Healing The Inner Child Of Emotionally Immature Parents

So welcome everyone and thank you for listening.

I am so glad that you found your way here.

So today we are going to explore something that I think is one of the most important and often misunderstood dynamics in human psychology.

We are going to talk about what happens to children who grow up with emotionally immature parents.

Now the phrase emotionally immature parents might land in different ways for different people.

Some of you might immediately think yes that's exactly what I experienced and others might feel resistance that my parents were not immature.

Some of you might feel that they are immature,

They just and then trail off.

Not quite sure how to finish that sentence.

Both responses are completely valid and by the end of our time together I think you'll have a much clearer sense of whether this framework applies to your experience and if it does what you can actually do about it.

Because here's what I've learned in my years of working with people.

Understanding is powerful but it's not enough.

We need to feel our way through these feelings too.

So today we'll do both.

We'll understand,

Then we'll feel,

We'll think and then we'll try to heal.

So let's begin.

First let's get clear on what we are talking about because emotionally immature can sound like an insult and that's not how I'm using it.

Emotional maturity is the capacity to be aware of your own emotions,

To regulate them effectively and to tolerate discomfort without acting out or shutting down.

Take risk taking responsibility for your impact on others and to respond to other people's emotions with empathy and attunement.

It's not about intelligence.

Emotionally immature people can be brilliant,

Successful doctors,

Lawyers,

Executives,

Artists.

So it's not about education or achievement.

It's specifically about the emotional dimension of being human.

And here's the thing.

Emotional maturity is developed.

It's never automatic.

We learn it through our early relationships.

We develop it when our own emotions are met with attunement and when we are helped to regulate.

When we see it modeled by the adults around us.

Which means that if someone didn't receive this in their own childhood,

They often can't provide it for their children.

Not because they are bad people,

Not because they don't love their kids,

But because they simply don't have access to capacities that were never developed.

You can't give what you don't have.

You can't teach what you were never taught.

So emotionally immature parents don't all look the same.

In fact,

They look quite different on the surface,

While creating similar wounds in their children.

Let me walk you through some of the patterns I see most often.

Now first one is the emotional parent.

This parent is ruled by their feelings.

When they are happy,

The whole house is happy.

When they are upset,

Everyone walks on eggshells.

Their emotional state becomes everybody's problem and often everybody's responsibility to fix as well.

So children of emotional parents become hyper vigilant.

They learn to constantly scan for signs of parental mood shifts.

They become experts at managing other people's emotions while losing touch with their own.

They develop a kind of radar which is always attuned outwards,

Never inwards.

Now I know and I've worked with people in their 40s and 50s who can walk into any room and immediately sense the emotional temperature.

Who's upset?

Who's anxious?

Who needs soothing?

Who's lying?

But if you can ask them what they are feeling,

They really don't know.

And that's the legacy of growing up with an emotional parent.

Then you have the driven parent.

The parent that is focused on achievement,

Success and getting things done.

They might be high functioning and impressive to the outside world,

But the emotional connection is not on their agenda.

They don't have time for feelings.

Theirs or yours.

So children of driven parents often become achievers themselves.

Because achievement was the only currency that got attention.

But underneath the accomplishments,

There is often a persistent emptiness.

A sense of is this all there is?

A nagging feeling that they're running on a hamster wheel,

Succeeding at things that don't actually fulfill them.

Now these children learn that their worth is conditional on what they produce.

Love must be earned.

Rest is laziness.

Emotions are for inefficient people.

Then there is the passive parent.

Now this parent is physically present,

But emotionally absent.

They are here.

But they're not here.

They might be nice enough,

But there's no real engagement.

No emotional investment.

No curiosity about the child's inner world.

And sometimes the passive parent is dealing with depression,

Overwhelm or their own unprocessed trauma.

Sometimes they simply don't have the capacity for emotional connection.

Either way,

The child experiences a kind of emotional starvation,

Not dramatic enough to point to,

But profoundly affecting nonetheless.

Children of passive parents often struggle with a deep,

Deep,

Deep sense of invisibility.

A feeling that they don't really exist in a meaningful way.

They might become people pleasers,

Constantly trying to get some sign of engagement from the world.

Or they might withdraw because they've decided that connection simply isn't available to them.

Now the last one is the rejecting parent.

Now this parent actively pushes emotional content away.

They don't want to hear about your feelings,

Your problems or your needs.

