Emotionally Immature Parents & CPTSD

Transcript

Welcome to my channel! I am so excited to talk with you a little bit today about emotionally immature parents. This is a topic that has been so helpful for me in my own life, and also for my clients to be able to see, "Oh, okay. Some of the things I experienced in childhood were... traumatic. Maybe that is part of why I show up in my relationship the way I do today."

One of the things about complex trauma is that it's not always about what happened to you, but it can also be about what didn't happen to you. The lack of emotional attunement and emotional presence from your parent or caregiver is traumatic, and that carries with us into our adult relationships.

So we're going to talk about emotionally immature parents and the four different types and this comes from Lindsay C. Gibson's book, The Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. I highly recommend this book if you haven't read it yet. It will shed so much light for you on some of your childhood history and the effects that still linger in your life today.

So we're going to talk about the four types, and then we're going to talk about how being parented by an emotionally immature person forms you as an adult. Okay? So, let's dive in.

Emotional Immaturity

First of all, an emotionally immature person in general is somebody who has a really hard time coping with reality as it is.

They are emotionally handicapped in the sense that they did not have the tools given to them (and they haven't learned the tools) for being able to deal with distressing moments. It's hard to even get in touch with their own emotions, let alone be around somebody else's difficult emotions.

Now, I want to pause here because if you find yourself getting some anxiety coming up of like, "Ooh, but I have emotional immaturity in me," take a deep breath.

Of course, you have some element of emotional immaturity in you.

First of all, that's not a death sentence. It's expected. If you didn't grow up with somebody who modeled for you how to navigate your emotions and how to know that you can feel something distressing and make it to the other side, then of course you're going to have leaned on the survival skills that a lot of emotionally immature people will do in order to cope through life.

The Generational Cycle of Emotional Immaturity

Unfortunately, this is a generational cycle and I'm so glad you're here because this is part of you being the person in your family line saying, "enough is enough. It's time to break the cycle. I want to try something new and different."

It's HUGE that you're doing this work, and I would even say that you taking the risk to dig into your trauma and feel your emotions is part of becoming an emotionally mature person.

So, take a deep breath and let's take this one step at a time.

Now, I just want to pause for a moment. If you are finding yourself really wanting to dig into this work, you can go to the link below and get my guide for how to know if you had an emotionally immature parent. It walks you through, how to understand If you had an emotionally immature parent, what kind of emotionally immature parent you had and what are some of the ways it formed you. It's totally free, no reason not to grab it. Go ahead again, go down to the link below and you can just quickly sign up and I'll send it to you.

But back to emotionally immature parents.

4 Types of Emotionally Immature Parents

So there are four types.

1. And the first type is the emotional type.

This is the kind of parent that was so overwhelmed by their own emotions or anxiety that they couldn't be present to you for your own emotions as a kid. They're very preoccupied. They tend to be very unstable and unpredictable. And as a kid, you probably noticed that you felt this urge to take care of your parent.

And maybe they even did depend on you to be their emotional stability. What this does to us as kids is we learn that we need to subjugate our own needs for the sake of taking care of another person. We experienced a parent who forced us into a position of either being somebody who abandoned them, by not taking care of them, or who saved them by being very enmeshed and caretaking.

So, you learned as a kid that everybody else's needs comes before your own. You became an expert at abandoning yourself. And I bet if you were to take a really long look at yourself, you might see that in your relationship with people today, you are probably good at abandoning yourself.

2. The second type of emotionally immature parent is the driven type.

This is the kind of parent that a lot of people actually don't see as somebody who could traumatize a kid, but it is traumatic because you are being neglected emotionally.

The driven parent is somebody who's very goal oriented, very busy, and focused on perfecting people and things. They tend to think that everybody else should value the same things that they value. And what this does to you as a kid is you learn to feel like you're constantly being evaluated. As an adult, you have this feeling that you're not doing enough, or you're not doing something right, and it creates a lot of tension in your relationship. You don't know yourself. You don't know what you value, or the goals that you have, and you've become an expert at avoiding your emotions. And talk about emotional disconnection in relationships. If you're not connecting with your own emotions, how can you expect to have a deeply connected relationship with somebody else?

Okay, again, it goes back to learning to abandon ourselves. We lost our primary relationship, which is with ourselves. It's very disorienting.

3. The third type of emotionally immature parent is the passive type.

And this is usually the favorite parent of the two because they can be playful and empathetic at times, but the problem comes when this parent, because they can't cope with distressing things, enables or invalidates the abusive or neglectful behavior of another parent.They're good at making excuses for that parent and you experience abandonment.

One of the phrases I like to say to paint a picture of what this kind of parent is like is, "they can love you, but they can't help you." So you might feel loved by them, but in a moment of need, they abandon you. It's very damaging. And it really disrupts our attachment with people. You learn, "when I need something, I can't trust that they're going to be there."

And one of the biggest effects it has on us as adults is that we learn that we can make excuses for other people's abandoning or damaging behavior. You might find yourself in a relationship with somebody who is very critical or who makes you feel so triggered, but you can find an excuse for them that helps you abandon yourself. So for example, say your partner has their own abandonment wounds and they start screaming at you, trying to get you to prove to them that you're not going to abandon them. You might get in a situation where you're like, well, they're hurting. So I need to just keep being in this conversation with them. I need to keep responding to them, even though I feel so triggered and hurt right now. We're able to make excuses and it gets us in some really damaging relationships as adults.

4. Okay, now the last one, and this is the one that most people will typically think of when they think of, um, childhood abuse, is the rejecting parent.

This is the parent that really likes their own independence. They do not show empathy at all, they can be very demeaning of you, and if you have any needs, they reject responding to those needs and might even get angry or abusive in response if they're pushed too hard. So, gosh, I mean, not only is there neglect, but there's also that abuse there of, "I'm going to make you feel small, I'm going to push you away." 

What that does to us as adults is we learn that we're a burden. It's really hard to ask for help. It's really hard to lean on other people because we learned that we need to become smaller than we are. Again, we need to abandon ourselves. Our needs don't matter.

We learn to abandon ourselves

So each of these different types of emotionally immature parents teach us to disconnect from our core self. It teaches us to abandon ourself. Not only did we not have a parent who met our needs emotionally, but now we as adults don't even know how to parent that wounded part of us.

We're expecting other people to be able to hold us up because we can't do it for ourselves. If you find yourself getting sucked into codependent relationships, or in abusive relationships that replicate your trauma growing up, this might be why.

And this is a really good starting point for dealing with our trauma so that we can have healthy relationships as an adult and show up for ourselves. We need to repair that relationship with ourself more than anything.

Where to go from here...

So, again, this is not a death sentence if you had an emotionally immature parent. And it's not a death sentence if you have some emotional immaturity in you. It's expected. It's a generational cycle, but there are things you can do about it.

It starts with becoming that mature parent for yourself. It starts with learning not to abandon yourself. You know, I see couples all the time in my therapy practice who say, "we just need new communication skills. We just need to figure out the right way to say it."  I find over and over again, it's never about the communication skills.

If you don't have a healthy, loving relationship with the wounded parts of you--if you don't know how to show up for your neglected, traumatized inner child--you cannot expect to be able to show up in your relationship well. So start there. Start with the trauma. Start with healing things at the root.

Again, if you want to dig into this and you really want to see change in your life, go ahead and download that free guide. It's totally free and it walks you step by step through this process.

I am looking forward to being able to continue to support you. I can tell you that it's worth it. I have seen so many people experience breakthrough and I've experienced it myself too.

So go ahead and download the guide and I'll see you next time!