Dealing with Emotionally Immature People (and Parents) | Dr. Lindsay Gibson, Being Well Podcast

Hello everyone, welcome to be

well

. I'm Forest Hansen. If you're new to the

podcast

, thank you for joining us today and if you've listened before, welcome. My guest today is clinical psychologist Dr. Lindsy Gibson, author of several books. including I Think It's Fair to Call It a Cult Classic, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, which has now sold over 1 million copies, which is an incredibly huge number, and his most recent book, which untangles

emotionally

immature

people

. , Dr. Gibson's work has helped so many

people

. better understand themselves and their experiences while giving them the tools they need to recognize

emotionally

immature

people, manage their relationships with them effectively, and establish healthy boundaries that allow us to protect ourselves emotionally, so today we will explore emotional immaturity, including some of the common symptoms and coping patterns that can arise from

being

raised by emotionally immature

parents

, we will also learn how to deal with these challenges in adulthood and work through some of the common problems that arise when we begin to unravel from people who just aren't It's not very good for us, so Lindsay, thanks for joining me, how are you today?

Oh, I'm fine, it's wonderful to be here. Forest, yeah, I really appreciate you taking the time. I've been waiting for this video for a while and I'd love to start with a kind of basic general question: what is emotional immaturity? Yes, good question, what are we talking about here? So I have to tell you that when we were trying to decide on the final title of the book, we had a uh, consultant who worked for Barnes & Noble, I think, and she said, I think you should call this book adult children of emotionally immature

parents

and my editor. and I said H, you know, we don't think it's a very exciting title, you know?

Etc. and they finally convinced us, but it was surprising how many people told me later that that was what made them choose the book and that when they saw that sentence emotionally I'm sure something clicked with them and resonated with it, it's like people recognize what it is even if they don't technically know what it is. When I was training, there was a big emphasis on child development and the relationship between a person's level of development and their mental health or their daily functioning, so when I say emotional immaturity, I mean that on an emotional level some people, unfortunately , many people tend to react to life as if they were psychologically much younger than they really are now.

General development in a human

being

can occur in separate threads, as we can have. our intellectual development we can have our social development we can have our occupational development so that you can be an extremely intelligent person who is very successful in business or you know your um in the field that you choose and you can be very popular socially okay? Everything moves at a pace, but in your emotional development you may be more like a three- or four-year-old, a seventy-year-old or a 15-year-old, so we want to understand that people get stuck at certain ages in terms of how they handle things. their emotional responses to life and of course that includes things like intimate relationships and stress, so if you think about it on a Continuum, we don't have the absolutely 100% emotionally immature person, that would be hard to find, and then we don't have a 100% emotionally mature person, so you'll notice that I always refer to adequate emotional maturity or sufficient emotional maturity because everything is relative, yes, and people move back and forth between maturity and immaturity depending on the level of stress . they face and depending on the demands for emotional intimacy or closeness with other people, so if we are sick, exhausted or very stressed, we can all display emotionally immature behavior.

We become more impulsive, we become less sensitive towards other people. They have problems modulating our emotional and anxiety responses to life and, conversely, the emotionally immature person when they really want something or when they have very good resources, know that they are full, feel that things are going

well

, can stretch and seem be much more emotionally mature than they really are. Well, really, more than they can handle. What are some of the common characteristics of this? You know, those are good signs of emotional immaturity for people to look at. The emotional part is huge because one of the biggest challenges for any child's development, as we all know, those who have children or have been around children have problems regulating their emotional responses.

They find it difficult to keep their keel balanced on their own, so a big part of parenting is about intervening when the child feels overwhelmed by their own emotional responses, and over time the child learns that this way. it's how I calm down or who I go to for help calming down, but it's not something we all know about babies it's not something babies come into the world knowing how to do, they must be taught over years of care attentive enough to that they start to figure out how to get depressed and develop those parts of the brain that can actually cope with stress adaptively if you think about it in terms of how I deal with stress, how I deal with my own emotions when I get angry and then how I deal with stress.

Reach out to other people and get to know them in an emotionally genuine way without feeling overwhelmed or scared by them. How can I get in and out of an optimal level of closeness with them? You know this takes years, hopefully, of good relationships with adults. Um, to develop those kinds of controls, yeah, so I just think about the behavior of young children and I think that this model that you have of being kind of stuck in a moment, in terms of your ability to relate emotionally to other people, is It's very, very useful for people to think generally and think about the consequences of that and their relationships with other people in their lives, which will certainly be covered a little bit later, but there are some characteristics of the behaviors of the puppies suitable for To begin with, they are very self-centered.

They are very wrapped up in themselves. They find it difficult to see things through other people's perspectives. They can get there from time to time, but it is difficult to access. Most kids are not super selves. -reflective, they do not like to do deep introspection into their own nature. They can be quite self-righteous in their own way and are very willing to justify their behavior based on whether or not it was good for themselves and others. What you talk about in the book that really caught my attention is this notion of effective realism that we also see in children, which is when you define reality based on what you feel it is as opposed to what it could objectively be and I I was wondering if you could talk about that a little bit more because I think that's a very important characteristic that when people look back on their personal history they could see in their relationships with others if they were around a lot of emotionally immature people. people, yes, it's one of the more subtle aspects, but when I describe it, everyone knows what I mean, because anyone who has ever met someone like this has experienced it, yes, and it is extremely frustrating to be on the receiving end of this when Emotionally immature people face a reality that is distressing and emotionally overwhelming.

