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

"Unfortunately, being counted on isn't the same thing as being loved, and the emotional emptiness of this strategy eventually becomes apparent."

"Many people who were neglected as children don't realise that their independence was a necessity, not a choice."

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.