5 Ways to Recover and Heal After Being Raised by Emotionally Immature Parents
Despite being raised by an emotionally immature parent, this article shares five ways you can learn how to recover and heal after being raised by emotionally immature parents. Doing this allows you to recovery your true self - the person you always wanted to be - and cultivate healthier relationships in your life.
“Humans share the primitive instinct that familiarity means safety” ~ John Bowlby
If we are raised in a chaotic home, we seek that out, even though we say and believe we want something different. If you grew up with emotionally immature parents, you might find yourself instinctively drawn to people who are emotionally unavailable, self-centered, and exploitive.
Despite the feelings of anger, loneliness, frustration, you feel there are ways you can heal and move on from being raised by emotionally immature parents. Taking these steps will help you grow and evolve as your own person, regardless of your first chapter - your family of origin and upbringing.
And making these changes for YOU, and no one else, will help you feel empowered and hopeful about your future both individually and collectively within a relationship.
How to Heal From Emotionally Immature Parents
In her book, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, Dr. Gibson offers ways in which you can start to heal from being raised by this type of parent.
Ways that include: giving up the current relationship you have with them, discovering and healing your fantasy, setting personal boundaries, understanding and clarifying your values, and engaging in self-care.
There are many ways you can recover from emotionally immature parents, these include:
Let go of the fantasy.
Take an observational approach.
Learn to express, then let go.
Focus on the outcome.
Create personal boundaries.
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Let go of the fantasy.
It is common for children of emotionally immature parents to have the fantasy that their parent will change and begin to love them and show concern. As an adult you might continue to believe this and try different things in hopes of eliciting a response from your parent that will make you feel validated, heard, and loved.
And as an adult, you might have learned healthy communication skills and attempt to use these on your parent, to no avail.
Unfortunately, emotionally immature parents remain wedded to their own fantasy, expecting you - their child who is now an adult. - to continue to fix their childhood wounds and hurts.
The ‘dance’ that has been created between you and your parent continues until you decide to change the relational patterns that have been created.
Thus, the only way that things will change if you as the adult stop trying to convince your parent to change and be someone else, someone they are not capable of being for their own reasons.
Most adults continue to pursue the love, attention, and affection from their parent they never received in childhood and you may try to do that hoping that your parent will acknowledge how they hurt you, but they will not.
2. Take an observational approach.
Emotionally immature parents often create an enmeshed relationship with their child over individual identity. They don’t respect boundaries and their are blurred lines between where they end and the child begins.
A person’s true self is never acknowledged so you grow up not knowing who you really are, what you like, what you value, what you want out of life. Your decisions have been based on the enmeshed and unhealthy relationship you have with your parents.
Taking an observational approach means learning how to stay emotionally detached and how others are behaving in the world. Learn to think like a scientist. To recover from emotionally immature parents, try to ask yourself questions like:
What am I noticing?
How do they respond to I when you try to engage?
What feelings are coming up?
If you start to get emotional, this means that your healing fantasy is being activated. You feel like unless they validate you (which they will not), you will be okay. If you are still in an emotional state, take a moment to step away, drink some water, splash some cold water on your face, - just create some distance - to help center yourself again.
Take the tiny baby steps you need to start creating space and healthier boundaries. This a very active approach to redefining the relationship and getting the emotional space you need to grow and recover.
3. Learn to express, then let go.
Sharing your feelings in a way that is calm and centered helps you gain mastery over your feelings without focusing on the outcome. They may or may not understand, empathize, or agree with you. That shouldn’t be the focus.
The goal should be, with any exchange, is healthy and clear communication, being able to recognize and articulate your thoughts and feelings, and feel good about the outcome.
This will help build your self-confidence and self-esteem and make you feel more in control of not only your feelings, but the situation and how you handled it.
When we are able to understand their emotional immaturity has more to do with them and less or nothing to do with you, you can begin to free yourself from the emotional loneliness you experienced.
Learning how to express how you feel to them, to yourself, or to others, allows you to return to yourself and begin to lead a more authentic life, free from the restrictions once put on you.
This allows you to free yourself from your frustration with them and eventually minimize your doubts you have about being lovable.
