CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - How to Develop Emotional Closeness

Episode Date: June 24, 2025

In this solo episode, I’m exploring how to develop emotional closeness in your relationships. I discuss why some people struggle with vulnerability, how emotional immaturity creates barriers to closeness, and practical ways to practice emotional connection. Some family members may never be capable of deep emotional intimacy. Developing emotional closeness for yourself often means accepting these limitations while still finding meaningful connections elsewhere. Whitney Goodman is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) and the founder of Calling Home, a membership community that helps people navigate complex family dynamics and break harmful cycles. Have a question for Whitney? Call in and leave a voicemail for the show at [phone]⁠⁠ Join the Family Cyclebreakers Club⁠⁠ Follow Whitney on Instagram | sitwithwhit Follow Whitney on YouTube | @whitneygoodmanlmft ⁠⁠Order Whitney’s book, Toxic Positivity⁠⁠ This podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Mitsubishi Motors. Drive your ambition. Hello and welcome back to the calling on podcast. I am your host, Whitney Goodman. Today we're going to be talking about what emotional closeness really feels like. And I want to take you all through the process of how to develop emotional closeness, what it feels like, what it looks like, how to tell if you can't be emotionally close with someone. And so this is a great episode for anyone that wants to develop this skill set more for themselves, as in you want to. You want to. You want to. to be someone that people are able to be emotionally close with. And also for those of you that are trying to build more emotional closeness with your family members, your partners, other people in your life. I think that this is something that we are noticing a lot of people value now in their relationships. And when I have conversations about why adults aren't close with their parents or with their siblings, a lot of it boils down to this emotional intimacy, emotional

maturity, and emotional closeness component. to remind you that if this topic really resonates with you, we have an entire content month on the Calling Home website dedicated to how to become more emotionally mature. So if this is something that you're working on yourself, you can go to Callinghome.co, and we have a search icon right at the top. Just type in Emotional Maturity, and it will bring up all of those resources for you so that you can take this podcast a step further and start working on that. and as a member of the Family Cycle Breakers Club, you get access to all of that course material included in your membership. The first thing I want to talk about is what is emotional closeness?

So when you feel close to someone, connected to them emotionally, I think the most important things that you're going to feel is that you feel known and accepted by them. And as I've been interviewing adults who are estranged from their parents, this is a question that I always ask. Did you feel accepted by your parent? And what's really interesting is I've noticed that when I ask this question, people either immediately say, no, they did not accept me, or they kind of hesitate and they're like, I'm not really sure. And I think that if you don't feel accepted by someone, as in they don't accept who you are as a person. They don't accept who you love, your identity, how you choose to express yourself. As long as you're not doing that obviously, like in a harmful

way, then it's very hard to feel known by that person or to feel close to them. How close can you feel to someone that doesn't accept you? That would be pretty challenging. The second part of emotional closeness is that you feel like you can share your internal world with them. And this is where I want to bring in like the concept of culture and the different ways that people do this. The way that you feel seen, known and accepted and that you share your internal world might look very different for a lot of different types of people, depending on where you're from, how you were raised. If you have any like, mental health issues or if you're neurotypical, I think there are different ways that people

express themselves. There are different ways that you share and how you feel known. So I'm not going to explicitly share with you like this is the only way to share your feelings, fears, and dreams. But what I want you to focus on is what does it feel like when I am emotionally close with someone and I feel like they accept me. I'm able to tell them the things that I feel in whatever way that looks like what I'm afraid of, what I'm dreaming of without feeling like they are going to judge me or reject me or ridicule me. The biggest thing here is that you can share and for some of you that truly means like sitting in silence next to each other while you just say I'm feeling really scared and I'm not ready to talk about it. And for others, it might mean that I can call this

person up every day and talk to them on the phone and share everything that I'm going through in all of this detail. And that makes us feel emotionally close. So it's not necessarily about the mechanism of how it's done, but more about the feeling. And ultimately, that feeling is going to result in a sense of safety and trust with that person. And so this is going to look different across cultures, families, individuals, different types of nervous systems, ages, like the way that I'm going to have emotional closeness with a five-year-old is going to look very different than maybe I have emotional closeness with my partner. But instead thinking about how would I define emotional closeness with the people that I love and care about? And I really think that in most definitions,

it comes back to safety, trust, feeling known and accepted, and being able to share with that person without fear of retribution. And if you have a different definition or a different way of quantifying that, I would love to hear about it. So definitely leave a comment here on the video or wherever you're listening to this on Apple or Spotify. I mentioned this a little bit before, but I want to go deeper into why emotional closeness feels different for different people. So if you have different attachment styles, if you have a

