For those who feel alone in their relationships
By Malynn Kuangparichat (Psy.D., J.D.) and Anna Youhouse (M.A.)
When you were a kid, you may have wanted emotional support from one or both of your parents, but they weren’t able to connect at the emotional level with you. Even now, when you interact with your parents, you’re left with a sense of emotional emptiness.
And you bring that loneliness from childhood into your adult life, continuing to feel alone, even in relationships, and not feeling like you’re able to get your emotional needs met.
You may have parents who weren’t able to connect on a deeper level with you due to factors from their own life.
To put it in the words of Lindsay C. Gibson, PsyD, psychologist and author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, you may have grown up with emotionally immature parents.
When we talk about emotionally immature parents, it’s important to understand that we’re not trying to place blame on any parents.
Breaking free from emotionally immature parents is about viewing the patterns of interactions from an objective stance because a lot of these patterns happen unintentionally.
What is Emotional Intimacy?
When you develop emotional intimacy with someone, you feel fully safe and secure to express all of your feelings. You feel heard, and you feel like the person wants to know you and not judge you. What it really comes down to is the fact that you can really depend on them emotionally. And you also feel at ease to just be yourself.
As an example, you can experience these same feelings of safety and security when you work with a psychologist or therapist.
Ideally, you have an emotional connection with your therapist, and you’re in a nonjudgmental environment where you can fully talk about your feelings and your emotions in a way that allows you to process and understand your emotions.
For children who had that emotional connection with their parents, they’re able to develop that ability to be comfortable in their emotions, understand their emotions, and feel that connection with others. They can carry on these skills to develop emotional intimacy throughout their life.
If you didn’t experience this connection, then you may feel that sense of emotional emptiness or loneliness. You may not know what to do with your feelings, and that’s okay.
We’re going to touch upon the 4 types of emotionally immature parents, from Lindsay C. Gibson’s Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents.
We’re also going to talk about how to break free so you can develop emotional intimacy and stop feeling alone in relationships.
How Your Emotionally Immature Parents Affected You As a Child
As we had mentioned, when talking about emotionally immature parents, we’re not placing blame on any parents. More often than not, these patterns are unintentional.
We understand that mixed feelings may come up, so we encourage you to approach this topic as an observer of your experiences.
So, moving forward with our conversation, it’s helpful to view patterns of interactions with your parents from an objective standpoint.
Why You Feel Alone
When you were young, your parents may have struggled to display attentiveness, interest, and empathy towards you.
At the root of it, your parents were uncomfortable with their own emotional needs. If they don’t understand their own emotional needs, it’s harder to understand your emotional needs.
So, you as the child, weren’t getting those emotional needs met. This is where the feeling of emptiness and loneliness shows up.
Because you didn’t learn how to truly understand and copy with your own feelings, the pattern continues into your adulthood.
Ultimately, you’re left feeling this loneliness and you want to be able to connect with others, but you don’t know how because you haven’t received that from your parents.
Because emotionally immature parents manifest in various ways, we’re going to briefly touch upon the different types in this next section.
Different Types of Emotionally Immature Parents
As explained in Lindsay C. Gordon’s book, there are four types of emotionally immature parents that we’ll give a brief overview here.
Type 1: The Emotional Parent
The first type of emotionally immature parents is the emotional parent. These are the parents that can feel like they have a range of extreme emotions.
For instance, one day they’re in a calm state. And another day, they’re in an angry outburst state where you’re trying to avoid their emotions. You feel like you’re walking on eggshells around them, and that can create a lot of stress for you as the child to be around this type of emotionally immature parent.
Type 2: The Driven Parent
Another type of emotionally mature parent is the driven parent. These are the parents who want everything to be goal-oriented and perfect. They’re frequently trying to control and manipulate their child’s life. They create an environment that is task oriented and rigid. What’s more, they want their child to be a certain way, and achieve certain standards and expectations.
