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Lockdown Reading to End DSM

Psychiatry? - Mad In America
Magdalene Sylvaire, BA/LLB, LLM, MA
23-29 minutes

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted life around our

world, doubts about psychiatry’s future exposed its professional
identity crisis, which was apparently self-inflicted by its “troubling
search for a biology of mental illness.” Other research shows that
adverse childhood experiences (emotional-mental, physical, sexual,
and financial abuse by a child’s parents or caregivers) cause long-
term negative physical and psychological outcomes in adulthood.
These non-medical causes of our distress support the views of
trauma-recovery psychiatrists like John Briere, Ph.D., who is said to
have remarked,

“If Complex PTSD were ever given its due—that is, if the role of
dysfunctional parenting in adult psychological disorders was ever
fully recognized, the DSM (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders used by all mental health professionals) would
shrink to the size of a thin pamphlet.”

During the present pandemic, many who are in hospital, who have
lost loved ones and jobs, or who are locked down at home as
others quarantine in hotels, will be grieving an enormous sense of
loss. Though some might try to replace their loss with on-line
shopping, or with marathon mainstream and social media
consumption, others are embracing this sudden worldwide
disruption as an opportunity to join online book clubs and prayer or
meditation groups. Many more are admitting that life was already
precariously painful well before this pandemic which is forcing us to
change.

In this regard, two excellent self-help books written by U.S. clinical

psychologist Lindsay Gibson, Psy.D. are essential reading at this
time. Gibson’s books might also help to further shrink the DSM and
end the business of mental disorder marketing, by addressing the
root cause of why so many people have succumbed to biomedical
DSM psychiatry in the first place. These books are: Adult Children
of Emotionally Immature Parents: How To Heal From Distant,

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Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents (which I’ll refer to as Book 1)

and Recovering From Emotionally Immature Parents: Practical
Tools To Establish Boundaries and Reclaim Your Emotional
Autonomy (Book 2).

Although there are already many self-help oriented pop-psychology

books on toxic parents, physical disease caused by childhood
trauma, “inner child” theory, and the latest trend, “narcissism,” by
and large, they do not address our current existential crisis of “self”
and “identity.” Whilst academic psychiatry and psychology debate
their definitions of “narcissism,” Gibson’s books seem to address
the whole “narcissistic abuse” phenomenon without using
hackneyed phrases like “the narcissist” or the questionable DSM-5
definition of “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” (NPD). Instead,
Gibson employs her notion of emotional immaturity, which she
prefers as it is “broader than a clinical diagnosis … more useful and
less pathologizing” as emotional immaturity can underlie many
psychological problems, including narcissism.

Existential Loneliness (Before Social Distancing)—The Cause of

An “Identity Crisis”?

In Book 1, Gibson begins by clarifying that even though adults

experience emotional loneliness, such loneliness can also start in
childhood when we might have felt (and I would submit, actually
were) unseen emotionally by self-preoccupied parents. Gibson
observes that the most outwardly successful adult parents can lack
any capacity for emotional intimacy, which provokes profound
emotional loneliness in their children.

Without implying that all children are “ego-centric,” as other

psychologists might do (which effectively blames children for
“misinterpreting” their parents’ immature behavior), Gibson’s books
spotlight parental dysfunction without defending, rationalizing or
excusing parents. Such parents “may look and act perfectly normal,
caring for their child’s physical health and providing meals and
safety,” she writes. “However, if they don’t make a solid emotional
connection with their child, the child will have a gaping hole where
true security might have been.”

As Gibson also points out, children’s existential loneliness due to

feeling unseen by their parents (rendering them alone in the world)
is as painful as a physical injury. Gibson’s insights thus do perhaps
lend support to valid criticism of censorious parenting trends such
as “helicopter parenting” and “safetyism,” “paranoid parenting” or

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“narcissistic parenting,” as she says that real emotional intimacy is

about feeling safe enough to open up to another person about all of
our feelings. Whether by words, an exchange of looks, or just being
present together quietly in a state of connection (rather than doing
constant activities or ingratiatingly “affirming” whatever children
say), Gibson says that emotional intimacy between parent and child
provides “a sense of being seen for who you really are … which
can only exist when the other person seeks to know you, not judge
you.”