And they respond to this expression with criticism,

Dismissal or withdrawal.

Stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about.

You're too sensitive.

Don't be so dramatic.

Toughen up.

Now these messages repeated over years,

Teach children that their emotions are unacceptable,

Even dangerous.

So children of rejecting parents often develop kind of an internal exile for themselves.

They are split off from their emotional selves.

Now they might have this persona of being strong.

They're apparently unaffected by things that would affect most people.

But underneath that armor is a small herd child who learned that showing up authentically would lead to rejection.

Do any of these patterns feel familiar to you?

Now despite these different presentations,

There is a common wound at the center of growing up with emotionally mature parents.

And that's the experience of not being met.

What do I mean by that?

I mean the experience of reaching out with your needs,

With your feelings,

With your authentic self and finding nothing.

Or worse,

Finding rejection,

Dismissal or sometimes the requirement to take care of the parent instead.

Children need to be met.

They need to express something and have it received.

They need to show up and be seen.

They need to reach out and be reached back at.

This is meeting.

This is mutual recognition.

And this is how we develop a sense of self.

It's how we learn that we are real,

We matter and our inner world has validity.

When this meeting doesn't happen,

When a child's emotional bids are consistently unmet,

Something profound occurs.

The child begins to doubt their own reality.

And they conclude that there must be something wrong with their needs,

Their feelings or them.

This is the birth of the adapted self.

The self that learns to perform rather than to be.

The self that manages impressions rather than expressing truth.

The self that survives childhood but loses something essential in the process.

And this adapted self can persist for decades so seamlessly that we don't even know that it's not us anymore.

Now,

Another thing that often happens in families,

One of the most damaging family dynamics is role reversal.

Now this happens when the child consciously or unconsciously takes on the role of the emotional caretaker of the parent.

Instead of a parent attuning to the child's needs,

The child attunes to the parent's needs.

And sometimes there are circumstances in which this is valid but nonetheless it impacts the person who's in this situation.

So this journey is not about judgment,

It's simply about awareness and understanding that might help you break some patterns.

So instead of the child being held,

The child does the holding.

This might look like a child who learns to soothe their mother's anxiety.

A child who becomes their father's confidant,

Listening to adult problems no child should have to carry.

A child who manages emotional temperature of the whole family,

Always making sure nobody gets upset.

A child who gives up their own needs to keep a fragile parent stable.

Now this sometimes is called parentification and it might not feel bad at the time.

In fact,

It often feels important.

I am the one who understands mom.

Dad and I have a special connection and the child might even feel proud of their role at the time.

But here's what's actually happening.

A child's developmental needs are being sacrificed to meet an adult's emotional needs.

The child is being used as an emotional resource.

And what is the cost of this?

The child never gets to be a child.

They never experience what it feels like to be held without having to hold.

They never learn that their needs matter,

That they are allowed to receive without giving,

That they don't have to earn their place in the family through emotional labor.

These children often grow up into adults who are excellent at taking care of others and terrible at receiving care,

Who feel selfish when they have needs and who don't know how to let anyone in.

Now another sign,

Another thing,

There is a very specific quality of loneliness that comes from growing up with emotionally immature parents and that's different from the other kind of loneliness.

It's the loneliness of being surrounded by family but never feeling truly known.

From the outside everything might look fine.

There's a family,

There are dinners together,

Holidays,

Birthdays.

But inside the child's experience there is a persistent sense of isolation,

Of being alone in a crowd,

Of something essential never being touched.

Now I've heard clients describe it as being in a room with people who are speaking a different language or like living behind a glass,

Able to see others but never connect with them.

So the loneliness often persists into adulthood.

People describe having friends,

Partners and even their own children and still fundamentally they feel alone.

Still feeling that nobody really knows them.

Still feeling that the deepest parts of themselves have never been seen.

Now this isn't a social problem that can be solved by meeting more people.

It may be a developmental wound that requires a different kind of healing.

Now the patterns we develop with emotionally immature parents don't just stay in childhood.

They travel with us into every significant relationship that we form.

And let me share some of them and see if some of this resonates with you.

The first is attraction to emotional immaturity.

Now this one may be very painful to understand.

We are often drawn to what's familiar even when what's familiar hurts us.

People who grew up with emotionally immature parents frequently find themselves in relationships with,

And if you're guessing it by now,

Emotionally immature partners.

Not because they are stupid but because emotional immaturity feels like home to them.

