Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents with Dr. Lindsay Gibson | Being Well

Hello and welcome to Being Well. I'm Forest Stansen. If you're new to the podcast, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back.

Over the past decade, there's been a growing movement of people re-examining their childhoods and particularly their relationship with their parents. There's been an explosion of content about inner child healing, emotional neglect, and generational trauma. We've certainly contributed some to that. And a greater willingness to ask what are often very emotionally complicated questions. What kind of inheritance did I receive from my parents? How has it shaped who I am today? And what patterns have I brought into my adult relationships that I'd like to change?

The work of today's guest has been a major influence on those conversations. And I'm very excited to welcome Dr. Lindseay Gibson back to the show. Dr. Gibson is a clinical psychologist and the author of the Emotional Immaturity series, including her bestseller, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. So, Lindsay, thanks for joining me again. How are you doing?

Oh, I'm doing great. It's it's wonderful to be back. Thank you for having me. I was so happy to. I loved talking with you last time. That conversation kind of blew up. It's one of the bigger ones that we've done actually and I've been really looking forward to this one. So, for the for the first part of this, I'm not going to assume that people heard our first conversation. We'll kind of set the stage a little bit. And from there, we'll go into uh some stuff that we didn't have the time to cover last time.

So, I would love to start with how do you define emotional immaturity? Like what are some of its key characteristics?

The way I think about emotional immaturity is on a continuum. Um that a person is not 100% emotionally immature or 100% mature. For instance, you can have uh a person who is, you know, basically pretty um emotionally mature or sufficiently emotionally mature. But if they're sick or if they're uh fatigued or if they're uh stressed, you can have people sort of slide across the continuum toward the more immature kinds of behaviors and reactions just because that's what happens to us when our consciousness is altered uh by some kind of u bodily state that that drains our resources. And conversely, the more emotionally immature person, if they are feeling good and there's something that they really want, they are likewise capable of moving in the other direction toward looking more mature because they stretch. So you can't necessarily take a piece of behavior and extrapolate from that that oh this person must be really emotionally immature because they lost their temper or they must be very mature because they showed empathy for me. It's not like that. It's you have to see a person's behavior over time to kind of get a fix on where they they hang out.

One of the things that that I really stress is that emotional maturity is just one line of development. And we have our intellectual development. We have our social development. And people can be, you know, very well-developed in those areas. They can be very popular. They can be very intelligent. But when it comes to managing their emotions and managing their relationships or even being able to relate to others in a connected way, that's where the emotional immaturity part comes in. I would say the the hallmark characteristic would be egoentrism, self-centeredness. The emotionally immature person tends to interpret everything through the lens of what it means for them. All roads lead to me. So, anything that happens is interpreted in terms of how it's affecting me just like a a little three or foury old. Yeah. Not not dissimilar to a young kid. If we if if you have children, you you know what this is like. Um and it has to be that way for little kids, you know. But there's something in emotionally immature people that has not progressed to the point where they can have full empathy for other people or even imagine what that other person's viewpoint is like. They're not able to really stand in their shoes and and look at life from from their perspective. They have low empathy. It's not that they don't have any empathy. I mean, they're not I'm not calling them psychopaths. Sure. This is not necessarily an antisocial thing. Yeah. Yeah. Even antisocial personality disorder, they have empathy that they use maybe in a self-s serving way. Yeah. Deliberately. But lots of times people think, well, because my parent, my boyfriend, my wife uh showed empathy when I was going through a hard time, they couldn't be emotionally immature. But yeah, it's not that they don't have any. It's that it's very low and it's compromised by that that boomerang effect of everything very quickly comes back to being about them.

Another thing I wanted to mention is that for the emotionally immature person, reality is really pretty optional. Meaning that if I'm an emotionally immature person, I'm going to interpret life through the lens of how it makes me feel. So if you say to me, and I'm an emotionally immature parent, "Mom, I don't want you stopping by without calling first." Okay. To me, that feels like I've been slapped. Uh that feels like I'm not loved. And so I might say something like, "Oh, well, I must just be the worst mother ever if I can't stop by to see my own daughter." Yeah. Okay. Which makes you crazy. Um because that's not at all what you said and that's not at all what you meant. But because of the egoentrism and because of that that emotional way of interpreting reality, what I feel is what I know to be true. And then lastly, I would just mention that One of the biggest problems with emotional immaturity is the difficulty that they have in reflecting on their own behavior. So everything tends to be somebody else's fault. They externalize blame. Um they have a million ways of coming up with um reasons why something was due to something else other than their own behavior which makes it really hard for them to change and that can be a problem in relationships. Yeah.

And also the one of the things I really remember from our first conversation that stuck with me is the feeling of inconsistency associated with Yes. Thank you. There's a lot of research that for kids, one of the toughest things to be subjected to is inconsistent parenting. You know, sometimes your parent is emotional and attuned and really present for you. And sometimes they are just absolutely not. And it's kind of that combination of variable empathy. And then the uh the effective realism that you were talking about, if I feel a certain way, it must be true creates this environment where you just kind of feel like you're standing on unsteady ground all the time. That just I really remember that piece of it. Yeah, thank you for reminding me of that. That that is that is a really good description of the experience of the child.

So, for somebody who is trying to figure out for themselves, they're they're going through this process that I was talking about in the intro of creating a coherent narrative or, you know, revisiting their childhood experiences. How do you think that a person can tell, okay, I had parents who had some emotional maturity issues versus my parents were were really okay. They were imperfect as all people are, but they were fundamentally okay. It was just that the environment was kind of crazy and chaotic or whatever else was going on. Like what are some of the things that you could really point to and say, "Hey, if this is present or not present, that's a really good indicator."

