CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Emotionally Immature Parents with Morgan Pommells

Episode Date: March 19, 2024

This week on the Calling Home podcast, Whitney interviews therapist Morgan Pommells about emotionally immature parents. They’ll discuss how these parents can have good intentions but become defensive when their adult children bring up past issues, leading to feelings of being unheard and causing relationship problems. Repair is possible at any age and they’ll talk about how parents can acknowledge and validate their child's experiences, even if they differ from their own memories.  Follow Morgan on Instagram at @morganpommells  Have a question for Whitney? Call Home at 866-225-5466.  Join Whitney’s Family Cycle Breakers Club for further support and discussion on family dynamics at CallingHome.co. Follow the Calling Home community on Instagram or TikTok.  Follow Whitney Goodman on Instagram or TikTok.  The Calling Home podcast is not engaged in providing therapy services, mental health advice or other medical advice or services, is not a substitute for advice from a qualified healthcare provider, and does not create any therapist-patient or other treatment relationship between you and Calling Home or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Calling Home’s Terms of Service. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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most of your getaway wherever that is because the only thing better than a great playlist is a great trip life's the trip make the most of it at Best Western. and save at bestwestern.com. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The Calling Home Podcast. I'm so excited to be back today with an interview. I am talking to Morgan Pommels, a therapist who's here to talk with me about emotionally immature parents. If you're not following her on Instagram, you definitely should be.

I am Whitney Goodman. Welcome to the Calling Home podcast. I'm glad you're here. Morgan Pommels was a highly requested guest on the Calling Home podcast, and so I'm so glad we're able to have this conversation because I think this can be a really difficult issue to talk about. I think what can happen with emotionally immature parents is that they can have the best intentions for their child, but they can become defensive really quickly if their adult child remembers or mentions things about how they were not parented properly or in the way

that they would have liked to have been parented. And when a parent refuses to accept the adult child's reality, it can make the adult child feel unheard and it can cause a lot of issues in the relationship. And this usually translates into a cycle that is passed down unfortunately through generations when people don't learn how to apologize or take accountability. That being said, the most important thing to note here is that repair really is possible for anyone at any age and Morgan offers a lot of information about that healing process. Before we get started, I wanted to mention that starting on April 1st, inside the Calling Home community, we are going to be talking about parents who will not apologize.

So if you relate to this episode or having an emotionally immature parent, this is definitely going to be the month for you. I'm going to be dropping new content every Monday to help you either get an apology from your parents or grieve not getting an apology or having a relationship without getting an apology. We also are going to have weekly groups for five weeks throughout the month of April where you can connect with other family cycle breakers who are dealing with parents who will not or have not apologized or who they want to apologize to them for something. And honestly, as a therapist that's been doing individual therapy for almost a decade, I have found these groups to be immensely

helpful, maybe even more helpful than individual therapy for these types of issues, because you can actually connect with other people, hear what they've done, ask for advice, and see that you're not alone. So you can go to callinghome.com and learn more about joining the family cycle breakers club. And I definitely recommend that you do that by April 1st so that you can secure a spot in our group. All right, let's go ahead and dive into my conversation with Morgan. Why do you focus on emotionally immature parents, on the relationships with adult children. What has drawn you to that? And why do you think it's important? Good question. I focus on that because often when we're talking about emotionally mature parents, there is this weird in between of like I can't identify that my parent was like,

quote unquote, the typical abusive kind of stereotype because my parent was still kind and loving and had moments of being gentle or nice. But I also can't swing to like the other side completely saying that they were like, you know, the picture perfect mom or dad. So there's this like weird gray, right, that exists that we don't talk enough about. And so I was constantly working with people who weren't able to like put a name on it. They weren't able to put a label on it. And so as a result, they were internalizing a lot of the painful stuff they went through as like things they were either making up or their fault because they weren't like X, Y, Z type of child. So that middle space of like wanting people to be able to feel validated that like what they went through was actually