Everyone has felt overwhelmed at times where it's like I can't process another, you know, bit of information, I can't, I can't deal with it, so when this happens. Emotionally immature people like the rest of us have these very involuntary automatic unconscious defense mechanisms that appear whether we want them to or not. That's one of the things that I think people often misunderstand about psychological defenses or coping mechanisms because it seems like we're so consciously oriented today that we forget about the subconscious, you know, it's like it doesn't exist, but The fact is that we have this whole part of our mind that is dedicated to keeping us in control and safe, and what would be the purpose of a good defense if it didn't spring into action before we got angry M okay, so there's a little Sentinel that you know how to patrol all the time.

Is this safe? Will this make me feel good? Is this somehow? Know? threat to me and if he senses something is wrong, he will send a defense before you know you are getting nervous, okay? So when emotionally immature people go into their defense, self-protection and coping mechanisms, they don't. By doing it because they are trying to push you away or they are trying to give you a hard time, they have no choice in the matter and when it is reality or a part of reality that they really don't like, they automatically do it. I will deny it, I will dismiss it or we will distort it and that is very effective because now reality has become something that I can deal with or now reality has become something that is not worth

dealing

with.

Our reality has now become something that didn't really happen. First of all, it's really cool, it's a very effective defense mechanism, yes totally, it really is, it really is, yes, I don't have to worry about it if it's not there, everything is fine exactly, so the part of immaturity that's what I. I am not changing myself to deal with reality nor am I IAP to reality. I'm changing reality, so what happens with affective realism is that I use how I feel something as the defining characteristic of this thing that just happened, for example, if an adult child says to their rather intrusive uh mother or father um mom dad you know I would really appreciate it if you called me before you stop by you know I might be taking a nap maybe you know I might be giving the baby a bath um just call me before you come and let's see if it's a good time to visit and they'll say what are you talking about I'm your mother I can I want to come see you I'm G come see you we're family and then it would be um are you saying you don't want to see me anymore?

Are you saying you don't love me? It feels like you're done with me. Alright? What the person did was ask for a respectful phone call before coming, he didn't say anything about not coming again, he didn't say anything about how he feels about his parents, he just asked for a little warning and a little space, okay, what we would call a boundary. healthy, but because the parents felt rejected by it, they felt like they were being pushed away and, oh, emotionally immature people are super sensitive to any sign of rejection or abandonment, any breakdown in attachment, because they feel that way. they think that's the reality and that's a term that was coined by a Barrett and bar investigation uh where they looked at the people who did this and when they did it, so it can be very frustrating because there's no logic to it and there's no evidence. .

Because of that, but because the emotionally immature person feels that way, they will make you feel as if you have been disloyal or cruel or even downright rejecting them for having talked to so many different people and with so many different people related to them. Could you paint a little picture here of an example of what a childhood with an emotionally immature caregiver or caregivers might be like for someone, just so they can put themselves in the shoes of this experience or see it in their own life? Yes, good. I think one of the reasons the book became so useful to many people was that it described something that was difficult for them to put into words because many people with emotionally immature parents know that their parents love them, love them.

Their parents know that their parents mean well, that their parents put a roof over their heads, food in their stomachs, that they take care of them when they are sick, that they send them to school, but this is not widespread, I mean, for Of course, there are many emotionally immature parents who are falling into some of those areas, but for the most part, the people who are drawn to A Book Like Mine have what on the outside perhaps to the rest of the world looks like a lifetime. quite normal family and They can also see that and yet they don't feel that there is a closeness there and they don't feel safe within that family structure, but they don't know why, a cardinal um characteristic of the adult child of an emotionally immature. father is that they grow up feeling very alone emotionally, you know that everything is in its place many times, but they have the feeling that they are not deeply known, they are not seen, they do not have that sense of emotional connection. and emotional intimacy with their parents where they feel like they can go to their parents with their deepest feelings or they can express their needs, you know, from their heart, in a very, very deep, heartfelt way, and they feel like there's something.

Unfortunately, the problem with them is that, you know, we talked about the egocentrism of children that you mentioned. Well, kids interpret anything that's not going well in the family as something they could be doing, which is a pretty adaptive response because, you know, it gives them a chance to change it because you know that if it's your fault maybe you can. figure out what to do about it, but it seemsthat everything is caused by me, that's what the child thinks, so if I have a bad thought and then something bad. It happens, I make that happen, it's magical thinking, you know, from the age of two to six we live in this magical world where everything we feel and think affects our outside life, but when you have an emotionally immature parent who doesn't is able to come in with you and be really present in your feelings Faith and understands what you are going through and can guess that this is important.

They can guess what you might be feeling and then help you with that because they've been around the block a few times and they know what it feels like and how it tends to turn out and they can be there for you in your moment. of emotional need, but for these children it feels good, mom, mom and dad, or you know, whoever the parents of the couple are, they seem to be fine, they seem to be saying that everything is fine and that we are fine, I don't. HE. I feel this way, I'm scared or I feel alone or I feel like I've done something wrong all the time, but no one else seems to feel this way and that creates this feeling that you know maybe there's something wrong with you.

Maybe I'm exaggerating. They certainly get the message that they are too sensitive, that they want too much, that they are always interrupting, that they are kind of a nuisance because the emotionally immature parent has a very limited capacity for stress. and what's stressful is stressful is when you have to do six things at once, yes, totally, and I think it also goes back to the effective realism part where the father is creating a story about where the problem lies within the family system. and they attribute it to the child because one of the things we talk a lot about on the

podcast

is that children effectively have two options: they can decide that their parents are the problem, that their caregivers are doing this so wrong. things and they will continue to do these bad things until they can escape.

