‘The Interview’: Dr. Lindsay Gibson on ‘Emotionally Immature' Parents
I just started watching “The Sopranos” for the first time. If you listen to the dialogue, they completely nailed it, because everything always comes back to the viewpoint of the emotionally immature character. It’s always all about them. Another one is the lack of empathy. The parent just doesn’t get it. They say, “Why are you so upset about this?” Or, “This is not a big deal.” They cannot enter into the reality of their child’s emotional truth
The broad definition of emotionally immature parents is parents who refuse to validate their children’s feelings and intuitions, who might be reactive and who are lacking in empathy or awareness. But can you give me examples of emotionally immature behaviors?
how do people distinguish between normal, flawed parental behavior and behavior that’s detrimental enough to rise to the label of “emotionally immature”? If you think of emotional maturity and immaturity as being on a continuum, all of us have a spot that we tend to hang out on. It doesn’t mean that we stay there. If you’re tired or you’re sick or you’re stressed, you are not going to be as emotionally mature as you could be when you’re rested and well and not stressed. However, if you’re in one of these compromised states, you may do some things that look immature, but it’s going to bother you. You’re going to think about what you did. The emotionally immature person, it’s like: “That was in the past. Why are you wallowing in it?” The more emotionally mature person would get why you’re still upset, and they’re going to do something that indicates that they have felt for the other person’s experience.
‘Isn’t labeling someone’s parent “emotionally immature” a kind of pathologizing? You could argue that. There’s no way of getting around that you’re boiling down this person that they love into a set of traits, and it calls them a name. It’s pejorative. But when you say “emotionally immature,” it’s not from the diagnostic manual. Although it is a way of categorizing them, it has a more explanatory tone. If you say, “Your father is narcissistic,” I get an immediate caricature of a narcissist. If I say, “Your father sounds like he may be emotionally immature,” there’s a little grace in that.
If somebody goes to their parent and says, “I think you were an emotionally immature parent,” how would a parent ever disprove that? If they would only say, “Tell me what you mean by that.” It would be the curiosity and the caring about what their child was expressing. Emotionally immature people shut the door because they know they don’t handle emotional things very well, and their best defense is to not get into it and to point the finger back at you.
When is estrangement the best option? That is something I start thinking about when they start having physical or emotional problems directly associated with their contact with their parents. Say, a woman who had very demanding, egocentric, emotionally immature parents, and they expected her to come at the drop of a hat, help them out, do something for them. They were as needy as her own children and also entitled, so she was exhausted because when they pulled her into these interactions there was no exchange of energy. It’s like, they need more, and she’s a bad person because she’s trying to set a boundary. It’s always frustrating, and you never feel like you’re doing enough
This woman I’m thinking about, she was developing stress-related physical symptoms, and it was like, OK, let’s talk about the effect on your health. So then you may bring up to the person, “Do you want to keep visiting them?” Lots of times, that’s the first time that thought’s ever crossed their mind.
There’s a moral obligation that is not only implied but explicitly stated: If I have a need, you should be there because you’re my kid. I’m trying to get them to feel the cost of it to them, which often they have completely tuned out because they don’t want to be a bad person.
I think the book’s ongoing popularity has been due to the fact that it said something about the cultural stereotype that we’ve had about parents for eons: that all parents love their children; all parents only want the best for their children; all parents put their children first; children can depend on their parents to be there for them when no one else is. I think people’s actual experience is that these stereotypes and these tropes don’t match up with their emotional experience.
Once we call something something, we think we know all about it. On the other hand, sometimes when you reduce and isolate out the operative factors, it gives you a way to not only recognize it but to control it and do something about it. So it’s a valid point, David, but it is a point that you could say about anything where you have an effective categorization: that it oversimplifies and leads to black-and-white conclusions that are not helpful. I’ve just tried to moderate that by helping people see more of the big picture about why these people became emotionally immature, what they’re trying to do with that kind of behavior and what you can do about it.
Do children owe parents anything? I look at that question differently. I look at it as, do any of us owe anybody else anything?
What’s the answer? The answer is, yes, I think we do. If I’m walking down the street and somebody trips and falls, I’m going to stop and help them get up. I wouldn’t want to live in a world where that wasn’t there, but what has happened is that there has been such an assumption that because you’re my child, you owe me something. Or, I’m entitled to your attention, and I can treat you any way I want because we’re family. That’s where you get to a point where there should be a boundary
People could decide, Hey, my unhappiness has to do with being raised by emotionally immature parents, and I’ll work on that. Then six months down the line, they realize there’s still a bunch of things they’re unhappy about. So how do we understand what our expectations for happiness should be? If you ever watch little kids, their default mode is happiness, and that’s because they’re spontaneously going and doing the next interesting thing. They naturally are following their energies. I think that’s what happens with people too. If they feel released to say no to the things that kill their energy, if they don’t feel guilted into acting more compassionate or loving than they really feel, if we take these things off of them, it’s like a cork that bobs to the top of the water.