Gibson’s definition of “who you really are” does not invoke identity
concepts derived from role-performance, but rather refers to our
core, primal feeling and emotional experiences of our world and the
people who are supposed to love and care for us. Emotionally
immature (EI) parents, however, do label their children according to
pre-conceived roles—according to a child’s actions,
accomplishments and choices. EI parents do this because they are
so self-absorbed, insecure, dominating, and controlling, that they
are unaware of their children’s inner experiences. Gibson further
describes EI parents as nervous, angry and punishing, rather than
comforting to their children. This shuts down children’s instinctive
healthy urge to reach out to their parents when they are afraid and
distressed.

Gibson then explains that our sense of “self” and feeling secure in
the world, begins in our childhood relationship with our
caretakers—our parents. If our parents are emotionally mature and
engaged, they will allow us to feel confident that we always have
someone secure to turn to. But those of us who were raised by EI
parents had no way to know that the hollow, empty and insecure
feeling inside us was a normal reaction to our parents’ emotional
immaturity. This lonely feeling is said to be a universal human
response to a lack of adequate human companionship (for which
some governments now appoint “Ministers for Loneliness”). Gibson
however, does not psychiatrically medicalize loneliness, instead
assuring her readers that it is the predictable result of growing up
(and perhaps still living) without receiving sufficient empathy.

Recognizing the Emotionally Immature Relationship System and

Emotionally Immature Parents (or People)

Book 1 introduces Gibson’s notion of an “emotionally immature

relationship system” (EIR system) and how and why EI parents put
their own needs first, ahead of and at the expense of their own

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children. Gibson describes EI parents’ tactics in an EIR system,

such as role coercion, which is forcing someone else to live out a
pseudo-self or role-self (which I’ll refer to collectively as a “pseudo
role-self identity”) and act in a certain way according to it, because
they want them to.

Emotional contagion is another EI parent (or any other EI person)

tactic by which they get other people to feel what they are feeling,
by spreading their upset feelings to others, so everyone reacts
without understanding why. EI parents use role coercion and
emotional contagion to routinely violate their children’s personal
boundaries. EI parents also seem to effectively make their children
parent them (referred to by other psy literature as “parentification”),
by expecting children to soothe their feelings and emotions. In this
way, children are forced to fulfill their parents’ responsibility for
“emotional work.” Gibson’s practical explanation of emotional
contagion by EI parents and EI people complements public self-
help information about such parents that is already widely available.
Gibson also explains the nature and origin of inner shame and guilt
in adults as early childhood emotional distress responses to EI
parents.

Book 1 describes the tell-tale behavior of EI parents, which helps

readers to discern for themselves, whether they grew up under EI
parenting. Readers can then self-assess whether now as adults,
they are still attracting and attracted to what Gibson calls “EI
people,” who are similar to their EI parents. Gibson’s books may
therefore help readers to identify and handle EI people in all areas
of life, such as: at work, in marriages and friendships, and in society
at large.

EI parents’ other tactics include role-entitlement, such as by

demanding certain treatment simply because they are in the role of
“parent.” There are also tactics of role-coercion and role-
compliance, by which EI parents force their children to act out
designated “roles.” Role-coercion tactics can range from shaming,
guilt, threats, physical or other forms of abuse, and excessive over-
intellectualization, to playing favourites between siblings, emotional
enmeshment (parents’ emotional dependency on, or idealization of
a child), and shunning or outright rejection of children.

Gibson says that such harmful behavior occurs because EI parents

“relate on the basis of roles, not individuality.” Consequently, young
children (and adult children of EI parents) learn to respond to their
EI parents by becoming internalizers or externalizers.

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Internalizers develop a coping habit of solving problems from the

inside out, by being self-reflective, trying to learn from their
mistakes and enjoying becoming more competent. Similar to pop-
culture terms like “people pleaser” and “empath” to “victim of
narcissistic abuse” or even “co-dependent,” Gibson describes
internalizers as those who believe they can make things better (for
everyone) by trying harder and instinctively taking responsibility for
solving problems (including presumably, others’ problems) on their
own.

