The damage done by emotionally immature parents (and how to heal) - ABC News

Sana Qadar: A quick warning, this episode touches on the topic of suicide, take care while listening.

Mandy's mother has always had a controlling streak. When she was 10 years old, her mum got a job at her school, which is a bit of a nightmare scenario for most kids anyway, but her mother used her presence in a peculiar way.

Mandy: My mother was telling me who I was and I wasn't allowed to be friends with. She was prohibiting most people I made friends with. So she would actually leave her post during my lunchtime to see who I was hanging out with and if I was following her orders.

Sana Qadar: Mandy quickly realised this wasn't normal.

Mandy: Because I was like, well, nobody else's mom is coming in here and checking to see who they are friends with.

Sana Qadar: In her teens, Mandy's mother threw her a big, expensive birthday party, which doesn't sound so bad but she really, really didn't want one.

Mandy: So in Brazil we have a tradition where we have a large party when somebody is 15 and they are coming in to be a woman et cetera, it's usually a very expensive party. I kept telling her, 'I really don't want to do this,' and she said, 'No, but I missing out on this experience.' And it was funny because it's very clearly a party that is not for the parent, it's for the child. And so she set up this whole party, did it all her own way. You know, that's not completely unhealthy in and of itself, but when you notice that in a pattern of behaviour, it becomes very interesting.

Sana Qadar: Mandy is now in her late 20s, and until a few years ago, her mother was still trying to control what she wore, going as far as to pre-approve what she could buy.

Mandy: There was one day where I was wearing an outfit that she didn't like the combination and she started freaking out to the point where she went up to the door and blocked my exit. She would not allow for me to leave the house. And she seemed so genuinely frightened of us somehow presenting in a way that wasn't acceptable to her, and that scared me a little bit because I was, like, you could escalate based on these incredibly small things.

Sana Qadar: Call them narcissistic, bullying, abusive, whatever they are like, difficult parents can have a lasting impact on us, our future relationships, and our very sense of self. Mandy has faced many such struggles. And while we don't get to pick our parents, we can try and heal or move on or be different, whatever helps us process the experience. It's that kind of work that Lindsay Gibson specialises in. She is a clinical psychologist and author of two books on what she calls emotionally immature parents.

Lindsay Gibson: As human beings we have deep, deep needs for connection and for being seen by the people that we belong to, and when the parent can't engage at a deep enough emotional level, that child is left in a place of emotional loneliness.

Sana Qadar: You're listening to All in the Mind, I'm Sana Qadar, and today, the damage done by emotionally immature parents, and how to recover.

How common are emotionally immature parents in your experience?

Lindsay Gibson: Well, I don't have any research on the demographics of them unfortunately, that would be a whole other lifetime, but I became aware of them through my work in psychotherapy with people who came in and would talk about their parents in such a way that I was astounded at the immaturity of their behaviours. And as I'm listening to them, I'm thinking, oh my gosh, her father is acting like a four-year-old, or her mother sounds like a 14-year-old.

So I became aware that a lot of the clients that I was seeing, once we started talking about their family dynamics, it became very clear that they were dealing with parents who psychologically actually were not as healthy as the patients sitting in my office who had come for psychological care. And that was fascinating to me. It was, like, why are these people in psychotherapy and yet in their description of their parents, the parents clearly have much more serious problems and in fact are projecting a lot of blame and negativity onto my client, which is really confusing them and contributing to their symptoms, such as depression and anxiety. So it was fascinating to me that what I was seeing was this general characteristic of emotional immaturity.

Sana Qadar: Within that umbrella of emotional immaturity, Lindsay also realised these parents often followed more specific patterns of behaviour. So she developed a loose typology to describe them. There are four types of emotionally immature parents.

Lindsay Gibson: The first type is what we call the emotional parent. They approach the world from their emotions first.

Sana Qadar: These parents can be very volatile, even hysterical, Lindsay says.

Lindsay Gibson: Everything is a big deal, everything is a big reaction, they get exhausted from that, they exhaust the people around them, and people feel like they are walking on eggshells with them all the time.

Sana Qadar: The second type is the driven parent.

Lindsay Gibson: This is the parent that to the external world they look like the most normal parent. In fact they may even look like the kind of perfect parent because they are very driven towards success.

Sana Qadar: These parents pack their kids' schedules will all kinds of activities. They might have advanced degrees and expect the same from their children.

Lindsay Gibson: But when it comes down to matters of the heart, and emotional attachment, these driven parents can't stop long enough to really get down on the child's level and connect with them. They are also very perfectionistic. They are hard to be around.

Sana Qadar: The next type is the rejecting parent.

