Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - How to Disentangle from Toxic People | Lindsay C. Gibson

Episode Date: July 5, 2023

Our relationships are the most important variable in our health and happiness, but they may also be the most difficult. This is especially true when those closest to us turn out to be emotionally immature people.Lindsay C. Gibson is a clinical psychologist and bestselling author who specializes in helping people identify and deal with emotionally immature people, or EIP’s. Her first appearance on our show was one of our most popular episodes of 2022. Now she’s back to offer concrete strategies for handling the EIP’s in your life, wherever you may find them. Her new book is called Disentangling from Emotionally Immature People.In this episode we talk about:A primer on the cardinal characteristics of emotionally immature people (EIP’s), how to spot them, and why you might want toWhat Lindsay means by “disentangling” from EIP’s, and how to do itWhat often happens to your own sense of self when you’re in relationship (or even just in conversation) with an EIP How to interact with an EIP How to prevent brain scramble when you’re talking with someone who isn’t making any attempt to understand what you’re saying  How she reacts when she comes across EIP’s in her everyday lifeWhether it’s possible to have some immature characteristics without being an EIPHandling your own emotionally immature tendencies  Whether or not EIP’s can changeThe limits of estrangementWhy she encourages “alternatives to forgiveness”For tickets to TPH's live event in Boston on September 7:https://thewilbur.com/armory/artist/dan-harris/Full Shownotes:https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/lindsay-c-gibson-617See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. Today we're going to talk about how to disentangle from toxic people, or the technical term my guest is going to use is emotionally immature people. Earlier this week, just a few days ago here on the show, we rebroadcast an interview from 2022 with a clinical psychologist by the name of Lindsay C. Gibson, all about the idea of emotionally immature people, which

is a concept she originated. When that episode originally aired, it was one of the most popular episodes of the year. So we invited Lindsay back on the show the next year in 2023 to talk about her then new book called Disentangling from Emotionally Immature People. And today we are bringing you that episode. You're getting a double shot of Lindsay C. Gibson this week because we heard from so many of you that her work was enlightening, extremely practical, and even comforting in its way. We've all known people who meet the criteria for being emotionally immature, and we will cover those criteria again at the top of this conversation.

But then, of course, the question is, how do you handle having them in your life? So in this conversation, we start with a primer. I've never known how to pronounce that word. On the cardinal characteristics of EIPs, emotionally immature people, how to spot them and why you might want to. Then we turn to what Lindsay means by disentangling. By the way, it doesn't necessarily entail estrangement. We talk about what often happens to your own sense of self when you're in a conversation

or relationship with an EIP, how to interact successfully with an EIP, how to prevent brain scramble when you're talking to somebody who is not making any attempt to understand what you're talking to somebody who is not making any attempt to understand what you're saying, how she reacts when she encounters an EIP in the wild, whether it's possible to have some immature characteristics without being an EIP yourself, handling your own emotionally immature tendencies, whether or not EIPs can change the limits of estrangement, and why she encourages what she calls

alternatives to forgiveness. One quick audio note here, you may hear a few stray background noises on Lindsay's and that's of course the nature of remote recording. Lindsay C. Gibson coming right up. But first some BSP, as you've heard me say before, the hardest part of personal growth, self-improvement, spiritual development, whatever you want to call it, the hardest part is forgetting.

You listen to a great podcast, you read a great book, you go to a great talk, whatever it is, and the message is electrifying. But then you get sucked back into your daily routines, your habitual patterns, and you forget. So this is the problem for which I have designed my new newsletter which we just started a few months ago and we're just really hitting our stride so I'd love it if you sign up. Every week I list one quote that I'm pondering right now and then I give you two of the top takeaways from the podcast

this week. It's really for both me and for you to get these messages into our molecules. I'm just kind of mainlining the practical aspects of the episodes from the week and listing it out for you. And then I also list three cultural recommendations, books, movies, TV shows that I'm into right now. You can sign up. It's free. It's at danharris.com. That's my new website, danharris.com. Sign up for the newsletter. Also want to tell you about a course that we're highlighting over on the 10% Happier app. It's called Healthy Habits. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonigal and the meditation teacher Alexis Santos. It's great stuff. To access it, just download the 10% Happier app wherever

