Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson

Author:Lindsay C. Gibson [Gibson, Lindsay C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw, pdf
ISBN: 9781626251724
Publisher: New Harbinger Publications
Published: 2015-05-31T22:00:00+00:00

Ron’s Story

Ron was a lifelong internalizer with chronic back pain who constantly tried to please his self-involved mother and critical boss. He originally came to therapy with an internalizer’s perspective, looking for ways he could change his life. But as work stresses increased and he began to feel the loneliness and lack of support in his life, he started externalizing by taking more pain medication and drinking more. Finally, Ron confessed to me that he thought he was going too far in abusing alcohol and pills, and shortly thereafter he sought residential treatment to get his addiction under control. With specialized care, he was able to return to using his own inner coping as the way to solve his problems, rather than turning to the externalizing escape of drugs.

Exercise: Identifying Your Coping Style

This exercise will help you identify whether you tend to be more of an internalizer or externalizer. If you’d like to use the checklists below to assess other people and see which coping style seems to characterize them, use the downloadable version of this exercise available at http://www.newharbinger.com/31700. (See the back of the book for instructions on how to access it. With the downloadable content, you’ll also find a table summarizing these traits. You might want to print it out and keep it at hand so you can use it to quickly peg others’ coping styles.)

Note that the attributes listed below lie at the extreme ends of the spectrum, accentuating the basic differences in how these two types approach life’s challenges. As a reminder, in real life people are likely to exist somewhere along a continuum for these traits. Still, most people will resemble one type more than the other.

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