Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.
And I'm Jonathan Cohen.
And welcome to our breakdown.
Today, we've got something very special.
We're actually going to be airing, for the first time ever, a recording we did from the Innovations in Psychotherapy Conference that took place in Anaheim, California.
Last October, we actually did this recording in front of an awesome audience filled with therapists and mental health professionals.
Who did we get to speak to?
We spoke to Dr. Lindsay C. Gibson.
She's a renowned psychologist with over 30 years of clinical experience, but she's the author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents.
This is something Jonathan and I have been hearing about so much.
I'm sure a lot of you have been hearing about it as well.
It's blowing up on TikTok all over social media, and younger generations are continuing to find this book so helpful for understanding themselves, their relationships with their parents and how to maintain health, even if you are the adult child of emotionally immature parents.
One of the things we got to ask Dr Gibson about is how do you avoid being an emotionally immature parent?
What are the ways that children can feel healthy and safe as we continue to parent them throughout their lives?
Dr Gibson also talks about what's important to recognize and what we can diagnose in ourselves and in our parents.
She also talks about the differences between narcissism, borderline personality disorder, codependency and emotional maturity.
She also talks about the ways to strengthen our relationship with our children, so that we're not repeating the patterns that we might have been taught by our emotionally immature parents.
It's a fantastic conversation, and we're so excited to get to share it with you.
We can't wait for you to hear our conversation with Dr. Lindsay Gibson.
A friendly reminder, check us out on Substack.
And now we hope you enjoy our live recording from the Innovations in Psychotherapy Conference with Dr Lindsay Gibson.
Break it down.
We are live in Anaheim.
We are currently on a stage with hundreds of psychotherapists, healers, trauma experts.
And we're going to be talking today about, I think I'm just going to welcome our guest.
Dr. Gibson, welcome to The Breakdown.
Thank you for having me.
It's a very different format for us.
She's right there, here we are.
The first thing.
I wonder if you can kind of explain to us what does it mean to say that someone is an emotionally immature parent?
The first thing I think we have to understand is that emotional maturity has its own line of development.
We're all familiar with people needing to develop their intellectual skills, their social skills.
We have emotional maturity as one of those lines of development and it can be very independent of intellect or social ability.
So a lot of times people will say My parent could not be emotionally immature because they run their own business.
He's a college professor, she's the head of the PTA, whatever.
But what they don't realize is that those are separate lanes of development.
When you have emotional immaturity, it means that the things that you needed to develop to become a fully functioning human being, in the realm of self-development, relationship development and your relationship to reality something has gone amiss and they haven't been able to attain the level of maturity that you would hope to see.
It's not something that You would identify easily as, oh, well, this is what this is.
They're different forms.
But there are some key characteristics that when you have those it kind of keeps you in a set of behaviors, that is, in a certain line on that development lane.
And it's hard to get out of that if you don't really work at it.
Something that's so important for me here is the difference between competency, high performance and emotional maturity.
It can be masked a lot that because we prioritize as a society being competent, getting things done.
That is not what we're talking about whatsoever.
No, completely different entities.
I mean, you can be highly successful in our culture.
A lot of the things that contribute to success in a society like ours actually are some emotionally immature characteristics.
So we have to keep in mind that just because somebody made it to the top or they're very skilled in their area, just because someone's on a TV show, it doesn't matter.
Emotional immaturity is equal opportunity.
Everybody gets to potentially have that problem.
Quite early in the book There's a little exercise called assessing your parents' emotional immaturity.
It's like a checklist.
First one says, I'm laughing because my mother loves listening to our podcast.
She listens to every single episode.
Hello, Bev.
Hi, Mom.
The first thing on the list, my parent often overreacted to relatively minor things.
And I was like, okay, and we're done here.
Thank you.
That's great.
And then I became a psychotherapist.
That's right.
But I do want to highlight some of the rest of the things on this checklist.
When I sent this to my first cousin our moms, our sisters she looked at it and she's like How many qualifies?
I said, I don't know if it's that kind of grading assessment.
It's like, check them off and take them to your therapist.
It's like, just check them off and be like, fix this, all this.
My parent was often irritated by individual differences or different points of view.
My parent often said and did things without thinking about people's feelings.
My parent was inconsistent, sometimes wise, sometimes unreasonable.
Facts and logic were no match for my parents' opinions.
My parent tended to be a black and white thinker, unreceptive to new ideas.
Conversations mostly centered on my parents' interests.
So, if you look at this list, one of the first things I thought of was How can any parent not be classified as emotionally immature, right?
And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about, sort of, in terms of diagnostic criteria.
You know, what are we actually trying to assess when we look at, you know, this kind of list?
I mean what you say is, if there's one that you check off, it might be a sign of an emotionally immature parent.
And I was like, what if you check off a lot more than one?
Yes.
So can you talk a little bit about from a clinical perspective?
Is it like if you check them all off, you're in one category?
And if you've got one, you could still have as many challenges?
What does it look like?
Yeah, so if you check one off, It's going to be a characteristic that is hitting at one of the main overall characteristics of emotional immaturity.
That's why I can sort of safely say, if you check even one, you're talking about one of the primary problems.
That's there.
If you check more than one, of course, you're going to be dealing with more of that stuff.
But that, of course, is not a normed or statistical.
