In this important sequel to Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, author Lindsay Gibson offers powerful tools to help you step back and protect yourself at the first sign of an emotional takeover, make sure your emotions and needs are respected, and break free from the coercive control of emotionally immature parents.
Growing up with emotionally immature (EI) parents can leave you feeling lonely and neglected. You may have trouble setting limits and expressing your feelings. And you may even be more susceptible to other emotionally immature people as you establish adult relationships. In addition, as your parents become older, they may still treat your emotions with mockery and contempt, be dismissive and discounting of your reality, and try to control and diminish your sense of emotional autonomy and freedom of thought. In short, EIs can be self-absorbed, inconsistent, and contradictory. So, how can you recover from their toxic behavior?
Drawing on the success of her popular self-help book, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, author Lindsay Gibson offers yet another essential resource. With this follow-up guide, you’ll learn practical skills to help you recognize the signs of an EI, protect yourself against an emotional takeover, reconnect with your own emotions and needs, and gain emotional autonomy in all your relationships. This is a how-to book, with doable exercises and active tips and suggestions for what to say and do to increase emotional autonomy and self-awareness.
If you’re ready to stop putting your own needs last, clear the clutter of self-doubt, and move beyond the fear of judgment and punishment that’s been instilled in you by emotionally immature parents, this book will help you find the freedom to finally live your life your way.

A groundbreaking approach to transforming traumatic legacies passed down in families over generations, by an acclaimed expert in the field<br /> <br />Depression. Anxiety. Chronic Pain. Phobias. Obsessive thoughts. The evidence is the roots of these difficulties may not reside in our immediate life experience or in chemical imbalances in our brains—but in the lives of our parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. The latest scientific research, now making headlines, supports what many have long intuited—that traumatic experience can be passed down through generations. It Didn’t Start with You builds on the work of leading experts in post-traumatic stress, including Mount Sinai School of Medicine neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score . Even if the person who suffered the original trauma has died, or the story has been forgotten or silenced, memory and feelings can live on. These emotional legacies are often hidden, encoded in everything from gene expression to everyday language, and they play a far greater role in our emotional and physical health than has ever before been understood.<br /> <br />As a pioneer in the field of inherited family trauma, Mark Wolynn has worked with individuals and groups on a therapeutic level for over twenty years. It Didn’t Start with You offers a pragmatic and prescriptive guide to his method, the Core Language Approach. Diagnostic self-inventories provide a way to uncover the fears and anxieties conveyed through everyday words, behaviors, and physical symptoms. Techniques for developing a genogram or extended family tree create a map of experiences going back through the generations. And visualization, active imagination, and direct dialogue create pathways to reconnection, integration, and reclaiming life and health. It Didn’t Start With You is a transformative approach to resolving longstanding difficulties that in many cases, traditional therapy, drugs, or other interventions have not had the capacity to touch.

With <i>Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters</i>, Susan Forward, Ph.D., author of the smash #1 bestseller <i>Toxic Parents</i>, offers a powerful look at the devastating impact unloving mothers have on their daughters—and provides clear, effective techniques for overcoming that painful legacy.<br /><br />In more than 35 years as a therapist, Forward has worked with large numbers of women struggling to escape the emotional damage inflicted by the women who raised them. Subjected to years of criticism, competition, role-reversal, smothering control, emotional neglect and abuse, these women are plagued by anxiety and depression, relationship problems, lack of confidence and difficulties with trust. They doubt their worth, and even their ability to love.<br /><br />Forward examines the Narcissistic Mother, the Competitive Mother, the Overly Enmeshed mother, the Control Freak, Mothers who need Mothering, and mothers who abuse or fail to protect their daughters from abuse. <br /><br />Filled with compelling case histories, <i>Mothers Who Can’t Love</i> outlines the self-help techniques Forward has developed to transform the lives of her clients, showing women how to overcome the pain of childhood and how to act in their own best interests. <br /><br />Warm and compassionate, <i>Mothers Who Can’t Love</i> offers daughters the emotional support and tools they need to heal themselves and rebuild their confidence and self-respect.

