hey everyone welcome to being well I'm Forest Hansen if you're new to the podcast thanks for joining us today and if you've listened before welcome back my guest today is clinical psychologist Dr lindsy Gibson she's the author of a number of books including I think it's fair to call it a cult classic adult children of emotionally immature parents which has now sold over 1 million copies which is just a crazy enormous number and her most recent book disentangling from emotionally immature people Dr Gibson's work has helped so many people understand themselves and their experiences better while also giving them the tools they need to recognize emotionally immature people manage their relationships with them effectively and establish the healthy boundaries that allow us to protect ourselves emotionally so today we'll be exploring emotional immaturity including some of the common symptoms and coping patterns that can come out of being raised by emotionally immature parents we'll also learn how to deal with these challenges in adulthood and work with some of the common issues that come up when we start to disentangle from people who just aren't very good for us so Lindsay thanks for joining me how are you doing today oh I'm doing great it's wonderful to be here Forest yeah I really appreciate you taking the time I've been looking forward to this one for a while and I would love to start with just kind of a basic general question what's emotional immaturity yeah good question what what are we talking about here so I have to tell you that when we were trying to decide on the final title of the book uh we had a uh consultant who worked for Barnes & Noble I think and she said I think you should call this book adult children of emotionally immature parents and my editor and I both went H you know we we don't think that's a very exciting title you know Etc and finally we got talked into it but it's been amazing how many people have told me later that that was what made them pick the book up that when they saw that phrase emotionally IM sure parents something clicked with them and they resonated with it it's as though people recognize what that is even if they don't technically know what that is so when I was getting trained um there was a big emphasis on Child Development and the relationship between a person's level of development and their mental health or their daily functioning so when I say emotional immaturity I mean that at an emotional level some people uh unfortunately it's many people tend to react to life as though they are psychologically much younger than they really are now General development in a human being can happen in separate threads like we can have our intellectual development we can have our Social Development we can have our occupational devel velopment so you could be an extremely intelligent person who is a great success in business or you know in your um in your chosen field and you can be very socially popular okay these things all proceede a pace but in your emotional development you may be actually more like a three or a four year old or a seveny old or a 15y old and so we want to understand that people kind of get stuck at certain ages in terms of how they handle their emotional responses to life and of course that includes things like intimate relationships and stress so if you think about it on a Continuum we don't have the absolutely uh 100% emotionally immature person um that would be hard to find um and then we don't have the 100% emotionally mature person so you'll notice that I always refer to adequately emotionally mature or sufficiently emotionally mature because it's all relative yeah and people slide back and forth between between maturity and immaturity depending on the level of stress that they're facing and depending on the demands on them for emotional intimacy or closeness with other people so if we are sick or exhausted or very stressed all of us can show emotionally immature Behavior we become more impulsive we become less sensitive to other people we have trouble modulating our emotional and anxi responses to life and conversely the emotionally immature person when they really want something or when they're very well resourced you know they're topped off they're feeling good things are going their way they can stretch and appear to be much more emotionally mature than they really are well to say really more than they can sustain what are some of the common features of this that uh you know are kind of good symptoms for people to look at of emotional immaturity the emotion part is huge because one of the greatest challenges for any kids development as as all of us know who have children or have been around children they have trouble uh regulating their emotional responses they they have a hard time keeping an even Keel by themselves so a huge part of parenting and nurturing has to do with stepping in when the child is getting overwhelmed by their own emotional responses and over time the kid learns that this is how I calm myself down or this is who I go to to get help in calming myself down but it's not something that what we all know this about babies it's not something that babies come into the world knowing how to do they have to be taught it over years of hopefully attentive enough nurturing that they they begin to figure out how to bring themselves down and to develop those parts of the brain that can really uh cope with the stress in ways that are adaptive if you think about it in terms of how do I deal with stress how do I deal with my own emotions when I get upset and then how do I get close to other people and get to know them in an emotionally genuine way without getting overwhelmed by them or scared by them how do I move in and out of an optimal level of closeness with them you know this takes Years hopefully of good relationships with adults um in order to develop those kinds of controls yeah so just thinking about the behavior of uh of young kids and I think this model that you have of being kind of Trapped in a moment uh in terms of your ability to relate emotionally to other people is a very very helpful one just for people to to think about generally and think about the consequences of that and their relationships with other people in their lives which will certainly get into a bit more later but there are some features of the behaviors of kits right for starters they're very egocentric uh they're very wrapped up in themselves they have a hard time kind of seeing things through the perspectives of other people they can go there every once in a while but it's difficult to access most kids are not super self-reflective they're not like doing a lot of deep introspection into their own nature uh they can be quite self-righteous in their own way and uh are very willing to justify their behavior based on whether or not it was good for them and another thing that you talk about in the book that really stood out to me is this notion of effective realism which we also see in children which is when you define reality based on what you feel it to be as opposed to what it might be objectively and I was wondering if you could talk about that a little bit more because I think that's a huge feature of this that when people look back in their personal history they might be able to see in their relationships with others if they were around a lot of emotionally immature people yes it's one of the more subtle aspects but yet when I describe it um everybody knows what I mean because anyone who's ever known anyone like this has experienced it yeah um and it's and it's extremely frustrating uh to be at the receiving end of it when emotionally immature people are confronted with a reality that is distressing to them it overwhelms them emotionally all of have been overwhelmed at times where it's just like I can't process another you know bit of information I can't I can't cope so when this happens emotionally immature people like the rest of us have these very involuntary automatic unconscious