It matches their internal template.

So mature emotional availability can actually feel uncomfortable,

Even boring.

As someone whose nervous system is calibrated for unpredictability will never feel safe with an emotionally available person.

Then we have over-functioning in relationships.

So if you learn that relationships require you to manage other people's emotions,

You will probably keep doing it as an adult.

So you become the one who does the emotional labor.

You are the one who tracks how everything is feeling.

You are the one who soothes things over and keeps the peace.

And this might make you a very attentive partner or a friend,

But it comes at a cost.

You're so busy managing relationships that you are never actually in it.

You're performing a partnership rather than experiencing.

Then we have difficulty receiving.

When someone tries to give you something,

Attention,

Care,

Help,

And love,

It feels extremely uncomfortable,

Somehow wrong.

You deflect compliments.

You struggle to accept support.

You'd much rather be the one giving.

And this makes perfect sense when you're understanding history.

Receiving wasn't safe.

Receiving wasn't available.

The only role you knew was the giver,

The caretaker,

The one who meets the needs rather than the one who has them.

Then we have the fear of abandonment.

People with emotionally immature parents osculate between desperately wanting closeness and feeling suffocated by it at the same time.

They reach for connection,

And then they pull away when it gets too real.

They want to be seen,

But being seen is dangerous.

And this push-pull isn't craziness.

It's literally your nervous system trying to navigate between two equally scary options.

The pain of isolation and the danger of intimacy.

Now we've been talking for a while,

And if any of this resonates with you,

Makes sense to your conscious mind,

Let me bring the somatic piece in.

Everything we've been discussing doesn't just live in your psychology.

It lives in your body.

It lives in your nervous system.

It lives in your breathing patterns.

It lives in your muscles.

When a child can't be authentic,

When they have to constantly adapt,

Manage and perform,

The body shapes itself around that requirement.

Tension patterns start to develop.

Breathing becomes restricted.

The nervous system calibrates hypervigilance or shutdown.

Adults who hold their breath without realizing it,

Who carry their shoulders up to their ears all the time,

And who have a particular quality of watchfulness in their eyes all the time,

Who can't fully relax even in safe environments because their body doesn't know what safety feels like.

The body has been holding the story for years,

Decades sometimes.

It's been keeping the child safe the only way it knew how,

Through vigilance,

Suppression,

Suppression of needs that were not going to be met anyway.

And this is why insight alone,

Understanding what happened is not really enough to heal this wound.

The body needs to have a different experience.

It needs to feel safe to relax,

Safe to feel and safe to need.

And we'll do some of this work together shortly.

One more piece that we bring in before we do a relaxation.

Your parents weren't just your parents.

Before they were your mother and father,

They were also someone's child.

Someone who had their own experiences,

Their own wounds,

And their own emotionally immature or traumatized or absent parents.

Now we are not doing this so we justify anybody's actions.

The goal of any healing is to bring more peace to you,

Wherever you are.

Emotional immaturity doesn't come from nowhere.

It's usually passed down.

What do I mean by that?

Your parents inability to meet you emotionally almost certainly reflects their own unmet needs,

Their own developmental wounds,

And their own experience of not being seen.

Once again,

This doesn't excuse anything.

It doesn't mean your pain is not valid.

And it doesn't mean you should just understand and move on.

It is just about perspective.

Your parents weren't withholding from you consciously.

They were limited and wounded themselves.

Giving from an empty cup.

They were just running on a program that was installed in them long before you were born.

And there's something freeing about this,

About seeing all this clearly,

Because it depersonalizes the wound.

Your parents emotional immaturity wasn't a about your worth.

It was about their capacity,

If that makes sense.

When people can truly see their parents,

Not as all-powerful figures of childhood,

But as the wounded,

Limited humans that they actually were,

Something begins to shift.

The grip of the past loosens and there's more space to grieve what was lost,

More freedom to create something different.

This is not about forgiveness.

Nobody should be pressured to forgive anybody.

This is about clarity.

Seeing things as they actually were,

For my own peace,

For my own understanding,

For my own closure.

Not to forgive anybody,

For my own closure,

For my own peace.

Now,

What does the inner child of emotionally immature parents actually need?

Not theoretically,

But practically.

What can help?

If any of this happened to you,

What can help?

Now,

The first thing,

To be seen by you.

Your inner child may have been waiting a long time for someone to really see them,

To notice them,

And to say,

I see what you went through.

