to learn how to survive under those difficult circumstances by maybe becoming uh sort of tougher in the sense of being more

stoic or maybe controlling your own emotions so that you don't make the the beating or the spanking worse um so it could be in that sense that yes I I had this difficult situation with this man that was beating me and I learned how to be tough in that sense and that would actually somewhat be explainable um in the sense that yes um our worst experiences in life usually have something to teach us but the question I have is is that what you needed to be taught in other words when you were growing up if your parent was being aggressive with you and maybe even physically hurtful or harmful to you was that something that you needed to be

taught about how to withstand that now maybe if you're going to um grow up and you're going to do cage f fighting for a career maybe that would do something for you but that's that skill of learning how to put up with a with a physically um hurtful parent I don't quite see how that pays off later on now on the other hand it could be that he taught this person how to be tough in that he taught them how not to let their feelings get the best of them uh and I say that because so often when children get really upset and they really cry they really become distraught when their parents spanks them or hits them or does something physical like that it lots of times ins senses the

parent they get very upset with that uh that's where the you know Expressions I'll give you something to cry about or you know why are you crying or don't be a baby come from because it's upsetting to the parent to be confronted with the evidence that they have hurt their child that is weirdly enough a form of emotional intimacy where the parent hits the child the child responds with an honest emotional reaction of being distraught and in pain and that honest authentic emotional response triggers that thing in the emotionally immature parent where they can't stand to be around that kind of intimacy they can't stand that kind of real feeling and they react to it very defensively so it's possible that this person learned to be tough in the sense that they learn to hold their emotions

in or not to show it when something was getting to them okay I could see how that could be useful in some situations but the problem is that often times those lessons go deeper than that and they go into a person's model of how to do relationships and so the person not only is tough when they are uh you know in in dire circumstances like they need to be but they stay tough and they stay defended even in their closest relationships after they grow up so you know that's a potential downside um but that's a very common kind of outcome when you appeal to the parent to have empathy for your situation as a child yeah the the parent just their defenses won't allow them to go there because it would probably make

them feel really bad and it would also lead them into an emotionally intimate moment with their adult child and usually they're not having that yeah this idea uh I see it all the time just in my comments so I I assume you see it endlessly or or hear it um this idea of my parent was and then a story that you know is horrific but I still love them do dot dot but I still love them yeah uh do you think that's actually love like that the person uh if they could kind of zoom out and be completely authentic that that that's what they are actually feeling or is it just uh kind of you know prisoners uh dilemma sort of thing yeah I think it's true um I think children are made uh to love their parents I I think it's their

very nature so whether or not that person loves their parent in the same sense that they love their partner or that they love their children I don't know about that because those are very different kinds of relationships but oh and and I would also say that you could parse it and say well there's love and then there's family bonds you know like a bond is formed by familiarity and proximity according to Balby the the attachment researcher and that bond is very powerful and it can stay there in a very strong form even when the person consciously dislikes or even hates their parent they can still feel that family bond but what I've learned is that this relationship with an emotionally immature parent is so complicated it's so deep and it's got so many layers of

conflicting feelings but my experience has been that what makes therapy so difficult is that there is love there that they do really feel this uh affectionate attachment to their parent now not in every case of course because there are uh you know naturally many kinds of parent child relationships that are really not based on love or not what we would you know Define as love but I think a lot of people underneath all the uh trauma even they really do long to be close to their parents they really do care about their parents it really does matter to them what their parents think of them and I I just think that's part of the complication um yeah I and to me that that poignant

dilemma of I love this person and I'm furious at this person or I can't stand to be around this person that dilemma when you face that in therapy and you allow yourself to work through that mourning that grieving that has to happen when when you feel both of those things together that's where I've seen people really make strides in their own individuation in becoming their own person because if you deny or uh try to suppress feelings of love for the parent even if it doesn't make any sense you know even if you're embarrassed that you still love them but if you try to suppress that it's like you never you never really find your true self and you never really get free of their influence because you're always fighting that or denying that so I always in therapy look for those feelings to be brought out