But what I found I really did that, off of psychotherapy sessions, people that come in and talk about these very things.
For instance, if you have one of those things, it could mean that the parent's empathy just wasn't there.
Or you could say that the parent's egocentrism was sky high.
Or you could say that the parent's thinking was very rigid because it's not maturely developed into an adequately complex level.
So all of those things are tapping into some of the basics.
So you can have people at different levels of emotional maturity.
But if they hit on some of these key things like egocentrism, poor empathy, lack of self-reflection and others, it's pretty hard to have other mature characteristics if you've got that going on.
So that's why, when I did it, I felt pretty safe in saying, if you check even one, because I couldn't think of a way that they weren't all connected anyway.
Right.
And also, you know, I instantly jumped to, well, which is worse, right, of all of these things?
Yeah.
And I guess it would depend so much on the particular circumstance, right?
So, for example, I didn't get much attention or sympathy from my parent, except maybe when I was really sick.
So then I was thinking well, what if you're dealing with a situation where you had a chronic illness, right?
And you were always sick, then it's going to look a little bit different.
So I instantly, do you know what I'm talking about?
I was trying to look for like, who had it worse, right?
Like if you've got these four, but only, you know, but not this one, maybe you'll be okay.
But it seems like you don't want to have a lot of these checked off.
You definitely don't want to.
I think if you have a less, you don't want to go bingo on this.
It's the worst bingo game ever.
And I would imagine that it's hard to classify one versus the other.
Someone who is emotionally mature is likely going to have overlap between these definitional areas.
Definitely, because if you're super egocentric, if you never moved out of your self-absorption phase which is very normal for toddlers and preschoolers you never moved out of that it's going to be really hard for you to develop empathy.
Just by definition, or it's going to be really hard for you to develop self-reflection.
Because if I'm the world and I'm the most important person in the relationship, and that is the fact as far as I'm concerned why do I need to self-reflect?
It's your problem.
So I'm an expert in answering, asking very difficult questions that are too broad to possibly.
This is kind of a rough audience to say you're an expert.
I'm an expert in asking questions, not answering them.
Where my brain goes is, what does this look like for people who have these parents?
It's obviously very broad, but...
What are some of the core characteristics that people are struggling with in their life that might make them ask wait a second, did I have an emotionally immature parent?
Well, the problem is that if you grow up with an emotionally immature parent, they are the arbiter of not only reality, but also of whether or not you're a good person.
You are basing your self-image, your sense of worth, your view of reality on what this emotionally immature person is telling you.
That can be devastating in terms of the amount of guilt and shame, self-doubt, and outright fear.
You know, when you have somebody who is saying I know what's best, it's all about me and you're bad if you're making me feel bad.
So lots of times when they come to therapy, they're full of self-doubt.
There's probably been quite a bit of gaslighting that's gone on.
And it's very hard for them to understand why their parent would be doing this if it weren't true.
So there's a lot of reassessment, not only of how they feel about themselves, but they have to start thinking about reality, you know, on their own now, and assessing whether or not their parent may have distorted that.
So much of what was their real experience gets invalidated by a nervous parent that doesn't want to go into the deep feelings.
So that's how they come into therapy.
And lots of times I mean.
I'm sure that everybody has had a person come into their office and start crying and apologize.
You know, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
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You identify four kinds, four different kinds of emotionally immature parents.
And this was very, very interesting to me.
This is something that the social media and TikTok universe is not necessarily focusing on the way that I think it should if it's going to try and address emotional immaturity.
What are the four different kinds?
What do they look like?
The emotionally immature parent that I identified were the emotional type, the rejecting type, the driven type and the passive type.
These have no research other than my experience behind it.
But when you start using these, as I did, it was like people's parents started falling into these slots.
Now, there's a neurological reason for that, I understand.
But still, it seemed to capture... these types of parents that I would be hearing about in therapy.
So, like the emotional parent, they all have emotional immaturity, but they're showing up in different ways.
The emotional parent is the parent who really has trouble dealing with their feelings.
Everything's a big deal.
Everything's a big deal.
Everything's about me.
And overreactivity is huge.
And everybody in the family will be tiptoeing around that person's emotional stability.
So it's like, don't say that, or you'll get dad upset, or mom's in her room, don't disturb her.
Because everybody's, everybody's sense of security is based on keeping that person on an even keel.
So they rule the roost.
And lots of times they'll be married to another, more passive type, and that person colludes with it by explaining to the kids about how we have to watch, how we are with mom or dad.
So that's the emotional.
That's the emotional one, yes.
Okay.
Yes.
So then we have the rejecting parent, and the rejecting parent is the person that you're just sort of wondering why did this person get into a situation where they have a family?
You know, they don't seem to enjoy relationships particularly.
They don't seem to like the kids.
They just want to be left alone.
It can be very gruff.
Kids that come out of this family end up apologizing for the rest of their life for being a nuisance, a bother, and they worry about interrupting somebody from something more important, because that was their experience with that parent.
One of my clients reported that at the end of the day, when her dad would come home, she would run to greet him and she said it felt like I was hitting a slam door.
And that's the experience.
So it's like, if I have affection, if I have excitement, I'm bothering somebody.
I need to learn to leave them alone.
And then... this is almost my favorite one to talk about because this is the driven parent.
And this is like this parent would win awards in a culture like ours for being very achievement-oriented, very on top of things.
