Lindsay C. Gibson Answers Your Questions - Adult Children Of Emotionally Immature Parents

The person said, "Whenever I've tried to talk to my dad about these kinds of things it almost always turns into an argument. He refuses to believe that he was that bad but I don't know how else to see it when I was a small child I was getting beat up by a grown man over the most minuscule things on a regular basis." And then below that there was another comment where they came back to add, "I love the man though, still. He didn't teach me much, but he taught me how to be tough."

I think the biggest problem in trying to communicate with emotionally immature people is that they just can't see it from another person's point of view. It's like a learning disability.

Their minds don't work that way. They're pretty stuck in the part of their brain that is very like one track mind. And so if this person was trying to talk to their dad in hopes that they could elicit an empathic and perhaps even apologetic response from him, it would be sort of like handing a kid a copy of Ulysses and asking them to read it when they have a learning disability. I mean, their mind just doesn't work that way. So this dad figures that he is giving his kid a good lesson. It may have been the way he got his lessons. But he probably feels very justified in what he did judging from his angry reaction when he was questioned on it by his adult child.

And he doesn't think he was that bad possibly because he got worse from his father. We don't know of course. But when someone says, "I wasn't that bad," I always think "Who are you comparing yourself to? What happened to you that made you feel this wasn't that bad?"

Of course many of us love our parents very much. We admire all the things about them that made them our heroes when we were growing up usually. And when they say that he taught me to be tough, I can see that in two ways.

I can see it in the sense of he put me through adversity and I had to learn how to survive under those difficult circumstances by maybe becoming sort of tougher in the sense of being more stoic or maybe controlling your own emotions so that you don't make the beating or the spanking worse. So it could be in that sense that yes I had this difficult situation with this man that was beating me and I learned how to be tough in that sense. And that would actually somewhat be explainable in the sense that yes our worst experiences in life usually have something to teach us.

But the question I have is: was that what you needed to be taught?

In other words when you were growing up if your parent was being aggressive with you and maybe even physically hurtful or harmful to you was that something that you needed to be taught about how to withstand that? Now maybe if you're going to grow up and you're going to do cage fighting for a career maybe that would do something for you. But that skill of learning how to put up with a physically hurtful parent I don't quite see how that pays off later on.

Now on the other hand it could be that he taught this person how to be tough in that he taught them how not to let their feelings get the best of them.

And I say that because so often when children get really upset and they really cry they really become distraught when their parent spanks them or hits them or does something physical like that it lots of times incenses the parent. They get very upset. That's where the expressions "I'll give you something to cry about," "Why are you crying?" or "Don't be a baby" come from. Because it's upsetting to the parent to be confronted with the evidence that they have hurt their child.

That is, weirdly enough, a form of emotional intimacy, where the parent hits the child and the child responds with an honest emotional reaction of being distraught and in pain. And that honest authentic emotional response triggers that thing in the emotionally immature parent where they can't stand to be around that kind of intimacy they can't stand that kind of real feeling and they react to it very defensively.

So it's possible that this person learned to be tough in the sense that they learn to hold their emotions in or not to show it when something was getting to them. Okay I could see how that could be useful in some situations.

But the problem is that often times those lessons go deeper than that. And they go into a person's model of how to do relationships. And so the person not only is tough when they are in dire circumstances like they need to be, but they stay tough and they stay defended even in their closest relationships after they grow up so that's a potential downside. But that's a very common kind of outcome when you appeal to the parent to have empathy for your situation as a child.

The parent's defenses won't allow them to go there because it would probably make them feel really bad and it would also lead them into an emotionally intimate moment with their adult child and usually they're not having that.

Yeah this idea I see it all the time just in my comments so I assume you see it endlessly or hear it. This idea of my parent was and then a story that is horrific but I still love them. but I still love them. Do you think that's actually love like that the person if they could kind of zoom out and be completely authentic that's what they are actually feeling or is it just kind of prisoner's-dilemma sort of thing?

I think it's true.

I think children are made to love their parents I think it's their very nature. So whether or not that person loves their parent in the same sense that they love their partner or that they love their children, I don't know about that because those are very different kinds of relationships.

But I would also say that you could parse it and say well there's love and then there's family bonds like a bond is formed by familiarity and proximity according to Bowlby the attachment researcher. And that bond is very powerful and it can stay there in a very strong form even when the person consciously dislikes or even hates their parent they can still feel that family bond.

