264. Disentangling from Emotionally Immature People with Lindsay C. Gibson

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Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things.

We have been holding our breath since last week.

And for the 40 years before that.

Yes.

Since the last episode.

The amazing, world-shifting Lindsay C.

Gibson is here.

She fixed our lives by helping us realize that we are not, in fact, as jacked up as we thought we were.

We just may have been raised by emotionally immature people.

We all had some eureka moments at the last episode that maybe we had some emotional immaturity in our families of origin.

We might have some people in our lives who are emotionally immature people.

You're looking right at me.

No, I just thought you might have someone in your life.

And

last episode, we discussed how important that is just that knowing.

Yes.

So go back and listen to the last episode to learn what an emotionally immature parent or person might look like and what it might do to you.

if you are in close contact with that person.

For anyone who is just listening to this episode, you might be able to do a little recap of some of the characteristics of an emotionally immature person.

Sure.

So

what we talked about was that most basically, the emotionally immature person

has a

line of development emotionally that has not kept pace with their chronological age.

And emotional maturity falls on a continuum, just like your intellectual development, your social development.

And a person can be very well developed intellectually.

They can be very well developed in their social skills, their social abilities.

But in their emotional maturity, in their ability to regulate, control their emotions, and to have deep, intimate relationships with other people, they can be very emotionally immature.

So think of the

four-year-old.

Okay, that's a good example.

If you've ever met a four-year-old, if you've ever known a four-year-old, they have just enough language to make you think that you could reason with them.

Okay.

But emotionally,

they're like three-year-olds.

Okay.

So that's the way emotionally immature people are.

They have language, they can talk about things, but they are so vulnerable to kind of falling apart or feeling threatened that they're very, very hard to get close to.

They tend to be extremely egocentric.

You know, the world is about me.

Every interaction needs to come back to me.

Let me tell you what that reminds me of in my life.

And they have very poor empathy.

for other people.

If you have empathy, it's an automatic thing.

You just can't help but wonder how that person felt about what you said.

Once you get it, you never lose it.

But for a person who is emotionally immature and doesn't get that, okay, it's very hard to explain to them that they should be feeling what this other person is feeling because that just doesn't compute because it's all about them.

Wow.

And then you have like very poor self-reflection.

They don't ask themselves if they were to blame for any relationship problems.

And as a result, they don't engage in repair or apologies, that kind of thing, which is a shame.

Very afraid of emotional intimacy, you know, with other people, where people talk about their deeper feelings or they let themselves be known at a deeper level.

They tend to shy away from that.

And basically, they're kind of afraid of all kinds of, you know, deep, sincere emotion.

They have a really

contentious relationship with reality.

They tend to deny, dismiss, or distort anything in reality that they don't agree with or they don't like, and that doesn't bother them in the least.

And they tend to be quite immature in their mental functioning in the sense that they don't tolerate complexity very well.

You know, things are very black and white, cut and dried, right and wrong.

They have a lot of those kind of rigid thinking characteristics that can't see that someone could be this and this

and that could be part of the same person.

They tend to split and categorize and then judge, you know, according to what feels right to them, the worth of people, which leads to all kinds of problems with their kids when their kids start to individuate into their own personalities.

So that's just a little, you know, overview of what you can expect to see in them.

One important thing for folks who are trying to identify this is you said this last episode is that like your mom could have been the CEO of a huge company and totally mature from a business professional perspective and still not be developed emotionally.

And also that it shows that emotional immaturity shows up most significantly under stress and in the super intimate relationships.

So you could have grown up with a dad that all of your friends love and thinks he's the absolute best and you're the luckiest, or your partner, everyone loves them, they're great to everyone.

But in the stress and most intimate relationship is when that shows up the most, which I really think is important from your work because that is like a gaslighting when everyone else sees the wonderful and you receive the

rough parts of that.

Yes.

So can you tell us what do we do?

I would really like in this episode to get into the specifics and the practical ways if we have identified that we have an emotionally immature parent or that we're married to an emotionally immature person or we're in our bosses.