really painful and really abusive, even if it wasn't this like outright depiction of really painful stuff, not to say, you know, that emotionally mature parents don't do the really outrightly kind of stereotypical abusive stuff. But there's a little bit of like an insidious and sneaky nature to some of this. And so I just. just really saw the weight of that on the people that I was working with. Yeah, I've had such a similar experience, and I think a lot of people, when they hear the description of an emotionally immature parent, this light bulb goes off of like, wow, that's so my experience. And I didn't know that there were, you know, words for that. And of course, Lindsay Gibson's

book, I think, does a really good job of highlighting that for anybody listening that doesn't know the book, but it's the adult children of emotionally immature parents' book. And you're right, there's such this divide between your parent is either good or abusive, right? And I've found that when talking to or interacting with estranged parents, that they have a lot of trouble wrapping their head around their being this gray space in the middle that you can be a parent that tried. You can be a parent that's good. at times and even really love your child and not intend to be abusive but still have harmed them. And I'm wondering if that's something you come up against as well and how you deal with that.

Yeah. There's often this defensive factor of like, but I did all of these things and I tried really hard and I love my kids so much. And I even did things really differently from what my own parents did, right? Like I actively tried. And yet you can still enact a lot of harm. and you can still be struggling with emotionally immature defenses, right? If we think about even like the common parenting techniques and this whole generation that was really raised of like to be seen and not heard, right? Like a lot of really painful stuff, some of that's just going to create emotional immaturity. Like that's just par for the course, right?

And so you could have done things really different from what your parents might have done. You could have tried to break generational cycles and might have. And that doesn't mean you still didn't hurt or harm your child. and it doesn't mean you didn't have your own stuff that you needed to tend to, right? If we even think about the normalization of therapy over just the past decade even, a lot of parents today, they weren't going to therapy 20 years ago, 30 years. It was not normal to be doing that, right? And so when you have your own stuff that needed to be tended to and you weren't doing that,

that inevitably is going to bleed onto your kids in some way. I love that you say that the emotional maturity is a result sometimes of how these people were treated in their childhood, right? So when we have these generational patterns of harm, of trauma, of abuse, of just emotional immaturity being passed down, we're going to see that come out in the way that people respond. And to me, the most harmful of those, and you can tell me if you agree or disagree with this, is the defensiveness. Like, I think that's what makes it so challenging to talk about this. It's that double trauma of like I went through it, right?

I went through it. I had to endure it and it was so painful. And now I'm moving closer towards you to see if you can hear me, to see if you can hold space for my pain and you're actually just invalidating it. Right? And there's that traumatization all over again. Usually, you know, my content sometimes makes people upset, like makes emotionally immature parents upset because they see some of these things. And I try to get very highly specific

in like what shouldn't be happening. Right. And so there's this piece of like accepting that you might have been acting this way, right? You might have been behaving in this way for very real reasons because this doesn't just happen. And that the way to feel better about this, the way to have the relationship you want with your child is actually through repair. Right. It's actually through acknowledging and validating and understanding what that world was like for your child, right? Like, that's the key to a lot of this. Because these parents, like, you're right.

You're not going back in time to undo all these things. But there are still things in the today that can help with that relationship. And defensiveness is obviously not one of those things that's going to make it easier, right? It causes a lot of pain. It's hard to even get the conversation started or to even open up, like, space to talk

if you're highly defensive. And I understand why these parents are defensive, right? And I think the stuff I put out there is also quite triggering to a lot of parents. And I get it. But I think what both of us are trying to say here is, like, no one's expecting you to be perfect or to go back and be perfect. But what can we do now that we have more information to repair? So if you're talking to a parent who's maybe feeling a lot, lot of that defensiveness, but is like on the fence wants to talk to their adult child.

