How Emotionally Immature Parents Affect Their Adult Children’s Lives

Hello and welcome back for our Tiny Sparks read-along.

I'm so excited that you're here.

If you've been here with me for No Bad Parts, the Internal Family Systems book, and Healing Developmental Trauma, the NARM book, then welcome back.

If you're here for the first time, then welcome.

I'm so excited to dive into the book adult children of emotionally immature parents, how to heal from distant, rejecting, or self-involved parents.

If this is your first time here, I'll just give you a little bit of background of how our read-along works.

Many people read the book along with me, and we usually take one chapter every two weeks so that we have time to really dig into it and sit with and be curious and track our responses to it.

While it might seem slow, we know that the nervous system and brain prefer things to go much slower than our quick, quick, fix-everything selves might feel.

So it's normal if a part of you feels like you want to speed up, and I invite you to just be curious and notice those parts of you.

If you read faster than the book club goes, that's wonderful. It gives you an opportunity to come back and review.

Many people also are a part of our read along and don't read the book at all. They listen to these podcast episodes that I create to allow them to have the space to just process what's happening.

So if you feel like you don't have the bandwidth to read right now, or maybe you don't have the space to kind of read as quickly as you might like to, then know that it's perfectly fine to be here and not be reading the book at all.

We have one episode together every two weeks where I dive into the chapter, share a little bit about it, and share my perspective from a therapist.

And often it is a little bit different than the books that we are reading together because I practice from a model that centers around the idea of developmental trauma, relational trauma, and attachment trauma, and agency.

And developmental trauma is going to feature very heavily in this book, where the idea is, this is for people who grew up with parents who were emotionally immature, which oftentimes may not be considered a trauma in our society, but creates significant ongoing environmental ruptures.

AKA the feeling or experience that our environment can't meet us or care for us or provide for us or meet our needs when we are children. And that, no matter what you might think as an adult, is often experienced as a trauma for children.

So while we dive into this book together, we'll be reviewing the book, but we'll also be going a little bit deeper into some of my thoughts and experiences around that. As always, you're more than welcome to send any questions via email.

You can comment on the Substack posts, or you can reply to the posts and that will come to my email as well. I love when you send questions because it gives me an opportunity to know what you'd like to know more about We'll have two live meetings together where we hop on a Google Meet video session and I answer your questions and we talk and we explore and we connect.

It's okay if you can't join those live because they are recorded, so no worries, we're all in different time zones.

Our first meeting will be on Saturday, May 24th at 10 a.m. Eastern Time. So that allows our European folks to join and hopefully our U.S. folks to join. I know it's a little early for Pacific and may not work for some of our Australian friends, but not to worry, it will be recorded. And we'll try to make sure to do the other one at a different time. So 10 a.m. Eastern Time, Saturday, May 24th, will be our first live meeting.

One thing I appreciate about this book is that it's really written at a level for anyone to understand. So it's not as clinically complex as the first book we read, Healing Developmental Trauma.

That being said, it's normal when exploring things like this that it can bring up unexpected feelings. especially if it's describing something that you experienced, or maybe something that you didn't even know you experienced.

So as always, I encourage you to take it slow, to slow down. And if you notice something feels activating or triggering or upsetting, even if you don't know why, it's an opportunity to pause.

Our cognitive brain, and especially those of us who are intellectualizers, may feel like we want to override that experience and push on to finish the chapter or whatever it is.

But know that this is an opportunity to practice tracking and connecting to yourself in a way that maybe your parents or caregivers never tracked or connected to your experience, your emotions, and what you were feeling in your body.

So as we dive into this chapter, the author, Dr.

Lindsay Gibson, gives us this way of understanding what emotional loneliness is and what it's like to experience that in childhood and with parents who aren't able to be aware of us or be with our emotions and it's really important to know that this might be an experience that you had and didn't even know that you had because oftentimes parents who struggle with emotional connection and are emotionally immature may present as very quote-unquote normal They may have taken care of your needs in many ways, like your physical health and meals, and maybe they took you to sports or activities that you wanted to do, but they weren't able to be fully present to you emotionally.

This can be a really confusing experience because oftentimes adults who experience this feel guilty or bad for thinking that they experienced something traumatic.

And a lot of times they'll tell me, well, other people had it way worse than I did.

And I understand that there is a way in which we can be compassionate toward other people that had different trauma.

But it's important to understand that having parents and caregivers who aren't able to be present to our emotions and to be present to our experience and to see us. does feel like life threat to us.

And so as she's describing it here, that there's this gut feeling of emptiness and the sense of shame for having needs or having emotions, that that carries through for us.

And so if you've joined me here because you've heard me talk a lot about intellectualization, people who use intellectualization as a survival strategy or a protective mechanism often had emotionally immature parents or parents who were not able to be present to their emotions.

And maybe that's because your parents' parents weren't able to be present to their emotions.

But imagine you're a person who learned it wasn't safe to have emotions and you stay very intellectualizing and very rationalizing.

And then you have a child and children by their nature have all range of emotions and they look to their parents for regulation and to learn how to be with those emotions.

Well, when you have a parent who's emotionally immature, They're not able to do that.

And so they may pull away when you have an emotion, they may send you away to your room or pull back or punish you, or they may just kind of ignore it.

And what happens is over time, we learn that having an emotion, having an emotional need, Wanting to be connected feels dangerous because we feel our parents pull back from us.

And we perceive that as a child as a dangerous thing because we rely on our parents to take care of us.

This is a theme we've noticed through all the books we've explored, how much our perception as children impacts the way the pathways in our brain works.

None of this is to say you have the worst parent in the world or the best parent in the world, but it's to notice how our parents' patterns impact us. and how those form predictive patterns because our brain works much like a data model.

So it takes in that data from our childhood and then it uses it in the present to predict what's going to happen.

So if we grew up with parents who were emotionally immature, and we form these patterns of intellectualization or not having needs or having deep shame around being seen or having needs, then our capacity to have emotional intimacy and deeply connect with other people will be ruptured.

And that's because our experience of that as a child was a lack of safety or an environmental rupture that didn't feel safe to be attuned to.

So then it doesn't feel safe to attune to ourselves.

So when we meet someone who maybe can attune to us or can see us, a friend or a teacher or a potential romantic partner or even a therapist, instead of it feeling good, it can feel really threatening and scary.

And that's because our brain is using that old data from our childhood to say, this is not a safe experience.

Remember, oftentimes children do not know what is wrong.

They can't put words to it.

So you might not even have the words to have described this, but you would have gone around feeling this emotional loneliness.

And oftentimes then we carry that into our adult lives and it makes us feel like we're on the outside.