263. Healing from Emotionally Immature Parents with Lindsay C. Gibson

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And it took some time,

but I'm finally fine.

Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.

We're about to fix your life right in time for the holidays, okay?

Right in time for these holidays, we have with us,

I think we're going to call her today, the matron saint of the holidays, because she is going to help us deal with emotionally immature people, or as we call them, people.

So.

Without further ado, I introduce you to Lindsay C.

Gibson.

I met your work through my dear friend Ashley Ford, who I think is the patron saint of you because she is like an evangelist for all of your work.

She swears that your work about how to deal with emotionally immature parents has changed her life.

I can see why now, having been immersed in your work for the last few weeks, Lindsay C.

Gibson is an author and a clinical psychologist.

She's been a psychotherapist for 30 years.

She has written several books, including Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents and Disentangling from Emotionally Immature People.

Dr.

Gibson specializes in therapy and coaching with adults to attain new levels of personal growth and confidence in dealing with emotionally immature people.

So,

what I want to start with is: if a person's listening right now who has never heard of this term emotionally immature

people or emotionally immature parents, I think what for me has been so interesting is there are people in your life,

when you're with them, you feel crazy

in one way or another.

You have kind of figured out this type of person, which is neither good nor bad.

It's just is.

who maybe is, would you call it stunted in the emotional sense?

And so creates havoc in relationships.

Tell us how you came to this understanding that there is something called an emotionally immature person or parent.

Yeah, well, I guess there were two phases of discovering that.

One was that in my early training, I was lucky enough to have gotten a lot of training in child development and in understanding

quote-unquote psychopathology in terms of what has gone wrong in a person's development psychologically.

So I didn't come from the school of let's figure out the diagnostic category to put this person in and pretend we understand all about them now.

Let's look at how their behavior and their problems are really

coming from a different developmental place

earlier probably in their lives.

So I did a lot of psychological evaluations doing testing where I would have to interpret the test results according to

what was developmentally expected.

So, I knew what a three-year-old's responses look like, I knew what a 10-year-old's responses look like, and so when I was testing adults, I was always looking through that lens.

So, I was prepared early on to have this orientation.

But then in psychotherapy, a number of years ago, I was listening to people and thinking to myself,

just kind of idly, you know, like her husband sounds like a four-year-old or her dad is acting like a 15-year-old.

And one day I just decided to share that with my client.

I say, you know, his behavior really sounds like a little kid's.

Like, that's what little kids do.

They throw a tantrum or they insist on having having their way.

And they say, yes, yes.

And I'd say, well, you know, it sounds like their psychological development didn't keep pace with their body development and their intellectual development.

So what do you think?

I mean, is this typical of him in other areas of his life?

And we would get into these discussions, and it was so helpful to them because Essentially what I did was, when I said that, I took this big scary person

who's dominating and intimidating or manipulating or whatever it is and I'm saying hey that's little kid behavior

okay this is not the alpha gorilla this is a four-year-old who's not getting their way

and that really helped to shift something in them in the way that they approached the whole situation with that person And it makes it easier to understand because one of the reasons why it's hard to identify emotional immaturity immaturity is that's just one strain of maturity.

So a person can be highly intellectually mature, highly socially mature.

So they can look like and be a highly functioning person.

And yet this part of their life, their emotional maturity has stopped at a certain point.

So you started noticing that a lot of people actually have been raised by people who might have a lot of intellectual maturity, might have a lot of social maturity, but do not have emotional maturity, and that takes a toll on the child.

Yes, yes, it does.

And what happens is that

maybe the, I mean, who knows really?

I mean, we don't have any research that can go back in time and see what happened to these people.

But just from what I know about trauma and how it interrupts, you know, trauma or neglect, how it interrupts people's emotional development, you can kind of guess that these people are acting as though they've had some pretty bad experiences in their past and they have gotten

ultra defensive, very well defended against a number of things.

They're not being bad people.

They're not being evil people.

