The Parent Who Wasn’t There (Even When They Were)

Happy Friday, book club! My first 2 minutes of intro got eaten by my editing software, but suffice to say, I’m so happy to be doing this exploration with you, and I encourage, as always, to take it slowly (slower than that - soooo slow you start to get annoyed). Please feel free to comment below or reply with any questions, curiosities, or observations! Dive in to the episode or check out the transcript below. Wishing you a gentle weekend ahead!

So in chapter one, we started by talking about how emotionally immature parents affect their adult children's lives. And I always really like to emphasize, as you heard me talk about two weeks ago, that sometimes people have difficulty recognizing that this was their experience. And of course, that's just fine. It can take time to come to terms with what happened from an adult place.

But it's important to remember that it's not always as stark as some of these examples. Sometimes it can be those environmental ruptures that you've heard me talk about many times where you just didn't fully feel seen in your experience. Your parents themselves never got the chance to develop their emotion and And so while you may not have said, I had a traumatic childhood, there was a way in which your child self experienced those ruptures. In this chapter, we're going to talk about recognizing the emotionally immature parent.

And as always, we want to take this topic gently because it can be both illuminating, where we might have moments where it's like, wow, I'm This makes so much sense why I feel the way I do now or why I felt the way I did then or why I developed some of these patterns and habits and relationships that I see in my adult life now. And so it can be really validating and illuminating, but it can also be painful and bring up grief and anger and all that old fear that we might have felt as children if we recognize some of this in our parents. So we remember that we're not here to create blame or place blame because that in itself can be activating to feel that we're here to attack your parents or you may recognize some of this in yourself as a parent, not because you are bad or wrong, but because you are still learning and developing. And so our curiosity here is self-understanding, self-connection, and building a felt sense of safety here in the present with our self, as IFS calls it, or with our adult consciousness, as Narm calls it.

And in that way, we can feel and metabolize some of the experiences we had as children. that may still be impacting us now through that predictive patterning and that data modeling in our brain. And as we metabolize that and let it move through, then we can be more and more present in our lives in an adult way and move more toward what we want for ourselves and feel more connection and have needs and have emotions. And don't worry, we'll take it one step at a time, but that's really what we're curious about.

So as we're diving in, Maybe you can take a moment and just feel your breath or feel where your body is right now in the world and just knowing that this material can be challenging to learn or to take in and that's okay. For many of us, it's hard to see our parents clearly because to a part of our brain, it can feel disloyal to think about our parents this way or to admit that they weren't fully emotionally capable of giving us what we need. And in our brain, when we start to feel that disloyalty, even though we know somewhere in our adult consciousness self that our parents are complex people and it's okay to notice the way that they couldn't meet us where we are, in our predictive patterns, in our child consciousness, in our protective parts... A survival part is going to come up and say, it's not okay to think badly about my parents.

And so we might start to feel some fear or anxiety come in or some distraction come in where we're like, no, don't look away. Or we might feel some of that intellectualization coming in, right? The part might come in that wants to disconnect you from feeling the emotions of recognizing that your parents weren't capable of giving you what you needed fully or feeling the fear of recognizing that. It would make sense that a part of you would want to intellectualize and figure it out logically and distance yourself from the pain.

Or maybe there's even a perfectionist part that wants to come in as you're reading this book or taking this in and say, well, yeah, but you were a difficult child. What could you have done better to make them understand? these are our adaptive protective survival strategies they are patterns and neural pathways in our brain that developed based on the early environments we grew up in not just our caregivers but our teachers and our peers and the world around us so if these strategies come up as we're exploring this it's okay to notice them and notice the way that they might try to protect you from something here in the moment, from the vulnerability and the confusion, as is laid out so well in this book here, that comes from being unseen. So if you notice right in this moment, some internal resistance, maybe it's okay to just name that for yourself right now, a neutral curiosity.

We're just documenting what's happening. We're not trying to do anything with it right now. We are just noticing that. So as this chapter moves forward and encourages us to hold this capacity of being curious, but being with ourselves through the difficult emotions that might come up here, she talks a little bit about the goal of of gaining self-confidence by knowing the truth of your own story and even that word self-confidence or knowing your own story can be activating so again i just want to encourage you to take what works for you from this book and leave the rest for now more of it might come in later there is an exercise here to assess your parents emotional immaturity This is another one of those things that can be deeply insightful, but deeply activating.

So you can take your time and you can have a look if you'd like to. But knowing that you don't have to take this all in right now, but some signs that your parents may not have been able to be with their own emotions or yours. is maybe they overreacted to minor things like you spilling something. Or maybe as you were growing up, when you started having your own ideas or asking questions, they would get irritated by that.

