Were my parents emotionally immature?
That is an important question for you to answer, because if they were it almost certainly has impacted your experience of the world since you were a child. It’s something you deserve to know.
If your parents were emotionally immature, you may:
have believed growing up that your feelings and needs are unimportant because your parents failed to acknowledge them (do you focus on what your partner or boss needs before understanding what you need?)
have had no support in understanding and feeling your emotions, forcing you to internalize them and maybe turn them against yourself (do you experience critical self talk?)
were forced to maintain a relationship with your parent on their terms (do you hold onto relationships that make you unhappy? Or try everything to change yourself, so the other person will love you?)
feel emotionally dependent on, rather than emotionally connected to, your parent (do you experience deep emotional strife when your partner is emotional or distant?)
Take a moment to slow down and check in with yourself. Stop reading after this paragraph, go back and read each point above, close your eyes, and sit with it for 30 seconds. Notice what comes up. Does your stomach turn a bit? Maybe you feel some tension in your heart? Perhaps visions of your past come up.
If you’re getting the sense you experienced the points above, this article is for you.
As a next step, let’s seek to understand your parents a bit better. If your parents were emotionally immature, they may have:
struggled to focus beyond themselves.
frequently taken action to protect themselves, even when it hurt those around them.
only been capable of shallow feelings.
They live this way because their parents didn’t make space for them to feel, understand, and express their emotions. They were forced to keep their feelings in and discount their needs to maintain a relationship with their parents. They were forced to adapt to their parents’ emotional dysregulation.
If your parents were emotionally immature, they, most likely, grew up with emotionally immature parents.
They still needed to get their needs met, but their parents weren’t in tune with them. So, they learned to manipulate rather than advocate. They were forced to manipulate their parents to get the attention, love, and resources they needed to grow up.
Imagine being your eight-year-old mother or father, sensing their mom or dad is about to have an emotional outburst. Their little body and brain is terrified so they calculate what they need to do to prevent the outburst and act.
Whatever it was they did to pacify their parent, it was not about their needs. It was about their parents’ needs. Whatever your mom or dad needed or was feeling in that moment was forced down and became secondary to whatever their parents needed to defuse.
All that thinking and pushing down feelings requires great effort and skill. Their bandwidth was spent identifying and neutralizing threats and figuring out how to subversively get their needs met, leaving them with little emotional space for those around them.
This plays out over and over and becomes how they experience the world. They grow up unaware that the experience of life could be different. There are attracted to partners that feel like home—other emotionally immature people. Their kids (you) trigger all kinds of emotional buttons. They lose themselves emotionally. And the cycle repeats.
If you’ve just realized you have emotionally immature parents, you’ve completed the hardest part.
Awareness is 80% of the work. The vast majority of people never become aware. If you noticed for the first time today that your parents were emotionally unaware, you’ve taken a huge step forward in your life. Congratulations.
Be careful not to judge yourself or them. This is all part of the human condition. No one is bad. No one is wrong. It’s simply true. And discovering what is true is what sets you free.
So, what to do next?
This stage is about awareness. It would be easy to finish reading, step back into your day, and completely forget what you’ve discovered here. Don’t let that happen.
Next time you're with your parents, if they are still in your life, try to notice what comes up for you when they act. Maybe they sneer at their partner over a little mistake and you feel a twinge in your stomach—that's something to notice. Maybe they get worked up at the moment before dinner when everything is ready at once and needs to be plated, and you feel your own anxiety rising—that's something to notice.
You don't need to do anything else. Simply start to notice. Most of the rest takes care of itself.
p.s. remember, there is always time to develop your awareness.