It's just that when you get too close to something that reminds them of a time in their life when they really felt extremely helpless or even felt like they were on the edge of the existential cliff, like non-being is staring into their soul.

You get anywhere near that kind of feeling, and you're going to put up a defense whether you want to or not, because

we have automatic psychological coping mechanisms that keep us from going into overwhelming situations.

Okay.

So, when these parents, in this case, begin to move into that territory with their child, and kids are like always triggering emotional stuff because they're so emotional, right?

Right.

Yeah.

So when they get anywhere near it, they start putting up these defenses.

And if you don't understand what's going on and you're on the receiving end of that, it just feels to you

very threatening and very hard to handle and makes you feel crazy, like you said.

So we have to understand that, you know, these are people that in some ways are acting as though they're fighting for their lives, no holds barred.

And it's because, I think, it's because they're getting near some kind of awful feeling, probably associated with abuse or neglect, but could also be because

they may have had intrinsic difficulties handling emotion.

I mean, neurologically, physiologically, they could have been born with trouble regulating their own emotional systems.

That's that's another way of thinking about it.

But whatever it is, they don't do real well with intimate relationships and emotional arousal.

Wow.

So if you were going to paint a picture for someone who's like, this feels kind of familiar, but tell me what it looks like in practice.

Like operationalize an emotionally immature person.

I know you have a set of characteristics that generally show up in people like this, but can you flesh that out a little bit for people so they can kind kind of see if they can recognize their experience there?

Sure.

Yeah, we'll do it

from the standpoint of what your experience would be and how you might guess that you had been around one of them.

Usually what people feel around emotionally immature people is

kind of

a combination of being bored.

and being irritated because emotionally immature people tend to keep a very superficial level of interaction going and it tends to be very, very self-centered.

So these are people that talk a lot about nothing or they talk a lot about themselves or you feel like you can't get a word in edgewise to try to

reciprocate or have a two-way conversation

because they are packing the air with their need to be the most important person in that interaction.

That's kind of their guiding principle.

Okay.

And so you are being asked to fit yourself into

what they need you to be so that they can feel better about themselves.

And lots of times that means turning you into an audience or assuming that you think exactly the way they do.

So they say tactless or insulting things and don't even realize it because they're sure you're just like them.

And it's boring because there's no spark going on.

There's no

interaction that is lifting your spirits or making you feel any kind of real connection, or even that you're talking about something meaningful.

Because emotionally immature people feel better if things are kind of on the surface and they're very, very fond of cliched kinds of sound bite

speech.

When you're saying that, like it is boring and it is dull and it is one way, I am the receiver, until that is challenged.

And then it is anything but boring because

isn't it like then that person's very selfhood in that moment is challenged.

If you are bucking that, if you are pushing that, if you're not just the dutiful audience, like, what then does that turn into?

It's double-edged, right?

Dull until it's, unless, until it's pressure tested, and then it's not dull because that person's fighting for themselves and you are going to lose.

But you call that egocentrism, right?

That's the first hallmark

characteristic, egocentrism.

That's all the things you just described, the audience, the performer, the control of the, and the no letting go of control in order to have a back and forth sinking into a moment.

You're not ever really making progress with them.

You're just in the audience.

Yeah, that's a really good way to put it.

You're not making progress with them and you're not being received by them.

Right.

So they're not looking for input from you.

They're looking for you to be their audience.

Right.

Yeah.

And you can see like

from what I described that

they also have this fear of intimacy,

emotional intimacy.

And that means that, you know, when you're emotionally intimate with someone, you're telling them about yourself, what you really feel,

who you are, and they're doing the same back.

And you come away from those encounters feeling like, wow, I really know this person now, or I really felt seen.

And that is inherently energizing to a human being.

to relate at that level.

It's actually the right hemisphere of the brain resonating and attuning with the other person's right hemisphere of the brain.

Interesting.

I say that because I just want you to know that it's physically hardwired into us to not only enjoy that, but to get energy from that.

So we have our built-in batteries with each other if we can relate at that level.