They get the kids into the travel soccer.
They make sure that they get the best teacher in school.
Meanwhile, they're getting a master's or two themselves.
Driven.
And they do a lot of good for their children because they are looking out for education activities, that kind of thing.
The problem is that this is not the kind of parent that's going to be able to sit down beside the kid with their arm around them and say honey, what's wrong.
Because they're so busy spinning.
Yeah, and they're like, let's get to it.
What do we need to do?
What did you say?
What did they say?
Let's analyze this.
And they don't know how to just be and be present with the kid, which is so important.
When somebody has a parent like that and you begin to explore this thing about emotional maturity or immaturity, they can't believe that this could be a problem.
Until you get into.
What did that feel like and did you feel the connection?
That's where it begins to show up.
And then the passive parent is the parent that doesn't look like the prototypical emotionally immature parent.
They're not flamboyant.
They don't have obvious characteristics.
And many times they're like the favorite of the child.
In some ways they're like big kids themselves.
They may play.
They may play the role of the comforter sometimes. to the kid.
They'll go in the child's bedroom after mom or dad has blown up at them and talk with them, comfort them.
Will they stand up to mom or dad?
No, no.
They're very passive.
So they don't take that adult responsibility to protect the child.
They let it go on.
And that's where the egocentrism comes in, because it's good for them to keep their marriage, to comfort the kid on the side, and yet tacitly condone the other parent's treatment of the kid.
One of the things that for each of these types I've been sort of rolling through and I think probably for the audience.
I wouldn't be surprised if I'm not alone.
How does one distinguish between these different types of emotional immaturity and other kinds of diagnoses like narcissism or narcissistic personality disorder?
You know, I'm hearing a lot of patterns that we often hear about in alcoholic homes or in homes where there's abuse right.
Where one parent is the co-dependent as it were, right?
How does one distinguish or, as you know, a psychotherapist?
Do you need to sort of be able to hold that there's this kind of overlap?
You know, borderline personality disorder also came to me with some of these things like I'm seeing some nodding heads.
There's a lot of other things, right, that can be going.
How do you sift through that when you're trying to be helpful to someone?
Pretty much anyone who is falling into the diagnostic categories of personality disorder or major mental illness very likely in my mind that they have emotional immaturity going on as well.
But there are lots and lots and lots of people who are not diagnosable, but they will have these sort of cardinal characteristics of emotional immaturity going on.
But they're functional.
This is reminding me of your movie.
There is love there.
There is connection, there is attachment and the emotional immaturity is not something that has caused the kind of problems that would lead to a diagnosis.
So to me, it's a lot more of it out there than there would be if you're just going by diagnoses.
So I would say that people that have those kinds of diagnoses, it's highly likely that they may have emotional immaturity.
But not all emotionally immature people would be diagnosable as having a mental illness or a personality disorder.
I mean that would reduce it to, you know, like absurdity to to call all of that mental illness, because it's not.
They just don't meet the criteria.
That's very interesting.
It's very, very helpful also because I think and we'll talk about this in a little bit when we get to sort of the use of this term and also how it really has taken hold and really helped a lot of people encapsulate something that they were experiencing that they couldn't name.
I think this is a place where it's very accessible to be able to understand it.
In this framework, and especially if you think about the access or lack of access that many people have to mental health care, to diagnoses.
You think of underserved populations who may not be even having access to those conversations.
This is such a helpful thing that so many people can understand, in terms of these four categories, for example.
Yeah, and the reason that I like it is that if you wade in in psychotherapy and start calling their parents diagnostic names, I mean nobody likes that.
I mean, because you know better.
This is your parent.
This is the person that you grew up with.
You don't think that they're mentally ill, or maybe you do, but I mean, a lot of people don't.
And they're like, I don't want to go along with that.
I don't think that's really right.
I don't think that's really them.
And I, by the way, am not pushing this until they bring up stuff that makes me ask them about this.
But they don't want to call their parent narcissistic or borderline or whatever, because that's scary and it feels disrespectful and it feels like it's diminishing their parent.
But when you use a description of their behaviors as emotionally immature, There's a little bit of grace in that.
When I heard the description of all four, I can't help but wonder, is anyone not in that camp?
Does anyone have an emotionally mature parent?
I heard guilt shame, self-doubt fear, which I would also imagine is lack of agency, disconnection from intuition, not having confidence.
Who has escaped their childhood without that?
No one escapes the rap.
No one escapes.
If you think that on a continuum where there's a hypothetical mature and immature level of development, you're going to fit on there somewhere, right?
But depending on the circumstances, that is a movable mark, okay?
So you could be relatively and I always say say sufficiently or adequately emotionally mature.
For that very reason,
Okay?
Because... That's when I should yell at my children.
I'm sufficiently emotionally mature.
Some days.
I'm sufficient.
Today.
Today I'm enough.
It's enough.
So we can all regress.
If we're feeling sick or we're tired or we're stressed.
None of us are as emotionally mature as we are on our good days, right.
Same with emotionally immature people.
On their good days they can stretch, they can show love, they can show empathy, they can think about somebody else for a minute, when they're well-resourced and they're feeling good.
When they're getting what they want and they're feeling like they're going to continue to get what they want.
It strengthens them and they can show more maturity at those times.
It's just that when you have some of these kind of cut-off items, like the degree of egocentrism, the degree of lack of empathy, the constant lack of self-reflection, and there are others that really begin to say, you know, this person, even when they stretch,
They return to their place.
You can only stretch so far.
You can only stretch so far, yes.
So kind of to speak to also what Jonathan brought up, another delightful checklist.
Assessing your childhood difficulties with an emotionally immature parent.
So this first checklist was kind of what might that look like.
But this is what does the child report, right?
Or what does an adult reflecting back report?
Same thing.
It's not graded.
But if you check off more than one of the items suggests some level of emotional maturity.
So things like I didn't feel listened to.
I rarely received my parents' full attention.
My parents' moods affected the whole household.
I felt like I could never do enough to make my parent happy.
I was trying harder to understand my parent than my parent was trying to understand me.
I always felt that my parent thought I was too sensitive and emotional.
That's such an interesting one.
My parents stopped listening when he or she didn't like what was being said.
That is a really painful one.
I often felt guilty, stupid, bad, or ashamed around my parent.
I often felt pent-up anger toward my parent that I couldn't express.
So these are some of the features of what what you will recall, what you will present with, right?
What does this person look like when they try to have relationships?
Yeah, you know, it's all about what models in the mind we construct when we're growing up and we all, subconsciously I mean there's no deliberation in this at all we all Figure out what is reality and what are relationships about.
And this is all done, you know, automatically.
And a lot of times the people who grow up in these households really come to believe that other people are more important.
I mean, literally, literally are more important than them.
It's like a fact of reality.
And so they behave in ways it seems like they're always trying to help the other person emotionally stabilize.
They're overly concerned about other people's feelings and their self-esteem.
They're trying to help that person regulate their own emotions and self-esteem.
Sometimes to the point where it gets to be a bit bothersome, you know, because they're trying to regulate someone who's already regulated.
But it's what they learn to do.
And they also have a sort of a characteristic way of they can't believe that another person is really interested in them as an individual.
If you've grown up with somebody who is very self-involved, it's very hard to believe like when you go to a therapist that this person is truly interested in you, that they're curious about what's going on inside you.
They think you have an inner world that needs to be explored.
I mean, that's not something that a truly emotionally immature person is going to be getting into, unless there's some advantage to them to do that.
And, of course, people that have narcissistic traits do do that.
They love bomb and show that kind of interest.
But yeah, so it kind of it warps the person's viewpoint on how to see themselves in relationships and how other people are going to expect them to behave toward them.
Is there overlap here with codependency?
I mean, there's obviously so much similarity, but is that necessarily what it looks like?
Not that I'm an expert in it, because I'm not but I have a problem with giving a name to somebody's adaptive behavior in a family system.
That was absolutely the thing to do.
Okay, when you're growing up.
And you know, in real life and adult life, when you have children or you have financial involvement or whatever, there are a lot of reasons why you might want to over-function for somebody else.
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Can you talk a bit about internalizing and externalizing reactions to growing up with an emotionally immature parent?
Yeah, this is very interesting to me because when I would have people come in for psychotherapy, they would be presenting in the internalizer mode.
And I'm listening to them talk about the emotionally immature people in their life and I'm thinking why are you in here?
It's like they're willing to come in get diagnosed with a mental disorder, so the insurance will pay for it, and they're telling me about a person who is so much less functional, causing so many more problems in the relationship or in their life, than the person who has identified themselves as my patient.
It's like this upside down world.
It's interesting to me that you can have people have such a distorted idea of What they're trying to do.
They're trying to get help for themselves dealing with this person.
But it's also turning out that they are handling it in an emotionally mature way, because the internalizer has self-reflection.
They're curious.
They want to learn.
They think things are interesting.
They try to get to the bottom of things.
They internally process.
That's why I call it internalizing.
They take it in.
They think about it.
And they're, for that reason, ideal psychotherapy clients, right?
Because they want to get to the bottom of it.
They're willing to be self-reflective, to be fair about who's responsible for what.
So they get a lot out of psychotherapy.
The externalizer is the person they're talking about.
So the externalizer is the person who copes with anxiety and stress by projecting blame onto other people.
They externalize the cause of their problems onto other people.
And it feels to them like stuff is just dropping out of the sky on their heads for no good reasons.
It can go in a more paranoid direction, where they're convinced that people are trying to bring them down because they're having so many problems in their life.
But they're so brittle and their defenses are so inflexible that they really can't process things internally.
So it all gets pushed out and it's now it's somebody else's fault.
And you described that people who react as externalizers are more prone to addiction problems, right?
There's acting out behavior that's different.
If you were to say that people who are raised by emotionally immature parents are, let's say, either internalizers or externalizers, Does one of those favor better for not becoming an emotionally immature parent yourself?
It has been my experience that the internalizer is much more likely to become a more emotionally mature parent.
Mature parent.
Yeah, because they live in an inside world.
They process things internally.
So they can imagine that their kid has an inner world and has feelings and thoughts, and they're curious.
They like to learn.
So they might inquire about that.
They have that capacity within themselves to make that connection.
Whereas the externalizer is looking at the kid's behavior, whether it's good or bad.
They are trying to form the kid into their view from the outside in.
And that tends to create problems.
Is there a connection or an observation that children who have grown up with emotionally immature parents are more likely to fall into addiction?
You know if you're an externalizing type by definition means you're looking on the outside for the solution.