Can you talk to us about the strategies?

that an emotionally immature person uses inside of a conflict?

Because Because I think one of the things that is so hard about being in relationship with an emotionally immature person is that you're sitting in your little neurotic internalizer head.

You're thinking, I can make this better.

I know if I just do this different,

if I use all my self-help books about conflict, I'm going to go in, I'm going to say a thing, and I'm going to fix it.

If I go into a conversation with an emotionally immature person.

It's a little bit like getting sucked into a vortex of weirdness.

Can you talk to us about that vortex of weirdness?

What's going to happen to me in that

experience inside of that conflict?

You might know you're in a conversation with an emotionally immature person if

the vortex of weirdness.

I'll have to use that in my next book.

It's yours.

It's the least bunning could do.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

so the vortex of weirdness is when you

you are trying

in good faith to

communicate to make yourself understood to understand them in other words you're trying to activate good relationship skill skills to have you know, a better communication with this person.

So if you're doing this with your

parent,

and maybe there's, it could be any number of things.

Maybe you need to set a boundary, maybe you need you want to tell them about something, maybe you want them to understand

why you don't get in touch more often.

It could be many, many things.

But as you try to communicate to them using your best communication skills, okay, everything that you've ever learned, you know, about eye messages and saying something nice first and all this stuff.

And they come back with stuff that is either highly defensive, even aggressive.

They get mad, or they act like they don't understand what you're saying, or they come back and they seem very, very hurt.

Whatever it is, it's not

in the same spirit that you're approaching them, you know, which is let's share and figure out what's going on between us and then, you know, maybe we'll come up with a solution.

It'll be something tangential.

It'll take you away

from

what looks to you like a very simple process: let me tell you what I'm feeling and what's wrong, and then you tell me what's wrong with what you're feeling, and let's see if we can repair this and move forward.

No, it's like you get a bunch of confusing stuff that causes what a friend of mine called brain scramble, which is you can't figure out

what this has to do with where you started out or what they're trying to say to you.

And it gets very confusing and you end up feeling shut down because your brain is just, you know, like fried.

They're saying two things that don't fit together.

So

it's really sobering to people who try to go in and reach their emotionally immature parent through

good communication skills because

communication has to go two ways like if somebody wants to understand what you're saying to them it doesn't matter what you say yes okay if someone doesn't want to understand what you're saying

it doesn't matter what you say oh just one more time that's right just say it again one more time saying it for the next hour and a half it's the best it's the best service we can do for anybody this is the very thing that like prevents me from going to my parents.

If a person wants to understand what you're saying, it doesn't matter how you say it.

If a person wants to understand

what you're saying, it doesn't matter how you say it.

Did I get that right?

Yeah.

If they want to understand.

I think I turned it around.

Yeah, it doesn't matter.

I understand what you're saying because I want to understand.

It doesn't matter how you say it.

We get you because we're trying.

Exactly.

Because we're emotionally

right here.

Right here.

In in vivo.

It's happening.

You don't have to keep struggling for the exact, precise words that you think are going to unlock a person.

Because if they want to understand you, they will, regardless of what you say.

If they don't want to understand you, they won't, regardless of what you say.

So like that pressure

because it's the exhaustion, right?

The exhaustion of being connected to an emotionally immature person is

exhausting because we believe at some level that if we just figured out the magical way to express ourselves correctly, that we would be able to engage with them in a way that they would be interested in understanding us.

Yes, that is the exhaustion.

Or not even that, just like the right way to be.

It's like you're trying to figure out the right words to say, but like it can be deeper than that, too.

It's not even just the right words to say.

It's like, how do I be different?

Me as a person isn't right for this person.

So how do I change who I am so that they will

accept me or not be afraid of me?

It's really cellular.

It's like identity bare.

It can be identity, not just like, how do I have better communication skills, but how do I stop being so broken so that this relationship can stop being so broken?

Right.

Yes.

And so they're, so they're taking on

more responsibility after they've already taken on too much responsibility for making this relationship deeper, more meaningful, more satisfying, more real.