defense mechanisms that pop in whether we want them to or not uh that's one of the things that I think people often misunderstand about psychological defenses or coping mechanisms because it sounds we're so Consciousness oriented nowadays we forget about the subconscious you know it's like it doesn't exist um but the fact is that we have this whole part of our mind that is devoted to keeping us feeling in control and safe and what would be the purpose of a good defense if it didn't kick in before we got upset M okay so there's like a little Sentry that's you know like patrolling all the time like is this safe is this going to make me feel okay is this somehow you know a threat to me and if it senses that something is going south it will send up a defense before you are even aware that you're getting nervous okay so when when emotionally immature people go into their defensive self-protect itive coping mechanisms they're not doing it because they're trying to push you away or they're trying to give you a hard time they don't have any choice in the matter and when it's reality or a piece of reality that they really don't like automatically they will go into denying it dismissing it or distorting it and that's very effective because now reality has become something that I can deal with or now reality has become something that isn't worth dealing with our reality has now become something that didn't really happen in the first place it's really cool it's a very effective defense mechanism yeah totally it really is it really is yeah I I don't have to worry about it if it's not there it's all okay exactly so so the immaturity part of that is that I'm not changing myself in order to deal with reality neither am IAP to reality I'm changing reality so what happens with affective realism is that I use how something feels to me as the defining feature of this thing that just happened for instance if if an adult child says to their rather intrusive uh mother or father um Mom Dad you know I'd really appreciate it if you would give me a call before you stop by you know I might be taking a nap I might you know might be giving the baby a bath um just give me a call before you come and let's see if that's a good time to visit and they'll say what are you talking about I'm your mother I can I want to stop by to see you I'm G to stop by to see you we're family and then it would be um are you saying that you don't want to see me anymore are you saying that you don't love me feels like you're done with me okay now all the person did was ask for a respectful phone call before they came over said nothing about don't ever come over again said nothing about how they feel about their parent they just asked for a little bit of warning and a little bit of space okay a what we would call a healthy boundary but because the parent felt um rejected by that they felt like they were being pushed away and oh emotionally immature people are super sensitive to any sign of rejection or abandonment any any break in attachment um because they feel that way they think that's the reality and that's a a term that was coined by um a research Barrett and bar uh where they looked at people who did this and when they did it so it can be very frustrating because there is no logic to it and there's no evidence for it but because it feels that way to the emotionally immature person they will make you feel as though you have been disloyal or unkind or you know even frankly rejecting toward them having talked to so many different people and with so many different people related to these issues could you paint a little picture here of an example of what a childhood with an emotionally immature caregiver or caregivers might look like for somebody just so they can kind of put themselves in the shoes of this experience or see it in their own life yeah well I think one of the reasons that that the book became so useful to a lot of people was that it described something that was hard for them to put put into words because a lot of people with emotionally immature parents know that their parents love them they love their parents they know that their parents mean well that their parents are putting a roof over their head food in their stomachs getting them care when they're sick sending them to school now this is not across the board I mean of course there are many emotionally imature parents who are falling down in some of those areas but for the most part the the people who are pulled to A Book Like Mine have what looks like on the outside maybe to the rest of the world like a fairly normal family life and they they can sort of see that too and yet they don't feel that there's a closeness there and they don't feel secure within that family structure but they don't know why so of a cardinal um characteristic of the adult child of the emotionally immature parent is that they grow up feeling very emotionally lonely you know everything is kind of in place lots of times but they have a sense that they're not deeply known they're not seen they don't have that sense of of emotional con connection and emotional intimacy with their parent where they feel like they can run to their parent with their deepest feelings or that they can express their needs um you know from their heart in In This Very uh very deep heartfelt kind of way and they feel like there's something the matter with them this is unfortunately you know we talk about the you had mentioned the egocentrism of kids well kids interpret anything that's not going well in the family to something that they might be doing which is a pretty adaptive response because uh you know it gives you a chance to change it because you know if it is your fault maybe you can figure out what to do about it but it seems like everything is caused by me that's what the little child thinks so if I think a bad thought and then something bad happens I cause that to happen it's magical thinking you know from like the age of two to six we live in this magical world where everything that we feel and think affects our life outside but when you have an emotionally immature parent who's not able to get in there with you and really be present for your Fe feelings and understands what you're going through and can guess this is important can guess what you might be feeling and then help you with it because they've been around the block a few times and they know what this feels like and they know how it tends to turn out and they can be there for you in your moment of emotional necessity but for these kids it feels like well Mom mom and dad or you know the uh whoever the the partner parents are uh they seem to be okay they seem to be saying that everything's all right and we're fine I don't feel like that I'm scared or I'm feeling lonely or I feel like I've done something wrong all the time but nobody else seems to be feeling this way and so that creates this sense of you know maybe there's something the matter with me maybe I'm overreacting um they certainly get the message that they're too sensitive that they want too much uh that they're always interrupting that they're kind of a nuisance because the emotionally immature parent has a very limited capacity for stress and what is stressful stressful is when you have to do six things at once yeah totally and I think it also gets back to the um the effective realism part of it where the parent is creating a story about where the problem lies inside of the family system and they're ascribing it to the kid because one of the things we talk about on the podcast a lot is that children effectively have two choices they can either decide that the uh that their parents are the problem that their caregivers are doing these these bad things and so they'll keep on doing these bad things until they're able to escape some kids do see that clearly but that's very uncommon um much more often they make the second choice which is they decide that they're the problem because they can do something about their own behavior they cannot