Yeah, that that's a that's a really great question because let's say those parents are so uh preoccupied with with you know getting a meal on the table or finding a home a lot going on in the field. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there are many reasons why parents could be inconsistent or in a bad mood or stressed out. Okay. All of that can have a lot of um basis in environmental circumstances. All right, but let's look at the things that a person could think about in terms of that parent's actual emotional maturity level. Like if the parent had half a chance, um are do they have the potential? Do are they emotionally mature enough to form a good connection with the child and make the child feel emotionally secure? You know, maybe there's financial insecurity, food insecurity, whatever. But does the child feel that they've got a good connection with their parent? And that's going to depend on that egoentrism part. Is the parent able to take the point of view of the child and focus on that long enough to show real interest in the child. The second thing that I think would be a a very important um marker would be is the parent willing to reflect on their behavior and their impact on that child's emotions and maybe come back and apologize to the child or ask the child some more questions. um let the child know that they're sorry that they were so tired they couldn't talk last night or you know apologize for yelling at them. These are classic modalities of relationship repair. Okay. So it's not that you never do anything wrong if you're adequately emotionally mature. It's that you have enough feeling for other people and enough objectivity, you know, that you can go back in and try to make things better. And children are, you know, so insightful about when a parent's heart is in the right place and when it matters to the parent how that child feel. The denial and minimalization parts of it, I think, are are great things to point to. Um, I think another thing that I've heard you say somewhere else, I forget what I was watching at the time, but you said something about if if you're willing if the parent is willing to say, "Hey, tell me more about that." Uhhuh. That's an incredible indicator kind of right there. If you're just interested in the experience as a baseline as of your kid's experience separate from your own as their own individual being. Yes. Really good indicator right there. Yeah, it really is because it's it's a capacity. Yeah. It's a capacity. And if you don't have it, you won't say things like that.

How aware do you think kids are in the moment, like the experience of a a seven-year-old, a 12y old that their their parent does or doesn't have that kind of a capacity?

I think they probably notice it instantly. Mhm. Um you know little children um up until you know maybe they really get going in school six or seven um they are mostly in their right brains. The part that processes uh all the nonverbal kind of non logical ways of of perceiving and thinking about the world. So they hang out in the very parts of the brain that people have to decipher other people's intentions through facial expression, tonality, uh body posture. That's where children are in early life. and and they you know we've all been surprised I think by a child who out of the blue says something that is so true and so observant you know something that a maybe an adult would never say or never make an observation about and you're just sort of stunned that you know they are that deeply insightful about what just happened but I think kids are I think they notice it when there's any you know like They talk in Star Wars about the disturbance in the force, right? So if there's a disturbance in the connection, we all feel it. But if we as adults feel it like that, you know, imagine how much more intense that is for a child who's completely dependent on that parent's interest for survival.

What are some of the consequences of this for somebody? like what comes out of those early experiences of not having somebody who is so emotionally available or interested or empathic or connected any of the things that we've talked about so far.

The first one that comes to my mind is emotional loneliness. You know, when I was writing the book, um this is a a common writing problem uh for anybody who does this, but it's like how do I start this thing? What do I What do I begin with? What's What's the uh Oh, I've lived that life, Lindsay. I got to tell you, there was so many so many pieces where I'm like, I know what I want to write about, but I have no idea where to start. I know. And then everything everything you try to write sounds so, you know, artificial and the first five pages are the worst. Actually, exactly. So, you just you just get rid of those and start start down the road when it, you know, catches your interest. Um, but that's where I got to uh in that first chapter in adult children of emotionally mature parents. It was about emotional loneliness because I thought, okay, what's the thing that everybody will resonate with when they pick up this book? How do I speak to them in a real well speak to them about a real experience that they're having as a result of this? So emotional loneliness means that you're having trouble having a feeling of being seen, being connected with, and being secure in the attention of your parent or the the loved one. Children need to feel that somebody's got their eye on them, somebody's watching out for them. We don't think about that a lot, but if you think back in your own childhood, at least I I know I can certainly do this and other people have told me this as well. You can think of times when you felt very uh concerned because you didn't feel like somebody was watching out for you or you did you felt like you were in a situation where there wasn't adequate um attention being paid to you. And it's a it's a very distinct feeling of loneliness and of not being seen. And of course for if we think back to early survival of the human species, you know, what happens to a little person who's not being watched over uh by their parent or not very connected to an adult, you know, it's a bad thing. So they really feel it. So that emotional loneliness would be one of the the biggest things. Yeah.

I also think that the the piece of this that's about conforming to the parental expectations or the parental view. Um a lot of people who come from dysfunctional family systems are really good at figuring out how to bid for what they need from the people who are around them. Particularly this this more um emotionally immature parent where the the child learns how to approach the parent at the right time, the right body posture, the right tone of voice in order to get what they need, which is that more nurturing response. And you write about this really beautifully when you talk about the construction of a role self. Um and I just remember reading that part of it and having it really really land in how I thought about this.

Yeah, the role self is absolutely essential. Um, for the child's emotional well-being, you need when you're a little kid, you need to know what is the way into your parents validation, into your parents attention, and into making the parent turn their energy toward you in an interested way. I mean, that's job number one. Um so yeah it's it's very um it's very important to that child that they keep that um keep themselves interesting to the parent. Also, you know, for emotionally immature parents, they have to be kind of emotionally nurtured and uh held by the child's attention, which sounds really upside down, and it is, but that's because of the level that they're operating on in terms of their own emotional needs, which probably been unmet. And so the parent expects the child, like they expect everybody, to help them manage their emotions, soothe them, make them feel better, and also buff up their self-esteem, you know, make them feel like they're important, make them feel like they're okay. And that in insistence on the parents part of being kind of uh taken care of is what I call the emotionally immature relationship system. Uh that you are responsible for my emotional regulation and you're responsible for me feeling good about myself. So, if you're a child, you know that you have a very big job to do and that it's not going to go well for you or anybody in the rest of the family if you decide just to be yourself and do whatever it is that you feel like doing in the moment because the repercussions are going to be so severe if you have a parent that depends on the child for that kind of um stability and support.

So now you have somebody who is listening to us talk about this. They're taking a look back through history and they're going yellow flag, yellow flag, red flag, yellow flag. And they're thinking for themselves about some of their some of the behavioral patterns that they might have had that might come out of this. And you can think of different things that could make sense. Somebody who has more of a peopleleasing tendency could possibly come out of this. Uh you talk about internalizers and externalizers as part of your work. people who tend to uh look to themselves to solve all of their problems versus people who tend to become more dependent on the problem solving of other people. So, somebody's looking at all of this and they're going, "Yeah, okay. You know, sounds about right for me." Is there a kind of process that you've seen people go through in your work with them where they start to find and reclaim more of an authentic sense of who they are? And how does that how does that work for somebody? like what's the normal arc to that work?

Oh, that's such a good question because it's such a beautiful process in therapy. It can be an arduous process for the therapist anyway because the therapist is, you know, asking how did you feel about that? What was that like for you? What was going on for you in your body? Um where do you feel that in your body? And the client is saying, I don't know. Oh, I feel it in my head, I guess. Um, or they'll tell you what they think instead of what they feel. They're really, by the time they come to your office, lots of times these adult children are so have been trained to be so out of touch with their own feelings and the way that things are affecting them in order to provide this support to the parent. They really kind of don't know what you're talking about. And they really do hear when you say, "How did that make you feel?" They said, "Well, I thought that, you know, or it made it made me start thinking that." It's like, "Well, wait a minute. Let's go back to how you felt." And lots of times you get a deer in the headlight looks. Yeah.

One of the most common questions that we get on the podcast is is we'll say something like okay a great tool here is to you know connect with your values or some act stuff for example like you connect your values you let your actions flow from what your values are from your sense of what the authentic self is inside and one of the most common questions we get is like but I look inside and I have a tough time seeing anything like what do you mean by authentic self?

Absolutely. Because the self is built and comes online and is supported by your interpersonal relationships. Okay? So, if you have a very self-absorbed, self-p preoccupied parent um who doesn't really have a lot of interest in the internal world of that child of their world of feelings or or even reactions, then you're going to have difficulty getting to know yourself, especially your emotions, especially your emotional self. Because you have to learn about emotions through somebody older and wiser than you telling you that this sensation that you're having right this second is called anger or it's called love or it's called impatience or, you know, irritability. Whatever it is, we just feel I I think somebody once said there are like four sensations that we feel and the combination and intensity of those physical sensations. We put these labels on like they're real things, okay? But they're not. They're just states that we've identified and we teach our children hopefully to be able to identify them in themselves so that if I ask you uh how did that make you feel? They feel the sensations and they say, "Oh, I was really angry." You know, that really took me off because they read the stomach clench. uh they feel their jaw, they feel the tension, they feel hot, you know, and they know that is called anger. But when you have a parent who can't do that kind of mirroring and certainly isn't interested in doing the kind of, you know, intricate um parsing of the difference between irritability and and anger and rage, say, uh then there's a blank there. They really kind of don't know what you're talking about. Now, I don't mean to make them sound like robots, you know, because plenty of people have uh ongoing relationships and do just fine without being able to have a real discussion about their internal experience. We we might say that the American culture is kind of geared that way because everything is is emphasized for the externals, you know, like the excitement or the thing that you do or the activity or how you look. Very external world we live in. So when a person begins that process of reconnecting with their feelings and their intuitions, they often feel very awkward. Um I've asked people, you know, well, can you give me an image of what that of what you felt like? Like is there a metaphor that you could help me understand your your experience? And they say, I don't I don't I don't do that imagery stuff. Um, I'm no good at it. I've tried it. I'm no good at it. It's like, yes, you are because you have a right hemisphere like I do. And there's no way that you're not an image maker because you dream every night, you know, and you you think about the future in terms of images. No way that you don't have that. But they they say they don't have it because they mean they don't use it and they've been discouraged from using it because it makes them more individual. it makes them harder to manage um as a child and so they've learned to tune their own self out and our job as therapists is to you know help them come back in and discover what's really going on inside them. And it's such a beautiful thing for us to to have people grow and be able to communicate vividly in imagery so that I and other people can catch their feeling and know what is going on inside them. And the release of energy and spontaneity that that brings just opens you up for better and better relationships because you allow yourself to be known really by the other person.

There are so many ways that I could take this here and and I have so much curiosity. There's like so much I want to ask you about it. Um, I think maybe a place to start here would be trying to get kind of pragmatic about this and and to give you sort of a practical example. So, let's think about this like a real person. This is a real person who has a hard time opening up and accessing particularly some of these more intense emotional experiences that you're describing. uh probably particularly intense feelings of anger and frustration on the one hand and intense feelings of sadness and vulnerability on the other hand. Those are often the two poles that are kind of like shunted off for a person. They tend to take a lot of responsibility and kind of blame themselves for what happens. maybe in some ways having internalized that from their parent. They're probably pretty sensitive and pretty perceptive about what's going on in other people, but for whatever reason that function like looking at themselves is sort of shut down a little bit. Uh maybe they don't have like the same granularity. They've been really monitoring the external figure for a long time, but they haven't necessarily learned how to monitor their their own internal world.

That's beautifully put. Oh, thank you. And so this person walks into your office. uh you're working through a process with them. Where do you start? Where do you want to go?

Well, you know, they've come into the office for a reason. Yeah. And 99.9% of the time, it's got some emotion associated with it. I mean, we don't come to a therapist's office until we're till we're bothered by something. So that's, you know, a very logical and easy place to start is start talking about what the problem is or what's been going on and then ask questions about how that felt or what was the hardest part about that or what is the thing that they would do differently if they could go back? What do they wish that the other person would have done differently? What do they want most from the relationship? I mean, we start to ask these questions that have to be answered from the inner world and that begins to turn the per it's almost like you have a person facing one way and you're taking them by the shoulders and sort of, you know, turning them to look another way and they're they're sort of saying, "Well, there's nothing over there, so we don't have to worry about that because there's nothing over there. I just need to know what to do." like you won't know what to do until you know what you feel and you have that internal guidance that you can trust. So we're trying to uh introduce them to the idea that their inner world is precious. It is trying to guide them toward a an emotionally fuller and more satisfying life. and that this is an awkward uh you know kind of a awkward period in skill building. If you haven't done this before, it feels unnecessary. It feels uncomfortable and it isn't immediately apparent what good this is going to do for me to be in touch with my feelings.

I do think that's one of the things that kind of comes up for people is like, well, why would I why would I want to feel that? That anger doesn't feel good. That sadness doesn't feel good. That frustration doesn't feel good. I'm pretty well managed right now. What's What's kind of the upside for me here?

Yeah, the upside is is reconnection with yourself and knowing yourself. Self-nowledge is one of the first things that gets undermined by an emotionally immature relationship system. The other person will actively tell you in so many words, it's not worth spending any time on understanding how you feel or what you want or why. That's just so much noise in the machine. We ought to, you know, we ought to be doing something. We ought to be deciding something. We ought to be moving toward. We ought to be getting. um and they convince some uh some of their um relationship partners and children that it's not worthwhile uh to try to go inside and understand how it is that we we feel. What I try to bring home to people is that if you don't know yourself and and especially your emotional self and what your emotional needs are, you will have trouble with self-confidence. You'll have trouble with decision making and you probably are going to have trouble with a sense having a sense of belonging because they seem unrelated on the surface but self-nowledge and self-awareness underlies those three things in a very big way. And once a person, you know, gets a taste of how that self-nowledge leads to a sense of security and confidence and a feeling of finding the people that they belong with, you know, then then it all makes sense to them. But it doesn't at first.

Do you think that if somebody hasn't necessarily done that work up to a point for whatever reason, most of which are totally understandable, including that it's hard, it's long, could be a real pain in the ass in a bunch of different ways. Um, do you think that they're more prone to landing in adult relationships with people who tend to be a little bit more emotionally immature?

I think so. Yeah. Yeah. There are a couple of other things, too. It's that people who are emotionally immature have a lot of qualities that the adult child um of these kinds of parents is a is attracted to. It's sort of like catnip to them. Like here you've got somebody who seems to know themselves very well, knows exactly what they want, has no problem with decision- making, knows that they're right about everything, blows off uh considerations and worries that a lot of people have, you know, apparently live life with zest, you know, which is another way of saying uh sometimes being impulsive um and and ill-considered, but that's really attractive. to somebody who has had to live their life, you know, very carefully through a role self, it's a breath of fresh air. The other thing that appeals to them is that the emotionally immature person, the potential partner, uh, often times will go through a period of, uh, latching on in a very intense way. Oftentimes maybe a little too quickly, maybe a little too intensely. That might be a red flag to somebody who didn't have some of these vulnerabilities. But to the adult child or the emotionally immature person, it's like this is what I've been looking for all my life. You know, somebody that's interested in me, somebody that wants to get very close to me. And of course, people who have strong narcissistic qualities will move in with that lovebombing thing or that idealization of of the um adult child. This this feels like, you know, a a repair to their soul to get that kind of attention from somebody makes them very vulnerable to that. And because a lot of the internalizing adult children are overly ready to overidentify with the other person's point of view and also to take the blame for things because they like to take stuff in and process it and you know wonder about whether or not they did something. And that is like a perfect fit for the externalizing emotionally immature person because they're happy to tell them what they did wrong and how they're lacking uh by not making their life better. So it's uh unfortunately yes it it really does sort of create these fast um apparent connections between people that over time really become very very difficult. Yeah.

Is this something where just being aware of it is enough or does somebody need to do more of a a process around it to not get so sucked into those relationships?

Yeah. Well, I mean it depends on a lot of things. I mean, think of the things that make people attractive as partners in our culture. Now a lot of those things such as appearance, income, uh social skills, these are things that people can become very highly developed in. We're attracted to certain things and we will continue as long as the human race exists probably to be attracted to those things. It's just that it's the best argument for dating a long time that I've ever thought of, which is that person may be stretching. And you won't know that until two things happen. One is you've been through a stressful time with them. you've seen how they react to real stress, really not getting what they want or really being uh up against a big problem. That's one thing. And the other one is you won't know what they're really like in the realm of emotional intimacy until you've been together long enough to see if they can be available to you in your emotional need. Okay? Because I mean all of us are so wellfed in the early part of a relationship just from the thrill of being with this new person including just terms of like neurotransmitter function. Yeah. Serotonin and dopamine. It's all going crazy. Absolutely. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Our tanks are full. So it's only after time has depleted some of that that you begin to see the underlying function. So that's why, you know, I think it's it's always it's it's not just it's not just you're trying to gather information about somebody over time because I think you can actually uh gather a lot of information about people in a short amount of time if you know what you're looking for. But it it's that you want to live through enough experiences with the person that you found that your initial hypothesis, this is reminding me a little bit of some of what we talked about last time when we talked about healing fantasies and letting go of the the feeling that a person can have where if they were just if they were just able to find the right person if they were just able to be a little bit different inside of themselves, they would able be able to finally get the experience that they're really longing for, which I think for many people who come from these kinds of backgrounds is that feeling to use an imperfect word that like slightly more narcissistic partnered love bombing and so on, they're giving you kind of a faximile of the experience that you're really longing for inside.

Absolutely. So, there's a part of you that's kind of very vulnerable to receiving what feels like all of that authentic interest and love because you've got this dream inside of you of of getting there. And you write a lot about releasing that healing fantasy.

Yes. I mean, the healing fantasy is the basis of hope for children with emotionally immature parents or any any kind of parent that is really not able to give that child what they need. So without that hope the child I I think it would affect their development. Uh it would affect their willingness to keep engaging in the world. And that and that's when you get the really tragic circumstance of childhood depression which used to be you know practically un unheard of and now we're beginning to see it younger and younger. But you know it's it is a feeling that um you know that the person has to has to be able to I guess kind of feel like that they are worth the love and the interest of that other person. And if you can't get it for real or you can't get it easily, if you have a fantasy that one day you will get it or remember that time last year at the beach when you got it. Uh that's all you need is just a little glimmer of hope to keep that alive, you know, to keep that that good spirit alive and not get depressed.

What do you think helps people let go of that over time?

Well, it's like that old behavioral thing about intermittent reinforcement, meaning that if you get rewarded every once in a while with no predictable pattern, that forms some of the most um powerful links between behaviors, between stimulus and response of anything. Yeah. We're back to that inconsistency. Yeah. Yes. So the inconsistency and the fact that that sometimes I get some empathy. Sometimes I see a warm look, you know, in my mother's eyes, that proves that it's there, that there's the hope of it there. And if there's a little bit of it there, you know, there's a spark, we could feed it and it could become a warming fire. The problem is that because of their defensiveness, and by that I mean real psychological defensiveness, meaning that that the parent won't open up to engage deeply enough at an emotional level because they can't. It's too scary to them. And so the child um learns that once in a while I can get them to connect with me and I'm going to keep trying and even, you know, when the parent doesn't respond for a long time. If they just give them a a kind look or pat them on the back, I mean, that's all you need to start it up all over again. Totally. Yeah. So with healing fantasies, I tend to be very um understanding of them. I'm not uh pressing the person to get rid of that, you know, because if they get rid of the healing fantasy, they'll do okay. All I want to do is I want to help them get in touch with their feelings. That's all you got to do. Because if you feel it genuinely enough when someone treats you badly, that's really all you need. Because it's like training the person to take in their own signals and believe in them and in a way suffer them. That's what over time tends to diminish the healing fantasy because that hopeful idea or, you know, continuing investment that one day, you know, they'll see me, they'll listen to me. If you start tuning into what it feels like to be not listened to, not seen, not connected with over a little bit of time that will become really noxious to you. it it won't really matter as much about the healing fantasy because you will be impressed or affected by the other person's behavior in a way that will make you, you know, step back a bit and look at what's really going on.

