Dr. Lindsay C. Gibson
Appearances
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
And they will say, you know, why does this bother you? Why are you getting so upset? But they are like the most emotionally sensitive people on this planet. And when you get that kind of feedback, you begin to feel like, well, maybe there's something wrong.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
And so when you pick up on those things, that's the first thing that comes to my mind is where did you learn to think like that, that your first go-to thought is, is, I'm doing something wrong. Oh, it's my fault. I didn't notice soon enough that this was going to offend you, or I wasn't sensitive enough to your needs, and now you're mad at me and not speaking to me for three days.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
But why does your mind go to, what did I do like that? And one of the things that maintains that is they do this thing where you feel a moral obligation to give them what they want, even at great cost to yourself, even to the extent that it may harm your health or your mental health. I've seen this with so many of my clients.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Well, let's just start by saying overall, you might find them exhausting. Dead giveaway. Tiring, boring, because they tend to be quite superficial. They're very easily threatened. Their psychological defenses are not very sturdy. So they tend to keep things at a kind of a superficial level. It's like the how is the weather sort of thing, or what is Aunt So-and-So doing lately?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Because that's where they feel safe. Because emotional genuineness, emotional depth makes them very uneasy. And I'm not talking about a little bit nervous. I'm talking about destabilizing. You know, people... keep trying to talk to their parent and get them to understand how they're feeling. Well, this is like asking an emotionally immature parent to keep their hand on a hot stove.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
They cannot do it. It's not because they are bad or they don't want to help their child. It's because it is so painfully destabilizing that they can't stand it. And that's something that I try to get across so that the person doesn't take it so personally. Maybe they would if they could, but they can't. They're going to change the subject. They're going to put it back on you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
They're going to give excuses. They're going to not understand what the heck you're talking about. That Difficulty in going into any kind of complexity or depth is something that ends up making people feel bored, exhausted. And also because there's a constant expectation that you're going to be a certain way for them.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
So you're going to agree with them, you're going to see things the same way as they do, and... That is very tiring because you're always feeling like you're having to play this role if you're going to get along with them. All of this comes from their egocentrism, meaning all roads lead to them.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Yeah, I would want them to know that it's going to have an effect on them, whether they've ever heard of this or not. Because if we're treated like we are insignificant or that we're not real inside, we feel that. It's like if somebody steps on your foot, you feel that. We do the same thing emotionally. When people disregard us or treat us like we're not important, that has an effect on us.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
And because, you know, such a huge amount of our learning is unconscious in childhood. We carry it forward and then we take it as, you know, what we've learned and it's a part of us and we give it to our children.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Yeah, that's the parent that emotionally rules the roost with their moods, with their reactions. Everybody orbits them. That's when dad comes home, everybody be quiet. Dad needs to relax. Mom's having a bad day. Don't anybody upset her. Mom's gone to bed for the week. Nobody make any noise. Everything is geared toward helping that parent regulate their emotional state.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
through controlling your behavior, suppressing yourself, inhibiting yourself, everything ends up being in the service of helping that parent feel calmer or feel better. So I call it the emotional parent because they tend to be very emotional and they can be, I mean, some of them can be extremely volatile. Some of them can be violent. Some of them can be even mentally ill, okay?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
But the emotional parent will make you feel like, you know, like you got to be vigilant. You got to be checking every second how they're doing, taking their temperature, so to speak. And the whole family does this. And often, the other parent colludes with this by being sort of the supporter and supporting
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
talking to the children as though it's the children's responsibility to make sure that mom or dad is staying calm. Whose responsibility is it that mom or dad stay calm? It's the emotional parent's responsibility. We all have the responsibility of managing our own emotions. That's how I look at it. Same. But lots of times emotional parents run right over their mate and
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
and end up with one of the passive parents that we'll talk about in a minute as someone who just doesn't protect the children from them.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
you become very vigilant to how the other person is doing. So everything revolves around the feeling state of the other person. You will be very alert, very vigilant, very tired, because you're always having to guess at what could upset them. You're always having to kind of keep them on an even keel. And if you live with someone, you know how to do this. You know when they need a little boost.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