you get your apps or by visiting 10% dot com. That's one word all spelled out. Listening on Audible helps your imagination soar. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, expert advice, any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, new ways of thinking. Listening can lead to positive change in your mood, your habits, and ultimately your overall well-being. Audible has the best selection of audiobooks without exception, along with popular podcasts and exclusive Audible originals, all in one easy app. There's more to imagine when you listen. Sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial and your first

audiobook is free. Visit audible.ca. Em, what do you look for in a globally massive pop star? Oh, I want sensationally inappropriate outfits, incredible glamour, and an almost unapproachable cool. Well, for the latest series of Terribly Famous, would you settle for some plaid shirts, ginger hair, and an acoustic guitar? Er, no. No I won't. What if there's a loop pedal?

Alright, keep talking. That is actually it. It just sounds a bit ordinary. Emily, this is Ed Sheeran. You really won't believe the twists and turns his story takes. Okay fine, sell me Ed. Addiction, shame spirals, family interventions, grief, massive court cases, obsession. Okay, okay, I'm listening. Ed mapped out his whole career when he was just a teenager and he has followed that path

to some very strange places. How strange? Jennifer Aniston's son, Langer. Just an ordinary guy. Follow Terribly Famous wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and ad free on Wandery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wandery app. Lindsay C. Gibson, welcome back to the show. Oh, it's great to be back, Dan. Thanks for having me.

It's a pleasure. We talked about this the last time you were on, but for people who didn't hear that episode or haven't had time to go back and listen to it, can you just give us the basic definition of emotionally immature people? Sure. Emotional immaturity is a line of development, just like people develop in their intellect, they develop in their social skills, they develop physically. These are all lines of development that

most of us are pretty adept at noticing whether a person has developed normally in those areas. Emotional immaturity is its own separate line of development, and so you can have a person who could be intellectually very bright, very accomplished, or they could be super socially skilled, the most popular person in their group. But that doesn't mean anything about their level of emotional maturity. Emotional maturity really is seen when the person is under stress or if they're in an emotionally intimate relationship. Those are the two places that emotional immaturity shows itself. So there are a lot of areas in life that people show up in

that don't have to do with emotional intimacy and they don't have to do with stress. They're just normal daily functioning and these people look perfectly normal. But when they go home and they are faced with relationship issues or stresses that they may not show in other situations, then the people who are living with them really get to see the emotional immaturity, and they really bear the brunt of it in a way that other people might say, what, your mom, she's so sweet, she's so cute, or it could be, your husband, he's such a great guy,

what are you talking about? It's because it's not going to show up until these particular conditions are there. So if we wanna just do a quick run-through of the characteristics of emotional immaturity, the first one is that they tend to be very egocentric. These are people who are self-preoccupied. They're always thinking of what's in it for them, how is it going to affect them. They really don't have much appreciation that other people are psychologically real on the inside.

They're more like characters in a play that the person is in. They have poor empathy. It's hard for them to feel what other people are feeling. They don't have great imagination when it comes to putting themselves in someone else's shoes, and they don't mentalize what other people are probably thinking about. They also have very poor self-reflection.

So if they have a problem in a relationship or problem at work, they're not going to ask themselves, gee, did I do something to cause that? Was there something that I was saying that was making this person uncomfortable? That would not occur to them because they externalize and project blame

for most things that go wrong in their lives. This makes it very hard for them to change too, because the people that come to psychotherapy usually are the ones who are asking themselves those questions, and they do have the potential for transformation because they're showing some curiosity about how they're showing up in the world and the effects that they're causing, but not the emotionally immature person. They're very afraid of emotional intimacy. Like when you try to get close to them or open up to them

or get them to talk about themselves at a genuine, deeper level, they're likely to back up and become very uncomfortable, brush it off, change the subject, make a quip. They just don't like to be down in that emotionally intimate, deep interaction, which is tragic when it's their child, because that's what kids need, is someone who can go down in their feelings with them. And then finally, they do this thing where they interpret reality according to how they feel. So if it feels like something is happening against them, then that's fact