So this can create that emotional loneliness in the child because they feel that their needs are met only when they reach certain expectations. Otherwise, they’re not able to get that emotional support from their caregiver.
Type 3: The Passive Parent
The third type of emotionally immature parent is the passive parent. These are the parents that avoid dealing with emotions altogether. In other words, they take the backseat in the car.
They may depend on the other caregiver to be the driven parent or the emotional parent. They take the backseat, and let the other parent lead the way. As a passive parent, they withdraw their emotions.
Outwardly, they can be seen as easygoing and playful. But they don’t feel like they know how to parent their child. For instance, they can avoid dealing with abuse or neglect, or how to really handle their child’s problem.
Again, these patterns are usually done unintentionally by the emotionally immature parent because they most likely had parents who weren’t able to support their emotional needs.
Type 4: The Rejecting Parent
The last and fourth type of emotionally immature parent is the rejecting parents. These are the types that avoid emotional intimacy altogether. They don’t spend time with their children, and their child doesn’t feel safe coming to them with any kind of problem.
The rejecting parent is the type that has the least empathy. When we say empathy, we mean someone is able to connect and try to understand someone else’s emotions and experiences.
For this type of parent, they don’t know how to connect with their child because they’re unable to understand their own needs and their own emotions. So, they really can’t handle and communicate with their child about how they’re feeling.
And for the child, they see themselves as a bother. They don’t want to come to their parent or ask them questions when they need help coping through life because the parent is not involved at all.
How Emotionally Immature Parents Provide For Their Kids
So we can see that these four types share similar characteristics, and they’re all emotionally unreliable. Specifically, they’re emotionally unavailable and aren’t able to understand their child’s emotions.
In short, they’re not in a place to meet their child’s needs, understand them, and bring that emotional intimacy into the relationship.
However, these parents are able to do other aspects in terms of caring for their kids. For example, they’re able to meet their children’s physical needs such as making sure they have food, clothes, and somewhere to live.
Additionally, emotionally immature parents also provide financially for their children. They provide everything, financially, like giving them toys when they’re young and a car when they’re teens. These parents make sure their kids’ material needs are met.
The way that the parents support them is financially, giving them materialistic things.
But at the very base of it, they’re not able to actually communicate with their child and emotionally be there for them and support them through their child’s life.
This leaves the kids feeling that there’s no emotional dependency or dependability from their parents.
What You Can Do to Reclaim Your Emotions and Break Free
Having grown up in this relationship, you might be wondering what you can do as an adult when one or both of your parents are emotionally immature.
Now you can move forward with this awareness and connect with your emotions in healthy ways.
And this process starts with finding your true self.
Finding Your True Self
Your true self means you feel like you can really express yourself, express all your emotions, express your thoughts, and not feel like it’s being impacted by your caregivers, or by your family members.
It’s where you can express your individual self.
By working with a therapist or psychologist, you can learn how to express your true thoughts and emotions. Finding your true self is about being able to grow and flourish and express yourself in a healthy way, without your caregiver in the picture.
Therapy can empower you to move through life with new awareness for what you need to create the life that you want.
And it starts with getting to know yourself better – figuring out your interests, what you like, what you don’t like. Going through this process helps you see yourself better so you’re more aligned with what matters to you and where you stand in your own life.
You can ask yourself:
- What do I need?
- What do I want to be able to have in my life?
- What opportunities do you want to create for yourself?
- What do you like in your life and what don’t you like?
Here are several different areas you can examine and look back at to find your true self.
Activities
As a child, what activities did you like to do? What made you feel good? What did you do if you had free time? What did you see yourself doing? Was I doing art? Was it music? Was I doing a certain sport or activity?
What did you like to do? What were you interested in? What bored you or disinterested you as a child?
Communication
Another area to dig into is how you behave around others. So looking back at how you communicated and interacted, think about which interactions made you feel small or you felt like you weren’t able to fully express yourself.
Examine those interactions to see what made you hold back or made you feel nervous. What were your needs in that situation? What were you able to express?
