Hi, tiny sparks reader! This week’s book club read-a-long is free to listen to (or read the transcript). I had some feedback that timestamps are useful, so I’m trying that out this week, let me know if that’s helpful or not! Thanks for being here and making this work sustainable for me. It truly means so much to me to get to do this work. Have others things you’d like to see me explore? Leave a comment below or reply to this email and let’s get into it!
Trisha 00:00:01 Hello and welcome back to our Read Along. So excited to get to dive into chapter four and five. This week together. I think these are really rich chapters and thank you all so much. You could come to our live meeting. And for those of you who watched the recording and sent me your messages, I love getting to hear your experience as we move along. I've had so much depth in this book that is incredibly helpful, because I think they name things that many of us sensed as children, but never were able to have language to, and this book really provides some structure around that, and I think it's so important for those of us, too, that have always sensed something inside of us that didn't feel right, but didn't feel like we actually had trauma. And so understanding these environmental ruptures, environmental failures, these attachment ruptures really helps us understand ourselves more in the present and observe where some of these predictive patterns and survival strategies in our brains may have developed, and it helps us be more curious about our experience versus criticizing ourselves.
Trisha 00:01:07 You know, oftentimes we do want things to make sense. And that's not just an intellectualizing pursuit. Understanding ourselves is a very important part of being able to connect to our agency. And so when we can start to understand how our patterns that we criticize ourselves for here in the present, we're actually survival strategies and adaptive patterns that served us in environments with emotionally immature parents. Then we can start to feel more neutral and eventually, maybe even more compassionate toward ourselves. So we know that not all emotionally immature parents look the same, but what they share is that deep emotional unreliability or inconsistency. And that's actually one of the most challenging things for our nervous system is to have inconsistency and unreliability. It's a slot machine effect, right? You never know when you pull the lever. Which parent you're going to get. And that creates a constant sense of hypervigilance or need to be alert in our system. So whether our parents were volatile or passive and not engaged with us, or whether they were intrusive, trying to be involved in every single aspect and control our lives, or if they were distant and completely uninterested in our lives.
Trisha 00:02:24 What we know is that parents who operate from these places themselves have these deeply unresolved emotional needs and are acting out their survival strategies. And so these things can really often pass generationally as parents who have these unresolved ruptures and attachment failures try to use their children to meet their own needs. So let's talk about the four types of emotionally immature parents we have emotional, driven, passive, and rejecting. And so while they may look different on the surface. Again, we know that these. These parents are operating from their survival strategies that are often engaged in egocentricity. So they have difficulty feeling into the experiences of people around them, especially their children. Low empathy or a really difficult time connecting with other feelings. Blurred boundaries. So either very hard boundaries which keeps them very distant or very enmeshed. Boundaries where you don't get to feel any separation or individuation from your parent at all, which is a key part of healthy development and often an inability to tolerate frustration, you know? So in nervous system terms, they are very often not in their window of tolerance at all, or their window of tolerance is so narrow you can think of it as a thimble.
Trisha 00:03:49 And being a parent requires some level of window of tolerance and a larger capacity. No, not all the time. We're not here to create unrealistic expectations for parents, but children will have big emotions and children's will make mistakes, and children will try on their autonomy in ways that don't make sense. And that's appropriate. That is how children are meant to behave. And so when a parent, for whatever reason, cannot show up for those things, that's where these attachment ruptures get created. And so having a parent who doesn't have the capacity for healthy emotional self-regulation means that they are trying to manage this dysregulation, this distress in these really reactive or shut down ways. So emotional parents, you could guess by the name are often ruled by their feelings. And so they might really swing between being overly involved in their child's life, that enmeshed style where you don't get to feel separate at all, and then a really abrupt withdrawal. Right. So again, there's that instability where you never know which parent you're going to get.
Trisha 00:04:59 And that creates that hypervigilance in our system. And if we're feeling that hypervigilance in our system of never knowing, is our parent going to overreact to this or withdraw entirely? Well, can you see how very quickly you would learn to shut down your emotional experience, because you know that having any need or having any emotion or even making any mistakes is a prime time for your parent to overreact or to pull back from you. And that is the origin for many of us of these protective adaptive strategies of intellectual ization, people pleasing and perfectionism that served us very well with a parent who wasn't able to manage their own emotional experience. They weren't able to stay with their own distress. And so this often also sets children up for the role reversal. So maybe you've heard the term parental ification where the child becomes the one managing the parents experience. They're the therapists, they're a fixer, or they learn to be that ghost. To just disappear and not need or want anything ever. Because they learn. Child learns subconsciously, and then maybe consciously as they grow up, that their safety as a child depends on being hyper attuned or over attuned to their parents emotions.