You know when not to bring the thing up that you need to talk to them about. So it really does flow downstream so that in your dating relationships or your committed relationships, you're going to just assume that they need a lot of help dealing with their emotions, even if they don't.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Yes. And the feeling is, did I do something wrong?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Or have I been bad? Yes. Okay. That gets conditioned in there in a very deep way. with parents like that.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Yeah, the driven parent is, in many ways, one of the most popular versions of parenthood, at least in our driven culture, right? where things are so materialistic and so measured in terms of success, the metrics of success. These parents look like paragons of parenting, and we can compare ourselves to them because we're
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
oh my gosh, we didn't get our kid onto the right softball team, or they're not on travel soccer, or this other parent did the intensive language thing in preschool that we missed. And they're very on it in terms of what can we do to maximize our potential in terms of success, not in terms of hard stuff, not in terms of creativity or what. It's like, where can it take us?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
That's a sign of emotional immaturity? It can be. The proof is in the pudding. Like, how does that affect the kid? Does it dovetail with the kid in such a way that everybody's happy? But I submit that nobody likes being treated like an object or like somebody's success object. I mean...
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
or having expectations put on you for where you need to measure up to in order for mom or dad to be really proud of you or happy with you. But I do want to say one thing about this, though. It's not only the kind of success that would be like intellectual success, monetary success. I mean, those are, you know, like scoring the goal, winning the game, that kind of thing.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
We're very familiar with that. But sometimes that drivenness can be channeled into things like your religious beliefs or your social behavior or being the quote-unquote normal family on the block. What will the neighbors say? I
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
a lot of these parents do do things like they get advanced degrees or they are on their kids about getting into certain colleges, but they can also be on their children about perfecting their social role or their place in the church or it could be anything. It just has that quality of driving toward a goal and
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
whoops, like too bad that that isn't what you want to do or too bad that it's making you anxious and depressed because you will be happier and things will go better for you in your life if you just believe me and do what I say. So we get there. And then there's the punishment if you don't emotionally.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Oh, you're never good enough. Perfectionism, procrastination in response to the perfectionism, the feeling like I can't sit down and read a book or someone's going to call me lazy. They'll talk about their relaxing day as if they did something naughty to their friends. Oh, I didn't do anything. I just sat there with my nose in the book. I was really bad today.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
There's that kind of judgment put on just being, just existing as a happy living thing on this planet. It's tragic because... We're not made, no animal is made to be pushed to the point where they're performing all the time. It's not healthy. And yet that's the kind of feeling that people get when they grow up under this. Dr. Gibson, can you describe what a passive parent is?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Yeah, the passive parent is usually the one that kids really like the best. Right. This is my husband. They are favorites of the kids, and they're often very attuned to the children. They can be playful. They can be almost like peers or playmates. I don't mean to say that they are irresponsible in that way, but they just tend to live and let live.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
And because they don't have that motor driving them, they can be more accessible to the child. oftentimes they are more empathic than the other emotionally immature parent. Like I had a client whose father would always come to her room after the mother had exploded at her. Sometime later, dad would come down, sit on the bed with her, console her, whatever.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Would dad step in when she was being abused? No, no, that's the passive part. They're not protective of the child anymore. They let the other parent get away with murder because, in a way, they're like children who are benefiting from the other parent's energy and the other parent's sort of willingness to dominate the course of things. And they, you know, they live and let live.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
But if you do that with your children who are not being treated well, you are not feeling the empathy and you're being really quite egocentric because it feels better to you to not take on that level of involvement. And that's for their benefit, not for their children.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Yeah, well, for one thing, you don't feel like you are worthy of protection. You feel like putting up with these things in life, in relationships, it's just part of having a relationship. It's just part of life because that's the way the passive parent is. demonstrated how to deal with this outrageous behavior. They just kind of went along with it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
So the child learns from the passive parents, like, what can you do? That expression, what can you do? They let it go and they learn not to stand up to it or to put boundaries on it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Yes. I had a client who said it very well once. She said that when her dad came home, she was always so excited and she would run to greet him. And she said, it was always like I was throwing myself against a closed door. Hmm. All he wanted to do was get in the house, read the paper, didn't want to be bothered.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