in their mind. If they feel like you don't like them or you're criticizing them, even if that's not your intent, it's not what you said, they use their feelings, just like little children do, to tell them what the external reality is. Now this is like a really immature way to do life because you can't guide yourself effectively through adult life on the basis of what things feel like to you. I mean, we can use our intuition and we can use our feelings, but we need to have an external objective ability to interpret reality based on something other than our own egocentrism. They also tend to adjust reality so that it doesn't upset them. So they will deny things, dismiss things, distort things.

Like it never happened, I never said that. What are you talking about? Because if they don't wanna deal with it, they will just not deal with it. So those are some of the cardinal characteristics of emotional immaturity. I remember the last time you were on you were talking about some of the cardinal characteristics and my question was wow, I see a lot of myself in that and

we are going to talk about later in this discussion what to do when you're noticing emotional immaturity in your own mind, but let's just stay with other people for a second. You said something interesting about how emotional immaturity shows up in one of two places generally. One would be under stress, the other would be in emotional intimate relationships. I'm remembering what I thought was a very wise thing that a friend of mine said to me like 20 years ago.

I said this cliche thing about how when people are under stress, you really get to see the real them. My friend who went on to become a psychiatrist, he was not medically trained at this point, said something that's always stuck with me, which was that, actually, no, I think when people are under stress, that is really not who they are.

It's the amygdala, the stress part of the brain is activated and it's who they are most of the time. That's the real measure. So what do you think of that? Yeah, I think your friend is right. I mean, I would hate to have somebody judge my emotional maturity on how I act when I'm super stressed. But it's more like you can think about it as when you're stressed, you're going to use

certain coping mechanisms. That's what we all do. We have our defenses. We have our coping mechanisms. The person who is relatively emotionally mature, even when they're stressed, they're still going to be aware of the effect on other people. They're still going to be aware of the realities. They may be upset, they may be out of their mind with anxiety or worry, but some of these foundational things, you're still going to have the feeling that they are in touch with reality,

even though reality is making them suffer, but they're still in touch with reality and you can still relate to them, okay? With the emotionally immature person, it's likely to be much more black and white, much more of a rigid response, much more judging, blaming, denial, distortion, insisting.

So that is what you're really looking for during the episode of stress is what is the quality of it? Are you still able to reach that person? Is there somebody still in there? Or are you just dealing with a bunch of reactive defense mechanisms that's all about trying to make them feel better? Then as the stress goes down,

does the person come back and say, ''Wow, I'm sorry I was so off the wall with that. I was just really scared. I didn't know what I was going to do.'m sorry I was so off the wall with that, I was just really scared, and I didn't know what I was going to do, but sorry I talked your ear off. They'll have some awareness that they weren't quite themselves. Whereas an emotionally immature person, they won't come back and do that kind of self-reflection. That's not what they're focusing on, is how they've affected other people. Does that help?

Yeah, it does. Okay. How do we spot an EIP? And what's the benefit of spotting them? In other words, what's the benefit of making this amateur remote diagnosis of somebody else's phenotype? So yeah, two-part question. How do we spot them and why?

They can be very hard to spot because a lot of them, especially if they have narcissistic components to their personality, and by the way, the way I look at it is that all narcissistic personality disorders are emotionally immature, but certainly not all emotionally mature people are narcissistic. So it's kind of like a subcategory. But they're very hard to spot because, like I said, their social skills, their intelligence, all of that is fine. And so you may be really drawn in

and really relate very well to them for a long time. You know, like let's say you're doing something in business with them or let's say you start to date them. Things can go well for a long time and I'm reminded of the psychiatrist Hervey Kleckley who worked with psychopaths who certainly are emotionally immature and he said that he could always tell a psychopath because that was the person he lent money to. So, I mean, we, even if you know about emotional immaturity, you're going to respond to charm,

