4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:00:14):

Wow.

 

Mel Robbins (00:00:16):

This is an exercise on page 26 for assessing your parents' emotional immaturity. I want you to just listen. My parents didn't express much empathy or emotional awareness. My parent was irritated by differences or different points of view. Even polite disagreement could make my parent very defensive. I was a very emotionally immature parent for a large part of my kid's life, and I can see the damage that it did. But I think as kids, you think that there's something you can do to change this, and the fact is you can't make somebody else emotionally mature. A person has to do that for themselves and they have to want to because it's actually work. If somebody would love to start becoming more emotionally mature, what is one thing that you would want for them to do?

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:01:08):

I'm a big advocate for...

 

Mel Robbins (00:01:14):

Hey, it's your friend Mel, and before we jump into this extraordinary episode, I just want to ask you, if you're loving this channel and you love the Mel Robbins podcast, take a moment and subscribe. It's a great way to support me and the show, and it helps us bring you world renowned experts. Alright, you ready to jump in? Let's do this. Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. I am so excited that you are here. I am fired up about our conversation. I cannot wait to dig into this with you. It's always such an honor to spend time with you and to be together. And if you're a new listener, I just want to take a moment and personally welcome you to the Mel Robbins podcast family. And I'm glad that you made the time to listen to this particular episode because here's what it tells me about you.

 

(00:01:56):

It tells me that you're the type of person who values your time and you're also interested in learning more about how your childhood experiences have impacted who you have become as an adult. And if somebody that you care about shared this with you, I want you to view this episode as an invitation to not only better understand yourself and improve your life, but also an invitation to discuss what you learned with the person who sent this to you. Because if you do, it's going to bring you even closer to them. And that's pretty cool. And if your parents sent this to you, it is an invitation to talk about a topic that is really hard to talk about in families, and that's the impact that your parents had on you. Look, it's easy to give them the credit. It's easy to talk about all the good stuff that happened, but nobody wants to talk about the things that weren't so great, that hurt, that were really confusing.

 

(00:02:47):

And so I'm going to come right out and I'm going to go first and I'm going to say I used to be an emotionally immature parent and it took me far too long to recognize that my emotional outbursts, my inability to manage my emotions or my stress, my mood swings that it had a negative impact on my kids. Look, I wish I had had the knowledge that you're about to gain today when I was in my twenties, both for myself and my own happiness, my own healing, and for my ability to be a more mature person in relationships. So today here's what we're going to do. You and I are going to go there. We're going to talk about this topic with the help of a world renowned expert by the name of Dr. Lindsay c Gibson. Dr. Gibson is a clinical psychologist and New York Times bestselling author With over 30 years of experience helping adult children heal from emotionally immature parents.

 

(00:03:40):

Her work is truly life-changing. Dr. Gibson has helped millions of people around the world break free from the invisible emotional suffering that has held them back since childhood. She earned her doctorate of clinical psychology from the Virginia Consortium Program. Her bestselling book is called Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, how to Heal from Distant Rejecting or Self-Involved parents. It is sold over a million copies and after we dig into her incredible research and the tools that she's going to share with you today, you're going to understand why her work is so. So please help me welcome Dr. Gibson to the Mel Robbins Podcast.

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:04:20):

Oh, thank you. It's a joy to be here, Mel, truly,

 

Mel Robbins (00:04:23):

When we knew that you were coming on, I went on to our Instagram account where we have 8.5 million followers and I put up a poll, are your parents emotionally immature? Maybe your parent has big intense reactions to things like having outbursts, punishing you for having feelings, relying on you for adult emotional support, or maybe they're emotionally unavailable, never demonstrating affection and only offering criticism, prioritizing their needs over yours. Can you relate? 91% of people said yes.

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:05:01):

Wow.

 

Mel Robbins (00:05:01):

91% said yes. My parents are emotionally immature. They could relate to a parent that has massive intense reactions to things or completely unavailable. And does that surprise you?

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:05:19):

It doesn't surprise me because it's one of the foremost reasons I think people look for help and validation from accounts and programs like yours, Mel, because they get so much validation from hearing somebody put into words things that they've been feeling that they've been told aren't really happening. And this doesn't have to escalate to the degree of gaslighting. It just has to be that the emotionally immature person just doesn't see it. They don't perceive it that way, and so they can't validate the person,

 

Mel Robbins (00:05:59):

Dr. Gibson, what does it mean to be emotionally mature?