The rejecting parent acts as though kids are a nuisance, a bother, and they never wanted them in the first place. So when you're the child of that kind of parent, you learn the best possible relationship with that parent. is achieved through not bothering them, maybe through serving them if you can find a way in, maybe going along with them on things that they like to do.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
But it's not a relationship in which you're going to be allowed to have sort of equal status or even take up as much room as that rejecting parent because you're intruding. You always feel like you're intruding on their energies and interests.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
One of the things that is going to happen as a result of growing up in this kind of household is that you're probably going to end up feeling very unsure of yourself and there'll be sort of an underlying sense of insecurity that doesn't match what The outside? Yeah. So you end up feeling like you're too much or you need to be thinking of other people overly much.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
But it's really interesting that they will often feel very selfish. That's a word that they'll use. Like when you said earlier, oh, I can't do that or how can I? It's because they feel like they're being selfish. And that sense of, I overwhelm people with my needs. I'm too needy. I should be able to handle everything on my own.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
That's a very common kind of thing that is carried over into future relationships. Another thing that happens is that people will doubt their ability to communicate. They will feel like, I just can't make myself understood. People who have emotionally immature parents have the experience of trying to communicate and that emotionally immature parent is not interested in what they're saying.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
So when you're trying to tell somebody something that's important to you and you're trying to communicate it to them and they're looking at you like you have two heads and they are not processing what you're saying, the problem is not your problem itself. with communication, it's their problem with being willing to process what you're telling them.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
If a person really wants to understand you, it doesn't matter how you say it. And if somebody doesn't want to understand you, it doesn't matter how you say it. So people get a very distorted idea about whether they make sense or not. They feel like they don't make sense because the emotionally immature person is not invested in trying to understand them.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
They're invested in getting off the hot seat as quickly as possible.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Exactly. And you also identify the wrong problem. You think that you need to learn better communication skills. That's not the problem because of what I just said. If someone wants to understand you, they will knock themselves out trying to understand you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Yes. And one of the most telltale qualities of that is when you experience what a colleague of mine, Jenny Walter, she's a coach out in the West Coast, calls brain scramble. So you get around people who are emotionally immature, and you're trying to explain yourself, or you're trying to communicate, and all of a sudden it's like, I don't feel like I'm making any sense.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
I can't find the right words. I start to say it, and then I can't remember what I was going to say. Brain scramble. Because when we're talking... The other person's responsiveness actually helps our brain organize itself and stay on a track of thought because communication is not only intellectual and verbal, it's emotional.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
The whole time we're talking, right, our hearts are going, is there a connection there? Our right hemisphere of our brain is saying, is there resonance? Are we on the same wavelength? That's being assessed the whole time we're yammering away with our words. If that's not there, it is an incredibly unsafe experience. You're getting a contradictory signal. They're looking at you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
They appear to be listening, but they're not processing it. And then it's like, whoa, the mismatch really pulls you away from the point that you're trying to make. And then it's like you can't remember even what you're trying to do.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
It's the idea that the parent does change and does develop empathy and does stop sort of distorting and dismissing realities that they don't like and starts to be willing to listen to how it has been for the child.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
The fantasy is that the parent will be capable of doing that at some point, maybe when they get older, maybe when they don't have so much stress, maybe when I have children as grandma, they will do this or whatever. And so we might say, well, where do they get this from? What would make them think that? Well, it's because sometimes emotionally immature parents can do better and do do better.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
They can be fun. They can be loving. They can be available. They're especially good if you're hurt, sick, need something, you know, some material thing. They can be really Johnny on the spot with that stuff. But it's the emotional comforting and the emotional validation that they have trouble with.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Yes, because you've got the self-reflection going on.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
