CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - The Emotionally Immature Parent Assessment

Episode Date: July 29, 2025

In this solo episode, Whitney introduces the upcoming August topic for the Family Cyclebreakers Club: adult children of emotionally immature parents. She walks listeners through an 18-question assessment to help identify if they have an emotionally immature parent, explains the key traits of emotional immaturity based on Dr. Lindsay Gibson's work, and discusses the common patterns adult children develop to survive these family systems.Have a question for Whitney? Record a voice memo on your phone and email it to [e-mail] 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.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

Td Bank knows that running a small business is a journey, from startup to growing and managing your business. That's why they have a dedicated small business advice hub on their website to provide tips and insights on business banking to entrepreneurs. No matter the stage of business you're in, visit td.com slash small business advice to find out more or to match with a TD small business banking account manager. Hello and welcome back to the Calling Home podcast. I'm your host, Whitney Goodman. Super excited to be here today because I'm going to be talking about our next topic at calling home. If this is your first time listening to the show, we have a paid membership community

called the Family Cycle Writers Club at Calling Home. And every month, we focus on a new topic. And you'll hear a lot about these topics on the podcast. But if you want to take it a step further and actually implement some of this stuff in your life, work on it in therapy, and meet other people that are dealing with these issues and feel less alone, that is what the Family Cycle Breakers Club is for. And next month for the month of August, we are going to be talking about adult children of emotionally immature parents. So this entire month is going to be dedicated to adults who grew up or still. have emotionally immature parents, how they can learn to either have a relationship with those parents or not what it looks like to set boundaries, understanding those relationships and why

your parents are that way and how to move forward. We will have groups every Wednesday that are support groups that focus on this specific topic. You'll also have the opportunity to join our other adult children of emotionally immature parents groups that happen twice a month. So there are six opportunities to join us for groups for this topic in the month of August, which is really great and very rare. And we would love to have you. You can join the family cycle breakers club at calling home.com. Now, if you're not sure if you're an adult child of emotionally immature parents, this is a great episode for you because I'm going to give you a high level overview of what it means to be an adult child of emotionally immature parents and how to

know if this is something that you are struggling with in your adult relationship with your parent. I'm going to walk you through some questions. There's about 18 statements that I'm going to read to you and you can answer them to yourself while you're listening to this with either true or false. And the more true statements that you have that apply to you, the more likely it is that you are an adult child of emotionally immature parents and that this episode and our content or August at Calling Home is going to be a good bit for you. Let's get started with those statements. The first one is, my parents struggles to relate to the experiences, thoughts, and emotions of

other people. They say or do things without thinking of others' feelings. My parent is rigid and operates with a strict wrong and right mentality, where in their minds, they're usually always right. My parent often misinterprets communication as a threat or criticism toward them or others, which makes them reactive and defensive. My parent is extremely controlling and wants to control my life. Or, my parent is extremely uninvolved in my life and hands off.

My parent has tantrums or big reactions that feel chaotic and uncomfortable to be on the other end. end of. My parents struggles to cope with their emotions in a healthy way. Things tend to only go smoothly when things go my parents' way. My parents' emotional responses tend to lack empathy or rationality. Their reactions can be off-putting to a healthy person. My parent has a strong need to be needed by me and or others. My parent cannot meet my emotional needs or support me emotionally. My parent struggles to hear my side or validate my emotions. My parent has a tendency to hold grudges. My parent is highly critical. Interactions with my parent feel one-sided and frustrating. I feel emotionally lonely

around my parent. My parent does not respect my individuality or my boundaries. I do all the emotional labor in the relationship with my parent. I want you to take a moment and think about how many of those statements did you respond with true. And you can also take this quiz on our website if you would like to sit down and actually take it and get a result. you can visit callinghome.com backslash quizzes or go to our homepage and find the quizzes as well.