But what I've learned is that this relationship with an emotionally immature parent is so complicated it's so deep and it's got so many layers of conflicting feelings. But my experience has been that what makes therapy so difficult is that there is love there that they do really feel this affectionate attachment to their parent.

Now not in every case of course because there are naturally many kinds of parent child relationships that are really not based on love or not what we would define as love. But I think a lot of people underneath all the trauma even they really do long to be close to their parents. They really do care about their parents. It really does matter to them what their parents think of them. And I just think that's part of the complication.

To me, that poignant dilemma of "I love this person" and "I'm furious at this person" or "I can't stand to be around this person." That dilemma when you face that in therapy and you allow yourself to work through that mourning that grieving that has to happen when you feel both of those things together. That's where I've seen people really make strides in their own individuation in becoming their own person.

Because if you deny or try to suppress feelings of love for the parent even if it doesn't make any sense even if you're embarrassed that you still love them. If you try to suppress that it's like you never really find your true self and you never really get free of their influence because you're always fighting that or denying that.

So I always in therapy look for those feelings to be brought out just as much as the anger or the disappointment or the frustration. Because in most cases, Will, I've seen it be there and the person has benefited from admitting it as part of the very very complicated emotional picture with these kinds of parents.

You say that children are wired to love their parents. Do you believe that the parent is wired to love their child as well or is it different?

Don't know about that. I really don't.

If I had to just give a guess I would say that I think we all, unless we have some neurodivergent problem with our wiring, with our brains, start out with the potential for loving our children. Really, for making emotional bonds with other people is what it boils down to, and we start out with that. We are equipped with those parts of the brain that are ready to be developed. But if they don't get responded to and they aren't brought into being in a bonded relationship with their caregiver, then I think those parts of the brain don't mature in a way that they then can even get it back later.

Meaning that if you pass certain benchmarks in your attachment process at certain ages I think the longer that goes on the harder it is to go back and try to kind of re-inject that bonding experience or that love experience. And I think it's very possible that there are parents who really don't seem to love their children. I mean that's a hard thing to say to even admit to consciousness but I think it's very possible that people can be so damaged by the time they become adults that they really don't feel love for their children.

Now along with that, though, I think that there can be people who do feel some love as long as they're not under too much stress or they're feeling well resourced they're maybe things are going well for them. I think then maybe they can enjoy and love their children.

But as soon as there is stress or as soon as the child begins to act in a stressful way that can evaporate because the emotionally immature parent just can't handle it. They have to try to make it stop whatever it is that the child's doing that they don't like. And they certainly are not acting lovingly when they're doing that so maybe it's an academic point but I think it is possible for there to be a grownup that has been so damaged in their early attachment experiences that they are not interested in loving their child and don't feel it.

But for the most part it seems to me that people feel a mix that the parents feel a mix. Now you can see this when there's an estrangement. The parent may act in such a way that the child decides not to have any further contact and there is a complete breakdown in the relationship.

And the child refuses to see the parent there's an estrangement. Now at that point the parent seems to get in touch with their love for the child and then they want the child back. They're trying to get the relationship back. And you can argue and say well is that true love or are they trying to get that kid back because they want control or they don't want their family messed up or what is the true motive? But I think we can call that a form of love. Maybe if it's only control, okay, it's only control. There's no love there. But usually there's a mix that they are touched by their child they do miss their child. It's just that their coping skills are so limited and their defenses are so strong that even when they get a chance to get back in touch with their child it's very hard for them to admit what they've done or listen to the child or accept boundaries so they don't act very lovingly.

Even though I think somewhere deep down they love the child in the way that they can especially if they're not stressed. But it isn't the kind of love that makes another person feel seen. And it isn't the kind of love that makes a person feel like they're safe with them.

There are a couple of comments here that I think are related. So the first one is about the struggle when your parent is getting older in age. The comment said my mother looks very frail now. And it's this kind of dichotomy of not wanting to hurt them but at the same time still holding on to so much anger and how do we navigate the guilt that comes with either we kind of let them have it and then we have the guilt of that or we don't and then we have kind of this internal guilt that we're not being authentic.

Or doing whatever work we need to do internally to heal.

