Healing from Emotionally Immature Caregivers
The words Emotionally Immature Parent sounds like an annoying or disappointing way to experience childhood, but in the field of psychology, it means developmental crisis. Parents who lack maturity are unable to provide a consistent emotional world for their children, or anyone. Maturity means that one’s moods are both acknowledged and handled with consideration for others. Without this, children are left to suffer the worst of their parents' failure to engage in self-control.
The impact of emotionally immature caregivers lasts over the course of a lifetime. It is their responsibility to guide their offspring through infancy, childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. It is their job to see you and to support who you are. That support can only be offered by adults with a stable identity for themselves. Children require thisin order to build confidence. Every day is not bliss; that’s not how living works, but all children deserve caregivers capable of acknowledging their own expressions of anger and anxious irritability because that is what it means to see children as the little universe of their own that they are. That’s what it means to be a consistent and reliable caregiver.
As Dr. Lindsay Gibson writes, there’s basically one way to give nurturing love, but many ways to frustrate a child’s need for love. We can take a nice, long reflective pause right there. How do those words feel? As in, how does your body feel right now? What is your breathing like? Is there anything in your head that feels agitated or wants to brush off the importance of adequate emotional care in childhood? Adults just have to get over it?
It is beyond ordinary for the adolescent and adult offspring of Emotionally Immature Caregivers (I’m fixing the language)to attempt to teach the caregiver empathy. That is to say, to try to demonstrate what psychology refers to as the theory of mind. To empathize with someone is to actively seek understanding of that person as a consistent and unique person. When someone is truly listening to us, truly seeing us, they perceive us as a process of becoming and understand us in the moment through the lens that we will continue to change. Empathy is imagining the mind of another with genuine curiosity and care for the sole purpose of knowing that person.
If you have to rebuild who you are in a person's mind every time you see them and then struggle to be heard and seen, you might be dealing with someone who is simply immature. Ideally, people mature naturally over the course of their lives, but someone who suffers from Emotional Immaturity in a clinical sense is not going to heal in the context of a personal relationship, even with their offspring. A person who falls into this category will have to learn self-reflection with a therapist and make a commitment to be accountable for growing as a person.
If you were a child whose primary caregiver lacked the ability to self-reflect, you carry a burden that is nearly impossible to describe and a frustration that grips you so hard it bursts into rage that takes a variety of forms. Maybe you lash out. Maybe you self-harm. Maybe you eat and drink to excess. Maybe you apologize profusely. Maybe you manipulate people because you need a connection, but can’t stand the feel of it. If this is you, then I want you to know something— I can see you just fine. You can be known and heard and allowed to just be. You can be right when you are right. You can be wrong. We can agree. We can disagree. My opinions won’t change just based on mere contrariness. I advocate for the Devil with tarot cards, not with our time together.
I will definitely forget what you tell me, but I won’t forget you. Those are different things. I want you to know that what you need is more than okay, it’s actually really cool. Life is fragile and cool, and the fact that we need love and to see ourselves reflected in the eyes and memories of those who respect us is just complex and amazing. The way we create each other from our loving imaginations is the most beautiful thing there is in the world of human primates. It is the survival instinct of our species. It’s just the sweetest, most deeply precious thing, isn’t it?
We are the stories we tell about each other as much as we are flesh.
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Please find a downloadable quiz and worksheet here to assist you with understanding the powerful forms of dysfunction and emotional pain that the neglect from Emotionally Immature Caregivers will create.
The purpose of the worksheet is for you to feel seen and validated. Resources for self-help with this matter are available. I recommend Dr. Lindsay Gibson’s book: Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to heal from distant, rejecting, or self-involved parents
You can find this book for free on the Internet Archive: www.archive.org