Like what would you recommend to them and what do you think the or what do you know the adult child wants from them? So the first thing I would recommend is acknowledging and accepting that the wounding has already happened. You living in denial, right, that it wasn't that bad or that you tried your best or that, you know, this random content creator called Morgan on the internet, you know, she's making everything up. Like that's not going to undo. the years of pain that your child has gone through, right? You accepting it or not accepting it doesn't change what your child is painfully experiencing. So I think I would pose that to anybody who's in this position of like, you can't undo it. It's already there. So what are we going to do

about it? Right? What are we going to do about it? And when it comes to actually having that conversation, one thing I'm constantly guiding people on, and this is also just like in the couples that I work with where there's this history of growing up with an emotionally mature parent. is validating that, like, reality is really subjective, right? Like, your child is going to be telling you their experience, right? And they are the authority on their experience. And it might be different. It might sound different from what you remember.

That does not mean it wasn't their reality. And that's one piece I'm, like, constantly walking people too, that when we can accept that, there's actually a lot of really beautiful healing that can open up. But there's this rigidity that often gets in the way of needing your version of events, to be the only version of events. Yes, 100%. I find that people get so caught up in debating the facts of like, oh, well, that actually

openly happened this many times, or it wasn't like that, it was like this. And I don't know if you find this to be true, but I think some of this depends on, like, a lot of parents don't have a good understanding of, like, child development. And I understand why they don't. I didn't until, you know, I went and did this for work that. sometimes we are looking at past events through the mind of an adult, right, when we're thinking about the impact instead of thinking about what would this have been like for a child to go through it, a five-year-old, a six-year-old, whatever it is. Yes, and their nervous system at the time,

right? Like, I'll be teaching and educating on what actually counts as trauma. And one thing I always come back to, it's like it's something obviously that overwhelms your system so much that you don't have the ability to cope. But it's about the depiction or the presentation of that system in a moment of time. Because at 15, being at the playground by yourself and not being able to find your parent isn't going to be very traumatizing because you have a 15 year old nervous system. But at two and three years old, that is terrifying, right? And that can be, if left long enough, right? And if something, you know, transpires, that can be traumatic for a child because the coping tools I have at that time are that of a two-year-old, right? And so as parents, if we're looking back and thinking

of that through, you know, our 45-year-old lens or whatever it is, we're missing what the subjective experience must have been like for the child going through that at the time. Mm-hmm. That's such a good example. I want to like break that down even more, like even just using this playground example, because the parent, I think, has other knowledge, right? Let's say they were like, oh, I was just over there talking to a friend. I was going to come back into your view in five minutes. They have all this other context for the situation, right, that the child doesn't have. And then I think when you're sitting with your adult child and they're bringing up a situation of like, mom, you were late to pick me up from school every day in kindergarten. And she's like,

oh, well, I was at work. I was late. Or the playground example, the child doesn't have that same context and even providing it in adulthood, it doesn't always fix that wound, right? I don't know if that's something that you experience as well. Yeah, because it often comes across as another form of like invalidation, right? Well, I was busy with work and, you know, I was a single mom. I didn't have much option. And all of that's true, right? All of that's the totally be factually correct. And yet, there was still a lonely child waiting for their mom to pick them up at school who was consistently late, who might have scared. them, who might have made them feel neglected, right? Like, this is where the both end is really important

because all of this could totally be true at the exact same time. I think another important piece to this that you kind of touch on is like this context and this ability to hold all of this information. When this stuff is happening, like the playground example even, like we are so young when we're forming our internal core beliefs about ourselves that I don't have the ability to say, oh, you know, my mom was yelling at me today because she's really stressed at work when I'm like seven years old. That's not my critical thinking. I don't have those skills yet. Right. And so instead, as we know, just through child development, we are like taking all this information in and it's forming our core beliefs, right? And those core beliefs are becoming our lens of like, well, it must have

been because I was a bad child. She yelled at me. She said these things. She shamed me. Right. because it must have been about me in some way. When we reach 30, 35, and have the critical thinking skills to say, oh, wait, like, that might have been my parents' own trauma, it might have been my parents' own emotional dysregulation, we can offload some of that burden of like, okay, maybe that wasn't about me. But those, like, crucial, fundamental years of building our core beliefs, like, we don't have that capacity to hold all that context. That's not where our brain is going.

