Karima’s Reviews > Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents > Status Update

"And because intimate adult relationships are so emotionally arousing, they tend to activate unresolved issues about not getting our emotional needs met. We often project issues about our parents onto our partners; then we may become even more angry with them because, at an unconscious level, they remind us of the past, in addition to whatever is happening in the present."

I should be studying...

If you had an independent, self-reliant personality, your parent wouldn't have seen you as a needy child for whom they could play the role of rescuing parent. Instead, you were pegged as the child without needs, the little grown-up. It wasn't some sort of insufficiency in you that made your parent pay more attention to your sibling; rather, you weren't dependent enough to trigger you parent's enmeshment instincts.

"They weren't allowed to explore and express their feelings and thoughts enough to develop a strong sense of self and a mature, individual identity. This made it hard for them to know themselves, limiting their ability to engage in emotional intimacy.

If you don't have a basic sense of who you are as a person, you can't learn how to emotionally engage with other people at a deep level."

"They are profoundly self-involved because their development was stunted by anxiety during childhood. In this way, their egocentrism is more like the self-preoccupation of someone with a chronic pain condition, rather than someone who can't get enough of himself or herself."

Ps. I'm finally emotionally ready to continue reading this book. Keep me in your dua's lol.