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:06:04):

They can think about their own behavior conceptually, they remain objective and they can also think objectively and still maintain a strong emotional connection with other people. So you've got a person who can handle their emotions, connect with other people and think objectively,

 

Mel Robbins (00:06:30):

Oh, that just put a giant yellow highlighter on what it then means to be emotionally immature. You can't think objectively. You can't really handle your emotions and you disconnect from other people.

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:06:42):

Yes.

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:06:49):

Sure. Let's say that a teenage daughter goes to her mother because she's just had her boyfriend break up with her and she's distraught and she's telling her mom about what happened, and the mother says, I know exactly what you're talking about. Your father does that to me all the time. And then the mother derails the conversation because of her egocentrism, because of her poor empathy and makes it all about her because there is that kind of childish ravenous hunger for being the most important person in the relationship at the moment. They didn't get their needs met when they were little for whatever reason, and now they're going to collect on their own children.

 

Mel Robbins (00:07:41):

Can you give me another example?

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:07:43):

Sure. Let's say that a young man decides that he wants to go into writing or something in the creative arts and maybe he has a lot of talent, but the parent hears this and it hits up against their goal that they have for what it would be to be a successful parent of a successful child. And that's something that they can't stand, and so they might not come out and say that to the young man, but they would make him start to feel bad about pursuing something that they didn't like and they would start withholding approval for his choices in order to get him on a path that would again align with their own egocentric view of who they want to be, which is the parent of a successful child. In their mind

 

Mel Robbins (00:08:41):

Is guilt trips around not being able to come home for the holidays or not being available to do something this weekend or not being available to drive you somewhere. Is that an example of emotional immaturity too?

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:08:54):

Oh, that's a great example. Thank you. Yes, because it's using emotional coercion. It's using force on the other person to make them comply with something that they don't want to do. And they have told you that and you are disregarding their right to have their own needs or their own opinions. You're saying in effect, my needs are more important than yours and you are being a bad person because you are morally obligated to give me what I want.

 

Mel Robbins (00:09:31):

What about trashing other family members like complaining to you about your siblings? You're on the phone with one of your parents and they always have to bring up a criticism of somebody else in the family.

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:09:43):

Great example. Great example. Because what that does is it creates a false sense of emotional intimacy when you triangle like that and you confide in somebody about a third party that feels really good to the emotionally immature person or the parent because it's a way of kind of talking about deep stuff, but it's not intimate between you and the person you're talking to. It's sharing a secret about this third person. So it kind of hits a bunch of points simultaneously, but it's destructive to the relationship between say that child and that other family member because you're talking behind their back and it's uncomfortable and it's uncomfortable

 

Mel Robbins (00:10:34):

And then you don't know what to say because then they're going to erupt and get all huffy if you call 'em out on it.

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:10:38):

Exactly. Or they might even say, this is an example of a woman who actually confronted her mother and said, don't talk to me about aunt so-and-so because it ruins my relationship with her. I can't be close to her after you've told me all these things that she's done. And the mother said, I know that you've told me not to do this, but who else am I going to talk to? It's like, who cares? That's your problem.

 

Mel Robbins (00:11:06):

And so I'm just going to keep on doing it

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:11:08):

So I'm just going to keep on doing it.

 

Mel Robbins (00:11:09):

That's one of the liberating things about your book is you just keep coming back to this point that the point isn't about shaming and blaming and all that stuff. It's about seeing the situation objectively and understanding this is who this person is and expecting that this is going to change magically on their own is setting you up for being frustrated in this dynamic and recognizing that you're in the dynamic is actually what gives you power to change how you show up in it. Yeah, exactly. Could you tell the person who is with us right now, what they could experience in their life that could be different if they really take to heart everything that you are about to share with us and teach to us today?

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:11:51):

I really hope when people listen to this, they'll come away from it feeling like, oh, I knew this all along, I just didn't know what to call it, or I knew I was right about that, but everybody was telling me that I was off the mark or crazy or whatever, but this is what I experienced. So I hope that they will get that feeling of validation for their own experience because we want people to be able to trust their own subjectivity and their own inner life because that's one of the things that's taken away when you have an emotionally immature parent. You could live your life with a sense of trust for yourself as somebody who is worth being taken care of and protecting.

 

Mel Robbins (00:12:45):

And what might change for the person listening about their relationship with their parents as we start unpacking this topic of being raised by an emotionally immature person?

