WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®

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Emotional Wounds: Overly Critical or Strict Parents

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When you’re writing a character, it’s important to know why she is the way she is. Knowing her backstory is important to achieving this end, and one of the most impactful pieces of a character’s backstory is her emotional wound. This negative experience from the past is so intense that a character will go to great lengths to avoid experiencing that kind of pain and negative emotion again. As a result, certain behaviors, beliefs, and character traits will emerge.

Characters, like real people, are unique, and will respond to wounding events differently. The vast array of possible emotional wounds combined with each character’s personality gives you many options in terms of how your character will turn out. With the right amount of exploration, you should be able to come up with a character whose past appropriately affects her present, resulting in a realistic character that will ring true with readers. Understanding what wounds a protagonist bears will also help you plot out her arc, creating a compelling journey of change that will satisfy readers.

NOTE: We realize that sometimes a wound we profile may have personal meaning, stirring up the past for some of our readers. It is not our intent to create emotional turmoil. Please know that we research each wounding topic carefully to treat it with the utmost respect. 

We hope the sample list of ideas below will help you see how emotional trauma will influence your character’s behavior and mindset. For the full entry of this and over 100 other emotional wounds, check into our bestselling resource, The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression.

Overly Strict or Critical Parents

Examples:

  • Parents who restrict access to one’s peers and allow only friendships they approve of
  • Imposing strict rules for dress that allows no room for expression or exploration of identity
  • Demanding one adhere to specific behavior and manners at all times…

Basic Needs Often Compromised By This Wound:  love and belonging, esteem and recognition, self-actualization

False Beliefs That May Be Embraced As a Result of This Wound:

  • I’ll never be good enough
  • I am a huge disappointment
  • I will never succeed at anything…

Positive Attributes That May Result: ambitious, cooperative, courteous, disciplined, focused, humble, industrious, introverted, mature, obedient, organized, patient…

Negative Traits That May Result: confrontational, cynical, evasive, indecisive, inhibited, insecure, needy, oversensitive, perfectionist, reckless, self-destructive…

Resulting Fears:

  • Fear of failure
  • Fear of freedom
  • Fear of those who are in a position of power or influence…

Possible Habits That May Emerge:

  • lying to avoid punishment or sanctions
  • giving up before one starts
  • self-sabotage in order to get the disappointment of others over quickly
  • playing down one’s skills and talents
  • refusing to take a compliment, deflecting compliments, giving the credit to others
  • aggressively seeking every advantage…

TIP: If you need help understanding the impact of these factors, please read our introductory post on the Emotional Wound Thesaurus. For our current list of Emotional Wound Entries, go here.

For other Descriptive Thesaurus Collections, go here. 

Which emotional wounds are haunting your characters and keeping them from being whole and fulfilled?

Emotional wounds are incredibly formative, changing how a character views the world, causing trust issues, damaging their self-worth, dictating how they will interact with other people, and making it harder for them to achieve their goals. As such, understanding your character’s wound is vitally important to your overall story.

To help with this, we have integrated this thesaurus into our online library at One Stop For Writers.

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Each entry has been enhanced and expanded to provide even more helpful information about your character’s wounds and is cross-referenced with our other thesauruses for easy searchability. We’ve also included a must-see tutorial on this topic—a crash-course on how a wound impacts the affected character and the role wounds play in his or her arc over the course of a story. Interested in seeing a sampling of our completed wound thesaurus entries?  Head on over and register for free!

On the other hand, if you prefer your references in book form, we’ve got you covered, too, because this thesaurus is now available for purchase in both digital and print form. In addition to the 120+ entries, each book contains instructional front matter to help you understand wounds and how they’ll affect your character and story. With chapters about the wound’s aftereffects and how the event ties in to the character arc, along with ideas on brainstorming your character’s wound and how to best reveal the trauma to readers, this book will be your go-to resource for connecting the backstory dots and coming up with characters who are well-rounded and realistic.

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. John Pepper says

    This really helped me with a character I was working on, but I need a little more to work with. Can you provide something on prejudice or discrimination on the Emotional Wounds Thesaurus?

  2. Dylan Jones says

    Will you be doing an entry about Parental Divorce? One of my characters parents divorced after he came out as bisexual. His mother is a Christian and the father is of another religion. The son wants to them to remarry.

  4. Karen Lynne Klink says

    Here’s one many people don’t realize, not even therapists, at least they don’t mention it that I’ve seen: You often imagine you are being watched. Not as in paranoia, but being seen. This comes from being ignored or criticized so often when you were growing up. If you are doing something good or clever or something you are proud of, it’s as though you are thinking to yourself: “See? Here I am. Look at me now. I survived everything you shot at me.” This last lifelong, and I suppose is some sort of survival mechanism.

  5. Alexandra Wallner says

    Wow! This is a good one!!! I can see myself and others I know in this one. Although I grew up, am accomplished in my field, am a good person – how one is brought up is always with a person. It takes years of therapy and meditation to get past the negative feelings about oneself and it’s a struggle even when you are old. But that’s the task of self realization for those who bother – we do the best we can. And for those that don’t bother, they live in a fog and in lots of pain for the rest of their lives. — Thanks for this very, very insightful post!