Are You Like your Parents? - Absorption and Rejection - Bob Hoffman

The terms absorption and rejection come from Bob Hoffman's book No One Is to Blame, and they describe two equally dysfunctional ways a child ends up carrying a parent's character into adulthood. In this video, Patrick Teahan, LICSW walks viewers through a self-guided version of Hoffman's exercise, designed to help childhood trauma survivors see which traits of an abusive parent they unconsciously took on, and which they rebelled against.

Patrick reads an alphabetical list of character adjectives and asks viewers to pick a parent or abusive caregiver, jot down the words that really nail them, and then go back through the list twice: first circling the traits they absorbed (learned to be), then starring the traits they rejected so strongly that they became the opposite. He uses a personal story about his father, who had narcissistic personality disorder and would rage at bill collectors on the phone, to illustrate how rejecting a parent's aggression can quietly produce its own dysfunction — in his case, becoming overly passive and easy to take advantage of.

The exercise is framed as a diagnostic tool for the inner child work that follows: until survivors can see which parts of a parent are living inside them in either direction, the patterns stay invisible and keep running the show in adult relationships.