Yeah.

And when you try to do that with an emotionally immature person, because they're so afraid of emotional intimacy, you're going to end up feeling defeated.

Yeah.

That feeling of defeat is like part and parcel of interacting with emotionally immature people.

So with my clients,

whether I'm doing therapy or coaching, we sort of anticipate that before you go into the interaction with the person.

It's like that old thing from Dante's Inferno.

It's like abandon hope, all you see.

It's like, yes, that's my favorite quote.

That's the subtitle of all of Glennon's work.

We can do our things, but also abandon hope.

Hope.

Hope is what screws us, man.

Well, that's what Nietzsche said.

Yes.

But hope is, you know, when you are hoping for something that, by the nature of of its being

is not going to happen

then you are

in effect going to end up blaming yourself yeah because you're not in reality yeah

misplaced hope and and that's based in this case on what i call healing fantasies about

You have the fantasy about how your emotionally immature parent is going to heal and they're going to mature themselves and they're going to be able to communicate with you and relate to you in this, you know, close way.

And when you have that kind of hope,

you're going to go into the interaction looking for them to be different from who they are.

And, you know, I'm sorry, that's also a setup for them

because that's not who they are.

That's right.

And you're treating them like someone who would be interested in your feelings and interested in working something out or want to know your boundaries.

Right.

But that's not probably true.

That's right.

Okay.

So when you are about to go into an interaction, I tell people: do what you can, do a little bit.

Don't set yourself up to, you know, have this be the turnaround moment for the relationship because that's going to scare them.

And when anybody gets scared, they're at their worst.

So

just go at it from the standpoint of you're going to,

A, stay in touch with yourself.

You're going to stay connected to yourself and your own observations of what's going on, both inside you and in the outside relationship.

And you're going to maintain a healthy detachment

from their emotion.

Now, see, right there,

that tends to take you out of the emotionally immature relationship system.

Because if you're kind of keeping an eye on what they're doing and how it's going, you can't be absorbed into their emotion to give them what they need to, you know, be stabilized or feel better about themselves or whatever they're recruiting you to do.

So it's important to have that healthy detachment, the ability to observe what's going on like a anthropologist.

I'm learning about these people.

Let's see what they're doing.

Oh,

you know, they just acted like I said this, but I didn't.

I wasn't being disrespectful.

All I said was that I can't come home for Christmas.

And so you are helping them to see what constitutes success in an interaction.

Success is going into it realistically, staying in touch with yourself,

treating that person like who they are.

In other words, not expecting them to be able

to go very far into emotions,

and then

not expecting that your communication skills are going to, you know, right every wrong or take you to a place of closeness with them, and that's no fault of your own.

And

you ask, what is your outcome that you want?

Where are you heading?

What's going to constitute success?

And a lot of times people will say, well, my father will understand

what effect his words have had on me over the years.

Or,

you know, my mother will stop criticizing me because she'll understand how much it hurts my feelings.

And it's like, okay, do you have control over that outcome?

Of course you don't.

So what else?

Let's work it down to get to something that you have control over.

And usually it ends up to be something like, I told them what I wanted to tell them, I drew the line where I wanted to draw it,

and I stayed in touch with myself the whole time.

I didn't dissociate, I didn't unhook from myself, I didn't go passive, I didn't become immobilized.

I ended the interaction before that point, and I maintained a sense of being in control of myself.

You know, that now, all of those things you have under your control.

You try to get the outcome identified that the person can achieve.

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Okay.

The moment I really deeply started falling in love with your work is when I realized

how

deep all of this is because what you just said when you stay with yourself, you know yourself, you don't get dysregulated, all those things.

For me,

while that sounds simple,

that has taken me 25 years to even know what you're talking about.

If you are someone who was raised by an emotionally immature person,

you were raised to not have a self.

You were raised to be a mirror to the other person.

So

you don't know what that is.

Like it might take a decade or a decade and a half of work to even have a you

to stick with.

So

in order to start this work of healing, the question of when you're little, do you exist?

Do you matter?