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:12:59):

Yeah, it holds up the hope that you can be two adults together after all this time. You may not be able to change them, but you may be able to maintain your own sense of self and your own boundaries with them adult to adult in which both parties are just as important as the other. By doing this kind of work within yourself, you have the option of creating a relationship after all this time where you can be you with your parent and they can be allowed to deal with that themselves, which is the proper alignment of responsibility for emotional experience.

 

Mel Robbins (00:13:44):

I think that's incredible, Dr. Gibson, and it actually reminded me of something that you wrote in your book. This is chapter two on page 24, that the mission is not to disrespect or betray your parents, but to finally see them objectively and that this discussion that you and I are going to have today gives you a deeper understanding of the reasons for the limitations of an emotionally immature parent. By viewing these and other aspects of your parents more dispassionately, you can understand things about yourself and your history that you might not have thought about before. My hope is that any new insights about your parent that you gain from this conversation result in you radically increasing your own self-awareness and emotional freedom. And one of the other things that you write about is that most signs of emotional immaturity are beyond a person's conscious control. And most emotionally immature parents have no awareness of how they've affected their children.

 

(00:14:53):

We aren't trying to blame these parents, but to understand why they are the way they are, and that's how the insights that we're going to gain from our conversation today will empower you to see this differently. And what I'm excited about Dr. Gibson and the opportunity to work with you is that I do think that it's very difficult to look at your parents objectively. You either blame 'em or you excuse what happened. 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:15:37):

Yeah. Well, part of the reason why we feel guilt is because we've been blamed. Okay, that's pretty basic. But wait, what do you mean by that? What I mean is that if you have been blamed a lot or someone has told you that what you're saying or what you're thinking is wrong or it's morally bad, you take on an exaggerated sense of guilt about your own self-expression. And that is a profound impact on a person. And when somebody comes back and reflects to you that there's something wrong with you for having felt that or having said that, and this is a person that you love and admire, that you look up to your parent, you feel guilty because you don't want to hurt or embarrass somebody that you love. So people have this sense of guilt and it can really lean way too far over toward guilt and shame, heavy self-criticism because they've learned that that's the kind of feedback that they often get when they're just being themselves.

 

(00:16:53):

Because emotionally immature people are very, very sensitive. Now. They will accuse you of being oversensitive and they all say, why does this bother you? Why are you getting so upset? But they're like the most emotionally sensitive people on this planet. And when you get that kind of feedback, you begin to feel like, well, maybe there's something wrong. And so when you pick up on those things, that's the first thing that comes to my mind is where did you learn to think that your first go-to thought is, I'm doing something wrong. I didn't, oh, it's my fault. I didn't notice soon enough that this was going to offend you or I wasn't sensitive enough to your needs and now you're mad at me and not speaking to me for three days, but why does your mind go to, what did I do like that? And one of the things that maintains that is they do this thing where you feel a moral obligation to give them what they want, even at great cost to yourself, even to the extent that it may harm your health or your mental health. I've seen this with so many of my clients.

 

Mel Robbins (00:18:13):

So what I would love to do is have you describe for a person who has never even considered or given themselves permission to look openly at their own childhood or their own parenting through the lens of emotional immaturity.

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:18:57):

Okay, well, let's just start by saying overall you might find them exhausting. Do dead giveaway tiring, boring because they tend to be quite superficial. They're very easily threatened. Their psychological defenses are not very sturdy, so they tend to keep things at a kind of a superficial level. It's like, how is the weather sort of thing? Or what is aunt so-and-so doing lately? Because that's where they feel safe,

 

(00:19:37):

Because emotional genuineness, emotional depth makes them very uneasy. And I'm not talking about a little bit nervous. I'm talking about destabilizing people keep trying to talk to their parent and get them to understand how they're feeling. Well, this is asking an emotionally immature parent to keep their hand on a hot stove. They cannot do it. It's not because they are bad or they don't want to help their child. It's because it is so painfully destabilizing that they can't stand it. And that's something that I try to get across so that the person doesn't take it so personally

 

(00:20:30):

That maybe they would if they could, but they can't. They're going to change the subject. They're going to put it back on you. They're going to give excuses. They're going to not understand what the heck you're talking about. That difficulty in going into any kind of complexity or depth is something that ends up making people feel kind of bored, exhausted, and also because there's a constant expectation that you're going to be a certain way for them, so you're going to agree with them, you're going to see things the same way as they do, and that is very tiring because you're always feeling like you're having to play this role if you're going to get along with them. All of this comes from their egocentrism, meaning all roads lead to them.