And that's why it feels so boring talking to them because

their fear of intimacy is holding them back from really allowing themselves to go go into that kind of connection.

Wow.

And it's energy provoking.

That's so fascinating.

Okay.

So that is egocentrism, fear of intimacy.

You have poor self-reflection.

That's category two.

Talk to us about that.

Poor self-reflection is the thing that makes it so they don't change.

Like a very frequent question is, can they ever change?

Can the emotionally immature person change?

And it's like, well, anybody can change if they're willing to ask themselves, you know, am I a part of the problem?

What am I doing here that's causing this difficulty?

Maybe I need to step back and look at what I said, or maybe I need to imagine, you know, what this was like for them.

That's self-reflection.

I can stand apart from myself, look at my own behavior, reflect on it, and then maybe I come up with an idea that I said something wrong.

And then maybe I'll go back and attempt a repair by apologizing or sharing empathy for my tactless remark or whatever it is.

But that ability

is so crucial to any kind of relationship,

to be able.

to reflect on your own behavior so that you can see it from the other person's point of view.

And you can see how if you have trouble with that, you are going to have trouble with your relationships.

Because this leads to another characteristic.

You are not able to have empathy for how they may have experienced what you did or said.

So that combination of poor self-reflection and poor empathy, you know, just right away takes away some central tools of good relationships.

And then the fear of emotional intimacy takes away another one.

So now we're talking about someone who either has to have a pretty stereotyped relationship that's very rule bound,

they have to be in a relationship in which they feel like they're right all the time, and that's not questioned, and they have to feel like that they're going to be safe because they have control.

Yes.

They have control over other people.

They have control over circumstances.

And of course, a person who is lacking in these abilities needs a great deal of control over other people

because they don't have that ability to finesse it with the social skills that an adequately mature person automatically has.

I love this quote that of yours, that it seems to encapsulate all of those qualities.

And you said that the motive of an emotionally immature person is basically, I can't do it on my own.

So I need you to adopt my perspective, my sense of self, that like, I can't reflect and decide that I could have done something different.

I can't see anything from your perspective.

I am like drowning and you need to come over with me and you need to adopt my sense of self.

This is the only way.

And I think that's so interesting because

when that happens so early, can you talk about like when that happens so early, when you are a very young person growing up in this environment where you need to join an emotionally immature person from where they are, and therefore you don't get to have your own independent sense of self, what that looks like as a child and what you start to look like as an adult when that is so formative to you when you're young.

Yeah, let's start with the idea that like emotionally immature

people

create a certain kind of relationship system on the basis of their needs as emotionally underdeveloped people.

Okay.

The emotionally immature relationship system is just what we're in with children all the time.

It's a system where you have one person who is not able to emotionally regulate their own emotional stability and equilibrium, and they're not able to regulate their own self-esteem.

They're completely dependent on another person to do that with them and for them.

Okay?

As you mature and you get older and

you become a more emotionally mature person,

you are better able to

you know, keep your cool, maintain your equilibrium when things are going wrong or somebody says the wrong thing to you or looks at you cross-eyed, you know, whatever it is, you don't lose your stuff because you're able to do these internal actions that allow you to cope with it.

But if you're emotionally immature, you can't do that.

And you feel like you're coming apart.

You feel like you're just losing your ability to cope.

And with your self-esteem, you don't really, because you don't have a solid sense of self, if you're that emotionally immature.

You know, self develops over the lifetime.

But in early childhood and middle childhood, the self really is in a very accelerated developmental path so that you get that sense of self, like this is who I am.

Emotionally immature people have not developed that to the degree that they need to.

And so they always feel kind of shaky about who they are and are are they worth anything?

You know, are they good?

They really don't have a sense of self.

And so it's very easy for them to have low self-esteem or have that very, very thin skin because they don't have that inner feeling of self that would kind of say, no, you're okay.

We know who we are.

We know what we feel.

We're good people here.

They're not able to do that.

So they depend on other people to do that for them.

