Adult Children of Spiritually Immature Parents: Healing from Emotional Captivity & Reclaiming the Path to Rushd

What happens when religion is present, but emotional maturity is not?Many adult children grow up in homes where faith is taught, practiced, and protected, yet emotional safety is missing. They learn to pray, obey, serve, perform, and preserve the family image - while quietly losing access to their own inner life.In Adult Children of Spiritually Immature Parents, therapist and Islamic studies scholar Anika Munshi offers a compassionate, psychologically grounded guide for Muslims trying to untangle inherited religiosity from lived spiritual reality.This book explores how spiritual immaturity can appear in Muslim families, marriages, masjids, and communities through fear, shame, control, silence, enmeshment, emotional captivity, spiritual gaslighting, and the misuse of religious language. It gives language to the painful confusion many adult children carry: loving Islam while needing to heal from the emotional systems through which Islam was first delivered.Through the lens of rushd - moral and spiritual maturity - this book invites readers to move beyond fear-based compliance and toward a more honest, grounded, and integrated relationship with Allah, family, community, and the self.Inside, readers will explore: - Why religious appearance and spiritual maturity are not the same- How family closeness can become enmeshment- Why "patience," "obedience," and "respect" can be misused to silence harm- How spiritual gaslighting distorts a person's trust in their own reality- Why the body often carries what the mind was trained to deny- How grief, boundaries, repair, and differentiated adab become part of healing- What it means to return to Allah without abandoning the self He entrusted to youThis is not a book written against parents, families, scholars, or tradition. It is an invitation to tell the truth with mercy. To honor what our families carried without sanctifying what wounded us. To stop confusing survival with maturity, fear with faith, silence with ṣabr, and performance with righteousness.For anyone who has felt spiritually exhausted, emotionally unseen, or caught between loyalty to family and honesty before Allah, this book offers a path toward clarity, dignity, and healing.Adult Children of Spiritually Immature Parents is a compassionate, honest, and necessary companion for Muslims ready to stop confusing survival with maturity-and begin reclaiming faith with truth.