And you have the empathy going on. Because when we lose our cool or we have been too egocentric with our kids or whatever it is, it hurts us. we realize that almost immediately we feel that altruistic need to go back in and repair it. And that is a huge part of being adequately emotionally mature.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Yeah, all you have to do is imagine what it would be like for your parent to come to you and say, honey, I am so sorry. I was so young. I was so green. I was so involved in this other thing. I didn't even know at the time what I was doing. I mean, you don't even have to be a parent to imagine what what that would feel like coming from anybody.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Anybody who says, you know, I've been thinking about how I treated you. I mean, is that not the most precious, unexpected gift that a person can get? It makes you feel so seen, and it also solidifies your The bond between you, and that's what the healing fantasy is. It's almost like the deathbed fantasy. Like, sweetheart, I am so sorry for everything I did. And now I see the light.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
That's the hope. But, you know, children have to have that hope. They have to create that potential in their parent in order to keep adequate hope to keep growing and keep going on.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
It gets in the way of your healing because it is essentially a kind of reality distortion.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
It's because it's such a sad thing. You know, when you realize what you didn't get that you really needed and you begin to feel empathy for yourself, you then feel grief or loss over what you didn't get. The problem is that lots of times people have been talked out of their self-empathy. They've been trained not to take seriously how they feel or how they react.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Once we notice the reality of what has happened to us, The grief will help solidify this new understanding or this new reality of what we grew up in, which will give us a solid sense of security. Because now we've got something to put our feet on. We understand that.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
And the grief comes in when we realize what that did to us, what that did to the child we were, and how impossible it was for us to understand why this was happening other than to blame ourselves. And that understanding is poignant. It tugs at your heartstrings to realize that this little kid that you were was stuck in this situation.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
None of us likes to feel that we're stuck or that we were out of control or that even that something bad happened to us. It's amazing to me that one of the predominant reactions to trauma is shame. It just seems to go with it. You don't have to have somebody even actively shaming you about it. It's almost as though if this bad thing happened to me, somehow that means something bad about who I am.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
It doesn't surprise me because it's one of the foremost reasons, I think, why people look for help and validation from accounts and programs like yours, Mel, because they get so much validation from hearing somebody put into words things that they've been feeling that they've been told aren't really happening.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
And don't ask me how or why that is, but it seems to be the human condition. So when you feel the grief about it, it's like... acknowledging the shame, the pain, that you got the short end of the stick, you didn't get what you need. All of those things in the unconscious psyche tend to equate with I didn't deserve it or something along those lines.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
So it's often hard for us to get to the grief because we have to pass through the shame that had happened to us in the first place.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
The drained part. Not the having a relationship part. Well, say more about that. I appreciate you saying that. Yeah, because I think they're tiring. And I think that they're often emotionally exhausting. So we have to realize that that's going to be their experience. And to not expect it to be any better than that.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
So one of the things that we want to do in therapy, for instance, is we want to lower people's expectations. That sounds so depressing, but I agree. Yep.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Yes, and it also takes the onus off of you for being able to somehow change this reality. Mm-hmm. That you should be, you know, if you find the right communication style, if you find the right approach. But really what I encourage people to do is if you're going to have contact with the emotionally immature person, Try to go into it aware. Try to stay objective.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Pretend you're an anthropologist and you're there to investigate this new tribe of people and how they conduct themselves and whatever. So you get your intellect in the foreground and you try to stay objective in a way that keeps you from being sucked in emotionally into what I call the emotionally immature relationship system, which is the deal is...
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
you are responsible for my emotional stability and for my self-esteem. Okay, that's the deal. If you go in aware that that's what you're dealing with and that's what's going to happen, you have a chance of avoiding it.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Yeah, I suggest a little mantra that which is detach, detach, detach. I mean, every time you get the urge to explain yourself further, or maybe this is the time that, you know, dad will listen to my political views or whatever. It's like detach, detach, detach, because that's where you're power is, is in how you're going to, like out of your book, you know. Let them. Yes, exactly.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
And this doesn't have to escalate to the degree of gaslighting. It just has to be that the emotionally immature person just doesn't see it. They don't perceive it that way. And so they can't validate the person. Dr. Gibson, what does it mean to be emotionally mature? So the emotionally mature person can think about their own behavior conceptually. They remain objective. And they can also...
