Adult children of emotionally immature parents

Dombey and Son

Charles Dickens

Classic Book Hall of Frame

Toxic Parents

Susan Forward

Are you the child of toxic parents? When you were a child... • Did your parents tell you you were bad or worthless? • Did your parents use physical pain to discipline you? • Did you have to take care of your parents because of their problems? • Were you often frightened of your parents? • Did your parents do anything to you that had to be kept secret? Now that you’re an adult... • Do your parents still treat you as if you were a child? • Do you have intense emotional or physical reactions after spending time with your parents? • Do your parents control you with threats or guilt? Do they manipulate you with money? • Do you feel that no matter what you do, it’s never good enough for your parents? In this remarkable self-help guide, Dr. Susan Forward draws on case histories and the real-life voices of adult children of toxic parents to help you free yourself from the frustrating patterns of your relationship with your parents — and discover a new world of self-confidence, inner strength, and emotional independence.

Das Drama des begabten Kindes und die Suche nach dem wahren Selbst

Alice Miller

The “drama” of the gifted—i.e., sensitive, alert—child consists of his recognition at a very early age of his parents' needs and of his adaptation to those needs. In the process, he learns to repress rather than to acknowledge his own intense feelings because they are unacceptable to his parents. Although it will not always be possible to avoid these “ugly” feelings (anger, indignation, despair, jealousy, fear) in the future, they will split off, and the most vital part of the “true self” (a key phrase in Alice Miller's works) will not be integrated into the personality. This leads to emotional insecurity and loss of self, which are revealed in depression or concealed behind a facade of grandiosity.Alice Miller defines the ideal state of genuine vitality, of free access to the true self and to authentic individual feelings that have their roots in childhood, as “healthy narcissism.” Narcissistic disturbances, on the other hand, represent for her solitary confinement of the true self within the prison of the false self. This is regarded less as an illness than as a tragedy.The examples Alice Miller presents make us aware of the child's unarticulated suffering and of the tragedy of parents who are unavailable to their children—the same parents who, when they were children, were available to fill their parents' needs. In her psychoanalytical work, Dr. Miller found that her patients' ability to experience authentic feelings, especially feelings of sadness, had been for the most part destroyed; it was her task to help her patients try to regain that long-lost capacity for genuine feelings that is the source of natural vitality. Many people who have read her books have discovered within themselves for the first time in their lives the little child they once were. This may explain the unusually strong and deep reactions Alice Miller's books have evoked in so many readers from different countries. The Drama of the Gifted Child and the Search for the True Self is the origina

Prozac nation

Elizabeth Wurtzel

Elizabeth Wurtzel's New York Times best-selling memoir, with a new afterword "Sparkling, luminescent prose . . . A powerful portrait of one girl's journey through the purgatory of depression and back." --New York Times "A book that became a cultural touchstone." --New Yorker Elizabeth Wurtzel writes with her finger on the faint pulse of an overdiagnosed generation whose ruling icons are Kurt Cobain, Xanax, and pierced tongues. Her famous memoir of her bouts with depression and skirmishes with drugs, Prozac Nation is a witty and sharp account of the psychopharmacology of an era for readers of Girl, Interrupted and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar.