Adult children of emotionally immature parents are typically used to carrying a heavy weight or emotional responsibility for others since infancy; as such, it takes some painful adult experiences to make this burden conscious.
How Do I Know if My Parent was Emotionally Immature?
Emotional maturity is defined as a person’s ability to both understand and manage their emotions, as well as have increased awareness of their thoughts and behaviors and how they impact others. Adult children of emotionally immature parents typically grow up with caregivers who are not able to meet their emotional needs and tend to lack emotional intelligence to empathize and provide compassion due to their own self-centeredness, narcissism, and poor ability to manage their emotions. More specifically, emotionally immature parents have the following characteristics:
- They see their children as extensions of themselves
- They find their own value in their children’s achievements
- They can’t see their children as autonomous beings who are separate from them
- They are emotionally needy and need their child to soothe their feelings
- They are distant or rejecting unless the child benefits them in some way
- They have a difficult time with their own emotions so if you needed emotional support as a child they could not be there for you- hence you grow up not having emotional needs
- They tell you that “you’re too sensitive”
- They seem to be “there” for acquaintances or strangers but not for more intimate relationships
- They use meeting your basic needs (food, shelter) and material things as showing love
- They use guilt, shame, punishment to control their child’s behavior, thoughts, and emotions
- They have difficulty regulating their own emotions and blame others for their state of being
- They have difficulty with empathizing or viewing things from other people’s perspectives
- They are unable to self reflect and accept responsibility for their actions
- They are uncomfortable with emotions (their own and others) and therefore avoid emotional connection and prefer connecting on a superficial level
What Happens as a Result of Growing Up with an Emotionally Immature Parent?
Emotionally immature parents neglect to provide secure attachment for their children. Unfortunately, the effects of this type of parenting creates adult children who suffer from low self-esteem, a sense of emptiness and loneliness, depression, anxiety, trauma, substance abuse, and difficulties in relationships. They may have a strong sense that “if I’m truly myself, I won’t be loved”. They are also likely to repeat this cycle of parenting on their own children unless they become aware of these patterns and make conscious efforts to change them. Furthermore, since this was the blueprint for connecting to others as a child, an adult of emotionally immature parents may re-create the same dynamics in their friendships and in their romantic relationships as well.
What Does Healing from Growing up with Emotionally Immature Parents Entail?
Healing from the effects of emotionally immature parents takes work but it is possible. Here are the important things to note when you first recognize that this was the dynamic you grew up in:
- Create boundaries for yourself if needed – it is okay to create space between your parents and yourself so you can introspect and learn to understand their impact and what you want/need for yourself.
- Because there was no emotional validation for your true self, you may find that you have been placating to people in your life who feel really sure about things.
- You may realize that you have been denying your instincts and intuitive messages.
- You may realize that you have been confirming to a role you thought would be “acceptable”. Examples of roles or masks can look like: the peacekeeper in relationships, always putting others’ needs before yours, the helper, the calm one, the overachiever, the “I have everything under control” role, the overly self-sufficient one, hyper-indepemdence.
- Understand that you cannot change your parents (they will likely not take responsibility for the effects of their emotionally immature parenting), so focus instead on yourself and what changes you need to make in order to break the cycle.
- Use mindfulness and self-compassion to get in touch with your emotions and learn to express yourself in a way that might have felt unwelcome to others before.
- It’s ok to grieve a childhood that was never actually a childhood since you were responsible for your parents’ emotions versus the other way around. In fact grieving this is a very important aspect of the healing journey.
- You may recognize this pattern in other adult relationships such as with friends and romantic partners. It is natural as the healing process continues for some of your friendships to orbit off away from you, and to “lose taste” in romantic partners you were previously drawn to.
- When feeling stuck, engage in therapy or other modalities that use a trauma-informed lens such as EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing), IFS (Internal Family Systems), Ego States, trauma informed yoga, meditation or somatic interventions that can help access unconscious emotions, thoughts, and beliefs and help heal them.
Understanding parents’ emotional immaturity can free you from emotional loneliness as you realize their emotional neglect wasn’t about you, but about them. Once you recognize what needs they did not meet for you, you can learn to meet those needs for yourself with self-love, patience and grace.
If you recognize yourself in this blog, I welcome you to reach out so we can work together on understanding the effects of growing up with such caregivers and focus on the parts of you that were neglected and need your attention and healing.
Great article. Informative, cogent, and illuminating.
It also has a timely relevance. The external work demands on parents, the intrusion of technology, the media’s attention to growing corruption and the seemingly amoral character on display in government have never been greater, putting children at greater risk for growing up with their emotional needs overlooked if not neglected, inadequate emotional education, and or inappropriate modeling. (Sometimes it seems as if the country is being run by grown children, if not narcissists.)
Children do not know that are emotionally neglected. These families not only shut out sunlight, but the neglect is normalized, no worse than, say, forgoing music lessons. Even if children come to see that their parents’s behavior is not quite right, it is dismissed under parental prerogative. The number one rule in dysfunctional families is to deny. (The number two rule is to avoid responsibility for anything that is too “uncomfortable.”)
Not knowing that they were emotionally neglected, adult children will thrash about, unable to resolve or overcome their insecurities and emotional difficulties, thinking there is something inherently wrong with them. Emotional neglect is often discovered indirectly, when seeking help, for example, for depression or other effects on one’s life. Even then, it requires an analyst trained in family systems, childhood emotional neglect, or trauma informed for professional help to be truly effective.
It’s been said that emotional neglect is the equivalent of being sent out into the world unable to read and write. The problems can be profound and lifelong — ranging from unhealthy relationships, being unable to reach one’s potential, and a failure to reach goals and build a satisfying life, to impaired wellbeing, addictions, depression, and other mental illness.
The effects can be especially devastating for the oldest girl in families where the mother is the neglectful parent. As in all families, children learn how to treat each other by copying their parents. But for the oldest, she is also targeted by the younger girls who displace onto her their anger for being neglected by their mother and punish her as the mother-substitute. Thus, the younger siblings have an outlet for their anger while preserving their relationship with their mother.
Parents who emotionally neglect their children often have other problems, too, such as narcissism or other personality disorders, addictions, financial duress, physical and or emotional abuse, or other mental illnesses. It is a thin line between emotional neglect and emotional abuse.
I thought my parents were simply not mature enough for parenthood, especially my mother who I knew did not like me and took out her stress, frustrations, etc. on me. It wasn’t until I was in my 50s that I began to realize the full the extent, and effect, of my parents’ dysfunction, both of whom were emotionally neglected. I grew up not only with the same emotional neglect, but my mother also scapegoated me for the effects of her own emotion neglect.
However, it was coming to terms with the effects of my mother’s covert narcissism, that was particularly devastating– as much as it was revelatory–made worse when that abuse is multiplied by four to include three sisters and being made the mother-substitute.
I don’t think there is an existential crisis or trauma quite like realizing that your entire life was a lie and needing to rewrite the narrative of 50 years.
The only thing worse is realizing that the ten years when you thought your family finally accepted you was only a pretense for the benefit of your husband, who they loved and adored. As soon as he died (cancer, at 36), I was immediately returned to my childhood role of family scapegoat– and with no support or help for my grief.
Just when I thought it could get no worse, my father died. My mother always resented the attention I got from my father (the oldest and daddy’s little girl). No longer with any restraints, she was free to finally unleash the full fury of her resentment. I’ve had cut all contact.
We do a great job in our culture raising engineers, bankers, doctors, and celebrities. But we’re not so good at raising human beings. Maybe there should be course in grade school on “What it Means to Be a Human Being.”