Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

They’ve developed enough self-awareness to be comfortable with their own feelings, as well as those of other people.

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

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.

Being well cared for in nonemotional 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 unconsciously developed defenses against experiencing many of their deeper feelings.

Relationships are sustained by the pleasure of emotional intimacy, the feeling that someone is interested in taking the time to really listen and understand your experience. If you don’t have that, your relationship won’t thrive. Mutual emotional responsiveness is the single most essential ingredient of human relationships.

For emotionally immature people, all interactions boil down to the question of whether they’re good people or bad ones, which explains their extreme defensiveness if you try to talk to them about something they did. They often respond to even mild complaints about their behavior with an extreme statement, like “Well, then, I must be the worst mothe

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

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 relatio