Quick thing before the holiday weekend.

Your Emotionally Immature Parent is invested in you looking like the crazy one.

Emotionally immature parents, especially the more punishing or slightly “sadistic” ones (and I know that word sounds extreme, but I’m using it in its true clinical meaning), often feel a sense of relief when they can position you as the bad one.

This is because EIPs carry overwhelming internal chaos made up of shame, rage, inadequacy, and fear, and they have little to no capacity to process any of it.

So instead of dealing with those feelings, they push them onto you.

If they can make you the problem—the crazy one, the difficult one, the dramatic one—they get to feel like the stable one. The reasonable one. The wise one.

This process is physiologically soothing to them.

And it's why they escalate when you stay calm. Why they twist your words until you sound irrational. Why they'll say things so outrageous you'll spend the drive home wondering if you're the one losing your mind.

What I need you to remember:

You don't have to take the bait. You don't have to convince them you're right. You don't have to make them understand.

It's okay if they're wrong about you. It's okay if their version of you is completely distorted.

Because you and I both know who you actually are.

You're the one who's quite literally trying to heal intergenerational cycles. You're the one who seeks out help (you just being here is proof of that). You're the one willing to be even just remotely self aware.

You're not the problem. You never were.

So when it gets hard tomorrow, please remember: they can be chaotic, AND you can still be okay.

Big hugs

Morgan

P.S. for those of you not seeing family tomorrow: holiday triggers still hit hard. Grief, rage, emptiness, longing, the ache of what should have been but never was, etc. Whatever you're feeling right now: I see you. I know that exact weight. You're not alone in this; thousands of us are carrying the same thing, and we're here with you. I want you to know that I get it — that not seeing them doesn’t mean you’re free of them yet. And that’s okay. We can work on that together

P.P.S. Enrollment for the holiday workshop opens tomorrow. If the holidays usually leave you spiraling with grief, guilt, and rage, you won’t want to miss this.

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