Emotionally Immature People - Lindsay C. Gibson

People may 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 or confiding in them about something. 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 it could be a boss it could be a best friend 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 Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, one of the things that I had trouble with was how do I start the book? What's the place to get into this material? And I struggled with that for a while. Nothing seemed to really zero in to an entryway to the rest of the content of the book.

And then it occurred to me that what all of these people would have in common, all these adult children of emotionally immature parents, 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 emotional loneliness, you would feel emotionally lonely 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 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 nobody is feeding you there's a good reason why you would be hungry.

Okay 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 and they let everybody know. There's no interface or lag there 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 because it's such a mobilizing sound and such a mobilizing experience to hear a baby cry. So it's a wonderful thing that has come up over the millennia for little babies to 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. There's a feeling that whatever it is that you're experiencing is pretty much yours to deal with 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 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 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: 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 have to 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 that maybe there's something wrong with you, maybe your desire to seek help or get closer to your parent—or this could be a loved one later in life. 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. Because 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 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. What happens to a child whose parent doesn't listen? What happens to that child when they grow up and they have to sort of go out into a new social world whether they're going to a new school or they're going to 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 injured in some way? Well, they'll feel anxious about approaching other people. And they'll feel self-conscious that maybe there isn't anything interesting about them or maybe nobody would really want to talk to me that kind of feeling.

That old emotional learning, which we would call implicit learning, means 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 in 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 I remember 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 very early emotional learnings that we get stay at this implicit level. So that they aren't conscious and yet they run us. 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 my parent told me all their secrets and all their 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. 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.

And we can say that emotions are so hardwired into us humans and to animals they are the kind of the monitoring system for life. I mean our emotions tell us when things are 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 whatever it is that we need.

The emotions are absolutely central. And basically people are hopefully going to help their children learn about their emotions. So that they can be familiar with them. They can know what they are. They can handle them they can deal with other people's emotions and name them. So that they're not just overwhelmed by mysterious 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. Meaning that they show on their face what they think the child is feeling. They cue the child. 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, 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: they have a tightening in their stomach, their heart rate goes up, their mouth feels dry, the back of their neck feels tense. These are what they are feeling. They don't know that's an emotion until someone labels it for them like oh, you look scared, or what's the matter? Are you worried about something? Or what's going on? There's an inquiry into the feeling and help in learning to label what those feelings are.

And the parent's job is really to keep their children in an emotional zone that is not too stimulated and not too unstimulated. There's got to be enough pleasant emotion but there can't be too much or there's overexcitement or 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. One way that they do that is identifying the feelings and showing the feelings on their face. So the child gets the idea of what this experience is these emotional experiences.

But there's another thing that's happening 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. And this is true of all mammals that we have. But humans are like amazing with this.

Because it's almost like our emotional regulation is spread out over a group of people that typically we live with, work with, have relationships with. And we rely on these relationships to help us modulate and take care of our emotional health. We need someone to talk to. We need someone that can talk us down, someone who understands us and is receptive to our feelings. That ability to be calmed by other people is absolutely primary, when you're a child, in learning how to deal with your emotions.

And if the parent doesn't understand this 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 can feel things inside. 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 deal with our feelings and stay calm enough I should say while we're dealing with it.

But if you have a parent who can't manage their own emotions very well, their emotions run hot and cold. They get very upset or then they get lethargic or they get depressed and then they get enraged. 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. The fear is there because they can't handle it. 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 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 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 overwhelmed by other people's feelings, but can help you go into it more deeply and 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's this feeling, and this feeling came about because this happened, and I'm 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 encouraging them to keep it all to themselves.

Let's take just a moment here and see if there are any questions so far. Yeah I see a couple of questions here. I wanted to ask too in just listening to you. Every time I listen to you speaking about 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 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 what percentage in your experience of parents are actually doing these things like helping their kids properly identify and label emotions?

Like what percentage of parents are actually emotionally mature?

Yeah I wish I had that data. Maybe another time I'll do a study on that. But yeah 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 with a relatively small amount of gratification. I mean it's pretty amazing what it's like making soup with a carrot. They're able to get the goodness out of little experiences in ways that they use them to construct 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 the parts of their parent that can give to them.

On the other hand, when we're talking about a very sophisticated, emotionally mature parent, the one who can help their kid verbalize about feelings and puts things into the perfect words for feelings and all of that, 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. It's still nutritious it's still wonderful.

