Eight Signs of Emotional Immaturity and Four Ways to Heal from Emotional Neglect and Trauma: Part 1

In this episode, Sarah covers eight signs of emotional immaturity and shows how being in a relationship with someone who is emotionally immature can be traumatic. Understanding these eight signs of emotional immaturity will help you identify where you end and the other person begins, which is the start of any healing journey for emotional abandonment. Explosive anger, self-absorption, and discomfort with disagreement are a few examples. Sarah discusses Dr. Gibson's book "Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents." If it is your parent who is emotionally immature, the effects can be especially hard.

Handout for "Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents": http://curioushealing.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/ACEIP_exercises.pdf

Important links:
TSD Mindfulness Virtual Meditation Center https://www.tsdmind.org
Sarah's Mindfulness Coaching website: https://www.sarahvallely.com

This episode is a meditation for beginners, and mindfulness for beginners resource. Intermediate and advanced meditators will also benefit. The Aware Mind produces content that supports stress reduction, anxiety relief, better concentration and focus, and trauma healing.

The Aware Mind is produced by TSD Mindfulness, a virtual meditation center, offering mindfulness classes, certifications and private coaching for people with past trauma, anxiety and depression disorders, business leaders, and people who work in the helping professions (i.e. counselors, healers and yoga and meditation teachers).

Transcript

 I am here on my own today, and I usually do that when I'm doing a book review. I'm kind of doing a book review, but it's not complete book review. The information I'm going to go over includes a lot of information from an excellent book called Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self Involved Parents.

It is written by Lindsay C. Gibson. She has a PsyD. She has a private psychotherapy practice and is also an adjunct professor of psychology at William and Mary College in the Virginia Beach area. There's not much information on the web about her. She just seems like a regular person like you and me.

She's got a job, a private practice of being a therapist, but other than that, uh, she's just lives like a normal life like all of us. But what an excellent book she has written, and one thing I love about this book is that you can download handouts to go with it. I always love it when these books have some handouts to go with it.

I will link the handouts in the show notes. It's 10 pages of information that covers a lot of what I'm going to be going over. On the first page of the handout, she shares something that she did not share in the book, and that is they did some significant research in the field of emotional immaturity years ago, until people in the mental health field started diagnosing people with disorders, and then that research fell off.

So not really sure what's behind that. Maybe they shifted away from emotional immaturity and started more looking at it through the lens of disorders, but I thought that was interesting. It also made me think about the research that's out there about emotional immaturity. I couldn't find a lot. But I did look through one study, it's called The Impact of Emotional Immaturity on Mental Wellbeing and Physiological Symptoms of Emerging Adults.

So basically what came out of this study is that people who have emotional immaturity qualities Also have some physiological somatic symptoms, meaning pains, issues with digestion, things going on in your body. And also show that those people who are more emotionally immature have trouble with mental well being.

If I'm reading the study right, it did show both men and women who have emotional immaturity struggle with mental well being, but there's more women, it's more common for women who struggle with emotional immaturity to struggle with mental well being. I guess you could interpret that in a lot of different ways.

I kind of interpret that as women who have emotional immaturity, are not that content, not that happy, but men who have emotional immaturity, at least some of them are a little bit more content. So I thought that was interesting, but then I read more into it and realized that the study was published in Pakistan.

So I don't know. That could be just like, Uh, women in Pakistan just being really having a hard time with mental well being for a variety of reasons. So, who knows, but I thought that was interesting. So this topic I'm actually going to release in two episodes. I don't ever do that and, and the reason is, is because I like to give you a full package.

Just in one episode, in 25 minutes. Show the problem, share some solutions, and just have it all there for you, leaving you in a feel good place, right? Leaving you feeling like, yes, there's things that I can do to help with these challenges. But I'm not going to do that this time. And the reason is, is because what I'm going to go over today is It's going to probably bring up some difficult emotions for some of you.

And I want to give you some time in between episodes to process through some of those difficulties that are going to come up. So I'm really going to be focusing today on qualities of someone who is emotionally immature. Like I said, this episode is really influenced by this book. that I love called Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, but when I present this, I'm going to present it as these qualities could be in anyone, not just a parent.

It could be a friend. It could be an ex partner. It could be yourself. You could identify with some of these qualities in certain times, in certain situations. Uh, we, we all can. That is because this is a spectrum. I would really like you to consider these qualities that I'm going to share as a spectrum.

Yes, they can have someone who is really, really checking off, like, so many of these elements in a very intense way, and then having their gray areas moving to the other side of the spectrum. So we're all on the spectrum. It's just a matter of where are we going. on the spectrum between emotional maturity and the other end of the spectrum, emotionally immature.