Interestingly, Gibson says that internalizers don’t see abuse for

what it is, and their main source of anxiety and guilt is “feeling guilty
when they displease others and the fear of being exposed as
imposters. Their biggest relationship downfall is being overly self-
sacrificing and then becoming resentful of how much they do for
others.”

Gibson’s contrasting notion of “externalizers” sounds similar to

circulating pop-culture memes on “the narcissist” which are the
subject of countless self-help books, internet blogs, mainstream
media articles, public discourse, and scores of YouTube videos.
Gibson defines externalizers as those who are reactive, act before
they think, tend not to self-reflect and do things impulsively to blow
off anxiety quickly. Externalizers blame other people and
circumstances, rather than their own actions, and experience life as
a trial and error but rarely learn from their mistakes. Akin to popular
self-help concepts like “narcissistic supply,” Gibson says
externalizers are attached firmly to the notion that things need to
change in the outside world in order for them to be happy,
“believing that if only other people would give them what they want,
their problems would be solved.”

Importantly, Gibson further describes externalizers as having a self-

defeating and disruptive coping style, such that others have to
repair the damage caused by their impulsive actions. They may
have a sense of inflated superiority (which sounds like the
grandiosity trait in the DSM-5 definition of narcissism). Gibson also
masterfully draws attention to the fact that externalizing people
depend on external forms of soothing, which makes them
susceptible to many forms of immediate gratification and addiction
(such as, arguably, addictive relationships and substance abuse, or
as others might suggest, even addictions to psychiatry and
psychotherapy).

People who become internalizers or externalizers are thus not, it

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would seem, necessarily genetically born this way. Yet Gibson’s

books do make some questionable comments about biology, by
saying for example, that “some children’s genetics and neurology
propel them into impulsive reactivity instead of constructive action.”

Gibson notably observes how living our lives through a pseudo

role-self identity is an unconscious survival coping response to EI
parents. However, this pseudo role-self (which renowned spiritual
writers like Eckhart Tolle call “ego”) replaces our original true self,
which Gibson says “has no interest in whatever desperate ideas
you came up with in childhood regarding a healing fantasy or role-
self.”

As adults, we may still continue playing whatever false, pseudo role

self-identity we adopted in childhood “in the hopes that someone
will pay attention to us the way we wished our parents had as
pretending to be what their parents want, children think they’ve
found a way to win their parents’ love.” Gibson’s profound insight
here raises other important questions for readers to consider that
are beyond the scope of this review, such as whether child
psychology needs to re-examine if and how early childhood identity
formation is influenced by parents (as some research has found).

The rest of Book 1 explains how to break free of pseudo role-self

identities adopted in childhood to survive EI parents, and to grieve
the impossibility of what Gibson calls “parent healing fantasies.”
Healing fantasies are those which have us clinging to a hopeful
story about what will make us happy one day, such as dreaming
that our parents can change, will finally love us, make up for the
emotional loneliness they caused in us, and become the loving
parent we never had but needed and deserved when we were
children. Book 1 also describes what it feels like to grieve the death
of parent healing fantasies, live a life free of pseudo role self-
identities, and learn to find emotionally mature people with whom to
now connect as adults.

Citing John Bowlby’s seminal Attachment Theory, Gibson explains

why being raised by EI parents causes us to gravitate repeatedly to
familiar situations and EI people who share our parents’ emotional
immaturity. We do this because “by denying the painful truth about
our parents, we aren’t able to recognize similarly hurtful people in
future relationships. Denial makes us repeat the situation over and
over because we never see it coming the next time.”

Parent healing fantasies and denial about being raised by EI

parents (or medically camouflaging the lonely distress that EI

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parents cause as a “mental health issue”), can have dangerous

implications. As Gibson writes: “Our vulnerability to self-centered
authority starts in childhood when EI parents teach us that our
thoughts are not as worthwhile as their thoughts and [we] … accept
whatever our parent tells us. It’s easy to see how EI parenting could
turn out children who later fall prey to extremism, exploitation or
even cults.” Gibson’s insights here seem pertinent for the: #MeToo
movement, de-radicalisation programs, consent laws and
investigations into sexual abuse, all of which might need to ask
whether EI Parenting itself constitutes “victim grooming”?