do something about their parent and this moves into something that you talk about in great detail in your books which is the creation of what's called Ro self and I would love if you could talk about it a little bit including like how it gets created now I I I was just resonating with what you were saying about uh the child who can recognize that maybe their parents are having trouble or maybe there's something the matter with the parent um and you're right for most kids that is the conclusion of Last Resort because nobody wants to think there's something wrong with their parents I mean that is like the scariest thought you can have when you're a little kid so when the child gets the message that when let's say a child is upset about something maybe a a peer has hurt their feelings or or you know maybe they have um uh lost something precious to them but whatever it is they're very upset they're unraveling and they go to the parent for comfort and the parent stiffens up and actually moves back okay they withdraw because they don't handle stress very well they're not structured enough inside to be able to handle that kid stress while they're dealing with you know whatever's going on in their adult life plus the emotionally immature parent has very low empathy it's not that they don't have any empathy um they're not Psychopaths I me I'm sure some of them are but um but they're not they're not antisocial personality disorders they have some empathy but they use it when they're feeling very well resourced you know when things are going well that's when they can afford to tune into their kid with some empathy and of course that means that sometimes they do which makes it even more confusing to the child because they're saying well I know that Mom or Dad can connect with me but they didn't this time so what did I do wrong yeah I must have done something wrong again there's that like positioning of where the fault is yeah totally yeah exactly but that inability to get an empathic response means that whatever is going on with them at their authentic self level has to be kind of curated uh before it is taken to the parent in order to avoid the experience of devastating rejection or no response or withdrawal okay because that all says I am alone in the universe and there's no hope for connection and somehow I've got to solve this huge problem completely on my own so what the child learns is they learn how to approach the parent at the right angle at the right time with the right role in order to trigger nurturing or um helpful responses from the parent this is all happening at a very unconscious level totally yeah but we're really good at it I mean our Loosely speaking our right hemisphere is excellent at picking up what works in in an interaction it notices facial expressions it notices body posture it notices tone of voice it captures what works to get a good response from the parent and again like with defenses you don't do this intentionally you don't say oh I you know I have this problem I'll put on my roll self and go go ask Dad you just segue into it you know yeah so you go you go into your Ro self you go talk to Dad and things go better and then that's reinforced but the RO self is something that really is based on uh Donald wincott he was a u British psychoanalyst and pediatrician who had just incredibly astute observations of mothers and babies he's the one who came up with good enough mother um but he called it the fault self and he said that you know that the baby is tasked with finding a way to relate to the mother or the or the we say the nurturing parent um and order to do that they find these ways of relating that are not true to their actual needs or their actual emotional state and I call it the role self because I think it extends into the world of interconnected relationships within the family and it's really is finding your slot finding a place where you can exist exist with some individuality but in a way that the parent can understand it know um and relate to it and isn't threatened by it so when you are able to do that you have a higher chance of getting more nurturance and eliciting more patient responses from the parent but it's at the cost of you being able to connect with your own true feelings and your own true thoughts yeah you're you're choosing safety over authenticity is may be like a very kind of tight way to put a great way to put it thank you yeah and on the one hand there's a very tidy behavioral explanation for all of this uh kids have certain behaviors some of those behaviors are reinforced by their parents and some of them are disincentivized they go to the parent with one kind of look on their face and they are punished for that look they go to the parent with a different kind of look on their face and they are not punished for that look so you learn to take on those kinds of behaviors and we know that the behaviors that we adopt in childhood have a very long tale they're very powerful behaviors brain is very malleable it really sets the tone for what we do later on in life so on the one hand there's this kind of Behavioral explanation for the whole thing on the other hand I'm very interested in the the slightly warm and fuzzier explanation for the whole thing that uh gets to how you think about the the existence of a true authentic self that is playing in the background as the person adopts these various behaviors because at least what I've seen in my own life is that sometimes we can adopt a role self that we understand is very functional and that we're kind of 90% bought into but there's this 10% of a person that feels that something is not quite right and that's the part of us that can start to fall into what you call a healing fantasy where we start to construct this kind of story of our life about what would make things better or what would allow us to access that authenticity in a different kind of way because we feel styed in that self-expression because we've gotten so wrapped up in the behavior of the RO self and I think that that really gets to some of the material that you Explore More in uh disentangling from em emotionally immature people which feels to me uh is in a lot of ways about exploring that more authentic form of self-expression which then moves away from the behaviors that are keeping you trapped in relationships with these people who just kind of aren't good for you anymore so for starters is that a fair characterization here and then what do you think about that yeah no I I totally agree I'm I'm uh I'm of the warm and fuzzy mindset too because I think it's true yeah tell me I mean I really do think that each of us has an you know where does it come from I don't know but there seems to me to be an innate something about each person that is intrinsically very individual and that we might say is the authentic self and when we are in the authentic self we have Vitality we have energy uh we have an an ability to have feelings for other people we have the capacity for Joy but most of all we have we have a good spontaneous energy to us where it feels like we're all of a piece I have experienced that with my clients when they begin to move from the you know sort of like the life raft of their role self and then I'm talking about in the therapy sessions you know they start out usually kind of in their role self um presenting what they think will enable a good relationship with this uh therapist person who's kind of like an authority figure at that point totally yeah and and then gradually gradually it's like they start climbing on board um and they are able to like be more themselves and to respond in this more lively I mean it truly is more lively spontaneous way and they start saying things that surprise them and surprise me because it's so true about them I'm you know completely absorbed in what they're saying because there's a real connection happening I'm wondering how you've seen the that Ro self which are also just like the patterns that a person has created of their