Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - How to Deal With Emotionally Immature People (Including Maybe Your Own Parents) | Lindsay C. Gibson

Episode Date: July 1, 2024

Today’s guest, Dr. Lindsay C. Gibson, gives advice for dealing with emotionally immature people— whether they are your parents, boss, spouse or childhood friend, she offers practical tools to help navigate these difficult relationships. Description: Emotionally immature people (EIP’s) are hard to avoid and most of us, if not all of us, have to deal with them at some point in our lives. These interactions can range from mildly annoying to genuinely traumatic, especially if the emotionally immature people in question are our own parents, which is true for an awful lot of us.Today’s guest, clinical psychologist Lindsay C. Gibson, gives advice for dealing with emotionally immature people, whether they’re your parents or not. She has written a sleeper hit book on the subject called, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents. In this episode we talk about:The signs of emotional immaturityWhether or not I’m emotionally immatureWhat happens to children who are raised by emotionally immature parents, including their signature coping strategiesWhy adult children of EIP’s turn to healing fantasies, and how to let them goHow to cope with emotionally immature parents as an adultWhat role compassion should and should not play in your relationship with EIP’sHow to healFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/lindsay-gibson-2022-rerunBooks Mentioned:Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved ParentsWho You Were Meant to Be: A Guide to Rediscovering Your Life's PurposeRecovering from Emotionally Immature Parents: Practical Tools to Establish Boundaries and Reclaim Your Emotional AutonomySelf-Care for Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: Honor Your Emotions, Nurture Your Self, and Live with ConfidenceDisentangling from Emotionally Immature People: Avoid Emotional Traps, Stand Up for Your Self, and Transform Your Relationships as an Adult Child of Emotionally Immature Parents Other Resources Mentioned:Lisa Feldman BarrettAdditional Resources:Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/installSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Okay, everybody, today, and in fact, this whole week, we're focusing on emotionally immature people. Let me say before we dive in that every once in a while here on the show, we like to bring back episodes from the archive that are worth highlighting. And this week, we're going to focus on two episodes from the same guest because she is

that good. Lindsay C. Gibson is a clinical psychologist and the originator of the concept of emotionally immature people. And she was a guest on this show back in 2022 and again in 2023. That first episode from 2022, which you're going to hear today, was about what it means to be emotionally immature, particularly how it relates to parenting. And the 2023 episode, which we're going to re-release on Wednesday,

focuses on how to disentangle from the emotionally immature people in your life, whether you're related to them or not. Gibson's book, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, has more than 10,000 five-star reviews on Amazon, so this is a topic that clearly resonates. And just to be super clear from the outset here, she has advice for dealing with emotionally immature people, whether they're your parents or not. Maybe it's your boss, your spouse, a childhood friend, whatever. In this conversation, we talk about the signs of emotional immaturity, whether or not I am

emotionally immature, because I got a little worried when I started hearing her talk about the signs of it, what happens to children who are raised by emotionally immature parents, including their signature coping strategies, why adult children of EIPs, that's her term, turn to healing fantasies and how to let those fantasies go, what you're probably doing with your emotionally immature parents now that those fantasies go, what you're probably doing with your emotionally immature parents now that you're an adult and what you should do instead, what role compassion should and should not play in your relationship with EIPs and how to heal. Lindsay C. Gibson coming up after this.

But first some BSP. As you've heard me say before, the hardest part of personal growth, self-improvement, spiritual development, whatever you want to call it, the hardest part is forgetting. You listen to a great podcast, you read a great book, you go to a great talk, whatever it is, and the message is electrifying. But then you get sucked back into your daily routines, your habitual patterns, and you forget. So this is the problem for which I have designed my new newsletter, which we just started a

few months ago, and we're just really hitting our stride. So I'd love it if you sign up. Every week I list one quote that I'm pondering right now, and then I give you two of the top takeaways from the podcast this week. It's really for both me and for you to get these messages into our molecules. I'm just kind of mainlining the practical aspects of the episodes from the week and listing it out for you. And then I also list three cultural recommendations, books, movies, TV shows that I'm into right now.

You can sign up. It's free. It's at danharris.com. That's my new website, danharris.com. Sign up for the newsletter. Also, I want to tell you about a course that we're highlighting over on the 10% Happier app. It's called Healthy Habits.

It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonigal and the meditation teacher Alexis Santos. It's great stuff. To access it, just download the 10% Happier app wherever you get your apps, or by visiting 10% dot com. That's one word all spelled out. Listening on Audible helps your imagination soar. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, expert advice, any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine

new worlds, new possibilities, new ways of thinking. Listening can lead to positive change in your mood, your habits, and ultimately your overall well-being. Audible has the best selection of audiobooks without exception, along with popular podcasts and exclusive Audible originals, all in one easy app. There's more to imagine when you listen. Sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial and your first audiobook is free. Visit audible.ca.

M, what do you look for in a globally massive pop star? Oh, I want sensationally inappropriate outfits, incredible glamour, and an almost unapproachable cool. Well, for the latest series of terribly famous, would you settle for some plaid shirts, ginger hair, and an acoustic guitar? No, no I won't. What if there's a loop pedal? All right, keep talking.

That is actually it. It just sounds a bit ordinary. Emily, this is Ed Sheeran. You really won't believe the twists and turns his story takes. Okay, fine, sell me Ed. Addiction, shame spirals, family interventions, grief, massive court cases, obsession. Okay, okay, Sell me Ed. Addiction, shame spirals, family interventions, grief, massive court cases, obsession.

Okay, okay. I'm listening. Ed mapped out his whole career when he was just a teenager, and he has followed that path to some very strange places. How strange? Jennifer Aniston's son, Langer. Just an ordinary guy. Follow Terribly Famous wherever you listen to podcasts, or listen early and ad-free on Wandery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wandery app. Dr. Lindsay C. Gibson, welcome to the show. Oh, thank you for having me, Dan.

