Do you have an Emotionally Immature or Toxic Parent? Here are 6 types.
Emotionally immature parents. It’s not really a term you hear often and it’s often something you feel, experience, and see the effects of before you have words to really describe it and know what it is.
Emotionally immature parents can be described as parents who are emotionally immature, unavailable, selfish, and put their needs before their children to the point of physical or emotional neglect. They are often described as overly emotional, manipulative, narcissitic, avoidant, neglectful, and the king or queen of gaslighting. Due to their behavior, lack of insight, and inability to take ownership of “their stuff” and their contribution to conflict, they are exhausting, leave us feeling confused, hurt, betrayed, and abandoned. It’s not uncommon to feel resentment, overwhelm, and hopelessness with how to deal with them in your life.
Here are Six Types to see if you might have grown up and/or are dealing with one.
The Driven Parent: These parents are highly driven, goal oriented, and constantly trying to fix everything and everyone. And although they are trying “fix”, it’s not from a place of empathy and love, instead it comes across as critical, controlling, and as interfering. They can’t pause and are always on the move to find and be perfection.
Passive Parents: These parents are avoidant, turn their attention away from any abuse, neglect, or harm, and minimize problems and emotions. They are unable to show up for hard conversations and emotions, which in turn causes abandonment and neglect.
Rejecting Parents: These parents are withdrawn, dismissive, derogatory, easily blow-up and are extremely closed off. They view the need for love and affection as “needy”, have a thick wall up to keep others out, and can be abusive.
Narcissistic Parents: These parents make almost everything about them, have a grandiose sense of self and their parenting abilities/relationships, are preoccupied with themselves and their needs/achievements, and crave constant attention and validation (including from their children). They lack empathy with their children, therefore struggle to validate, provide for emotional needs, and violate boundaries often. They often use manipulation and gaslighting tactics to get their needs met from their children.
The Parent Who Needs Parented: These parents place their child in the parent role, whether emotionally or physically. This type of parent may present loving and affectionate towards their child; however, they place significant emotional and/or physical expectations on their child. This includes a parent placing their child in a role that should be for a partner/parent, like caretaking for younger siblings, managing a house/workload, going to them for emotional validation, or financial supp
Impact of Emotionally Immature and Toxic Parents:
As an adult child of an emotionally immature parent(s), you may feel you were never able to be a “child” or experience a “childhood.” You probably feel you never got your needs met, had to grow up fast, parent yourself, and possible grew up taking care of your parent.
It doesn’t matter if you are an adult now, if you haven’t dealt with your emotionally immature parent and learned specific tools to help you manage this relationship, the hurt and anguish will continue.
Just a few other effects might include:
Difficulty knowing your own emotional needs and the ability to process emotions, needs, and how you feel.
Difficulty asking for what you need and communicating.
Enmeshment with parent and difficulty with differentiation of self – or difficulty being your own individual and putting your needs as a priority. Instead, you worry more about your parents needs or what they will think.
Anxiety, depression, trauma symptoms, triggers, shame, faulty beliefs systems and unhelpful core beliefs about who you are.
Low self-esteem/worth/confidence
Limited boundaries (struggles to say no, speak up, be assertive) or too rigid of boundaries (keep people out, don’t self-disclose when appropriate, want to keep self-safe)
Steps to Heal, Recover, and Live a Life of Freedom:
1.Get educated and improve awareness.
Learn what emotionally immature and toxics parents are and the behaviors they do, so that you can have words to name and identify their behavior. This will help you challenge their guilt, manipulative, and gas lighting behavior. You can end this cycle with knowledge, skills, and support.
2. Grieve.
Grief can be thick, painful, and incredibly hard at moments to work through, but you are capable. It’s important to go back and grieve what you lost as a child and now in your adulthood. There is so much loss if we grew up in childhood trauma with toxic parents, and the loss continues into adulthood. However, working through grief allows you to step into what you do have and can create. Which is still a beautiful life, even if it doesn’t include the parents you wish you would have had. It really is possible, I promise.
3. Process the hurt.
This part is hard. You will most likely have to dig deep and share your pain, but you will be capable of this, survive, and then thrive. Trust the process. Trust someone worthy of trust to do this with. Trust yourself that you won’t get stuck and you will be ok. Journal, use mindfulness/grounding practices, and find things that bring you comfort during this time.
4. Learn what healthy love is and isn’t (especially with parent-child relationships)
Work with relationship therapists, coaches, read books, reach out to mentors, groups. Learn. It’s hard to know something we never had before or weren’t taught.
5. Define what you want your relationship to be.
This might include your parent(s) in your life, it might not. It might be somewhere in between, but you get to define what that is. This is about you and what’s good for you (finally).
6. Get really good at boundaries.
LIKE REALLY REALLY GOOD. You will need support with this. Due to the nature of our relationship with our parent, years of being taught to treat them in a certain way and engage in an unhealthy-toxic relationship with them, it will be really hard to put and keep healthy boundaries in place.
7. Get support and stick to what is best for you.
Reach out to trained therapists, coaches, support groups - enlist supportive friends that know what you need to heal your relationship. Allow people to help and support you. You will need to be reminded you are not “crazy” during the process, especially if gaslighting and manipulative behavior continues.
And finally, just know process isn’t easy and it doesn’t happen overnight. It often includes digging deep, grieving your lost childhood and letting go of the ideal parent you wish you had. Remember, you don’t have to do this alone.
If you’d like to learn more, please subscribe to my newsletter to get your free download of starting this healing and recovering process from emotionally immature and toxic parents.
If you’d like more support, please reach out directly to jess@besecurelyher.com - to see how I might support you more. I’m passionate about this topic and believe you can see the change you want. There are so many other professional out there that are also eager to help you if I’m not a good fit for you. I can help connect you with one of those too!
What step might you need to work on in this healing Journey? What barriers do you foresee? Leave a comment or message me! I’d love to chat more.
With Love,
Jessica Rix - Securely Her
jess@besecurelyher.com
IG: securely.her