Lexie Carroll’s Reviews > Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents > Status Update

TRAITS OF EMOTIONALLY MATURE PEOPLE:
They work with reality rather than fighting it
Can think and feel at the same time
Consistent, reliable & truthful
Don’t take everything personally
They respect boundaries
Reciprocal, they give back
Flexible and compromise well
Even tempered, thoughtful, willing to be influenced
Can reflect, apologize & make amends
Empathetic, can see & understand others
Can laugh & be playful

Emotionally mature people have a good sense of humor and can use lightheartedness to relieve stress. Laughter is a form of egalitarian play between people & reflects an ability to relinquish control and follow someone else’s lead.
The immature form of humor includes cynicism, using it at someone else’s expense to boost one’s self-esteem, pushing it even when others aren’t amused, or as humor to trick others.

Remember what John Bowlby said: all humans share the primitive instinct that familiarity means safety. Therefore, if you grew up with EI parents, you may feel subconsciously drawn to the familiarity of egocentric and exploited people. Schema Therapy (Young & Klosko 1993) tells us that the people we find most charismatic often are subconsciously triggering us to fall back into negative family patterns.

If your childhood thoughts & feelings made your parents uncomfortable, you would’ve quickly learned to suppress these inner experiences as they threatened to distance you from those you depended upon. You learned that your goodness or badness lay not only in your behavior, but in your mind as well. In this way, you may have learned the absurd idea that you can be a bad person for having certain thoughts & feelings.

As children, we absorb our parents’ opinions & beliefs in the form of an inner voice that keeps up an ongoing commentary that appears to be coming from inside us (but is really an echo of our early caretakers). As you get more objective about your EI parent, you can use the maturity awareness approach to also reevaluate the voices in your head and begin to free yourself from their undue influence.

A child’s individuality is seen as a threat to emotionally insecure/immature parents because it stirs up fears about possible rejection or abandonment. If you think independently, you might criticize them or decide to leave. For parents who fear real emotion & abandonment, authenticity in their children presents frightening evidence of the child’s individuality. Children often sense this and suppress themselves.

Stepping Out of an Old Role Self:
When we take an observational stance we can also see how we get stuck in a role-self or healing fantasy; then we can try & do things differently. Be cautious about unexpected openness from your parents when you take a mature detached stance. Your child self may wish to get closer and hope for fulfillment, but this will trigger their fear of emotional closeness & they will pull back.

The Maturity Awareness Approach:
It helps to try to relate to the parent or EI person in a neutral way, rather than trying to have a relationship. First assess their level of maturity and approach interactions from an observational perspective.
Then these 3 steps:
1. Express yourself and then let it go
2. Focus on the outcome rather than the relationship
3. Manage the interaction rather than engage emotionally

Relatedness vs. Relationship:
Another tip to help in detached observation is remembering that relatedness is different from relationship. Real relationship involves openness & emotional reciprocity- attempting this with EI people is frustrating & invalidating. In relatedness, there’s communication but no goal of having a satisfying emotional exchange. You stay in contact without expecting validation or attunement.

Detached Observation:
Become observational by deliberately taking a detached stance when interacting with EI person. Use mindfulness, paced breathing & relaxing imagery to calm your emotions. Shift into a rational, descriptive perspective: pretend you are a scientist conducting an anthropological field study. Internally narrate your observations to yourself; if needed, silently repeat: “Detach, detach, detach.”