Emotionally Immature People - Lindsay C. Gibson

once you get that idea that people who make you feel bad about showing them more of your true self or when you're more authentic with them or even when you need to go to them for comforting uh or confiding uh in them about something that when something goes wrong with that there's a good chance that the person that they went to has some issue with emotional content that's where we're going to kind of start from and look at how this plays out when the parent or you can substitute other people in here like it could be a significant other um it could be uh a boss it could be a best friend um you can substitute in what we talk about today but I'm going to put it in terms of what happens when a child has a parent who is terrified of feelings so when I was writing my book

um adult children of emotionally immature parents one of the the things that I had trouble with uh was how do I start the book what's what's the um what's the the place to get into this material and I struggled with that for a while nothing seemed to really you know zero in to an entryway to the rest of the content of the book um and then it occurred to me that what all of these people would have in common all these adult children of emotionally immature parents what they would all have in common what they would have to have in common would be an underlying sense of emotional loneliness because the emotional immaturity of the parent means that they have not matured in their ability to deal with their emotions that's literally what it

means so they are going to not give the child the connection and the help that they need with their deeper feelings so when I hit upon that idea of oh it's it's emotional loneliness you would feel emotionally lonely uh with a with a parent like this I started out the first chapter on emotional loneliness and that happened to be something that really resonated with a lot of people it it took a feeling that they had put it into words and gave them a way to look at it that was not self- pathologizing it allowed them to think about it from the perspective of well if you know if nobody is feeding you there there's a there's a good reason why you would be hungry okay if if a parent is not responding to you or

they're making it all about them then of course you're going to feel emotionally lonely because you can't get that connection the child is really stuck with their emotions I mean if you've ever been around an infant you know how completely ruled they are by their emotions and their emotions come up as a response to anything that's going on in their bodies um and they let everybody know uh there's no no interface or lag there uh between their feelings and their expression which is great because it immediately lets the caretaker know that something needs to be done okay and the intensity of that from a baby will make you do something to help that baby feel better uh because it's such a

mobilizing sound and such a mobilizing experience to hear a baby cry so it's a wonderful uh thing that has has come up over the Millennia you know for little babies to uh have that kind of effect on their parents but when you're the child of an emotionally immature parent there is a sense that you are pretty much alone with your emotions um there's a a feeling that whatever it is that you're experiencing uh is pretty much much yours to deal with um that other people aren't necessarily interested in that and when you feel like someone is not listening or not interested in listening it gives you the impression that you're kind of um all alone in the world that you're alienated from other people and that nobody really wants to

listen to you so this can give a child uh some sensation of Shame about their deepest feelings because it feels like there was something wrong with them showing that to somebody now under optimal conditions or normal conditions the child shows their need to the parent and the parent responds and the child feels better now don't get me wrong um having been a parent myself I know that your first try often does not fix the problem with a baby or a small child you have to try things you know you have to you have to um make an effort to understand what's going on with them and then keep trying to get it right until you do Comfort them but when the parent is afraid of strong

feeling they have this Sensation that they want to shut that baby down or they want to shut that child down because they don't know what to do they don't have the experience or the ability to really regulate their own emotions and then the child is upsetting them so their natural reaction is they want the child to stop it leaves you with a feeling of Shame uh that maybe there's something wrong with you that maybe your desire to um seek help help or get closer to your parent or this could be a loved one later in life um but whatever the relationship is it makes you feel like well maybe there's something weird about me that I don't understand that makes them not want to get close to me uh because you're as a child you're trying to piece together what could be going on here

like I need help I go to my parent and they respond to me like they're not interested or they turn it back to them or they blow me off or you know they get angry and I can only figure out in my little child's mind that there must be something about what I'm doing so of course this will affect your spontaneity right it affects your self-confidence your social confidence like what happens to a child whose parent doesn't listen what happens to that child when they grow up and they have to uh sort of go out into a new social world uh whether they're going to a new school or they're going to a a a party at work or whatever what happens to them when their spontaneity and their sense of confidence that people will be interested in what they have to say what happens if that's

been uh injured in some way well they'll feel anxious they'll feel anxious about approaching other people and they'll feel self-conscious that maybe you know there isn't anything interesting about them or maybe nobody would you know really want to talk to me that kind of feeling because that old emotional learning which we we would call implicit learning meaning that it's learning that happens below the level of Consciousness so you might implicitly learn that I'm not interesting I need too much I talk too much I want too much and then you might carry that forward into your adult life into one of these situations I just mentioned and then you might have that feeling like I'm about to get rebuffed now nothing has happened you know and the real world but you have that old learning that you