Has to be answered before you go into the ring.

Do you find that?

Like

when you, when you talk about how do you really heal if you're an adult child of an immature parent,

it's not that you figure out how to have this conflict.

The real healing is separate from the other person.

It's like finally knowing that you are a real human being

with real experiences and that you exist and that you matter.

That's step one, which might take a lifetime, yes?

Well, working on it.

could take a lifetime.

Absolutely.

And that's one of the things that therapy, coaching

best friendships good marriages people

are equipped to restart their growth to you know come to know themselves through relationships with other people it's like the british psychoanalyst winnicott said there's no such thing as a baby there's only a baby and a mother

And so it's like, there's no such thing as a self.

There's only a self and an other.

Okay.

So, yes, we do have to do that

getting to know ourselves and becoming aware of ourselves internally.

And that's kind of the inside job.

But we also

grow so much through our relationships and having that bounced back at us so that we come to know who we are and how we are through someone else's reactions to us and also also someone who helps us, who mirrors us, who loves us.

It's an ongoing thing.

So it isn't like you have to get yourself figured out first, then you go in and talk to your parents.

No, it's all happening at the same time.

And each thing that we

do

sets us up to be, you know, maybe a little more self-aware or a little more capable.

And that's something that I keep trying to emphasize in my books is that

these tiny little things

are so

crucial and they all have their little place in our development.

You know, Glenn, I was reading in your book recently and it said something about, you know, when something knocks on your door and it's, you know, it turns out it's a package for you, for your growth.

Well, each one of these little moments that we have is like that.

It's like, it's another little piece of the puzzle.

It's another little piece of the self.

And if we keep open to that, it's just amazing what we can develop into.

So, you know, that part is very hopeful.

But in my mind, it's an ongoing life journey.

Maturation, psychological, emotional maturation is a lifelong process.

I'm trying to understand this because I very much relate to everything and all of your work in my personal life.

And I think what I've just heard you say is so important for me to hear

because, and correct me if I'm wrong.

So we go in with not expectation of changing the other person because I think what we're all trying to do, those of us that were raised by maybe emotionally immature parents, is to

actually figure out that we ourselves are real apart from our parent

and that whatever happens in the relationship and however the interactions go, the response that I get from them will not matter.

Because what prevents me from going to my parents is the knowing that they've done absolutely no personal work.

They've had no therapy,

which I'm sure a lot of the listeners have parents in this situation as well.

And so I am scared to even approach them because I actually don't know if there's any possibility of growth on their part in their maturity emotionally.

And so correct me if I'm wrong, but

me

doing this work isn't about necessarily creating a better relationship between me and my parent.

It's creating a better relationship with the relationship I have with my parents.

Nicely said.

I love that.

Yeah.

Better relationship with the relationship.

Yeah.

And I think it's also a relationship with yourself.

Yes.

You know, whatever that happens to look like at the moment.

I mean, it can be your adult self, it can be your child self.

You know,

I do a lot of

hearts work with

people around, you know, internal family systems.

I love that approach.

So, you know, we all have these multiplicity of aspects to ourselves.

But yeah, yeah, your relationship to yourself, your connection and your self-knowledge to yourself, and then your ability to be connected to your ideas.

about the relationship that are healthy, that are realistic, that are based in fact, so to speak.

Yeah, all of that is very, very important.

And then the relationship with the parent, you know, that's going to have its own life and its own characteristics, much of which you probably are not going to be able to change.

But I loved your comment about your relationship with the relationship.

Yeah, so good.

Because I had

a friend who said that she had the best relationship with her parents.

she had ever had over the past 10 years and they've been dead the whole time.

We've heard that a lot.

Oh my gosh.

And so she was having a relationship with her relationship with her particular mind.

And she was changing herself around that and changing her view of them around that.

Or another, another friend said, you know, now I just see them as two older people

who I don't have much in common with, but I still love them.

Yeah.

Like that's changing your relationship with the relationship.

Yeah.

I love that.

You're not necessarily going to have to ever disentangle yourself

from an emotionally immature person.

