The Joys of Being an Internalizer and How It Can Lead to Healing and Growth

Are you an internalizer? What does that mean exactly? And more importantly, how can you make the most of it? Learn what internalizers and externalizers are, how to deal with emotional loneliness and break childhood patterns. I read one of the best books I’ve ever seen just recently. It’s called ‘Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents’ and safe to say, it’s written for me. I’ve been eyeing it for a long time now and knew it’s a good one, but the timing just wasn’t right as I was working on other things. Last month the timing was just right though and I ordered and read it quickly. Not only this, but I’ve already seen massive results and even had the chance to implement all that I learned. I needed it because I wanted to get more clarity about my childhood and mostly about my dynamics with my father, who is the most triggering person in my life. There’s a lot of self-healing to be done but I needed to understand him better. The book helped me in a few powerful ways. First, it allowed me to understand that I was expecting understanding and a supportive and emotional connection from a person who simply isn’t capable of giving me that. Sounds simple but learning the theory behind this was all I needed to accept this once and for all. Second, it allowed me to let go of the guilt I had associated with avoiding many situations with my dad and having set strong boundaries in the last years. Turns out, I was right to do that. Now that the guilt is gone, I can add even more boundaries to protect my energy and avoid conflict. Third, it explained a very specific feeling I’ve been having (and what being an internalizer means) ever since I was a kid. Now I recognize it as emotional loneliness caused by the emotional neglect by an emotionally immature parent. In adulthood, this results in attracting similar people. In my case, emotionally unavailable men, and expecting from them a level of intimacy that they simply can’t provide. Or put in other words, because my dad couldn’t love me the way I wanted to be loved, that’s a pattern I now repeat to seek comfort. As kids, we associate safety with familiarity. So as adults, we imitate the environment from our childhood. Until the day we open our eyes, do some healing and stop operating from a child’s mentality. The book also explains why the children of such parents were totally normal, why the way they feel now is a natural response to what happened during childhood, and why their parents are the way they are. This goes back to their childhood, of course. I find all this fascinating. And the quick progress I saw thanks to this content is that I just came back from visiting family back in my home country, after not having visited for a long time. Which means being around my dad for nearly 2 weeks, which offers a couple hundred opportunities to be triggered and turn into a version of myself I don’t like. I’m happy to say this is the first time ever that I did not allow a trigger to have control over me. I applied the steps I learned in the book for managing emotions and dealing with emotionally immature people,