Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

Emotional parents are run by their feelings, swinging between overinvolvement and abrupt withdrawal. They are prone to frightening instability and unpredictability.

When people keep themselves poised in neutral observation, they can’t be hurt or emotionally ensnared by other people’s behavior.

Practice compassionate self-talk and be your own emotional coach and cheerleader.

Learn to identify emotional flashbacks so you can separate current realities from past habits of thinking.

Set small goals each day that help you build confidence and give you a sense of control.

You are the hero of your own story. Take time to acknowledge and appreciate how far you've come.

The better you know yourself, the less susceptible you are to the distortions of people with immature motivations.

Part of reparenting yourself means learning how to identify your wants and needs.

Trust is earned over time. You don't owe anyone instant forgiveness or the benefit of the doubt.

When it comes to family, you get to decide what healthy boundaries look and feel like for you.

You have a right to live your own life and find rewarding pursuits that make use of your talents and abilities.

When you know how to soothe and resource yourself, you are far less affected by other people's criticism.

You can't change the past, but you can take control of your story and how you choose to remember it.

Adult children can recover by setting healthy boundaries, managing expectations, finding supportive communities, and cultivating self-compassion.

Mutual emotional responsiveness is the single most essential ingredient of human relationships.

Emotionally immature parents negatively affect their children, especially children who are emotionally sensitive, and shows you how to heal yourself from the pain and confusion that come from having a parent who refuses emotional intimacy.

Emotionally engaged parents make children feel that they always have someone to go to. This kind of security requires genuine emotional interactions with parents.

Emotional connection is a basic human need, regardless of gender . Children who feel they cannot engage their parents emotional ly often try to strengthen their connection by playing whatever roles they believe their parents want them to.

Parental neglect and rejection in childhood can adversely affect self-confidence and relationships in adulthood, as people repeat old, frustrating patterns and then blame themselves for not being happy.

Impaired empathy is a central characteristic of emotionally immature people, as is avoidance of emotional sharing and intimacy. Being out of touch with their own deeper feelings, they’re strikingly blind to how they make other people feel.

Being well cared for in nonemotional areas can create confusion in people who grow up feeling emotionally lonely. They have overwhelming physical evidence that their parents loved and sacrificed for them, but they feel a painful lack of emotional security and closeness with their parents.

Sensitive and emotionally responsive parents mirror their children’s feelings by showing those same emotions on their faces. Good mirroring from a parent also gives a child the feeling of being known and understood as a unique individual.

Externalizers think the solutions to their problems will come from outside themselves, while internalizers tend to look within themselves to solve problems.

Driven parents are compulsively goal-oriented and super busy. They can’t stop trying to perfect everything, including other people.

Passive parents have a laissez-faire mind-set and avoid dealing with anything upsetting. They’re less obviously harmful than the other types but have their own negative effects.

Rejecting parents engage in a range of behaviors that make you wonder why they have a family in the first place. Whether their behavior is mild or severe, they don’t enjoy emotional intimacy and clearly don’t want to be bothered by children.

When immature parents can’t engage emotionally and give their children enough attention or affection, their children cope by imagining healing fantasies about how their unmet emotional needs will be fulfilled in the future.

If you’re an internalizer, you may wonder how you ended up being so alert to other people’s inner states. It could be that you were prompted to be so attuned to the feelings and needs of others by something as basic as your nervous system.

Because they’re so attuned to feelings, internalizers are extremely sensitive to the quality of emotional intimacy in their relationships. Their entire personality longs for emotional spontaneity and intimacy, and they can’t be satisfied with less.

Instinctively turning to others for comfort when stressed makes people stronger and more adaptive. Even if they’ve been shamed by an unresponsive parent for needing attention, their emotional needs show that their healthy mammalian instinct for seeking comfort is working well.

Many internalizing children optimistically believe that when they grow up, they’ll be able to single-handedly love another person into a good relationship. Reflecting on her failing marriage, one woman put it this way: 'I thought I could be enough for both of us.

Emotionally immature parents avoid emotional work if they can. As a result, they may not deal with their children’s emotional or attention problems or difficulties at school, leaving the children to flounder on their own.