trauma history, if you're neurodiverse, if you have different cultural or family norms, then you are going to express and experience closeness different. There's also a lot of situations, and I've talked about this in a TikTok video that I did, and I was sending a message about this to my Instagram group for adult children of emotionally immature parents that there are some people who are only used to very distant relationships. They don't know what closeness feels like or because of their history, because of their neurodiversity, certain types of closeness or the ways that you define closeness feel very overwhelming and suffocating and overwhelming for them. And so I think this is where we have to go back to that this close. This close

is not a one size fits all experience and we have to learn our own comfort zone what makes us feel safe and secure and accepted and like we're not going to be judged but we also really have to focus on learning that about other people right and understanding that like if I want this person to feel emotionally close to me I might also have to enhance my capacity for listening and understanding and validating, because that's what allows other people to feel close to me. Which, speaking of that, that's a good transition point into talking about how emotional immaturity is a barrier to closeness. I saw a clip of Lindsay C. Gibson, the author of Adult Children of Emotion Emotionally Immature Parents. She has been on the Calling Home podcast,

but I saw a clip of her on another podcast. And she was talking about how emotional immaturity really prevents closeness because it feels like an absolute threat to the emotionally immature person. They cannot do it. She likened it to asking them to put their hand on a hot stove. And so when someone has an inability to handle vulnerability, and that could be their own and or yours, they are not going to be able to be that close to you emotionally because they're not going to be able to make you feel seen, known, heard, understood because all of those

things require some level of vulnerability, right? It requires them to be vulnerable in like, I'm going to sit with this person's pain and not try to fix it. I'm going to need to learn to understand them or I'm going to need to share with them. And that feels really vulnerable and overwhelming for me. We also see that people who struggle with emotional immaturity have very poor emotional regulation. And so this can make it very difficult for them to connect in that space of vulnerability because they simply cannot handle it. They become very triggered, very overwhelmed physically and emotionally that they, like she said, do not want to keep their hand on the hot stove. if they're scared, they want to run away. It is not safe to them. And so when you are trying to

achieve emotional closeness with emotionally immature people, you are probably going to keep budding up against that wall. Right. And I think this is when a lot of people have to decide, can I have a surface level relationship with this person? Because it seems like having a close emotionally vulnerable relationship with them truly is not possible. There's also a big difference between wanting closeness and being capable of it. And I believe that all people truly want to feel seen, heard, understood, loved. But for some people, they are not capable of it because they were rejected so much as children. They have become avoidant as a result of their experiences. Something in them does not allow them to experience that level of vulnerability and emotional closeness.

And so you can want it and maybe not be willing to take the risk to get there. I touched on this earlier, and you might be one of these people, that there are some people who have never felt true emotional closeness, right? There's people who have never experienced this with their own parents, with their siblings, or even with their partners, especially if you have been in, an abusive relationship or you have not had any emotional vulnerability or sharing within your family. You may really have never experienced this type of closeness. And I talked about this in the video that I recorded about this, that I find that this is why a lot of adults are actually

very shocked when their children cut them off for this reason. When they say, like, you're emotionally immature, there is no emotional closeness between us, because that relationship with their child feels like every other relationship that they've ever had. And it is this huge shock to them, like, what do you mean we're not close? This is how I talk to my friends. This is how I am with your dad. Like, this is how I was with my parents. In fact, I was even less close with my parents. And so it is very shocking and overwhelming for them to feel like, oh my gosh, are all my relationships is not close. Some of them can't even go there. And so it's easier just to be like, oh, my kid is being dramatic. And really our relationship was fine, but they want to point the finger at me and call me

emotionally immature. But I do want to validate for you that if you're listening to this and you're thinking, gosh, I don't know if I've ever had a real close, emotionally intact relationship, that if that is you, first, you know that this is something that you want, right? Because you're listening to an episode like this. You're realizing that like, oh, maybe there is more to life. Maybe it would be really nice to have these emotionally connected relationships where I could be vulnerable and I could be sharing with people and seeking understanding. And it probably feels pretty scary to you.