 

Mel Robbins (00:21:25):

You have so many helpful quizzes in the book, and I want to read some of them because I think that these questions, if you're somebody who's never considered this in yourself or in your parent or in your own experience, it's liberating to have somebody say, oh, no, no, no, no. This is not behavior to excuse away. I realize you lived with it your entire childhood and your entire adult life with your parents, but this is not what you were supposed to get. You were supposed to be seen and you're supposed to feel safe, and you're supposed to have your emotions validated and some of the things on your list. This is an exercise on page 26 for assessing your parents' emotional immaturity. I want you to just listen to the work of Dr. Gibson. So here's a question. My parents often overreacted to relatively minor things.

 

(00:22:13):

My parents didn't express much empathy or emotional awareness when it came to emotional closeness and feelings. My parents seem uncomfortable. They didn't go there. My parent was irritated by differences or different points of view. When I was growing up, my parent would use me as a confidant but wasn't a confidant for me. My parent often said and did things without thinking about people's feelings. I didn't get much attention or sympathy for my parent except for maybe when I was sick. My parent was inconsistent, sometimes wise, sometimes unreasonable. If they became upset, my parent either said something superficial or unhelpful or got angry and sarcastic. Conversations mostly centered on my parents' interest. Even polite disagreement could make my parent very defensive. It was deflating to tell my parent about my successes because it just didn't seem to matter. Facts and logic were no match for my parents' opinions.

 

(00:23:14):

My parent self-reflective rarely looked at his or her role in any problem, and my parent tended to be a black and white thinker and unreceptive to new ideas. And certainly as I read that list, I can see check, check, check for myself, I think I was a very emotionally immature parent for a large part of my kid's life, and I can see the damage that it did. What do you want the person listening as they're sitting there going, oh wow, never thought about it this way. What do you want the person who may be hearing this and feeling validated for the first time ever to know about the experience of being raised by an emotionally immature parent?

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:24:02):

Yeah, I would want them to know that it's going to have an effect on them whether they've ever heard of this or not, because if we're treated like we are insignificant or that we're not real inside, we feel that It's like if somebody steps on your foot, you feel that we do the same thing emotionally when people disregard us or treat us like we're not important. That has an effect on us. And because such a huge amount of our learning is unconscious in childhood, we carry it forward and then we take it as what we've learned and it's a part of us and we give it to our children.

 

Mel Robbins (00:24:53):

One of the things that I found as I was reading your book and as the team here at 1 4 3 studios and I were just pouring over your work is just how validating everything that you write is, and I'm going to read it just a little bit more. Emotionally, immature parents can have devastating impacts on their children's self-esteem and relationships and adulthood. And while the effects can range from mild to severe depending on the parents' level of immaturity, the net effect is the same. The children feel emotionally unseen and lonely, and this erodes their sense of their own lovability and can lead to excessive caution about emotional intimacy with other people.

(00:25:58):

And I'll read them to you. It's on page 70 of your book. There are emotional parents who are run by their feelings. There are driven parents who are compulsively goal oriented and super busy. There are passive parents who are just kind of checked out. And then there are rejecting parents that engage in behaviors that make you wonder why they have you in the family in the first place. And so I'd love to have you unpack them one by one. What is the emotional parent that's run by their feelings? What is that parent like to be around?

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:26:34):

Yeah, that's the parent that emotionally rules the roost with their moods, with their reactions. Everybody orbits them. When dad comes home, everybody be quiet. Dad needs to relax. Mom's having a bad day. Don't anybody upset her mom's gone to bed for the week. Nobody make any noise. Everything is geared toward helping that parent regulate their emotional state through controlling your behavior, suppressing yourself, inhibiting yourself. Everything ends up being in the service of helping that parent feel calmer or feel better. So I call it the emotional parent because they tend to be very emotional and mean. Some of them can be extremely volatile. Some of them can be violent, some of them can be even mentally ill, but the emotional parent will make you feel like you got to be vigilant. You got to be checking every second how they're doing, taking their temperature so to speak. And the whole family does this, and often the other parent colludes with this by being sort of the supporter and talking to the children as though it's the children's responsibility to make sure that mom or dad is staying calm.

 

Mel Robbins (00:28:13):

Whose responsibility is it that mom or dad stay calm?