Lindsay Gibson: And the rejecting parent is just exactly what it sounds like. I mean, you wonder why this person ever had children in the first place because they can be very taciturn and withdrawn but there is an aura about them of 'stay away from me'.

Sana Qadar: And finally there's the passive parent.

Lindsay Gibson: And this one is a little bit tricky but it's an important category because lots of times the other three types, they will end up with a passive type because the passive type really lets the other three get away with murder. They don't step in to protect the child, they tend not to make a fuss. At the same time they are often the favourite parent because they can be fun-loving, they can be warm.

Sana Qadar: Is the damage these various types of emotionally immature parents inflict essentially the same, or is there one or two types that are most damaging to most people?

Lindsay Gibson: Well, within each of these of course there is a spectrum of severity. So you could have a very severe emotional parent who would be truly a wild ride, and oftentimes these people are…at the extremes, they can become very abusive because they are so emotional. And then you can have another parent who…for instance the rejecting type, who sounds awful but yet they might be milder.

Sana Qadar: For Mandy, her mother's emotional volatility did cross the line into abuse, but it took her a while to fully understand and accept this.

Mandy: I think there were various lightbulb moments. I think one thing many people don't realise is that generally we are very poorly educated on what abuse is. I think everyone thinks it's such a heavy word, people are so hesitant to use it or to label their parents as such, and just a lot of people don't realise there are so many forms of abuse. There is emotional abuse, there is psychological abuse, there financial abuse, and it doesn't have to be physical for it to count as abuse. And I think also what a lot of people don't realise is that it doesn't have to be incredibly severe for it to be hurtful, for it to have long lasting consequences and for somebody to reasonably set boundaries around it.

Sana Qadar: One of the things Mandy's mother put pressure on her about was her weight, so much so that she developed an eating disorder from the age of 11 to 15. Weight was an obsession that stemmed from her mother's own insecurities.

Mandy: My mother moved to the United States and she became obese to the point where she had to have bariatric surgery, and she was always incredibly controlling of what I was eating, always watching every move. Part of that insecurity led me to a period in my teens where I was suicidal for quite a long time and I had a suicide attempt when I was 15.

Looking back, I just think it's very interesting when I see photos of myself, I look so tiny, I look so young, and it's weird to think that's when I first started starving myself because somebody told me I wasn't good enough or that I was too fat.

Sana Qadar: Mandy says she was also constantly walking on eggshells at home, trying to manage or moderate her mother's behaviour.

Mandy: Yes, absolutely, and I think sometimes that can create a false sense of intimacy with the abuser. Something that a lot of people don't realise is that abuse is actually a cycle. You know, these events will happen, these fights will happen and then there are phases of calm, phases of reconciliation, which is what keeps victims around. A lot of people think, well, it's not abuse because my parents are nice to me sometimes, and it's like, well, it doesn't mean there isn't a pattern of abuse happening and that there is a cycle there that is continuing.

And so, yes, we had good moments, definitely, and a lot of people thought we had a good relationship, but really there was no willingness to respect me when I brought up any issues, there was zero willingness to make any changes in behaviour really and that's when I realised, well, these good moments, they are not really defining our relationship in any way, they are not really worth anything if I'm not being respected as a person when it's important.

Sana Qadar: Given how crucial our relationships with our parents are, it's no surprise how they treat us can have a lasting impact on our emotional well-being. Psychologist Lindsay Gibson says there are a few common ways this can play out.

Lindsay Gibson: I would say that the most common impact that these parents have on their adult children is an underlying sense of emotional loneliness. This was something that people really reverberated with in the book. You know, I'm part of a family, I may even know that I'm loved, but oh my gosh, there must be something wrong with me because I feel so lonely. So that's the biggest characteristic.

But when they get to be adults, you really start seeing some of the long-range impact of having parents that can't respond to you emotionally. And one of them is that you learn to deny your own needs and how things affect you because it really doesn't make a difference to the parent. So you get taught to disconnect from your own instincts and feelings. They teach you to doubt yourself and mistrust your emotional needs, and you can imagine how that plays out later when that person has to figure out what they want to do for a living or decide who to marry, all these things that have to come from an internal sense of guidance.

Sana Qadar: Lindsay says these children often grow up to have unsatisfying relationships too.

Lindsay Gibson: Because they aren't used to emotional intimacy because their parents weren't interested in that, and so they have a hard time letting others see the real you, so to speak. They tend to be passive and put others first and, worst of all, they are used to settling for people who make them feel invisible or inadequate. So I've had a lot of adult children who've come in ready to get a divorce because they have married someone who was really very self-centred and that they couldn't get actually close to, but that felt normal to them when they got married.

Sana Qadar: The other dynamic Lindsay often sees is that children of emotionally immature parents end up feeling responsible for other people's emotions.

