Treating Adult Clients of Emotionally Immature Parents: How Your Clients Can Reclaim Their Lives from the Toxic Legacy of Controlling, Rejecting or Self-Involved Parents

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Handouts

Faculty

Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD Related seminars and products

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Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD, is The New York Times and Amazon #1 best selling author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents (New Harbinger, 2015). Her groundbreaking work has sold over 100,000 copies, been translated into 37 languages, and empowered thousands to break free from toxic legacies and reclaim their lives.

With over 30 years of experience as a psychotherapist and psychdiagnostician, Dr. Gibson identified that many clients’ anxiety, obsessions, and depression stemmed from distorted beliefs and emotional coercion imposed by emotionally immature parents. She observed that while these parents might not fall into severe mental health categories, their emotional immaturity had profoundly damaging effects on their children.

Dr. Gibson currently works as a clinical psychologist in private practice. Her follow-up book, Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents: Practical Tools to Establish Boundaries and Reclaim Your Emotional Autonomy (New Harbinger, 2019), offers practical strategies for overcoming these challenges and fostering emotional resilience.  

Speaker Disclosures:
Financial: Dr. Lindsay Gibson maintains a private practice. She is a published author and receives royalties. Dr. Gibson receives a speaking honorarium and recording royalties from PESI, Inc. She has no relevant financial relationships with ineligible organizations.
Non-financial: Dr. Lindsay Gibson has no relevant non-financial relationships.

Alternate Options

Objectives

1. Distinguish between psychopathology and emotional immaturity, and establish how a disease concept model can impede therapeutic progress.
2. Demonstrate practical communication skills that clients can use to protect themselves and redirect interactions with emotionally immature people.
3. Utilize cognitive and emotional techniques to teach clients how they can set boundaries without feeling guilty.
4. Employ interventions that help clients regain self-trust and the ability to identify emotionally immature control maneuvers.
5. Formulate a treatment strategy that teaches clients how to evade attempts to undermine their mental freedom, inner-world connection, sense of goodness, and ability to reach out to others.
6. Apply effective therapy approaches to release clients from emotional coercion and self-doubt in emotionally immature relationships.

Outline

Spotting Emotional Immaturity: Teach Clients to Understand Emotional Immaturity

• Importance of describing over diagnosing
• Projective identification and the Emotionally Immature Relationship System
• Characteristics of emotional immaturity and maturity
• What relationships feel like with emotionally immature people

How Emotionally Immature Parenting Impacts Your Clients: What You Can Expect When They Come for Therapy

• Emotional loneliness and the fear of non-being
• Good coping, emotional suffering; polyvagal effects
• Self-disconnection and distrust of the inner world
• The four horsemen of self-defeat
• Loss of emotional autonomy and mental freedom
• Healing fantasies, role-self, internalizer vs. externalizer styles

Cognitive and Emotional Techniques: What Works and What Doesn’t

• Why clients find it so hard to break free from exploitation and emotional neglect
• Why CBT and psychodynamic approaches aren’t enough
• Exercises to help clients express themselves without anxiety
• Teach clients to simultaneously disengage and become relationship leaders
• How to define and use values as guideposts for the future
• Phrasing suggestions, encouraging agency and showing how it’s done

End Emotional Takeovers and Coercion: Help Clients Achieve Emotional Autonomy from Emotionally Immature People

• The emotionally immature person’s “distortion field”
• Emotional coercion: how clients can spot and deflect control maneuvers
• Communication skills to establish boundaries without guilt
• When to sever ties with someone

Release Self-Doubt, Shame, and Fear: Clinical Tools and Interventions to Help Clients Find Their True Selves

• Techniques to release clients’ feelings of personal “badness”
• Interventions to address fears of being selfish and incapable of love
• Tuning into energy shifts to track safety, unreliability, and threat in others
• Repurpose self-doubt, shame, fear and guilt
• Practising experiencing emotionally intimate connection

Practice Tips for Working with the Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

• Using countertransference effectively
• Honouring personal style
• Invitation, collaboration and celebration vs. direction and persuasion
• How to phrase suggestions
• Research and treatment limitations

Target Audience

• Counselors
• Marriage & Family Therapists
• Social Workers
• Psychologists
• Case Managers
• Addiction Counselors
• Therapists
• Physicians
• Other Mental Health Professionals