I see how you worked,

How hard you worked to survive.

I see how much you adapted.

I'm here.

You can be that person now.

Not a therapist,

Not a healer,

Not a YouTuber,

Not an author.

You.

You can be that person now.

The adult you,

Who has the wisdom,

Resources,

And awareness that that child didn't have.

You can turn towards your own younger self and offer that recognition that was missing.

Let's try and do some of that now.

Now,

I'd like to invite you into a different kind of experience.

A chance to actually feel some of what we've been discussing,

To meet your inner child,

The one who adapted,

The one who performed,

The one who took care of everyone else,

And to offer them something they've been waiting for.

This is not a long meditation.

This is a gentle doorway that we are opening today.

A few minutes of turning in and making contact with the young one who's been running the show from behind the scenes.

If you're driving or doing something that requires attention,

Maybe save this part for later.

Otherwise,

If you can just allow yourself now to settle where you are.

Allow yourself now to settle where you are.

Start just by noticing where you are.

The surface beneath you,

The sounds around you,

And the temperature of the air.

You don't need to relax.

You don't need to achieve anything.

Just notice.

Now,

Bring your attention to your breath.

Not to think about it,

But to feel into it.

Your chest,

Your belly,

Your throat,

And your shoulders.

Notice what's here.

Tension,

Softness,

Numbness.

Whatever is present,

Just acknowledge it.

Whatever is present,

Just be present with it.

I want to ask you something now.

Can you sense the part of you that has been managing?

The part of you that learned to watch?

That learned to adopt?

Can you sense that part of you?

Now,

If you find it,

If your body is talking to you now in any way,

If you can locate this part of you as a tightness,

As a sensation,

As a warmth,

As a cold,

As a memory,

As a tingling.

I want you to acknowledge it.

Silently or out loud,

You might say,

I see you.

I know how hard you've been working.

Thank you for keeping me safe.

I see you.

I know how hard you've been working.

Thank you for keeping me safe.

Now,

Beneath this energy,

Beneath this activation,

See if you can sense something younger,

Smaller.

The child who had to create these strategies to survive.

They might be hiding.

They might be very quiet right now.

They might have learned that being invisible is safer than being seen.

But you are here now.

If you can sense this young one,

I want you to let them know,

I see you.

I know you're there.

You don't have to manage anything right now.

You don't have to perform.

I am here and I am not going to need you to take care of me.

I see you.

I know that you're there.

You don't have to manage anything right now.

You don't have to perform.

I am here and I am not going to need you to take care of me.

I see you.

Just notice what happens in your body as you say these words.

Is there a softening?

Is there a tightening?

Is there emotion or nothing at all?

Whatever arises is okay.

If it feels right for you,

You might place a hand somewhere on your body.

Your heart,

Your belly,

Or your chest.

Just a gesture of warmth,

A physical acknowledgement that you're here with yourself.

And from this place,

One more message for your inner child.

Say it either silently or feel it in your body.

You were never too much and you were never not enough.

You were just a child who needed more than you were given and that wasn't your fault.

You were just a child who needed more than you were given and that wasn't your fault.

Now just let yourself settle.

You don't need to force anything to happen.

You have made contact.

You've turned towards yourself and that turning towards is the beginning of everything.

So,

When you're ready,

Gently bring your attention back to the room,

To the space,

To the chair,

To the bed,

To the mat.

Feel your body in the space.

Hear the sounds around you and whenever it feels right,

You can open your eyes if they were closed.

Now what you did just now,

Turning towards your inner child and offering recognition.

You're creating new pathways.

You're giving yourself experiences that you didn't have growing up.

This is healing,

Not dramatic,

Not instant but very,

Very real.

Every time you acknowledge the child beneath,

You're healing.

It's a practice,

Something you can build upon and return to again and again and again.

I want to leave you with one last thought.

The fact that you've listened to this,

The fact that you've engaged with this material,

That means you're ready to stop this pattern now.

To become the emotionally mature presence that you needed.

Not just for yourself but potentially for other people,

Children,

Partners,

Loved ones,

Friends,

Anyone who needs to be met by someone who knows how to actually show up.

You are breaking the chain that may stretch back generations and that's no small thing.

So thank yourself for being here.

Thank you for doing this work and be gentle with yourself as you integrate all of this.

Thank you very much for joining me in today's practice and until next time Namaste.