Lindsay Gibson: So they feel guilty and responsible if someone else is unhappy, and they make a point of monitoring the other person's moods to the point where they bite their tongue and make it all about keeping the other person happy. So all those things are very self-defeating when you grow up and you're trying to create a life of your own as an individual.

Sana Qadar: Mandy isn't a client of Lindsay's, but what Lindsay describes is very similar to the impact Mandy says her parents have had on her. She finally moved out of her parents' home last year and has since started seeing a therapist.

Mandy: My trauma response is actually a fairly common one, which is kind of developing this very anxious attachment style. When you are used to emotional neglect to some extent, sometimes when somebody comes along and treats you well, with even a little bit of an ounce of respect, it can be easy to put them on a pedestal, when really they are doing the bare minimum, it's just that you're not used to the bare minimum. And so there's this weird stage where you start interacting with other people…it's easy to become incredibly attached to people, to always need reassurance. So that's definitely something I've been working on, not only with romantic relationships, with platonic relationships as well. I've been a people-pleaser for many years because sometimes a trauma response isn't just like having panic attacks, sometimes it's also like, well, I'm going to get used to being a people-pleaser because I just want to lessen the conflict.

Sana Qadar: You're listening to All in the Mind. I'm Sana Qadar, and today, the damage done by what psychologist Lindsay Gibson calls emotionally immature parents.

Mandy started grappling with the impact her parents had on her emotional development in her 20s, but for many of Lindsay's clients, it's often not until later in life that they start to process their childhoods.

Lindsay Gibson: Generally speaking, the 30s and 40s tend to be prime ages when people begin to turn their attention to their own psychology, because that's when you're kind of really in the thick of adult life and your intimate relationships, your marriage, your relationships with your children, those are beginning to maybe remind you of things from your own childhood. You're trying to make it in the world perhaps and so your individuality becomes very important because you are crafting your own life.

Sana Qadar: And again with the clients you've worked with over the years, do you find that they are starting to see that they are repeating the same patterns their parents had with their own kids and that's what worries them?

Lindsay Gibson: Two things. Yes, that's the first one. And the second one is that little children of course will stir up your own emotions incredibly. They really make you reactive. And if that child is expressing her needs and that parent who is the adult child of an emotionally immature parent is thinking, oh my gosh, I was never allowed to do that, is my kid really disturbed or what's going on here, and it's very, very threatening to them. And this is normal childhood behaviour, right? But if you weren't raised to be able to acknowledge your own needs, that can be really hard to take in your own child. It sparks a re-evaluation of what happened to them in their childhood.

Sana Qadar: I know you don't have any research on this, but anecdotally or just across your own work, do you have a sense of how common it is for parents to be failing in this aspect with their children? Are most of us ill-equipped to meet the emotional needs of our children?

Lindsay Gibson: I think it's actually pretty common because I think emotional immaturity, at least in my estimation, and believe me, as I said, I do not have official research on this, but when you read the news or you hear about how things are going with children and children's needs, you come to realise that a lot of parents really don't have the emotional maturity that's needed to give those kids that solid sense of attachment and security. And when you have a book like mine that goes out there and suddenly there are all these people who are responding to this concept about emotionally immature parents, it tells me that there's a lot more of it than even you might think.

Sana Qadar: Yes, do you have any thoughts on why it would be so common? What contributes to making so many emotionally immature parents?

Lindsay Gibson: Well, if you think about emotionally immature parents being the children of people who really were growing up in the early to mid part of the 20th century, there was really not a lot of emphasis on the emotional needs of children. They were doing well to raise people's awareness of the physical needs of children, such as getting rid of the child workplaces or making sure the children had enough to eat. But around about the 1950s, there was a paediatrician, Benjamin Spock, who began to push this idea that children had emotional needs and that meeting the child's emotional needs had tremendous importance in their adult life. And so there was an awakening.

Sana Qadar: And so for people listening right now you might be recognising themselves as the child of an emotionally immature parent, what should you do about it and are you doomed to repeat that behaviour unless you do something about it?

Lindsay Gibson: Yes, I think what we call psycho-education is huge, and that's part of the movement that I hope that my books would support because if you don't know about these concepts, then your only conclusion can be either there's something terribly wrong with your parent or there's something terribly wrong with yourself. But when you understand that emotional immaturity is a phenomenon, then you have conceptual power over your experience and you no longer have to automatically react in a kind of a psychologically blind way. Instead, you can see it for what it is and gradually begin to not take it personally anymore that your parent has trouble with emotional intimacy or that parent doesn't control their anger. So the psycho-education is incredibly important for people to begin to look at their parents in a different way, not to malign the parent but to understand the parent's limitations and thereby begin to grieve the loss of the hope that that parent could be the ideal parent that they always wanted, because of course that's a healing fantasy that all children have.