When we can get the idea that we’re not in this world to function as a sort of auxiliary coping mechanism for people who can’t do it for themselves, we begin to feel our energy coming back. That’s what happiness is. Happiness is like free energy.
what I’m talking about is that with the people that I work with in psychotherapy, the adult children of these emotionally immature parents, the problem was really an excess of compassion. What I’ve seen is that the compassion takes over the instinctual self-preservation, and the person feels too guilty, too ashamed and too self-doubting to even think about what’s healthy for them.
don’t think there’s much possibility of change unless you have self-reflection, and you have self-reflection because you have a sense of self. You developed a sense of self because your emotional needs have been met and you have been responded to as a human being early enough that that sense of self gets in there.
I think there are earth-shattering moments that permanently shift your view of something or your way of thinking. That kind of change can happen in a flash. It’s like a joint goes back into place. There’s a click and it’s like, ah, everything starts to reorganize around that new realization. What I have found, though, is that the biggest change that people seem to have gotten from therapy is that they have a realization of their own inner experience. They now know how things affect them, what they really feel, what they really think, and they use that to guide themselves through relationships and their lives. The insight is not an intellectual exercise. It is like a becoming — an awareness that this is who I am.
What if I’ve come up with something that is most palatable for me? Well then you’ve got a problem, and what will happen is that reality will spank you. [Laughs.]
When we’re talking about relationships between people, is there such a thing as “the truth”? Just to use my own example: I have what I think is a truthful understanding of my relationship with my biological father and how it affected me as an adult. I think he has his own interpretation that is true for him. So what does truth mean in your context? Well, there’s no eye in the sky that’s going to one day give us the answer, but I think we can sense the truth for ourselves. Even if it’s a bad thing, even if it’s a painful thought, you still have those experiences of, I’ve touched on the truth of something. As far as human beings go, the best we can get is that internal sensing of what our truth is. And of course the next question’s going to be, What if I am a conspiracy theorist or a paranoid personality?
if our expectation about childhood is one where happiness is the default, might that retrospectively lead us to feelings of disappointment as adults? I think what I was trying to get at is that if children’s basic needs are met, they want to go and experience things that make them even happier.
you can mess it up early if you don’t pay attention to what something needs when it’s young
My mom and I have a great relationship because I was able to articulate to her, and was willing to, how she hurt me. She was blown away at first and we fought for months about it. Now she has come to terms with yes, she did some pretty terrible things. No she didn’t hit me, but what her and your generation doesn’t understand is there are many ways a parent can hurt their child without putting a finger on them, creating difficulties for them in later years. The fact that my mom could own those things, sit with them, accept that she had hurt me and accept that she had been the villain at times, saved our relationship. We never talk about it anymore. We never fight. We talk everyday. She is now not only the mother I want and need at 36 but my friend and confidant. My father however refuses to accept anything I tell him about how he hurt me. We can’t talk about it because he believes I’m making it up and the culture has taught me my parents are the root of all my problems, that he is the victim, that I have to do what is best for me if that means cutting him off. I did, and don’t regret it
When therapy knocks up against economic reality, one sees how meager therapy’s promise is. The most psychologically healthy person today is limited by destructive environments. If only my outlook was emotionally healthy— maybe then I would be able to—- able to what? Find an affordable rental, send my child to a good school, take time off when I am sick, feel secure about the steps taken to combat global warming, eat healthy food….
Has anyone in the comments actually read this book? The misplaced assumptions are astonishing. It is not about holding a grudge against your parents or about sidestepping personal responsibility. It is about better understanding the emotional landscape we come from so that we can understand what, specifically, we can take responsibility for, and how, specifically, we can truly and wholly forgive. I am a parent, and my mother fits the definition of emotionally immature. Reading this book has helped me have MORE compassion for her and more compassion for myself. It has not made me feel like I’m walking on eggshells around my daughters. It has helped me develop a roadmap for how I can repair our relationship when those rifts inevitably happen
My husband noticed when I was in my 30s that seeing or talking to my dad was hard for me. He said, ‘you get wound-up for a couple of weeks before you see him and it takes you a month to come down.’ So seeing my father once took me 6 weeks to cope. So I didn’t see him much. This story is clearly longer and more complex than the comments section can allow. In the end, I helped him - with his doctor appointments, hospitalizations, moving to assisted living, running errands. I did it for the basic idea of his humanity, and I excused his behavior to help him. But I exposed myself to a lot of toxicity in the process.
if a parent was not emotionally, physically, or mentally abusive then have a conversation. Let the parent know whats happening and how you’re thinking about the relationship. I did understand that she has her own journey and gets to choose those she will share it with. But she didn’t tell me any of that until i asked directly. I want my adult child to be satisfied with her life and to have autonomy. She didn’t have to break my heart to get there. Folks who write books like these make it black and white but people, families, are so many different shades in between. The author should recognize and callout the difference between extreme and repairable.
My own mother has started being able to talk with me about what she wishes she'd done differently while raising me, and that's helping me go easier on her. It's easier to forgive someone who says, "I'm sorry, I didn't handle that well," or, "If I'd known then what I know now," I would've handled that differently."
I think it’s fair to say that one of the problems with contemporary life is how we label other people in ways that are reductive or don’t acknowledge multidimensionality. Is there any part of you that thinks it’s not a good thing for the people who have read your book to be thinking about a parent, Oh, you’re emotionally immature, and that is what defines you now? Absolutely, I think it’s a danger. That is the problem with the categorizing part of our mind.