Is that maybe then one of the answers to the question, when should I take some distance from people? when you need the space to start to separate out from some of those healing fantasies or more to create enough room for you to start exploring who you are separate from who these other people are.

That's a great way to put it. That is a great way to put it. I think a lot of times that's is that is what people need. Anybody needs space to process something big. you know, we we just can't be available for everything that life throws at us or you know, social things or um activities whatever when we're processing something big. So we just have to keep in mind that that processing is necessary and if the other person is not able to tolerate any change in your behavior or they're not able to respect your wishes for space or your boundaries or whatever. Then sometimes people will decide that they need to take a break from contact with that person. I'm not talking about full-on arangement here. I think it gives the person the time and the grace period to check out how it feels to be able to process their own material without somebody else telling them what they ought to be thinking and feeling. Yeah.

Well, as you are extremely aware, there has been a huge conversation about estrangement and boundary setting with parents and how much space is the right amount of space and all of that going on these days. And I was really interested in talking with you about that a little bit more during this conversation cuz we we didn't really quite get to it last time. Yeah. If you're just talking with a friend or somebody you know kind of peripherilally and it comes up that you have more distance from your family, a message that you will often receive is some version of well, can you just have more compassion for them because if you had more compassion, you wouldn't need to have such a strong boundary is kind of the implicit communication in there, right? Just appreciate that they were doing the best that they could. See things from their perspective, you know, they really loved you even if they were kind of imperfect.

I'm sure that you have had clients come in telling you about all these messages and then often people say those things to themselves too.

I was just gonna say so that message is landing on kind of very vulnerable ground for people when they hear it from the outside. For starters, I'm just wondering what you think about all of this having been so in this territory and also if you're talking to somebody who came into the office and they're getting that message from people, how do you have a conversation about it?

Yeah. Well, again, I'm always going to bring it back to how they're feeling. That's like the original data that we want to be processing. Yes. Other people think it's it's a good idea for them to have more and more compassion or to tell a narrative to themselves about their parents that aligns with the, you know, sort of the societal um ideal. Uh so yes, we will we will hear those um those kinds of things. But if you bring it back to Yes. But how how did it feel to you last night when you were over there for dinner and this thing happened with your dad or your mom? What was that like for you? And how do you feel now about that? Um, and what do you what do you want to do? And the person often times has that's a lot for them to process upfront. And when I say what would you like to do, I'm not hinting at wouldn't you like to estrange yourself from your parent. I would never never say that for many reasons but among them uh because it's a decision that that person has to come to and they will come to it if they have enough um I call it like specific interpersonal emotional injury from a person they experience enough of that. They will want some distance once they start feeling their feelings because it hurts. I'm not interested in jumping the gun to, well, maybe you shouldn't see so much of them because then I would be directing them according to what I think. My job as a therapist is to get you to know what you think really and what you feel. So we explore that. The only time that um I have explore ex explicitly explored with clients whether or not the relationship is good for them is when they are actively showing emotional or physical harm, health reasons as a result of the stress of that relationship. And I've had just a handful of people over the years that I had one woman, she would come in my office, she would just go like this like, "I can't talk. I can't I can't deal." She would curl up on my sofa in a little ball. She couldn't even speak. She was so overwhelmed with the way that her father was really commanding her life. and using up her energies um and his kind of um insistence that she make him the center of her world. Now, in situations like that, I'm going to raise the question of what do you think it's doing to you? What's been your experience in this relationship? And do you think that you might need to create a little bit of space so that you can get your health back or you can, you know, refill your energy reserves? But the idea that therapists are out there like encouraging people to leave their parents or estrange themselves from their parents, I don't know if there are people out there doing that or not. I haven't taken a poll, but I do know that I think a responsible therapist would be trying to help that adult come to a decision on their own based on their own experience.

Check me on this, Lindsay. It's just something I've been thinking about and and you're just so much more in the weeds of this than I am, but I've always found this sort of argument just have this emotional experience that would be helpful a kind of silly argument. Like of course if you could flip a switch and activate an authentic feeling of love or compassion or anger and frustration as might be appropriate and helpful for a person like we were talking about earlier. If you could flip a switch and feel all the sadness like wow yeah that would be really great that would be really helpful. But that's not how people work. That's not how our brains are. and trying to force compassion out of a feeling of obligation. Um, I just don't think is how it works, bottom line. And so that's the piece of it that I've that I've always kind of raised my eyebrows at.

As caring people or people who are interested in having relationships with other people, compassion is, you know, like primary. Yeah. I mean, it's it's where would we be without compassion? Totally. Yeah. Really? Um so there's no no question about that. But what happens with emotionally immature people is that they kind of often commandeer that that issue of compassion and take it over into the realm of I'm entitled to your compassion. Mhm. And you owe me this certain attitude of permissiveness toward my bad behavior because this happened to me as a child or I've got this problem or I'm I'm too I'm too tired or you know whatever perform these functions for you as a parent that yes definitely. Um so so that can be promoted to create a sense of moral obligation in the adult child that somehow doing what that emotionally immature parent wants is somehow making you a good person. that selflessness, you know, putting others first is the key to being a lovable, worthwhile person who's not going to be abandoned. Okay? And that tradeoff or that that kind of setup is something that makes people really feel like there's a moral component to doing whatever that emotionally immature person wants them to do. And so when compassion is demanded, I think the person needs to think about whether or not they want to be controlled by that if it's at their expense. You know, the other thing, this is kind of a different way to think about it. Um, emotionally immature people want you to understand what their intention was, not what the impact was. Oh, yeah. Yeah. There's a total intention impact thing. Yeah. Here, for sure. Yeah. It's like, sorry I shot you. I didn't intend to, but don't make such a big deal out of it. Yeah. The whole deal with with intention is that it's great to have good intentions. But if you always had good intentions, but