Right.
Right.
So, I mean, that's a perfect setup for substance abuse.
But it doesn't mean that an internalizer can't have substance abuse.
Because I could be processing so much.
I'm driving myself crazy and that's my only stress release would be to get into some kind of substance use.
And when you describe someone constantly scanning their environment, looking to make sure this person is okay in order for them to be okay, it just seems like, in order to turn something like that off, someone may go to like, wait a second.
I can no longer have to focus on that if I can distract myself.
Absolutely.
And it may not be drugs and alcohol.
It may be any sort of intense behavior that's going to distract them from the fact that they're not feeling okay externally.
Exactly.
And it also gives them a break from their vigilance.
Because when you are an internalizer, you are very hypervigilant about what's going on with other people.
You're hypervigilant about your own internal process, but you're really on the lookout for what's going on.
And that is so tiring.
It's using parts of the brain that are very expensive energy-wise.
And wow, to be able to have that lifted off you through whatever your thing is.
It's huge.
Well, I would love someone to take this research one step further and say what is the connection between that and people who have either chronic disease or autoimmune conditions as an underlying contributing factor?
To me it's like asking the question where does the stress come out?
You know where's the weakness in the gasket.
I mean, where's the point that something's gotta give?
Yeah, I mean, I was thinking of, you know, the myth of normal and we had Deborah Mate on and that notion that caregivers are bearing a tremendous emotional burden.
And when you think of some of the kind of homes that might produce this sort of dynamic.
And in my experience my grandparents are immigrants from Eastern Europe, so there's a very strong cultural leaning towards the females of the family, kind of bearing a lot of the labor.
And also for many of us who are the sandwich generation, caring for children and also aging parents right.
We talk a lot about autoimmune conditions and the rise in women and things like that.
So I'm kind of thinking of it in terms of that as well.
And if the emotional burden for caretaking begins when you're a child because you're dealing with emotionally immature parents, how much more you know that stress load is placed upon you.
Right.
And the unfortunate thing is that if you're a highly capable person and there really is like you're talking about the sandwich generation, I mean these are real demands that are being put on them.
And so they function even more, and all they know to do is to continue to function more and more.
And because they have been trained out of listening to their own internal voice.
Stop, you know like, Or even somatic information.
I can't take this anymore.
That's not permitted by the emotionally immature person.
It makes it very hard for them to read themselves and know when they've had too much.
So they just keep accepting it.
Trained out of listening to their own internal cues is so huge.
Relationships you want to get in, for the jobs you want to go to, for how you're navigating life.
And so when I heard... earlier in this conversation, all the ways that someone can be stunted.
It just strikes me as you're losing your ability to effectively navigate the world.
We all have this inner core place and you call it the self, you call it the soul, whatever you want to call it.
But there is this inner core thing that wants to actualize itself, that feels and notices its internal experience.
And when that is met up with in the outside world with a person who can do that back, who sees you, sees you, in that You know there's the life course for relative emotional maturity, because you are being set up with a line to another person where you can internalize that relationship and carry that around with you like batteries included.
But whatever that thing is, it's so huge and it's so important.
And that's what we're trying to get back when we're doing psychotherapy with people is we're trying to reconnect them with this source of who they are and what they really feel, and this internal guidance that it gives them for their health and their life.
Give us a picture of someone who really gets resourced, because I think it's normalized now to not be connected to intuition, to be lost, to feel purposeless, like it's.
It's on the rise not to attack the tools of today, but our algorithms are increasing our ability to disconnect and to feel more lost and we're looking for external solutions.
What is it like for someone to grow up?
And we've heard in some of the spiritual conversations we've had on the podcast.
People talk about that.
The body has its own intelligence and knows where it wants to go.
To have a sense where.
Wait a second.
This situation just isn't right for me.
And it doesn't matter that I just got hired here.
I'm like walking out the door, and that can be taken, you know, to extreme, where people don't want to work hard.
That's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about really knowing oneself in a way that has a powerful compass style influence on your life, where you're able to navigate and find your direction.
That, whatever it is, I think comes about because the child you know from the get-go is having internal experiences.
When the parent responds to that with a sense of resonance and seeing the child and just imagining that that baby even is having a certain experience or a certain feeling, they're telling the child that you are real inside.
You are psychologically real.
And I see that and I experience that in you.
So whatever it is that comes out of you psychologically or emotionally, I know that that is really you.
It's not something to get rid of or it's not something to modify.
It is who you really are.
So when you have the mindset of my child is psychologically real, my child has an inner world.
They matter.
They matter.
And also, I can handle whatever they bring out.
Yes, so they don't have to cut that part off and hide it in order to have a relationship with you as the parent.
But there are so many things that kids really need active communication enthusiastic, fascinated responses from their parents.
It's not just, I accept you, whoever you show up as.
It's not that, and it's not that I unconditionally love you.
It is that I love your wildness.
I love your spirit.
I love that you just did that, even though I'm going to put you in time out for it.
It's a resonance with the basic humanness, and that includes their impulses, their emotions, whatever it is.
But when a kid gets that and they're able to have it at their developmentally normal stage, it becomes something that they know about themselves.
So they get self-knowledge, they develop self-confidence, they feel like they belong.
Because those parts have been actively welcomed into the relationship, not just unconditionally accepted, but actively welcomed and kind of celebrated.