And they actually suck you into it.

And it's one of the things that makes, you know, to go back to the thing about if you're in a conversation with one of them, how would you know?

Another characteristic that they would show you would be that you would be drained.

You would feel exhausted after that conversation because it would feel like someone just, you know, turned the tap and all the energy ran out of you because

they need your attention as a kind of energy to fuel their own stability and their own self-esteem.

And when you're doing that for two people at once,

it's exhausting.

It's exhausting.

So an interaction between two people should be like you're charging each other, like a battery back and forth.

You're charging each other.

But with an emotionally immature person, it's like you're the gas tank and they're the car and you just don't get anything back and you're just getting sucked out.

And that's why, after it, you're like, I was not charged, I just was sucked from.

Yes, exactly.

And that's because there's actually something that's supposed to happen between two emotionally mature people.

So, this is the energy vampire, the all the different things we call people.

You're saying that type of person is very likely an emotionally immature person.

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is any of this generational i feel like a lot of my friends would identify their parents as emotionally immature people is there any part of this that's like well this generation was before oprah was telling us to live our best lives it was before people were like you know therapying all over the place and emotional maturity was not a focus of a certain generation like is it is any of it generational?

Or, like, our parents' generation was raised by parents who used to beat the crap out of each other.

Exactly.

Is it not their fault in some way?

Is it, are we evolving towards emotional maturity?

In other words,

yeah, I think we are because I think emotional maturity begets emotional maturity.

If you can think of other people, if you can be empathetic, if you can self-reflect, you know, all these more mature qualities, and you do that with your children, your children are going to be able to develop their sense of self and develop their own emotional maturity as a result of that.

Yes.

The problem with that is

that, yes, when people have been mistreated and they've turned out emotionally immature as a result of that,

they can pass that down to their children and so it can be generational, absolutely.

But

like what's happened in this country, you know, maybe in the past, maybe 30 years,

is

that people

have had access to all kinds of,

I would call it consciousness-raising things.

You know, Glennon's book, book,

you know,

helping people to do these very things, think about themselves, think about their relationships, self-reflect, have empathy for others, understand how other people work and their own personalities work.

So there's been a tremendous blooming of awareness about psychological issues and the impact

of certain kinds of interactions on people and their psyches.

So maybe that came about when Dr.

Spock encouraged people not just to change their diapers, but to think about the child's experience and to think about the effects psychologically on the child of how you speak to them and how you hold them and how you treat them.

That was a big

foreign concept.

Now,

you know, we just know all of that.

But I think there's been a tremendous explosion in self-help.

Aside from the psychology part of it, there's been a tremendous explosion in awareness of human rights that's gone on probably since after World War II.

There's been this awareness that what happens to people inside is huge and it really matters.

It's real that people suffer and it's real that people feel disrespected or dishonored.

That's not a made-up thing.

So those two things, the explosion of self-help, the increase in awareness of human rights, I think has propelled us toward be more aware of emotional maturity.

However, I will say that all you have to do is look at the news

and realize that the people who are

reading the books and doing the work and spreading the word, you know, are probably a fairly small

percentage of the world population and through no fault of anybody's own, just that we have the resources and the abilities to raise, you know, our consciousness, consciousness or we've had good parenting ourselves or you know but

yeah the emotional immaturity in the world i think is still pretty high yeah

i just think that's a really important point like i just had like this wave of compassion that hit me around the privilege that so many of us who are

trying to become emotionally mature whether it's through therapy, all of these methods, I think it's really important just to remember that not everybody everybody has the same kind of access and privilege to be able to want to or find the resources for emotional maturity.

It allows you to look at it.

It's like, okay, it's not our fault, but it's still our problem.

Yeah.

And that's what I want to get to next.

When you are raised by an emotionally immature parent, regardless of whether it's their fault that they were that, we can release that, like

the faulting of it all.

What, as a child, if you are raised by a parent who is egocentric, who has all of these defenses, who has effective realism, who has poor empathy, what happens to you as a child?