It's great to have you. So let's start with a story. I believe you have a little story to tell about how you got interested in adult children of emotionally immature parents. I started out my training in a program that fortunately emphasized psychological development as well as clinical psychology. And it was a very helpful thing because I was trained to do a lot of psychological testing. So when you're doing psychological testing, you're writing a report for a therapist who's working with a client.

And it's enormously helpful to them to have the report writer sort of peg the client for where they are in terms of their developmental spot. So I might write a psychological report for somebody, and I would say, you know, they're a 45-year-old man, but, you know, actually they're functioning as a 12-year-old emotionally or as a three-year-old, and that would give the therapist a very quick glimpse

into what to expect from this person in the emotional realm when they were doing psychotherapy. And later on, when I had my own practice, I began to notice that a lot of the people that were coming in with problems were describing people in their lives that I, as a psychologist, would say to myself, oh my gosh, you know, he sounds like a three-year-old,

or he sounds like a five-year-old. And I became aware that a lot of the problems that people were having with other people in their lives were coming from these developmental arrests in the people around them. So they were trying their best to get along with them. But this immaturity kept rearing its head and making it difficult for them to have a good relationship. So I thought that this was such an interesting way

of looking at it, that I was sharing it with my clients and explaining about emotional development, emotional immaturity, how it worked. And it really was very, very helpful to them because they felt like this was something they could relate to, this was an idea they understood. And it really reflected to them something that they had already sensed,

which was that these emotionally immature people were acting like little kids and they often had to stabilize them and tiptoe around them in ways that they would with, you know, a cranky child. So it became evident that this was very very helpful as a concept to my clients. And then of course, I just kept expanding that and reading more and researching it and understanding it better. So that's how it all started. So how do you define emotional immaturity?

First of all, think of it as we have different strands of development in our personality. For instance, you might have an intellectual strand, you might have a, you certainly have a physical development strand, you might have social skills, you might have educational strand, but all of these different strands in the personality,

really in some ways operate kind of independently. So you can have a person who in their emotional immaturity, that they are quite young in the coping mechanisms that they use, and their tolerance for frustration, and their emotional regulation, they can be really quite young. But in their intellectual development, they might be really quite young, but in their intellectual development, they might be very intelligent.

They might be highly educated. They might be highly skilled. They might have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and are a business success. And so emotional immaturity can co-occur with these different strands of development in such a way that it feels very contradictory sometimes to claim that someone is behaving in an emotionally immature manner because the rest of their life, in our culture anyway, looks very actualized, very competent, very adult, very grown up. So it's often a surprise to people when you raise that concept with them because they

say, well, how can they be emotionally immature? He owns his own business. He's well thought of in the community. He's been very, very successful financially. How can this person be emotionally immature? But it's certainly possible. So the first thing is to realize that being emotionally immature doesn't mean that you're not smart or that you're not capable. It just means that in the emotional realm,

you may not have fully grown up yet. What are the key signs and symptoms of people who are emotionally immature? I'm glad you use that word symptoms, Dan, because with emotional immaturity, it's not a diagnostic category. You won't find this in the DSM-5. It is how I describe a syndrome, but it's not made up of necessarily clinical symptoms,

which is one of the reasons why I like it, because sometimes people don't like to think of their parents in terms of clinical diagnoses. So I found that using the term emotional immaturity was much more palatable to people than diagnosing in absentia their parent as borderline or narcissistic or whatever it might be. So we wouldn't necessarily call the behaviors symptoms because they wouldn't be diagnosable, but they certainly have some cardinal signs that we would look out for.

So think of it in terms of there's a continuum. People may be extremely emotionally immature to the point where it affects all those other strands of development that I mentioned, and they may not be functioning very well. And then you can have someone who has a little bit of emotional immaturity, usually based on patterns that they've learned in their past, like family patterns or sort of inherited traumas from parents, that kind of thing. So they have some of the symptoms, but it's not so wholesale as the person who is definitely emotionally immature.

But there are about five characteristics that I think are what I would call kind of a tipping point kind of sign. In other words, if you have one or two of these, you probably are falling into the category of emotional immaturity. But there are four main characteristics, and then there's a fit. The first one is egocentrism. Just for a quick shorthand, think of a three-year-old. So a three-year-old is like

the most egocentric little creature on the planet. They have to be center stage. They want it to be all about them. Everything that happens is a reference to themselves. Then the second one is that they have poor empathy. That is, it's very hard for them to put themselves in the shoes of another person. Another way of thinking about that

is that they just don't have emotional imagination about the interior world of other people. So they don't mentalize, they don't conceptualize the subjective experiences of other people. And so you can imagine that frees them up to say and do all kinds of things that might be very hurtful or might be embarrassing to other people because it just doesn't occur to them to wonder about how that would feel to that person. The third one is they have very poor self-reflection. They're self-referential, meaning everything's about them, but when it comes to self-reflection,

like gee, I wonder if I had something to do with that. I wonder if I was to blame for part of that. What can I do next time that would make that better? What do I need to watch out for? That's self-reflection, and they don't do that. It's not a capability that they have at an emotional level. They can't stand outside themselves and regard themselves as kind of an object

of their own attention. And then the last of the big four is fear of emotional intimacy. Now, emotionally immature people are disorganized by strong emotion. So when somebody is showing strong emotion, whether it's being upset or expressing love or being moved or you know these kind of very intense feelings between people, they get really scared and they pull back. One therapist called it affect phobia, meaning that they just became scared and unable to function when the

emotional intimacy got to a certain level in the relationship. And you can imagine what that does to a child whose wellbeing and emotional development really depends on being able to make a strong, intimate connection with their parent, to be able to feel like that parent knows them and gets them and is right there with them, is connecting with them at an emotional level. And that's what a lot of emotionally immature people have a lot of trouble doing. It really makes them nervous. And when you try to relate

to them at this deeper level, they become very uncomfortable, turn the subject back to them, move it to a superficial topic, have a free association, anything to get away from the intensity. Now the fifth quality is not as central as the first four, but I'll mention it here, and if you want we can talk about some other characteristics as well. But it's affective realism. This is a term that I got from Lisa Barrett's work on emotions. And what affective realism is, is the way of approaching life so that reality is what I feel it is. Reality is not objectively assessed. Reality is assessed on the basis of how it feels to me. So if I feel like someone doesn't like me,