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<b>An Expert Guide to Achieving Serenity for Codependents Who Want to Take Care of Themselves</b>
</p><p>• Have you become so absorbed in other people's problems that you don't have time to identify, or solve, your own?<br />• Do you care so deeply about other people that you've forgotten how to care for yourself?<br />• Do you need to control events and people around you because you feel everything around and inside you is out of control?<br />• Do you feel responsible for so much because the people around you feel responsible for so little?</p><p>By its nature, alcoholism and other compulsive disorders create victims out of everyone close to the afflicted person. Whether the person you love is an alcoholic, a gambler, a foodaholic, a workaholic, a sexaholic, a criminal, a rebellious teenager, or a neurotic parent, this book is for you—the codependent. This inspiring new overview of codependency by Melody Beattie, a recovering alcoholic and former chemical dependency counselor, details its characteristics, where the behavior comes from, and how it affects us and those around us. Offering hope and guidance, <i>Codependent No More</i> discusses several options to controlling behavior and helps us understand that letting go will set us free.</p><p><b>"We're so grateful to see that no one gets hurt. No one, that is, but ourselves.</b> —Anonymous Al-Anon Member</p>

Validation, compassion, and guidance for relationships with narcissistic mothers As the daughter of a mother with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), it may have been difficult to receive the validation and nurturing needed to recognize your value—but there’s a road to recovery. Recovering from Narcissistic Mothers is filled with guidance and evidence-based strategies for recognizing what narcissistic abuse is, understanding its effect on your life and core identity, and establishing healthy relationships moving forward. Learn how to navigate communication to protect yourself from the manipulation you’ve experienced. Discover tools for processing your emotions, creating and maintaining boundaries, breaking the cycle of narcissistic abuse, and taking care of yourself. You are not alone! Recovering from Narcissistic Mothers Reclaim your identity and thrive with practical tools and guidance for daughters of narcissistic mothers.

Surviving a Borderline Parent is the first step-by-step guide for adult children of parents with borderline personality disorder. Between 6 and 10 million people in the US suffer from borderline personality disorder. This book teaches adult children how to overcome the devastating effects of growing up with a parent who suffers from BPD. Although relatively common, borderline personality disorder (BPD) is often overlooked or misdiagnosed by therapists and clinicians and denied by those who suffer from it. Symptoms of this problem include unpredictability, violence and uncontrollable anger, deep depression and self-abuse. Parents with BPD are often unable to provide for the basic physical and emotional needs of their children. In an ironic and painful role reversal, BPD parents can actually raise children to be their caretakers. They may burden even very young children with adult responsibilities. If you were raised by a BPD parent, your childhood was a volatile and painful time. This book, the first written specifically for children of borderline parents, offers step-by-step guidance to understanding and overcoming the lasting effects of being raised by a person suffering from this disorder. Discover specific coping strategies for dealing with issues common to children of borderline low self-esteem, lack of trust, guilt, and hypersensitivity. Make the major decision whether to confront your parent about his or her condition.

All parents fall short from time to time. But Susan Forward pulls no punches when it comes to those whose deficiencies cripple their children emotionally. Her brisk, unreserved guide to overcoming the stultifying agony of parental manipulation—from power trips to guilt trips and all other killers of self worth—will help deal with the pain of childhood and move beyond the frustrating relationship patterns learned at home.

From Dr. Patricia Love, a ground-breaking work that identifies, explores and treats the harmful effects that emotionally and psychologically invasive parents have on their children, and provides a program for overcoming the chronic problems that can result.

This informative guide helps you identify and heal from childhood emotional neglect so you can be more connected and emotionally present in your life. Do you sometimes feel like you’re just going through the motions in life? Do you often act like you’re fine when you secretly feel lonely and disconnected? Perhaps you have a good life and yet somehow it’s not enough to make you happy. Or perhaps you drink too much, eat too much, or risk too much in an attempt to feel something good. If so, you are not alone―and you may be suffering from emotional neglect. A practicing psychologist for more than twenty years, Jonice Webb has successfully treated numerous patients who come to her believing that something is missing inside them. While many self-help books deal with what happened to you as a child, in Running on Empty, Webb addresses the things that may not have happened for you. What goes unsaid―or what cannot be remembered―can have profound consequences that may be affecting you to this day. Running on Empty will help you understand your experiences and give you clear strategies for healing. It also includes a special chapter for mental health professionals.