What can you do if you have or had emotionally unavaible parents?
Did you grow up with emotionally unavailable parents? It is a somewhat vague term, but one that can create quite a few obstacles in your adult life.
Do you know that feeling—that even though you are in contact and listened to—that you still somehow feel unseen and unheard? Or that you have to cater to your parents’ needs? Of course, all parents have their moments of being inwardly absent due to minor or major work or private concerns. But if your parents were truly inwardly absent, that generally has consequences for you. You tend to harbor self-doubts. As a child, your deep love for your parent(s) will initially keep you from considering the possibility that something might be wrong with them. It is easier for children to place 100% of the blame on themselves than it is to recognize that something might be wrong with their parent(s). You think, “If only I had been sweeter, smarter, calmer, or more attentive, this would not have happened.” This pattern then repeats itself at work and in relationships throughout the rest of your life. It brings with it a sense of “false hope” or “false power.”
CAN A CHILD ALSO GO TOO FAR IN DEMANDING ATTENTION WHEN PARENTS ARE UNAVAILABLE?
What can also happen when parents are inwardly absent for a long period of time is you start exhibiting increasingly extreme behavior to get attention. You only get attention when you are very annoying and are up to no good, or you even “have to” become seriously ill, which is when real attention is focused on you. The unfortunate thing is that this can leave you feeling confused. You are rewarded for “inappropriate” behavior. This can also make you start to doubt yourself. If you exhibit certain behavior one day, you get one reaction from your parent, and if you show the same behavior another time, you get a different reaction from your parent. This unpredictability makes you feel insecure. You often become very unsure of yourself.
HOW DO YOU RECOGNIZE THAT ONE OR BOTH OF YOUR PARENTS WERE EMOTIONALLY UNAVAILABLE?
Although the indicators differ per person, the behavioral patterns fall between two extremes and can vary. On one end of the spectrum, a child is ignored or marginalized by their parents. On the other end of this spectrum, a child’s parents could also smother them, letting the parents’ needs and desires rule the home. The latter may appear to be loving and caring to an outsider, but this behavior really only serves to fulfill the parent’s emotional needs. You as a person are not seen. Sometimes, parents are ashamed of their emotional emptiness, or they deny it. Processing occurs at two levels: rational and emotional. Rationally, you construct a logical story in your head that justifies to yourself what happened and how you responded—it does not necessarily matter whether it is true or not, as long as you believe it yourself. Emotional processing is not an option, because what happened is too distressing to deal with, and it is intercepted by a survival mechanism. This is what turns people into “wandering heads” because through this mechanism the emotional charge can be denied and stuffed away. It can also result in behavior aimed at keeping up appearances rather than behavior that comes straight from the heart.
HOW CAN YOU CREATE SPACE FOR EMOTIONAL PROCESSING?
Emotional processing takes place in your body. Emotions are felt in your body, such as in your belly or heart. Healing lies in engaging your primary emotions. These are the emotions that belong to the original situation or wound. This tends to be quite a complex thing in emotionally damaged people. With them, primary emotions get transformed into secondary emotions. It is easier to be indignant and angry (secondary emotions) than it is to feel primary emotions, such as loneliness, rejection, and powerlessness. With secondary emotions, it can seem like you are good at tapping into your feelings, but that is pretense. And when there is insufficient processing of primary emotions, the behavioral result can be defensiveness, victimization, and manipulation—such as emotional blackmail—or a person becomes emotionally distant and literally and figuratively withdraws.
WHAT ABOUT WITH PARENTS WHO HAVE NARCISSISTIC TRAITS?
If a parent has narcissistic tendencies, they can only be there for you if they have space, which is generally not the case. People with narcissistic tendencies are often insatiable. If they experience some kind of deficit, that usually has to be filled first, and then any leftover crumbs might be given to you. Please realize that such behavior is due to powerlessness and not a lack of willingness. There was a time when many things could not be talked about, and suffering had to be processed mostly alone. You never know what went on in the other person’s past that made narcissistic behavior the best possible option. After all, the behavior someone exhibits, no matter how destructive it may be, is always the “best choice for that moment,” otherwise they would have done things differently. Children have little influence on the narcissistic behavior of their parents. Feedback does not get taken on board in the long run, which results in disappointment. When children are older, they can set boundaries more easily, and this is necessary to protect themselves.
WHAT HAPPENS TO CHILDREN WHEN PARENTS ARE INTERNALLY ABSENT?
As a small child, you gaze into your parent’s eyes to get validation of your feelings, for love, or to seek comfort. If your parent can only respond to that gaze with emptiness, despair, or absence (because the parent is suffering deficits of their own at the time), the child learns to set aside their own needs in order to survive. The emptiness of the parent is felt by the child, and the child does whatever it can to care for the parent because that is when the child is most likely to receive something potentially nurturing. As a child, you exhibit adapted and learned behaviors. Everything you do needs to have a positive effect on the parent. You work to be “perfect”—everything is hidden behind a smile because your parent cannot adequately cope when something is wrong with you. You start ignoring your own needs. At a certain point, you no longer know who you are and how you can find yourself again. Your behavior can appear fake to those around you, except for the parent in question. You lack authentic behavior of your own. You also develop the belief “Fine, I will do it on my own,” and the frequent side effect of this is that your self-esteem depends on how accommodating you can be to others and to what extent that is valued and acknowledged.
WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EMOTIONALLY ABSENT PARENTS AND THE FAMILY SYSTEM?