And then the other comment was about grief after the parent has passed. And so I wonder people who find your work kind of later in life maybe when their parents have already passed and suddenly become aware of all these feelings that they have inside. How do those people deal with that when there isn't even an option to do anything external about it?

Well, even if the parents are still living, and let's say they're in healthy middle age, technically speaking they're not triggering that sense of poignancy that a frail older person might elicit.

Even in those cases it's still very difficult to hit this place inside yourself that is a balance between your own anger and hurt and disappointment really like devastation even the balance between that and the desire to not hurt this person that you love.

So there's a desire to be authentic and yet there's a desire not to hurt the parent. Now part of the reason for that I think is that because so many internalizers, adult children, are so sensitive and empathic to other people. It almost hurts them more than it hurts the parent to be authentic or to take the parent to task for something that they did.

I mean it's excruciating for them because they know that it would be hurting them if they were in their parents' shoes. And they can't just tune that out because they are very sensitive very perceptive people.

So what I always ask a person is how would you approach your parent to see if you could tell them what you have to tell them in a way that would be less likely to elicit a defensive response? Because that's always the challenge with an emotionally immature person. If you come out swinging they will defend themselves. I mean their shields go up and your words bounce off of them like pebbles because they're going to protect themselves.

They're not going to take in and be hurt by what you say if they can find any way at all to defend against it. So I think sometimes people get kind of confused or mixed up between being authentic and being aggressive.

To be authentic could be actually very quiet. It could be very even toned. It could be a letter. It doesn't necessarily mean that you sit them down lock eyes with them and tell them in no uncertain terms what they've done to you. Now you may choose to do it that way. But it's not the only way that you have. And sometimes I suggest to people that you try it in small doses.

And this is also a nod to the fact that elderly people lots of times have less or fewer resources within themselves to deal with the kind of stress that such an encounter would stir up. So they're more likely to get upset or become disorganized or in one way or another become very defensive.

So if you say to them, "I have some things I'd like to talk over with you. Could we sit down and talk for 15 minutes? Would you be willing to just listen if I told you some things that I have on my mind?" And then the parent would say, "Well, what kind of things?" Ready for whatever's coming. And then the person says well, first of all, I just want to have a short conversation and tell you some things that I've always wanted to tell you because I want to have you understand how I felt. All I want is 15 minutes.

And I just wonder would you be willing to listen for 15 minutes? That's all. And then maybe they'll say okay with a sideways glance like what's coming.

And then if you tell them the facts of what happened: I have this memory and it has bothered me for years. And this is how it affected me. And I just wanted to let you know that that is still bothering me. And I wondered what led you to do that. Can you explain to me why you reacted to me in that way? And then maybe the parent says well I don't know I don't even remember what you're talking about I'm sure I never did or said something like that.

And then you might say well, that's my memory and I'm wondering: of course you don't remember, I understand that, but if you had to guess, what would you guess would have been your motive?

So in other words you are presenting the situation to them in a way that you are telling them the facts of whatever it is that you want them to know in that little section that little 15-minute section. And then you are having a conversation with them that is not super confrontational. It's not aggressive. It's more stating the facts and being curious about what their memory of it was. And lots of times that's going to be the best connection that you can probably make that isn't too much for them to the point where they close down completely and they make this all about what an awful child you are and how disrespectful you are and whatever they're going to come up with.

So small doses, non-aggressive, curious and doing it in small little bites small little manageable bites is a way to do it with a very defensive parent or also with an elderly parent. And the part about feeling guilt I think is that thing about feeling like in order to be authentic you have to download all the rage that you've had for the past 20 years. And I don't know about you but if someone is downloading rage on me I'm not listening very well to what they're saying because it's just too much. So we have to consider how to get the fact across in a way that the other person continues to be able to listen to us.

To switch gears here, the guilt that people feel after their parents have passed. You're going to have that no matter what.

I remember being at a conference that was on treating trauma. And one of the things that the expert said was, he said after a trauma everybody feels guilty. They look back and they say oh if only I hadn't said that if only I hadn't done that if only I had told him if only I hadn't gone to the store that morning. And he said don't try to talk them out of that. Because we need to be able to go back in time to the point where this thing happened. And find some things that we could have controlled it with like if I hadn't gone to the store that morning my child wouldn't have gotten hurt whatever if only I had told him don't leave he never would have gotten in that accident.