But if you're going to be healthy, you need to disentangle yourself from your own expectations.

of what that person will do or not do or what they will understand about you or the way they will connect with you.

So it's almost like you have to do that to have any kind of relationship or or else you're going to be chasing that hope that to which there is no door.

Right.

And it's so true in terms of like, all you need to do to prove yourself to that disentanglement isn't just about physical relationship or boundary.

You're like, I'm estranged from that person now or whatever, is think about like how many times you've dis you've put up physical boundaries.

You don't see the person and you're still fucked in your head.

Estrangement often fixes nothing because the patterns have still been laid in your brain.

So,

this is a relationship between you and you.

Like, you've got to get your own self right.

Because if you have been raised not to have a self,

separating from that parent isn't going to fix that.

You're going to go into your marriage without a self.

You're going to go into your work without a self.

This is really a lot of internal work, disentangling with an entire belief system that's been planted in you, not with just a person.

Right.

And

it's also disentangling from the habitual behaviors and triggers of the emotionally immature person

who is not deliberately, but very actively trying to draw you in to be who they need you to be for their own stability and self-esteem.

So yes, I think it's both.

I think you definitely have to disentangle from your own inner patterns, your own internalized patterns and and all of that kind of learning that you've done.

But

you also,

in the interpersonal world, have to be alert to the ways that you are entangled because of what this other person is actually doing.

Yeah.

So to me, it's both.

Yes.

Yeah.

And can we go back to that practical going into a potential brain scramble scenario?

Because I think that's right.

We've been talking a lot theoretically about like the relationship writ large, but you know, we're going into the holidays.

There are many like practical conversations that people will want to be having and they'll probably be avoiding them because they know as soon as they start it, they want to talk about X, they're talking about Y, Z, and A, and they don't understand how and they agreed to something and that made them feel like complete shit afterwards and they abandoned themselves again.

I think that that is so, it sounds so small.

Like my goal for this really, this conversation is to say, I'm staying at a hotel when I come to visit for the holidays.

Okay.

That doesn't seem like something that's, oh,

monumental, but it is, because if you're in that conversation

and the emotionally immature person takes it over here

to Z that has nothing to do with it and you resist chasing them to Z, and you stay with what you came for.

That is radical.

It is radical.

And that is the way that you reconnect to yourself.

That's the way you dual track that I know I have a self, and I can see this insanity from afar, from my safe place.

I can see what's happening.

Can you just walk us through the kind of radical things that happen in your seemingly very modest goal of staying to the main thing

yeah staying to the main thing and staying in touch with yourself yes because adult children of emotionally immature parents engage in these automatic self-defeating behaviors in order to get along with the emotionally immature parent.

Like they become passive, they dissociate, they cut off from themselves, they get fuzzy, they get foggy, they're kind of out of it.

They get immobilized.

They absolutely cannot think of what to say.

And they beat themselves up for that afterwards because they're like,

you know, what was wrong with me?

I couldn't even think of a word to say, you know?

And then

they can also feel like

they're in a state of learned helplessness.

It's like all of a sudden it feels like, what's the use?

They just give up.

I mean, they don't want to give up.

They weren't planning to give up, but it's a defensive mechanism.

You flip into that because of the old pattern.

So,

what you're trying to do is you're trying to teach them that even a little bit of activity in the right direction is undermining that whole construction of passivity that you've been trained in.

And it's incredibly important, and useful, and healing for you to engage in any kind of activity that helps with that.

So, what I tell people is, you know, it's repeat, repeat, repeat.

Like, if you want to set a boundary, you want to tell them that you're not going to be staying with them or whatever it is, your goal is that you communicate that information.

Your goal is not that they receive it well, not that they understand it.

you know, so on and so on.

It's that you communicated what you had power over communicating.

And

with emotionally immature people,

it works best if you just keep repeating whatever the thing is that you want to get across

because

they don't have a good defense

against a simple repeated fact.

They really don't.

They're used to having people get flustered, confused, back off, argue with them, you know, get hurt.