The parent liked it.
I really love this fantasy you're telling.
It's a great story. my father died 10 years ago.
And a year after my father died, I wrote a screenplay, which I ended up directing.
And it was a movie that has Dustin Hoffman in it and Candace Bergen and Simon Helberg from the Big Bang Theory and Diana Agron.
And this movie that I wrote and directed is deals with a lot of these concepts of children and parents.
It's called As They Made Us, and you're welcome to look it up if you'd like a good cry.
But one of the things that I was thinking of is the levels to which, also generationally, there's a difference in expectation.
That's very interesting to me because You know, my parents were born during World War II.
And you know there were stories told about my father's mother in particular that at that time in history, like my grandfather, was literally in the war.
You know, he was serving in the Army.
And she was home, right, with two kids.
And you were told don't give the baby too much attention, because it's going to keep wanting attention if you give it attention.
Right.
And mothers were told, you know, don't breastfeed.
Like, it's too much intimacy.
Like, literally, it's too much closeness.
And, you know, they would pin babies into their beds.
They would pin the sheets down firmly, right?
Which part of me is like, oh, maybe it felt like a warm embrace.
But...
But that's not what a lot of that generation kind of came out in terms of parenting.
But I'm also like, oh, greatest generation.
Then I think, I'm 49, so I was born in 1975.
The film is not an autobiographical film, but it has a lot of elements of my family.
And my parents did the best they could with the education resources and support that they had.
And there was a tremendous amount of love in my home.
And also, when you talk about this, I think of what was expected of me as a child.
And I see a lot of people who are, you know, around-ish my age.
There was a way to be good.
There was a way to be good.
And the way to be good was to not complain.
Don't ask for the things that we can't afford.
Don't cry about them. finish what's on your plate.
You know, there were all of these things that meant that I was being good.
Don't be so contrary.
You know, don't make too much noise when your dad's napping.
My dad was a teacher and it's very stressful, you know, but it was like he comes home, he has to nap.
Don't make noise.
Right.
You're a little younger than me, but I think we both had this.
This kind of way that so many of us were taught like this is how to be good.
And when you talk about this kind of freedom that a child might be given, it's kind of baffling to me.
And I'm a parent.
I have a 17 and a 20 year old, so I know what I tried to do.
But can you talk a little bit about sort of also the shifting cultural framework?
Is it always okay to let children have this full range?
Do we always have time for that?
Do we always have patience for that in homes with one parent or with parents who are both working, where there's not that kind of time and energy and space?
A lot of people are finding it difficult, I think, to dial in that way as parents.
I know that was a lot of different things in one thing.
Yeah.
This is what it's like for my therapist, who I don't think is here.
That's why we do double sessions.
Well, maybe I can address one thing, and then you can remind me of the other one.
It's not that children need freedom to be themselves, because what that suggests is that they're running wild and they get to do whatever they want to do, and we think it's just adorable and we don't put any limits on them.
No, I mean, that would be terrifying for a child.
It would also be bad practice for dealing with reality when that child grows up, right?
Because you don't want to have one world in childhood and then another world that they're thrown into when they're 18.
So, no, we want to have limits.
We want to give them guidance.
We want to let them know that, you know, this is not something that we do.
So it's not the, I'm not talking about the freedom.
I'm talking about the parent's ability to do not lose sight of the fact that that kid is psychologically real inside.
This stuff is coming up in them or happening in them for a reason that this is, you know, their experience, this is how they feel, and that you can respond to that in a way that lets them know.
You get it.
I'm not going to let you hit your little brother over the head with a pan, but I get it that you're angry.
I might say something to you about how you're angry and we learn about talking about feelings and stuff like that.
There is that tendency to feel like, if I am crazy about my kid and I honor that inner life of theirs, that somehow I'm going to become a laissez-faire parent that forgets all about guiding them or giving them limits.
And that does not have to be the case.
Like I said, you can be putting them in time out while at the same time remembering when you did that, when you were a kid.
But that connection inside is not lost.
And the judgment is not, you're bad and you need to stop being this way.
Not just stop doing that, but stop being this way.
Right.
There has been such a shift culturally in what is expected from parents.
I mean, it's huge.
Many, many parents are doing the best they can.
They really care about their children.
They're trying to do the best they can.
All we have is what we learned in our families, what our culture tells us, maybe what we've read.
That's what we have to go on.
So when somebody is saying don't pick your child up every time they cry, they'll become overly attached or weak or whatever,
I think with the advent of so much psychotherapy now I mean people can't get in to see therapists now
It's so popular.
This awareness of how experiences affect us has become just so widespread that people are now aware of how things affect us.
I mean, human rights was not a thing until the late 1940s.
And once we get this idea of human rights, that the way things feel to people, the inside experience of people matters and has to be accounted for, Then we open up this whole new way of not only seeing children but all kinds of people all over the world.
We do the best we can with what we were given by our culture and by our families.
And if you love your children and you try to be there for them, that's the main thing.
Yes, it definitely changes.
Both you and Mayim have said some version of the phrase.
They did the best they can with the resources that they had.
Can you talk about the power of acknowledging your parents without a diagnosis?
But in this way, how does it help the person either see their parents with more love, have more acceptance and maybe address some of the pain that they may be carrying from what they didn't get?