And there is an adult children of emotionally immature parents quiz that has all of these questions. And I want to remind you that these questions, these statements are based on the work by Dr. Lindsay C. Gibson, who wrote the book, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents and is ultimately the creator of this concept. she's also been a guest on the Calling Home podcast last year in 2024, so you can definitely go check out that episode as well. Okay. So if you have an emotionally immature parent, let's say you can relate to a lot of those signs that I just discussed. Let's talk about what emotional immaturity is, according to Dr. Gibson. There are a couple of common traits among emotionally immature parents. And I want to emphasize here that this is a label. It's not a diagnosis in the

DSM, but it is a label that overlaps with a lot of diagnoses. So if you have a parent that struggles with addiction, a substance use disorder, potentially a serious persistent mental illness, they have narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, there is a chance that they also have emotional immaturity. A lot of mental health diagnoses may manifest when they go untreated with the same traits that we see with emotional immaturity. Now, what I find is that there is a huge population of adults who have parents who are highly successful in other areas of their life. They do not have a serious mental illness. They don't have addiction, but they do struggle in this specific area. And that is why I think this label has become

so popular because it does explain a lot of the behavior and issues that exist outside of some of these mental health diagnostic criteria. And so I just want to emphasize that you can have both or you can have one or the other, but you're certainly going to see a lot of overlap. between certain mental health diagnoses, specifically personality disorders, things like that, and emotional immaturity. Now, people who are emotionally immature, emotionally immature parents, they're going to have poor emotion regulation. And they often have very self-centered or egocentric behavior. You'll see that that was reflected in a lot of those statements that I read to you. So these are people that need things to be a certain way in order for them to appear

quote unquote like stable or normal. They really need things to kind of revolve around them, which means that you might find yourself walking on eggshells, only being able to talk about certain things or certain topics, feeling like their reactions are really big to small things, which is another characteristic that is common among emotionally immature parents. They have very black and white thinking. So things are either wrong or right, good or bad. You're either on their side or you're not. It's very difficult for them to tolerate nuance or to understand why you might have a different opinion or perception of the world. They also have a lot of trouble with empathy for others' feelings. They particularly might really struggle to have

empathy or understanding of others' feelings of the people in their family. They may actually be good at doing this for other people that they have more distance from. And I've heard even, you know, some people being adult children of emotionally immature parents and those parents were religious leaders in their community. They were therapists. They were doctors. They were seemingly in positions where they could have empathy for other people, but not for their own children or their spouse or their family members. And Dr. Gibson talks about this in the book that emotionally immature parents find their children and their family members to be some of the most threatening to them emotionally. They're the people that have seen them at their worst,

that maybe know what they're really like, quote unquote, that can be the people that cause them to feel the most vulnerability or shame or guilt. And so they tend to not be able to have emotional closeness or vulnerability with those people. But they can, perform it on a surface level outside of those relationships maybe in the outside world. They also avoid emotional intimacy and they have a lot of discomfort around emotional intimacy. And so you may notice that when you would bring up feelings to your parent, when you would cry around them or have maybe any type of feeling outside of like just what they deemed appropriate in that moment, that they would shame you, ignore you, give you the silent treatment, tell you to get

over it, move on, whatever it is. And I want to clarify that this is very different from just having a bad day or being someone that struggles a little bit in some of these areas. This is a consistent pattern over time that you have experienced with your parent and that you were able to say they are like this most of the time, not that they were only like this when they got diagnosed with cancer or they were only like this in very high stress situations. They were like this all the time because I've talked about this when we did emotional maturity at Calling Home, which we have an entire month and topic section on the website dedicated to developing emotional maturity that all of us have the ability to slip into emotional

immaturity when we are tired, stressed, overwhelmed. But some people are never able to move out of that window of tolerance. And their window of tolerance is so short and so small and you notice that it is pervasive. And it only gets worse in those situations. It doesn't ever like rebound back or totally improve. Now, if you are the child of an adult who is emotionally immature, you are are going to feel like there is this invisible burden where you're always feeling like don't upset them make sure they're okay don't speak your mind don't tell them how you feel definitely don't call them up in a crisis or when something is wrong that's going to require any type of emotional support avoid that topic make sure that they're comfortable don't set

boundaries with them. Don't try to get them to do something different. Definitely don't tell them that they're wrong. There will be this constant looking out for landmines and trying to assess their mood and what's going on in the situation all the time. And a lot of adult children are emotionally immature parents experience this chronic sense of guilt, anxiety, self-doubt. they might struggle to express their needs or set boundaries.