And that is okay. That doesn't mean that it's not. worth pursuing or that it's not going to be extremely rewarding, but you have to remember that these are skills that some people have been learning since they were born. And if you didn't grow up in a family where that was modeled to you, it makes sense why you are having to teach yourself and learn it later on in life. Now, you also can't be emotionally close with everyone. And I think that for some people who did not grow up with a lot of emotional closeness and who are very starved for that attention and reciprocity, you can become one of those people that really, like,

overshares, tries to get too close with people too quickly, doesn't really know how to measure safety. So we have two ends of that spectrum, right? There's people that are overly guarded, overly, like, wound tight, keeping everything close to the vest because they have been hurt so much or they haven't learned these skills. And then you have people that are really just so desperate for that that they are looking for it and all the wrong people and giving it away without it being reciprocal. And so depending on where you fall in that range, I think it's important to note that emotional closeness requires mutual safety, effort, and capacity. So this brings us back to what we were talking about before, that some people just don't have the skills or the

ability. Some of them aren't willing to put in the effort. They don't have the capacity. They are people that have routinely shown you that they are not safe people to share with. So maybe they are overly critical. They dismiss you. They share your very private or emotionally charged information or business with other people. They gossip about you. They gossip about you. they are not able to be there for you because their life is too challenging or they are just not someone that is emotionally mature and has the skills to do it. There's also this idea that some people are just not good fits for us, not because there's anything wrong with them or they're evil, but when you're talking about having emotional closeness and reciprocity

with someone else, there also has to be a good personality and temperament fit and a good fit in where you're at in your lives that you can share about certain things. And this is where I think people need to be careful that sometimes you can't get all of this in one person. And this can be really painful and frustrating because you can feel this with especially, I think, with your parents and your siblings. And when you can't get that emotional closeness with them, I think it forces you to go out and find it in the world. And there can be some resentment around that because we feel like we should be able to be emotionally close with those people and to share. And when they're not able to and you see other people having that, it's like, oh my gosh.

Now I have to go and find like chosen family and friends. And this is so frustrating and difficult. And it's a lot of that is like social conditioning. And I think everyone that listens to this show and joins our groups at Calling Home and is in the Family Cycle Breakers Club knows that that's not the case for a lot of. families. And we have to normalize that this level of closeness isn't always possible with our closest family members. And that doesn't mean that you're incapable of it. Sometimes it's just not a good fit. Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two

breakfast items for $4. New four piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. But if you're dealing with that disappointment of not being able to get close with your family members or with the people that are closest to you, this is a loss. And I want you to know that it's not necessarily a loss of what was because most of the time these people could never be that for you. And it sucks that they're not working on it and they're not doing the things that you're doing to try to be close. But it's a loss of what you hoped. it could be and it's okay to want more from those people. It's okay to say that it hurts and that it's

coming from a place of like, I want to be close to those people. I want to have close family relationships. I want to be family oriented. And instead, you know, for those of you that don't have the emotional closeness, but maybe can share other things with these people, like whether that's a hobby or an activity or a shared interest or even just, you know, hearing about each other's days, that sometimes you can get to that place of acceptance without forcing yourself to pretend that the relationship is something that it's not. And instead really come to this place of like, I accept this person cannot meet this need for me, but I can have other needs met by them and we can have this type of relationship and that's okay too. Now I want to move into how to

practice emotional closeness and vulnerability yourself and how to get more comfortable with it. So a lot of people struggle with emotional closeness because they're afraid of rejection. There's shame around it. Either you've been silenced, told that emotional closeness was wrong or not something you should pursue or that it's only for weak people. You may have. developmental trauma or relational trauma around pursuing closeness where you were constantly rejected by those that were closest to you or shamed for needing that type of closeness. We also talked about how it may have not been modeled safely by anyone around you. And so I think at first you really need to check in with what you are putting out there into the

world because sometimes we want emotional closeness, but we're not doing anything to get it. And so asking yourself, like, do I let people see the real me? Do I feel like I am being myself, which your authentic self changes depending on environments, right? Like, none of us are the same self all the time. Certainly, there's myself when I record this podcast. There's a version of me when I'm in session with my clients. There's a version of me with my partner. And yes, they all have this underlying foundation where no one would probably be overwhelmingly shocked by how you show up in each of those areas, but you have range as a person. And I think we need to remember that sometimes about authenticity, that it's not that you can act how you act like

on the weekends in a bar with your friends while you're at work, but that there is some continuity across that spectrum. So how do I show up authentically in spaces where I want to have emotional closeness. And are those the appropriate spaces for emotional closeness? You know, if you are someone that I was reading Nedra Twab's email newsletter the other day and she was talking about someone sharing with her whenever she'd pick up her groceries and they would like emotionally vent every time. And this is a good example of like, are you only letting out your feelings and seeking emotional closeness and vulnerability in these moments where it's maybe not going to be received well or where it's going to overwhelm the person or you're not going to