don't even remember it's not like you go to the party or you go to the new school and you say gee you know I remember um you know when I broke my toy and I went to Mom crying and she told me to stop being such a baby and it wasn't a big deal ah I wonder if this will be like that now that's an explicit memory it would be nice if we had that because then we would know what was going on with us right but these these very um early emotional learnings that we get stay at this implicit level um so that they aren't conscious and yet they they run us they they run our reactions to situations the child and the parent are seeing each other and getting to know each other there's a closeness developing there as a result of this Mutual sharing that is not what's happening in that kind of situation with an emotionally immature

parent no that child is being emotionally used okay that's not intimacy except in the broadest definition of that word so we don't want to get confused with oh if if my parent told me all their secrets and all their uh problems with their spouse that meant that we had a very close emotionally intimate relationship no it means that your parent was forgetting that you were a child and they were using you as a fellow adult um and that does not feel like emotional intimacy to the child it feels scary to the child and overwhelming to the child so it all comes back to how do parents handle emotions um and we can say that emotions are they are so hardwired into US humans and to animals they are

the um kind of the monitoring system for life I mean our emotions tell us when things are um going right or very bad for us we feel that and so it prompts us to have a certain reaction to whatever's going on that's going to protect us or it's going to get us what whatever it is that we need the emotions are absolutely Central and basically um people are uh hopefully going to help their children learn about their emotions so that they can be familiar with with them they can know what they are they can handle them they can deal with other people's emotions and name them you know that they're not uh just overwhelmed by mysterious uh Sensations but they know what emotions are and they know why they're having them all this has to be

taught and it has to be taught by an adult who is sensitive enough to tune in to what that child may be feeling so the parent does things like they mirror the child um meaning that uh they show on their face what they think the child is feeling uh they cue the child I we do this all the time in any kind of interaction but our face reflects what we see going on with the other person if you're neurologically normal that is your face will reflect what they're feeling that's called mirroring and it helps the child understand what's going on inside them so before that help the child is really just experiencing physical Sensations you know they have a tightening in their

stomach they have their heart rate goes up their mouth feels dry um you know the back of their neck feels tense these are what they are feeling they don't know that that's an emotion until someone labels it for them you know like oh you look scared or what's the matter are you worried about something or um what's going on there's a a an inquiry into the feeling and help in in learning to label what those feelings are and the and the parents job is uh really to keep their children in an emotional Zone that is not too stimulated and not too unstimulated uh you know there's got to be enough uh Pleasant emotion but there can't be too much or there's um uh OV excitement or uh the child is upset so we help them calm down and we try to get

them back into this zone of manageable emotion or manageable affect now the way that they do that is you know one is uh identifying the feelings and showing the feelings on their face so the child gets the idea of you know what this experience is these emotional experiences but there's another thing that's happening and with emotions and children and their parents and that is that there's a unique ability of mammals to calm each other down and create a feeling of safety simply with proximity okay um and this is true of all mammals that we have but but humans are you know like amazing with this because it's almost like our emotional regulation is spread out over uh a group of people that you know typically we

live with work with uh have relationships with and we we rely on these relationships to help us modulate and take care of our emotional health you know we need someone to talk to we need someone that can talk us down someone who understands us and is receptive to our feelings so that um that ability to be calmed by other people is absolutely primary um in terms of learning how to when you're a child of learning how to deal with your emotions and if the parent doesn't understand this uh and isn't familiar with their own emotional regulation they're not going to be able to help their child come into a feeling of safety and confidence that I can feel deep feelings I can maintain control of my behavior

and I I can feel things inside and then I can talk about them or I can express them in some way and it's okay because I know what's going on with me I know what I'm feeling and why that all has to be learned and we have to use our relationships to learn how to uh deal with our feelings and stay calm calm enough I should say uh while we're dealing with it but if you uh have a a parent who can't manage their own emotions very well you know their emotions run hot and cold um they get very upset or then they get lethargic or they get depressed and then they get enraged um and they're not able to regulate and modulate their own feelings then they're not able to help you learn about feeling and expressing your

own emotions so that it becomes a friendly aspect of your self- experience instead what happens with emotionally immature parents is their own fear of emotion that and the fear is there because they can't handle it and they haven't been um for whatever reason they haven't been brought up in a way that would help them deal with it and you are left in a position where you figure the best thing to do is just to keep yourself under control all the time that that that seems to work best and you stop trying to express yourself at a very deep level even to yourself I mean you may stop doing that with other people but you may also kind of learn to turn aside from your own emotions when you're just uh you know going about your daily life because