You talk about two routes we can take as an internalizer or an externalizer, right?

So, talk to us about that experience as a child and then how you might know

that you are an adult child of an emotionally immature person.

What might show up in your life?

As you can imagine, little children need their parents to be able to

see them, help them understand what feelings are, help them understand themselves.

I mean these are all things that you know little children need and they don't just get it from their parents.

I mean they get it from you know other adults, they get it from teachers, even their peers.

But

The problem with the family that has emotionally immature parents is that their kids end up having to supply that empathy, that resonance to the parent.

And it typically is done out of fear.

Okay, in other words, if I try to be very empathic toward my mom

because she's likely to, you know, blow a gasket and get very volatile if things don't go her way.

Now, I'm being empathic.

I'm being very concerned about her

and that's good because I'm building empathy and I'm a sensitive little kid, but it's not good for me

because I'm having to pull out of an undeveloped personality a level of empathy and effort that I'm really not prepared to make.

So that's why a lot of adult children of emotionally mature parents feel tired all the time,

because they keep doing that in their relationships automatically, you know, very vigilant about what the other person needs, because that was how they started life.

That's how they learned what life was about.

So it's very tiring.

It makes it so that that child

approaches problems feeling initially very overwhelmed because you know they haven't been helped to you know kind of grow up and develop coping mechanisms with a parent who protects them from being overwhelmed and teaches them how to deal with problems instead that parent is more likely the source of the overwhelm okay so that kid grows up in a kind of a

outwardly over mature way like they can handle anything their friends come to them with their problems.

You call them old souls.

They get

old souls.

Thank you.

Yes, old soul, exactly.

Yep.

Yep.

The problem is that they're not old souls.

They're kids who had to grow up too fast.

And so what we want to be aware of is how deceptive it can look on the outside.

This adult child would look like a person who had it all together.

You know, they're the one on whom other people depend.

But inside, they may feel like they are caving

or like they really don't know what to do, but they can't show anybody that they don't know what to do.

They just have to figure everything out on their own.

So

when you're thinking about how would you know

if you were a person person like this, an adult child, I think it would be that

feeling of I had to grow up too fast.

I was overwhelmed and yet I still had to cope.

I still had to be the one that took care of things.

And I felt emotionally lonely.

That's a huge piece of it

because You don't have a parent who's capable of empathizing with your emotional experiences.

Yeah.

They're not interested in it.

They don't care to talk about it.

They tell you you're going to be okay.

They tell you not to worry about it, but they can't go in there and sit with you

and be with you in it in a resonant, empathic way.

They just can't bring themselves to do that.

And is it because they're afraid?

They're afraid, right?

What is the part where you say they're very afraid of big feelings, of big expressions of intimacy or expression of feeling emotionally immature parent can't handle, which I think is so interesting because kids blame themselves for that, right?

You say that if a kid shows a parent their most vulnerable self and their parent can't handle that and shuts it down for some reason, then the kid learns the most real part of me is not attractive to my parents.

There must be something wrong with me.

So when you have a parent who is afraid of emotional intimacy,

the kid thinks the most real part of me is shameful.

There must be something wrong with me.

There must be something wrong with me.

Is that a hallmark of an adult child of an emotionally immature parent is someone who constantly thinks that there's something wrong with the realest part of them?

Yes.

Yeah.

That's really well said because.

Well, you said it.

I just quoted that from you.

You nailed that.

Yeah.

Well, you know, yes, there is that feeling.

And when we all get that feeling, like if we're, if we're really upset and maybe we call a friend or, you know, we run into somebody and we download on them because we're so upset about something and the other person just doesn't respond with much interest or emotion.

We feel too like there's something wrong with us.

I mean,

it's not because the child is overly sensitive or it's because they're a child.

It's because they're a human being.

And when we get like a blank face or a startled face or a face that looks like, I don't know what you're talking about, it makes us feel like, oh, there must be something wrong with me, or I said the wrong thing.

you know, because you're trying to get a sense of control of the situation.