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:28:16):

It's the emotional parents' responsibility. We all have the responsibility of managing our own emotions. That's how I look at it. Same, but lots of times emotional parents run right over their mate and end up with one of the passive parents that we'll talk about in a minute. As someone who just doesn't protect the children from them,

 

Mel Robbins (00:28:40):

How does being raised by this type of emotional immaturity in a parents, you've got the eruption, you've got somebody whose mood dictates the house. How does that impact your development as the child and the types of patterns that you're struggling with in your adult relationships?

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:28:58):

You become very vigilant to how the other person is doing. So everything revolves around the feeling state of the other person. You will be very alert, very vigilant, very tired, because you're always having to guess at what could upset them. You're always having to keep them on an even keel. And if you live with someone, you know how to do this when they need a little boost, when not to bring the thing up that you need to talk to them about. So it really does flow downstream so that in your dating relationships or your committed relationships, you're going to just assume that they need a lot of help dealing with their emotions, even if they don't.

 

Mel Robbins (00:29:56):

Or you're probably going to be hyper reading every mood and every action for cues as to whether or not they like you or you're okay or things are going okay, like that hyper vigilance and that sense that something is going wrong or could go wrong or that you're somehow going to be to blame. I think that sounds like is something that gets conditioned into you.

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:30:19):

Yes. And the feeling is, did I do something wrong or have I been bad?

 

Mel Robbins (00:30:26):

Yes.

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:30:27):

Okay. That gets conditioned in there in a very deep way with parents like that.

 

Mel Robbins (00:30:36):

Talk to us about the driven parents.

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:30:38):

Yeah. The driven parent is in many ways, one of the most popular versions of parenthood, at least in our driven culture where things are so materialistic and so measured in terms of success, the metrics of success. These parents look like paragons of parenting, and we can compare ourselves to them because, oh my gosh, we didn't get our kid onto the right softball team, or they're not on travel soccer, or this other parent did the intensive language thing in preschool that we missed. And they're very on it in terms of what can we do to maximize our potential in terms of success, not in terms of heart stuff, not in terms of creativity or what it's like, where can it take us? It's very goal-driven. Wait,

 

Mel Robbins (00:31:43):

So you're talking about the kind of parent that is driving their kids to get into the Ivy League and driving their kids to get into the division this and the sports that, and because you just said we, so the driven isn't that they're climbing the corporate ladder or just completely goal oriented in their own life. It's that they're goal oriented and driven in terms of micromanaging what their kids are doing because it's an extension of them.

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:32:14):

Exactly. The extension of them, it's an enmeshment.

 

Mel Robbins (00:32:17):

That's a sign of emotional immaturity.

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:32:20):

It can be the proof is in the pudding. How does that affect the kid? Does it dovetail what the kid in such a way that everybody's happy? But I submit that nobody likes being treated like an object or somebody's success object mean or having expectations put on you for where you need to measure up to in order for mom or dad to be really proud of you or happy with you.

 

(00:32:52):

But I do want to say one thing about this though. It's not only the kind of success that would be intellectual success, monetary success. I mean, those are scoring the goal, winning the game, that kind of thing. We're very familiar with that. But sometimes that drivenness can be channeled into things like your religious beliefs or your social behavior or being the normal family on the block. What will the neighbors say? I mean, it doesn't have to be, when I say driven, a lot of these parents do things like they get advanced degrees or they are on their kids about getting into certain colleges, but they can also be on their children about sort of perfecting their social role or their place in the church, or it could be anything. It just has that quality of driving toward a goal and whoops, too bad isn't what you want to do, or too bad that it's making you anxious and depressed because you will be happier and things will go better for you in your life if you just believe me and do what I say. So we get there. It's all about the getting there.

 

Mel Robbins (00:34:16):

And then there's the punishment if you don't emotionally.

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:34:18):

Yes,

 

Mel Robbins (00:34:18):

The guilt, the shame, the questioning, the withdrawal of love. How does this impact a person in terms of the things they struggle with as an adult If they're raised by somebody like this?

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:34:31):

Oh, you're never good enough. Perfectionism, procrastination in response to the perfectionism, the feeling like, I can't sit down and read a book or someone's going to call me lazy. They'll talk about their relaxing day as if they did something naughty to their friends. Oh, I didn't do anything all day. I just sat there with my nose in the book. I was really bad. Today. There's that kind of judgment put on just being just existing as a happy living thing on this planet. It is tragic because we're not made, no animal is made to be pushed to the point where they're performing all the time. It's not healthy. And yet that's the kind of feeling that people get when they grow up under this

 

Mel Robbins (00:35:27):

Dr. Gibson, can you describe what a passive parent is?

