Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

Lindsay C. Gibson

Created: Almost 2 years ago

My 30 highlights

Terms like “self-absorbed” and “narcissistic” make it sound as if these people enjoy thinking about themselves all the time, but they really have no choice in the matter. They have fundamental doubts about their core worth as human beings. They are profoundly self-involved because their development was stunted by anxiety during childhood. In this way, their egocentrism is more like the self-preoccupation of someone with a chronic pain condition, rather than someone who can’t get enough of himself or herself.
Fear of genuine emotion can cause emotionally immature people to be killjoys. As parents, instead of enjoying their children’s excitement and enthusiasm, they may abruptly change the subject or warn them not to get their hopes up.
Emotional loneliness is a vague and private experience, not easy to see or describe. You might call it a feeling of emptiness or being alone in the world. Some people have called this feeling existential loneliness, but there’s nothing existential about it. If you feel it, it came from your family.
For emotionally immature people, all interactions boil down to the question of whether they’re good people or bad ones, which explains their extreme defensiveness if you try to talk to them about something they did. They often respond to even mild complaints about their behavior with an extreme statement, like “Well, then, I must be the worst mother ever!” or “Obviously I can’t do anything right!”
Affect phobia can lead to an inflexible, narrow personality based on rigid defenses against certain feelings. As adults, these emotionally immature people have an automatic anxiety reaction when it comes to deep emotional connection. Most genuine emotion makes them feel exposed and extremely nervous. Throughout life, their energy has been devoted to creating a defensive facade that protects them from emotional vulnerability with other people. To avoid dangerous emotional intimacy, they stick to a well-worn life script and resist talking about or processing emotions, including in relationships.
As adults, they may deny their instincts to the point where they acquiesce to relationships they don’t really want. They may then believe it’s up to them to make the relationship work.
Because internalizers are sensitive to the subtleties of their relationships with loved ones, when they have an emotionally unengaged parent, they are much more aware of the painful loneliness that results.
The ability to feel mixed emotions is a sign of maturity. If people can blend contradictory emotions together, such as happiness with guilt, or anger with love, it shows that they can encompass life’s emotional complexity.
When things get too intense, they become passive, withdraw emotionally, and hide their heads in the sand.
Emotionally immature people are highly self-referential, meaning that in any interaction, all roads lead back to them. However, they aren’t self-reflective. Their focus on themselves isn’t about gaining insight or self-understanding; it’s about being the center of attention.
Lacking adequate parental support or connection, many emotionally deprived children are eager to leave childhood behind.
the children of driven parents always feel they should be doing more, or be doing something other than whatever they are doing.
Emotional parents are the most infantile of the four types. They give the impression that they need to be watched over and handled carefully. It doesn’t take much to upset them, and then everyone in the family scrambles to soothe them.
Emotionally immature people who are otherwise intelligent can think conceptually and show insight as long as they don’t feel too threatened in the moment. Their intellectual objectivity is limited to topics that aren’t emotionally arousing to them. This can be puzzling to their children, who experience two very different sides to their parents: sometimes intelligent and insightful, other times narrow-minded and impossible to reason with.
As children, many emotionally immature people grew up in homes where they were taught that the spontaneous expression of certain feelings was a shameful breach of family custom. They learned that expressing, or even experiencing, these deeper feelings could bring shame or punishment, resulting in what psychotherapy researcher Leigh McCullough and her colleagues have called affect phobia (McCullough et al. 2003).
Many people can readily enumerate all the reasons why they should be satisfied and be shy about admitting that they aren’t. They blame themselves for not having the “right” feelings.
In groups, the most emotionally immature person often dominates the group’s time and energy. If other people allow it, all the group’s attention will go to that person, and once this happens, it’s hard to redirect the group’s focus. If anyone else is going to get a chance to be heard, someone will have to force an abrupt transition—something many people aren’t willing to do.
Attentive and reliable emotional relationships are the basis of a child’s sense of security. Unfortunately, emotionally immature parents are usually too uncomfortable with closeness to give their children the deep emotional connection they need. Parental neglect and rejection in childhood can adversely affect self-confidence and relationships in adulthood, as people repeat old, frustrating patterns and then blame themselves for not being happy. Even adult success doesn’t completely erase the effects of parental disconnection earlier in life.
You may wonder whether these people are just being extroverted. They aren’t. The difference is that most extroverts easily follow a change of topic. Because extroverts crave interaction, not just an audience, they’re interested and receptive when others participate. Extroverts do like to talk, but not with the purpose of shutting everyone else down.
Role reversal is a hallmark of emotionally immature parenting. In this case, the parent relates to the child as if the child were the parent, expecting attentiveness and comfort from the child. These parents may reverse roles and expect their child to be their confidant, even for adult matters.
Another cognitive sign of emotional immaturity is overintellectualizing and getting obsessed about certain topics. In those areas, emotionally immature people can conceptualize well—indeed, excessively. But they don’t apply that ability to self-reflection or being emotionally sensitive toward others. Their preoccupation with ideas distracts them from emotional intimacy. They may discuss their favorite topics at length, but they don’t really engage the other person. As a result, they can be as hard to talk to as overly literal thinkers.
People who focus mostly on the present moment don’t have enough of a time perspective to engage in self-reflection. Instead, with each new moment they leave their past behind, freeing them from any sense of responsibility for their actions. Therefore, when someone feels hurt by something they did in the past, they tend to accuse the person of dwelling on the past for no good reason.
Enmeshment sometimes manifests as playing favorites (Libby 2010). It can be hard to watch your parent give attention to a preferred sibling, making you wonder why your parent never showed that kind of interest in you. But obvious favoritism isn’t a sign of a close relationship; it’s a sign of enmeshment. It’s likely that the preferred sibling has a psychological maturity level similar to your parent’s (Bowen 1978). Low levels of emotional maturity pull people into mutual enmeshment, especially if they are parent and child.
Emotionally immature parents may yell at or punish externalizers for their behavior, whereas they’re more likely to dismiss or reject internalizers’ feelings with shaming, contempt, or derision.
It’s crucial that internalizers see their instinctive desire for emotional engagement as a positive thing, rather than interpreting it to mean they’re too needy or dependent. Instinctively turning to others for comfort when stressed makes people stronger and more adaptive. Even if they’ve been shamed by an unresponsive parent for needing attention, their emotional needs show that their healthy mammalian instinct for seeking comfort is working well.
Such parents may even become nervous and angry if their children get upset, punishing them instead of comforting them.
Passive parents aren’t angry or pushy like the other three types, but they still have negative effects. They passively acquiesce to dominant personalities and often partner with more intense types who are also immature, which makes sense given that people with similar emotional maturity levels are attracted to one another (Bowen 1978).
driven parents seem so invested in their child’s success that their egocentrism is hard to see.
Impaired empathy is a central characteristic of emotionally immature people, as is avoidance of emotional sharing and intimacy. Being out of touch with their own deeper feelings, they’re strikingly blind to how they make other people feel.
If one or both of your parents weren’t mature enough to give you emotional support, as a child you would have felt the effects of not having it, but you wouldn’t necessarily have known what was wrong. You might have thought that feeling empty and alone was your own private, strange experience, something that made you different from other people. As a child, you had no way of knowing that this hollow feeling is a normal, universal response to lacking adequate human companionship.