Lindsay Gibson – 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

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
• Practicing experiencing emotionally intimate connection

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

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