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:35:33):

Yeah. The passive parent is usually the one that kids really like the best.

 

Mel Robbins (00:35:38):

This is my husband.

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:35:39):

They are favorites of the kids and they're often very attuned to the children. They can be playful. They can be almost like peers or playmates. I don't mean to say that they're irresponsible in that way, but they just tend to live and let live. And because they don't have that motor driving them, they can be more accessible to the child. Oftentimes, they are more empathic than the other emotionally immature parent. Like I had a client whose father would always come to her room after the mother had exploded at her. Sometime later, dad would come down, sit on the bed with her, console her whatever. Would dad step in when she was being abused? No, no. That's the passive part. They're not protective of the child. They let the other parent get away with murder because in a way they're like children who are benefiting from the other parents' energy and the other parents' sort of willingness to dominate the course of things and they live and let live. But if you do that with your children who are not being treated well, you are not feeling the empathy and you're being really quite egocentric because it feels better to you to not take on that level of involvement,

 

(00:37:18):

And that's for their benefit, not for the children.

 

Mel Robbins (00:37:22):

And how does that impact you when you become an adult, if you have had a parent that is that type of emotionally immature parent that they're just passive?

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:37:32):

Yeah. Well, for one thing, you don't feel like you are worthy of protection. You feel like putting up with these things in life and relationships. It's just part of having a relationship. It's just part of life because that's the way the passive parent demonstrated how to deal with this outrageous behavior. They just went along with it. So the child learns from the passive parents, what can you do that expression, what can you do? They let it go and they learn not to stand up to it or to put boundaries on it.

 

Mel Robbins (00:38:11):

Let's talk about the fourth type of emotionally immature parent, which is the rejecting parent. Can you describe what that type of person's like?

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:38:19):

Yes. I had a client who said it very well once she said that when her dad came home, she was always so excited and she would run to greet him, and she said it was always like I was throwing myself against a closed door.

 

(00:38:35):

All he wanted to do was get in the house, read the paper, didn't want to be bothered. The rejecting parent acts as though kids are a nuisance, a bother, and they never wanted them in the first place. So when you're the child of that kind of parent, you learn that the best possible relationship with that parent is achieved through not bothering them, maybe through serving them. If you can find a way in maybe going along with them on things that they like to do, but it's not a relationship in which you're going to be allowed to have sort of equal status or even take up as much room as that rejecting parent because you're intruding, you always feel like you're intruding on their energies and interest. I

 

Mel Robbins (00:39:29):

Have a feeling that the person that's with us right now is listening to you and hanging on to every word and going, Dr. Gibson, how were you in my house growing up? How do you know all this stuff that I went through? Can you tell the person listening how just recognizing that you have had this experience of being raised by an emotionally immature parent may have impacted their emotional development and what you want them to know.

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:39:59):

One of the things that is going to happen as a result of growing up in this kind of household is that you're probably going to end up feeling very unsure of yourself, and there'll be sort of an underlying sense of insecurity that doesn't match the outside. So you end up feeling like you're too much or you need to be thinking of other people overly much. But it's really interesting that they will often feel very selfish. That's a word that they'll use when you said earlier, oh, I can't do that, or how could I? It's because they feel like they're being selfish and that sense of I overwhelm people with my needs. I'm too needy. I should be able to handle everything on my own. That's a very common kind of thing that is carried over into future relationships. Another thing that happens is that people will doubt their ability to communicate.

 

(00:41:14):

They will feel like, I just can't make myself understood. People who have emotionally immature parents have the experience of trying to communicate, and that emotionally immature parent is not interested in what they're saying. So when you're trying to tell somebody something that's important to you and you're trying to communicate it to them and they're looking at you like you have two heads and they are not processing what you're saying,

Mel Robbins (00:42:34):

Which is why they erupt or they dismiss. Yes. Or they get defensive or they put it back on you, or I don't want to talk about it. And then that trains you to walk on eggshells and use a different tone of voice and worry about whether or not this is the right time or kind of couch it in a certain way in order to manage somebody's emotional immaturity. And that just leaves you feeling like you're the problem

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:43:02):

Exactly. And you also identify the wrong problem. You think that you need to learn better communication skills. That's not the problem because of what I just said, if someone wants to understand you, they will knock themselves out trying to understand you.