So what I'm going to be sharing today is definitely describing that far end of that spectrum of that emotional immaturity. As I go through this, it might be kind of hard to hear some of these descriptions of emotionally immature people, maybe, because you have a parent who really fits these descriptions, and it's hard to really hear that, to face to face with that.

There are some emotions that might come up for you. So I want to invite you, if you find yourself becoming angry, find yourself becoming resentful, to instead focus on you and your pain and your sadness. So you can do that. You can step away from all those things. thoughts about the other person, right? So it's going to be just a tendency to want to just really focus on the other person, especially the way I'm presenting this.

But it is possible to step away from that and look at yourself and say, what is happening within me? Is this sadness that's coming up? Is this anger that's coming up? Is this grief? What's happening in with me? And it is really helpful to check in with your body. So if it is sadness, what does this sadness feel like in my body?

And that's going to help you take a step away from that thinking that's going to come up because there might be some real negative thinking that's going to come up, which is understandable. And it's, it's okay to some degree, but the purpose of this episode and the purpose of this book. adult children of emotionally immature parents is to seek things clearly.

It's to have clarity. It's to be able to truly see that person in your life for who they are, so you can move into acceptance about it, and so you can make decisions about how you are going to handle the situation. So some of the emotional responses you might have, or you might consider it like fallout from, from some of what I'm going to share today, are feeling neglected, being neglected, leaves you feeling alone.

This neglect or abuse could also leave you feeling angry. Missing out on having a parent, or whoever this person is in your life, missing out on having them be more emotionally supportive, more emotionally mature, can leave you feeling tremendous grief, loss, for what you missed out on, especially if this is about a parent, right?

To just have that grief about what you lost in your childhood because of this emotional immaturity. It is, it's a lot that you've lost because with that emotional immaturity. You didn't get that emotional support. You didn't get that attention that you needed as a child. So those are all natural feelings that can come up.

It's a grief process. I mean, when you really look at the big picture, it is a grief process, grieving what you lost. And so those stages of grief, denial, if you are listening to this episode, you're probably not in denial, anger, bargaining. I want to take a moment to reflect on the bargaining stage. The bargaining stage in this format probably means that you are still hoping the person will change, you know, so you can have that better relationship.

And so since you still have that hope, then there's a part of you that doesn't believe you need to go through the grief. And that's the bargaining stage. And that's where the majority of my clients who are going through what I'm going to share in this episode, that's where they are usually at in that bargaining stage, like still kind of holding out for hope.

And that's kind of nice to, to be in that hope, but it unfortunately can get in the way of you completing through the cycle of emotions, moving through the stages of grief and moving into that acceptance. So that's so much what this episode and. next episode is going to be about in this book as to how to move into this clarity and acceptance.

And then the fourth stage of grief, they call depression. I like to call it sadness. It doesn't have to be depression. Depression means you feel like these feelings are permanent, that you're forever going to be in this negative, depressed state. But you can be in sadness. The big difference is it feels more temporary.

Yes, I'm really sad right now. This is hard, but it's temporary. At some point, I will move out of it. It might come in waves, might come and go. And that's, that's really a healthy way to experience that stage. And then the last stage is the acceptance, accepting them for who they are, where they're at. They did the best they could, but that doesn't mean that you don't set boundaries.

In some cases that might mean no contact, but you do move into that acceptance. The other thing that I want you to consider while listening is the role your parent wanted you to play to help them feel better about themselves. This role could be being the good child, being the helpful child, being perfect, being responsible.

Sometimes the roles are more like you're the incompetent child that makes me look good because I'm more competent. It could be all different things. So think about what was that role. So what I'm going to do is go over eight signs of emotional immaturity. So the first one is rigid or irrational opinions.

This person being uncomfortable with differing points of view. If you have a different view on something than they do, this causes them a lot of discomfort. They might be reactive. It might also mean that it's really hard to be honest and share your opinions in conversations because of this, because of the reaction that you might get, because of that discomfort that they have with opinions that don't match up with their own.

They might get really irritated. when you don't think the way they do. Uh, this person might not be responsive to facts and logic. You might try to be rational with them to kind of move through the conversation, to invite them to look at it a different way, but facts and logics don't seem to have any meaning.

Black and white thinking, you know, it's totally this way or it's totally that way. There's no gray area. There's no subtleties, not being receptive to new ideas.  I think you get the picture. I'm sure you have had some conversations with some of these types of people in your life. I'm not sure I need to give you any more examples on that.