Some children see it clearly, but that is very rare. Much more often they take the second option, which is deciding that they are the problem because they can do something about their own behavior, they can't do something about their parents and this becomes something you talk about in great detail. in your books, which is the creation of what is called Ro self and I would love if you could talk a little about that. a little bit including how it's created now I I was resonating with what you were saying about the child being able to recognize that maybe their parents are having problems or maybe there's something going on with the parents um and you're right for most kids. which is the conclusion of Last Resort because no one wants to think that something is wrong with their parents.

I mean, that's the scariest thought you can have when you're a little kid, so when the kid gets the message, let's say a kid is upset. about something, maybe a classmate has hurt their feelings or, you know, maybe they've lost something valuable to them, but whatever it is, they're very upset, they're breaking down and they go to their parents for comfort and the parents they get stiff and actually back off, okay, they withdraw because they don't handle stress very well. They are not structured enough inside to be able to handle the child's stress while

dealing

with you knowing what is going on in their adult life plus the emotionally immature parent. have very little empathy it's not that they don't have empathy um they're not psychopaths I'm sure some of them are but um but they're not they're not antisocial personality disorders they have some empathy but Use it when they feel very resourceful, you You know when things are going well, that's when you can afford to tune in to your child with some empathy and of course that means that sometimes you do, which makes it even more confusing for the child because I'm saying, Well, I know mom or dad can connect with me, but this time they didn't, so what did I do wrong?

Yes, I must have done something wrong again. There is a position in which the fault is, yes, totally, yes, exactly, but that. The inability to elicit an empathic response means that whatever is happening with them at their authentic level must be healed before taking it to the parents to avoid the experience of devastating rejection or unresponsiveness or withdrawal. everything says that I am alone in the universe and there is no hope of connection and somehow I have to solve this huge problem completely on my own, so what the child learns is how to approach the parents at the right angle at the right time . with the right role to trigger loving or helpful responses from the parents, this all happens at a very unconscious level, totally yes, but we are very good at it, I mean, generally speaking, our right hemisphere is excellent at picking up what it works. in an interaction, notice the facial expressions, notice the body posture, notice the tone of voice, pick up on what works to get a good response from the parent and again, like with defenses, you don't do this intentionally, you don't say oh, you already know.

I have this problem, I'll get on my act and go ask dad, just get on with it, you know, yeah, then you go, you get into your Ro self, you go talk to dad and things go better and then that gets reinforced, but the RO Self is something that is really based on Donald Wincott, he was a British psychoanalyst and pediatrician who had incredibly astute observations of mothers and babies. He was the one who came up with a good enough mother, but he called it self-blame and said that. You know that the baby has the task of finding a way to relate to the mother or, say, the loving father, and to do so he finds these ways of relating that are not true to his real needs or to her real emotional state. and I call it the role of self because I think it extends to the world of interconnected relationships within the family and it's really finding your place, finding a place where you can exist with some individuality but in a way that parents can understand. um and you identify with it and you don't feel threatened by it, so when you're able to do that, you have a greater chance of getting more love and getting more patient responses from parents, but it's at the cost of being able to connect with your your own true feelings and your own true thoughts, yes, you are choosing security over authenticity, that may be a very strict way of saying it, a great way of saying it, thank you, yes, and on the one hand there is a very orderly behavior. explanation for all this uh children have certain behaviors some of those behaviors are reinforced by their parents and some of them are not encouraged they go to the parents with a kind of look on their face and they are punished for that look they go to the parents with a different type of expression on their face and they are not punished for that look, so you learn to take on those types of behaviors and we know that the behaviors that we adopt in childhood have a very long history, they are very powerful brain behaviors. it's very malleable, it really sets the tone for what we do later in life, so on the one hand there's this kind of behavioral explanation for the whole thing, on the other hand I'm very interested in the slightly warmer explanation and confusing to the All of this refers to how you think about the existence of a true, authentic self that plays in the background as the person adopts these various behaviors because at least what I have seen in my own life is that sometimes we can adopt a The role of the self that we understand is very functional and in which we are 90% convinced, but there is 10% of a person who feels that something is not quite right and that is the part of us that can begin to fall into what you call a healing fantasy where we start to construct this kind of story of our life about what would make things better or what would allow us to access that authenticity in a different way because we feel trapped in that self-expression because we've gotten so wrapped up in the behavior of the RO self and I think that really gets to some of the material that you explore more in untangling emotionally immature people, which I think in many ways is about exploring that more authentically. form of self-expression that then moves away from the behaviors that keep you stuck in relationships with these people that just aren't good for you anymore, so to begin with, that's a fair characterization here and then what do you think about that? yeah, no, I totally agree, I'm, uh, I also have a warm and fuzzy mentality because I think it's true, yeah, tell me, I mean, I really believe that each of us has a you know where it comes from.

I don't know, but it seems to me that there is something innate in each person that is intrinsically very individual and that we could say is the authentic self and when we are in the authentic self we have vitality, we have energy, we have an ability to have feelings for other people. , we have the ability to feel joy, but above all we have a good spontaneous energy that makes us feel as if we are all of one piece. I have experienced this with my clients when they start to move. from the you know, like the life raft of their role and then I'm talking about the therapy sessions, you know, they usually start in their I role, um, presenting what they think will allow for a good relationship with this uh.