Internalizers are highly perceptive and extremely sensitive to other people. Because of their strong need to connect, growing up with an emotionally immature parent is especially painful for them.

Your true self has the same needs as a flourishing, healthy child: to grow , be known, and express itself. Abov e all, your true self keeps pushing for your expansion, as if your self-actualization were the most important thing on earth.

People often keep playing their childhood role-self far into adulthood because they believe it keeps them safe and is the only way to be accepted. But when the true self has had enough of the role-playing, people often get a wake-up call in the form of unexpected emotional symptoms.

Just to be clear, what helps isn’t telling the other person; it’s knowing what you really feel. Simply admitting your true feelings and stating them out loud can make a huge difference in regaining your emotional peace.

Because anger is an expression of individuality, it’s the emotion that emotionally immature parents most often punish their children for having. But anger can be a helpful emotion because it gives people energy to do things differently and lets them see themselves as worthy of sticking up for.

It’s important for people to consciously appreciate their strengths. Unfortunately, the children of emotionally immature parents usually don’t develop much appreciation for their positive qualities because self-involved parents have little or no ability to reflect their children’s strengths.

Your clear mind and observational attitude will keep you strong no matter what the other person does.

The maturity awareness approach will help you deal with an emotionally immature parent—or any difficult, self-involved person—more effectively. You’ll have better results if you try to relate to your parent in a neutral way, rather than trying to have a relationship.

A child’s individuality is seen as a threat to emotionally insecure and immature parents because it stirs up fears about possible rejection or abandonment. If you think independently, you might criticize them or decide to leave.

Your goodness as a person isn’t based on how much you give in relationships, and it isn’t selfish to set limits on people who keep on taking. Your job is to take care of yourself, regardless of what others think you should be doing for them.

Emotionally mature people are innately courteous because they naturally honor boundaries. They’re looking for connection and closeness, not intrusion.

Emotionally mature people may tell you how they feel about what you did, but they don’t pretend to know you better than you know yourself.

Emotionally mature people don’t like taking advantage of people, nor do they like the feeling of being used. They want to help and are generous with their time, but they also ask for attention and assistance when they need it.

Most emotionally mature people can accept that changes and disappointments are a part of life. They accept their feelings and look for alternative ways to find gratification when they’re disappointed.

Emotionally mature people have a secure sense of self. They don’t feel threatened when other people see things differently, nor are they afraid of seeming weak if they don’t know something.

Emotionally mature people are capable of taking a look at themselves and reflecting on their behavior. They may not use psychological terms, but they clearly understand how people affect each other emotionally.

Emotionally immature parents can have devastating impacts on their children’s self-esteem and relationships in adulthood.

Emotionally immature parents expect their children to know and mirror them. They can get highly upset if their children don’t act the way they want them to.

Driven parents are the type that tends to look most normal, even appearing exceptionally invested in their children’s lives. Being driven, they're always focused on getting things done.

For all mammals, including humans, something magical happens when this desire to seek comfort switches on. The danger might not go away, but individuals can stay relatively calm as long as they feel tied into their herd, pack, or circle of loved ones.

Internalizers have strong emotions but shrink from bothering other people, making them easy for emotionally immature parents to neglect.

Emotional immaturity manifests in self-centeredness, avoidance of responsibility, and poor self-regulation. Immature parents fail to meet children's emotional needs. This can lead to self-doubt, people-pleasing tendencies, overthinking, and difficult romantic relationships in adulthood.

If their parents aren’t interested in noticing their impacts on others, they have no impetus to look at themselves; without such self-reflection, there’s no way to change.

You can’t win your parent over, but you can save yourself.

Action on your own behalf is the antidote to traumatic feelings of helplessness.

Emotional loneliness comes from not having enough emotional intimacy with other people.

Emotionally immature parents fear genuine emotion and pull back from emotional closeness. They use coping mechanisms that resist reality rather than dealing with it.

The loneliness of feeling unseen by others is as fundamental a pain as physical injury, but it doesn’t show on the outside.

They often settle for emotional loneliness in their relationships because it feels normal to them, like their early home life.

The most primitive parts of our brain tell us that safety lies in familiarity (Bowlby 1979).

Ben’s childhood experience of his mother’s rejection had clearly deflated his self-confidence.