And you're frantically trying to figure out how did I create this bad connection?

Okay.

But if the person is emotionally immature, then there's probably going to be a not so great connection anyway.

And that's where that feeling comes from.

But the other thing that emotionally immature people do is they do this moral

judgment thing on other people.

It can be very subtle.

It can be very overt.

But the message is that I have a need

and you better fill it for me, and you better do it quick, because I need it right now.

And if you don't, then you're bad.

So, when an emotionally immature person comes across your boundary and they

do something that

is asking you to go against what's best for you and serve them, they're doing it in a morally obligated way.

In other words, you will feel like it's up to you to meet their need.

And if you don't, that you're a bad person.

Now,

here we go to the internalizer type of adult child.

The internalizing type of person will take that to heart in a big way.

Okay, they'll be like, you know, did I, I did, you know, I did that.

I made the, you know, I was selfish.

Oh, I should have self-sacrificed.

I didn't respond quickly enough.

I wasn't generous enough.

Because the internalizing personality looks inside themselves

and tries to

not only figure out what they did wrong, but they try to understand what they need to do to fix it.

They're always trying to improve themselves, always trying to, you know, catch it before it gets out there with other people.

And so that internalizing, it's a skill, really, but it makes a person take in the projections of the emotionally immature person in a way that, you know, really makes them feel terrible about themselves and lets the emotionally immature person completely off the hook.

Now, there's another type of personality, the externalizer, and they just, you know, basically blame everybody for everything that happens to them.

Everything gets kicked out as soon as it comes in, so that it's always somebody else's fault.

And you can imagine a lot of emotionally immature people are like that.

And so, if you have an internalizer child who's taking stuff in, questioning themselves, trying to learn, trying to understand themselves, and then you have an externalizing parent who says, I didn't do anything.

It's your fault.

You're the problem.

You know, that's like a terrible combination.

Yeah,

because it all flows into

the heart of the person who, you know, is least defended

against that kind of distortion because they're ready to learn, they're ready to change, they're self-reflecting.

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I'm 47 and what I think is so interesting about my group of friends who are all my same age is that many of us just started to understand that we may have been raised by emotionally immature people.

And I think that this is a very

common thing, right?

Like you're a kid and you can't see it because you're dependent upon these people.

You'd rather decide that you're bad than your parents are inadequate because then the world's unsafe if you decide that they're bad.

But then this thing happens where we get older

and

catalysts make us unable to tolerate the thing anymore.

For example, we might see our parents start being the way they were when we were younger with our kids.

Suddenly we're like, oh, hell no.

Right?

I may not be real, but my kid is real and you can't treat them that way.

Yeah.

Or like big events happen and we have now our adult consciousness.

You say like

weddings or big events might happen that showcase this emotional immaturity in a way we haven't seen it before.

This is what keeps happening to my friends right now.

It's like, I've said this a million times, but I'm, it could be the, the cartoon that is the theme of this podcast, which is a New Yorker cartoon where there's a man laying on a therapist's couch and he says to the therapist, I had a hard childhood, especially lately.

And he's like 60.

And it's like, oh, shit.

Wait.

And so it's like this I see dead people moment where you look back on your life and you're like,

and that's what happens, right?

And is it true that maybe emotionally immature parents also are okay with raising small kids because it's small kid with small kid and then suddenly the kid gets older and is developing in in maturity and that and the parents not keeping up

i really think there's something to that i have wondered about that so much like why is it that uh the child's able to grow up with a parent who got stuck in their own emotional development.

How does that even happen?

A friend of mine, Tiffany Root, has the theory that

the child who does the best, you know, like you can have one or two kids in a large family and they do great and everybody else is just, you know, barely scraping along.

And her idea was that the kid who's doing great was tagged to be the caretaker for the parents.

And so they overdevelop their

adult side, so to speak, and really, you know, step in as like a third parent, or they become the parent's confidant

or, you know, their advisor,

that kind of thing.

It's a very weird kind of way to grow up.