Therapist person who is like an authority figure in that moment, totally yeah, and then gradually, it's like they start to get on board, um, and they like to be more themselves and respond in this more animated way. I mean, it really is more lively. spontaneously and start saying things that surprise them and surprise me because it's so true about them. I am completely absorbed in what they say because there is a real connection. I wonder how you saw that. I, which are also like the patterns that a person has created of their behavior based on early experiences, affect the types of relationships that people with emotionally immature parents have in adulthood, well, we use what we think works, um, If we've learned that being needy or needing to talk to people about our problems or asking for help or any of those things, if we learn that it's not going to get us love and acceptance, we can start in our adult relationships by being very careful, you know? maintain our new relationship by not being too demanding or too needy or you know whatever, so we are starting the relationship in a role of ourselves and again, are we doing it deliberately?

No, not at all, we are doing it in spite of ourselves. because we see hope for this relationship and we want to do our best, that's okay and that can work for a long time, the problem is that if you think about it in terms of internal parts like the multiplicity of Personality, there is an inner child there that you know, like wait, you know, when we get out, when we can find out, you know if this person can really be there for us, like it's like, oh boy, you know, maybe they. Everyone will be different, maybe we will have a chance with them and when that little child part of us, the part that has felt emotionally lonely that hasn't been given enough attention, that may have been emotionally neglected and that feels so alone, start to Unfortunately, that person can expect that their new partner can give them everything that they didn't get as a child, so it's unfortunate because you start in this kind of uh, I'll make all the adjustments that you know in To have this relationship, but at some point, when it gets deep enough, there can be this tendency to change that to uh, if you really loved me, you'd be thinking about me more or you'd guess what I want and that's completely fair.

For a small child to tell his parents if they could, of course not, but that is a fair request from a child to his parents. I want you to guess what I need because I don't have the language. or the STS scam to do that. I want you to know what is good for me and do it without having to ask me to put it into words and when that part comes up later, you will know that that partner may be surprised as if you knew what happened. to the kind and docile person with whom I have established a relationship up to this point yes, I thought I had signed up for this.

I'm totally understanding what's going on here, yeah, right, yeah, well, what's happening is that kid, uh, you know, it's like mission accomplished, you made that person feel safe enough to that childish part now rears its head to see if it can really be loved, you know, by showing the unmet need, showing the unmet expectation, um and when people realize, that's what it is. This happens especially if you know that one or the other partner is in some kind of therapy or some kind of um, you know, increasing self-awareness, um Effort, then maybe someone can realize that this is an attempt to be more genuine and authentic than these old needs. are coming up now, does the person need to realize that it's kind of unfair to, you know, expect the other person to guess?

Yes, absolutely, but if we can create a space for that emotionally immature part of ourselves that didn't get to We have that if we can create a space for that to be accepted while learning more mature ways to ask for it, you know, with some Grace to let the other person do thattransition from our ideal self or our role to our needy child. You know that everything can turn out well, but if you start a relationship or a friendship, in some cases you can solve some of those problems and friendships where you are confident enough to do so and often it is not with an emotionally immature person, but with I'm wondering if people who have emotionally immature caregivers, if you found that they tend to be more likely to end up in relationships or friendships or just surround themselves with more emotionally immature people in adulthood, do you think there's a connection there?

Yes, I believe that because I believe that when you grow up as a child with emotionally immature parents, you have to realize that you are learning a whole set of skills, yes, totally, you know that once you have a skill. I love this concept, it comes from uh F. I think his name is Clifford Anderson in the stages of life and he talks about how we develop it's like these new skills come online, you know, at different ages or different levels of maturity, when we reach a certain level of skill, it becomes a necessity, it's almost like you can do it, you know, with a razor from a trampoline Seeing a trampoline will trigger the urge to do a Jack B Offit.

I know what you mean, yes, totally, yes, because you have the ability and our abilities are always eager to be exercised, they really are, so, here you are as a child who grew up with a certain type of personality and a certain type of parents and you develop these skills to deal well with their needs and now we want to exercise them. Some of us might pursue therapy as a career because it allows us to exercise all day long. I think Al Miller would have something to say about that. I'm sure you're familiar with the gifted child drama, which is one of my favorite books and essentially the first chapter is that short.

The book is like why do people end up becoming therapists and its kind of underlying theory was exactly what you just said, yeah, yeah, so I think people form adult relationships that allow them to be their best cells, okay, because it's fun to exercise our skills, which now I feel like we need um it's energizing, it brings more energy into our system to be able to use it, so we start the relationship, it feels familiar, well, I'm good at this, um, it's working well and that it is often done through that role. You know this and it's not until later that the real you, the real you, starts to rear its head, so to speak, and wants to go out more to be more a part of your life and be more involved in the relationship, and when that happens , You start to feel dissatisfied with the level of the relationship on a personal RO level and then you can end up being authentic in moments that can be very surprising, you know, even shocking to your partner because it's like wait a minute, um, I haven't seen that. . this side of you before so you know that sooner or later it's like the truth will come out it's like the real you the real you is trying to become a conscious part of your relationship that's supposed to be that's what it's supposed to be. should happen it's just that no one It was very clever to make that transition and that's why I think it's so important for us to understand Ro and how normal and really talented they are and have some understanding and compassion for our partners so that they can have some catching up to do. when they arrive.

We start showing more of our true selves, it doesn't mean you know they are unloved or the relationship is on the wrong foot, it means I'm taking a risk with you, you feel safe enough with me to leave him. I try to go one step further and unfortunately when you get hooked on someone who is really emotional and immature and you try to go one step further, they don't want anything to do with it because they are emotionally immature people. Another characteristic of Hallm ​​Hallmark is that they are very afraid of intense emotions and they are very afraid of emotional intimacy, so when you try to tell them something real and true about how you feel and show it to them, they will do something to shut you up.