And also, how do you distinguish that recognition of parents when sometimes the decision is that you would like to take a break from them?
That was so poignant that I almost forgot what you said.
Well, you were talking about having more compassion for your parents.
Yeah, let me address that one first.
My perspective is that when you can acknowledge that your parents have done the best they can with the resources that they had, that doesn't mean that you weren't hurt by them.
But it acknowledges the reality of them as individuals and starts to, for me at least allow a bit of a detachment that I can see them and honor them and say you were just a human being who has tried to do what you can do.
And now it's my job to try to give myself what I wasn't able to get or what I might wish I had more of.
Right.
And lots of times that is a point to be desired, I mean a point to reach, because that gives you peace, it's fair to the parent.
The problem is that usually, when you've been really hurt by your parent, your problem is not to see things with fairness toward their point of view.
Your problem is reclaiming yourself.
And lots of times people will use that kind of understanding of their parent as a way of staying away from realizing what it did to them.
And so they end up making reasons for why their parents acted certain ways, and they might use that reason with her mother.
Even though they're trying to be fair to their parent, it can be so hard for them to stay in touch with their own feelings and what the experience did to them that any effort on the therapist's part to say well, you know, your parents did the best they could they grew up in the 1930s really is experienced as a dismissal and an invalidation of what they're trying to come to in themselves.
So we want to be careful that we don't allow that to be a reason why we don't look at that person's feelings.
That totally makes sense.
And given that this is a room full of therapists, that's an amazing message in the dynamic of trying to ensure that people look at their stuff.
I have seen it in the maybe opposite way, where if they're so angry at their parents all the time, it doesn't allow them to sort of move away from the anger and the conflict into a level of sort of accepting the things that they need to give themselves.
They're still sort of going into trying to go to the well and get the thing that they didn't get.
Yeah, and that is a whole process.
I mean you can't move a person out of that place when that's where they need to be.
I mean if you've grown up feeling like your anger or your responses, that there was something wrong with you for feeling that way toward your parent and now suddenly you're seeing things differently and now you're having your feelings about it.
To me as a therapist, we stay with that as long as it's there.
Lots of times, emotionally immature parents will come back and they will say well, you know, I did this because my mother did this, or that's the best we knew.
It's like, yes, that's true.
But you could listen to my experience of that without dismissing it as something that happened in the past to you or your culture.
We could talk about it.
And we know that that's there too.
But how about listening to what happened with me?
And let's use that as a foundation for a more intimate and closer relationship.
Forgiveness comes to you.
It's not something that you can manufacture or get to on your own.
This is the way I think about it.
It's that, the process of integrating and thinking about what has happened to you, feeling your real feelings, working that through.
One day, maybe it comes to you.
Oh, my God, you know, she felt the same way, or he felt the same way, or now.
I understand the stress.
Now I have kids, whatever it is.
And then that understanding comes to you in a natural way, because now you're having an empathic response toward the parent.
But when therapists try to help people by encouraging them to get to forgiveness before it comes to them or to not rent their parents' room, in their minds you know like obsessing about what happened.
It doesn't work because you don't achieve that except through this internal process.
This book was written, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents was written in 2015.
What I know to be true is that, in the world of social media, this topic has become extremely popular.
And I cannot tell you how many TikToks, Instagram stories, reels, posts, people send me saying, you have to check out this concept of children of emotionally immature parents.
It resonates with so many people.
And I know this is something that probably all of you are dealing with in ways that I can only imagine
The notion that social media has become, for many people, a diagnostic tool, a tool for self-diagnosis, for diagnosing and pathologizing your parents and every aspect of your life.
What's interesting is that this is resonating and kind of taking off, you know, on social media in so many ways.
It's overlapping with so many things.
I've seen a lot of things about your book.
You know from people who are familiar with 12-step programs like ACA right,
Adult Children of Alcoholics.
There's a lot about emotional immaturity that occurs in the texts of 12-step programs like that.
Many people who are saying, my parents are narcissists and this, fits, right?
Can you talk a little bit about where you have seen social media shift both diagnostic understandings and also, in particular, the resonance people have with this notion of oh my gosh.
I think this fits me.
Yeah, you know, it's interesting.
To me it seems like social media is.
It's like the perfect opportunity for somebody to share their inner experience with someone.
You put it out there.
People put hits on it.
It's like your parents listening to you, you know?
I mean social media is like we focus on the performance aspect of it and that people are out there trying to get hits and it's you know.
But to me, it's really like an attempt to be listened to.
And that's part of the compelling nature of it.
Because when someone is touched by something that they read about or learned about and they're putting it out there, to me it's the genuineness of that person's account.
That is like catnip to people.
It's like somebody is showing their feeling about what they learned, or whatever, and we are drawn to that.
It's like, what did you find out?
How come you're having this reaction to this?
Why has social media had such an effect?
I think it's because, in a way, it is an example of a very genuine kind of intimate relationship communication.
It seems weird to say intimate when you're broadcasting to your audience, but I think it is.
I think when someone cares about something that they've just learned about and they're broadcasting that, we feel it as though it's directed to us, and then we wanna learn more about it ourselves.
The other arena that I've seen the conversation about adult children, of emotionally immature parents kind of brought into is in this kind of online frenzy of we're going to help you figure out if you should cut off your parents.
And to me, this is something that I would hope gets more fleshed out than in simply sharing.