4. Focus on the outcome.
When people start to make changes on their end, they put expectations on the relationship and the person for it to go a certain way. Often, this is not how things play out. Ask yourself, what are you hoping to get from this exchange? Are you hoping they will change and understand you?
If so, maybe you should think about changing your goal because if it is focused on the other person, often we walk away feeling disappointed and frustrated.
So, maybe the goal should be more self focused. How do you want to show up in this exchange? What would healthy communication look like?
If you focus on the outcome and not the relationship, there is a greater likelihood that you feel better about the exchange rather than defeated.
Your parent will continue to behave as they do regardless of what you say or don’t say. Thus the relationship will not change however, the outcome most likely will and this is where the growth and change takes place.
5. Create personal boundaries.
It is important to learn how to set healthy boundaries with your emotionally immature parent. However, when you begin to do this, they will do things that attempt to force you back into the enmeshed and unhealthy patterns. So, you must not take the bait.
Being able to identify the triggers that come up for you will help you identify when your parent is trying to ‘suck you back into the unhealthy pattern.’
We all have triggers that affect us emotionally so creating a plan about how you will manage the triggers and come before you interact with your parent. Trying to figure it out in the moment, rarely if ever works.
Creating healthier boundaries means engaging in self-care. At the beginning, you may not know what self-care is or how you need because your life and all that you have been doing has been for your parent.
The focus has been on them, not you. You should expect that you wouldn’t know where to start.
Self-care means thinking about the things that bring you joy, how you want to spend your time, or even reading about self-care is and how you can start.
Learn to recognize the signs of emotionally mature people.
As you move on from unhealthy relationships and recover from emotionally immature parents, there are several signs of an emotionally mature person that you want to be aware of. Knowing these signs will help you forge healthier relationships and improve your self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-respect.
13 Signs of emotionally mature people.
1. They are realistic and reliable. You can count on them. They are reliable. They honor their word and you can depend on them. Their views are realistic and not something that is far fetched.
2. They are consistent. An emotionally mature person has a grounded and intact sense of self. They will not be inconsistent. You can count on them to react basically in the same way in different environments.
3. They don’t take everything personally. They have learned not to take things personally and are not easily offended. They can laugh at themselves and be self-deprecating.
4. They have a healthy emotional intelligence. They are able to think and feel at the same time and stay emotionally connected with you if they see things differently. They can also see your perspective even if its different. They can manage their own emotions.
5. They acknowledge and accept reality. They look for realistic solutions and try to fix problems. They are open minded in coming up with solutions and don’t live by how it ‘should’ be done. They can compromise.
6. They are respectful. They respect you and your boundaries. They also respect how thoughts and feelings and want to hear about them as a way to understand you better.
7. They can compromise. They have flexibility in their thinking and can compromise. They can also be influenced in positive ways to think about a situation in a different way. If their partner shares another point of view, they are not insulted by that or feel weak just because they see things differently.
8. They are trustworthy. You can inherently trust them. You can rely on them to be honest and truthful. They are dependable. Its one of the most important qualities in life.
9. They are truthful. They tell the truth because this is a value of theirs and their personal level of integrity. They are genuine and you can count on them to be this way consistently.
10. They use levity. They recognize the usefulness of levity as a way to diffuse tension and recognize that not everything in life is super serious. They like to have fun and are playful.
11. They apologize. They can apologize for their wrongdoings and want to learn from their mistakes. They take responsibility and don’t just ‘lip service’ for their apology. Their apology includes taking actionable steps. They are sincere. They can accept when you share that they have hurt or disappointed you.
12. They make you feel seen, heard, and understood. These are three of the most important traits of a person. When we feel seen, heard, and understood, we feel our partner really gets us. It makes us feel safe. We feel we can go to our partner for many things and they will be emotionally available to and for us.
13. They are empathic. Having empathy makes us feel safe in the relationship. Its the base of emotional intelligence. They are responsive to your feelings and can understand your perspective.
Final thoughts.
Being able to operate from an adult mind and setting healthy boundaries, your objective mind will start to feel your parents are safe to be around. Eventually as you do the work and engage in healthier ways and live your life in ways that are good for you, you will become more of your true self, the person that has been hiding all of these years.
This will take time and may feel like an emotional roller coaster, however, it is possible. Eventually you will recognize that you have stepped out of your role-self and into your true self one filled with possibility and individuality.
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