you're going to respond to attention, you're going to respond to social, you know social charm and facility. I mean, we all respond to that stuff. But over time, as you get to know the person, you're going to find out a lot more about how they cope with life and how they treat other people. At the beginning of the relationship, you may feel like the only person on earth in their eyes. But as time goes on, you'll see how they handle disagreements. You'll see how they handle it when things don't go their way. And you'll see what they do when it looks like they're not going to get everything that they want. That's kind of where the rubber meets the road and you start to see some of these things

be directed back at you in a very unpleasant way, or maybe you'll get the cold shoulder. But it won't be that they will come toward you and try to work it out with you. What they'll do instead is express their displeasure and hope that you get the message that you need to shape up and be the way that they want you to be. So I think it's crucial that we be aware of emotional immaturity and look out for it. Because what happens if we go ahead and marry that person or we go ahead and make that business deal,

sign that contract with somebody who's not able to do some of the basics of working out problems with other people? I mean, that's a terrible situation to get yourself into. So, yes, the why is because it's going to be a hard road with that person if you have to negotiate or work things out with them when things get tough. And it's much easier to spend the time upfront to get to know them better, you know, to kind of suss out whether or not they do handle things in emotionally mature ways. It's much more economical to spend the time upfront than to pay later. How do you know you're right? I mean, most of us are not clinicians, so how do we know if we're right in our diagnosis?

Well, to me, you know, it's going off those hallmark characteristics because every one of those spells trouble for a long-term relationship. I mean, if you don't have empathy or you are not comfortable with intimacy or you can't self-reflect, for instance, you're not gonna be a very good partner in any kind of relationship. It's going to be hard on the other person. You don't have to be a clinician to know that when

somebody gives you the cold shoulder, speaks curtly to you in a way that makes you feel very small, refuses to talk with you about problems because they just don't like it, they just don't see why they should. Any normal human being is going to have a reaction to that because the interpersonal quality of a relationship with an emotionally immature person is that sooner or later, you're going to end up emotionally taking care of them, putting them first, and kind of agreeing

that they're the most important person in the relationship. And that gets tiring. But you'll be able to tell that, and people do tell it early in relationships, it's that they haven't known what to call that. And so they might have those experiences and then chalk it up to, oh, he was tired, or I wasn't very sensitive to her, they'll make excuses for it. That's why I think it's so important for us to know about emotional immaturity,

because some of these things can be lifelong patterns that maybe you don't want to get involved with. Your book is about, the new book is about disentangling from EIPs, and I want to talk at great length about that, because sometimes disentangling is not really an option or it's more difficult if it's like your boss or your parent than a prospective romantic partner or a business partner.

Anyway, I do want to get to that. But before we get into that, I'd love to talk a little bit more about EIPs generally. Let me just throw a bunch of questions at you and you can pick whichever one is interesting to you. I'm just curious, like how common do you think this is as a percentage of the population? And how does an EIP get made? Why are they this way? Yeah, remember what I said about the quality

of the interpersonal relationship is going to have a particular tone to it. Like, you're going to end up being the one who feels responsible for emotionally stabilizing the emotionally immature person. They kind of give you the job of making them feel better or calming them down. And they also give you the job of making sure that their self-esteem stays good. So those two interactions are very central to any kind of emotionally immature relationship system. You're going to find yourself put in the position of being kind of an emotional caretaker or the person who beefs up their self-esteem.

And that's why I said it's very tiring because it's an energy drain to be that alert to another person's inner state. So when you hear terms like energy vampire or, you know, how draining someone is, that's because they're not able to really modulate their own emotions and soothe themselves. And so they turn to you to help them regulate their own emotions. Now, that's exactly what little kids do, and we expect them to do that. That's normal and healthy because they can't regulate their internal state. They need to be able to come to an adult and have that adult understand with empathy what's going on inside that child and then respond in ways that soothe them,

help them learn how to calm down. And that's normal development. The child gets their self-esteem internalized through many interactions with their parent where the parent loves that child and adores that child. And that little child is just the cutest little thing ever. And the child feels delighted in and they internalize that self-esteem. Well, for emotionally immature people, what probably happens is that there is some difficulty that occurs in the attachment process or in the basic

