Have you ever felt your life looks fine from the outside, but you’re still feeling deeply unhappy  ?

I have. Reading Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay Gibson would have helped me tremendously. It’s a shame it was not written yet.

It’s one of these Aha books, able to change our perspective entirely about what our problems really are, and how to tackle them. And it’s an excellent book on healing from trauma.

How do we spot we may be adult children of emotionally immature parents ?

A good starting point is a pervasive feeling of loneliness.

Sometimes, we feel lonely because it’s difficult for us to build loving relationships : we seem stuck in repetitive patterns such as obsessions with people we barely know, chasing unavailable partners, one-sided relationships, or toxic entanglements with narcissists.  We may even end up avoiding relationships entirely.

Some of us do manage to build loving relationships and meaningful friendships. But we still feel lonely in them. From experience, it’s better than having relationships that don’t work, but it’s still painful and frightening : we’re feeling terrible , and we don’t understand why and what we can change.

What is missing in both cases is an emotional connection with others. It’s difficult for us to see though : in most cases we’ve never known emotional intimacy and we have no idea how to find and navigate it.

If we can trace back our feeling of loneliness to our early childhood, here we are: we are children of emotionally immature parents and our caregivers were probably unable to give us meaningful emotional connection.

And this childhood experience sets the stage for us having enormous difficulties finding them once adults.

Our experience growing up as children of emotionally immature parents

There was no one we could go to for comfort, reassurance, and understanding when we were upset. Sometimes, we were even shamed  – the message being we should have been able to manage our emotions on our own. In extreme cases, there was no one we could go to even when we were in actual danger.

There was also no one to clap and congratulate us when we achieved something. There could be approval because we made our parents look good, but no real warmth. In some cases, our caregivers could not even tolerate our successes and lashed out at us when we did well.

I remember feeling utterly alone when I was a child. I had no way of making sense of this experience, so I assumed it was my fault somehow. It seems we all do this when faced with parental failures.

When we grow up lonely with emotionally immature parents we are bound to experience difficulties with emotional connections down the line.

I didn’t even realize I needed emotional intimacy. I though I should be able to function alone, not needing anything from others. Self sufficiency was my motto. That’s the message I received my whole childhood: don’t ask others to be around to fill your needs. It’s shameful to have any.

It took time for me to realize I needed emotional intimacy, but I still did not know how to build meaningful emotional connections. I even found them a little scary and weird.

Well, let’s say it’s been a long journey.

Characteristics of emotionally immature parents

Emotionally immature parents are not interested in their children’s inner lives, feelings, emotions, hopes and dreams. They find it difficult to tolerate their children’s emotions. And they don’t see themselves as responsible for attending their children’s emotional needs.

At the same time, because they are emotionally immature, they uncousciously feel enormous, bottomless, childllike, emotional needs. And they do often will use their children to fill them: they are available, they love their parents by design (until they don’t anymore), and they cannot flee or fight (until they can).

Sometimes, this exploitation is obvious because there is some form of abuse. It can be, for example, a narcissistic parent exploiting a child sexually. Or a scapegoating parent who uses one of his or her children to offload inner feelings of shame and incompetence.

Sometimes it’s more subtle, like a driven parent who needs his kids to perform exceptionally well to feel good about themselves, while ignoring what the children actually want and feel.

In all instances, this combination of refusing to attend to their children emotional needs, while imposing the same children attend to parental needs, is a form of exploitation.

If you are wondering why this description of emotionally immature parents looks like the one of narcissistic parents, it’s because there is no real difference. Gibson chose to use this terminology in order not to scare off readers, but she herself admits it’s basically what we are talking about here.

What can we do if we realize we are adult children of emotionally immature parents ?

According to Lindsay Gibson, because of their parents egocentricity and unwillingness to connect to their children’s inner selves, these children end up feeling their true selves are not enough to engage others. They may even start believing that the only way to be loved and seen is to become something other than who they really are.

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but the paragraph above describes my younger self to a t. Does it look like complex trauma symptoms ? Absolutely ! That’s because being raised by emotionally immature parents is a form of relational trauma. Emotional exploitation and neglect are invisible, but they’re real.

This unfortunate situation leads to plenty of problems in us, obviously: low self esteem and an overly active inner critic, depression, being cut off from our needs, feelings and desires (in other words, dissociation),  perfectionism, and then of course, there are relationship problems and existencial loneliness.

I believe we need to work on each of these problems, by getting as much information as we can, and look for help (and of course, meaningful connection!).

But more importantly, I believe it’s crucial to learn about the cause of all of this, rather than a list of symptoms. This cause can be called our caregivers emotional immaturity, narcissism, emotional neglect, or relational trauma.

I think you already understood that Lindsay Gibson’s work is very helpful if you suspect your history incorporate parental emotional immaturity.

It helps shifting the cause of our issues from our own inadequacy to parental failure, in other words let go of our shame.

It also helps figuring out what can be healing for us, for example working on our boundaries, self esteem, and capacity for connection. Sometimes it’s even simpler, like getting out of our house and meeting people.