Trisha 00:06:17 And so when you have to be attuned to your parents emotions all of the time for your safety, of course you would develop this anxiety, this hypervigilance, or even the quote unquote fawn response, right? The people pleasing the peacemaker. But what this does is it cuts us off from our own experience of anger and sadness and grief and needs and fun and all the things we should be experiencing as children. Then we have the driven parent and, you know, driven parents often appear externally as very successful, very competent, very admirable, but they are profoundly disconnected from their own emotional experience and thus their children's as well. and so driven parents are. Often they give their love based on performance. So it's very, very conditional. And so of course we can see from the driven parent how that would develop a child who feels like they constantly need to be performing to get their parents love. And there's a lot of control in this style of parenting, because they are trying to act out their own experiences onto their children.
Trisha 00:07:26 And so they learned as children. Our parents learned as children to get around their own emotional neglect by just trying really hard. And so then they want their children to do the same thing. So they couldn't possibly offer their children unconditional acceptance or love. Instead, they try to control and they hold love as a reward only for only for doing well. And so in another way, this creates a deep hypervigilance and anxiety and frustration in a child's experience of never feeling like they're good enough. And I can't emphasize enough that not feeling like you are good enough as a child for your parents. Love creates a lack of safety. You've heard me talk about the felt sense of safety a million times. This is where it develops. We don't have a felt sense of safety that the person we rely on to keep us safe in the world is going to do so unless we perform. That's terror. And that terror carries through with us to adulthood. Whether we're consciously aware of it or not. You know, maybe you're the person who, when you get a message from your boss that says, hey, can we talk at 2 p.m.? You're panicking for five hours because you're trying to figure out a list of all the mistakes you could have made, and all the way down to thinking you're going to get fired and you're going to lose your home and lose everything, that's that over attuned hypervigilance to making a mistake.
Trisha 00:08:49 And then we have the passive parent. And this sometimes can confuse people because a passive parent can be very Affectionate, very kind, very fun. They can even be engaged with their children and emotionally available. But with the passive parent, it's only available up to a point. So if things get intense emotions or experiences or whatever it is, they will withdraw. They will hide their head in the sand and so they don't offer boundaries or guidance or containment. As you've heard me talk about being very important to child development. They can't offer any of those things. They can offer fun and playfulness, but they can't offer true, connected, authoritative, boundary loving parenting. So they rely on their children to be fun and playful and meet their needs for a companion. It's really another form of parental fixation, but they don't want to deal with any of the other experiences that that children need. Right. The children need to have help, to have boundaries, to make mistakes, all of those things. But it's not possible to get that from passive parents.
Trisha 00:09:59 So passive parents themselves are likely in a freeze response or a fawn response. And you may have heard the term before. I've learned helplessness. And learned helplessness is a survival strategy where it's like, I will just keep myself safe by never trying for anything, never putting myself in the line of fire. And I'll stay completely disconnected from my own agency, which is sort of developmental trauma at its core. Right. But in the child, this creates a real developmental confusion and a real sense of disconnect. So the child will never feel protected or that they were worth protecting, or that they are worth showing up for. And so they will become an adult who rationalizes other people's bad behavior, minimizes their own needs, and adapts to whatever it is without recognizing that they have agency to change. And so they might end up staying in jobs that are horrible. They might end up staying in abusive relationships or making excuses for a partner who cheats on them, not because they are bad or wrong, but because they never learned that they were a person who was worth standing up for, or that they can stand up for, or that they can stand up for themselves or their own feelings.
Trisha 00:11:18 And then finally, we have the rejecting parent. And rejecting parents are those parents who are very shut down and pulled back and very, very disconnected from their child. And so oftentimes children who have a rejecting parent experience, that very overt detachment. And this is this really creates a strong shutdown in the child where they feel like their very existence is a problem. And so it's not just having needs, but it's also having emotions or even existing That seems to create some sense of irritation, or even disgust or revulsion, or pushing away from the rejecting parent, and a child who grows up in that environment learns to disappear. And this is where a deep, deep sense of shame comes in. Because if you remember some of my past work, I don't necessarily view this kind of shame as an emotion, but rather as a process to shut down other emotions. So when you live in an environment with a rejecting parent, you will be experiencing, consciously or subconsciously fear, unsure ness, grief, anger, frustration, confusion all at the time.