I mean,

that is the kind of interaction that they derail a lot of

things into.

And they're very comfortable with that.

Because who is feeling close and emotionally intimate when people are going at each other like that?

That's their happy place.

Well, I shouldn't say happy place.

It's definitely their safe place, okay, because there's a kind of an enforced distance when there's that kind of conflict.

So when you just keep repeating what it is that you want to get across,

they ultimately tend to kind of give up or they get flustered and they walk away.

But

that approach tends to be much more effective than any strong arm tactics

that people try when they're trying to, you know, like impress upon the other person

what they're there to tell them.

So repetition, it works really well with emotionally immature parents.

It works really well with little kids.

I mean, have you noticed that like with little kids, you say, no, you can't, or no, you can't, or no, you can't, no, you can't.

You don't have to say, I've told you 10 times.

No, you just, no, you can't, no, you can't.

And they get bored with that.

It's no fun.

And when they start talking about some tangential thing that happened nine months ago that's not relevant to this, we don't follow them down that path for 12 minutes minutes like we might do with our parents and wonder why the hell we're talking about that now.

Yes.

We just say you can't have the candy.

Exactly.

Because we think that if you are, you know, 60 years old and you're talking, you're making sense.

And I'm sorry.

That's not necessarily true.

Amen.

Amen.

So you say the goal is true to self, honest with them.

I love that.

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You know, I'm thinking about this thing right now that I used to just my strategy for like family gatherings was to always have like a hot cup of tea in my hands.

And it always seemed so silly, but I'm wondering if it has to do with what you're saying about maintaining a self.

It was like, I'm contained in this space.

I feel the heat of the tea, which reminds me, I am a person.

I'm feeling something.

I have heat.

There's like

a loss of self inside of systems.

And is that why we leave and we're like, what just happened?

Because we haven't maintained a self.

So whatever you can do in these holiday times, tiny strategies to remember, I am a person, I exist, I have boundaries, I have feelings that matter.

Yes, because brain-wise,

there's like a real reason for this.

Because if you were sitting with a cup of hot tea,

the sensation of that, the presence that that invokes, I mean, you become a person sitting with a cup of hot tea instead of a person floating in some never, never land between adulthood and childhood.

You are you with the tea, and that puts you in a part of your brain that's very present.

It's also the part of the brain that the sense of self comes from,

which is the right side of the brain.

It's very hooked in with physical sensation embodiment.

Okay.

And so that's a great technique.

Paying attention to your breathing, paying attention to your feet on the floor,

rubbing your arm,

squeezing your arm.

These things bring us back to our body, which brings us back to the part of our brain that is connected to ourself, quite literally.

I mean, that's where it's coming from.

If you just try to argue by, you know, communicating verbally, that sends you over to your left part of your brain, which is very logical and

very verbally expressive, but it won't give you that feeling of being grounded.

It won't give you that feeling of self.

And that's what you really need when you're interacting with them.

Don't you feel so much compassion too?

Because you absolutely to survive need to grow through yourself to have these very small, manageable.

I understand that I am not going to get this mutual understanding from you.

So I'm going for the thing I really need, which is this concrete, small, manageable, maybe small, but huge thing.

I'm staying at the hotel.

I'm doing whatever.

And yet I understand why when we go into these,

we get so amped up and so engaged.

It's like we're fighting for our lives.

It's like we're, it's like you,

your, your self-esteem and your sense of self and your peace feel so based on that human and you're so desperate for it to be reflected back to you.

And so

undoubtedly you need to place your peace and your sense of self and your self-esteem in yourself,

which will disentangle you from that person because you're going to stop pursuing it so hard with them.

But what do you do with the grief?

What do you do with the grief piece of that?

That like, I am never going to get that.

That's right.

That is not going to happen for me.

Yeah.

I know I need to stop like walking through fire with no boots on because that's better for me.

But what about the grief part of that?

That like, I don't have, I won't ever have that.

And what happens when that parent dies?

I think most hold on to a healing fantasy because we think in the arc of our story that clearly there's going to be some kind of resolution to this.