Book 1 explains beautifully how to awaken our “true self,” which

Gibson says is a concept that goes back to ancient times when the
idea of having a soul first arose. Again, it’s worth noting that when
talking about our “true self,” Gibson does not seem to invoke role-
performance identity concepts. Gibson says, for example, that “this
self is the source of our unique individuality … the consciousness
that speaks the truth at the center of a person’s being.” This clear
and inclusive explanation of “self” is what arguably sets Gibson’s
books apart from other psychology discourse that seldom mentions
soul (even though the “soul” was part of the original meaning of the
term psyche from the Greek language). However, Gibson also
says that “whatever our true self is, it is based in our biology as
human beings” which is a point that needs more clarification.

Change and Recovery (Without DSM-5 Diagnoses and Psychiatric

Drugs)

Book 2 is in two parts and expands on the themes in Book 1 by

offering new skills with which we can identify and resist emotionally
coercive takeovers by EI parents (and EI people at large). In Book
2 Chapter 4, Gibson discusses the tactic of emotional takeovers, by
which the EI parent creates situations to project their emotional
contagion onto others. Gibson explains our psychological survival
response of “dissociation” which is when “you feel psychologically
separate from yourself … freeze up or shrivel inside … you feel like
you’re detached from your body.”

Gibson says dissociation is where we feel we have exited our

bodies, which can occur when facing severe threats and abuse,
and then becomes an unconscious habitual response to all
emotionally coercive takeovers. As Gibson also says, contrary to
dramatic stories about “multiple personalities,” dissociation is a
“natural defense … a primitive type of emotional escape … a

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common psychological defense against threat or danger, especially

for children in an unsafe environment.” Gibson explains that such
separation from our inner self-connection makes us passive so we
are sucked into EI parents’ emotional takeovers.

Book 2 Chapter 7 invites adult readers to effectively re-parent

themselves by learning to understand, value, and be responsible
for respecting and comforting their own emotions. Gibson here
expands on the true self notion she mentions in Book 1, by offering
the idea of an inner self which she refers to as our “soul, spirit,
heart, the you of you … the internal witness—the nucleus of our
being—that takes in all of life but is unchanged by life … your
unique individuality, underneath your personality, family role, and
social identity.”

Book 2 Chapter 8 then helps us to clear our minds of the incessant,

negative critical voices in our heads, which are echoes of our
parents’ opinions about us. Using diagrams, Gibson’s book depicts
how to silence the intrusion of our parents’ thoughts and criticisms
by showing us how to differentiate inner critical thoughts inherited
from our parents from those thoughts which emanate from our inner
self or conscience. Whilst many self-help social media, pop-
psychology, or spiritual writers talk about listening to our “intuition,”
Gibson’s advice on this is practical and clear. She says to mistrust
any thoughts that give you a sinking feeling, as legitimate
conscience guides us, whereas harsh self-judgments are
mockeries that echo the rigid thinking of our EI parents when we
were children.

Book 2 Chapter 9 invites readers to establish their own authority

and sense of self-worth. Gibson’s approach for doing this seems
different from Cognitive Behavioural Therapies because here,
rejecting and correcting negative critical voices in the head seems
to effectively involve disidentifying from the voices (rather than just
rationally countering them cognitively), by realizing they are echoes
of EI parents’ distorted opinions about us.

Interestingly, Gibson further explains that depressive thinking is

promoted by making children feel guilty or ashamed in childhood,
through past emotional coercions by EI parents. This chapter is
especially intriguing because Gibson cites and adapts Dr. Stephen
Karpman’s Drama Triangle Theory to demonstrate how EI parents
place everyone (including themselves) into distorted, unconscious
pseudo role-self identities. These roles are namely:
Aggressor/Villain (which some pop-psychology might call “The

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Narcissist”), Victim/Innocent, and Rescuer/Hero. EI parents thus

“see every situation as a story populated by victims, aggressors, or
rescuers … and jump to conclusions about who’s bad, who’s
innocent, and who should step in to save them.” Consequently,
Gibson’s book potentially goes further than almost any other book
in this genre, by showing readers how to be alert to and break free
from every relationship or situation that is actually a Drama Triangle
trap.