quality of relationship with their parent or their caretakers. Something happens where they're not able to trust and complete that process of internalizing their own comfort and their own ability to regulate their reactions and responses to stress. It may be that they experience trauma. Trauma just stops development in certain areas. That might happen. There might be external things that break apart the parent's ability to be there for the child through no fault of the child or the parent, like natural disasters or illnesses, things like that. But the problem is that

that child's developmental needs, their emotional needs, don't go away because there's been a natural disaster. They continue. And when the parent may be too overwhelmed to respond to the child, the child's not getting something that it needed to continue their psychological growth, their emotional development.

So that's how it may happen. I don't know that there are any studies about emotional immaturity and how it develops yet, but we certainly have a lot of information from attachment studies that when the child is not in a securely attached relationship early in life, they don't pick up a lot of these things that we assume a normal person to have, like the empathy and the ability to think of other people. And then for the, how common is it? I think you can read the news or watch the, the world. Who could she be referring to?

Who could she be referring to? I mean, I mean, it's all over the place. People behaving badly, people who react to stress by starting wars, you know, personally, I think, you know, all I have to do is read the newspaper and realize how widespread emotional immaturity really is. Because you can see the egocentrism, you can see the refusal to self-reflect, you can see the lack of empathy, the distortion, the denial. I think it's probably very common.

But I have no idea of the percentage. I just suspect it's higher than we want it to be. I have a million other questions about EIPs generally, including whether they can ever change. But let's come back to that because I do want to get to the tactical information and guidance for those of us who have EIPs in our life and want to disentangle. Again, disentangling is in the title of your book. What do you mean by that?

What does disentangling look like? Yeah. Well, you know, I was describing how emotionally immature people set up their relationships. I call it the emotionally immature relationship system, meaning that they're looking for you to help emotionally stabilize them and build up their self-esteem. And they're also looking to be the most important person in that relationship. That's what they're all about. So that system needs to entangle you in it for you to be constantly available to them in a way that makes them feel good, okay, makes them feel calm, makes them feel stabilized. So we get entangled because

we end up finding ourselves pulled into a role of psychological caretaking that we never anticipated, we never signed up for, and yet we're deep into it. We're dealing with their reactions, we're helping them to feel better, we're dealing with their anger. There are a lot of things going on that tend to pull people in to a relationship that ends up feeling like you're tangled. And it doesn't feel like you're free to be yourself. It doesn't feel like you're important too,

or you're just as important as them. It feels like they're the ones who are consuming all the resources in the relationship. Also, because emotionally mature people don't have a great sense of self, they tend to do this thing that has been called enmeshment, meaning that they draw other people into their sense of identity. Let's say that a woman marries a man who then becomes part of her identity

as a successful or a socially well-respected woman, but he becomes, in this example, kind of an object in her life that is for the purpose of her own identity. Or let's say it's a mother who insists on telling her grown child what to do, how to live their life. And that enmeshment means that the boundaries are not good. The boundaries that should be there between two individual adults are not being respected, and that other person is seen merely as an extension of the emotionally immature person. And that kind of bond to someone who is

seeing you as sort of an extension of themselves, I mean, that feels awful. And people want to, at some point in that, they begin to want to get away. They begin to have to distance themselves from that person. But what I'm trying to do in the book is not just how do you distance yourself from a person like that, because most people figure that out, but if you have to be in relationship with them But if you have to be in relationship with them,

or you want to be in relationship with them, how do you go about psychologically disentangling yourself from them? How do you find yourself after you've gotten tangled up in being who the emotionally immature person thinks you ought to be. So disentangling doesn't necessarily mean cutting off all ties. It can mean just having some inner boundaries.