So like

I guess the grief now or later, but yeah, what, how do you grieve that?

Well,

I think by the time you've gotten to a point of recognizing that there's grief involved,

your self-awareness has probably

grown immensely

because

you have to know yourself very well to know that it's grief that you're feeling when you are working through some of these things with your emotionally immature parents.

No child wants to believe that there's anything wrong with their parents at all.

Okay.

They don't think it's right.

They don't think it's fair.

They don't think it's nice to see their parents in any kind of negative light.

It just hurts a kid to, you know,

see

their parents in that kind of negative or critical light.

Children are so protective.

of their parents.

There's even a story in the Bible about Noah where he was

lying drunk on a bed or something, and his emotionally mature son walks backwards into the room with a cloak and throws it over his head onto his father.

It's that kind of sensitivity to the parents' shame.

Oh, that parents' heavy shit.

Yeah,

yeah, and that and the parents' loss of control, or the parents' loss of emotional stabilization.

I mean, kids feel that they are deeply embarrassed for their parents.

And so it's really hard for them to stay in touch with that awful feeling that, you know, that the parents having a hard time or the parents not handling things very well.

So

when

the child begins to work through some of these realities about their parent,

yeah.

At a certain point, there begins to be a sense of grief because

you're coming to terms with the reality that that parent can't be like any of us, you know, can't be more than who they really are.

And they really,

you know, in some ultimate existential sense, they really don't need to.

I mean, they're doing their life, they're who they are.

The world's not going to stop turning if they don't change.

And we can begin to acknowledge that their way of doing things

is not ours.

We don't want to be that way.

And

we are losing the,

honey, back to hope.

We're losing the hope that these people can change in ways that would give us what we need.

And what I think we have to think about is, you know, like stop trying to claw back what you didn't get

and instead turn your attention attention toward what you can get from other people from yourself from your own pursuits you know there's a whole life waiting for you that

by recovering from your passivity recovering from your sense of owing your life to other people um and and making them feel better about themselves.

When you recover from that, you have an opportunity to really

have the kind of of life that you wish your parents had given to you.

Oh, God, that's so beautiful.

You just said, stop trying to claw back what you didn't get for your life and instead turn and accept what you can get.

Do you ever see that happening

in the relationship with the emotionally immature parent?

If the child has gotten to a place of true acceptance,

letting go of false hope,

really grieving what they lost, and not trying to call it back anymore.

Are they able to sometimes truly accept what that parent has to offer because they've gone through that process?

Yes, I think so.

Like I had a client once

who was pretty obsessed with getting her mother to change and,

you know, just couldn't turn loose of the idea that she would be able to get her mother to give her what she wanted.

And I said to her, I said, it's like you have a box of diamonds and you're obsessed with your mother's bag of pennies.

And I said, you know,

the pennies aren't going to add to your fortune.

What if you didn't keep trying to get those from her and just started started focusing on the worth of what you already own?

And that was helpful to her

because

it put it into a perspective that she could relate to.

Yeah.

Because pennies are also pennies.

Pennies are something.

They're not nothing.

True.

That's true.

That's true.

And when you're a little kid, pennies are even more something.

Compounding interest on those pennies if I had them 40 years ago.

I mean, I think what you you just said i mean it just it's making me cry a little because part of like what you just said that hit me so hard is that i've had that reversed

for so long that like exactly i was only i was holding the pennies and my mom had the diamonds and i think yes

and i don't want to like diminish my mom in any way here but

with with her holding a bag of pennies, I just think it's really important

that I have to get comfortable with the fact that I have created a beautiful life and I have to change my concept around what I thought was.

Because when I was a kid, when we're all kids, you grow up believing that your parents are these extraordinary gods in a way.

Like they are the doers and beers of your whole life.

And I think that I'm reconciling with the fact that they're just people with real problems, with real stuff, with real life situations and that limitations.

Yeah.

Ungoding your parents

through a lifetime of work.

Our children will likely say that we are limited in some ways as we grow older.