you've learned that there's nothing to be done about it you're kind of stuck with them and there isn't any way to feel better but there is a way to feel better and we are designed to feel better by going to someone who is good at emotions who can read our faces who is not scared or over whelmed by other people's feelings but can help the person go into can help you go into it more deeply and you know kind of like understand why you're feeling that way and when you can do that you end up feeling much more confident about yourself because now you make sense to yourself it's like oh there that's this feeling and this feeling came about because this happened happed and I'm oh a normal human being because I had this reaction that's what an emotionally regulated person can do for another person by teaching them

to slow down and be friendly with their emotions and get to know what they're telling them instead of in one way or another rebuffing them and and encouraging them to keep it all to themselves let's take a just a moment here um and see if there are any questions so far yeah I see a a couple of questions here I wanted to ask too in just listening to you every time I listen to you speaking about emotionally emotional maturity and I'm sure so many people here resonate it's like a list of things that we didn't get it's like oh no that when when you're describing the ideal parent it's like I didn't get that I didn't get that I didn't get that and so it makes me wonder uh what percentage in your experience of parents are actually doing these things like helping their kids proper properly identify label emotions like what percentage of parents are actually emotionally

mature yeah I wish I had that that data maybe another time I'll I'll do a study on that but um yeah I I suspect that it's probably in some ways more than we think and in some ways less than we think and by that I mean that there's a general resilience to human beings including little children so that they can get a lot of their needs met uh with a relatively small amount of gratification I mean it's pretty amazing what it's it's like um you know making soup with a carrot um they're able to get the the goodness out of little experiences in ways that they use them to construct a you know a a beautiful adult personality of their own so I think that there's probably

more good parenting in that way than we would think just because children are so Adept at finding what they need and responding to uh the parts of their parent then can give to them now on the other hand I think when we're talking about a very oh gosh I would say sophisticated emotionally mature parent the one who yeah can help their kid verbalize about feelings and puts things into you know the the perfect words um for feelings and you know all of that uh that probably you know maybe there's not as much of that as we think but again maybe we don't absolutely need that it's like it's okay if the cake doesn't have icing you know it's still nutritious it's still wonderful uh because again I think that what really

counts Here's the the number one thing that really counts in parenting is that the adequately emotionally mature parent looks at that child like they're a real person they look at them like they have an inner life like they have a subjective experience that they're real inside they're psychologically real and if you've ever had this experience you know what I'm talking about because when when someone looks at you and they see you they see you as psychologically real they see you as a as a um a real person you feel it you feel the connection okay and if you just have some of that it allows you to feel like you're really here and that you're good and that somebody noticed you and it pulls you into the world in a very positive

way so good parents or adequately emotionally mature parents will be able to just interact with their children normally with basic empathy basic concern for them basic kindness basic niess uh without cynicism without sarcasm without rage and they'll do fine that child will be able to get what they need from a parent who's just adequately emotionally mature because the parent will be doing all these things moment to moment in daily life that will be giving the kid plenty of what they need to develop their own personalities it's only when you get into the extrems of emotional immaturity that you really end up with the person uh feeling that loneliness or feeling that low

self-esteem and that's what we're here for is to help people get out of that um and return to you know their own confidence as a result of being with other people who care too and also from learning about these Concepts thank you so much I see a couple uh questions here one is emotional in intimacy is it is it is that when you trust a person that allows you to be vulnerable especially children trust plays a big role in it and um the other one is how do you distinguish fawning from staying calm and emotionally regulated with a disregulated person ah well fawning works really well with disregulated people so uh yeah so I'm not sure that's a bad thing I mean if you have somebody who is you know completely losing their cool um and you're scared and you're

trying to calm things down if fawning works with that person then that's an Adaptive response in my book it's if it's fawning when it's not really necessary that can be you know a problem for that person because they're they're you know suppressing themselves way too heavily for the situation but yeah fawning is a response that calms the other person down because you are increasing their sense of control now they're not feeling as emotionally disregulated because you just treated them like they're uh you know the the most important person in the room so that helps them to feel better about themselves it increases their self-esteem and it makes them feel like they're more in control so they calm down um the thing about trust is that

