Can Emotionally Immature or Toxic Parents Actually Change?
It's the question underneath almost every other question. If they could change, the boundaries, the distance, the grief would all be temporary. So I ask it in some form in nearly every conversation I record for the Academy. Here is what four of the therapists our audience trusts most said, in their own words, with the moment in each conversation where you can hear them say it.
Dr. Sherrie Campbell: "Never."
The question: "After everything you've learned about toxic parents, how likely do you think it is that they will one day see their kids' perspective and change for the better?"
Her answer starts with one word: "Never. At least not mine."
Campbell's reasoning: toxic people see themselves as above reproach, and that lets them numb themselves to what they do to people and to the consequences. She also believes the character disorders are progressive — the behaviors are practiced every day, all day, so the person gets better at them, not worse at hiding them. Her conclusion: "I just don't think that they change."
▶ Watch her answer (at 15:30) Full conversation
Meg Josephson: "It takes two."
The question: "In your experience, can parents who are emotionally immature, absent or abusive actually change? And if so, how often does that actually happen? Can we save our parents?"
Josephson's answer is the nuanced one. Change starts with awareness, and people are not fixed — but it requires willingness and humility from the parent, and it takes both people: open, accountable, willing to repair. Adult children, she points out, would overlook almost anything to have the relationship.
The danger she names is taking the changing on as your job: the belief that if I'm just good enough, if I just try harder, they'll change and finally be the parent I need. That's the fawn response, and what follows it is grief work — the recognition that "I can't change them. I can't fix them." Her rule for what honest communication gets you: if the other person is willing, it leads to closeness. "If it's not closeness, it's clarity" — clarity about what you can expect, and what needs to be grieved and released.
▶ Watch her answer (at 27:18) Full conversation
Jasmin Lee Cori: "She couldn't. It's not that she wouldn't."
The question: "Can parents actually change?"
Cori starts one level up: "Can anybody really change?" People have a consistency, she says — we call it personality, it's their conditioning — and transformation is possible, but "it takes a hell of a lot of work." She is blunt about the base rate: only very occasionally does she hear of a mother really changing, personality-wise.
Her test for your situation is evidence. Does your mother show the capacity for this work in any other relationship in her life? Are the resources there — the time, the energy, the willingness? If not, the hope is what Dr. Gibson calls the healing fantasy, and pursuing it is "kind of a foolish mission."
Then she tells you her own turning point: "It was a turning point for me when I realized, oh, it's that she couldn't. It's not that she wouldn't. She didn't have the capacity to do certain things." After that, her relationship with her mother changed — she describes curling up next to her in bed and holding her shortly before her mother died — and it happened without ever having the big archaeological conversation about the past. "You work it out in yourself," she says. "Then you consider what's possible, what's practical, what do I want with mom."
▶ Watch her answer (at 25:15) Full conversation
Dr. Lindsay Gibson: "There is no magic answer."
Gibson took this question from an audience member in a live Q&A. Her answer: you don't have to keep hoping you'll find the magic answer, because there isn't one — "what's the magic answer to someone who doesn't want to listen to you?"
Her advice has two parts. If you haven't actually tried, try: tell them how you feel, ask what's going on, be an experimentalist and see what happens. But if you have tried: "If you've already done that and the writing's on the wall, please turn back to yourself and please turn back to your own life with people who really are safe."
In her audience-questions interview she answered the same hope from the other side — a son still trying to get his father to see what he had done and say he was sorry. Gibson's point was about capacity: emotionally immature people "just can't see it from another person's point of view." It's like a learning disability, she said — their minds don't work that way. Which is why the waiting doesn't end: you're hoping for a response the person isn't built to give. It's the same stance behind the advice of hers I quote in other conversations: expect that they're going to be how they've always been, and prepare from there.
▶ Watch her answer (at 14:00) Full conversation: "Lindsay C. Gibson Live Q&A"
▶ Watch the questions-interview answer (at 0:41) Full conversation
Where the four of them land
They disagree about the odds. Campbell says never. Josephson says it happens, but only when the parent chooses it — and your work is the clarity, not their change. Cori says check the evidence, and consider that it may be couldn't, not wouldn't. Gibson won't put a number on it at all: she moves the question to what you do with the answer.
They agree on the part that's yours. None of the four tells you to wait better, explain better, or be good enough to trigger the change. The work, in every answer, is on your side of the relationship.
Not sure whether your parent is emotionally immature? Take the free assessment: https://www.theacademyofselfhelp.com/assessment
Dealing with a parent like this day to day? The Emotionally Immature Parent Survival Guide: https://www.theacademyofselfhelp.com/survival-guide
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