I mean, Lindsay, every time I walk by the couch, every time I walk by the couch and one of my kids is reading your book, I'm like, put that shit down.

I do not

because it's on our coffee table.

It's on our

be for a book report.

I want to ask you something.

I feel

we have had a lot of time to sink into your work and I'm feeling actually for the first time like almost

bad for the pod squad.

Like, I feel like we should have them all into my living room right now, all millions of them.

Because I think that this is probably causing some real seismic shifts in people, and they might be feeling seen for the first time, and they might want more.

We're going to link to all of your books, but also, can I ask you something?

The pod squad's about to go into the holidays.

I'm wondering if we have the pod squad call in their real-time questions during during the holidays.

Would you come back sometime and answer some of these questions with us, with them?

I would love to do that.

That would be

very fulfilling.

I'd love to do that.

Okay.

I just want to say one other thing on the topic of when a person gets over their grief and they, you know, sort of resolve their issue with their parent, that theme.

I just want to reaccentuate that the key to that is your own self-awareness and your own self-development.

It's easy to get

into how to

practically handle the misbehavior of the emotionally immature person.

But as you develop yourself and you have

better relationships as a result of that, you have a better sense of yourself,

you will develop an allergic reaction to emotionally immature behavior.

You won't want to be around it.

That's right.

Okay.

It sort of takes care of itself because you can no longer make yourself engage in those kinds of interactions and relationships.

But that comes from the work on yourself, on your own self-development.

And at a certain point, what tends to happen is that it's almost like you see the parent for

who they are and how they are functioning.

It's a very distinct moment for a lot of people.

It's almost, I've had people describe it as almost like a twig snap.

It's like there's a moment where it's like you'll never go back to seeing them as the God again.

I don't know what it is, but it's like there's a transition moment where the gestalt shifts and they become this person that you understand in a completely different way.

And they lose that godlike power because the person who's dealing with them now is your adult self, you know, instead of your terrified child.

So I just wanted to mention that because with the grief comes a process that helps to get you to that point.

And then when it happens, it comes about because of your self-development.

You really can't plan that, but you can grow to the point where, you know, you just can't go back and enter into that anymore.

It is the breaking of the spell.

And that's the hope.

That's the speech.

Ah, thank you.

Thank you.

The breaking of the spell.

Absolutely.

And the healing process is that.

That's what I mean by let.

That's why hope drives me nuts so often is because

hope is the fake barrier.

It's like the thing I don't want to let go of because I know there's grief.

Hope is the blockage of the grief, but the grief is the necessary thing to walk through

to get you to reality, to get you to the ungodding of the parent.

And I think the reason why I feel worried about everybody is that ungodding your parents is scary as shit.

It's not just like, oh, that's the thing.

Yay, now we're good.

It's like, oh, no, that's scary too.

It's like you've revolved your whole life around the maypole of your parents.

It's like losing your religion.

And then you're like, wait, I got to jump over to my own maypole.

I'm a person.

I have to do this whole thing myself.

It's terrifying.

But that's the only way you can actually love them.

I do think that

you can love the person that actually is

if you can stop love-hating

the

phantom dream of what they could be.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

That's so good.

Well, we are.

Really good.

Your work is phenomenally important.

And I'm so grateful for you, like deeply grateful for you.

All my friends are deeply grateful for you.

Well,

I feel the same way toward you.

Well, and now we don't even have to say goodbye.

We'll just

see you soon.

And pod squad, I know, I know.

Okay, I know.

Just take yourself to your little computer and write down your feelings right now.

Okay, write your feelings or call it.

Write your questions.

Take these conversations in your hot cup of tea through your holidays when you're in the middle of a brain scramble.

Call the We Can Do Hard Things hotline.

It is 747-200-5307.

747-200-5307.

Call us.

Well, mostly call Lindsay Gibson.

And we'll just reconvene and we'll have more conversations about this.

We are not dropping this thread.

We're in it with you.

We love you.

Lindsay, thank you.

And we will see you back here next time on We Can Do Hard Things.

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