You get depressed, or they'll ignore you or withdraw, and that, of course, is devastating because now you've taken a chance and usually what the adult child does is keep trying. This is where the healing fantasy comes in, they keep trying to get it. that the person gives them what they need to heal, which would be to make that connection, listen to their feelings, let them express themselves, let them form that deep attachment at the base of the real self and you know. if the person can do it, everything goes up a notch, but if the person can't do it, you know it becomes extremely frustrating for the adult child, so let's say, Lindsay, someone has been listening to this conversation and they are kind. from nodding a lot, you know they see some of the characteristics you're describing, maybe their caregivers are very familiar with some of the childhood experiences you're describing, maybe they're looking at some of their behavior and they say yes absolutely, I know that I do this in terms of those Ro behaviors or at least they're looking back and saying, eh, yeah, that seems like it might be the case and now here they are.

I have reached adulthood and want to start working on some of these patterns that have been created. What advice would you give him? The first thing I would say to someone who was facing that. Now I guess this would be, uh, not in the way you're asking this wouldn't be part of an ongoing therapy where you have the time and the luxury of knowing how to resolve this in some long-term way, but basically the idea is to lend Pay attention to your true self. Pay attention to your authentic reactions to what you really feel because if you can establish a connection with yourself, then you can be more authentic in the relationship and it gives the relationship the opportunity to become something more real and often has a solid foundation. .

It is difficult for adult children of emotionally mature parents to take that step of trying more active ways of being themselves in the relationship because they have learned to be somewhat passive and, by the way, I never use that word with my clients because in the Passive American culture is like a bad word, you know, everyone is supposed to be active and assertive all the time, so you say a basically neutral word like passive and the people you know feel horrible about it, so I'm just using it as a conceptual shorthand here. but basically they learn to stay back and not take action and one of the things that is most difficult for them to learn is what it is that they want, what is the outcome that they are going towards or where they want to go.

Going forward with this and if you can identify that, then you have the opportunity to identify what you can do or what you can try, that would be an active step in taking your relationship more to that kind of level, so that you are helping them to know. First, find out what they feel, what they want, second, translate that into some kind of outcome that they want, maybe they want a more emotionally intimate relationship, and then what would you have to do to increase the odds of that? happen? uh, in this situation, can you think of anything else you could have done that would have given you a greater response than what you were looking for?

That being said, if they are with an emotionally immature person, this is not the case. necessarily means it's going to work, yeah, so we're ready, we're ready for that, but you can still get a lot out of the practice, let me get in touch with myself, don't confuse me about who I am and what I want. first of all and then let me figure out what I'm really looking for, let me have a concept here about what that is and then let me think about what I can do even if you don't end up in the same relationship that you are in. learning to come back to yourself instead of trying to please the other person or trying to pacify the other person and that skill, that ability to come back to yourself and figure out what you want and how to take some positive steps towards it, can be carry out. that with you for the rest of your life and you can actually get a lot of practice in relating to emotionally immature people in adulthood.

They can totally pay off big afterwards and, for someone I would love to turn to the detangling side of the spectrum because I think you're starting to talk about that here, basically, where almost everyone is going to have a relationship of some kind in their life , romantic or not, with someone who falls on the emotionally immature side of the spectrum you were talking about. at the beginning of our conversation here, just to start, because they are natural distributions and we have many different types of relationships with many different types of people, we will meet people who are like that, um, if you find yourself in a relationship with that type of person and I'm using relationship in the sense of the world, I'm not just talking about a romantic relationship, what do you think starts to help people establish the separation or the boundaries that they need to be able to show more of that authentic self um in a way? to feel safe for them, first you notice that it hurts.

I remember when I was in elementary school and a teacher of ours said something about you know there are people who have this disorder where they can't feel pain and I, I don't know, maybe we were in fourth grade or something and she was saying, you know , that wouldn't be terrible and we were all like, what do you mean that would be great? Nothing would ever do that. I hurt you, you know, and then she started talking about how you know, well, what happens if you burn your hand, but you don't feel the heat, and you know, she came in and then it was like she was like. eye-opening experience, uh, I remember that as, oh, it could be a bad thing not being able to feel the pain, this is the same thing, the first step in getting out of an entangled relationship, uh, or an entangled relationship, and by that I mean that you're being coerced and emotionally controlled by another person's emotional needs or even, you know, it could be narcissistic needs, but basically you're responsible for their self-esteem and you're responsible for their emotional stabilization, that's what I call an In a relationship. complicated, you are being used emotionally for someone else's psychological purposes, so when you are in that type of relationship and you have been conditioned since childhood to think that that is normal, you may not even feel the pain of being treated that way. way or being emotionally coerced. ashamed, guilty, made to doubt yourself, made to feel afraid, you may not even realize that's what's happening, so the first job in therapy or self-actualization is to be able to feel that hurts. one way or another this doesn't make me feel comfortable I don't like this this is bad for me my energy goes down when this happens I feel exhausted I'm exhausted by this and you're really trying to regain your innate ability to feel when something is not good for your life energy when you can do that these things start bothering you in the wrong way it starts to feel like well wait a minute you know this is fair this is this type am I being treated right is my individuality being allowed? , You know?

You start asking questions when something doesn't feel right, so that's the first step for a person to regain their connection to their true self, that ability to start to feel what it's like for someone to do that. for you and to be used that way no one likes that animals don't like that yeah another part of this that I really heard you emphasize is and we've talked a little bit about it on the podcast in the past is how a A big part of this process for people can be letting go of those healing fantasies, that is, releasing our attachment to the desires we had for a certain type of relationship with this other person.