Or maybe your parents were very inconsistent, your caregivers. Sometimes they were there, sometimes they weren't. Sometimes they were connecting, sometimes they weren't. Or they were there for you until you became upset.

And then they tried to shut that down. So these are just some of the things that can demonstrate some emotional immaturity. Why? Because your parents were likely in their own protective strategies too.

And that landed onto you. You know that emotional immaturity or really what we can think of it as is an inability to be with emotions. We don't have the capacity for it. It is a protective survival strategy where when a big emotion comes in, our body and brain just shut it down.

And whether it moves to the intellectual, you know, where they send you away, or they just try to meet your emotions with logic, or the irrational, where they yell and get upset at you, or they go away. What we know is that this experience, this survival strategy, often echoes unmet generational needs. That it's likely that your parents and caregivers maybe had parents or caregivers who also lacked that vulnerability, that emotional connection, that presence, and that self-awareness. So it's likely that these survival strategies pass through in generations until people are able to do the work to recognize them.

which is what you're doing right now. And it's a really brave and courageous thing to do. It's very typical that emotionally immature parents will experience traits like rigidity or impulsiveness or low stress tolerance, and that the way they respond to you or the world is much more subjective rather than it is objective. And again, that is because they are trying to manage their own survival responses at any given time.

But as children, we can recognize as adults, right? We can say, okay, I get that. Maybe I even recognize some of those things in myself. Like maybe I have a lot of rigidity and a low stress tolerance.

We can understand that for us, those are survival strategies. Intellectualizing, like disconnecting from our emotions, it's a survival strategy. And so it's likely the same for your parents or caregivers. But the difference is, as a child, you don't have the cognitive capacity to recognize that.

you rely entirely on your caregivers to be okay to show up for you and to model for you so that you can develop and learn how to do things and when you get this inconsistency this hot and cold or this idea that in some way you are causing a problem for those around you just by being a kid or having emotions or making a mistake That creates this real disconnect in your brain where your brain says, I don't think my parents are taking care of me in a way that feels good. This is all subconscious, of course. Kids don't think at this level. But it's really scary to feel that way.

And so then we have to choose between being on our parents' side or being on our side. And we will choose being on our parents' side nine times out of ten because that is what feels safest to our survival system. And then, of course, those patterns carry through to adulthood as those major survival strategies. Not being able to attune to ourselves and over-attuning to others.

Not being able to have autonomy or agency, but getting mad when we don't have autonomy or agency. Intellectualism, people-pleasing, we know those things. And there's some stories in here about children who had really unpredictable and volatile parents and whose parents demanded emotional caretaking from her. And so it creates this role reversal.

And maybe you've heard the term parentification, where the child is put into the parental role, where they have to take care of their parents' emotions or they have to be their parents' confidants. And that creates, within a child... A survival response. There's a pattern here, right?

The brain and the nervous system will respond as if something dangerous is happening. And so the nervous system will have this persistent hypervigilance, this watching out for what's going to come next, and I need to make sure to make things okay before my parent gets upset. And that manifests in our adult life, maybe, for example, through anxiety, through needing to make sure everyone else's needs are met and not being allowed to have your own needs, being on edge, even if someone's a little bit upset, even if they're upset in a way that makes sense. But again, it can be really difficult to recognize it because in this story, for example, she's talking about how when she was an adult, her father decided she needed a porch swing, didn't ask, didn't check in with her if she wanted a porch swing.

But of course, there is that sort of self-centeredness that comes from an emotionally immature parent where their feelings are the only ones they can tolerate. And so he shows up at her townhouse with this huge porch swing he made himself and had it delivered to her deck where it took up all the space that she used to have to kind of have her little outdoor space. So you can see how that can be like, oh, well, your dad was doing something nice for you. He made this porch swing.

And I mean, he just really wanted you to have something nice for your house. Why are you being so ungrateful? Maybe you've heard something like that before from your parents or caregivers or your grandparents, or maybe you've even had like an aunt or uncle or a friend say something like that to you. And it's not about the gift itself, but it's about miss attuning to and misunderstanding.

and disconnecting from his daughter's experience rather than his own experience of needing to make this thing for her because she's in her house and she's going to enjoy it. And that's what he wants to do. And so while it may sound simple, that's a big demonstrative act that shows us some of that emotional immaturity where he is not able to connect to his adult self of this is my daughter. What does she want and need? Not just do what I want and need.