I know they don't like me. If I feel like I'm not doing a very good job, then I'm a terrible person. I'm incapable, I'm not doing a very good job, then I'm a terrible person. I'm incapable, I'm incompetent. Their feelings lead the way, not their rational objectivity. Those are the characteristics that if you have those, it's very likely that you will fall into the category,

as I describe it, of emotional immaturity. I mean, I listen to that and I think, am I emotionally immature? I mean, I certainly, I can recognize myself in some points in my life in most, if not all of those. Yeah, absolutely. And in all our lives, in every single person's life, we will recognize these characteristics because we've all been through them. And we all carry our past experiences like those little Russian nesting dolls, right? So we have our inner three-year-old, we have our inner 12-year-old, we have our inner

15-year-old. We know what it's like to be egocentric. We know what it's like to not think twice about how we're affecting somebody else, right? We know the trouble we've gotten into when we haven't self-reflected and someone has gotten very upset with us because, you know, we're sure that our viewpoint is the right one. And we have all been through affective realism, where we're convinced that something is something because of the way we feel. So these are human qualities, Dan.

They're not something that we would be unfamiliar with if we were emotionally mature. It's just that when you reach an adequate level of maturity, you can do something with these qualities because you have the ability to feel egocentric, what's in it for me, how's this going to affect me? But then other things come in, like your values, your empathy for other people.

Those things come in and you sort of rationally consider all of it. So it's not that we get rid of all these things, it's that we have other coping mechanisms and other values that sort of grow on top of that, like the Russian nesting doll, where the doll gets bigger and bigger as we mature. If you're emotionally mature enough, you can self-reflect. Affective realism, yes, of course, we all do that. But then if you're adequately mature,

at some point you might think, well, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's not the way it feels to me. Maybe I better check this out. And then what would a love story be if there wasn't fear of emotional intimacy, right? So all these things will be very familiar, but the difference is that the emotionally immature person is stuck in these. They don't go to other levels when they're engaging with people. Got it. So in some ways, an emotionally mature person will recognize themselves in these list of qualities

An emotionally immature person will be stuck in them You know if not in perpetuity most of the time and won't have many other arrows in the quiver That's a really good metaphor. Yes They have many fewer arrows in the quiver and also Dan anybody who, anybody who says, I wonder if I'm emotionally mature, I would almost bet that they're not. Because in asking that question, you're showing self-reflection. You have run these things through,

you've assessed it, you've compared it to yourself and you come up with that little worry. But that is something that the emotionally immature person doesn't. In fact, one of the things that always catches my attention is when I tell people the title of my book and they say, oh, well, at least I know I'm not that. I'm like, oh gosh, I wonder. So do you think, I mean, you probably don't have data on this, but do you think most people

are emotionally mature or immature? What a great question. You know, of course, from my point of view in clinical psychology, and I must add reading the paper every day, it looks like there's an awful lot of emotional immaturity out there. So I'm probably the wrong person to ask about the statistics on this. I would love at some point for someone to do a study to assess this. But I would say that emotional immaturity seems to be quite prevalent.

When children are raised by emotionally immature people, how do they tend to cope with that? Well, the child blames themselves. That's how they cope with it. And that's because children being young are very egocentric, and't pay attention to them, they figure the reason must be that they're not very interesting. Or if the parent is egocentric and self-preoccupied and doesn't have time for the child, the child unfortunately concludes, oh, okay, well, if I try to break into that egocentrism with my problems or my needs, then I see I'm a bother, I'm a pest, I'm a nuisance. They interpret the immature behavior as being something about them,

that if they were a better little person, that parent would pay attention to them, would not be so egocentric, would have empathy for them and caring, would be able to get close and make that connection. But when the parent is afraid of emotional intimacy, and emotional intimacy just means that we share honestly what's going on with us at the deepest level, but when the parent can't do that, the child concludes, oh my gosh, you know, the innermost part of me, the most real part of me is not attractive to my parent. It must be something wrong with me.

And so, unfortunately, the child blames themselves for all of these characteristics, and it goes very deeply into their self-concept, because the parent is the original mirror that we gaze into to find out who we are and what our standing is in the world. Coming up, Lindsay C. Gibson explains the two main coping strategies of adult children of emotionally immature parents. She also talks about why adult children of EIPs often turn to what she calls healing

fantasies and she outlines some healthier ways to respond to emotionally immature parents and also emotionally immature people in general. After this. Hello, I'm Alice Levine. General. After this. for a Wimbledon-themed scandal. Yes, we're telling the story of Boris Becker, how he went from being a tennis child star Wimbledon champion to having a one-night stand in a London bar that turned into a headline-grabbing paternity row. And then tax evasion that saw him behind bars just a couple of miles from Wimbledon Centre Court.

So if you need something just a little juicier than the current rolling coverage of aces and juices and people queuing for things, then this might just be for you. To find out the full story, follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and ad free on Wondery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. Hello, I'm Hannah. And I'm Saruti. And we are the hosts of Red Handed, a weekly true crime podcast. Every week on Red Handed, we get stuck into the most talked about cases.