 

Mel Robbins (00:43:21):

So is the problem that your work helps us highlight is recognizing when you're dealing with somebody who's emotionally immature?

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:43:30):

Yes. And one of the most telltale qualities of that is when you experience what a colleague of mine, Jenny Walters, she's a coach out in the West Coast, calls brain scramble. So you get around people who are emotionally immature and you're trying to explain yourself or you're trying to communicate, and all of a sudden it's like, I don't feel like I'm making any sense. I can't find the right words. I start to say it and then I can't remember what I was going to say. Brain scramble. Because when we're talking the other person's responsiveness actually helps our brain organize itself and stay on a track of thought because communication is not only intellectual and verbal, it's emotional. The whole time we're talking, our hearts are going, is there a connection there? Our right hemisphere of our brain is saying, is there resonance? Are we on the same wavelength that's being assessed the whole time? We're yammering away with our words. If that's not there, it is an incredibly unsafe experience. You're getting a contradictory signal. They're looking at you, they appear to be listening, but they're not processing it. And then it's like, whoa, the mismatch really pulls you off your game. You really pulls you away from the point that you're trying to make. And then it's like you can't remember even what you're trying to do.

 

Mel Robbins (00:45:10):

I actually love that you just said mismatch, and I love this brain scramble because I feel like one of the most important things about your work is giving words to a extraordinarily common experience. If 91% of people, of 8.5 million followers that we pulled asked, were you raised by somebody who was emotionally immature? We'll say, yes, this rings true. That experience of I'm trying to connect and communicate with you, and then all of a sudden the person's mood shifts or their body language turns hostile or their facial expression just looks blank and rejecting, there is a complete mismatch. And you do start to scramble in your mind because the signaling from the other person is very clearly Shut up. I'm not interested. You're annoying me. I don't care about this. And you can pick up on it immediately.

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:46:04):

Absolutely.

 

Mel Robbins (00:46:05):

And it is true. You start to think, I'm the problem. And I love that you just said, no, no, no, that's the wrong problem. It's not how you're communicating. It's that you're trying to communicate with somebody who is either too emotionally immature to be able to communicate like a mature person or that has no interest in communicating with you. And that's an important thing to understand because from the very beginning, you've been saying, this isn't about blaming anybody. It's about seeing the situation objectively so you can change how you show up in this relationship and what you expect of this person. Because I think if I'm speaking from my own experience, whether it's the child parent relationship or it's me as a parent to my child and being able to look and see at how my own emotional immaturity being overly emotional, big eruption, I'm sure my kids would tell you that they never knew what kind of mood I was going to be in when I woke up.

 

(00:47:00):

My husband definitely, we were the classic, I'm the emotional one. He's the passive one. I'm the one that is probably a little bit scarier, or at least I used to be. And still I started working on myself and developing the skill of emotional maturity. But I think as kids, you think that there's something you can do to change this. And the fact is you can't make somebody else emotionally mature. A person has to do that for themselves, and they have to want to because it's actually work to want to learn about your emotions and learn how to process them. And I found a part of your book so fascinating, Dr. Gibson. It's on page 84. You talk all about this thing called healing fantasies

 

(00:47:50):

And how these healing fantasies that we have about our parents in particular, that you've noticed that one thing that all children who have been raised by emotionally immature parents, which you also say that means they've been emotionally deprived children. One thing they have in common is they come up with a fantasy about how they are going to eventually get what they need. And as you're listening to Dr. Gibson, this might absolutely just hit you like a sledgehammer that children often think the cure for their childhood pain and emotional loneliness lives in finding a way to change themselves and other people into something other than who they really are. Healing fantasies have one theme. If only people may think they'd be love, if only they were more selfless or more attractive, or they may think that their life would be healed if only they became more famous or rich, that there are all these things we make up in our mind that help us get through these situations where we're not getting our needs met. But the problem is they affect us as adults. So Dr. Gibson, can you unpack what a healing fantasy is?

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:49:08):

It's the idea that the parent does change and does develop empathy and does stop sort of distorting and dismissing realities that they don't like

 

(00:49:21):

And starts to be willing to listen to how it has been for the child. The fantasy is that the parent will be capable of doing that at some point. Maybe when they get older, maybe when they don't have so much stress. Maybe when I have children as grandma, they will do this or whatever. And so we might say, well, where do they get this from? What would make them think that? Well, it's because sometimes emotionally immature parents can do better and do better. They can be fun, they can be loving, they can be available. They're especially good if you're hurt, sick need something, some material thing. They can be really Johnny on the spot with that stuff. But it's the emotional comforting and the emotional validation that they have trouble with.