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Is how you're going to behave or how you're going to approach the situation. That is your point of power because there's no way that you're going to find this secret method of turning an emotionally immature person into someone who cares what you think. okay, or cares how you feel. So I suggest that technique and the anthropologist fantasy. Also to stay very connected to yourself.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
And by that, I mean, we tend to dissociate when we're with difficult people. We just kind of zone out, you know, because it's too hard. So when I tell people to, you know, maintain their self-connection, it's like, keep up a running dialogue with yourself. Keep up an active commentary. Rub your arm, cross your arm, squeeze yourself.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Something to bring you back into your body so that you exist just as surely as they do, because you will feel erased. when you get pulled too far into their orbit. The other thing is to find the optimal distance for visits or social contact that allows you to stay in yourself. Like a two-day rule or a no overnights.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Yes. When you go back into your parents' home, I'm sorry, you've just stepped into a time machine. Okay, and you're going back to your childhood self whether you want to or not. So we have to be aware of that susceptibility, that vulnerability, and create for ourselves a set of boundaries or circumstances that we are willing to engage in because we know we can stay in touch with ourselves.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
I'm a big advocate for journaling. Now that's, you know, an introverted solution.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
What do I wish I hadn't done today?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Yeah, what do I wish I... If I had a do-over, what would I change? Now, you don't have to know what the preferable behavior is yet, okay? Because not all of us know what that is. But we do have a little thing, a little bell that rings inside when we do or say something to someone that we love that really matters to us that is off or wrong or hurtful to that person. That is there.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
So if we ask ourselves that simple question, what do I wish I hadn't done today? And then we think about what could I do next that would make that slightly better? Not fix it, not erase it, just what would be the next best thing to do given that I did that? What are my options? That's the royal road to profound change right there.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
It would be that you matter, that other people are not more important than you. It would be that other people can affect you emotionally, whether you want them to or not. That's very important to know because people, especially with emotionally immature parents, get down on themselves because there's been this thing promoted that other people can't make you feel things. Well, they certainly can't.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
I mean, we are designed to be emotionally affected by other people. That's what's put us at the top of the food chain. We can read and get messages from other people like that. So we don't get a choice about whether or not something's going to affect us. It will affect us. What we get a choice about is how we're going to respond to that or
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
when we're going to take ourselves out of the interaction so that we don't get taken over by it. That is within our power. I would tell people to grow in their own style. If you're a sweet, nice person, you don't have to turn yourself into some assertive, commanding person. take-no-prisoners type in order to be successful at this.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
think objectively and still maintain a strong emotional connection with other people. So you've got a person who can handle their emotions, connect with other people, and think objectively.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
You can be as sweet as you like, as long as your behavior is moving in the direction that you want to go in. So maybe you say, Mom, gee, I wish I could. I'm so sorry. I know you're disappointed. I just, you know, it's just not going to work for me this time. Now, some people would say, Just set a boundary. Just tell them you can't do it. Cut out all the song and dance.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
But for a lot of people, that's impossible. So keep your style. Grow in the way that feels like you can be yourself. I think we should have more people who want to be sweet and nice, not fewer. And then the other thing is that... you know, we're never going to get rid of the parts of ourself that we're unhappy about. But our job is to learn how to work with them and how to support them.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
And really, most of all, to have a compassionate attitude toward yourself that you did the best you could and you're continuing to try to do the best that you can. But it's not kind, it's not self-kindness to say, I want to get rid of this part, or I want to get rid of the part that feels guilty. No, take care of that part. That part keeps you honest about how you treat other people.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
It's got a whole good side to it. So you can look at just how you can nudge it toward helping you to have better boundaries or whatever. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Dr. Gibson, what are your parting words? Trust that you came factory equipped with the ability to tell who is good for you and who is not. And then please follow that for your own growth and all that you'll be able to give other people once you've taken care of yourself in that way.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Oh, thank you, Mel. It's been a pleasure being with you. Thank you.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Let's say that a teenage daughter goes to her mother because she's just had her boyfriend break up with her, and she's distraught, and she's telling her mom about what happened. And the mother says, I know exactly what you're talking about. Your father does that to me all the time.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