From Idaho student killings, the Delphi murders, and our recent rundown of the Murdoch saga. Last year, we also started a second weekly show, Shorthand, which is just an excuse for us to talk about anything we find interesting because it's our show and we can do what we like. We've covered the death of Princess Diana, an unholy Quran written in Saddam Hussein's blood, the gruesome history of European witch hunting, and the very uncomfortable phenomenon of genetic sexual attraction. Whatever the case, we want to know what pushes people to the extremes of human behavior.

Like, can someone give consent to be cannibalized? What drives a child to kill? And what's the psychology of a terrorist? Listen to Red Handed wherever you get your podcasts and access our bonus shorthand episodes exclusively on Amazon Music or by subscribing to Wondry Plus in Apple Podcasts or the Wondry app.

Before we get back to the show, just a reminder about the Healthy Habits course over on the 10% Happier app taught by Kelly McGonigal and Alexis Santos. To access it, just download the 10% Happier app wherever you get your apps. In your writing, you talk about two classic coping mechanisms among children of emotionally immature parents. One is internalizing, the other is externalizing. Can you say a little bit more about these two ideas?

Yes. They were my attempt to understand the differences that I saw in people from the same parents. How does this happen that this person is in my office trying to improve themselves, talking about the issues, trying to make things better? In other words, being very emotionally mature. And they're describing a sibling or many siblings who really are very emotionally immature,

not functioning well at all, very fused with the family, very entangled with the family. And that's always interested me, like how in the world does that happen? So when I was trying to really understand what kind of person comes to psychotherapy or what kind of person comes to a bookstore and looks for self-help, I mean, think about how self-reflective that is.

I mean, it's like a major indicator of maturity, of emotional maturity. But I began to see people kind of sorting into two groups. And the internalizer is a person who, from the very get-go, I mean, they have done research with babies who have started out in life with more perceptiveness and more physical sensitivity than other babies. So this is very, very early. The more perceptive babies looked around, they were curious, they just looked into things basically, and they were very sensitive. And I think that initial perceptiveness and sensitivity turns into a kind of awareness of other people

and of oneself. There's a lot going on internally in that child because they process it and they think about it and they make connections. So these people are avid learners, by the way. They tend to be learners their whole life because of that love of putting stuff together inside themselves and getting better at something.

So that internalization brings in more experience and it also ends up complexifying them. They become a more complex person with deeper, more nuanced feelings. So that internalizer really becomes sort of, you might say, self-modulating, self-guiding, because they have the ability on the inside to perceive reality in a very accurate way, because they are so perceptive. And they also, unfortunately, suffer more under the parenting of emotionally immature people because their feelings get hurt so easily. And they are very, very aware

when someone is not paying attention to them or ridiculing them or criticizing them. They have that tendency to take that in, in a way that can cause a lot of anxiety and sometimes even depression. So that's the internalizer. Stuff goes in, it gets processed, and just basically seems to be a deeper kind of person. Now the externalizer, you can think of them as someone who really kicks experience out of themselves. So an experience comes in and they react and externalize it. It's almost like they spit it back out.

They don't take it in, mull it over, try to figure it out, wonder about it. They just do something to dissipate the sensation or the amount of disturbance that it might cause. So externalizers live by the rule that it's somebody else's fault because when you live in an externalizing mindset, it looks like that. It looks like this person did something I don't like. I, of course, reacted in this way.

Could there be any question that anyone would react any differently? That caused a big problem. It was their fault because all I did was react to them. And they have no idea that their reactions are a problem, or I should say that their reactivity is a problem. So the externalizers always think it's somebody else's fault. They always look outside themselves for the solutions and they tend to not take

in information that other people are trying to give them in a relationship that could help them grow and could help the relationship. So instead of responding to their spouse's suggestion to get therapy, what happens? Of course, it's the spouse's fault. And externalizers are the people who will say things like, hey, I'm just saying what I think, or hey, this is just me, I can't change. They have no awareness of the impact

that they have on other people because they can't take it in in such a way that they could get that information from internal processing. They're stuck with the reactivity. Okay, so we've talked about some of the ways children of emotionally immature parents cope. It will broaden at some point to talk about

emotionally immature people generally, not just parents. But let's stick with emotionally immature parents now. If you're a grown up, and you've been raised by people who you're pretty sure are emotionally immature, and the relationship is still causing you problems, how do you deal with that? One of the ways that people deal with it, unfortunately, is by engaging in what I call a healing fantasy. And that is that the person believes that one of these days, they will find the answer,

the magic key that will create a good relationship between them and the emotionally immature person. So the healing fantasy goes something like this, like I will keep trying to reach them, I will keep trying to understand them, I will keep trying to soothe them till they get to the point where they say, oh my gosh I'm so grateful for all that you've done for me all these years, and now I want to pay you back by talking about what you'd like to talk about, and I'd like to have us get to know each other better. It's something like that. I'm exaggerating, but they

hope that one day the parent will have this enlightening awareness of how they've been and will want to correct that and then there will be a good relationship. So that is what we all do with problems with our parents because we need our parents. We can't afford to be critical or cynical about them when we're growing up. We have to believe the best of them for our own maturational needs. Later on, when we come to realize the limitations that our parents have, or maybe we realize that we don't like certain things about them very much, then this calls for a deeper level of dealing with the situation.