Often, relationships with emotionally immature people can actually begin very intensely and satisfyingly. In some ways it's like being selected as your favorite narcissistic person. You know, it's very difficult to match the emotional intensity that is channeled your way and that, at least for a while, can feel very good and very rewarding, but. Over time, you realize that you're just not going to get the blood from that stone you've been craving all this time, but that craving itself is kind of a problem; After a while, you really want that and you let it go. It can be very difficult for people, yes, and what a pleasure it is to be bombarded with love if you have not received the proper attention or response to your needs or your individuality and Along Comes A person with some narcissistic characteristics and of course everything The basis of narcissism is that things are idealized or degraded.

So at the beginning of relationships, the partner is always idealized because that is a reflection of who the narcissistic person wants to be with and who they want to be, and that's how it is. It's intoxicating for a child of emotionally immature parents to be the apple of someone's eye like that, to see them light up, you know you're special and unique, I mean, it's all that person probably ever wanted, so we have to respect that and how are you, you know it's like when you're starving, are you going to think about which bakery your bread came from?

It's like you have no discriminatory powers at that moment, you're just hungry. I love that, yeah, yeah, so is it narcissistic attention, is it healthy attention, who cares, yeah, I'll take thePay attention at this point, totally, yeah, no, I mean, I've been there, man, yeah, totally, we've all been there, so what do you do? I think it helps people let go of those fantasies they have about it. Having worked with a lot of people around these issues, yeah, pain, pain, you know, there was a story about a um uh, a guru and his disciple IPL of him and one day his disciples come. to him and they say oh Master, you know that you have brought us to Enlightenment and we are very lucky and you know, but what about all the other people in the world who never met?

You can never hear your message, how will they learn? How will they evolve? and the master said by the whips of pain, so that's it. What's going on? We are fortunate enough to have this internal ability to sense when things are not good for our life force. That's why I keep using that energy illusion or the energy goes up or down and there's nothing you can do about it. Whether you like something or you don't like something, but you will get a very different signature of your experiences if you are attuned to your own sense of self and what increases or decreases your energy, when people begin this process.

They will start to report things that bother them and they often feel very embarrassed about it and they will like to say: you know, I know this is stupid, I shouldn't even mention this or you know other people have so many bigger problems than me, they will do the same. what they've done to them, dismissing or minimizing the problem and then I'm always dying to hear what they're going to say next because I know it's going to be something big, okay? and then they say this and it's connected to some of the deepest pains and deepest unmet needs that they have and we're starting to get closer to that, they're starting to bring it in and when we can realize what it is, we can explore that and allow them in. in the feeling.

The first thing therapy always does is Forest. I always ask people, well, let's wait a second. Can you get into that feeling and let me know? From there, let's slow down, super slow motion, you know, and let's taste what you feel, and they, once they can slow down, they will start to expand the experience of feeling in the moment and then they will know that it is as if They have entered the room and can see how impactful this has been for them or continues to be for them. It's not a small thing, it's a huge thing and they have this intuition that it's important to mention this in therapy, but everything. their training has been: you're too sensitive, you make mountains out of molehills, you didn't understand that, you know, they're made to feel bad about their internal perceptions, their perceptions, their consciences and it feels like you're highlighting this underlying thing.

Guilt that people may have for feeling the way they feel, either exactly as you are describing here or guilt that other people in a system, perhaps those more emotionally immature people, may impose on them as a means of control. as a way to force the behavior and prevent the other person from establishing the distance she needs to begin accessing these healthier parts of her personality. That's a very good point. I love what you're saying about the distance they need. Think about it in terms of, you know, when they're trying to decide how much contact to have with the emotionally immature person and I use the phrase optimal distance, it's like you're free to find that place where it works for you, um, where is it? not too much and not too little, but it's kind of that optimal distance, but part of the appeal of having that distance is that emotionally immature people use a lot of emotional coercion, you know, I mentioned shame and guilt and doubt and fear, but they do it with a great burden of moral obligation, it goes from the psychological and emotional sphere to the moral sphere and a person receives the message that if they were a good person I would do this for them and that if you don't do what I want you to do, well, You had a moral obligation to do it to give me what I want and since you didn't do it, you know that in this you have a moral black mark against you. and this is like entering Are we good?

Are we bad? I'm a good person? and they give the message of no, you're not, unless you're happy when people start exposing that to themselves, it's such a liberating experience because it disengages that moral obligation from the fact that the other person demands that you be who they want you to be. whoever you are and once you understand it, putting the moral obligation on that you really are free to tell yourself it's fair. that I always have to be who you know meets your needs or is it true that I have a moral obligation to lend you money, you know, you start to think, yeah, I've seen it over and over again in my friendships with people who are going through this process. to make more space around the emotionally immature people in their lives, often they come from family or caregivers but sometimes not, sometimes they're from exes or people they're currently in a romantic relationship with or anything else that component Morality is a huge control that we have over other people's behavior and it is a very very powerful type of stick to wield within a relationship where you are going after someone and this is often complicated by the fact that that person that you were with. describing, that maybe she was raised by a more emotionally immature caregiver, now she's entered into some kind of relationship, maybe it's romantic, maybe it's just a friendship with someone who she's getting some of those things that she wanted with.

They're not getting all of them, but they're getting some of them, they're getting some of that attention, some of that care, some of that ability to express themselves and now, as they've gone through this growth process, maybe they're starting to stop. realizing that I'm not going to get the blood that I really want from this particular Stone and so now they have to establish some separation, but they are getting some of what they want, so there are these accompanying fears of rejection and abandonment . Where is the person doing well? If I separate myself from this situation, will I ever find something as good in my life again?