And then the mother derails the conversation because of her egocentrism, okay, because of her poor empathy, and makes it all about her because there is that kind of childish, ravenous hunger for being the most important person in the relationship at the moment. They didn't get their needs met when they were little for whatever reason, and now they're going to collect on their own children.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Can you give me another example? Sure. Let's say that a young man decides that he wants to go into writing or something in the creative arts, and maybe he has a lot of talent, but the parent hears this, and it hits up against their goals goal that they have for what it would be to be a successful parent of a successful child. And that's something that they can't stand.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
And so they might not come out and say that to the young man, but they would make him start to feel bad about pursuing something that they didn't like. And they would start withholding approval for his choices in order to get him on a path that would again, align with their own egocentric view of who they want to be, which is the parent of a successful child in their mind.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
That's a great example. Yes, because it's using emotional coercion It's using force on the other person to make them comply with something that they don't want to do. And they have told you that, and you are disregarding their right to have their own needs or their own opinions. And you're saying, in effect, my needs are more important than yours, and you are being a bad person.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
because you are morally obligated to give me what I want.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Because what that does is it creates a false sense of emotional intimacy when you triangle like that and you confide in somebody about a third party. That feels really good to the emotionally immature person or the parent because it's a way of kind of talking about deep stuff, but it's not intimate between you and the person you're talking to. It's sharing a secret about this third person.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
So it kind of hits a bunch of points simultaneously, but It's destructive to the relationship between, say, that child and that other family member, right? Because you're talking behind their back. And it's uncomfortable. And it's uncomfortable, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Exactly. Or they might even say... This is an example of a woman who actually confronted her mother and said, you know, don't talk to me about Aunt So-and-So because it ruins my relationship with her. I can't be close to her after you've told me all these things that she's done. And the mother said, I know that you've told me not to do this, but who else am I going to talk to? It's like...
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Who cares? That's your problem.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
I really hope that when people listen to this, they'll come away from it feeling like, oh, I knew this all along. I just didn't know what to call it. Or I knew I was right about that all But everybody was telling me that I was off the mark or crazy or whatever. But this is what I experienced.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
So I hope that they will get that feeling of validation for their own experience because we want people to be able to trust their own subjectivity and their own inner life because that's one of the things that's taken away when you have an emotionally immature parent. you could live your life with a sense of trust for yourself as somebody who is worth being taken care of and protecting.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Yeah, it holds out the hope that you can be two adults together. After all this time, you may not be able to change them, but you may be able to maintain your own sense of self and your own boundaries with them adult to adult.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
in which both parties are just as important as the other, by doing this kind of work within yourself, you have the option of creating a relationship after all this time where you can be you with your parent and they can be allowed to deal with that themselves, which is the proper alignment of responsibility for emotional experiences.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
Yeah, well, part of the reason why we feel guilt is because we've been blamed, okay? That's pretty basic, but... Wait, what do you mean by that? What I mean is that if you have been blamed a lot or someone has told you that what you're saying or what you're thinking is wrong or it's morally bad, you take on an exaggerated sense of guilt about your own self-expression.
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
And that is a profound impact on a person. And when somebody comes back and reflects to you that there's something wrong with you for having felt that or having said that, and this is a person that you love and admire, that you look up to, your parent, you feel guilty because you don't want to hurt or embarrass somebody that you love, right?
The Mel Robbins Podcast
4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal
So people have this sense of guilt, and it can really lean way too far over toward guilt and shame, heavy self-criticism, because they've learned that that's the kind of feedback that they often get when they're just being themselves. Right. Because emotionally immature people are very, very sensitive. Now, they will accuse you of being oversensitive.