Hey, here's the Instagram post that proves that you should cut off your parents.
But can you talk a little bit?
And you talk about it, obviously, in the book, and it's part of, I think, a larger conversation.
How do you know if you have emotionally immature parents that you need to have resources to tolerate or to forgive, or where do we cross the line into?
I'm going to use a phrase that people use this is a toxic relationship.
And I don't want to engage anymore.
And I want to withdraw, right, my part of relating from this parent.
And I know you can't, you know there's not any sort of clear cut here's when you go from this is annoying to this is abusive and this is toxic.
But what does the conversation feel like when you're People are trying to have that and especially how does that get sort of played out in a format like social media?
My experience has been that, by the time people have reached the point of thinking about estrangement or keeping their distance, there has been such a backlog of experiences of feeling dismissed invalidated, told that they're wrong.
I mean, this is not anybody's first line of response, right?
And understandably so.
When you hear from the other side of the parents who are estranged, they make it sound like the therapist has talked their kid into cutting them off for no good reason, because their intentions were good and they loved their kid and they were not intending to do this harm.
What people have reported to me is that they have tried to tell that parent what was wrong and why it's hard for them to be around them, or what they don't want to talk about or what they want the parent to stop doing because it hurts.
They have tried that.
And what they get back is the reasons why the parent did that, what the parent's true intention was and why that person ought to have understanding and empathy for the parent.
And then we start it all over again.
It's tragic because the parent really loves their child.
They want a relationship.
But when they get confronted with the estrangement process they cannot get off the thing about.
It was not my intention to make you feel that way.
It was not my intention to, and that's true.
But if they could listen just to what the kid's experience was, there might be hope for something different to form there.
But the way that I think about estrangement is if there is physical or mental or emotional harm being done to the person.
That's the point at which I would begin to ask the person exactly what are the effects and what happened and why.
Have you thought about whether this is having a negative effect on your health?
For instance, I had a client who had a very intrusive, very troubling kind of father.
She had just had a baby.
She was postpartum in a big way.
And now he wants to come visit.
And he wants to come visit and stay at her home.
She was torn up.
Even I can do this.
Pretty easy one.
But she was wracked with guilt because she knew that he would feel rejected.
And we had to work through that.
Ultimately, she decided that she was going to set a boundary and he could not come.
But that is so hard for people.
It's up to the therapist to help that person really examine what the effects are on them.
Because sometimes I mean, I'm sitting there thinking this is making you sick.
You know the word trauma is used liberally.
I would say and I'm not gonna say that there's not trauma, it's not for me to say, but when you said mental harm, that also has fluctuations in terms of our cultural understanding of what's mental harm, and some of us are like, until I'm being hit over the head right with a pan, it's not abuse right, and that's one extreme.
But I also do wonder and I think I love the emphasis on working through this with a therapist
I'm a huge, huge fan of psychotherapy.
And I know a lot of people are switching to other modalities and people want an ayahuasca journey.
And even some people want CBT instead of.
You know traditional psychoanalysis or you know these kinds of methods.
But I think it's really important to not and this is what I tell my kids to not look to social media to solve elaborate problems, elaborate psychological interactions, right.
Don't determine if your parent was abusive based on that person's TikTok.
Oh, yeah, of course, of course.
And I will say too that for people that it's never occurred to that what they have gone through might be abuse, it is a tremendous awakening to hear that this is behavior that can be very harmful to people and that there's a reason why it hurt and there's a reason why you recoil.
If someone has struggled with emotionally immature parents and they're recognizing that, can you talk about or offer them some hope in ways that you've seen people change, regrow their sense of inner self, their confidence and their ability to connect?
Oh, absolutely.
And to me it's the most beautiful thing in the world to be working with a person who has found their own sense of self and they are now internally oriented to decide what gives them energy, what exhausts them, what they like, what they prefer not to do.
It's like watching somebody come back to life, because they reconnect with their own self, with their own inner guidance and with their own emotions.
And when they do that, they even start talking differently.
They start using more metaphor.
They start expressing themselves more.
They're much more in touch with their feelings.
It's like watching them become a whole person again.
It's really amazing.
When my husband and I were on the flight.
Out here, the attendant comes by with a drink and on her arm there is an anatomically correct drawing of a brain with a heart coming out of it.
So it was like mind and heart, but it wasn't like this kind of.
It was like with the pipes and it was kind of awful in a way.
But it was like, I thought, wow, what a tattoo.
Because that's what we're trying to do.
We're trying to get the person's heart and mind working together again for that person's individuality.
And that's what you end up seeing ultimately in this kind of therapy is the person gets that integration back and they don't have to pretend that they don't feel something.
And now we know what matching tattoo to get.
I want to mention also you have a book coming out in April of next year, How to Raise an Emotionally Mature Child, which is a much, much needed kind of flavor right to add to these conversations.
I'm now terrified to go home to my children.
I'm afraid everything I say is going to be a problem.
You need to acknowledge them.
Meet and acknowledge them exactly where they are.
I'll just have them read the book.
Anyway, we want to thank the Innovations in Psychotherapy Conference for having us.
And we really, really appreciate being able to have this conversation with so many knowledgeable experts.
And really, thank you so much for being here from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have.
We'll see you next time.
And now she's gonna break down, it's a breakdown, she's gonna break it down.
