Blog Post #120: Emotionally Immature Parents
On our podcast, we recently hosted Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD., the New York Times and Amazon #1 best selling author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents. Many Type C people grew up in invalidating, neglectful, or abusive environments and Dr. Gibson helps us better understand the damaging effects of emotionally immature caregivers. Highlights of the episode are below.
Dr. Gibson, through the course of her career, became very interested in how her patients and their close relationships looked at the world in terms of their maturity level. Some behaved in childlike ways. When patients understand that the people around them might be emotionally immature, they gain some objective distance, take the blame off themselves, and stop trying to fix things in a one-sided way.
Emotional immaturity (EI) can be thought of as an egocentric, self-centered view of the world. Everything comes back to the EI person. They cannot consistently consider another person’s inner world or feelings.
EI people say things like “don’t feel that way” or “how could you say/think that?” They view everything through their own emotions. They are rigid thinkers - they are right and you are wrong. They have little capacity for self reflection and deny, distort, or dismiss anything that doesn’t match their reality. You can’t work anything out with them. They project blame and look for fault.
The EI person needs someone to help them regulate and stabilize their emotions. They need someone else to make them feel confident and secure and they put this responsibility on the other person. When the other person doesn’t fulfill these functions, the EI person’s reaction is to blame them. They see the problem as coming from outside themselves.
EI parents have children that generally fall into two categories: internalizers or externalizers. Externalizers cannot engage in self reflection, therefore it’s very difficult for them to grow psychologically. Perceptive and sensitive children tend to become internalizers, meaning they cope by doing internal exercises to process, reflect on, and learn from a situation.
Internalizers are similar to Type C in their tendency to be focused on fairness. We hew to a higher set of standards so we are not taking or giving too much credit. We work hard to make sure we are in the good graces of other people.
Internalizing/taking things in as a coping style gets in the way of being able to set boundaries to keep bad stuff out. When the EI person isn’t acting in good faith - gaslighting, blaming, etc - internalizers will take it in and have a hard time getting it out of their heads and hearts. They over-identify with the pain of the other person who is blaming them.
When there is clarity about what EI people will do or say, you can set up boundaries, like the amount of time spent with the EI person or what is up for discussion.
Sometimes patients will come into therapy with physical health issues, but these will often abate over the course of therapy. It’s as if it becomes not the only form of communication to say “I’m having trouble here.”
Internalizers are almost over-developed when it comes to emotional maturity to the point where it’s become a liability. The strict definition of maturity is going from unregulated, impulsive, lack of control, egocentric to the opposite - regulated, calm, controlled, empathetic. For internalizers, the good development goes two steps beyond and becomes a defensive system - hypervigilance, working too hard to figure out what the EI person needs and what I need to do to keep them calm so I can survive.
Internalizers use this good ability to such an extreme that they take attention off their own self awareness. When you are hyper focused on everyone else, you lose the ability to tell how things affect you. You might not know you are angry or hurt or badly treated.
Emotional maturity means you become more complex. A mature person can think of themselves AND other people. They can anticipate consequences and learn from the past. Internalizers therefore have a super power - but we know the excessive focus on others can cause damage. However, they are capable of self reflection, they can get to know themselves better and learn to set boundaries. Externalizers never accept there is a problem, they over-simplify everything, and there is little capacity for growth.
People pleasers blame themselves and lose self respect when they excessively please and can’t stop. It’s a defense mechanism. It jumps in before you even know you feel bad. Pleasers need the tools for self awareness and they can get out of it. Retaining the ability to empathize with others is something we never want to lose; we simply need to add a few more tricks - assertion, setting boundaries, and communicating directly.
Internalizers learn to tune out information from their inner worlds and don’t trust themselves and their intuition. There’s still a line of connection to the inner self though. Progress comes through paying attention to how we are feeling in the body/body sensations and paying attention to imagery in the mind.
We can learn to focus on a feeling until it is recognized and articulated, then we can release it; at this point it has delivered its message.
To find your true self - follow your energy. If energy goes up - this is something you find enlivening. If your energy goes down, this is something to move away from.