Trisha 00:12:33 And that is way too much for a child to feel that their very existence is a burden. And so deep shame comes in to shut all that down and freeze us and say, well, there's just something wrong with me. And so I need to create a different identity. And so we do. We shut everything down and we create a sort of faux identity, and that faux identity can be just dissociating all of the time. And so living inside of our brain, disconnecting. But in a functional freeze way where we're still functioning in our life, we may feel nothing at all. This can create a deeply intellectualized part who has shut everything down in their experience and only exists in thoughts, analyzing, and performance. A person who grows up in this environment may have a very difficult time with intimacy or connection with others and may be very, very, very hyper independent because what did they learn? If I need anyone, I will be hurt. I don't have a right to have needs or have a right to exist.
Trisha 00:13:34 So instead I will just hyper function all of the time and then I will never be hurt and I can handle everything. Of course, in real life, oftentimes it's not just one thing. And so emotionally immature parents are often blends of these parts. Right. And so based on the situations that are happening in the world, in the home, at work. Parents can show up in different ways. Maybe they're passive and under stress. They become rejecting. And so it just intensifies the confusion and the disconnection that happens. And all of these things exist on a spectrum, right? Like some parents may be very far down the spectrum into even being abusive, and some may be very unaware and undeveloped and just not able to connect with that. And so again, we're not pathologizing, but instead we're here to recognize how these patterns in our parents impact the development of ourselves, because we want to support you little tiny bits at a time in recognizing that you are not defective. There is nothing wrong with you.
Trisha 00:14:41 The strategies or experiences that you have in your adult life adapted to your parents. They exist because you adapted to your environment and to your teachers, and to your school environment, to your extended family. But who do we spend the most of our time with? And it's often our parents. And so these strategies are not because there is something wrong with you, but they were adaptive within the system you grew up in. And why it's so important to recognize some of these things is, again, not because we want to sit in therapy or in our journal or whatever it is, and just blame our parents over and over and over again, but rather so that we can connect here in the present to what's happening now, what we want for ourselves and what's getting in the way of that. So if you want to be more emotionally present in your life, if you want to connect more deeply and be able to have more intimacy with people, if you want to feel your emotions and not have to analyze everything all of the time, not have to be perfect, and not have to take care of everyone else's needs, you can't strongarm your way into that.
Trisha 00:15:48 You can't become your own rejecting or driven or passive or emotional parent. Many of us try that and we reject ourselves over and over again where we say, okay, now I'm going to take care of myself. I'm going to set this new routine. I'm going to make this spreadsheet. I'm going to take care of myself so well, I'm going to do it every single day. Or now I'm going to have boundaries. Finally, finally, I'm going to have boundaries with this person who has been hurting me. And so we set out to do it, and maybe we do it a little bit, but then we don't do it and we become our own rejecting parent where we push ourselves away and say, you never do what you say you're going to do. You never actually show up. You never can actually set boundaries. And it's because you are a loser. You don't try hard enough or there's something wrong with you at your core. And of course, we also have these subconscious ideas that if I have needs, I'll lose everyone around me.
Trisha 00:16:44 If I show my true emotions, I won't be loved. People only like me when I'm calm. People only like me when I'm perfect. People only like me when I'm taking care of everything. If people knew the real me, they wouldn't like me. They wouldn't love me. Those states, those thoughts, emotions and body sensations that go along with those states are implicit. So what that means is they are below our conscious awareness to recognize that we are saying those things to ourselves. So it's not conscious that we're saying those things to ourselves. It's automatic. It's unconscious. And it happened through repeated exposure. Right. So that happens through exposure to these emotionally immature parents. So when you grow up in an environment like this and you're exposed over and over and over again to this idea that there is something wrong with you, that you are defective and that you are the problem, all of that gets encoded in our brains Atlas or GG, if you will, As true facts as roadways, big, well-maintained roadways that say we are the problem.
Trisha 00:17:58 And if we are not controlling ourselves all of the time, or managing ourselves all of the time, or criticizing ourselves all of the time, or trying harder all of the time, then we will risk losing our connection and thus being voted off the proverbial island, if you will. If you've ever watched survivor. All of that goes into our implicit learning below. Our conscious awareness. Just like riding a bike, when you get onto a bike, you don't have to think about it. You just do it. You do it subconsciously. You don't tell yourself, now push down on the right pedal. Now push down on the left pedal. Now grab the brakes. All of that is encoded in your implicit memory. And so because the implicit memory is unconscious below our awareness, that's why it's very difficult to change because our brain is taking us down those pathways without us even being aware. Where can we change that? Yes. Hope is not lost. We can take what is unconscious and make it conscious.