The impacts are always bad, then it actually doesn't matter what your intentions were. Because having a good intention is about correction. You know, if if we have a conversation, Lindsay, and you say to me, "Hey, Forest, you messed this thing up. You you spoke to me in a way that I didn't like. You didn't treat me kindly." Whatever it is, I could say to you, "Hey, I just want you to know off the top, that's not what I meant to do." And I can do that as a joining act. I can say like, "Wow, of course, you know, it was my intention to not harm you." So that way, you know, my heart's in the right place or whatever it is. But from there, the next sentence is, "And I'll change it in the future." That's the next sentence. So, if the next sentence isn't there, then the intention kind of stops mattering at a certain point, right? I can't say it any better than that. It does stop mattering. It just feels like people get trapped by that a lot. They really do because in our logical mind, we say, "Is there a reason for compassion here?" Yes. Okay. Therefore, I should forgive them for whatever they do because they've got a good reason for it. Did they intend to hurt me? No. They're not willfully trying to make my life miserable. Okay. Therefore, I have to spend a lot of time with them. I mean, sometimes it's helpful to in a journal or even just talking aloud to yourself lay out some of these assumptions and listen to them or read them uh to give you some distance and perspective on the kind of logical curly cues you're having to, you know, get yourself into to have this work. Yes. Um it's good to have compassion. It's good to think about other people's intentions, but then what happened after that? Yes.

And just to broaden this out, we're focusing on the the parent child relationship here for starters because it's a huge part of your work. And it's also a very common space where this kind of relationship is created. But you see this in just friendships all the time too with varying degrees of emotional maturity and the kinds of sometimes well-intentioned but frankly often not well-intentioned like mechanisms of control that people will have to keep on doing what they're comfortable with and keep on sucking somebody back in to their emotional black hole. I I'm just thinking of examples I can think of in the lives of friends where they've had a longtime friend who ran some of this game that you're describing on them effectively in terms of like, well, can you just see it from my perspective and I intended this? What do you mean? Why aren't you, you know, being more compassionate to me over and over? And it just really does keep people trapped for a long time. Yes.

And that's again that's because it depends on which part of our brain we're processing that through. If we're processing it through our left brain, our rational logical uh step-by-step brain uh you know it kind of goes it leads you to a conclusion that may be logical but it may not make any sense. We need our right brain to remind us what it felt like. Uh whether or not this this does make sense, how many times this has happened. You know, what's the big picture? The logical picture is great, but what is it has happened over time? Is there a pattern here? You don't get that with your logic brain.

What advice would you give people who want to maintain some kind of a relationship, particularly with their family, but it could also be with, you know, friends or co-workers, whatever it is, people they have to be in relationship with. But they also don't want to perform that act as much anymore. They want to move into that more authentic way of being that we're talking about, but they don't want it to just totally torpedo their relationship with their family system. Yes. So what happens if they start in little ways being more authentic by I mean it can be tiny like not pushing yourself to say or do the thing you know will ingratiate yourself with that person. Um, not acting out of fear by not saying something that you want to say or not asking for something that you need because you're afraid uh of what their reaction might be or even that you might just make them a little uncomfortable even. I mean, this gets very very um granular uh in terms of what people are concerned about. I think one of the best things that I can tell people is try to think of it as that you are there. Your main job is to stay connected with yourself and your own emotional reactions, your own emotional needs and your own perspective on the situation. like what do you think is going on and stick with that can take other people's uh input into account of course but really how do you see it what do you think has happened do you think that's right and you help them to detach and step back a little bit because I mean the whole thing about emotionally immature relationship systems is that everybody needs to be inshed you know and everybody's uh uh behavior is taken very personally and there's a lot of reactivity going on, a lot of insistence that they be comforted. All that happens. So to become more objective and to step back a little bit and observe what's going on in a more detached way from the emotional demand of the situation is very helpful. while simultaneously staying in touch with your own feelings, your own perspective on the situation. And lots of times I'll suggest um that people do things to ground themselves in their body like you know try just rubbing your arm um cross your arm you know feel your body flex your feet have an awareness that I'm still here because the emotionally immature person will effectively erase your connection with your own self with your own body with your own reactions in order to pull all of that into their own uh need satisfaction. So, you know, it it's very helpful if you can create some distance, set some boundaries, and I always call I always suggest that they say, "I'm asking for space, not I'm setting a boundary." That seems to be less inflammatory. I need need some space. I need some um time.

So something that we've talked about on the show a lot is how when we start to change that puts an inherent kind of pressure on the systems we're a part of and on the people around us, right? Because we have these very familiar social scripts and different ways of interacting with each other. That parent or that friend is very used to you being a certain kind of way and you step in to this slightly different way of being. You're staying reconnected with how you feel, how you think, all the things you just detailed, Lindsay. And most of the time they're going to have a feeling about that. They're going to put a little pressure on you. They're going to ask, "Hey, what the heck is going on here?" When somebody's in that phase of it where they're receiving that kind of social pressure, have you found things that that help a person stay connected to authentic self, what they want from it, all the things that you were describing? Yeah. The the biggest idea is that you want them to see it as managing the relationship as opposed to trying to uh have a good deep fulfilling relationship because when you changed your expectations a little bit. Yeah. Yes. Exactly. you have changed your expectations because you've learned that if I ask for empathy, if I try to get close, if I try to explain myself, uh that that often makes the emotionally immature person very uncomfortable and makes them push back even more or get more controlling because now, you know, you're asking for something from them like understanding. that doesn't usually have a really good effect. Um it it just unfortunately doesn't. So what what we're trying to um we're trying to do there is help the person get some healthy distance and if the other person doesn't seem to like it that they're being different that they expect that. That's part of the process. And you also expect an extinction burst which you know in in old uh lab behavioral psychology. Yeah. Yeah. Behavioral psychology it means that before you eliminate a behavior the animal or the human will try even harder. That's the burst of behavior. They will have an intense effort made to get you to come back into the old pattern. Just expect it. That's what's going to happen. Be prepared. Totally. Be prepared. Yes. Doesn't mean that you'll always remember that or that it feels good. But you can keep asking yourself, did I do anything wrong? Was I selfish? Uh was that unreasonable to set that limit? Um am I a bad person? You know, you can ask yourself, you can dialogue with yourself about some of these things that come back on you when you change so that you get a a healthier um more objective perspective on what what you've been doing with them.

