Answering Your Questions On Emotionally Immature Parents & Grandparents - Dr. Lindsay Gibson

This is a grown person that we're talking about here, an emotionally immature grown-up, and you do not have that same responsibility for helping them manage their feelings, especially when this is chronic.

They count on other people to emotionally stabilize them and to ensure that their self-esteem stays in good shape. They're very dependent on other people for that. So when they get upset, they're calling for your empathy and for your understanding. And because they're emotionally immature and so poorly emotionally regulated, this can go on and on and on in your relationship with them until you become, frankly, emotionally exhausted.

Now, the problem is that they don't get emotionally exhausted with that. For them it's a way to hook up with you emotionally and help them draw from your empathy and your strength to get themselves restabilized. However, from your standpoint, it will feel like your empathy is being wrung dry. You have the option to not engage in that. You have the option to look inside yourself and feel your feelings and know that you can't take yet another episode of holding and trying to soothe and understand their feelings. It may be just too much for you at the moment.

So really, when you start to give yourself permission to say, ‘I know that you're hurting. I wish I could be of help right now, but I'm so tired right now. I can't be any good to anybody. So maybe we can talk again later, but I've really got to go right now.’ Something like that. That is your prerogative always. You're not a bad person for that. And so if you can take back your ability to believe that you have the right to protect and take care of your own energy, your own mental health, then you can set that limit with them as needed. And it no longer is a weapon because you're no longer threatened by it.

Now, another way to do this is you may not leave. Instead, you may just sort of leave inside. And that's what we might call compassionate detachment. That's when you still have some feeling for the person that, after all, they are miserable, but you're not wringing out your soul wishing that you could help them or somehow make this all better for them. In other words, you have that feeling that you would have toward a baby or a small child where you feel like you just have to do something to help them with it. This is a grown person that we're talking about here, an emotionally immature grown-up, and you do not have that same responsibility for helping them manage their feelings, especially when this is chronic.

So, with compassionate detachment, you recognize that this is an ongoing, endless quest on their part to get what they need emotionally from you that they didn't get when they were children. And you have the right and really the responsibility to yourself to detach inside emotionally. You can still show compassion, but you can move back inside yourself and have a reasonable amount of compassion. But don't let your empathy run away with you and take on, incorporate, their suffering as your own. That part is not necessary. It's not doing them any good and it's actually hurting you. So compassionate detachment is your way then of taking care of yourself, retaining the relationship on a controlled basis and not giving up your heart to someone who really can't appreciate it. They're just clinging to it like a life raft.

You always have a choice about who you're going to take care of in your life. With aging parents, because of their vulnerability and often their fragility, we do feel like we have a responsibility toward caring for them. But you have to consider your own mental health and your own emotional limitations and your history with this person. What they do with you, while it might not be a big deal to someone else, if you've had a lifetime of this behavior from them, it can be so triggering that you may feel like you just can't stand it.

So, it's imperative if you're in a situation where you're having to give more care to aging parents than you really feel like you have the strength to do, you've got some hard decisions to make. And to help with that, I think psychotherapy or group supports, those are imperative. Or if you're fortunate enough to have a really good friend that looks out for you or a partner, this is where they come in to help you set some boundaries about what you can do and how much you can do before you start going downhill yourself. It's not up to us to single-handedly not be triggered by them. We also need to set the limits and make sure that we protect the amount of free time or downtime that we need.

And I know all of this takes effort and it can even take a lot of money to do this. But those are resources well spent if you can preserve your mental health. I think it's very important to be real with our parents when we're in a situation where we've been sort of thrust into more intimacy than we want. And I think that trying to be a certain type of child to our parent can be so exhausting that it's not good for anybody. So, make sure that you plan things so that you have some respite or some backup because if this really is a triggering situation, you're going to need that. And it doesn't mean anything about your love for your parent or your willingness to assist them. It's just that we have to work within our limits.

Think about what is threatening to little children. And by extension, you'll know that those are things that are threatening to every human being. It's just that in children and in emotionally immature adults, there is an involuntary reactivity that happens because they don't have the maturity to feel a feeling and yet not show it, or feel a feeling and express it in some way that is workable for other people. They just react emotionally. Things like insecurity: What will happen to me? Will you still love me? Have I been a bad person? Do you feel like I'm someone that you don't want to be around? I mean, all these things that create insecurity and anxiety in any person, child or adult. Of course, this is going to be what's going to trigger them, too.

They're especially sensitive to anything that would make them feel like they were being accused of being wrong, or they were accused of being mean or egocentric, something like that. Because in their mind, that's not at all what's going on. They really believe that they're right and they really believe that they are responding to you when they talk about themselves. But you can bet that anything that doesn't go their way, that doesn't end up making them feel better emotionally, making them feel better about themselves or seeing themselves in a better light—anything negative is what's going to set them off, just as it does with any of us. The difference is that they lack that observing ability, that self-reflection, and that ability to control themselves long enough to not give their first reactive response. It's easy to imagine what will set them off because you probably already feel uncomfortable when you get anywhere near the kind of content that will do that. You'll be able to tell because you've probably been exposed to it a lot.

When we grow up and we're looking for friends, partners, people to spend our lives with, of course we're going to be looking for people who make us feel comfortable. And those people are going to be people that we are in some ways familiar with because of their personality or their way of behaving. Unfortunately, if you grew up with emotionally immature parents, you can be drawn toward people who are like that. People who are egocentric, who don't think about their behavior, who don't have much empathy, don't think about other people. When we feel what's happened to us and we recognize the dynamics of it, then we have a choice when we get involved with people as adults about whether or not this is the kind of setting that is going to enable us to grow and flourish or whether it's going to exhaust us just like it did in the past.