Your family system is the inextricable connection you share with all your relatives, your blood ties. Only once you are standing in your own place do you become firm and strong as a person. But what is your place? I use a metaphor, called “the fountain,” to explain this. Imagine a beautiful fountain, made up of several tiers, all filled with water. At the top are your ancestors, below that are your grandparents. The next tier down is that of your biological parents, and below that comes you, with any full or half-siblings, miscarriages, abortions, and so forth, in birth order. Below that tier comes the tier with your children. And so it continues. You are always in the child tier, below your parents. No one place is better than the other. To feel inwardly fulfilled, you have to stand in your place in the fountain, allowing both parents their place in the tier above you and not assuming responsibility that is not yours (what I call “assuming undue responsibility”). As a child, you are never responsible for your parents’ happiness. Only when you stand in your place can you receive the invisible flow of the fountain that is so essential to your well-being. You can bet that if someone is struggling to find their place in everyday life, they are not standing in their place in the fountain.
Perhaps this metaphor has allowed you to determine for yourself whether you are standing in your place. And who knows, your parents might have also “ascended” to a tier above them because they took care of their parents (your grandparents) or have passed judgment on them. The moment you are not firmly, through your inner stance, in your place in the fountain, you are needy. A baby can immediately sense when a parent is needy and will, for example, start to relieve their mother by not asking for attention, or by asking for a lot of attention if their mother has a need to care. If you are not in your place in the fountain, chances are you have had to deal with complicated situations and confusing feelings, like “I loved my parents and yet I got spanked” or “I never did things right.” At their core, emotionally absent people have a heavy fate that has caused them to ascend in the fountain.
WHAT STEPS CAN YOU TAKE TO STAND IN YOUR RIGHTFUL PLACE IN YOUR FAMILY SYSTEM WHEN NARCISSISM AND EMOTIONALLY ABSENT PARENTS HAVE PLAYED A ROLE IN YOUR LIFE?
Realize that today you no longer depend on your parents’ care for your survival. They have given what they were able to give you and that is nearly always enough. Parents are a package deal: all the beautiful, the not-so-beautiful, and everything you longed for and will never receive. It is not uncommon to blame them for not seeing you. In fact, the question is whether you can see them. Because to truly see them is to accept the entire package deal that they are. If you reject them or keep focusing on what was not there, you will only see the less beautiful aspects of the package deal. The key is to find a suitable rational and emotional answer to the question of “what is mine and what is theirs.” You release what is not yours and, if necessary, give feedback and set boundaries. You face what is yours and experience it in your body in order to process it emotionally. This enables you to stand in your place in the fountain, thus resolving your neediness. You will then be able to take excellent care of your children, and all their energy can go into themselves instead of them having to fill your voids and fulfill your needs.
In my book, The Fountain: Find Your Place, I describe how you can release your children from your neediness by descending to your place in the fountain. The good news is that this is always entirely within your control. It does not matter whether your parents are alive or not, or even whether you knew them or not. What matters is that you see your parents and “accept” them.
COULD YOU SHARE THREE PIECES OF ADVICE FOR PARENTS ABOUT BEING EMOTIONALLY AVAILABLE TO THEIR CHILDREN?
People can be eternally, temporarily, and briefly emotionally unavailable. Realize that your way of being present affects your surroundings. It is smart to check that you are in the here and now and in your body before you enter a place, rather than being in your mind on things elsewhere. A few minutes of breathing exercises or doing a body scan from a place of mindfulness before you “step into the next thing,” can make the difference between real contact or hassle and the “confirmation” that things will never be different.
Make sure you are standing in your own, unique place in the fountain. With that, also look at any potentially traumatic experiences and depression. Academic, author, and podcaster Brené Brown puts it so well, “When we’re suffering, many of us are better at causing pain than feeling it.” Perpetration and victimization are often two sides of the same coin. Seek professional help if necessary. You cannot just “get rid” of depression or trauma, nor do you have to deal with it alone.
Know your triggers that cause your survival component to step in. If you know what kinds of situations are difficult for you, you can prepare for them. After all, things do not just happen to you. Your sensitivities are yours, and the world will not usually adapt to you or your needs. If it did, you would be a very privileged person indeed. What you can do, though, is decide how you want to deal with any given situation. That is what instills dignity, and it also sets a wonderful example for your children when it comes to how they can deal with difficult situations.
WHAT THEMES DO YOU NEED TO HEAL AS AN ADULT IF YOUR PARENTS WERE UNAVAILABLE IN YOUR CHILDHOOD?
The most important theme is “daring to live.” That includes both giving and being able to receive. It can be quite scary to be seen and to be in the spotlight. After all, you are not used to that when you have grown up with emotionally unavailable parents. Overcome your shyness and dare to stand in the light with people who can see you. And learn to endure that you are doing well, even though your loved ones around you may not always be doing so well.
One of the ways Simone de Beauvoir beautifully defined the art of living is this: “I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth—and truth rewarded me.” You create merely a “lifestyle” if you stick to an ideal image. And when you stick to an ideal image, you linger on the surface of life instead of getting to know yourself as the package deal that you, too, are. If you keep wanting to do everything perfectly, you will never be able to be yourself. Learn to make choices and set boundaries. Accept the consequences of this graciously, without sulking, otherwise you will just be exhibiting the behavior of a child. Dare to be yourself, without using that as an excuse to avoid change, and continue to develop into an even better version of yourself. People are capable of growing beyond things. That does, however, require awareness of the situation and action rather than passivity. Realize that you will only begin to feel satisfied with yourself when you can allow your parents to be who they are. After all, you are 50% your biological father and 50% your biological mother. The circle of emotionally unavailable parents can largely be broken by accepting your parents for who they are and what they have been able to give you. You will also have to face your other personal issues. When you say yes to your fate, you will always find strength. Trust in that.