Letting Forgiveness Happen Naturally (Without Religion or

Psychotherapy)

There is a deep presence, warmth, and wisdom in Gibson’s Adult

Children of Emotionally Immature Parents books. Although she is a
parent herself, Gibson’s writing contains little to no hint of parental
defensiveness or excuse-making. Her books’ compassionate
narrator voice gives readers permission to recount honestly their
own parents’ emotionally immature behavior, whilst understanding
the inter-generational cycle by which EI parents socially inherited
their dysfunction from their EI parents. Consequently, Gibson’s
books do not seem to mention nor advocate “forgiveness”
specifically. Instead, her approach seems to be about allowing
forgiveness to happen naturally and inevitably. At the beginning of
Book 2 for example, Gibson writes:

“Your parents gave you life and love, but only of the sort they knew.
You can honour them for that but cease to give them unwarranted
power over your emotional well-being.…”

This sounds similar to the non-sectarian spiritual teachings of

Eckhart Tolle, who counsels against trying to let go of grievances
because “trying to forgive” does not work. Tolle says that
forgiveness happens naturally when you see that grievances have
no purpose other than to strengthen a false sense of self. Indeed,
akin to Gibson’s books, Tolle himself recognizes that childhood is
often a source of pain in adulthood, saying in A New Earth that
“Most psychotherapists have met patients who claimed initially to
have had a totally happy childhood, and later the opposite turned
out to be the case.”

Final Thoughts on Why Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

Is Essential Reading

There are some potential problems in Gibson’s books worth

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mentioning, such as her brief suggestions of mindfulness and

meditation practices as ways to heal emotions. Nothing seems to
be said, for example, about the ethical void that might be left by
using secular, spiritually stripped, psychologized capitalist forms of
“McMindfulness” meditation.

Otherwise, Gibson’s Adult Children of Emotionally Immature

Parents books are stunning because they show how EI parents in
dysfunctional family systems are replicated in adult EI relationship
systems, which psychohistory might say reappears as dysfunctional
political-economic, social and legal systems that cause needless
suffering. The genuine respect Gibson shows her readers and
clients, viewing them as fellow human beings, rather than as
medically sick mental-health patients, is reflected in her warm and
wise narrator voice which she enriches with sensitive anecdotes
from real cases.

I suggest that Gibson’s books have the potential to help readers

end transgenerational cycles of family abuse and resolve lifelong
emotional distress, so they are no longer vulnerable to accepting or
seeking DSM-5 mental disorder diagnoses and the emotion
numbing drug prescriptions that can go with them. Gibson does
suggest that some readers might need the support of a
psychotherapist when reading her books. However, as some warn
of a risk that psychotherapy may cause further harm, if some forms
of therapy are unsuitable for childhood trauma from EI parenting,
readers may need to seek out only those therapists, counsellors or
social workers who specialise in childhood trauma from emotionally
immature (narcissistic) parents and dysfunctional family systems
(and who have perhaps faced and resolved their own EI parent
attachment trauma). Otherwise, readers may find support from
other well-informed sources (such as the Crappy Childhood Fairy
YouTube series and coaching programs).

Gibson’s books are a delight to read (and re-read) and I cannot

recommend them highly enough, especially at the present time.
The quiet success of Gibson’s Emotionally Immature Parents books
(they are Amazon bestsellers) seems to have even turned the
phrase “emotionally immature parents” into a meme spread by pop-
psychotherapists and life coaches on YouTube. This might be
because Gibson assures anyone who feels lost, alone, and
distressed that their feelings and emotions are normal, rational
responses to childhood experiences (and, I would add, to the
frightened and confused world in which we live right now). By

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showing us how painful emotions can be experienced, understood,

witnessed and calmed (without numbing them with psychiatric
drugs, addictive relationships or mindless consumerism), Gibson’s
books light a path home to the loving and true inner voice of the
conscience in our heart—our soul.

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