The first giveaway is that you will begin to become a little hypervigilant around them. And that's because you will have discovered that they become very reactive to certain things that you say or do, or maybe things that you don't do, like you don't pay attention to them every second or you don't let them say whatever they want without disagreeing or presenting another viewpoint. But you will find yourself beginning to watch yourself so that you don't have the kind of behavior that will ‘set them off,’ because emotionally immature people tend to be very reactive. Now, that doesn't mean that all of them throw a temper tantrum or become violent or yell or anything else. Sometimes they can be more passive. Sometimes maybe they just withdraw, or maybe they leave, or maybe they just clearly have emotionally withdrawn from you. They're just not acting like they're feeling as close to you as they used to.

So you will feel like you have stepped in it and that you better look out in the future so that this doesn't happen again. And what you're feeling there is you're feeling the shift of the responsibility for managing their emotions being transferred to you as their partner. That's their job: to handle their reactions and feelings and then communicate to you about it. The emotionally immature person communicates through emotional behavior, not through good communication or emotional intimacy. Everything comes back to them and they're never wrong. Or if they do apologize or they do take responsibility, it's done in a kind of a learned way. That is, they know that's the thing to do, so they do it. But you don't feel that repair happening in the relationship because it was superficial, and they are saying the right words, but they're not really empathically sorry for what it was that they did or how they acted. They've just learned to give you the right phrase.

So, you don't have a good cycle of repair and reunion. I mean, real good reunion where both people are honest in talking about the problem. They get it out in the open. They share their feelings with each other in a respectful way. And then, through that honesty, they feel better and they feel closer. That's what doesn't happen with emotionally immature people. Emotionally immature people can't allow themselves to get to the depth of emotional intimacy that is needed for that kind of true repair work where you really sort of get to the point where you're baring your soul with each other and you're being vulnerable to each other. Emotionally immature people cannot stand that for very long, and so you end up feeling like it's up to you to keep peace and that gets to be very tiring. And you begin to feel less and less of an equal partner. You feel more unseen and it feels, I would say, lonely. I would say that after a while it starts to feel very emotionally lonely. That's one of the biggest tip-offs in a longer-term relationship with an emotionally immature person.

Really, the thing that matters there, that really makes a difference, is whether or not you have been able to process emotionally what happened to you as a child. That is the ultimate protection against perpetuating sort of the emotional inheritance of an emotionally immature parent. If you know what happened to you and how it affected you, and you have felt that and you've worked on that, you're not going to be able to do that to your child. You are not going to be able to treat them without empathy or to shame or guilt them just because you're having a reaction. You will see your child as being real inside, as having feelings, as being able to be hurt, as needing reassurance and protection, because you will have experienced yourself consciously what it was like to not get that reassurance, to not feel protected, and you will not want your child to have that same experience.

So yeah, do we perpetuate family patterns across generations? Absolutely. But only when it's unconscious to us. Only when we haven't looked at it within ourselves. If you have processed any of these feelings that you've had, I guarantee that you're not going to do it to your child. Now, does that mean that because you've had therapy or because you've read books that have helped you a lot, or you feel like you've done your own self-growth, does that mean that you will never pass on any of these behaviors to your children that your parents did to you? No, it doesn't mean that because, in spite of our best intentions, in spite of our most dedicated work in therapy or self-growth, we can still fall into these old patterns.

But thank goodness we have the ability to notice the look on our kids' face or witness them run to their room or whatever form their communication is going to take, and we're going to know, ‘Oh no, I handled that badly.’ And because of the work that you've done on yourself, that's not going to devastate you to the point where you have to deny the whole thing and make it the kid's fault because you can't stand to be wrong. No, you're going to say, ‘I made a mistake.’ And you're going to go to your child and tell them that you wished you hadn't done this or that, and that you want to tell them that you love them and ask them how they're doing and how they felt about that because you're very sorry. And let them express to you their side of it. And then you're going to be closer to them and that will form the repair. Even if you can't be perfect, you can reverse a lot of these patterns because you're not only treating them differently, you're teaching them about the possibility of apology and repair. And wow, I mean, how important is that in life?

You as parent always have the right and the responsibility to try to protect your child from other people's behaviors that might be detrimental to them. Everybody gets to set boundaries or limits on other people's behavior toward their kids. We just get to do that. So, it may be extremely uncomfortable and the grandparents may have all kinds of manipulative responses to that, but you still have your first responsibility to your child and what you think is good for them. When you set a limit on a grandparent, oftentimes they will be extremely hurt and indignant. And really, that has to be something that you just shed. It's like being caught in a rainstorm or something. It's like you do not have to take that inside yourself. Yes, they're upset. Yes, they think you're terrible for doing that, etc., etc. But that is not your problem.

And when you stand your ground and really dictate the limits of what they can and can't do, over time they may calm down a bit and accept the limit, but they probably won't at first because they're used to getting their way. So, it's good practice for you as a parent to take care of your child in a way that nobody took care of you. You have the ability to be that person that your child returns to and talks to about the incident or interaction that may have worried them or caused them hurt or made them mad. You can be there for your child to process what the person said and to give your child the idea that there's nothing wrong with them, that this wasn't good behavior on their part, that you'll be happy to either speak to them or talk with your child about what they want to do differently next time this happens.

I mean, you can work with your child without throwing your parents under the bus by saying, ‘Oh yes, let me tell you what grandma did to me.’ It's not that idea. It's that you're going to be their compassionate witness, that you understand what they have gone through with that grandparent, and you are the one who's going to decide whether that's within acceptable limits or not. If it's within acceptable limits, then you have the opportunity to be that listening witness who holds their feelings, who listens to them, who validates what they experienced. And that is a completely different scenario probably from what you grew up with. So it's very valuable.