Running on Empty No More: Transform Your Relationships with Your Partner, Your Parents & Your Children

surface. Many of us were raised by parent-figures who had difficulty navigating their emotions as a result of their own unresolved childhood pain. They may have projected this pain onto us directly, when they urged us not to cry, or indirectly, when they withdrew in response to our displays of emotion.

The story is a tragic example of the deep damage that can occur in a toxic parent-child relationship when the more normal feelings of mutual affection get distorted into a mirroring of the mutual defenses of numbing and out-of-control acting out.

A child who has painful experiences early in life will either feel cut off from those around him or will attempt to fuse with them, not knowing where he leaves off and others begin. This lack

Many therapists believe that adults unconsciously repeat unhealthy patterns from their early parent-child relationships—for example, picking partners who are unavailable in ways that are similar to how a parent was unavailable. In these cases healing is often a matter of becoming aware of the pattern, working through these childhood wounds in thera