Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents: Practical Tools to Establish Boundaries & Reclaim Your Emotional Autonomy

by Lindsay C. Gibson

A childhood spent with EI parents can lead to long-lasting feelings of emotional loneliness, as well as ambivalence about relationships in general. Emotional loneliness is the result of feeling unseen and unresponded to, no matter how hard you try to communicate and connect. In adulthood, these children were often attracted to unsatisfying, disappointing partners and friends who seemed very familiar in their self-involvement and refusal to connect at a deeper emotional level.

When you try to share something important to you, they’re likely to talk over you, change the subject, start talking about themselves, or dismiss what you’re saying. Children of EI parents often know a great deal more about their parents’ issues than the parents know about theirs.

EI parents dump their problems on you in such an agitated, victimized way that it seems you can’t refuse. Before you realize it, your feelings are unimportant, and your mission becomes their stabilization.

EI parents can draw you into reacting to them with unusual emotional intensity. That’s because they offload their unpleasant emotional states by acting in ways that stir up the same emotions in you. They pretend they don’t have such emotions, but actually they project them onto you to be contained and processed so that it seems you’re the one having the feeling. For instance, a passive-aggressive EIP might make you furious while they remain unaware of the extent of their own anger. This unconscious way of getting rid of disturbing emotion by making others feel it is called projective identification (Ogden 1982). As with children, you end up saddled with their difficult, disowned emotions.

Developing a sense of self is also necessary for the self-awareness and self-reflection that allow us to observe ourselves and how our behavior affects other people. Without a sense of self fostered in childhood, people can’t self-reflect and therefore have no way to grow and change psychologically. Instead, they are limited to blaming others and expecting others to change first.

EI parents can also be very generous at times, but with a catch. They often think of their own tastes first and give the child what they themselves would like to get. Their gifts often reflect the parent’s interests, not the child’s preferences. It’s as though they were subconsciously giving to themselves by proxy. Other times, EI parents pick out generic childhood gifts without considering their child’s unique interests. But of course, sometimes they do get it exactly right, and your hopes about being known and loved spring up again.

If you did not get much emotionally from EI parents in childhood, you might be too willing to put a lot of one-sided effort into your adult relationships. You may not be happy, but you may feel you should take whatever’s offered. Your job now is to question any one-sided relationship and look for something more satisfying. As you work at lowering your expectations for the EIPs and EI parents in your life, you should simultaneously raise your expectations in order to find friends and partners who put as much effort into reciprocal, empathetic relationships as you do.

EIPs offer a spectacular relationship deal: if you do what they want, then you will be everything to them. However, the fine print says that you are only as good as the last thing you did for them. In this distorted arrangement, you can be everything one minute and nothing the next. This is because they have an extremely self-preoccupied way of looking at relationships. You are either wonderful or useless to them—with nothing in between.

It’s usually not a good idea to stay at the home of an EIP if you can afford not to. When you spend time with EIPs, you feel an odd combination of being simultaneously disregarded yet drained. Staying in touch with yourself around such people can be tiring because they relate to you like an audience, not a person.

If you grew up with EI parents, you might have learned to feel anxiety toward things that are good for you. For instance, if you grew up feeling ignored or rejected, you may have generalized that anxiety to all social situations.

Like your parents, you may think that self-criticism will make you a better person. But criticizing yourself won’t improve you any more than attacking a child’s self-esteem makes them more confident. Self-criticism is no way to have a relationship with yourself. It sentences you to a life of anxious dependency in which no power is greater than someone else’s opinion of you.

Obsessive worry is another type of thought that comes from being the child of EI parents. This comes about because these children have to be so hypervigilant to their parents’ moods. When your emotional security feels threatened by a parent’s upheaval, you learn to obsess over why someone is upset and what could happen as a result. You worry about what you should do to make things right for them.