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 someone looks at you and they see you they see you as psychologically real they see you as 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 niceness, 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 extremes of emotional immaturity that you really end up with the person 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 and return to 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 questions here. One is: emotional intimacy, is that when you trust a person that allows you to be vulnerable, especially children? Trust plays a big role in it. And the other one is how do you distinguish fawning from staying calm and emotionally regulated with a dysregulated person?

Well, fawning works really well with dysregulated people. So yeah so I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

If you have somebody who is completely losing their cool 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. If it's fawning when it's not really necessary, that can be a problem for that person because they're 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 dysregulated because you just treated them like they're 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.

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 step into a more intimate kind of conversation with you.

But when you engage in emotional intimacy, they tell you what's wrong. 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 get to know somebody better and they become more predictable, you end up feeling more trust for them. So it's kind of a chicken and the egg sort of thing.

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. I'm just looking at our time. I'm gonna go on and we'll leave time at the very end for another question. Well sure that sounds great. Thank you. All right okay.

So what happens with the emotionally dysregulated parent in their history that has made it so hard for them to manage their feelings? 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.

They can feel like emotions 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 that emotional dysregulation does not feel like the world of emotions is a safe place for them. And so they tend to keep their emotions under wraps when they can. 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 very unmodulated forms, where they get angry and they yell or they become 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 coming apart.

Now that means that they get overwhelmed by feelings very easily.

So one clinician Leigh McCullough had the brilliant designation of affect phobia. And affect just means kind of emotion or mood having to do with feelings. And she said that some people are just like affect phobic. They won't talk about feelings. They won't get into feelings. They keep a distance. And the reason that they do that is that they're trying to 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 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.

There's a book called The Primal Wound that talks about this. 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. And they have a kind of an existential terror about falling into those feelings of powerlessness or worthlessness or abandonment. Those feelings create in a child an existential Terror that they're about to cease to exist.

I've had people describe it as falling down a well being adrift in outer space without a tether baby in the desert. 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. 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. 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 to us or seem interested in our feelings or want to make us feel better. It's because they've never learned how to do it. They haven't even learned how to do it within themselves.

And you can notice this by listening to their communications. Like a very typical thing that happens is that a client might come for psychotherapy. And at some point they decide that they want to talk to their parent about what's been going on.

Maybe they want to tell the parent how they've been feeling all these years or 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 parent will be able to hear them and respond appropriately with genuineness.

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. They're not doing it to be mean; they're not doing it to be insensitive. It just happens.

All defenses like this are involuntary. They're automatic, and they disrupt the meaningfulness of the communication so here you go with your plan to talk to them about this serious matter. And they respond by going off on a tangent. They start talking about their experiences with that in a very superficial way. They maybe start talking at length in language that doesn't have any substance that kind of begins to destroy truth even. Because what they're saying doesn't really make sense given what you said. And you're trying to get yourself understood by them. But 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 a type of communication that often ends up being boring and repetitive 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 effort like I'm such a poor communicator that I didn't get my point across.

Like if I had said it the right way then they would have understood. No, 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's no hope that there's going to be any kind of mutuality there.

That is not you. That is their need to turn the conversation into something that is meaningless. Basically that's what they do to protect themselves from emotional dysregulation.

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 existential meaninglessness like 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 things like what we're doing here today where you're learning about how emotionally immature people react 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 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 very lucky to have a very insightful friend or companion or partner, you begin to repair that emotional loneliness. And you learn more and more about emotion and you learn more and more about just the whole world of feelings. And you get a better handle on it. But you start to find meaning in these connections with other people. 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 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 for another question. Yes I see one that I missed earlier. So I'm not sure the exact place where it came. But question is this also not pushing the child into a parentifying role? I wonder what that was referencing. Yeah maybe the person who asked if you could add some context that would be awesome. In the meantime 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 loneliness. And so as a child, I think when we hear that, maybe not for everyone, but for sure for some, there is this instinct to help. Like oh they're lonely let me do something about that. Does that work?

Is it possible? Is that a realistic goal?

Well yeah I think it does work. When you are an emotionally dysregulated 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 your child comes to you and tries to help, it does help. 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 extra sweet or ask them how they are whatever. But unfortunately what we have there is a child who is being parentified emotionally.

They're not just helping out with the dishes or 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 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. Some context here it was earlier when you were saying about the parent oversharing with the child and having the child be their confidant. Yes oh. That's exactly what we're talking about right now.

Yeah that's definitely a kind of emotional parentification a reversal of roles the 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 orientation to relationships toward being the one who's always concerned about other people's needs. And can make them feel very uncomfortable actually in accepting help from others. Because so much of their identity and their self-esteem gets wrapped up in helping others.