trust both comes before and after emotional intimacy there has to be a little bit of trust for you to try it for you to open up to somebody or to stop someone and say I feel like something's going on can you tell me what's wrong that is showing trust too because you're inviting that person to uh step into a more intimate kind of uh conversation with you but when you engage in emotional intimacy they tell you what's wrong um they ask you what you really think or what you would do and you tell them in a way that shows them something about your experience that builds trust because anytime you know somebody better and they become more predictable to you you you end up feeling more trust for them so it's kind of a chicken and and the Egg sort of thing um and of course we

hope that parents will show the kind of receptivity and sensitivity to their children that will cue them to feel that sense of trust um I'm just looking at our time I'm gonna go on uh and we'll leave uh time at the very end for another question well sure that sounds great thank you all right um okay so what happens with the emotionally disregulated parent in their history that has made it so hard for them to manage their Fe feelings um and what we can imagine is that something went wrong with how they were helped to deal with their distress I mean there are as many ways of something going wrong as there are people um they can feel um like uh emotions uh are unsafe that they will

lead to people losing control losing their minds going into a rage but whatever it is the emotionally immature person with with that emotional disregulation doeses not feel like the world of emotions is a safe place for them and so they tend to keep their emotions uh Under Wraps when they can um because they don't feel like anybody's going to help them with it so they end up trying to stay strong but then of course the emotions come out in often in very unmodulated forms uh you know where they get angry and they yell or you know they become uh distraught or they become very labile with their emotions but it's all reflecting that they have not gotten the help that they needed in being able to feel their feelings without kind of coming now that means that they get

overwhelmed by feelings very easily so one clinician uh lee Mulla had the uh brilliant designation of affect phobia and affect just means kind of emotion or mood um having to do with feelings and she said that you know some people are just like affect phobic they won't talk about feelings they won't get into feelings um they keep a distance and the reason that they do that is that they're trying to uh contain Their Fear and contain their lack of trust that anything is going to be helping them with their feelings they really don't think that there's going to be any help available for them they have had the experience somewhere along the line that other people don't want to hear from them um that other people are not safe that they react to emotion in scary ways

and overall they feel like they are left more alone after showing their feelings than they felt before they showed their feelings so for the normal situation you would think that showing my feelings will enable me to make a connection with somebody and then I'll feel better that's the way it's supposed to work but what happens I think for these emotionally immature parents who didn't get the chance to really emotionally grow up all the way or learn how to regulate their emotions is that when they had intense emotions instead of feeling welcomed and instead of being helped that they ended up feeling powerless or worthless or abandoned I think that's what happened to them and in addition to that there's a book called The Primal wound that

talks about this um and I think in addition what happens is that they don't have the experience of their parent looking at them with that awareness that they are a separate psychologically real little person with their own subjective experience they didn't get that in some important ways and so as a result when they feel like people pull back from them it takes them into a very dark place um and they have a kind of an existential Terror about falling into those feelings of powerlessness or worthlessness um or abandonment and that those feelings create in a child an existential Terror that they're about to uh cease to exist I've had people describe it as falling down a well um being a drift in outer space without a

tether um uh baby in the desert you know this sense of there's this tremendous space and here I am all alone and helpless in it okay that is I think what emotionally immature people are facing when you come to them with your emotions as their child or their spouse or whoever uh they feel like they're this close to being thrown into that awful feeling and that's why they fight so hard to not get further into the feeling or to not have the emotionally intimate discussion because when they say that um that well when it is said that they can't handle it that's what it's talking about it's that they will go into this place of existential Terror of ceasing to exist

and nobody is going to do that nobody is going to keep their hand on a hot stove okay it's psychologically unbearable so we want to understand that that is probably what's going on when they don't listen uh to us or seem interested in our feelings or um want to you know make us feel better it's because they've never learned how to do do it they haven't even learned how to do it within them themselves and you can notice this by listening to their Communications like a very typical thing that happens is that a client might come uh for Psychotherapy and at some point they decide that they want to talk to their parent about what's been going on you know maybe they want to tell the parent how they've been feeling all these years or uh talk to the parent about some boundary that they want the parent to

observe and they think that if they use the right approach and talk to the parent in a special kind of good communication way that the child will be I mean that I'm sorry that was a slip that the parent will be able to hear them and respond appropriately you know with uh genuiness but what happens is that they scare the parent they threaten with that intimate communication to throw the parent into emotions that they can't handle they don't know what to do with and they feel overwhelmed to the point of existential Terror so what they do instead is they get defensive and this happens automatically it's not they're not doing it to be mean they're not doing it to be insensitive it just happens just all defenses like this are involuntary they're automatic and they

