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 authors present a guide that addresses parents of adult children as suffering people in their own right and as essential to assisting their child into entering functional adulthood. The authors, one of whom is the originator of the Non-Violent Resistance Therapy approach (NVR), provide an intervention manual that implements NVR principles for helping families of adult children. The book is based on the authors' ten-year journey of helping such families in cases where traditional interventions and therapeutic values seem not to work.

1. The Adult Child: Functional and Dysfunctional Dependence; 2. Non-Violent Resistance and Accommodation; Objections; Treatment Goals; 3. The Intervention; 4. Suicide Threats; 5. Helping Parents of Children and Adolescents at Risk of Failure to Emerge; 6. Addressing Entrenched Dependence in Special Contexts; 7. Survival Mode: The Adult Child's Experience; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

Dan Dulberger is a marriage and family therapist and a psychotherapist. He is internationally recognised as an expert in Non-Violent Resistance (NVR) therapy and teaches in the Couple and Family Therapy diploma program at the University of Calgary, Canada.
Haim Omer is a professor in the School of Psychological Sciences at Tel-Aviv University, Israel, and the developer of the Non-Violent Resistance (NVR) approach for parents, teachers, and other caregivers.