But

the emotionally immature parent, because they get kind of stuck, they don't understand

what it is that their kids need.

And so they end up

getting upset with the child when the child does show needs and they make the child feel ashamed for needing to turn to them.

That's another big problem.

So what do you see happening next when a person finally goes, wait, what, there's some kind of catalyst where they are reading your work or they're and they're looking and thinking, oh my gosh, I think I may have been raised by an emotionally immature person.

What happens next?

Is there a confrontation?

Is there, like, what do you see most likely happen when a, say, a person is like, Eureka, I have been raised by an emotionally immature person, so now I will fix it.

Not what should happen, because we're going to do a whole nother episode on that.

Right.

What usually does happen?

It's so interesting how

this works.

But, you know, so many of the comments that I've gotten back from readers have said things like,

you said what I've known all along, or you put into words what I couldn't, or

how did you meet my mother, or how did you get in our house in our living room to see what goes on?

You know, you're describing exactly what happened.

So when you get that kind of eureka moment, it's like

someone is

reflecting and putting into words your exact experience.

And you no longer feel crazy or like you're exaggerating things

or like you're making stuff up just to get sympathy.

I mean, all of a sudden, everything makes sense.

So that eureka moment

in these cases was only coming from reading a book.

What I'm trying to say is that it's been so important to people just to have these ideas

and to describe what they've gone through.

I don't get the message so much like, oh my God, what do I do now?

I get that about the relationship with the parent, of course, because that's a practical issue that we can have some ideas about.

But it's almost like they got what they needed

by just hearing about it.

I get that.

And by feeling like, oh, this, this, I'm not crazy.

All the stuff that I've sensed all this time has a name and it has

a reality.

And I, yeah, I haven't been crazy.

I haven't been selfish.

So the eureka almost almost takes care of itself.

It's so transformational.

Yeah, it is.

Just to get the right concepts.

That's how we deal with reality:

we experience it.

Somebody says, Oh, that's called this or that.

And we have a sense of it clicking, you know, and we're like, Oh, that's what that's called.

That's, you know, that's how I am.

That's what I am.

Yes.

And it, that very process strengthens you

in a way that is just phenomenal.

Yep.

So

I really have not had a lot of people say,

yeah, what, yeah, that's nice, but what do I do about it?

It's almost like just by reading about it and acknowledging yourself and having that kind of self-empathy and self-knowledge, they've already done what they needed to do about it.

Wow.

Yeah.

It's like the answer to the attachment injury, because if the whole idea of attachment, like Dr.

Becky Kennedy says, like it's the child asking, am I real?

Am I safe?

Do I matter?

And if throughout when you're being raised by an emotionally immature person,

you're getting no's to all of those answers.

And then to read the experience from you, it is affirming, like, yes, you are real.

That was real.

Those things happened to you.

You were right to notice those things.

You matter.

You can make yourself safe.

That is such huge work to heal that attachment injury that you had growing up.

We're going to come back because we're going to talk about practical things that we can do next.

Let's go.

If we are.

Because I feel like what you're saying too is the Eureka moment of maybe I was raised by, if you're an internalizer.

Part of it is so freeing because, and it's directional.

It's like, for me, an internalizer might, you know, spend 30 years in therapy trying to figure out what's wrong with them.

Yep.

Because their whole life, they've been wondering what's wrong with them, what's wrong with me, what's wrong with me, what's wrong with me.

It's a directional shift too, right?

Like it's like,

maybe that's not the only work.

Maybe there's work I need to do to get this relationship boundaried because maybe what's wrong has not always been what's wrong with me.

Maybe there's something wrong with this dynamic.

So let's come back to a part two and talk about what do we do after the Eureka moment?

What do we do when we find ourselves entangled

through parent-kid relationship, through friendship, through work, through marriage, God help us,

with an emotionally immature person?

What next?

We can do hard things.

Pod squad, come back to figure out what's next.

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I give you Tish Melton and Brandi Carlisle.

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lack.

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