disrupt the meaningfulness of the communication so you know here you go with your plan to talk to them about this serious matter and they respond by going off on a tangent uh they start talking about uh their experiences with that in a very superficial way um they maybe start talking at length in language that doesn't have any substance that kind of begins to destroy truth even um because it what they're saying is doesn't really make sense given what you said and you're trying to try to get yourself understood by them but they're they just don't seem to be connecting up with what you're trying to get across and this is as I understand it anyway part of their defensive structure that will not let you get close enough

to them emotionally with this kind of communication attempt to stir up old deep feelings in them about what happened to them when they tried to get close to their parents okay so they engage in uh a type of communication that often ends up being you know boring and repetitive uh confusing tangential and you end up so confused about what just happened that you stop trying to communicate and then unfortunately what always happens is that you feel bad about your your effort like you know I'm such a poor communicate Communicator that I I didn't get my point across like if I had said it the right way then they would have understood no no that's not that's not

what happened they understood enough emotionally that you were getting close to something that was very authentic and very real for you they understood at a subliminal level that you all were close to making a connection okay and their defenses come in because they can't handle the emotion it makes them feel like they're coming apart or they're drifting in outer space so they come in and disrupt that and change the communication into something where there you know there's no hope that there's going to be any kind of of mutuality there that is not you that is their need to turn the conversation into something that that is meaningless basically that's what they do to protect themselves from emotional disregulation so back to emotional

loneliness because the child feels like no one understands nobody wants to understand and they begin to have that feeling of um you know existential meaninglessness like you know I'm unworthy I'm powerless I've been abandoned they catch those feelings from the parent who can't deal with the emotion so what do we do about this well anytime you engage in uh things like what we're doing here today where you're learning about uh how emotionally immature people react uh to others and you understand what may have happened to you you're creating empathy and connection with yourself that is so important and so crucial to to feeling good about yourself and to stop

that feeling of emotional loneliness a lot of times the loneliness comes from feeling like we've been cut off from our own selves but as you come to things like this or you go into therapy or maybe you're you're very lucky to have a very insightful friend or companion or partner you begin to repair that emotional loneliness and you learn learn more and more about emotion and you learn more and more about um just the whole world of feelings and you get a better handle on it um but you start to find uh meaning in these connections with other people your maybe your parents couldn't do it for you maybe your spouse couldn't do it for you but you can be on the lookout for people who are going going to be able to help you understand your feelings more and solidify that relationship with your own emotional

self okay we have a few minutes uh for another question yes I see one that I missed earlier so I'm not sure the exact place where it came but um question is this also not pushing the child into a parentifying role um I wonder what that was referencing yeah maybe uh the person who asked if you could add some context that would be awesome uh in the meantime uh the thing that stuck out most to me was actually I think the first thing you said which was that these parents are like this because they're experiencing emotional emotional loneliness and so as a child I think when we hear that uh maybe not for everyone but for sure for some uh is this instinct to help like oh they're lonely let me do something about that does that work is it possible is that you know a realistic

goal well yeah I think it does work um you know when you are an emotionally disregulated person and you're struggling and you're not happy and you feel like you're about to lose your mind if there's even a little child that shows you some attention and tries to comfort you you will feel better that's that mammal thing again okay doesn't have to be another adult if a little if your child comes to you and tries to help it does help okay and the child feels good about that and then the child learns to be extra sensitive to the parent because they've learned that they can help by being you know extra sweet or ask them how they are you know whatever um but unfortunately what we have there is a child who is being parentified emotionally you know they're not just helping out with the dishes or uh taking

care of the younger kids they are now providing a critical kind of Psychological Service to the parent who is having some psychological difficulties with their emotions with the with the regulation of their emotions so yes it does help the parent when the child shows kindness and interest in them but it can be so hurtful to the child's own development in terms of them feeling comfortable with having their emotional needs met thank you uh some context here it was earlier when you were saying about the parent overly sharing Etc with child and having the child be their confident yes oh that's that's exactly what we're talking about right now yeah that's definitely a kind of emotional parentification a reversal of roles the uh child is serving as a kind of a

stabilizing security Center for that parent which is a complete reversal of roles and can again skew that child's identity and uh orientation to relationships toward being the one who's always concerned about other people's needs and can make them feel uh very uncomfortable actually in accepting help from others because so much of their identity and their self esteem gets wrapped up in helping