just as much as the anger or the disappointment or the frustration because in most cases will I've seen it be there and that the person has benefited from admitting it as part of the very very complicated emotional picture with these kinds of parents yeah excuse me uh you say that uh children are wired to love their parents do you believe that the parent is wired to love their child as well or is it different don't know about that I really don't um I you know if I had to just give a a guess I would say that I think we all you know unless unless we have some neurodivergent problem with our wiring

with our brains that people start out with the potential for loving their children really for making emotional bonds with other people is what it boil down to and that we start out with that we are equipped with those parts of the brain that are ready to be developed but if they don't get responded to and they aren't brought into being in a a bonded relationship with their care caregiver then I think those parts of the brain don't mature in a way that they then can even get it back later meaning that if you pass certain benchmarks in your attachment process at certain ages I think the longer that goes on the harder it is to go back and try to you know kind of re-inject that bonding experience or

that love experience and I think it's very possible that there are parents who really don't seem to love their children I mean that's a hard thing to say uh to even admit to Consciousness but I think it's very possible that people can be so damaged by the time they become adults that they really don't feel love for their children now along with that though I think that there can be people who do feel some love as long as they're not under too much stress or you know they're um feeling feeling well resourced they're uh maybe things are going well for them I think then maybe they can enjoy and love their children but as soon as there is stress or as soon as the child uh begins to act in a stressful way that can evaporate because the emotionally immature parent

just can't handle it they they have to try to make it stop whatever it is that the child's doing that they don't like and they certainly are not acting lovingly uh when they're doing that so you know maybe it's an academic point but I think I think it is possible for there to be a grownup that has been so damaged in their early attachment experiences that they are not interested in loving their child and don't feel it but for the most part it seems to me that people feel a mix that the parents feel a mix um now you can see this when there's an estrangement uh the parent may act in such a way that the child decides not to have any further contact and there's there is a uh a complete breakdown in the relationship and the child refuses to see the parent there's an

estrangement now at that point the parent seems to get in touch with their love for the child and then they want the child back they're trying to get the relationship back and you can argue and say well is that true love or are they trying to get that kid back because they want control or they don't want their family messed up or you know what is what is the true motive but I think you know we can call that a form of love um maybe if it's only control okay it's only control there's no love there but usually there's a mix uh that they are touched by their child they do miss their child it's just that their coping skills are so limited and their defenses are so strong that even when they get a chance to get back in touch with their child it's very hard for them to admit what they've done or listen to the child or accept boundaries so they don't act very

lovingly even though I think somewhere deep down they love the child in the way that they can when they and especially if they're not stressed but it isn't the kind of love that makes another person feel seen and it isn't the kind of love that makes a person feel like they're safe with them there's a couple of comments here that I think are related um so the first one is about the struggle when your parent is getting older in age uh the comment said uh my mother looks very frail now and it's this kind of uh dichotomy of not wanting to hurt them but at the same time still holding on to so much anger and you know how do we navigate the guilt that comes uh with either either either we kind of let them have it and then we have the guilt of that or we don't and then we have kind of this internal guilt that we're not you know

being authentic or or uh you know doing whatever work we need to do internally to heal and then the other comment was about uh grief after the parent has passed and so I wonder people who find your work kind of later in life maybe when their parents have already passed and suddenly become aware of all these feelings that they have inside how do those people deal with that when there isn't even an option to to do anything external about it yeah well you know even even if the even if the parents are still living and let's say they're in healthy middle age you know so technically speaking they're not triggering that that sense of um uh poignancy that that a a frail older person might elic it even in those cases it's still very difficult to hit this place inside

yourself that is a balance between your own anger and hurt and disappointment really like Devastation even the balance between that and the desire to not hurt this person that you love so there's a desire to be authentic and yet there's a desire not to hurt the parent now part of the reason for that I think is that because so many internalizers asps adult children uh are so sensitive and empathic to other people you know it almost hurts them more than it hurts the parent to be authentic or to take the parent to task for something that they did I mean it's excruciating for them because they know that it would be

