📖Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents

April 4, 2024 – April 6, 2024

authors: Lindsay C. Gibson
year: 2015
url: https://www.amazon.com/Adult-Children-Emotionally-Immature-Parents-ebook/dp/B00TZE87S4

Chapter 1. How emotionally immature parents affect their adult children’s lives

p.7 Children are unable to identify the lack of emotional intimacy with their parent. It isn’t a concept they have. Neither can they identify that their parents are emotionally immature.
p.8 Emotional intimacy is when you know that you have someone you can tell anything to. When you feel completely safe opening up to another person. “or by just being together quietly in a state of connection”
p.11 Lacking parental support, many emotionally deprived children are eager to leave childhood behind and become self-sufficient. They may become competent beyond their age/successful but this actually makes it hard for them to see and accept their pain.
p.17
As a human being, you can trust yourself to know when you’re emotionally satisfied.
p.20 Because children of emotionally immature parents don’t have experience of other people helping them to feel better, they may self-isolate instead of reaching out to people when they need help, making their situation worse.
p.21
Parental rejection doesn’t always result in low self-confidence. Some intelligent, resilient people somehow manifest the confidence to pursue good careers and reach high levels of achievement. Many find emotionally mature partners, enjoy satisfying long-term relationships, and create close families of their own. But despite their emotional needs being met in current relationships, the lingering trauma of childhood loneliness may haunt them in other ways, through anxiety, depression, or bad dreams.

Chapter 2. Recognizing the emotionally immature parents

p.43 For emotionally immature parents, it’s easier to tend for children physically rather than emotionally. When the child is seek, this gives them the reason to show a lot attention. (Physical aid is more sanctioned that emotional attachment.) Children may remember and use this attention as a proof of parent’s love.

Chapter 3. How it feels to have a relationship with an emotionally immature parent

p.54
Emotionally immature adults communicate feelings in this same primitive way. As parents, when they’re distressed they upset their children and everyone around them, typically with the result that others are willing to do anything to make them feel better.
p.59
They often use platitudes to support the authority of their role as a parent because, like roles, platitudes oversimplify complex situations and make them easier to deal with.

Chapter 4. Four types of emotionally immature parents

p.71 Emotional parents have difficulty tolerating stress and emotional arousal. They lose control in situations that mature adults can handle.
p.75
[Passive parents] don’t offer their children any real limits or guidance to help them navigate the world. They may love you, but they can’t help you.
p.70 Rejecting parents may engage in stereotyped family activities, but they still show little closeness or real engagement. They mostly want to be left alone to do their thing.

Chapter 5. How different children react to emotionally immature parenting

p.84 Healing fantasies are unrealistic expectations that you will receive what you want if something changes or you behave in a certain way.
p.84
We might think our emotional loneliness will finally be healed by a partner who always thinks of our needs first or a friend who never lets us down.
p.85 If your caretaker does not respond adequately to your true expression of self, you will figure out what to do and will build a role-self to get a secure place in your family system.
p.95 Internalizers may act as externalizers when they get overly stressed or lonely.
Most of the time, they first try to talk to their partner about their unhappiness, since their instinct is to take responsibility for solving problems. But if their partner doesn’t listen or, worse, rebuffs these overtures, internalizers may go on the lookout for someone to save them—a classic externalizer approach.

Chapter 6. What it’s like to be an internalizer

p.105 Internalizers have a deep need for connection.
internalizers are extremely sensitive to the quality of emotional intimacy in their relationships. Their entire personality longs for emotional spontaneity and intimacy, and they can’t be satisfied with less. […] If there’s anything internalizers have in common, it’s their need to share their inner experience. […] This isn’t a social urge, like wanting people to chat with; it’s a powerful hunger to connect heart to heart with a like-minded person who can understand them. They find nothing more exhilarating than clicking with someone who gets them. When they can’t make that kind of connection, they feel emotional loneliness.
p.106
Children who try to be good enough to win their parents’ love have no way of knowing that unconditional love cannot be bought with conditional behavior.
p.109 Internalizers naturally seek connection outside of their family to make self feel more secure. This may include neighbors, relatives, teachers, childhood friends or pets.
p.109
Spirituality can also provide this emotional nurturance, as internalizers experience and relate to a greater presence that accompanies them no matter what.
p.111 Internalizers hate to be a bother. They prefer to not raise their issues/needs and deal on their own. Therefore they become “invisible” and easy to neglect.
p.112 Emotional neglect may go unnoticed until they hear about it.
However, this emotional deprivation is often a silent and invisible experience for children. These children will feel the emptiness but won’t know what to call it. They’ll grow up suffering from emotional loneliness, but won’t know what’s wrong.
[…]
People often have no idea that they’ve experienced emotional neglect until the first time they read about it.
p.114 Internalizers learn to ignore one’s own feelings. They may develop a rejecting attitude toward their own feelings because they had to become tough.