Sana Qadar: And is it possible to maintain a healthy and safe relationship with an emotionally immature parent?

Lindsay Gibson: That's a great question, because you said 'healthy and safe', right? So it's not my definition of a healthy and safe relationship because health to me means that both people flourish, and the dynamic of the emotionally immature relationship is that the emotionally mature person tries to flourish at the expense of the other person. And it's certainly not a safe relationship because if you don't agree to be under the control and the approval of the emotionally immature person, then you are likely to get a lot of blowback, a lot of criticism, a lot of pouting, a lot of withdrawal, a lot of cold shoulders. So I don't know that I would call it healthy or safe. But I think it's possible to have a relatively pleasant relationship. It just depends on your ability to maintain a kind of a neutrality and not get sucked into their immature demands or their insistent kind of needs.

Sana Qadar: What would be your advice to someone who wants to enact boundaries so as to maintain some semblance of a relationship with their parents without totally cutting them off but more so on their terms?

Lindsay Gibson: Yes, and actually that is what I recommend because when you cut off a parent, it's a pretty big decision. However, if that parent is really destructive, if that parent is affecting your health or your well-being, sometimes you have to take a break and it may be an extended break, maybe a break that lasts for rest of your life. There is nothing wrong with that, but I just try to encourage people to learn how to actively set boundaries.

A good example is that sometimes these kinds of parents will force things, like they will give gifts that you don't want, they will insist on visits that you don't want. And if you learn how to say no in whatever awkward, frightened, shy way that you want to say no but you just continue to say what your limits are, that really works pretty well because emotionally immature people are not prepared for repetition. They expect that you're going to do this dance where they ask you for something, you say no, they keep on, and then you give in and feel guilty. But if you just continue to say no, after a while they really don't have anything to say because there's nowhere for them to go, but that's a very hard thing for an adult child to do, but it can be done and that's the way to do it.

Sana Qadar: Why do people give so much leeway to their parents, why do we allow them to treat us so badly over so many years?

Lindsay Gibson: Because we are scared of them. I mean, you have to remember that when this all started you were three feet tall and they were nearly six feet tall. You are living with a bad-tempered giant growing up…

Sana Qadar: That's a great way of putting it.

Lindsay Gibson: And that's very scary. Without that giant, you cannot survive. And so fear of that parent's reactions is a very, very healthy survival mechanism for all children.

Sana Qadar: Boundaries are something Mandy tried to establish with her parents many times over, but it never seemed to work.

Mandy: And of course it all got worse when they realised that I was queer. I kept establishing boundaries around it where I was like, look, my identity is not up for debate. That was completely dismissed.

Sana Qadar: By 2020 she had finally saved enough money to move out of her parents' home for good. She currently has no contact with them and it has been that way for about six months.

Mandy: I started realising, well, me being here isn't safe. Maybe I'm technically allowed to stay here, they didn't technically kick me out, but they created an unsafe environment for me to the point where I knew it was best for me to leave.

Sana Qadar: Mandy now runs an online forum where other children of difficult parents can swap survival stories, share encouragement and try and heal.

Mandy: It's worth realising that you are deserving of having boundaries, you are deserving of that, even in situations that are not extreme. In the group we will sometimes joke around that it's not about playing trauma Olympics, it's not like, oh, but this person had more trauma so they are more deserving of boundaries. It's not a competition, nobody is trying to win by having more trauma. You are deserving of being respected as a person.

Sana Qadar: Have you seen many cases where parents eventually gain insight and come to accept how their behaviour impacted their kids, or does that not really happen?

Lindsay Gibson: I have seen instances of that. In fact, just yesterday I had a call from a man who said that he was estranged from both of his children, and one of his children had sent him my book and he wanted to get an appointment because he wanted to change. That's amazing when that happens. Often that's not what happens. But it's interesting because it gives me hope because when the culture changes, when the concepts change, a lot of people can begin to become more self-reflective. I mean, look at what's happened with our awareness of child abuse, or police over-use of force. I mean, these are things that used to be accepted as completely normal.

Sana Qadar: As for how to be a good parent, it's really quite simple.

Lindsay Gibson: All you have to do is to not only love your child but be able to see your child as a unique individual who has a real internal world of their own where everything is just as important as it is to the adult, and there have always been parents who had that sensitivity, thank goodness.

Sana Qadar: That's clinical psychologist Lindsay Gibson. She is also the author of the books Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, and Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents.

That's it for All in the Mind this week. Our producer is James Bullen, sound engineer is Emrys Cronin. I'm Sana Qadar, thanks for listening, catch you next time.

The damage done by emotionally immature parents (and how to heal) - ABC News