Yes, exactly. That's a really good way of saying it. It's inner boundaries. It's a sense of self-possession, a sense that I know where I begin and end and I know where you start and I can tell the difference between what I want and what you want and I'm not going to be manipulated into losing that distinction. So, what does that look like? So, if you've got a boss or a spouse, a sibling, a friend, or a parent who's got an instrumental view of you,

where they're enmeshed in a way that you just become an extension of their ego, how would you manage that on an ongoing basis if you didn't wanna cut them out of your life? Yeah. Well, the fact is that as long as you're unconscious of the process, as long as you're unconscious or unaware of what is happening between you, like what the dynamic is that you're being kind of maneuvered into this particular role, or you're being maneuvered into

following these expectations or else you're a bad person. If you're not aware of that, you probably are going to get maneuvered into that because they're so good at it. Believe me, they've gotten really good at getting other people to take care of them. And so if you don't have that awareness of the dynamic, you're gonna move into that relationship and be kind of taken over by them. So for me, it seems crucial that people be aware of what emotional immaturity looks like and what its motives are. Its motive is not to make your life miserable

or to harm you or anything like that. The motive of the emotionally immature relationship system is I can't do it on my own. I'm immature. I don't have a strong sense of self. I can't figure the world out very well. And I need somebody to run interference for me. I need somebody to take care of me.

They're not bad people at all, but they're scared people, and they're inadequate in many respects. If you have an iota of empathy, you're probably going to sense that about them. And it can pull you into a relationship where, you know, you really end up letting them get away with too much, and you set your boundaries too late.

And these are things that can be avoided if we're aware of some of these signs of emotional immaturity. The first step in not getting enmeshed is to begin to ask yourself whether or not this person seems to be able to take my needs into account as well as theirs. Can they handle problems? Can they handle frustrations? What happens if we have a difference of opinion?

What happens if I need their help? Do they respond? Are they always too busy? I mean, what's the quality of the relationship? And when sooner or later you begin to feel taken advantage of or it begins to feel like it's kind of outweighed on their side about who's getting the most attention and benefit from the relationship. When that starts to happen, that's when you need to become very observant and very objective about what's going on in the relationship. And by that I mean that you begin to observe how they're behaving, what they're doing, and you narrate it to yourself. So it increases your objectivity and your perspective so that you're not

pulled in to this entangled relationship where you're just reacting emotionally. For emotionally immature people, it's a dream come true when you go in and you are reacting emotionally to them because they're so effective at using that to get what they want. So when you pull back and become objective and observational, you are freeing yourself from that emotionally immature relationship system, and you're giving yourself an opportunity to really be yourself in that person's presence,

instead of just the reflection of what they want to see. So that being yourself is so crucially important for therapy patients, people I've worked with who have people in their lives like this, that's the number one thing we have to do is just to get them to pay attention to what they want, how they feel, what they think is right. Because they get so muddled up with being consumed by what the emotionally immature person wants. I mean, when that system is working,

that's where your thoughts go is, yeah, but what about them? What's gonna happen to him? What's gonna happen to her? It's like, remember to take care of yourself first, and to make sure that you set boundaries that give you the space to be in touch with yourself like that. Coming up, Lindsay C. Gibson talks about what often happens to your own sense of self

when you're in relationship or even just in a conversation with an EIP, how to interact with EIPs more effectively, how she reacts when she comes across an EIP in nature, whether or not EIPs can change and the limits of estrangement. Hello, I'm Alice Levine. And I'm Matt Ford, and we're the hosts of Wanderers podcast British Scandal. Where we tell you outrageous tales of how the mighty have fallen on these pleasant pastures.

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or the Wondry app. Before we get back to the show, just a reminder about the Healthy Habits course over on the 10% Happier app taught by Kelly McGonigal and Alexis Santos. To access it, just download the 10% Happier app wherever you get your apps. A big theme in the book, in your new book, is authenticity.

If you were raised by an EIP or you're in a relationship, a deeply enmeshed relationship with an EIP, these are your words here, you can trade authenticity for approval. So you kind of lose your sense of self because you've got this interpersonal mind virus going on. Yeah. And if I'm hearing you correctly,

when the rubber hits the road and you're in an interaction with an EIP, you really need mindfulness, self-awareness to see, okay, am I being who this person wants me to be right now or a being who I am? And that seems tricky in and of itself because it's possible that you've actually never explored that question of who you are and what you want.