They feel like they need to please this parent all the time or be perfect so as not to upset them. And they also have this deep feeling of like, I have to prove my pain and why I'm upset. I have to explain it in a thousand different ways. I have to like make spreadsheets and lists and show screenshots. thoughts and I need to be like really sure that this is true and accurate before I explain it to them. And then I may even get to the point where I'm like, why am I even explaining this? Like, they're not going to see it. They're certainly not going to see it from my perspective. And something that I notice happens a lot in our support groups at calling home. And this is something

that I would see as a therapist all the time too in individual sessions is that adults who grew up with emotionally immature parents, they have a tendency to over explain and defend themselves like they are on trial when they're talking about their feelings. And so I try to remind everybody in our groups, like, you don't have to start the conversation with, I'm sorry if I'm not making sense. I feel like I'm all over the place. I hope that you all can understand me because it's crazy how a lot of people actually can understand you. And I pointed this out in our estranged adult child group the other day. One of our members said, like, I feel like this is one of the only places where I can

show up messy, like where I don't have to have this cohesive, perfect story to present. And I can just come in here and share how I'm feeling and share what comes out. And I've noticed that a lot of the time when people say, oh, I don't know if I'm making sense, or I'm just going to share this or I feel like I'm all over the place that the group is all like nodding along and they get it and they do understand and they're not confused by what this person is saying. And so you've developed this feeling of like no one understands me. I feel like I have to explain myself until I'm blue in the face and do it in all these different creative ways because no one understood me in my house or people were hellbent

on not understanding me, telling me that that didn't happen. that, you know, that couldn't be true. I'm remembering it wrong. That's not actually how it went down. And when you experienced that for a lifetime, like, you really get into this place where you're like, no one can understand me. I don't know how to communicate. And you have to relearn that people do understand you and that you are a good communicator

actually in situations where people want to understand you and they're trying to and they're open to it. And so I think that's something that's so great about our groups is that you're able to practice that skill in a place that is safe and understanding and that wants to know what you're feeling and to try to understand you and that we can validate and ask questions and give you the space to kind of talk through what you're feeling. For adult children of emotionally immature parents, you start to feel also like everything is your fault. And that's one of the biggest things I want you to walk away from this episode and from the content that we're going to be covering in August, starting on August 4th, is that emotionally immature parents have a talent. And that talent is the ability to deflect blame, minimize your experience, and make you feel responsible for their moods. and no child is ever supposed to be responsible for their parents' feelings. My kid can have a tantrum and throw stuff and be upset. And it is my job to stay calm.

It's my job to parent them through it. It's my job to be a leader. It is my job to be the adult in the room. It is not your job as their child to placate them. and to be this like perfect version of a child when you don't even have the skills or the capability. And I think a lot of you were sold this like false bill of goods that like everything was your fault. And so you had to adapt to survive that. Right.

And those adaptations don't always serve you in adulthood. So you have to remember that you were a kid born into a family system and you had to learn how to survive that. that system. Everybody does in their own way. And it made sense that you learned maybe to be the fixer, the caretaker, the quiet one, whatever it was, the therapist, the parentified child to your parent in order to survive that system. I want to talk about a couple of mistakes that I think people make when they discover that their parent was emotionally immature, is emotionally immature. I think that for most people, especially our members at Calling Home, reading this book and understanding this concept is a light bulb moment for them. And it's like the validation and

understanding that they have been searching for. And I think that a lot of you feel this overwhelming urge to be like, I should get throughout my barrett. I should tell them that they're emotionally immature. I should show them this book. It is going to cause them to have this awakening and they'll be able to get better and be more emotionally mature and I'm going to ask them for an apology and I can I finally get this so I can communicate with them or I'm going to like bank all the evidence that I have that they are emotionally immature and they harmed me and show them this book and be like, look, I was right. You do have deficits in all of these areas. And you may even believe that like, wow, now that I have this knowledge, I can get them to change or maybe I can