And a lot of times people find this out when they have major life events like getting married, moving into their first new house, maybe the parent gets ill or maybe the person has children and now they're interfacing with their parent as a grandparent, watching how their parent is handling their kids. And there can be this awareness that, you know, I really can't tolerate this in this situation. It comes to a head. And so people have different ways of responding to that. Some people move internally, that would be, of course, the internalizer,

and they try to find ways of understanding the parent and dealing with the parent in some other way than just reacting and getting mad at them, that kind of thing. And then other people, they react. They can get caught in a cycle of anger and blame toward their parents as well, because they're not dealing very well with it. And they don't know how to deal with it because they have proven for themselves

that these parents don't take feedback very well, they don't listen very well, and they really don't wanna change. So we can talk more about concretely what to do, but overall, in order to deal with the emotionally immature parent, you have to build your own self-awareness and the awareness of your own emotional reactions,

as well as understanding the concept of their immaturity. And both of those things position you to give a more realistic and perhaps helpful response to the situation. Can you say more about that? So you write about nurturing your relationship to yourself, and I think that's what you were just referencing just now, and then also understanding how immaturity works. Can you just put a little meat on the bone with both of those concepts? Sure. Yeah, this is such an important topic. The self-discovery that people go through in psychotherapy is enormously important. And psychotherapy of course is not the only way that you discover yourself or get to know yourself better. But it's so important

because one of the things that emotionally immature parents do is they don't allow you to really get to know yourself or express yourself because they are very concerned with you playing an appropriate role in their life. They want you to be just like them. They don't support major individuality in their children. Or lots of times they'll allow one or two children to have their individuality, often through neglect, unfortunately. But then they will kind of enmesh

with the rest of the children who don't seem to be able to create their own lives. But those emotionally mature parents do not help their children learn about their feelings, examine their thoughts, learn how to rely on other people for help. They just don't provide that parental guidance and that emotional connection. So their children end up with the wrong ideas about themselves that I talked about earlier, and they also don't know themselves very well

because no one has really expressed an interest in their deeper being, their most basic personality. The parent just isn't interested in knowing them at that level of emotional intimacy. So, it becomes extremely important later in life for the people who have suffered that to learn how to, well, I started to say to learn how to nurture themselves, but first they have to find themselves, they have to know themselves.

I was thinking about in reading your book, Dan, about the role that meditation and mindfulness can give to a person who has not been encouraged to find themselves, because it gives people a starting point for realizing that they exist. Now, that seems like a crazy thing to say, but if you're growing up with egocentric people who don't have good empathy for others and don't really put

much energy into emotionally connecting with you, sometimes children can feel not only emotionally lonely but kind of like, do I even matter? Do I even exist? And so experiences like mindfulness or meditation are a wonderful existential experiencing of the fact that I'm here, that this is me. And so nurturing is very important, but also beginning to build an experiencing of the self that leads be a spouse could be a boss could be a co worker the concept of emotional and maturity. Is often such a relief to them because as i said before what we all do as children is we blame ourselves. We do not blame our parents. Remember, the child's egocentricity means that all roads lead back to them. So they figure that it must have been something they did. And they don't have the concept, the ideas to understand

emotional immaturity and how it affects people. So when they're given that information, emotional immaturity and how it affects people. So when they're given that information, it's like a light goes on, because the theory of emotional immaturity explains the behavior and predicts the behavior so reliably that people are just amazed at what it has opened up And people are just amazed at what it has opened up for them in terms of understanding what's going on. So instead of them feeling crazy or selfish or bad about themselves, they instead can

label these behaviors and understand that this is coming from the parent or the co-worker or whoever and it's something about them. It's not something that they have to internalize and wonder how they cause this behavior. Now they have a roadmap to what makes people behave this way. So they're experiencing in their personal life the same kind of excitement that I experienced in my early training when I was learning about how people develop and what emotional immaturity and maturity look like.

That excitement of the idea and what it explains is incredibly healing. And then if at the same time you are interested in getting to know yourself and nurturing yourself, that's a very powerful combination for growth. That makes a lot of sense and it's probably good for anybody whether you've been raised by emotionally immature people or not or whether you have an emotionally immature coworker or boss or not. So yes to all of that, and I can absolutely see how both working on yourself and understanding

yourself and understanding how emotional maturity works, all of a sudden how that would make your world make sense and how exciting that would be too. And I'm also curious, once you've got this understanding, both of yourself and of the mechanism of the minds of the people with whom you're interacting and perhaps of the people who raised you, how do you then handle yourself in the face of people whose behavior may be extremely annoying or provocative?

Yeah, it's not easy, is it? Extremely annoying, provocative, emotionally immature people are difficult for everybody to handle. And that's what I emphasize with people that I work with, that it's very hard to know what to do because these people by definition are not playing by the rules.

So if you expect them to listen to you, take your point of view, for the purpose of the conversation at least, self-reflect, have a connection with you, they're already miles ahead of you in their defensive reactions. And so it's very hard for you to play catch up when you don't understand what you're dealing with.

Because an emotionally immature person will say and do things that pull you right off your train of thought that are so unrelated or outrageous that it stops your mind from working. A friend of mine called it brain scramble. That is, you're following along, you think, and then it's like all of a sudden you have no idea where this is coming from, what they're talking about, how this relates to what you brought up in the first place, and they're all over the map.

And when you try to follow that and make sense of it, you are out of the game, because the whole point is for you to give up. So these are very difficult people to interact with and to sort of have any kind of effectiveness with. Maybe I could just give some ideas for how to deal with them in general, and then we can go on from there. So I call this the maturity awareness approach,

and it's in my first book of the Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. The first thing is that you detach and observe what they're doing. This is where your conceptual understanding of emotional immaturity comes in really handy because you are not under the gun to respond right away. You do have the right to step back and observe what's happening and look at them and their effects on you. You can think about their thoughts, you can think about your thoughts, and you can name it so that you have some consciousness of what is going on in the moment. So you first become very present and of course you know any practice like mindfulness

or meditation will help you do that because you become familiar with that process of centering yourself and staying aware of your reality and of your existence, so to speak. And then you can express what you need to express to them and let go. In other words, when you express something to an emotionally immature person, you are not trying to get them to change. It's for your benefit to express. It's not to change them or transform them with an emotionally mature person, or I call them EIPs. You want to go in focused on the outcome that you want. Like where are you going to go with the interaction?