Yeah, that's so important, I think, for anybody listening who has young children, children even to remember is like, you know, I'm, I have a two-year-old and I'm thinking about like, okay, how can I explain situations to him at his level when he may not understand why I'm acting a certain way? Because you're right. Like, these things are going to happen. You know, we are going to get frustrated. We are going to be late. It's all about, like you said, the repair. And I think that that repair can happen at any age. Like, I, I don't. I don't. don't know that all is lost. I feel like most adult kids I talked to, I did a poll the other day on my Instagram, and it was like 94% of people said, if my parent apologized and changed their

behavior, like, and maybe went to therapy, I would resume the relationship. Like, it's such a small percentage that I find that interact with my work, and you can tell me about the population you work with as well, that say, like, it's totally over. I'll never go back. Yes. And I think, like, this is such a crux of it because there is this deep fantasy, especially for the adult children, emotionally mature parents, to just have their parent get it, to just have their parents say, I am so sorry, I can't believe, I did all that, I can't believe you experienced life that way, that must have been hard. That in and of itself can be incredibly healing.

I mean, it's usually the starting place of more work that has to happen, but all of a sudden we are on a path to connection, we're on a path to letting go of all of this anger and resentment, right? Like that apology can be the birthplace of a lot of beautiful things, but the problem is that apologizing for someone who is really emotionally immature and who has all of these defenses, it's such a vulnerable thing to do. And so we just end up in more conflict, more friction, right? But you're right. I mean, there's so many, it's a fantasy I hear across every single person I work with. It's like, why can't they just get it? Why can't they just validate me?

Why can't they just say sorry? Right? And I think that would do, I've seen it do really beautiful things, but it's a big ask for people who struggle with emotional maturity. Yeah, it's certainly a big ask if they're not doing anything to try to help them get there. Right. Like I think the fantasy that one day they're just going to wake up and have those skills is probably not very realistic.

No, and that's something I talked about over the Christmas season to. of like when we're going home for holidays and family events and, you know, we're going to see them again. And we're not preparing ourselves, right? We're not having these really honest conversations of like, okay, based on all the data I have over the last, you know, 20 years, I can expect my parent to behave in this way. When we don't have that conversation with ourselves and we have these maybe more, I don't know, expectations rooted in fantasy, that's where a lot of pain happens, right? We have to really be willing to accept and meet our parents where, they're actually at, and that can be really hard. Because as a child, like, you don't want to have

to give up on the fantasy that the parent you've always longed for and yearned for is actually never coming. That's really, really painful. Oh my gosh. Absolutely. I think that's something that you and I both talk about a lot is like this acceptance, you know, like accepting what's in front of you, not what you wish that you had or what someone told you you should have or what you see other people have and it is it is so so hard to get there but i have found that it is like the only liberation that you have from this pain is acceptance yes yeah it's like a bit of a band-aid because ripping it off hurts right like something i was thinking about the other day this concept and this use of fantasy and daydreaming right it's so common for childhood trauma survivors to just

grow up and really be fantasizing about the potential of what ifs, the potential of running away, the potential of my parents getting help, getting lost in those TV-type families of what could have been. And so to show up in my office, you know, X amount of years later, and I actually have to say, you know, all the fantasizing you're doing is part of the pain. And it's time we maybe be a little more honest. Like we're asking people to get rid of a coping mechanism that has really helped them and it can absolutely lead to this really liberating place but at first like we we have to grieve we have to be so honest about what's not coming and that is painful which is why like at least for that grieving stage i always tell people to work with a therapist because the pain that comes up

even if you're 40 50 60 years old realizing that that fantasy is not coming it's it's incredibly painful it's your business doesn't move in a straight line Some days bring growth, others bring challenges. But what if you or a partner needs to step away? When the unexpected happens, count on Canada Life's flexible life and health insurance to help your business keep working even when you can't. Don't let life's challenges stand in the way of your success. Protect what you've built today.

