Chapter 2: Recognizing the Emotionally Immature Parent

Excerpts from "Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents"

Chapter 2: Recognizing the Emotionally Immature Parent

"Most signs of emotional immaturity are beyond a person's conscious control, and most emotionally immature parents have no awareness of how they've affected their children."

"We aren't trying to blame these parents, but to understand why they are the way they are."

"Emotionally immature parents can have devastating impacts on their children's self-esteem and relationships in adulthood."

"Personality pattern versus Temporary emotional regression"

"Emotionally immature people don't step back and think about how their behavior impact others"

"Emotional maturity means a person is capable of thinking objectively and conceptually while sustaining deep emotional connections to others"

EMOTIONAL IMMATURE PEOPLE

They are rigid and single-minded
- "Once they form an opinion, their minds are closed."
- "There's one right answer, and they can become very defensive and humorless when people have other ideas."

They have low stress tolerance
- "Their responses are reactive and stereotyped"
- "They use coping mechanisms to deny, distort or replace reality."
- "They have trouble admitting mistakes and instead discount the facts and blame others."
- "They often overreact."

They do what feels best
- "They make decisions on the basis of what feels best in the moment and often follow the path of least resistance."

They are subjective, not objective
- "When they interpret situations, how they are feeling is more important than what is actually happening."
- "What is true doesn't matter nearly as much as what feels true."

They have little respect for differences
- "Emotionally immature people are annoyed by other people's differing thoughts and opinions, believing everyone should see things their way."

They are egocentric
- "Emotionally immature people are self-preoccupied in an obsessed way, not with the innocence of a child."
- "Young children are self-centered because they're still commanded by pure instinct, but emotionally immature adults are commanded by anxiety and insecurity."
- "Before you start feeling too sorry for them, keep in mind that their defenses work seamlessly to keep these underlying anxieties below the level of awareness. They would never see themselves as being insecure or defensive."

They are self-preoccupied and self-involved
- "They're constantly monitoring whether their needs are being met or whether something has offended them."
- "Their self-esteem rises or falls depending on how others react to them."
- "Because their self-involvement is all-consuming, other people's feelings are eclipsed by their needs."
- They are profoundly self-involved because their development was stunted by anxiety during childhood.

They are self-referential, not self-reflective
- "Emotionally immature people are highly self-referential, meaning that in any interaction, all roads lead back to them."
- "Their focus on themselves isn't about gaining insights or self-understanding; it's about being the center of attention."
- "As you talk to them, self-referential people will turn whatever you say back to one of their own experiences."
- "Those who are more socially skilled might listen more politely, but still won't hold their interest. They may not overtly change the subject, but they won't ask follow-up questions or express curiosity about the details of your experience.
- "Because they lack self-reflection, emotionally immature people don't consider their role in a problem."
- "Their egocentric focus remains on their intention, not the impact on you."

They like to be the center of attention
- "In groups, the most emotionally immature person often dominates the group's time and energy."
- "You may wonder whether these people are just being extroverted. The difference if that most extroverts easily follow a change of topic. Because extroverts crave interaction, not just an audience, they're interested and receptive when others participate."

They promote role reversal
- "The parent relates to the child as if the child were the parent, expecting attentiveness and comfort from the child."
- " These parents may reverse roles and expect for their child to be their confidant, even for adult matters."
- "Parents who discuss their marriage problems with their children are an example of this kind of reversal."

They have low empathy and are emotionally insensitive.
- "Impaired empathy is a central characteristic of emotionally immature people, as is avoidance of emotional sharing and intimacy."
- "They are strikingly blind to how they make other feel."
- "True empathy involves more than knowing what people feel; it also entails the ability to resonate with those feelings."
- "In spite of not resonating empathically, [emotionally immature people] are often quite canny when it comes to reading other people's intentions and feelings"

They are often inconsistent and contradictory
- "Emotionally immature people are like amalgam of various borrowed parts, many of which don't go together well. Because they had to shut down important parts of themselves out of fear of their parent's reactions, their personalities formed in isolated clumps, like pieces of puzzle that don't fit together."
- "Their personalities are weakly structured, and they often express contradictory emotions and behaviors."
- "They step in and out of emotional states, never noticing their inconsistency. When they become parents, these traits create emotional bafflement in their children."
- "Emotionally immature people may be either loving or detached, depending on their mood."
- "Intermittent reward situation: Meaning that getting a reward for your efforts is possible but completely unpredictable. This creates a tenacious resolve to keep trying to get the reward, because once in a while these efforts do pay off."
- "Parental inconsistency can be the quality that binds children most closely to their parent, as they keep hoping to get that infrequent and elusive positive response."
- "Since a parent's response provides a child's emotional compass for self-worth, such children also are likely to believe that their parent's changing moods are somehow their fault."

They develop strong defense that take the place of the self
- "Emotionally immature people learn during childhood  that certain feelings were bad and forbidden."
- "Not realizing the magnitude of their parents' developmental limitations, many children of emotionally immature people think there must be a genuine, fully developed person hiding inside the parent."
"But when people's defenses have become an integral part of their personality, they're as real as a scar tissue in the body. It may not have belonged there originally, but once formed, it's enduring."
- "Whether they can ultimately become more authentic and emotionally available, depends on their ability to self-reflect."
- "Unfortunately, if their parents aren't interested in noticing their impacts on others, they have no impetus to look at themselves, without self-reflection, there's no way to change."

They fear feelings
- "As children, many emotionally immature people grew up in homes where they were taught that the spontaneous expression of certain feelings was a shameful breach of family custom."
- "As a result, they anxiously sought to inhibit their genuine reactions, developing defensive behaviors instead of experiencing their true feelings and impulses."
- "Affect phobia can lead to an inflexible, narrow personality based on rigid defenses against certain feelings. As adults, these emotionally immature people have an automatic anxiety reaction when it comes to deep emotional connection."
- "As parents, they pass down this fear of vulnerable emotions to their children."
- "Many children of emotionally phobic parents develop the fear that if they start crying, they'll never stop, which arises because they were never allowed to find out that crying naturally stops on its own when allowed its full expression."
- "Even positive feelings of joy and excitement can become associated with anxiety."

They focus on physical instead of emotional
-"Emotionally immature parents can do a good job of taking care of their children's physical and material needs.
- "But when it comes to emotional matters, they can be oblivious to their children's needs."
- "Being well cared for in non-emotional areas can create confusion in people who grow up feeling emotionally lonely. They have overwhelming physical evidence that their parents loved and sacrificed for them, but they feel a painful lack of emotional security and closeness with their parents."

They can be killjoys
- "Fear of genuine emotion can cause emotionally immature people to be killjoys."
- "As parents, instead of enjoying their children's excitement and enthusiasm, they may abruptly change the subject or warn them not to get their hopes up."
- "In response to their children's exuberance, they're likely to say something dismissive or skeptical to bring it down a notch."

They have intense but shallow emotions
- "Emotionally immature people are easily overwhelmed by deep emotion, and they display their uneasiness by transmuting it into quick reactivity."
- "Their reactivity may seem to indicate that they're passionate and deeply emotional, but their emotional expression often has a glancing quality, almost like a stone skipping the surface rather than going into the depths."
- "When interacting with such people, the weirdly shallow quality of their emotions may leave you feeling unmoved by their distress."
- "Because they overreact so frequently, you may quickly learn to tune them out for the sake of your own emotional survival."

They don't experience mixed emotions
- "The ability to feel mixed emotions is a sign of maturity."
- "If people can blend contradictory emotions together, such as happiness with guilt, or anger with love, it shows that they can encompass life's emotional complexity."
- "The reactions of emotionally immature people tend to be black-and-white, with no gray areas. This rules out ambivalence, dilemmas, and other emotionally complicated experiences."

Difficulties with conceptual thinking
- "As children enter their teen years, their ability to self-reflect skyrockets because they become able to think about their own thinking. However, the intense emotions and anxiety that emotionally immature people experience can decrease their ability to think at this higher level."
- "Frequent lack of self-reflection comes from the tendency to regress and temporarily lose their ability to think about their thinking."
- "Emotionally immature people who are otherwise intelligent can think conceptually and show insight as long as they don't feel too threatened in the moment."

Proneness to literal thinking
- "If you listen to the conversations of emotionally immature people, you may notice how routine and literal their thinking is."
- "Emotionally immature people tend to talk about what happened or what they observed, not the world of feelings or ideas."

Intellectualizing obsessively
- "Overintellectualizing and getting obsessed about certain topics is a cognitive sign of emotional immature people."
- "Their preocuppation with ideas distracts them from emotional intimacy. They may discuss their favorite topics at length, but they don't really engage the other person."
- "Although they can think conceptually while communicating their ideas, they're only comfortable if things stay on an impersonal and intellectual level."

Done reading Chapter 2!