 

Mel Robbins (00:50:20):

Well, the way that I look at it's this way, and tell me if this feels like a good way to think about it, because I think it's very confronting when you start to at your parents objectively and you feel bad and you feel a lot of grief, and it's also very validating to be able to see behavior that was a complete mismatch for what you needed. And to understand that oftentimes according to your work, Dr. Gibson, that the emotionally immature person does not even realize that this is what they're doing and this is the impact it's having on you. But the more work I've done on myself, the more that I realize this isn't about always being emotionally mature. There are going to be times where you're exhausted and life is testing you or your child is frankly so freaking trying and annoying and taxing that you're going to freaking scream at them.

 

(00:51:14):

Just do what I'm saying. It's the ability to calm yourself down and repair what just happened that in my mind is the sign of an emotionally mature person, the awareness that the eruption happened or the withdraw happened, or the dismissing happened, or you didn't show up in a way that maybe was as supportive as you would've liked. And to be able to talk about it in a way where you can take ownership for your side of it and actually be genuinely interested in making sure the other person's okay and that relationship and that safety is repaired. That to me is the thing that feels like the hallmark of somebody who's emotionally mature versus somebody who's not.

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:52:03):

Yes, because you've got the self-reflection going on.

 

Mel Robbins (00:52:07):

Yes.

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:52:08):

And you have the empathy going on because when we lose our cool, or we have been too egocentric with our kids or whatever it is, it hurts us. We realize it almost immediately. We feel that altruistic need to go back in and repair it. I mean, that is a huge part of being adequately emotionally mature.

 

Mel Robbins (00:52:38):

I think that there's a lot of people that are going to listen to this and actually share this with their adult children as a way to open up a conversation about apologizing. Because as blunt as I am about the things that I regret, and as much as I can own the fact that when I was a young parent and my kids were younger, I was emotionally immature and very overwhelmed by my life and very overwhelmed by past issues of trauma that I had never dealt with and things just going on in my life that I took out on them that they didn't deserve. And I can speak very black and white about it, but I would give anything to go back in time and to change the parent that I was and be better for them. But being able to and to see it myself has been this enormous gift in my relationship with my kids and bringing us even closer in our relationship. And so I don't think it's ever too late to apologize for the things that you didn't know about yourself. And I would imagine you have much more experience with this than me that I would think a lot of people are very receptive to that apology if it's coming from a very earnest place. And you're also working on changing how you show up now.

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:53:56):

Yeah. All you have to do is imagine what it would be like for your parent to come to you and say, honey, I am so sorry. I was so young. I was so green. I was so involved in this other thing. I didn't even know at the time what I was doing. I mean, we don't have to, you don't even have to be a parent to imagine what that would feel like coming from anybody. Anybody who says, I've been thinking about how I treated you. I mean, is that not the most precious, unexpected gift that a person can get? It makes you feel so seen, and it also solidifies the bond between you, and that's what the healing fantasy is. It's almost like the deathbed fantasy, sweetheart, I am so sorry for everything I did, and now I see the light. That's the hope. But children have to have that hope. They have to create that potential in their parent in order to keep adequate hope to keep growing and keep going on.

 

Mel Robbins (00:55:15):

But how does that hope and the healing fantasy actually get in the way of you healing?

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:55:20):

It gets in the way of your healing? Because it is essentially a kind of reality distortion

 

Mel Robbins (00:55:28):

That you're expecting the emotionally immature person to suddenly be mature and rescue you from this dysfunction.

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:55:34):

Yes, exactly.

 

Mel Robbins (00:55:35):

When the only person that's going to rescue you is you seeing it objectively and recognizing that you have to rescue yourself from it by seeing who you're dealing with. Exactly. In your book, you talk a lot about this hidden grief that when you really embrace the reality that you were raised by somebody who's emotionally immature, there's a lot of grief that you feel about the fact that there's this massive mismatch between what you needed and what you actually got. Can you tell us why grief is such a common experience that people feel when they recognize that they are the child of an emotionally immature parent?

 

Dr. Lindsay Gibson (00:56:17):

It's because it's such a sad thing. When you realize what you didn't get that you really needed and you begin to feel empathy for yourself, you then feel grief or loss over what you didn't get.