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

by Lindsay C. Gibson

Emotionally immature people don’t regulate their self-esteem and emotional stability well on their own. They need others to keep them on an even keel by treating them just so. To accomplish this, they act in ways that make other people feel responsible for keeping them happy.

Appreciating how life events are hooked together on a timeline is crucial to understanding how cause and effect works. However, EIPs live in the immediate emotional moment and can be oblivious to the chain of causation over time. Instead of seeing reality as a timeline, EIPs experience events as isolated blips unrelated to each other. This makes it hard for them to anticipate the future or to learn from errors. Ignoring time’s sequential reality lets them say and do the most dumbfounding things because they don’t feel the need to be logically consistent with their past statements or actions.

Guilt should be a brief corrective signal, not a chronic condition. Its healthy purpose is to prompt apologies in order to keep good relations with others.

Guilt is a conscious feeling that is easily put into words. You can talk about why you feel guilty, citing reasons and describing feelings. Because guilt is familiar and easy to express, sometimes we think we are feeling guilt when we’re really experiencing shame.

Having an active mindset prepares you to think for yourself instead of automatically acquiescing. By questioning their assumptions, you’ll actively protect your boundaries and independence. You no longer agree that it’s up to you to repair their self-esteem or stabilize their emotions.

But now as an adult, you know better. You have the right to think of your own needs. EI expectations to the contrary, your purpose in life is not to make someone feel more powerful than they really are. A person can’t claim to be more important than anyone else just because they feel that way. You and that EIP are existential equals; no one is more important than anyone else. You’re neither their possession nor their servant.

The good thing about judgment is that you have to agree with it in order to feel bad. They may judge you, but you alone determine whether you feel guilty or not. You can step out of any EIP’s distorted judgments as soon as you feel free to disagree with their opinions. You can decline to accept their criticism and make a distinction between what they’re saying about you and what you know to be true about yourself. Remember, just because an EIP feels something is true, doesn’t necessarily mean it is. You get to define yourself, not them. Decline their judgment if you don’t think it’s fair.

By being a good parent to yourself, you reverse multigenerational traumas of low self-esteem and emotional self-neglect. You might be the first in your family to see the difference in life quality that honoring one’s inner experiences can make.