behavior based on early experiences affect the kinds of relationships that people with emotionally immature parents have in adulthood well we use what we think works um if we have learned that that being needy or um needing to uh talk to people about our problems or reach out for help or any of those things if we learn that they're not going to uh get us love and acceptance we may start out in our adult relationships being very careful you know to keep our new relationship by not being uh too demanding or too needy or you know whatever and so we're starting off the relationship in a role self and again are we doing this deliberately no no way we're doing it In Spite of Ourselves because we see hope for this relationship and we want to put our best foot forward okay and that can work for a long time the problem is that you know if you think about it in terms of inner parts like the you know kind of the multiplicity of Personality there's an inner child in there that's you know like waiting you know like when do we get to come out when do we get to find out you know if this person can really be there for us like it's like oh boy you know maybe they'll they'll be different maybe we'll have a chance with them and when that young child part of us the part that has been emotionally lonely that has not been paid enough attention to that may have been emotionally neglected that's felt so lonely begins to come out that person unfortunately can expect their new partner to be able to give them everything that they didn't get when they were a child so it's unfortunate because you start out in this kind of uh I'll do all the adjusting you know in order to have this relationship but at some point when it gets deep enough there can be this tendency to sort of switch that into uh if you really loved me you would be thinking of me more or you would guess what I want and that is completely fair for a little child to say to their parent if if only they could of course they don't but but that's a fair request of a of a child to a parent I want you to guess what I need because I don't have the language or the con STS to do that I want you to know what's good for me and do it without having to uh have me put it into words for you and when that part comes out later you know that partner may be surpris like you know what happened to the nice compliant person that I've established a relationship with up to this point yeah I thought I signed up for this I'm getting that like what's going on here totally yeah right yeah well what's happening is that that child uh you know it's like mission accomplished you made that person feel safe enough that that child part is now poking its head out to see if they can really be loved you know by showing the unmet need showing the unmet expectation um and when people can realize it uh that that's what's happening like especially if you know one or the other partner is in some kind of therapy or some kind of um you know selfawareness raising um Endeavor then maybe somebody can figure out that this is a an attempt to be more genuine and authentic that these old needs are coming up now does the person need to realize that that's kind of an unfair you know thing to expect the other person to guess at yeah absolutely but if we can create a space for that uh emotionally immature part of ourselves that didn't get to have that if we can create a space for that to be accepted while we learn more mature ways of asking for it you know with some Grace for the other person to make that transition from you know our ideal self or our role self to our needy child self you know it can all work out but that's if you enter a relationship or enter a friendship in some cases you can work through some of those issues and friendships where you have enough safety to do that and that's often with not an emotionally immature person but I'm wondering if people who have emotionally immature caregivers if you found they tend to be more likely to wind up in relationships or friendships or just surround themselves with more emotionally immature people in adulthood like do you think there's a connection there yeah I do because I think that when you grow up as a child with emotionally immature parents you have to realize that you are learning a whole set of skills yeah totally you know once you have an ability I I love this concept it comes from uh F I think his first name is Clifford Anderson in the stages of life and he talks about how as develop we it's as though these new abilities come online you know at different ages or different levels of maturity when we attain a certain level of ability it becomes a need it's almost like if you if you can do you know a jack knife off a diving board seeing a diving board will elicit the need to do a Jack B offit I know what you mean yeah totally yeah because you have the ability and our abilities are always itching to be exercised they really are so um here you are as a child who grew up with a certain kind of uh personality and certain kind of parent and you you develop these abilities to deal with it well now their needs and we want to exercise them now some of us might go into therapy as a career because it allows us to exercise it all day long I think Al Miller would have something to say about that I'm sure you're familiar with the drama of the gifted child which is one of my absolute favorite books and essentially the first chapter of it it's this very short book is uh like why people end up becoming therapists and her sort of underlying theory was exactly what you just said yes yeah so I think people get into adult relationships that allow them to be their best cells okay because it's fun to exercise our abilities which now feel like needs um it's energizing it brings more energy into our system to be able to use that so we start up the relationship it feels familiar we well I'm good at this um it's working well and that is often done through that role self you know and it isn't until later that the real self the true self starts to raise its head so to speak and want to to come out more to be more a part of your life and more more involved in the relationship and when that happens you begin to feel dissatisfied with the level of the relationship at the RO self level and so you may end up then being authentic at times that can be very surprising you know even shocking to your partner because it's like wait a minute um I haven't seen this side of you before so you know sooner or later it's like the truth will out it's like the the real self the true self will try to become a conscious part of your relationship which it's supposed to be that's what's supposed to happen it's just that nobody's very Artful about making that transition and so that's why I think it's so important for us to understand about Ro selves and how normal and really talented they are and to have some understanding and compassion for our partners that they may have some catching up to do when we begin to show more of our true s it doesn't mean that uh you know they aren't loved or that the relationship is on a bad footing it means I'm taking a risk with you you feel safe enough to me to let me try to go one step further and unfortunately when you get hooked up with somebody who is truly emot Al immature and you try to take it that one step further they don't want to have anything to do with that because emotionally immature people this is another hallm Hallmark characteristic are really scared of intense emotion and they're really scared of emotional intimacy so when you try to go to them with something real and true about how you're feeling and you show that to them they will do something to shut you down uh or they will ignore you or they will withdraw and that is of course uh devastating because now you've taken a chance and typically what the adult child does is they keep trying here's where the healing fantasy comes in they keep trying to get the person to give them what they need to heal which would be to make that connection