What is your intention? You have a goal in mind. You're not trying to improve the relationship. You're just trying to have a successful interaction. Because if you try to improve the relationship, now you've gone into emotionally intimate territory. And that is what they can't do, and it will make them even more defensive. So you're just trying to have a successful interaction. And then your job is to maintain enough management sense that you realize it's going to be up to you to have the interaction go the way that you want it to. In other words, you don't expect them to be emotionally open or emotionally reciprocal because then you'll just feel frustrated and

invalidated. You want to set yourself the goal of communicating clearly but without expecting a satisfying emotional exchange because you probably won't get it. And then you can set boundaries and not go along with whatever they have in mind for you. So you manage the interaction in a way that allows you to stay yourself and not fall under the spell of their emotionally immature relationship system. So people have to find a way of maintaining an optimal distance from emotionally mature people. You may want to preserve the family bond by visiting, but maybe it won't work so well if you're trying for a deeper relationship. There's no harm in trying. I never say to people,

don't talk to them, don't try, give up, it's no use. Never, because I don't know that that's true. And sometimes people have had some rather good experiences doing that. Most of the time, no, but that's not for me to say. So you can have them keep an optimal distance by setting boundaries, limiting contact, and thereby kind of stopping the drain that happens when emotionally immature people sort of suck up your energy and give very little back except frustration. So in terms of some ideas for how you manage EIPs, first of all, you want to step out of the rescuer role.

EIPs do this thing where they're always presenting themselves as the victim of something, and you are supposed to feel for them and jump in there. I always tell people, it's not good to over identify with the problems they're telling you about, which of course internalizers are want to do because they have such good empathy,

but it doesn't help with emotionally immature people because it doesn't get through to them very well. They don't have a good receptive capacity for things like empathy and love. It's never enough. It's kind of water off a duck's back. You can also be slippery and sidestep. You can say things like, I don't know,

I can't really answer that right now. You know, hmm. You can sidestep issues with them. And you can agree with their feelings, but not their demands. So you might say you know I guess you're pretty upset with me or I know you think this is a mistake so you're empathizing with them but you're not saying oh what can I do to make you not upset or what can I do to not make this mistake? You're just

empathizing that they don't see it the way you do. So when people do the slippery sidestep thing, sometimes people say, well isn't that avoidance? And really it is technically avoidance, but it's not passive. It's both tactical and strategic because when someone is not sincere in their interest in connecting with you and they're trying to Really make things less clear instead of clearer Then being slippery and sidestepping their efforts to control you is a good thing and it's a gentle way of doing it You can also lead the interaction, change the subject, introduce different topics, deepen the conversation with questions,

and you can create space for yourself. You can leave the room. You can limit the length of your exposure. Finally, you can set limits by stopping them. You don't invite them. You can even cut off contact and move into estrangement if it was really, really bad. So these are all some of the ways that people can react differently to their emotionally immature people. And I just want people to remember,

though, that you can do this in a couple of styles. One style might be to be what I would call the prize fighter, that you go in ready to confront, ready to fight it out, ready to have the argument. That's fine. That's a way of moving forward with whatever agenda you have that you want to accomplish. That's perfectly fine.

It's in some ways kind of like the American way. We want to see the action, you know. But other times people can handle things in more of a Tai Chi master approach or a jujitsu approach where you are again sidestepping being slippery but showing a graceful Necessary avoidance of some of the ways that they try to pull you into conflict or going along with They're imposing their will on you and I tell people, you know, whichever way you go about it,

if you end up feeling like you are being true to yourself and being honest with them, mission accomplished. That is a huge success right there. Doesn't matter what it looks like and it doesn't matter what your style is. It sounds like this could be easy to screw up in that you've just armed us with a bunch of tactics and strategies, but emotionally immature people are experts at provoking dysregulation.

So it's pretty easy to lose it and forget the strategies and tactics because you've been hijacked by your own amygdala. Absolutely. And emotionally immature people, by the way, are instinctive. They're instinctive fighters. They have a lot of natural defensiveness. But what they can't hide or what they can't obfuscate is they can't hide the confusion and the way

that what they're doing and saying just doesn't make sense. If you can see through that and remain in a somewhat detached place, and you can be prepared for this, that makes all the difference in the world. Like I said, it's never easy. But the difference between standing back and observing or being mindful of what's going on, engaging your prefrontal cortex in labeling and naming the behaviors as you see them, that is your power.

Because emotionally immature people will pull you right off of your own self-awareness. You will become a set of reactions like they are. And that's why staying in touch with yourself when you're interacting with them is so critical. Because it's the one thing that emotionally immature people try to do is to pull you off of yourself so that you will fuse with them or enmesh with them and be sort of like a reflection of them or mirror them. They like that kind of mirroring relationship as opposed to two separate people. Sounds like you can grind down

the emotionally immature person by being mature. Yeah, good point that persistence is everything with this, and repetition is everything with this. So sometimes my clients and I will talk about an approach if they're going home for a visit or maybe going home that night to dinner with their husband. What I tell them is you have to know where you want to go. That's the being prepared part, that's the setting a goal part. You have to know where you want to go. That's the being prepared part, that's the setting a goal part. You

have to know where you want to go and then you repeat it and repeat it and repeat it and you're persistent about it. What wears down is that emotionally immature people are not prepared for repetition. What they're used to is they propose something or insist upon something and other people react and then they may protest and then they do what they want. Meaning they do what the emotionally mature person wants. So that's what they're expecting. When a person stays calm and they repeat persistently their position and what they want. They may show a little empathy to soften it but you know basically they're saying

this is what's going to happen. They have no recourse for that. It's like what parents do with three and four year olds. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Well actually it's what parents do with children their whole lives because you keep repeating it, repeating it, and then at age 25 or 30, the child comes back and says, you know what I realized? And then they tell you exactly what you've been telling them for 20 years. I do that to my wife a lot.