And for someone who had those more emotionally immature caregivers like wow, that's a powerful fear because you're never sure if you're really going to understand that and now you have a little taste of it, but maybe not all of it. I'm wondering how you've worked with people around those fears they might have about not understanding that emotional thing. that they want them to be getting a little bit out of here, but they're not really getting enough, that can be a very lonely and scary time for someone because yeah, it's like why would I want to let a life go? life jacket before grabbing the next one, but then the question is what happens if you put on your own life jacket?

I mean, the question is how about you work on your relationship with yourself? Yeah, okay before you go get the other life preserver. How are you? If we look at this as if you are going through a period of development and growth within yourself, it is not that you are alone and have lost the opportunity to have something, some part of what you really want, how about we find out what it is that you really need and direct your attention to yourself and perhaps as a result of that you will be able to recognize the people who will be most compatible with you or most pleasant to you.

Approach it that way, but you know, another thing that often happens is you go back to that, you know once you develop a skill, it becomes a necessity, they've started to move forward in their development and the other person hasn't followed up. or maybe hasn't even shown interest in growing, so a person comes along who is now more into this new vibe with you and it's very convincing because you recognize that more of you comes to exist in this new relationship. Don't be happy with someone who is not capable of enjoying the same level of emotional intimacy as you, it is simply very incompatible.

After a certain point, this is a question we could do another podcast on and we're towards the end. It's here, but maybe it's just eclips notes. I'm very interested in what helps people identify as a secure base, which is basically what you were talking about a moment ago, you were talking about how the change in the view of The self as that from which you get that relationship that you really needed. . You know that you are in relationship with yourself in this way and you are developing that good connection. What do you think supports people to do that?

I think it's first of all. I think it's the knowledge, uh, that's there, you know, I mean, unfortunately, in our culture and this is probably any culture that is, um, you know, industrialized technology, logic, uh, we really have a model of people that are They look more like technological machines or computers, uh, and we. I don't really recognize the inner world the way I think it should be because I think it's very real and that inner world is where the true self resides, that's where the sense of self resides, so when you're in a culture. that doesn't value the inner world except when it makes money, like if you're creative and you're in the arts and you make money from your art, that's great, that's fine, but everything has to be quantified, it has to be quantified. it has to materialize in a productive or profitable way for us to take it seriously, so when you come in as a therapist, but you can come in as a good friend, you can come in as a good partner and you support that inside. world of that person to let them know that there really is something inside them, yes, and that it really matters, okay, that's where your meaning comes from, then you have the ability to increase that feeling of a secure base simply by being connected to yourself, but I know, of course, that it is a process to do that and no one I know will be particularly happy with just a relationship with themselves, but the rest of your life can continue as you build that connection with yourself and yes, your outside world will improve .

As you work on your inner world, at least that is what I have seen happen and people have told me when they are finishing the therapy they will tell me you know, I feel transformed, this has been a transformation and what they are What I am really saying is that I found myself and transformed my life to go from defining myself from the outside to finding myself inside. I love Lindsay and I think it's a perfect note to end our conversation today, so thank you. So much for doing this with me today I totally enjoyed it oh it's been a great pleasure.

It has been a pleasure to think about these questions. Thanks thanks. I really enjoyed today's conversation with Dr. Lindsay Gibson, she is the author of Untangling Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. of emotionally immature people and recently launched a new guided journal for adult children of emotionally immature parents that came out in early April and if you enjoyed today's conversation, I think you'll really like it, we started today's conversation by talking about what emotional immaturity is and we have this normal model of human development where we think that as people get older they develop more in many different ways, they gain all these skills and understandings about the way life works and that's usually the case, but Sometimes what happens is that people are sort of frozen in time at a certain stage of development and for emotionally immature people they are essentially frozen at a younger age, they have a level of emotional maturity of over 12 years. a 13 year old or even a 3 or four year old sometimes than a real adult and this leads to some common symptoms that are quite similar to what a young child experiences, for example, emotionally immature people are very egocentric in nature, They see the world primarily through their own concerns and will quickly entangle you in them.

They also tend to have fairly limited empathy. They do not put themselves in other people's shoes or imagine their internal experience. They tend to avoid them. self-reflection uh, they can be very self-justifying, often moralistic by nature and rarely question themselves, they tend to be extreme in their relationship with emotional intimacy, either withdrawing emotional intimacy because they are deeply uncomfortable with it or desperately seeking more emotion from The person they interact with also uses effective realism, which is something we talked about in more detail during the conversation, where you define reality based on how you feel about it rather than what it really is, and this can create a pattern in the behavior of emotionally immature caregivers, where they make their experience of reality about their children's behavior, where they respond to their children in ways that they do not because they need to learn how to better regulate their emotions or have more resources on that. relationship or access new tools that maybe they didn't have before becoming parents, instead, no, they just need their child to behave a little differently and if they would just behave differently, then everything would be fine and one of challenges by far One of the interactions we have with emotionally immature people is that the things they say are to some extent true, they are not outright lies most of the time, when things are going pretty well for them, when things are like they are. they need. to have emotional resources can behave like a mature person, for example, in this case perhaps that father can reallyrelate better to your child when your child behaves in a certain way, but that is not a criticism of the child.

That's a criticism of parents, but parents have to distort reality so that it focuses on the child instead of themselves, children tend to learn very quickly and they learn very quickly that when they approach their parents in a certain way things happen. They tend to do better and when you approach them in a different way they tend to do worse, so what this does is tilt them towards certain patterns of behavior that may or may not seem authentic to them and this is the creation of an ego role. which we talked about in some detail throughout the conversation.

