Treating Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: A Clinician's Guide

Help your clients heal the emotional wounds created by growing up with emotionally immature parents.

If you treat clients who grew up with an emotionally immature, unavailable, or self-involved parent, you know all too well the lingering feelings of anger, loneliness, betrayal, or abandonment these clients experience in their daily lives. This comprehensive professional guide goes beyond mechanistic prescriptions to show you how to help clients not only recover from their symptoms--such as a lack of confidence--but to also restart their own personal growth and self-actualization process.

In Treating Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, psychologist and New York Times bestselling author Lindsay C. Gibson draws on more than thirty years of clinical experience as a psychotherapist, and outlines a unique approach to treating an extremely common syndrome that shapes the lives of so many people seeking therapy. In the book, Gibson also shares her perspectives on the goals of therapy, and what therapists need to know in order to provide the most effective interventions. Using these insights, you can help your clients heal from feelings of loneliness and abandonment, improve confidence, decrease reactivity to emotionally immature behavior, find healthy ways to stop self-sacrificing and meet their own emotional needs, and rediscover their true selves.

You'll also find powerful, effective therapeutic strategies to:

• Establish a healing relationship with your clients
• Help your clients feel seen and validated
• Teach clients how to draw boundaries with emotionally immature people
• Help clients think through when to cut ties with their parents or others
• Help clients uncover self-defeating beliefs and engage in self-healing work

By helping clients free themselves from the effects of emotionally immature people--whether their parents or other people in their lives--you'll help them to create healthy, reciprocal, and positive relationships that uplift them and improve their overall quality of life.

Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD, is a clinical psychologist who has been a psychotherapist for more than thirty-five years, working in both public and private practice. In the past, Gibson has served as adjunct assistant professor for the Virginia Consortium Program in clinical psychology, teaching doctoral students clinical theory and psychotherapy techniques. She specializes in working with adults to attain new levels of personal growth, emotional intimacy with others, and confidence in dealing with emotionally immature family members.

Gibson is author of five books: Who You Were Meant to Be, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents, Self-Carefor Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, and Disentangling from Emotionally Immature People. She also wrote a monthly column on well-being for Tidewater Women and Tidewater Family magazines for more than twenty years. Her website is available at www.drlindsaygibson.com. Gibson lives and works in Virginia Beach, VA.