I realize things she's been telling me for 13 years. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, we're all constantly waking up. Seems to be the name of the game. But anyway, that's what really works in terms of sort of wearing them down or getting what you need ultimately is that process of just continue repeating it.

But so many people give up. They say, oh they didn't listen or they won't do it or because they have been trained to be passive by emotionally immature people. EIPs are very dominant. They can be scary. They can control you by withholding love. They have a whole bunch of ways of making you afraid of them. They will behave in ways that make other people move into a more passive or confused state where they just end up going along with them. So when you are persistent and stay in touch with what it is that you want to see happen,

they're really at a loss for that because being immature, they don't have great staying power. They make a big fuss and they try to control things and be the dominant one. But when it comes to methodically and carefully keeping on a certain path, that's very hard for them, actually. So you can actually get a lot done through that repetition and persistence approach. After the break, Lindsay talks about why it is so hard

to let go of our healing fantasies, what role compassion should and should not play in your relationships with EIPs, and what healing can actually and realistically look like. Keep it here. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankenbaum. And in our series Legacy, we look at the lives of some of the most famous people to have ever lived and ask if they have the reputation they deserve. In this series, we look at J Edgar Hoover.

He was the director of the FBI for half a century. An immensely powerful political figure, he was said to know everything about everyone. He held the ear of eight presidents and terrified them all. When asked why he didn't fire Hoover, JFK replied, you don't fire God. From chasing gangsters to pursuing communists to relentlessly persecuting Dr. Martin Luther King and civil rights activists, Hoover's dirty tricks tactics have been endlessly echoed

in the years since his death. And his political playbook still shapes American politics today. Follow Legacy Now wherever you listen to podcasts. Divorced beheaded died, divorced beheaded survived. We know the six wives of Henry VIII as pawns in his hunt for a son, but their lives were so much more than just being the king's wives. I'm Arisha Skidmore Williams. And I'm Brooke Zifrin. And we're the hosts of Wondry's podcast, Even the Royals.

In each episode, we'll pull back the curtain on royal families past and present from all over the world to show you the darker side of what it means to be royalty. We rarely see Henry VIII's wives in their own light, as women who used the tools available to them to hold on to power. Some women won the game, others lost. But they were all unexpected agents in their own stories. Being a part of a royal family might seem enticing, but more often than not, it comes at the expense of everything else, like your freedom, your privacy, and sometimes even your head.

Follow even the royals on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Go deeper and get more to the story with Wondery's top history podcasts, including American Scandal, Legacy, and Black History for Real. It seems like a key move here is dropping what you call the fantasy of relationship repair. I wonder though, when you're talking about parents or spouses or anybody who's emotionally immature, but when you're talking about parents in particular, that seems like a tough fantasy to drop. And then once you've dropped it, where do you get those primordial emotional needs met? Well, you get them met through yourself.

You get them met through finding other people who are more emotionally mature than the EIP that you're involved with. But they can't replace your parents, you know? That's true, that's true. That's a really sad and poignant thing because we have a deep bond with our parents. You know, John Bowlby, one of the original attachment researchers said that the basis of bonding was familiarity and proximity. Okay? Doesn't say anything about emotional connection, doesn't say anything about listening to each other, empathy, nothing. Proximity and familiarity. So, yes, we have very deep bonds with our parents. Of course we want it to go well

with them. Of course we want a better relationship with them. So there's nothing wrong with that. That's one of the things in therapy that we have to appreciate the poignancy of the healing fantasy. Because like you say, Dan, who doesn't want that? But the fact is that if you go at an emotionally immature person,

wanting a more emotionally engaged relationship, wanting a deeper relationship in which they empathize with you, you actually are going to scare them in a way that's going to get you less of what you want. It's a delicate balance. It's like you want to give up the more unrealistic parts of your healing fantasy, that is that one day they'll say, ah, I can't believe how insensitive I've been to you. You know, let's go out and have a deep talk. If you become more realistic about what you might be able to get from them and detach a little bit so you don't have pressure behind it, you might be able to have a little more of the closeness that you would like. But it doesn't work when that's what you are expecting and that's what you're trying to get in a big way.

So I always recommend to people to not over expect what they can get, but to find other ways of having pleasant interactions with their parents in which they can spend time with the parent, but to stay aware of your own limits and your own endurance because these people can be exhausting. And so maybe it works for you to have an optimal distance from them. Maybe you don't live next door to them, or maybe you do, but you have boundaries. You limit the amount of time that you spend with them so that the relationship can be as good as it possibly can be. I'm not looking for people to give up on their relationship with their parents. I understand and

I appreciate that bond. You know, as one person said to me, he's my dad. It's like, I know. So, we're not trying to get rid of that feeling. We're just trying to be realistic about what kind of relationship we can have with them as an adult. Last question from me, and this is a bit of a tricky one, but I'm going to ask about the role of compassion. I want to be clear when I say compassion for emotionally immature people, I'm not saying you condone their behavior or encourage their behavior.

What I mean is that you might be able to understand how they got this way, probably through pain, which might relieve you of some of the blinding anger. Does what I'm saying make sense to you? And if so, how would one operationalize it? Yeah, I'm so glad you asked that question because that in some ways I think is the question, has so many different levels to it, and it also involves issues of forgiveness as well. But for compassion, I think that there is a time in therapy or in your own self-work where compassion actually, it will evolve. Your compassion will evolve as you understand more

about what emotional immaturity is because it's not a great way to live. They are living in a state of rigid defensiveness. They can't get close to people, the world often appears very threatening to them, their feelings color things, they distort, dismiss, and deny reality. So you can imagine how well that goes. They're not living a fulfilling life. So as you understand more about what makes them tick, and you understand more, especially in your own self-research or in therapy, where they came from. How did their parents treat them? What kind of experiences did they go through in childhood? What traumas did they have?