I mean it is human nature to try to find the point at which you had control and you didn't act on it. And I thought wow, that is so helpful. Because to know that it's human nature that you're going to look back on your relationship with your parents in this case and you are going to feel guilt.

The reason that you're feeling the guilt is because you had so little control. It's not so much that you did such a bad thing with them. It's that your subconscious mind is trying to manufacture something that you did have control over and chose not to do or chose to do differently in a way that you now feel bad about. But it's that same instinct to go back in time and try to get a feeling of I had control I didn't use it or I used it poorly.

And somehow that helps the guilt helps you feel like well you could have done it differently. So it could have been better you did have some control.

But I'm here to say, I don't think we do have control. I think that when a parent gets to us and we get reactive to them and we do or say something that we regret that we feel guilty for later, the question becomes: did we have a choice at that moment? With everything that was going on, with all that was happening in our lives and their lives and how that came together, did we really have a choice about our response?

I mean sometimes I think we emerge out of our circumstances in a way that is really less than personal because we can get so reactive we can live in the lizard part of our brain for a while as we get angry or emotional or upset. And we lose our touch with the other person. I mean heck we lose our touch with ourselves. And we just become a bundle of reactions. So we have to accept that okay. We can grieve that. We can feel guilt about it.

But when you start torturing yourself with it, I just beg you to remember these things that maybe you're trying to get back a sense of control through your regret that really couldn't have happened under the circumstances that maybe that was an emergent event that you didn't have much control over.

And also the fact that you feel sorry about it or you feel guilty about it is just going to be one more thing in life that didn't go the way you wanted it to. And we all have to come to grips with that because we don't have the kind of ultimate control that every one of us would love to have.

We have to live in this world as best we can. Sometimes, hopefully less than a lot of the time, we are not able to behave or talk at a level that we would be proud of later. If that happens we kind of have to tolerate that and feel that and learn from it. But not to be hard on ourselves or not to beat ourselves up for just being human beings who have that reactive part of the brain that operates very independently at times.

We have to remember that we've got that in us because it's part of being human

Thank you.

We got a comment on a video of you speaking about the fact that emotionally immature parents will literally train you to put yourself last. And so the question was how do we learn to make ourselves be important? Because that is my parents to me and my older sister and I especially fall into unworthiness and I have no idea where to begin getting a grip of me.

The first thing is to have the concept of maybe not putting yourself like last I mean. This person now has that concept. There are plenty of people who don't even define it to that extent.

They just live their life putting themselves last or putting the other person first and it just seems like the way the world works. It seems like that's life. So when you have that thought that oh I feel unworthy or I'm putting myself last, you have opened up the possibility that you can change that.

Is it easy to change? No I don't think it is. Because that very early sense of self starts like when you're 18 months old. Well starts before that. But I mean when the child really starts to become an individual person that's around 18 months old when they're able to get up and walk away from Mom or Dad. And that child develops a sense of whether they are good or bad depending on how other people respond to them. So if you get the message that there's something wrong with you.

The parent says, "What's the matter with you?" Like, oh, there's something the matter with me. I'm bad. I don't deserve to be heard here. I don't count. I don't matter. When you have those kinds of experiences you soak this up at a very deep level within your sense of self. And of course if you feel unworthy it kind of feels right that you would put yourself last.

So what we are trying to do in therapy or in groups like this is, we're trying to first of all see that's what happened. I mean if you don't know what the reality is then yeah it's like how are you going to fix it? But when you do understand what the reality is then you have an opportunity to catch it and realize that's what you're doing.

Now in very deep psychotherapy we can go back to these kind of nodal memories where that sense of unworthiness and that sort of that fateful narrative of I should come last because I'm unworthy we can go back and we can look at where that started and what put that into place. And we can start to question it.

Like we always thought that the Earth was flat. It looks that way. But then we get information that gradually begins to shift that because it's like it can't be it can't be a flat Earth. And then we see this globe floating in outer space. It's got to be one or the other. Well you can do that same process with aspects of yourself.

I don't know if you ever used to do this when you were a kid but have you ever taken a word and just repeated it and repeated it until the sound of it just didn't seem to have any meaning anymore? Now maybe this was my weird child game because I loved words.