hurting them if they were in their parents shoes and they can't just tune that out because they are very sensitive very perceptive people so what I always ask a person is how would you approach your parent to see if you could tell them what you have to tell them in a way that would be less likely to elicit a defensive response because that's always the challenge with an emotionally immature person if if you come out swinging they will defend themselves I mean their Shields go up uh and your words bounce off of them like pebbles uh because they're going to protect themselves they're not going to take in and be hurt by what you say if they can find any way at all to

defend against it so I think sometimes people get kind of confused or mixed up between being authentic and being aggressive to be authentic could be actually very quiet it could be very even toned it could be a letter uh it doesn't necessarily mean that you sit them down lock eyes with them and tell them and know in certain terms what they've done to you now you may choose to do it that way but it's not the only way that you have and sometimes I suggest to people that you try it in small doses and this is also a nod to the fact that elderly people lots of times excuse me um have less or fewer resources within themselves to deal with

the kind of stress that such an encounter would stir up so they're they're more likely to get upset or become disorganized or um you know in one way or another um become very defensive so if you say to them I have some things I'd like to talk over with you could we sit down and talk for 15 minutes would you be willing to just listen if I told you some things that I have on my mind and then the parent would saywell what kind of things um you know ready ready for the you know whatever's coming and then the person says well first of all I just want to know I just want to have a short conversation and tell you some things that I've always wanted to tell you um because I want to I want to have you understand how I felt and I all I want is 15 minutes and I just wonder would you be willing to listen for 15 minutes that's

all and then maybe they'll say okay you know with a sideways glance like what's coming and then if you tell them the facts of what happened um you know I have this memory and it has bothered me for years and this is how it affected me and I just wanted to let you know that that is still bothering me and I wondered what led you to do that can you explain to me why you reacted to me in that way and then maybe the parent says well I don't know I don't even remember what you're talking about I'm sure I never did or said something like that and then you might say uh well that's my memory and I'm wondering of course you don't remember remember I understand that but but if you had to

guess what would you guess would have been your motive so in other words you are presenting the situation to them in a way that you are telling them the facts of whatever it is that you want them to know in that little section that little 15minute section and then you are having a conversation with them that is not um you know super confrontational it's not aggressive it's more stating the facts and being curious about what their memory of it was and lots of times that's going to be the best connection that you can probably make that isn't too much for them to the point where they close down completely and they make this all about what what an awful child you are and how disrespectful you are and whatever they're going to come up with so small doses non-aggressive

curious and doing it in small little bites small little manageable bites is a way to do it with a very defensive parent or uh also with an elderly parent and the part about feeling guilt I think is that thing about feeling like in order to be authentic you have to download all the rage that you've had for the past 20 years and I don't know about you but if someone is downloading rage on me I'm not listening very well to what they're saying because it's just too much so uh we have to consider how to get the fact across in a way that the other person continues to be able to listen to us um the guilt to switch gears here the guilt that people feel after their parents have passed you're going to have that no matter what um I remember being at a conference that was

on um treating trauma and one of the things that the expert said was he said you know after a trauma everybody feels guilty they look back and they say oh if only I hadn't said that if only I hadn't done that if only I had told him uh if only I hadn't gone to the store that morning you know and he said don't try to talk them out of that because we need to be able to go back in time to the point where this thing happened and find some things that we could have controlled it with you know like if I hadn't gone to the store that morning you know my my child wouldn't have gotten hurt whatever if only I had told him you know don't leave uh you know he never would have gotten in that accident I mean it is human nature to try to find the point at which you had control and

you didn't act on it and I thought wow that that is so helpful because to know that it's human nature that you're going to look back on your relationship with your parents in this case and you are going to feel guilt the reason that you're feeling the guilt is because you had so little control it it's not so much that you did such a bad thing with them it's that your subconscious mind is trying to manufacture something that you did have control over and chose not to do or chose to do differently in a way that you now feel bad about but it's that same instinct to go back in time and try to get a feeling of I had control I didn't use it or I used it uh poorly