Feelings and Thoughts
Take a look at your feelings and thoughts honestly. What makes you feel good? What doesn’t make you feel good? Give yourself permission to let out your feelings and thoughts. They’re there to tell you something, and they want to be heard.
It’s okay to feel your feelings and give yourself self-compassion because there are ways to get to know yourself better now as an adult. You can be kind and loving to yourself in this process as you examine your experiences from childhood.
Strengths
Many times, people imagine therapy sessions will bring out the worst in them or reveal things they’d rather not deal with. But strength-based therapy continually brings you back to your strengths. So, how can you appreciate your strengths?
What are some positive qualities about yourself? Are you caring? Are you loving? Are you determined? Are you a hard worker?
What are traits you would describe yourself as? What are some qualities that you have? Once you dig into your strengths, you can validate yourself. You can be grounded in who you are and let yourself be seen and heard.
What to Do If You Still Have a Relationship With Your Emotionally Immature Parents
If you still have a relationship with your caregivers or parents, then make sure you set healthy boundaries.
First, know that it’s okay to set boundaries. Setting healthy boundaries helps you and the people around you know what you’re okay and not okay with. Being clear about your boundaries allows the people in your life to adjust their behavior accordingly.
For example, when you know where your needs are, then you know when they’re not being met. It might be the way your parent acted toward you or something they said that you don’t like. You can take a step back to reflect on what triggered you in that moment, and how you can still give that love to yourself.
For those who don’t respect your boundaries, you can cut ties with them. We understand this is difficult, especially cutting ties with family members. Ending toxic relationships gives you space to heal and help you stand in your power.
It’s Okay to Feel Overwhelmed
This is a lifelong journey and learning process, so know that it’s okay to feel overwhelmed when you’re just starting out.
We’re proud of you for being here and wanting to learn more about emotional intimacy. And that’s really the first step – just be curious to know, learn, and reflect on your childhood.
And we’re proud of you for where you are right now in this moment, and we believe that you can move forward to connect with yourself, reclaim your emotions, and set healthy boundaries.
Further Reading
Contact Us
Here at CCWB, we value our clients and acknowledge the courage it takes to seek professional mental health support.
Chester County Well-Being (CCWB) provides a range of mental health services to ensure we meet our community’s needs. We serve individuals, couples, and families in the Chester County area. Reach out to us here.
Our specializations include:
- Work and Career issues
- Stress Management
- Therapy for Depression and Anxiety
- Conflict Resolution
- Couples Counseling
- Family Counseling
- Parenting Support
- Grief Counseling
- Addiction & Recovery
Teletherapy
All our clinicians provide safe and secure teletherapy sessions to anyone residing in PA. Additionally, we provide telehealth options for residents of other states, depending on the clinician. Simply head to our About Us page, and click each clinician’s “read more” tab for telehealth details.
Telepsychology services are provided by Dr. Kuangparichat and Dr. Stern to clients who reside in a state that participates in PSYPACT. Find out if your state is on the list of participating states HERE.
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About the Authors
Malynn Kuangparichat (Psy.D., J.D.) is founder and psychologist at Chester County Well-Being.
She has a collaborative approach that results in highly tailored evaluations intended to meet her clients’ unique needs. She focuses on an individual’s strengths, which are integrated in the practical, personalized recommendations identified by the findings of an evaluation.
In her free time, she enjoys running, spending time with family and friends, and getting ice cream or doughnuts from the local shops.
Anna Youhouse (M.A.) is a doctoral psychology student at Chester County Well-Being.
She is passionate about accepting individuals for who they are with a non-judgmental approach. Anna provides individual psychotherapy to children, adolescents, young adults and adults. She also provides comprehensive psychological testing for ADHD, autism, and mental health issues.
Outside of her doctoral studies and supporting each client on their healing journey to grow into their full potential, she has both spiritual and creative outlets like yoga, meditation, painting, and dancing. In the literature realm, she loves all of Eckhart Tolle’s books like The Power of Now.