Number two, the second sign here of emotional immaturity is emotionally explosive. So I just want to throw out there, when you're thinking about this person who might fall into this category of being emotionally immature, they might not align with all eight of these, but if they align with several of them, then that is a good indicator.

Uh, but this one is emotionally explosive. So the big word out there is unregulated emotions. I have a hard time with that term unregulated emotions because I spend so much time with clients helping them let those emotions flow, creating space to really sit with and allow the emotional experience to happen.

So putting that word regulation with an emotional experience is just really just too much for me. But, but I, I'm throwing it out there unregulated because that's the term that everybody uses. So this emotional explosive nature, this person's mood affects everyone around them. And the person usually doesn't have much remorse about that.

They just kind of accept everyone to, to deal with those emotions. It's not very emotionally mature because it would be great if they were more vulnerable, meaning they could share about how whatever happened is bringing them pain. Whatever happened is bringing up fear. Whatever happened is making them feel a little bit out of control and powerless.

That would be a more mature way to, to handle that type of situation. The next sign here, number three, emotional. Unavailability, right? We hear that all the time. Emotional unavailability. So here's really what that means. So this person is unaware or unsympathetic to your emotions, like they don't really notice you're having the emotions, or they disregard them, or they might even have a real negative reaction to your emotions.

Your emotional experience might feel like an attack to them, and so they might get angry. Emotional unavailability might mean leaning on you for emotional support, but not providing you with emotional support. I mean, someone who's emotionally unavailable just can't offer emotional support. Someone that's got this going on takes actions without considering your feelings.

So an example of that, maybe they cancel an event that you were planning together that meant A lot to you and they just cancel it without having any explanation or sensitivity toward how that was really meaningful for you and you were looking forward to it, or just simply just saying things that are hurtful, not considering how that's gonna affect you.

So this person might respond to your emotions in kind of a superficial way. It's like, Oh, that happens to everybody. Like I said, they might get angry, they might be sarcastic, and somebody who's emotionally unavailable might say you are too sensitive. It might feel like your emotional vulnerability or even having an emotional experience is too sensitive.

My fourth sign of emotional immaturity is unable to be vulnerable. Being vulnerable is hard for most people. I mean, let's be honest. It's not something that most of us were. taught how to do as children, and it's just not really supported in our culture, but people who have emotional immaturity really struggle for this.

It's like a no go. So that means they don't self reflect, look at their actions, look at their role in a conflict, realize that maybe some things they did or said maybe contributed in some way. Unable to apologize like just not going to happen, right? There's, you know, I know you know those people Maybe it's a parent and they've just never ever Apologized and that's actually a sign of not being able to be vulnerable like apologizing is vulnerable, right?

You're really admitting that you don't have it. I'll figure it out and you don't do it Right all the time someone who has trouble being vulnerable when things come up they get angry or they shut down Instead of admitting these feelings of rejection, neglect, or hurt. And like I said, that's hard for most people, but definitely should be on this list.

The fifth sign of emotional immaturity, centering on oneself. So this would mean that the conversations are mostly centered around their interests. It's just really hard for them to talk about a topic that they don't really know about, that isn't something that they. Personally have been involved in and the way I relate that to emotional immaturity is that vulnerability, right?

Engaging in a conversation about something that you don't want know much about you have to admit to yourself You know, I don't know everything you don't I don't have everything figured out I don't I don't know there's more for me to learn and that's gonna be really hard for somebody who struggles with emotional immaturity They're not going to be able to be curious about your life, ask questions about what's going on with you personally.

They don't try to understand you. And just remember, this is a spectrum. There might be someone you're thinking about that struggles with this, and they might not be way high up on the emotional immaturity spectrum, but they're on there. They might be in the gray area. Someone who centers on themselves will not be very supportive of your successes.

They will act in a way that it doesn't seem to matter to them that you had this accomplishment, that you got this recognition at work. They might really just brush it off. And this person will probably stop listening when they don't like what's being said. So that's a, you know, a real key sign of emotional immaturity is not being able to really focus in and be in the conversation when they don't agree with what is being said.

Another big one, the sixth sign of emotional immaturity. cannot follow boundaries that you set. So some of the boundaries that you might try to set with this person are to not give you advice. It's like impossible, right? It just, it's just coming out. They just don't have the sensitivity to notice that they're doing it and care that it's hard for you and that maybe what you're needing more is It's to have them trust in you and your decisions and in what you're doing.

Another example of a boundary that you might have tried to set that this person has a really hard time following is not to put down a mutual friend or, or a family member. And again, you know, it takes a level of emotional maturity to have that sensitivity to know that the relationship between the two of you would be better and people would feel more safe if they were able to refrain from putting people down that you care about.