to listen to their feelings let them get it out let them form that deep attachment at the basis of the real self on the basis of the real self and you know if the person can do it everything goes up a notch but if the person can't do it you know it becomes extremely frustrating to the to the that adult child so let's say Lindsay that somebody has been listening to this conversation and they're kind of nodding a lot you know they they see some of the features that you're describing maybe in their caregivers they're uh really familiar uh with some of the experiences that you're describing in uh in childhood they are maybe looking at some of their behavior and either going yes absolutely I know that I do this in terms of those Ro self behaviors or they're at the very least kind of looking back and going huh yeah that sounds like it could be the case and now here they are they've popped out into adulthood and they want to start working on some of these patterns that have been created what advice would you give that the first thing I would tell somebody who was facing that now I'm assuming that this would be uh not in the way that you're asking this would not be as a part of ongoing therapy where you have the time and the luxury of you know working this through in some kind of long range way but basically the idea is pay attention to your true self pay attention to your authentic reactions to what you really feel because if you can make a connection to yourself you can then be more authentic in the relationship and it gives the relationship a chance to become something that is more real and has um a solid footing many times it's hard for adult children of emotionally mature parents to take that step of trying out more active ways of being themselves in the relationship uh because they've learned to be kind of passive uh and incidentally I never use that word with my clients because in the American culture passive is like a bad word you know everybody is supposed to be active and assertive all the time so you say A you know basically neutral word like passive and people you know feel horrible about that so I only use it as a conceptual shorthand here but basically they learn to hang back and not take action and one of the the things that is the hardest for them to learn is what is it that you want what's the outcome that you are headed toward or that you want to head toward where are you going with this and if you can identify that you then have a chance to identify what can you do or what can you try that would be an active step toward taking your relationship more to that kind of level so you're helping them to you know first of of all figure out what they feel what they want you know secondly translate that into some kind of outcome that they want maybe they want a more emotionally intimate relationship and then what would you have to do in order to raise the odds of that happening uh in this situation can you think of anything else that you might have been able to do that would have gotten you more uh more of a response that you were looking for that being said if they're with an emotionally immature person it doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to work yeah so we're ready we're ready for that but you still can get so much mileage out of practicing let me get in touch with myself let me not be confused about who I am and what I want first of all and then let me figure out what I'm really after let let me get a concept here about what that is and then let me think about what I can do even if you don't end up in that same relationship you are learning how to turn back to yourself instead of trying to please the other person or trying to pacify the other person and that skill that ability to turn back to yourself and figure out what you want and how to take some positive steps toward it you can carry that with you for the rest of your life and you can actually get some great practice in relationship with emotionally immature people in adulthood uh they can pay off big later totally and and for somebody I would I would love to turn to the the disentangling side of the spectrum because I think you're starting to speak to that here basically where almost everyone is going to have a relationship of some kind in their life romantic or otherwise with somebody who falls into the emotionally immature side of the spectrum that you were talking about at the very beginning of our conversation here just for starters because they natural distributions and we have lots of different kinds of relationships with lots of different kinds of people we're going to bump into people who are like this um if you find yourself in a relationship with that sort of person and I'm using relationship in the en sense of the world I don't just mean romantic relationship what do you think starts helping people establish the the separation or the boundaries that they need in order to be able to bring more of that authentic self forward um in a way that feels kind of safe for them first you notice that it hurts I remember when I was in grade school and a teacher of ours said something about you know there are people who have this disorder where they can't feel pain and I I don't know maybe we were in the fourth grade or something and and she was saying you know wouldn't that be terrible and we were all like what do you mean that would be great nothing would ever hurt you you know and then she began to talk about how you know if well what happens if you you know burn your hand but you don't feel the heat and you know she went into and then it was sort of like it was such an eye openening experience uh that I remember like oh it could be a bad thing not to uh be able to feel pain well this is the same thing the first step in getting out of an entangled uh or in meshed relationship and by that I mean you are being emotionally coerced and controlled by somebody else's emotional needs or or even um you know could be narcissistic needs but basically you're responsible for their uh self-esteem and you're responsible for their emotional stable ization that's what I'm calling an in mesed relationship you are being emotionally used for somebody else's psychological purposes so when you in that kind of relationship and you've been conditioned uh from childhood to think that that's normal you may not even feel the pain of being treated that way of being emotionally coerced shamed guilted made made to feel self-doubt made to feel afraid it may not even register on you that that's what you're going through so the first job in in therapy or in self-realization is to be able to feel that it hurts in one way or another this doesn't feel comfortable I don't like this this is bad for me my energy goes down when this happens I feel drained I exhausted by this and you are really trying to get back your innate ability to feel when something is not good for your life energy when you can do that this stuff starts to rub you the wrong way it begins to feel like well wait a minute you know is this fair is this kind am I being treated well is my individuality being allowed you know you start to ask questions when something doesn't feel good so that's the that is the that is often the first step in a person regaining their connection to their true self is that ability to uh begin to feel what it's like to have somebody do that to you and to be used in that way nobody likes that animals don't like that yeah another piece of this that I've really heard you emphasize is and we've talked about it a bit on the podcast in the past is how a big part of this process for people can be letting go of those healing fantasies um releasing our attachment to the wishes that we had for a certain kind of relationship with this other person often relationships with emotionally immature people can actually start um very intense and fulfilling and kind of away it's sort of like being selected by as a as a narcissist favorite person you know it's really hard to kind of match the emotional