So Lindsay, as we get toward the end here, something I've been meaning to ask you about is there have now been I don't know how many million pieces of content that have been produced that are sort of tangential to your books. Million videos on Tik Tok, people talking about different aspects of this, trying to find the right boundaries for themselves. What do you think are some of the biggest uh common misunderstandings that still exist about this notion of either emotionally immature people or the things that can support somebody in um finding more kind of personal personal healing here? probably that I I would think probably the the biggest misunderstanding would be that somehow it's supposed to make you feel better because what often happens is that you're going back into yourself to look at and uh change and repair patterns in your life that you may have really counted on in a big way for much of your life. So the misunderstanding may be I'll go in, I'll set some boundaries with my parents, I'll learn to say no, I'll learn to stop people pleasing. I will uh stand up for myself. And there's this sense that all of this will feel good. Okay. And then you try it and it feels worse. Yeah. Yeah. And you feel worse and then you're wondering was it even worth it? But if you have gotten far enough along the path of becoming intrigued with your own with getting to know yourself and getting to know your own inner world, it's real hard to go back. Um, you know, once that growth process starts of getting to kind of getting to know your own soul and feeling like, well, maybe I am just as important as this other person because that's that's a foundational construct for emotionally immature relationships. I, the emotionally immature person, am the most important person in the relationship. Let's just get that out there and accept it because that's how it is. They may not say that, but all their behavior and their complaints and their requests are issuing from that foundational view of the world, the view of the relationship. So to help the person be realistic about there's great good to be gotten from your own self-nowledge, from your own self-growth. That's where your satisfaction is going to come from. And boy, there there is true satisfaction that people feel when they've been on this path for a while. But to expect that the other person is going to be able to be changed by your growth, by your authenticity. That's where you're really out on a limb and have less and less control the more you think that way because I mean, we just can't control other people. We can be an advocate for our own growth and we can learn to, you know, pursue things that are good for us, but um yeah, losing losing the expectation that I'm going to be able to change this person is probably a huge thing.

Lindsay, thanks so much for doing this with me today. I've totally enjoyed talking with you. It's been a great time as always. I feel like I feel like we took a great journey together. Yeah. No, absolutely. There was like a really beautiful arc to this, but I I just thought that uh your last comment there about the boundaries of what change inside of ourselves is able to create inside of our relationships with other people and having managed expectations around that is just it's a great summary of a lot of what we were talking about today and I think a good place to to leave it for now.

I love talking with Dr. Lindseay Gibson today about emotional immaturity. I really appreciated that she was up for coming back on the show and I feel like I've learned so much personally from her work and her work has really changed the lives of thousands and thousands of people. I mean, you just see how many people make videos on on Tik Tok or Instagram about adult children of emotionally immature parents and about her other books as well. And we started today's conversation with defining what emotional immaturity means. Emotional immaturity is when an individual functions emotionally at a much younger developmental stage than their chronological age. That's kind of the technical way to put it. So somebody can look like a 55year-old. They can have all of the academic knowledge that a 55year-old has accumulated. They might have the social knowledge of a 55year-old, but on the inside they're kind of more of a 15year-old or a 16year-old. And this is particularly the case when they're under pressure. One of the things that Lindsay started with is the idea that there's a continuum here. It is normal for us to exhibit some emotional immaturity when things are particularly tough for us. Right? We've all had a bad day. We we've all had moments in time where we haven't showed up quite the way that we would like to. Okay. The difference here is that people who are chronically emotional immature are that way most of the time. Maybe they can stretch into more maturity when everything lines up for them, but as a baseline, they've got these key characteristics. And those characteristics are that they're egocentric, they're self-p preoccupied, and they have low empathy. Uh they have limited emotional regulation. This means that they have some challenges with managing their own emotions, and this can lead to impulsivity and explosiveness on the one hand, and then withdrawal. you know, the silent treatment icing you out on the other. Another big feature of it that Lindsay emphasized is called effective realism. And this is when a person interprets reality based on their emotions rather than on objective facts or hey, what actually happened. The person is creating this story about where the problem lies based on their experience. Guess what? Most of the time it's not them. This all comes together to create an environment, particularly if you're a kid who grew up with a parent who has some of these characteristics of inconsistency. You just don't really know what you're going to get from day to day because on a good day, you're going to get one parent. On a not so good day, you're going to get a very different parent. And so I asked Lindsay, what differentiates emotional immaturity from a parent who was just in a situation where there was a lot of stress on them? They were managing a lot of different demands. They had to work really hard. they didn't have as much emotional availability. Uh maybe they're coming from a background where there wasn't a lot of money in the picture and they're working two jobs. You know, you just can't show up for your kid in necessarily the same way that that person might really want to. And what she emphasized is how willing the parent is to consider, for starters, the kid's emotions at all and to consider their perspective at all. And then the denial and the minimizing. So if a parent is willing to say, "Hey, yeah, I see where you are coming from. I get it." And also, here's all of this other stuff that was in the field that a child might just not understand as well. Right? This is a very, very minor example of this, but I remember growing up and having plenty of times where my dad was was very busy. He worked long hours. He was not always available. And I, as a kid, who, you know, loved my parent and wanted my dad to be around, uh, sometimes was frustrated or disappointed by this. But I also really knew deep down inside that my dad really loved me and he really cared about me. And he when he was around, he was doing the best that he could to really show up for me as a parent. And then, you know, 10 years, 20 years later, I can look back over that and really have an understanding of everything that was going on and why things were the way that they were. And then that was laid on top a lot of really positive experiences with my dad, him being a great guy, as having a great relationship in adulthood. That's one story. But if I went to my dad today and I said, "Hey, this was my experience back then." What he would lead with was, "Yeah, man. Sorry." You know, that's where he would start. He was like, "Wow, yeah, I totally understand that you had this experience, and also here's all the other stuff that was going on." Most of the time, an emotionally immature parent is not going to be willing to do that.