Trisha 00:18:57 And then we can start to build new roadways in our internal GPS or in our app list. But right now, when we flip through our atlas, so many of those roadways in there are formed around these environments we grew up in with emotionally immature parents. And so they're all roads that say, here's how to not be a problem. Here's how to shut yourself down, here's how to intellectualize your emotions, here's how to criticize yourself to make sure that you don't, you know, have emotions or put yourself out there or think you're a worthwhile person. And when we try to flip to the pages that say, here's how to care for yourself, here's how to have needs, here's how to go after what you want, here's how to let yourself be imperfect. The pages are blank, and this is all part of our adaptive survival strategies. As children, we made the best choices possible with the information and resources available. You found the role that was expected of you, and you built a pattern, and you developed adaptations that helped you stay tethered to the people you depended on and to help keep the people you depended on.
Trisha 00:19:59 Be as calm as possible, as regulated as possible. That was your role. But now you may find that these patterns are getting in your way or limiting you, and you might find now you are your own rejecting or dismissive parent. And again, that's because of these implicit patterns that you're bumping into in your brain, because those are the roadways that are available for you. And this is why, as we go through this book, we're observing, we're being curious. We're not trying to force change, even if a part of us wants to, because we know that we can build new neural pathways. This is the idea of self remapping that I'm always talking about. But it's not through blame or shame or pressure. It's through noticing and observing. And by doing that, we take the implicit and we make it explicit, and then we can start to make changes and update our data model and change our predictive patterns. We can update the map, but we can't do that through strong arming ourselves. We do it through observation and little tiny bits at a time, recognizing when a part of us that developed at an earlier time in our life is still driving the car, if you will, in our brain, and working to understand that part of us build trust with that part of us, build a felt sense of safety here in the present with our adult self so that we can be the one driving the car.
Trisha 00:21:29 I want to emphasize again that this process has to take little bits at a time, because trying to form new neural pathways is hard, and it's exhausting, and it takes a lot of energy. And so I'm going to end with just giving you a little example. So when I was in elementary school, I couldn't see well, I had very, very poor eyesight, but no one really knew that. I had very poor eyesight until I was around 8 or 9 years old. And so a lot of my early years in elementary school were formed around not being able to see very well, not being able to see what was happening in the board, not being able to see more than about a foot in front of my face. And so when I learned to write handwriting, you know, cursive and print was still happening when I was in school. It was written on that basis that I couldn't fully make out what was happening on the board, or I couldn't fully make out the shapes that were in front of me.
Trisha 00:22:19 And so now, as an adult, of course, now I wear contacts, I wear glasses, I can see. But now, as an adult, my handwriting that was learned as a young child has become implicit. So it's below my conscious awareness. And because implicitly, I learned it when I couldn't see well and make out the shapes well, I have really, really bad handwriting. It's not because here in the present, I'm not trying. It's because my implicit learning around handwriting happened when I couldn't see very well. And so thus what I learned was not good handwriting. If I want to, here in the present, write legibly for other people to read, I can do so. But it takes a lot of effort. And we don't use handwriting much anymore, so I don't have to try very hard. But if I want to sit down and write even a one page note to someone and I want to make it readable, it's really hard. It's not just that my hand gets sore.
Trisha 00:23:11 It's that it's hard for my brain because I have to try to change an implicit learning and make it conscious and form every letter with intention. And that's just handwriting. That's nothing around my survival. So imagine you here in the present, trying to change your implicit survival learnings by noticing them and making them conscious and making them explicit. You can understand why it's not so simple to just snap our fingers and start having needs, or start having boundaries. So I hope you can give yourself a little bit of neutral understanding or curiosity right in this moment about how the things you dislike about yourself or want to change here in the present where things that served you in the past, and maybe just for a moment, you have 1% more understanding of yourself. And maybe that starts to form a new roadway on your map that you are okay and worthy just as you are. Now, I know we plan to also do chapter five today, and I think that was just too much. I thought we could get through two chapters because they were both quite short, but chapter four was a really important chapter, and understanding these types and how they impact us, I think is really, really important.
Trisha 00:24:21 So next time we'll talk about chapter five that talks about how how we react to emotionally immature parents. And we did talk about that a little bit today. But we'll dive into that more next time, because I think the internalizing versus externalizing paradigm is really important to understand. So thanks for being here with me. And thanks for supporting me in being able to take things slowly. And I'm wishing you some little tiny moments of observation this week.
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