Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

Communication with emotionally immature people usually feels one-sided. They aren’t interested in reciprocal, mutual conversations. Like young children, they crave exclusive attention and want everyone to be interested in what they find engaging. If other people are getting more attention, they find ways to draw attention back to themselves, such a

They dislike having to tell people what they need and instead hold back, waiting to see whether anyone will notice how they’re feeling. The classic unspoken demand of the emotionally immature adult is “If you really loved me, you’d know what I want you to do.”

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. Most genuine emotion makes them feel exposed and extremely nervous. Throughout life, their energy has been devoted t

Their main sources of anxiety are feeling guilty when they displease others and the fear of being exposed as imposters. Their biggest relationship downfall is being overly self-sacrificing and then becoming resentful of how much they do for others.

Because they’re so attuned to feelings, 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.

You might tell yourself that you should be feeling more for them, but your heart can’t resonate with their exaggerated reactions. And because they overreact so frequently, you may quickly learn to tune them out for the sake of your own emotional survival.

They Resist Repairing Relationships Problems are bound to come up in any relationship, so it’s important to know how to handle conflict in ways that help the relationship weather the storm. It takes confidence and maturity to admit to being wrong and try to make things better. But emotionally immature people resist facing their mistakes. People who

When internalizing children have self-involved parents, they often think that being helpful and hiding their needs will win their parents’ love. Unfortunately, being counted on isn’t the same thing as being loved, and the emotional emptiness of this strategy eventually becomes apparent. No child can be good enough to evoke love from a highly self-i

Although emotional intimacy and enmeshment can look superficially similar, these two styles of interaction are very different. In emotional intimacy, two individuals with fully articulated selves enjoy getting to know each other at a deep level, building emotional trust through mutual acceptance. In the process of getting to know each other, they d