But it's true that when you repeat something and repeat it and keep your focus on it after a while the emotional charge to it kind of begins to break loose. I mean it begins to seem kind of weird or it seems less believable. When you keep presenting it to yourself in a way that you have to ultimately get this reaction of: is that true? Am I unworthy? Am I a person who doesn't count? Do I think I should always come last? Do I think this person should come first?

When you begin to ask those questions and feel the feelings that come up with that you are now ripe for a fundamental seismic shift in the way that you see yourself in the world. Okay it is very possible to change that sense of unworthiness. But not just by saying I'm a worthy person I'm an important person.

Affirmations help us at a conscious level. But we need to go deeper than that and question these unconscious patterns—they call them schemas. They're like these patterns of how we think the world works. We picked them up in childhood and they become these patterns.

And the pattern might be you should put yourself last because you are unworthy or this person should come first because they're more important than you are. Well if you start saying that to yourself or whatever other true statement you come up with, "true" in air quotes, about yourself, and you put that down on a piece of paper. And you read it out loud to yourself every morning and every evening for two weeks, you will set up a situation in your brain where your brain is going to question. It's going to think about it. It's not going to be such an automatic thought. The idea is not that we start out by denying it and saying I am too a worthy person or I do too deserve to come first sometimes.

Instead what we're saying is that we are accepting and looking at without judgment we're just putting it up there for our brain to take a look at that "I am not worthy and should put myself last."

We confront our brain with this underlying unconscious "truth," in air quotes, that we've been living by. And then we let our brain take care of the rest of it. Because hearing that out loud in a belief sort of voice twice a day for two weeks makes the brain begin to go "I don't know about that. I don't think so." It begins to change the assumption.

But see we're doing it by completely accepting the unconscious assumption. Which is where we should begin. Because it's in there. We learned it. It became our reality.

We got to start with where we left off which was that underlying belief and accept that and then present it to the brain over and over again just like saying that word to the point of it's sounding like nonsense. And then letting a shift happen.

Now later you may also find yourself reasoning out where your behavior comes from. Like you might say I wonder why I said yes to that when I really didn't want to. What was up with that? Now I'm stuck with this thing I don't want to do. So you can go back and you can ask yourself. What pattern, what old pattern did I just fall into? And you can see maybe where that old unworthiness or that old sense of being the person who should come last you might see how that got in there. And that gives you a place to stand.

It gives you a place to say well I know I used to believe that I know I got triggered into believing that again in this situation. But now I think I can think about it more objectively and let me think about what I'm going to do now. Which allows you to then treat yourself like you do matter to put yourself first to maybe correct the thing that felt bad to you. All because you understand where this stuff comes from.

So you're both trying to correct it mentally by catching it by noticing when you are acting that out and then deciding consciously to change that. But you can also confront it and accept it at its most basic level. And then let your mind reach a conclusion about whether or not you think that's true.

And anybody who does that I think has a really hard time getting to the point where they would say "Yes, I've really decided that I am an unworthy person". Because it really doesn't make any sense.

You're only an unworthy person if you think you are or somebody else thought you were. It is strictly a matter of opinion. And you can wrestle with that and accept that that is what you learned deep in your bones. But it's not the way that you're going to stay. Even if you have to go back and correct yourself when you fall into that kind of behavior again. But the more you accept and just wonder about why you had to believe that about yourself the more alien that thought will become. And the easier it will be for you to get free of it.

So those are my best ideas for how you deal with that because a lot of people having emotionally immature parents end up feeling that way because that's how they're treated. So these are the methods that I found that really seem to work best for people for the deepest possible change.

Thank you so much. We're running a bit low on time so I'll just power through.

Sometimes I get comments on videos that really make me laugh in the way that they're framed. And I got one the other day when I read a passage from Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents on internalizers which I'll read in a sec. And I thought maybe we could get your thoughts on it if anything kind of has evolved or changed in your thoughts on this topic. But the comment was "Holy beep, one paragraph explained everything. That's crazy." And my response was wait till you read the rest of the book.

Because it really seems like in speaking with people why your book stands out so much from kind of the sea of self-help out there is exactly that is people end up feeling like wow this was exactly my experience and nobody has ever talked about it before. And so I want to read you that paragraph that led to this comment. It is for anybody who has the book it's page 89.