intensity that gets channeled your way and that can for a time at least really feel very good and very rewarding but over time you realize that you're just not going to get the blood from that stone that you've been craving this whole time but that craving is itself kind of the problem after a little while you really want that thing and letting go of that can be very difficult for people yeah and what a treat it is uh to be uh love bombed if if you have not gotten adequate attention or response to uh your needs or your individuality and Along Comes A person with some narcissistic features and of course the whole basis of narcissism is that things are either idealized or they're debased uh so at the beginning of relationships the partner is always idealized because that's a reflection of who the narcissistic person wants to be with and wants to be like and so oh it's it's like intoxicating for a child of emotionally immature parents to be the apple of someone's eye like that to see them light up you know over you to to think that you are special and unique I mean it is everything that that person is probably ever wanted so we have to respect that and how are you you know it's sort of like when you're starving to death like are you going to think about which Bakery your bread came from it's like you have no discriminatory Powers at that moment at all you are just hungry point I love that yeah yeah so is it narcissistic attention is it healthy attention who cares yeah I'll take the attention at this point totally yeah no I mean I've been been there man yeah totally we've all been there so what do you think helps people let go of those those fantasies that they have around it having worked with just a ton of people around these issues yeah pain pain you know there was a story about a um uh a guru and his disciple IPL and one day his disciples come to him and they say oh Master you know you've led us to Enlightenment and we're so lucky and you know but what about all the other people in the world who never got to meet you never get to hear your message how will they learn how will they evolve and the master said by the whips of pain so that's what happens we are fortunate enough that we have this inner ability to feel feel when things are not good for our life force that's why I keep using that that uh illusion to energy or energy goes up or energy goes down and there's nothing you can do about it you you either like something or you don't like something um but you will get a very distinct signature off of your experiences if you are tuned in to your own sense of self and what raises or lowers your energy so when people begin this process they will start to report things that bother them and they're often very embarrassed about it and they'll like say you know I know this is a silly thing I shouldn't even be bringing this up or you know other people have so many more important problems than I do they'll do what has been done to them by sort of dismissing or minimizing the problem and then I always am like dying to hear what they're going to say next because I know it's going to be big okay and then they say this thing and it's connected up to some of the you know the deepest hurt and the deepest unmet need that they have and we're beginning to get closer to that they're beginning to bring it in and when we can realize what it's about we can explore that and and allow them to get into the feeling like the first thing that always doing therapy Forest is I'm always asking people like well let's just hang on a second can you go into that feeling and report to me from in there like let's just slow it way down super slowmo camera you know and let's sample what you feel and they will once they can slow down they will begin to start to expand the feeling experience in the moment and then they you know it's like they they've walked into the room they they they can see how really impactful this has been for them or continues to be for them it's not a little thing it's a huge thing and they have an intuition that this is important to mention in therapy but all their training has been you're too sensitive you make mountains out of mole Hills you misunderstood that um you know they're made to feel bad about their internal uh perceptions their their awarenesses and it feels it feels like you're highlighting a this underlying sense of guilt that people can have about feeling the way that they feel whether it's exactly as you're describing it here or the guilt that that other people in a system maybe those more emotionally immature people can place on them to as a means of control as a way to coers behavior and to stop that other person from establishing whatever distance they need in order to start accessing these healthier parts of their personality that's a really good point I love that uh what you're saying about um the distance they need I think of it in terms of you know like when they're trying to decide how much contact to have with the emotionally immature person and I use the phrase optimal distance it's like you are free to find that place where it works for you um where it's not too much and it's not too little but it's sort of like uh that that optimal distance but part of the appeal of having that distance is that emotionally immature people they use a lot of emotional coercion you know I mentioned the the shame and the guilt and the self-doubt and the fear but they do it with a heavy load of moral obligation it moves from psychological and emotional into the moral realm realm and a person gets the message that if they were a good person they would do this thing for them and that if you won't do what I want you to do uh well you had a moral obligation to do that to give me what I want and since you didn't you are you know in this you have a moral black mark uh against you and this is like getting into are we good are we bad am I a good person and they give the message no you're not unless I'm happy when people begin to expose that to themselves it it is such a freeing experience because it it it unhooks that moral obligation from the fact that the other person is demanding that you be who they want you to be and once you like see through that that putting the moral obligation on that you were really then free to say to yourself well is this fair that I have to always be the one who you know meets your needs or is it true that I have a moral obligation to lend you money you know you begin to think yeah I've just seen that over and over again in in my friendships with people who are going through this process of establishing more space from the emotionally immature people in their lives often it's from uh family members or caregivers but sometimes it's not sometimes it's from exes or people that are currently in a romantic relationship with or whatever else that uh that moral component is just such a huge control that we have over the behavior of other people um and it's a very very powerful kind of stick to wield inside of a relationship that you're going after somebody with um and this is often Complicated by the fact that that person that you were describing who maybe was raised by a more emotionally immature caregiver they've now entered some kind of a relationship maybe it's romantic maybe it's just a friendship with somebody where they're getting some of those things that they wanted they're not getting all of them but they're getting some of them they're getting some of that attention some of that care some of that ability to express themselves and now as they've gone through this process of growth they maybe start to realize I'm not going to get the blood that I really want from this particular Stone and so they have to now establish some separation but they're getting some of what they want so there are these fears that accompany it of rejection and abandonment where the person goes well if I separate from this situation am I ever going to find something even this good again in my life and for somebody who had those more