Your self Ro is a kind of self. of pseudo self that allows you to play a particular role within your family system, for example, perhaps you learned that if you were able to manage your parents' emotions, they responded to you more positively, if you could keep them happy and engaged, they were kinder with you and then what do you do? You develop a pattern of behavior that focuses on pleasing them, meeting their emotional needs rather than worrying about your own, and what tends to happen to people in life in general is that the patterns that we establish in childhood have a very long shadow over the rest of our lives, so we have learned these patterns of behavior and, as Dr.

Gibson said, once you have learned a skill, you want to exercise it in your life, so what happens well in the adulthood? We begin to look for people or situations that allow us to exercise that ability, which is one of the reasons why people who are raised by more emotionally immature caregivers tend to find themselves in relationships or friendships with emotionally immature people in adulthood. Now it is important to emphasize. that this is happening unconsciously for most people, they are not deliberately going through a process of doing this, it is just happening, but while it is happening, there is another part of them that is operating in the background and that is their true self, their authentic self and often Frankly, what happens is that as enough pain builds up in our relationships, I think it's really important for Dr.

Gibson to emphasize the role that discomfort plays in all of this. As enough pain accumulates, we begin to have the experience that this situation is simply not good for us. that there is something else that we really want and sometimes at an early stage this could take the form of a healing fantasy, a dream in which everything would be better if I could find someone who would perform this kind of function for me, who was as emotionally available as I need as emotionally intimate as I need like uh who was able to take care of me the same way I take care of other people all that kind of stuff and as we grow into adulthood we start to expect that our relationships more Close relationships also make those healing fantasies come true and we might think that our emotional loneliness will finally be healed by a partner who always thinks about our needs and who really cares about us in that deeply relational way that we are looking for, the problem is that these fantasies often they keep us stuck in different types of relationships because we constantly continue even if only if only if only for example, Lindsay tells a story in one of the books about a woman who secretly believed that if she could make her depressed father happy, she would. he would finally be free in his own life to do what he wanted and he didn't realize that he was already free to do what he wanted in his own life even if her father remained Miserable while people go through a process to try to strengthen your connection.

With a truer, more authentic version of who you are, to find healthier relationships, you often have to untangle yourself from the less healthy ones you are currently involved in and the friction of those unhealthy relationships as we explore truer aspects of ourselves. it becomes more and more. The more noticeable, we begin to experience more pain due to the distance between the way our relationship is and what we see as possible for ourselves, and as we progress in this process of self-discovery, we often feel more pain within the relationships that are currently happening. for us because we see how big the distance is between where we want to be and what we are currently getting and one of the problems for people is that dysfunctional relationships of different types, particularly with emotionally immature people, can be very difficult to extract. ourselves, there are many tools used by control systems, such as blaming people who are trying to leave or using a lot of very moral language to make it a moral failure if you want to get away from me or even taking advantage of fears of abandonment that Someone can having the fears that he has within himself, often based on that lack of emotional relationship that he experienced in childhood, that no one will ever love him and therefore, to withstand that pressure that the systems put on us, we have Being able to look inside ourselves and strengthen the relationship we have with that most authentic version of ourselves is a key part of this for many people.

And I want to do more content about this because I think it's a very important piece of the puzzle. is to define themselves as something that they can have a meaningful relationship with, to define themselves as a person from whom they can derive Safety and Security because the story that we tell ourselves so often and I don't know if it's a question of American culture or a A Western culture thing or just a human thing is that we can only be secure if we are in a particular type of relationship, we can only derive our security from things outside of ourselves and as long as we carry that story about us, we will be. inherently in effect, we are not masters of our own lives because our security, which is that fundamental need that we all have, depends on other people, it is not independent of them and, again, the complexity here is that that is true to some extent.

We are dependent beings, our relationships are very important to us. I want to have satisfying relationships with other people, and I want to feel like the environments I'm in are very safe. Those are important things to me as a person, but when we become overly dependent on those things, it becomes increasingly difficult to disentangle ourselves from even the dysfunctional systems that we are currently a part of and from which we feel we derive that security, for example. So this very difficult but very important process often happens in people where they look inside themselves and start doing these little tests.

What would happen if I tried to do this? What if you found a little more separation here? Can I trust myself to stay safe this way? Can I trust myself to stay comfortable? in this way and we begin to prove to ourselves over and over again that we can trust ourselves, that we can solve problems, that we can find our way through various difficult situations and developing that self-efficacy, that belief that we can have it in ourselves. is a very important part of the puzzle here. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I really loved it. I think Dr.

Gibson's work is really fantastic here. She is also a great speaker and was a total natural on the podcast. So again, if you were interested in the topics we explored during this conversation, I would highly recommend his books, especially about adult children of emotionally immature parents and how to disentangle yourself from emotionally immature people, and also the new Journal that he recently published if you are looking for more information. workbook style experience if you've been listening for a while and haven't subscribed to the podcast yet. Hey, subscribe. We would greatly appreciate it if you could listen to it through a podcast app.

By the way, we are too. on YouTube, and if you're watching it on YouTube, you can listen to it through a podcast app. If you prefer, you can find us practically anywhere. If you would like to support the show in other ways, you can also find us on Patreon. It's Patreon. .com, well, podcast and for the cost of just a couple of dollars a month you can support the show and get a ton of bonuses in return until next time, thanks for listening and I'll talk to you soon.