see them again. And so how are you going to build a relationship with them? But thinking really about where do I frequent that I want people to see the real me and where that would be appropriate and possible? And what does closeness feel like for you? Does that feel threatening? Does it feel overwhelming? Can you think of a time where someone tried to learn more about out you or to pursue closeness with you. And what was that like? And then also like, do you tend to kind of fade into the back and disappear in relationships? Do you over function and try to do too much for people? Do you share too much too quickly and feel this like sense of regret? These are all things that you can explore and you can talk about this also with like anyone that you

love and trust to give you quality feedback like a friend, a partner, a therapist, whatever it is. Then I think it's important to start practicing this stuff in small ways, right? So making micro disclosures, especially with new people, seeing how people handle certain information and also thinking about what are they sharing with me. If they're sharing something, then can I share back also in this moment? And can we have this reciprocal sharing? Trying to name your emotions and feelings in real time and sitting with your discomfort. for not trying to fix people or fix yourself. I think one of the best places to practice this

is in a safe therapeutic environment. And so I think that that's really something that our groups at Calling Home do for people and some of the feedback that I've gotten from our members is that there is this feeling of like, I know that I'm going to come to this place. I can listen. I can share. I can communicate in the chat. And no one is going to judge me or question me or make me feel bad for what I'm sharing, I am going to be among like-minded people that get what I'm talking about. And so whether that's in our estranged adult children group or our family estranged group or daughters with difficult mothers, like all of these groups have a certain culture where you know that you can come in and practice emotional closeness

and vulnerability, even just with these micro-disclosures of when someone shares in saying, I get that. I've also experienced that feeling, you know, or I've also had a situation like that. And if you're not ready for a group environment, I think doing this with a therapist can also be really great. And I want you to focus on consistency versus like these intense emotional shares. So trying to do these micro disclosures consistently with certain people, feeling it out in certain environments and building up like those reps to make yourself feel more comfortable about it and to slowly build these relationships over time. Now, of course, there are going to be people out there that you disclose to, that you talk to that are not

emotionally safe for you. And these are some things I want you to look out for. You consistently feel worse after you've been vulnerable with them. You walk away from that phone call or that conversation being like, wow, that did not feel good. And this happens repeatedly when you share about big or small things. They dismiss or mock your feelings. They weaponize what you've shared after, or they constantly share it with other people, they gossip about you, or they never share anything in return with you. Because that's not going to be a true reciprocal, emotionally close relationship. Now, I want to be clear here that there are certain relationships where it is not going to be fully reciprocal, right? Particularly a relationship between a parent and their child

at any age. But when we're talking about peer-to-peer sharing, as in you have friends that you know nothing about, but you're always sharing with them, it's very hard to actually feel closeness there when there is no reciprocal nature. I think we need to remember that not everyone has, earned or will earn access to your story and to your inner experiences and your inner world. And when I interviewed Nate Postal Wait for the podcast, the episode's called Trauma from a survivor's POV, I think. He talks a lot about this. And I would go back and listen to that episode because I think the way he puts it is so beautiful about like not feeling like we have to constantly share our story to get people to understand where we're coming from and to be

fiercely protective of your story with some people can be really empowering and enlightening for you. All right. So this is what I want you to hopefully take away from this episode, that emotional closeness is possible for you. But it might require you unlearning what you know, slowly rebuilding and practicing along the way. And that means that you might get hurt and you might experience some rejection and you might share too much and you might not know what to say when someone is sharing with you. And that is okay. This is a skill that you need to learn and you need to practice. And in the end, feeling close to someone is really just about being known and understood and accepted. And there are so many different ways to feel that from someone and to make

someone else feel that way. Thank you so much for listening to this episode today. We will be back on Thursday with another Q&A episode. So remember that you can always call and leave me a voicemail. I did want to remind you that every month at Calling Home, we focus on a new topic inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club. And for the month of July, we are going to be talking about narcissistic families. And so if you are interested in how narcissistic families function, how narcissistic abuse plays out within families, I am going to be releasing new content for the Family Cycle Breakers Club. Every Monday, you will receive a new worksheet, article, video, and script in your inbox. I also give you book recommendations, how to find a therapist

that works with these types of issues, and you get to do a special Q&A with me every month. This is available to members of the Family Cycle Breakers Club, and you can visit callinghome.com to join. Thank you again for listening or watching. Please don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review or a comment. Bye. The Calling Home podcast is not engaged in providing therapy services, mental health advice, or other medical advice or services. It is not a substitute for advice from a qualified health care provider and does not create

any therapist, patient, or other treatment relationship between you and Calling Home or Whitney Goodman. on this, please see Calling Holmes terms of service linked in the show notes below.