and somehow that helps the the guilt helps you feel like well you could have done it differently so it could have been better you did have some control but I'm here to say yeah I don't think we do I don't think we do have control I think that when a parent gets to us and we get reactive to them and we do or say uh something that we regret that we feel guilty for later you know the question becomes did we have a choice at that moment you know with everything that was going on with all that was happening in our lives and their lives and how that came together did we really have a choice about our response I mean sometimes I think we emerge out of our circumstances in a way that is really less than personal because we can get so reactive we can live in the lizard part of our brain for

a while as we get uh Angry or emotional or upset and we lose our our touch with the other person I mean heck we lose our touch with ourselves and we just become a bundle of reactions so we have to accept that okay we can we can grieve that we can feel guilt about it but when you start torturing yourself with it I just beg you to remember these things that maybe you're trying to get back a sense of control through your regret that really couldn't have happened under the circumstances that maybe that was an emergent event that you didn't have much control over and also the fact that you feel sorry about it or you feel guilty about it is just going to be one more thing in life that didn't go the way you wanted it

to and we all have to come to grips with that because we don't have the kind of ultimate control that every one of us would love to have we we have to live in this world as best we can and sometimes times hopefully less than uh you know than a lot of the time sometimes we are not able to behave or talk at a level that we would be proud of later if that happens we kind of have to tolerate that and feel that and learn from it you know but not to be hard on ourselves or not to beat ourselves up for just being human beings who have that reactive part of the brain that operates very independently at times we have to remember that we've got that in us because it's part of Being Human thank

you um we got a comment on uh a video of you speaking about the fact that emotionally mature parents will make you uh will literally train you to put yourself last and so uh the question was how do we learn to make ourselves be important because that is my parents to me and my older sister and I especially fall into unworthiness and I have no idea where to begin getting a grip of me yeah well I mean the first thing is to have the concept of maybe not putting yourself like last I mean this person now has that concept there are plenty of people who don't even Define it to that extent they just live their life putting themselves last or putting the other person first and it just seems like the

way the world works it seems like that's life so when you have that thought that oh I feel unworthy or I'm putting myself last you have opened up the possibility that you can change that is it easy to change no I don't think it is because that very early sense of self starts you know like when you're 18 months old well starts before that but I mean when the child really starts to become an individual person uh that's around 18 months old when they're able to you know get up and walk away from Mom or Dad and that child develops a sense of whether they are good or bad depending on how other people respond to them so if you get the message that there's something wrong with you like

the parent says what's the matter with you like oh there's something the matter with me um I'm bad uh I don't I don't deserve to uh be heard here I'm you know I don't count I don't matter when you have those kinds of experiences you soak this up at a very deep level within your sense of self and of course if you feel unworthy it kind of feels right that you would put yourself last so what we are trying to do in therapy or in groups like this is we're trying to first of all see that that's what happened I mean if you don't know what the reality is then yeah it's like how are you going to fix it but when you do understand what the reality is then you have an opportunity to catch it and realize I that that's what you're doing

now in very deep Psychotherapy we can go back to these kind of nodal memories where that sense of unworthiness and that sort of that fate Narrative of I should come last because I'm unworthy we can go back and we can look at where that started and what put that into place and we can start to question it you know like we always thought that the Earth was flat it looks that way um but then we get information that gradually begins to shift that because it's like it can't be it can't be a flat Earth and then we see this globe uh floating in outer space um it's got to be one or the other well you can do that same process with aspects of yourself you know how you can uh I don't know if you ever used to do this when you were a kid but um but if you ever

taken a word and just repeated it and repeated it until the sound of it just didn't seem to have any meaning anymore now maybe this was my weird child game because I loved words but uh but it's true that when you repeat something and repeat it and keep your focus on it after a while the emotional charge to it kind of begins to break loose I mean it begins to seem uh you know kind of um weird or it seems it seems less believable when you keep presenting it to yourself in a way that you have to ultimately uh get this reaction of is that true you know am I unworthy am I a person who doesn't count do I think that I should always come last do I think this person should come first when you begin to ask those