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Get almost, almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Order now. Alcohol and select markets. Product availability may vary by Regency app for details. So painful. And I think people will try to like bargain and negotiate and contort themselves a million different ways to like get that fantasy to happen. It's exactly what you said earlier about that egocentric child's like taking everything in and being like, it's me, it's me, it's me. And you can carry that into adulthood, right? And assume that I can fix this with my parent if I just do all the right steps. Yes. Yeah. I mean, that's where the perfectionism comes in. That's where the fawning comes in. That's where the, you know, we don't have this sense of self anymore because we've changed so much about ourselves to become this version that we think our parents want us to be. We wake up 20 years later having no idea who we are, right? Because we're just trying so hard to be loved by this very specific set of conditions that we actually can't achieve. Right. The goalposts are often moving. So there's this, yeah, there's this pain because there's a disconnect to who you are. there's this pain because the fantasy is never going to happen and it is liberating but it does

take a lot of grieving 100%. So I want to pivot a little bit because this month inside calling home we're talking about like growing up in chaos and how that can impact you. And I think one of the things about growing up with an emotionally immature parent, whether that's on the low end or the extreme end of that spectrum, is that it can often be chaotic. whether that's physically or emotionally chaotic. And a lot of the pushback that I get from estranged parents or from parents who have adult children coming to them with this is like, well, it was out of my control, a lot of the chaos.

And some examples of that might be poverty, divorce, getting sick, another child having an illness. So I want to talk about like repair in these situations. where someone isn't necessarily to blame, quote unquote, but there was still harm and chaos done to the child. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. This is where we have to really be okay with both and. Yeah. Like we really have to hold space, right? Because if we're thinking of the egocentric child that really is filtering everything through like, why am I not good enough? Why am I not lovable? Why is no one showing up for me? And it might be because, you know, your mom is taking

care of a sick sibling or whatever the structural, systematic kind of issues are at play, there still is a pain there. And this is where, just from like a clinical aspect too, we would want both individual and like family level therapy because that child does need to process like a lot of the neglect. And we do want that parent to be part of the repair, right? Because like that parent is as hard as they were trying, that child still didn't get what they needed. And something I think this also speaks to is like the defensiveness that is rooted within emotional immaturity. Like if we're talking about some of these bigger issues where the chaos was not necessarily the fault of a certain person, can we still hold space? Like, can you still listen to

your child describe how painful it was for them to be a little more invisible, right? Can we sit in the discomfort and like the shame that that might bring up, right, without saying, but it wasn't my fault. Can we just tolerate that for a bit before moving to invalidation, before moving to explanation, right? Because usually just like the ventilation of that, the ability to say that in front of a parent can be really healing. But you're right. Like it's not always as though there is these, you know, very specific people or that it's like a parent's very intentional behavior that's causing some of this. There are a lot of systematic and structural factors that will contribute to this. You know, the example that I always use it, I think, is like, can be the most clear for people

is like if a parent gets cancer and is in chemo and doing all these, you know, they're in treatment and they're missing out on school events for their young child and their child is watching them get sick. That child can grow up and say, that was a really traumatic time in my life. That was hard for me. I don't blame my mom for it. Maybe I don't feel like she's at fault, but it was still hard for me and it's still shaped who I am today. And I have clients who may have developed certain anxieties or difficulties or resilience and capabilities through those types of scenarios. But it sounds like what you're telling parents is like if your child in adulthood comes to you, or in childhood, with something like this, don't hear in their words, it's your

fault, I'm mad at you, you did this to me. Instead, how can we try to like step back and be like, they're describing to me how they feel? Can I just listen and sit with them and be like, that was a really hard time because it was. The conjuring left rights on September 5th, I come down here I need you. Array! The Warray! Hooray!

