Non-emerging adulthood: Helping parents of adult children with entrenched dependence

This book offers a therapeutic approach to a problem that many families and mental health institutions face: a growing number of adult-children who struggle to progress to a psychological, social adulthood. The family patterns that revolve around adult-children can remain inert for decades, are often resistant to conventional therapy, and can cause chronic suffering to adult children, parents, and extended families. The book presents a guide for therapists working with families of adult-children who are dependent on their parents in highly dysfunctional ways. It is based on 10 years of clinical work with hundreds of such families. It summarizes what we have learned about the use of Non-Violent Resistance (NVR) therapy in such cases, and shares about the processes of entrenched dependence, accommodation and de-accommodation and their roles in perpetuating or alleviating these families' sufferings. Since 2009, the author using the concept of Adult Entrenched Dependence (AED) to refer to an interpersonal pattern that forms in certain families between young adults or adolescents and their parents. The book links AED to the labyrinth of emerging adulthood, describing it as a failure to emerge. It describes why parental NVR is well suited to treating AED and presents a detailed presentation of the NVR manual for AED. The book presents the NVR approach to suicide threats that, tacitly or overtly, are highly present in families with adult-children. Although the literature on suicide is immense, little has been written on how parents can cope when the child voices a suicide threat. It deals with the precursors of AED in childhood and adolescence and describes how to deal with situations that require adaptations of the protocol. This book is intended as a guide for mental health professionals interested in NVR interventions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)