questions and feel the feelings that come up with that you are now ripe for a fundamental seismic shift in the way that you see yourself in the world okay it is very possible to change that sense of unworthiness but not just by saying I'm a worthy person I'm an important person affirmations help us at a conscious level but we need to go deeper than that and question these unconscious uh they call them schemas they're like these patterns of how we think the world works we picked them up in childhood and they become these patterns and the pattern might be you should put yourself last because you are unworthy or this person should come first because they're more important than you

are well if you start saying that to yourself or whatever other you know true statement you come up true air quotes statement you come up with about yourself and you put that down on a piece of paper and you read it out loud to yourself every morning and every evening for two weeks you will set up a situation in your brain where your brain is going to question it it's going to think about it it's not going to become such an automatic thought so we don't the idea is not that we we start out by denying it and saying I am too a worthy person or I do too deserve to come first Sometimes instead what we're saying is that we are accepting and looking at without judgment we're just putting it up there for our brain to take a look at that I am not worthy and should put myself last we confront our brain with this

underlying unconscious truth air quotes uh that we've been living by and then we let our brain take care of the rest of it because hearing that out loud in a belief sort of voice twice a day for two weeks makes the brain begin to go I don't know about that I this I don't I don't think so um it begins to change the assumption but see we're doing it by completely accepting the unconscious assumption which is where we should begin because it's in there we learned it it became our reality we got to start with where we left off which was that underlying belief and accept that and then present it to the brain over and over again just

like saying that word to the point of it's sounding like nonsense and then letting a shift happen now later you may also find yourself reasoning out uh where your behavior comes from like you might say I wonder why I said yes to that when I really didn't want to what what was up with that now I'm stuck with this thing I don't want to do so you can go back and you can ask yourself what what pattern what old pattern did I just fall into and you can see maybe where that old unworthiness or that old sense of being uh the person who should come last you might see how that got in there and that gives you a place to stand it gives you a place to say well I know I used to believe that I know I got triggered into

believing that again in this situation but now I think I can think about it more objectively and let me think about what I'm going to do now which allows you to then treat yourself like you do matter to put yourself first to maybe correct the thing that felt bad to you all because you understand where this stuff comes from so you're both trying to correct it mentally by catching it um by noticing when you are acting that out and then deciding consciously to change that but you can also confront it and accept it at its most basic level and then let your mind reach a conclusion about whether or not you think that's true and anybody who does that I think has a really hard time getting to the point where they would say yes I've really decided that I

am an unworthy person because it really doesn't make any sense you're only an unworthy person if you think you are or somebody else thought you were it is strictly a matter of opinion and you can wrestle with that and accept that that is what you learned deep in your bones but it's not the way that you're going to stay even if you have to go back and correct yourself when you fall into that kind of behavior again but the more you accept and and just wonder about why you had to believe that about yourself the more alien that thought will become and the easier it will be for you to get free of it so um th those are those are my best ideas for for how you deal with that because a lot of

people uh having emotionally immature parents end up feeling that way because that's how they're treated so these are the meth methods that I found that really seem to work best for people for the deepest possible change thank you so much um we're running a bit low on time so I'll just power through uh sometimes I get comments um on videos that that really make me laugh in the way that they're framed and I got one the other day uh when I read a passage from adult children of emotionally mature parents on internalizers which uh I'll read in a sec and I thought maybe we could get uh your thoughts on it if anything kind of has evolved or changed in in your thoughts on this topic uh but the comment was uh holy beep uh one paragraph explained everything that's crazy and my response was wait till you read the the rest of the book uh because it really seems like in speaking with

people why your book stands out so much uh from kind of the Sea of self-help out there is exactly that is people end up feeling like wow this was exactly my experience and nobody has ever talked about it before and so I want to read you this uh that that paragraph that led to this comment uh it is uh for anybody who has the book it's page 89 uh it goes internalizers are mentally active and love to learn things they try to solve problems From the Inside Out by being self-reflective and trying to learn from their mistakes they're sensitive and try to understand cause and effect seeing life as an opportunity to develop themselves they enjoy becoming more competent their main sources of anxiety are feeling guilty when they displease others and the fear of being exposed as imposters their biggest relationship down fall is being overly self-sacrificing and then becoming resentful of how much they do for others and I think probably what this