make them understand this. And I want you to step back from that urge and remember that you cannot fix them. You cannot convince them that they are emotionally immature. Telling your parent that they're emotionally immature is not going to help anything if they truly are emotionally immature. And I want you to use this label, this understanding and this knowledge to help you, not to help them, which is one of the biggest struggles, I think, for adult children of emotionally immature parents is to step out of that fixing, helping I'm going to change you role. And instead, look at this book and this understanding and everything we're going to be talking about in August at Calling Home as I am doing this so I can help myself step out of

this pattern. I'm not doing this to rehabilitate my emotionally immature parent. Because if they want to do something different. If they want to learn, all this is out there, they can listen to this podcast. They can go buy a book. They can do all of that. You have spent probably your whole life trying to rehabilitate and change your parent. And it's time to give up that quest. Now, that doesn't mean that you can't be a good communicator and kind and respectful and understanding and all of that. But that comes from that being your value system and something that you want to do for you, not on a quest to make them better and rehabilitate them. So you're walking away from this episode with this new understanding of what it means to be an adult child of

emotionally immature parents. Maybe this is the first time you've heard this and you're like, wow, I really relate to this. I answered yes to almost all of those questions. And this is very true for my life. Maybe you've heard about this concept and now you're like, all right, I really want to start diving into this. I think after this episode, here are some things that you can do. You can first just name this what it is. I feel like I have an emotionally immature parent. I am an adult child of emotionally immature parent. What does that mean for me? What are those specific things that I listed out at the beginning of the episode that you feel like are the biggest hindrances and roadblocks in your relationship with your parent. What do you find they do and that is

true most of the time and is consistent behavior for them throughout your lifetime? And then I want you to think about what are some ways that you can choose and to relate to them and change how you relate to them in those areas. And that's something we're going to be going into a lot deeper this month inside the family cycle breakers at calling home. We're going to be talking about boundaries, how to communicate, how to have better interactions, all of that. You'll definitely want to join for that. But I think setting small, realistic boundaries, things that you can enforce and hold yourself to, not changes that your parent needs to make, can be a really good first step.

You also need to practice how to regulate your own emotions and learning how to stop absorbing them, which is something I'm going to focus on as well in August. But we do have a podcast episode about how, I think it's called How to Become More Emotionally Mature, and that would be a great one for you to listen to as well to develop your own emotional maturity and regulating your own emotions. And then talking to people who get it, being in rooms like our support groups, going to therapy, being in community with people who understand this and who are working on themselves and trying to step out of this role of being the fixer and the caretaker for their parent can be

very, very powerful. And something I want you to take away from this is that you can move on from this. You can heal. You can grow. And that doesn't require your parent to change. And there might even be a world for some of you that, you know, you continue having a relationship with your emotionally immature parent. It just looks different. Or maybe some of you realize I can't have a healthy relationship with this person that doesn't totally, like, wipe me out. I think there's a lot of gray area in between. Some of you might notice that as you start to interact with your parent in a different way, they also start to interact differently with you. And that doesn't mean that you're trying to change them, but sometimes people can be responsive to changes in their relationships and

in their environment. If this episode felt like someone was finally putting words to your experience, the Family Cycle Breakers Club in August is designed for you. Every Monday, beginning on Monday, August 4th, members will get a article, worksheet, video, and script delivered to their inbox, and you will also get access to our weekly support groups that are for adult children of emotionally immature. parents. You can come to those groups and just sit and listen. You can share. You don't have to use your name. You can use your initials or a pseudonym. You can show up and just see what they're all

about. And I really think that you will understand why so many people are drawn to those groups, especially adult children of emotionally immature parents. So you can join at the Family Cycle Breakers Club at callinghome.co. And we have membership options for six. months or one year, and I would love to see you in a group in August. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Please don't forget to like, subscribe, leave us a review or a comment on this episode, and I cannot wait to see some of you inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club this August. I will see you all in a group soon. 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 healthcare provider and does not create any therapist, patient, or other treatment relationship between you and Colin Holm or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Calling Holmes Terms of Service linked in the show notes below. Thank you.