Okay. There's a plethora of different boundaries that someone who's really high up there on the spectrum of emotional immaturity will have a hard time following. The seventh sign of emotional immaturity on my list is requires people to play roles. And Dr. Gibson does a really good job in her book, talking about this specifically.

I asked you in the beginning to think about if it is one of your parents who is, you know, has an issue with emotional immaturity, what role did they want you to play so they felt better, right? So that that's what I'm talking about. A simple role could be, I'm the parent, you're the child. You know, I should always be respected and listened to and you're the child, you need to play that role.

It could be roles of, of gender. You might have a really hard time with not putting you into these old fashioned gender roles, uh, but also some of the other roles that I talked about, about you being the responsible one or you being the, the one who's always struggling or, or whatever it is. They're going to be really agitated if you move out of this role.

They're also going to be agitated if you aren't respecting the role that they think they're playing. They will use the role as a reason to blame. This is your fault because you are not being the one who always fixes everything. Maybe that's the role they want you to play. This person might also require you to read their minds because it takes a level of emotional maturity to realize that that people don't need to overcompensate and over anticipate your thinking and, and your needs that it's really healthier to be able to speak and ask for those needs in a healthy way.

But someone who struggles with emotional immaturity isn't going to want to get their needs met that way. Instead, they're going to want you to just automatically know them. So, how you doing? I know it's a lot going through all of these traits that can be really traumatic, right? It can be really traumatic to engage in a relationship with someone that holds these traits.

It's really hard.  So one more here, the 8th sign of emotional immaturity on my list is they do not acknowledge process and time. I find this one very fascinating. They do not acknowledge process and time. So what this means is They often, like, live in the moment, so they're really kind of forgetting about the past or forgetting about the future in a, in a sensitive way, being sensitive about what's happened in the past, being sensitive about the consequences of actions in the future, or it could also mean that they're really stuck in the past, so this real struggle with having a Clear sense of time.

They probably don't learn from the past. They don't plan for the future. It often takes a level of emotional maturity. And because they don't have this good sense of time, they don't understand why people don't get over things instantly. They don't understand that it takes time to heal and to rebuild trust.

So it all is wrapped up in this issue with time. These factors can cause so much pain and hurt, this feeling of not being seen, I'm not being heard, I'm not being understood. That's because it takes a level of emotional maturity to truly see someone, to truly hear them, to truly realize this person is a separate person than myself.

They have their own thoughts, they have their own opinions, and someone who struggles with emotional immaturity can't really see that. So it's really quite traumatic. In the next episode, I will go over ways to heal through this, and I'm sorry that I'm not doing that now, kind of leaving you in this open place of just like, whoa, thinking about all of these different characteristics that really do cause trauma.

But before I conclude, I do want to go over these four types of emotionally immature people that Dr. Gibson goes over in her book. The first one is called the emotional. They have unpredictable outbursts, and they expect you to work around that. These emotional explosions can be frightening. Probably really triggered your nervous system repeatedly.

Someone who falls into this category is often self absorbed, cuts people off, and they also are known to see themselves as a victim. The second one is called the driven type. The driven, they're so focused on getting things done and believe everyone should have the same beliefs as far as being perfect, getting everything accomplished.

They usually have really rigid values and, like I said, are perfectionistic in their expectations. They're really obsessed with their goals, busy, almost like machine like. They really see themselves as the fixer. Due to that approach to life, they can't be there for you emotionally. The next type of emotionally immature people is passive, especially if this is your parent, they were fun, they wanted to be with you, but if someone was being emotionally abusive to you, they did not protect you from that.

Maybe it's another parent, maybe it's another family member, maybe it's a sibling. They just shut down when things get intense. You know, they kind of like just tune out. But they can be sporadically emotionally intimate, so it can be really confusing. And they think of themselves as good natured. And the last type of emotionally immature people is rejecting.

This person has two types of rejection. Too many boundaries. It's actually possible to have too many boundaries. It's just like you really can't connect. You can't spend much time with them. Seldom engages in communication is really distant. They also can be reactive by being attacking, be demeaning. In addition to ignoring you and you might feel like a burden to them.

So that was a lot of information about all of these different qualities of emotionally immature people. It's a lot to take in. Just want to remind you to honor the emotions that are coming up. Honor that emotional process because that's healing. It's actually your inner child reaching out to seek healing.

That's what these emotions are about. They're to let us know, you know, this part of us needs healing, needs attention, those feelings of hurt, abandonment, rejection, dismissed, misunderstood, all of those.