It goes: "Internalizers are mentally active and love to learn things. They try to solve problems from the inside out by being self-reflective and trying to learn from their mistakes. They're sensitive and try to understand cause and effect seeing life as an opportunity to develop themselves. They enjoy becoming more competent. Their main sources of anxiety are feeling guilty when they displease others and the fear of being exposed as imposters. Their biggest relationship downfall is being overly self-sacrificing and then becoming resentful of how much they do for others."

And I think probably what this person was saying is because that one paragraph has kind of like both the positives of being the internalizers but then this list of like oh I do that oh I do that oh I suffer from that.

So I wonder what your perspective is on that all these years after it was written?

It's so interesting to me that you can take one or two facts about a person's personality or about their functioning and derive so much from it. I mean to me it's like this very very complex but very elegant kind of mathematical formula. Or I guess it could be more like physics: you have a couple of basic laws of how nature works.

And from that you deduce all this other stuff that can't help but be part of that.

So for instance if you love to learn, let's just take that. You can jump into these characteristics anywhere along the way. But let's say you look at the person loves to learn. So what else is hooked up to that? Well you have curiosity, you have openness, you have imagination. Because in order to learn things we have to imagine our way into them. We have to change what's in our heads to fit and accommodate this new thing that's coming in. And that takes imagination. So now we've got openness we've got imagination we have curiosity.

Now all of these things are associated with emotional maturity because people who have grown up enough inside that they have a solid sense of self, feel secure in themselves and have adequate emotional control are able to be curious and open and loving to learn because they feel generally safe. Because they know that they can cope. They know that they are able to kind of respond well to situations. So that would be one example of that one quality what that is really saying about a person.

Similarly if you're talking about an emotionally immature person and you say they have very poor empathy. Wow we know a lot about that person just from that one trait.

Because it means that it's going to affect their relationships it's going to affect their view of the future it's going to affect their ability to look at and deal with their own feelings. So I think part of what I was doing with these discoveries and descriptions that I did in the book was, I would notice one or two things about somebody. I would observe that, and that would be a fact about them because I had seen them do it. And then I would think: well, what does that mean about them? And then I would realize: oh, that means that in this kind of situation they would probably do this or that. So it would be a way of getting at deeper qualities. Which I would then go in and ask questions about or be on the lookout for.

And then sure enough they would pop up and I would have confirmation of what I had suspected. So we want to be able to put all of this stuff together in a complete picture. And really the picture is not completed until you kind of run out each one of those little associations or each one of those little if there's this then there's that. And you run those out and confirm them. And then they become something that you begin to see.

I began to see it in all my clients who were internalizers. And the more I learned about them the more things there were there to observe and confirm. So yeah so one paragraph explains a lot.

And there was a tremendous amount of wondering and thinking and discovering behind that. Just by realizing that all these things are hooked up together. People are not accidental. If a person has this quality they're likely to have that quality. And if they have that quality they're likely to do this thing. And if they do this thing this is how their relationships are going to go. And if they don't have good relationships here's what their mood's going to look like. So it's not a mystery. They're all hooked together. And I think it's when you can see the connections and how they feed off each other that you become able to realize all this complicated stuff about a single human being and then expand that out to understanding other people who are similar to them.

And so should we be doing that ourselves? Should we be like kind of I don't know maybe making a list of these tendencies or ways we are, and then trying to extrapolate: if that's true, then what are some other things? If I saw it in somebody else, maybe I'd connect.

I love that, Will. I definitely think we should do that. I would love to have everybody do that and maybe report back on our next time I'm here. Because it's a beautiful way of allowing yourself to get to know yourself and feel good about your qualities. It's sort of like well if I can be empathic to other people, what does that mean about the success or not of my relationships? And it's like oh yeah that's true. I do care about other people. I do let them know. I am good at relationships. I do treat friends well.

As you expand in the way that I was talking about here, these different qualities and how they suggest other positive qualities, it really helps you to build up a very positive self-concept.

That's your conscious image of yourself. You can build up this self concept through this kind of extrapolation. If I'm a polite person, if I'm a kind person, if I enjoy learning: all these things are related to other things. As you begin to understand that they all pull on each other, it's kind of like they're knit together in a net. We can begin to take credit for a lot of different things about ourselves. And our self-image expands and we end up feeling stronger and more self-confident.