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toasted cookie crumble. It's a sweet summer twist on iced coffee. Your cold brew is ready at Starbucks. Yes. Yes, both and, right? Like, it's not either or here. And even if we think of that example of like a parent getting sick with cancer, right? And just from my own experience, I've lost a parent to cancer when I was younger. And so I'm thinking and putting myself in that position, you know, if I were to be saying to my mother one day, I'm really upset that you weren't able to be there for me or I'm really upset like where were you why why was nobody paying attention to me like where were you if that was coming out of my mouth I would hope that my mother would reach over take my hand and say I'm so sorry that I could not be there for you in those moments

and just sit in that for a second right instead of well I was busy and what was I supposed to do and my world was crumbling too right instead of all of this can we just acknowledge that your child did miss out on something, right? Like, this is where we can have space for all of it. Does that make sense? Absolutely. And I think, like, I even feel emotional thinking about that because as a parent, you do have to, like, you have to swallow that feeling because you do get choked up

or you feel shame or guilt or pain or discomfort when your child says to you, like, where were you, you know, you weren't there for me? And I think we all know what that feels like to let somebody down that we really care about. And so this is a moment where it's like you got two paths. You can further contribute to that feeling or you can say, I'm going to take these big feelings that I'm having and I'm going to deal with them somewhere else, whether that's in therapy with a friend with my partner. And I'm going to be like the steady guide and presence for my child right now because they need me.

Yes, because they need you, because they're going through it, I think the other piece to this is like the benefit and the payoff of that is, you know, having your mom put their hand over and say, I'm so sorry I couldn't be there for you. And processing through that pain clears out so much emotional space that eventually the adult child can say, you know what? My mom was going through it too. Right. When we clear out some of that resentment and anger and all of that like internal pain that's there, there creates space for empathy and understanding. and not so much black and white thinking, but the more we invalidate and become defensive, we're just contributing to the anger and the resentment. So we have to create some space, right? And as the parent, this is the hard part for parents because you do have to be the modeling, like you have to be the safety figure. You always have to be modeling that, right? Like even when your child might be saying something that's really hurtful for you, it's your job as the parent to say, okay, I'm going to swallow this and I'm going to model what like, safe attachment looks like here. And being the bigger person, like, that's a cost. That's an emotional

toll. But that's the ask, right? Like, that's the job. It's so funny that you say that because I put up a reel the other day or TikTok or something that was about like, if you have a child, the expectation is that you will be like the steady leader throughout their lifetime. And even when they are coming to you with emotional immaturity, with, you know, they're making bad choices, whatever. Your job is to stay up here and, like, not bring yourself to that, not imitate that behavior. And I did not expect this to be like a controversial message. Oh, no way. Oh, my gosh. So hearing you say that, I'm like, okay, I'm not that crazy for saying this, but it was interesting how this struck a chord, you know, with both parents and adult children, the parents kind of saying,

oh no no once they're 18 like I don't have to do that anymore and if they're acting crazy like I'm going to match their energy basically and then there were a lot of adult children that you could tell this was rooted in like pain and I can't rely on my parent were saying like no they're old it's not their job like I'm an I'm an adult I have to take care of myself you know very much that like I'm responsible for me type of attitude and I was like wow when I put this up I thought this was the most like non-controversial thought of all time, which is always like kind of how it goes, you know, but it's so interesting. I almost would want to question like what's in it, what's in it for you as parents, like to these people who are commenting? What's in it to get to

turn off like the parent hat at 18? Yeah. To not have to like what does that soothe within you to be able to like relinquish all of that, right? Like there's there's almost a an urge to be like, well, once they're 18 or once they're 25, I get to match their energy. Why does that feel safe and soothing to you? Why does that feel fair that all of a sudden you don't have to be the parent anymore? What are you sitting on that it's like now it's your turn, right? And so like people have their stuff, right? But there's usually a reason when we want to match someone's energy and not want to take

the high road or the level headed road even because it's not even like it's the high road. Right, right. But there's usually something sitting in there. there's a reason for that. Yeah, that's a really good point. I think there's definitely this, like, if you're not behaving, like, quote unquote, how I raised you, how I taught you to be, whatever fits into that box, this ability to be like, well, you're an adult now, so that's not on me. And anything you do from this day forward is a reflection of you being bad and not of anything that I do. And I think that provides people with some relief. Yeah. It's interesting that