person was saying is because that that that one paragraph has kind of like both the positives of being the internalizers but then this list of like oh I do that oh I do that oh I suffer from that so I wonder uh what your perspective is on that you know all these years after it was written yeah yeah um it's so interesting to me that you can take one or two facts about a person's personality or about their functioning and derive so much from it it's I mean to me it's like this very um very complex but very elegant kind of mathematical formula where you have a couple or it could I guess it could be more like physics you have a couple of basic laws um of how nature works and from that you deduce all this other stuff

that can't help but be part of that so um for instance if you love to learn let's just take that you can jump you can jump into these characteristics anywhere along the way but let's say you look at uh you know um the person loves to learn so what else is hooked up to that well you have curiosity you have openness you have imagination because in order to learn things we have to imagine our way into them we have to change what's in our heads to fit and accommodate this new thing that's coming in and that takes imagination so now we've got uh we've got openness we've got imagination we have curiosity now all of these things are associated with emotional maturity because people who uh have

grown up enough inside that they have a solid sense of self they feel secure in themselves um they have adequate emotional control they are able to be curious and open and um loving to learn um because they feel generally safe because they know that they can cope they know that they are able um to you know kind of respond well to situations so that would be one example of you know that one quality what that is really saying about a person you know similar similarly if you're talking about an emotionally immature person and you say they have very poor empathy wow we know a lot about that person just from that one trait because it means that it's going to affect their relationships it's going to affect their view of the future it's going to affect

their ability to uh look at and deal with their own feelings so I think part of part of what I was doing with these discoveries and descriptions uh that I did in the book was I would notice one or two things about somebody and that would be you know I would observe that and that would be a fact about them because I had seen them do it and then I would think well what does that mean about them excuse me I would think you know what does that mean about them and then I would realize oh that H that means that in this kind of situation they would probably do this or that so it would be a way of getting at deeper qualities which I would then go in and ask questions about or be on the lookout for and then sure enough they

would pop up and I would have confirmation of what I had suspected so so we want to um be able to put all of this stuff together in a complete picture and really the picture is not completed until you kind of run out each one of those little associations or each one of those little you know if there's this then there's that and you run those those out and confirm them and then they become something that you begin to see I began to see it in you know in all my clients uh who were internalizers and the more I learned about them the more things there were there to observe and and confirm so yeah so one one paragraph explains a lot and there was a tremendous amount of

wondering and thinking and discovering behind that just by realizing that all these things are hooked up together you know people are not accidental uh if a person has this quality they're likely to have that quality and if they have that quality they're likely to do this thing and if they do this thing this is how their relationships are going to go and if they don't have good relationships here's what their mood's going to look like so so it's it's not a mystery they're all hooked together and I think it's when you can see the connections uh and how they feed off each other that you know you become able to uh you know realize all this complicated stuff about a single human being and then expand that out to um understanding other people who are similar to them H and and so should we be doing

that ourselves should we be like kind of I don't know maybe making a list of these Tendencies or or ways we are and then trying to extrapolate if that's true then what are some other things if you know if I saw it in somebody else maybe I'd connect I love that will I think I definitely think we should do that I would love to have everybody do that um you know and maybe uh report back on our next um next time I'm here because it's a beautiful way of um allowing yourself to get to know yourself and feel good about your qualities it's sort of like well if I can be empathic to other people what does that mean about uh the success or not of my relationships and he's like oh yeah that's true uh I do care about other people I do let them know oh I am good at relationships I do treat friends well okay so you can as you sort of expand in the way that I was talking

about here these different qualities and how they suggest other positive qualities it really helps you to build up a very positive self-concept that's your conscious image of your of yourself you can build up this self concept through this kind of extrapolation you know if if I'm a polite person or if I'm a kind person um if I enjoy learning you know all these things they are related to other things and as you kind of begin to understand that they all pull on each other it's kind of like they're they're knit together in a net um we can begin to take credit for a lot of different things about ourselves and our self-image expands and we end up feeling stronger and more self-confident as a