There are two key consequences of this for people who grew up with emotionally immature parents. First, Lindsay talks a lot about emotional loneliness. This is this deep sense of emotional disconnection. Uh they children of emotionally immature parents often feel emotionally isolated which tends to lead to a lot of self-paring and hyperindependence. You can also read more about this in Alice Miller's Drama of the Gifted Child. It's one of my absolute favorite books. It is a very very short book. You really only have to read the first chapter of it. If you're interested in these kinds of topics and you haven't checked it out, I would really strongly recommend it. Then the second big consequence is the development of what Lindsay calls a role self. This is a particular version of who you are. It's often not totally inauthentic. It has aspects of your true self in there as well, but it is a very thick mask that allows you to get what you need from that parental figure. So you learn how to approach your parent at the right time, right space, right angle, right tone of voice, right? all of those things in order to trigger a nurturing response from them. And this generally happens somewhat unconsciously, particularly the development of this is pretty unconscious. The behavior of it can sometimes be deliberate. And we learn that these are behaviors that work in life because they worked for us when we were growing up. And that was the that was the petri dish that we were experimenting in. But we extrapolate that relationship that relationship with that parental figure to our relationships with other people generally and we particularly apply this learning in our relationships with people who are loosely similar to that parental figure. So what does this mean? That means people who are in positions of authority and also people who are at a level of emotional closeness that's kind of similar to what we had with our parents. So what does that mean? This means our romantic relationships often get affected by these patterns.

We then talked a lot about the work that Lindsay has done with people to help them explore these tendencies and let go of some of these patterns and it's kind of difficult to talk about unfortunately because it's such a specific process and it's often quite a long process for people. The starting point of it that Lindsay really highlighted is the importance of feeling your feelings, connecting with your authentic emotional experience. You ask somebody who has been parentified, who has been in one of those positions where they were really functioning as uh Rick has said during some previous episodes on similar topics as a kind of plug-in module for the parents personality where the child learns to really define themselves by their relationship with the parent. They often have a really hard time telling you what's true inside of them. They have a tough time looking inside and seeing that clear authentic sense of what they feel like, what they care about, what um what emotions were they experiencing in those given in those different situations, right? And so part of the therapeutic process is about reconnecting with that and asking a lot of questions along those lines. Well, what did you feel when that was going on? And what Lindsay said is that a lot of the time the person leads with what they thought. Well, I thought this. Well, it seemed like that. You know, these very cognitive responses. And part of her job as a therapist is to increasingly get people back in touch with that more emotional self-connected aspect.

This then gets complicated by our continued relationships with people who have some of these patterns. Uh, a lot of people want to maintain a relationship with their parents even if they're even if their parents are complicated people. even if their relationship with their parents is not a super smooth one, some people do move up to full estrangement. And something I just want to get in here cuz I didn't say it during the episode is that I I think that we have um a real misunderstanding of that a lot of the time. People don't become 99% of people who become estranged from their parents don't do so flippantly. you know, they they don't do so just cuz they woke up someday, rolled out of bed and said, you know, today I'm going to become estranged. This is the end point of a lot of difficult difficult decisions and a lot of painful experiences for a person. And this is why I think the compassion conversation that we also talked about during the episode a bit is such a fraught one for people, right? The idea of well, just have more compassion for your parents, have have more understanding for their experience. Yeah. If you can just roll over and experience more compassion, great. Compassion is a a generally good thing. But the feelings that you have are based on your lived experience. And the intensity of those emotions is often directly directly connected in direct proportion to the extent to which you've been suppressing them for a long period of time.

Lindsay and I also talked a bit during the conversation about how some of these moral messages about obligations and requirements and what do we owe our families? What do we owe our parents? Which to me I think is an incredibly deep question. And my my personal moral framework is that we owe our parents a lot. We owe our families a lot. And it it takes a lot for a person to get to a point where they say, you know what, I'm just not going to engage with that anymore. Like that's a serious choice. that's a serious decision for somebody. Um, and I think that even though we do, you know, have a certain responsibility to our to our parents and our families, if for nothing else than the kind of general gift of life, and at the same time, I think we need to be really careful about the weaponization of that morality. So many em emotionally abusive relationships, parental or otherwise, leverage that kind of moral cudgel to perpetuate these incredibly unhealthy systems. Moral obligation is not a blank check. At a certain point, it's about behavior. It's about what you do. It's about what your relationship really looks like with this adult person who is standing in front of you and is asking for something really very different than what you've had in the past.

I then asked Lindsay toward the end of the conversation about the advice that you would give people who want to maintain some kind of relationship uh with, you know, some slightly more emotionally immature people in their lives, but they also don't want to perform that act anymore. And she had a great line about this. Your main job is to stay connected with yourself, your own reactions, your own needs, your own perspectives, and your own emotions. What do you feel about what is going on? And do you feel comfortable expressing that even just inside of yourself? And I think this is one of the ways that people can really draw some healthy boundaries in a way that can actually allow them to stay in relationship with people if that's what they want to do. where they can start saying, "Look, I know I'm not going to get everything from this relationship. This relationship is never going to be what I truly want it to be." And that is immensely sad, but it's also just the reality of it. And for me to stay in it, I need to understand that this person is not going to be really that interested in meeting my emotional needs. And you know what? for whatever reason, because it's not so bad, because I can handle it, because I I feel a sense of moral obligation, it doesn't destroy my life, I'm going to choose to stay in relationship, but I'm going to do it from that stance of clear seeing. I'm going to do it while getting it's never going to quite be that way. And that's actually what's going to give me the freedom that allows me to stay in touch with myself. And you know what? Sometimes I'm going to choose just to smile or not. But inside myself, I'm going to know, hey, I feel a certain kind of way about this. That's not what I think. That's not in alignment with with my view of this situation. But I'm just going to let you kind of keep on doing your thing over here because it's frankly not worth it.

I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. I always love talking with Lindsay. I'm sure we'll have her back on the show at some point in the future. If you've been enjoying the podcast for a while, you've made it this far and you somehow haven't subscribed to it yet, please subscribe to the podcast. It really helps us out. If you're watching on YouTube, you can subscribe there. If you're listening through the podcast feed, you can subscribe pretty much wherever you listen to podcasts. If you'd like to support the show in other ways, you can find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com/beingwellpodcast. And for just a couple of dollars a month, you can support the show and get a bunch of bonuses in return, including transcripts of all of our episodes, or I should say almost all of our episodes. I think that we started doing the transcripts 3ish years ago, something like that. So, if the episode is from before then, unfortunately, we don't have a transcript for it. I'm really interested in what people have to say about this episode. If you are watching on YouTube, a great way to let us know is by leaving a comment down below. You can also leave a comment, a rating, a positive review on Spotify or on Apple Podcast. That also really helps the show out. Until next time, thanks for listening and I'll talk to you soon. [Music]