Did their family move between countries when they were four years old? There are all kinds of things that can happen. But that compassion is not the first thing I go for when I'm doing psychotherapy for someone. And I don't think it should be the first thing that people go for when they read my books. Because compassion is a little too close

to what the emotionally immature person has been using all along to gain the advantage in the relationship, which is, it's all about me, let me tell you what happened to me, let me tell you how hard it was for me, let me tell you what a rough life I've had. Because the kids of these people often get that kind of message like feel for me have have sympathy for my plight They've already gotten a lot of that from those parents So I really allow it to evolve

Sooner or later, especially, you know when we're talking about understanding some of the behaviors in terms of their parents' history, they may begin to feel some compassion. That's great because it's just part of the complex understanding of what they've been through with that parent. But to, I guess, go for that right away or to see that as sort of a solution to the relationship, I think that has to naturally evolve.

I think as we mature, if we're self-aware, we tend to become more compassionate because we were saying earlier, it's like we remember all the stuff that we did and we remember our failings, and we start to put that in context and then that makes us feel more merciful toward other people. So I think it's a good thing, but I think it has to come to you at the right time for it to be helpful instead of making you either feel a little guilty or feel like you should

suppress your anger or suppress your disappointment because now you understand what they've been through. No, I think it's very important to be true to your own experience, to have empathy for yourself and compassion for yourself. So many of these people that are adult children of these kinds of parents have not learned how to have compassion for themselves, first of all,

because the parent doesn't do that. So I never pushed that. In fact, the time or two that I tried it early in my career, my clients set me straight right quick. They were furious that I had sort of, well, let's understand, you know, it's like, no, I'm not ready for that.

And lots of times they aren't ready for forgiveness either. So forgiveness is great, again, if you get there as a natural part of your development, but you can't make somebody forgive someone. It's an evolution. And so I think we have to be mindful of that when we talk about things like compassion and forgiveness, that they are

relieving experiences when we have them at the right time, when we've developed into them. But it actually pushes us backwards when people try to move us into that state of mind prematurely, it will come if it's going to come as you develop your own self-awareness. Point well taken and it makes a lot of sense. I know I said that was my last question, but I'm going to ask my two closing questions that I always ask. One is, is there something I should have asked but didn't? Yeah, I think I would say, what do people have to do

to get over this experience with emotionally mature people? And I would say, you don't have to claw back what was lost from that person. You don't have to go back and make them give it to you again because you have everything you need inside yourself and you always have, but you have been detached from it or unhooked from it by the eclipsing needs of the emotionally immature person.

So you can get your needs met with other people and through your own self work, you don't have to go and have a remedial experience with the parent or with the emotionally immature person. That's one of the beautiful things about psychological development on your own is that it's not like that childhood was your only chance to get that experience. You can create it for yourself. The other thing I would mention is that you don't have to master the EIP.

In other words, you don't have to take control of them or be dominant over them. You just need to be conscious and observing. You don't need to confront them if you don't want to. Sometimes that can be way too hard. But if you can feel when somebody is imposing their will on you and you can label behaviors that make you feel small or make you feel bad about yourself, You can master your own reactivity. That's really the point. It's not to master them. It's not to get them to change. It is to work with your true responses in such a way that they begin to shift and you start to have more confidence and more self-awareness as you go about your life.

One other thing, and that is that you want people to trust their awareness of what hurts and what makes them feel bad when they're around EIPs. To get back in touch with those self-protective instincts, that emotional self-protection, that sensation of safety and unsafety is hugely important to being able to find the people that you will be able to have that kind of reciprocal relationship with.

Chock full of insight and practical information. I really appreciate it. The final question is, can you please plug your books and any other resources you've put out into the universe? Gladly. So at this point, I have four books. The first book is Who You Were Meant to Be. That came out a long time ago in 2000. The book that we've been mostly concentrating on today is Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents.

That's been an Amazon bestseller in its categories for a long time. It's fortunately sold very well. It's translated into 28 different languages. And then the next book is called Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents. This is actually turned into a series. And the third book is called Self-Care for Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. And that's the first two books really talk about the syndrome and what you can do about it.

And then the third book is self-care in the sense of its little short insights into yourself and EIPs in a way that you can read at the beach, by the pool, before you go to bed. It's just easy reading. Then my next book, which is called Disentangling from EIPs, is going to be out in July of 2023. Anybody who wants more information about the books or what I do can look up my website, which is drlindseywithanagibson.com,

drlindseygibson.com. Lindsay, thank you so much for doing this. Really appreciate it. Oh, thank you for having me. It's been fun. Thanks again to Lindsay C. Gibson. Don't forget we've got another episode coming up from her in two days. Before I go I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and

Eleanor Vasili. We get additional pre-production support from my guy Wombo Wu, an old friend of mine. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer, DJ Cashmere is our managing producer, and Nick Thorburn of the Van Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier, and I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondry.com slash survey.

From Wondry, this is Black History for Real. I'm Francesca Ramsey. And I'm Conscious Lee. And every week we're going to be chronicling a lot of trials and triumphs from black folks who ain't never heard about, even though we've been doing the damn thing since forever. Together we'll weave Black history's most overlooked figures back into the rightful place in American culture and all over the world. Because on this show, you're gonna hear a little less... In August 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. And a little bit more... Sam looks to his fellow students.

They're just as mad as he is. He can't stop thinking about the tragic war in Vietnam and the violent backlash to the civil rights movement. It's like the whole world falling apart and ain't nobody ready to make it right. The school board could do something to change it, but they'd have to listen first. Follow Black History for Real on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts.