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

Emotional parents are run by their feelings, swinging between overinvolvement and abrupt withdrawal. They are prone to frightening instability and unpredictability. Overwhelmed by anxiety, they rely on others to stabilize them. They treat small upsets like the end of the world and see other people as either rescuers or abandoners.
• Driven parents are compulsively goal- oriented and super busy.
They can’t stop trying to perfect everything, including other people. Although they rarely pause long enough to have true empathy for their children, they are controlling and interfering when it comes to running their children’s lives.
• Passive parents have a laissez- faire mind- set and avoid dealing with anything upsetting. They’re less obviously harmful than the other types but have their own negative effects. They readily take a backseat to a dominant mate, even allowing abuse and neglect to occur by looking the other way. They cope by minimizing problems and acquiescing.
• Rejecting parents engage in a range of behaviors that make you wonder why they have a family in the first place. Whether their behavior is mild or severe, they don’t enjoy emotional intimacy and clearly don’t want to be bothered by children.

Interestingly, self- sufficient children who don’t spur their parents to become enmeshed are often left alone to create a more independent and self- determined life (Bowen 1978). Therefore, they can achieve a level of self- development exceeding that of their parents.

As a human being, you can trust yourself to know when you’re emotionally satisfied. You know when you’ve been given full measure. You aren’t a bottomless pits of ceaseless demands. You can trust the inner prompts that tell you when something is missing.

Emotionally immature parents don’t know how to validate their child’s feelings and instincts. Without this validation, children learn to give in to what others seem sure about. As adults, they may deny their instincts to the point where they acquiesce to relationships they don’t really want.
They may then believe it’s up to them to make the relationship work. They may rationalize why they have to try so hard in the relationship, as though it were normal to struggle daily to get along with your mate.

Typically, their relationships with their parents are so draining that they don’t have the emotional energy to pursue romantic relationships, nor do they want to. Their experiences with their parents have taught them that relationships mean feeling abandoned and burdened at the same time. To these people, relationships feel like traps. They already have their hands full with a parent who acts like he or she owns them.

People who lacked emotional engagement in childhood, men and women alike, often can’t believe that someone would want to have a relationship with them just because of who they are.

Children who feel they cannot engage their parents emotionally often try to strengthen their connection by playing whatever roles they believe their parents want them to. Although this may win them some fleeting approval, it doesn’t yield genuine emotional closeness.

Denial makes us repeat the same situation over and over because we never see it coming the next time.

People like Sophie often feel guilty for complaining. Men and women alike will list the things they have to be thankful for, as if their life were an addition problem whose positive sum means nothing can be wrong. But they can’t shake the feeling of being fundamentally alone and lacking the level of emotional intimacy they crave in their closest relationships.

enough (McCullough et al. 2003). They dislike having to tell people what they need and instead hold back, waiting to see whether anyone will notice how they’re feeling.