emotionally immature caregivers like wow that's a powerful fear because you're just never sure if you're really going to get that and now you've got like a little taste of it but maybe not the whole thing I'm wondering how you've worked with people around those fears that they might have of not getting that that emotional thing that they want that they're getting a little bit of here but they're really not getting enough of well that can be uh a very lonely and scary time for somebody because yes it's it's like why would I want to let go of one life preserver before I grab the next one but then the question becomes what about if you put your own life preserver on I mean the question is how about if you work on your relationship with yourself yeah okay before you go looking for the other life preserver How about if we look at this as you're going through a period of development and growth within yourself so you're it's not that you're alone and you've lost your chance to have something some part of what you really want how about if we figure out what it is that you really need and you turn your attention to yourself and maybe as a result of that you'll be able to recognize the people that are going to be more compatible with you or more more congenial with you you can approach it uh that way but you know another thing that often happens is you know going back to that thing about you know once you develop an ability it turns into a need they have begun to move on in their development and the other person has not kept up or has not even shown maybe even any interest in growing and so Along Comes A person who is now more on this new wavelength with you and it's very compelling because you recognize that more of you gets to come into being in this new relationship you can't be happy with somebody who is not able to enjoy the same level of emotional intimacy that you are it's just very incompatible um after a certain point this is a question we could do a whole other podcast on and we're toward the end of it here but maybe it's just eclips notes I'm I'm so interested in what helps people um identify themselves as a secure base which is basically what you were talking about a moment ago you were talking about how um the shifting to the view of the self as the thing from which you get that relationship that you really needed you know you're in relationship with yourself in this way and you're developing that good connection what do you think supports people in doing that I think it's first of all I think it's the knowledge uh that it's there you know I mean unfortunately in our culture and this is probably any culture that is um you know industrialized techn logical uh we really have a model of people as being more like machines or technology computers uh and we don't really acknowledge the inner World in a way that I think it needs to be because I think it's very real and in that inner world that's where the true self resides that's where the sense of self resides so when you're in a culture that doesn't value the inner world except when it makes money like if you're creative uh and you're in the Arts and you make money at your art that's very cool okay but it all has to be Quantified has to be Quantified it has to be uh materialized in uh productive or profitable ways for us to take it seriously so when you come in as a therapist but you could come in in as a good friend you could come in as a as a good mate and you support that inner world of that person to let them know that there really is something inside them yeah and it really does matter okay that's where your meaning comes from then you have the um ability to increase that sense of a secure base in just being connected with yourself but you know of course it's a process uh to do that and nobody that I know is going to be particularly happy just with a relationship with themselves but the rest of your life can proceed as you are building that connection with yourself and yeah your outside world will improve to the extent that you work on your inner world at least that's what I've seen happen and people have said to me when they're finishing therapy they'll say you know I I feel transformed this has been a transformation and what they're really saying is I've found myself and I've transformed my life to go from defining myself from the outside in to finding myself on the inside I love that Lindsay and I think that's a perfect note to end our conversation today on so thanks so much for doing this with me today totally enjoyed this oh it's been such a pleasure these questions have been just a delight to think about thank you thank you I really enjoyed today's conversation with Dr Lindsay Gibson she's the author of adult children of emotionally immature parents disentangling from emotionally immature people and she recently released a new guided journal for the adult children of emotionally immature parents that just came out at the beginning of April and if you enjoyed today's conversation I think you'll really like it we started today's conversation by talking about what is emotional immaturity and we have this normal model of human development where we think that as people get older they become more developed in a lot of different ways they pick up all these skills and abilities and understandings about the way that life works and that is normally the case but sometimes what happens is people get kind of Frozen in time at a certain stage of development and for emotionally immature people they are essentially Frozen at a younger age they have have the level of emotional maturity of more of a 12-year-old or a 13-year-old or even a 3 or four year-old sometimes than an actual fully-fledged adult and this leads to some common symptoms that are really quite similar to those experienced by a young child for example emotionally immature people are very egocentric in nature they primarily view the world through their own self- preoccupations and they will swiftly entangle you in them they also tend to have pretty limited empathy they don't put themselves in other people's shoes or imagine their inner experience they tend to avoid self-reflection uh they can be very self-justifying often self-righteous in nature and they rarely question themselves they tend to be extreme in their relationship to emotional intimacy either withdrawing emotional intimacy because they are profoundly uncomfortable with it or Desperately Seeking more emotion from the person that they're engaging with they also use effective realism which is something that we talked about in more detail during the conversation where you define reality based on how you feel about it rather than how it actually is and this can create a pattern in the behavior of emotionally immature caregivers where they make their experience of reality about the behavior of their children where they're responding to their children in the way they are not because they need to learn how to better regulate their emotions or become more resourced in that relationship or access new tools that maybe they didn't have before they became a parent instead no they just need their child to behave a little bit differently and if only they behaved differently then everything would go just fine and one of the challenges with a lot of the interactions that we have with emotionally immature people is that the things that they say are to an extent true they're not total Fabrications a lot of the time when things are going well enough for them when things are the way that they need it to be in order to be emotionally resourced they can behave like a mature person for example in this case maybe that parent really is able to relate to their child better when their child behaves in a certain kind of way but that's not a criticism of the child that's a criticism of the parent but the parent has distorted reality to make it about the child rather than about themselves children are often very fast Learners and they learn very quickly that when they approach their