reminds me of a lot of a lot of criticism I got unimposed. I did a little bit ago about how your children not an extension of you. Uh, yes. And like that really got people upset and I was kind of shocked of like, oh, okay, like kind of how you were feeling too, you know, as though your children are not these things, right? Like they, they are their own people. And we can of course teach them things and maybe help guide them towards what we think is fair and just, but they are ultimately their own person. And if we can create space for that, we will see this, you know, blossoming of a really beautiful human. But instead, we're really viewing it as like, it's my job to mold you into the person I want you to be. And when you have your own trauma and your own emotional immaturity,

you're now just a lot of emotionally mature parents struggle with distortions, right? And so there's a lot of internal shame. And so they're trying to make their kid not be, right, all of the shameful things that they might hold. So as a result, there's a ton of criticism. and judgment. And so we're just like pruning away, right? Like we're just trying to shape these children into things that they might not be meant to be, right? But because we view them as an extension, we think that that's our role. So yeah, I got a lot of pushback on that one too, which is just always fascinating how that turns out. That is so fascinating because, again, I would not feel like that's like a hot take, you know? It depends on it's in the eye of the

beholder, but it's reminding me of, like, I recently collected, like, I don't know, 300 responses from people on Instagram who were talking about the reason they are, like, low, no contact, estranged from their parents that don't include abuse. And this one that you're talking about was actually a huge one. Like, it fell along the spectrum of whether that's, like, identity being LGBTQ, political beliefs that a lot of people said, this is why I can't have a relationship with my parent, adulthood because they do not agree with who I became as a person. And they'll tell me things like, I'll always love you, you know, but I just don't agree with this. Like it's often cloaked

in like these very nice words, right? Toxic positivity. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yes. And so I think that really falls in line with what you're just saying that people do believe that it is their job to be like sculptors, you know, and make their child into who they are. And when it doesn't come out how they intended, it's at the fault of the child. Yeah. And it's so, it's so painful to me as like a parent that my child might be the thing that I tried to teach them not to be, right? Like, it's such an injury to my shame, to my efforts that I actually can't keep you around. There has to be distance. I have to criticize and judge. It's so unacceptable because it's a bit of a mirror, right? A mirror that no one's really wanting to look at. Yeah, I totally hear you on that. Well, this conversation has been

amazing. I really appreciate you being here and sharing with us. I think everyone is going to love this episode. The last thing I wanted to ask you was just like, if you have any tips for anyone listening who might be working on accepting their emotionally immature parent or accepting who their parent is. Any words of wisdom for that listener? Yeah. I think when when we talk about acceptance, we're actually talking about grief and being a little more comfortable with being sad that it's not happening. I'm not saying, you know, jump into the deep end and feel it all at once, but dip your toe into the reality that it's not happening, right? That they're not coming running. When you look at the data over X amount of years, that they're not, they have yet.

to show up, right? And you're not going to be the one that really changes them. So being okay with being sad about that, letting yourself be sad about that. I think the other piece is like if you knew they weren't coming, if you could like shake a crystal ball and see that that fantasy never actually plays out, how would you live your life differently today? Like, what would you do differently? Yeah. Would you still have the same job? Would you have the same partner? Would you still call them every Sunday. Would you subject yourself to abusive Christmas holidays if you knew they were never changing? If you say that, you know, I wouldn't do any more of these other things, then it sounds like there's an authentic life that actually exists for you, but you're really afraid to go towards

it, right? And that authentic life can bring a lot of peace and liberation. So I would invite people to just do a little bit of like a thought experiment, right? Like if you are the adult child's, get a little curious around how you would live your life differently if you knew they weren't coming. And if you are the emotionally immature parent, I would just say, stop taking your shit out on your kids. I don't know if I can swear, but it's okay. Stop taking your stuff out on your kids, right? There are therapists galore and books galore that exist to really help you. Your child is not meant to be the receptacle for your dysfunction and pain and shame. right so that's what i would say i love that thank you so much i think that's very helpful

and thank you again for being here today with all of us i hope everyone enjoyed this episode