“I’m really successful at what I do, but the truth is, I feel lonely a lot of the time.”
This client, like a lot of people I’ve worked with, struggles with emotional loneliness, and they think it’s their own fault.
But the truth is that they grew up in a family with emotionally immature parents—ones who didn’t make them feel safe or provide trustworthy emotional intimacy.
Art Credit: @Lisa-Vertudaches
When you are raised by emotionally immature parents, you’ll likely have more struggles to find safe, stable intimacy in friendships and romantic partnerships because your parents were the first template you were given for outside relationships.
When your parents are unable to reflect on their own behavior or take any feedback for change, for example, they will keep making any problem be about you. In these situations, it’s hard to navigate any difficulties without feeling scared of losing their love.
When your parents don’t know how to support or validate your instincts or feelings, you learn to just give in to whatever your parent seems certain about. Then as an adult, you’ll feel like you don’t know or trust yourself because you were taught to ignore your inner awareness for years.
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents—How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents.
A friend told me about this book and when I started reading, I realized it did such an amazing job at simplifying this experience and making it really easy to understand. Other books like “Stop Walking on Eggshells,” and one of my other favorites, “How to Be an Adult” may describe the experience of growing up with immature parents, but somehow this book speaks beyond pathology or philosophy to just be as clear and useful as possible.
The book is intended for laypeople, not clinicians, and is really helpful in spelling out plainly how this immaturity in parents operates and affect their kids.
Once you better understand where some of these issues came from, you may be able to identify this immaturity in others and know how to make better choices moving forward.