parent a certain kind of way things tend to go better and when they approach them a different way they tend to go more poorly so what this does is it inclines them towards certain patterns of behavior that may or may not feel authentic to them and this is the creation of a role self which we talked about in some detail throughout the conversation your Ro self is a kind of pseudo self that allows you to fill a particular role inside of your family system for example maybe you learned that if you were able to manage your parents' emotions they responded to you more positively if you were able to keep them happy and engaged they were nicer to you and so what do you do you develop a pattern of behaviors that becomes about pleasing them that becomes about meeting their emotional needs rather than caring about your own and what tends to happen for people just in life in general is that the patterns that we establish in childhood have a very long Shadow over the rest of our life so we've learned these patterns of behavior and as Dr Gibson said once you've learned a skill you want to exercise it in your life so what happens well in adulthood we start to look for people or situations that allow us to exercise that skill which is one of the reasons that people who are raised by more emotionally immature caregivers tend to find themselves in relationships or friendships with emotionally immature people in adulthood now it's important to emphasize that this is occurring subconsciously for most people they're not deliberately going through a process of doing this it's just kind of happening but as it's happening there's another part of them that's operating in the background and that's their true self that's their authentic self and often what happens is frankly as enough pain in our relationships accumulates and I I think it's really important that Dr Gibson emphasized the role that discomfort plays in all of this as enough pain accumulates we start to have the experience that this situation just isn't good for us that there's something else that we really want and sometimes at an early stage what this could take the form of is a healing fantasy a dream that everything would be better if I was just able to find somebody who performed this kind of function for me who was as emotionally available as I need as emotionally intimate as I need as uh who was able to care for me the way that I care for other people all of that kind of stuff and as we grow into adulthood we begin to expect that our closest relationships will make those healing fantasies come true and we might think that our emotional lonely will finally be healed by a partner who always thinks of our needs and who really cares for us in that deeply relational way that we're looking for the problem is that these fantasies often keep us trapped in different kinds of relationships because we constantly keep on going if only if only if only for example Lindsay tells a story in one of the books about a woman who secretly believed that if only she could make her depressed father happy she would finally be free in her own life to do what she wanted and she didn't realize that she was already free to do what she wanted in her own life even if her father stayed Miserable as people go through a process of trying to strengthen their connection with a truer and more authentic version of who they are well to find healthier relationships you often have to disentangle from the less healthy ones that you are currently wrapped up in and the friction of those unhealthy relationships as we explore truer aspects of ourselves becomes more and more noticeable we start to experience more pain based on the distance between the way our relationship is and what we see as possible for ourselves and as we go through this process of self-discovery we often feel more pain inside of the relationships that are currently going on for us because we we see how big the distance is between where we want to be and what we're currently getting and one of the problems for people is that dysfunctional relationships of different kinds particularly with emotionally immature people can be very difficult to extract ourselves from there are a lot of tools used by by controlling systems like guilting people who are trying to leave or using a lot of very moral language making it a moral fault if you want to get away from me or even leveraging the fears of Abandonment that somebody might have the fears that they have inside of themselves often based on that lack of emotional relationship that they experienced in childhood that no one will ever actually love them and so in order to bear that pressure that the systems put on us we have to be able to look inside of ourselves and strengthen the relationship that we have with that more authentic version and a key part of this for many people um and I want to do more content on this because I think that it's just such an important piece of the puzzle is defining themselves as something with which they can have a meaningful relationship defining themselves as a person from which they can derive Safety and Security because the story that we tell ourselves so often and I don't know if this is a American culture thing or a western culture thing or just a human thing is that we can only be safe if we are in a particular kind of relationship we can only derive our safety from things outside of ourselves and as long as we're carrying around that story we are we are inherently at of effect we are we are not the masters of our own lives because our safety which is that fundamental need we all have is dependent on other people it's not independent from them and again the complexity here is that that is to an extent true like we are dependent beings our relationships are very important to us uh I want to have fulfilling relationships with other people and I want to feel like the environments that I'm in are very safe those are important things for me as a person but when we become excessively dependent on those things it becomes harder and harder to disentangle from even the dysfunctional systems that we're currently a part of from which we feel like we're deriving that safety and so this very difficult but very important process often occurs for people where they look inside themselves and they start to run these little tests what if I tried doing this thing what would happen if I found a little bit more separation here can I trust myself to keep myself safe in these ways can I trust myself to keep myself comfortable in these ways and we start to prove to ourselves over and over and over again that we can rely on ourselves that we can solve problems that we we can find the way through various difficult situations and the development of that self-efficacy that belief that we have in ourselves is such a important part of the puzzle here I hope you enjoyed today's episode I really loved it I think that Dr Gibson's work is really fantastic here she's also a great speaker and was just a total natural on the podcast so again if you were interested in the topics that we explored during this conversation I would strongly recommend her books particularly adult children of emotionally immature parents and disentangling from emotionally immature people uh and also also the new Journal that she recently released if you're looking for more of a workbook style experience if you've been listening for a while and you have not subscribed to the podcast yet hey please subscribe to it we'd really appreciate that if you're listening to it through a podcast app by the way we're also on YouTube and hey if you're watching on YouTube you could listen through a podcast app if you prefer that you can find us pretty much anywhere if you'd like to support the show in other ways you can find us also on patreon it's patreon.com well podcast and for the cost of just a couple of dollars a month you can support the show and get a bunch of bonuses in return until next time thanks for listening and I'll talk to you [Music] soon