Yeah, and that's something. I mean, that is really what it comes down to because if you have been raised by emotionally immature parents yourself, you've been trained to put yourself at the very back of the line. You've been trained to think about how what you do is going to affect the people in your family. You've been trained to think about how is mom or dad going to feel about this? How do I keep them calm? So yeah, absolutely. You can come to an adult relationship

with an emotionally immature person. And if you've been raised with them, you are automatically, like you said, Dan, you're automatically going to put them first. It's just going to feel natural. It's going to feel normal to do that. And then you're going to feel natural. It's going to feel normal to do that. And then you're going to lose touch with what is actually going on inside yourself. So when you brought

up that term, the mindfulness, exactly, it's like you forget to even experience your own presence. It's not something that you've ever been trained to do if you were raised by an emotionally mature parent. And it's so important. It's not something that you've ever been trained to do if you were raised by an emotionally mature parent. And it's so important. It's interesting when I think about this in my own life. I don't think I was raised by EIPs. Maybe I'm not seeing my parents clearly, but I think they were quite mature and pretty

great parents. But I believe there are people in my life, including some bosses over time and particularly charismatic colleagues, and actually not a few family members who fit the description. And when I interpolate back to those interactions, I really say I don't love the word authenticity. I love the concept, but the word, sometimes it can be so vague or cliched that I lose a foothold in the true meaning of it. And yet I can really see that there are times when I'm dealing with an EIP that I do lose my authenticity. I'm playing into their hands because I'm so eager to like not be the bad guy. Exactly. Exactly. And they are very adept at giving you a sense of moral obligation to do that.

It's not just take care of me and make me feel good about myself. It is you have a moral obligation to put me first and take care of me because that's what good sons, good husbands, good friends do. And then you get kind of emotionally coerced into feeling bad because it generates guilt or shame, self-doubt, and what does a self-reflective person do when they have self-doubt? They start looking for information outside of themselves to kind of get a read

on the situation because maybe they're wrong, you know? But that is, like you say, that is like playing right into the maneuvers that emotionally mature people do to keep themselves feeling safe and in control. I actually don't like the word manipulate because I don't think they're doing it consciously. I don't think they're doing it to harm anybody. I don't think they're trying to make other people's lives miserable. I think these are all defensive maneuvers to keep them from feeling inadequate or afraid or something really, really awful. I think they're trying to stay away from some inner fears and some insecurities that they

really don't want to get in touch with. They're not trying to do that at your expense. It's just like a person who's going under for the last time is not trying to drown the person who's going under for the last time. It's not trying to drown the person who's rescuing them. It's just they need someone to stand on top of to get a breath of air. I appreciate that perspective. Do you ever get perversely excited when you meet an EIP out in nature, you know, at a family barbecue or whatever, because it gives you an opportunity to just study them in the wild?

Actually, I have to confess that I do get a little excitement when I encounter them in the wild. Just because I know what I'm looking for now, you know? And then, let me also hasten to add that I also get excited when I run into emotionally mature people because I can tell who they are too. They're the ones who listen, they're the ones who remember what you said two minutes ago, who try to integrate what you told them into something else that they're asking you about. You feel calm in their presence,

you feel safe in their presence. So I get excited by both of them. The fun is not the analyzing them. The fun is not getting pulled in to something where in the past, you know, maybe I would have lost myself or lost my perspective with this person. Yeah, I can imagine it's like testing your skills in real time. Yeah, exactly can imagine it's like testing your skills in real time. Yeah, exactly, exactly. You talked about emotionally mature people and how it's fun to run into them and your nervous system senses it, you feel safe, calm, heard, understood,

brief tangent. I recently read somewhere, I think it was on that there's this excellent newsletter called The Marginalian and either the author or somebody she was quoting talked about how understanding is actually just another name for love, which I actually find that an interesting concept. Yeah. But anyway, you talked about how when you're with an emotionally mature person, you feel like they kind of get you, they're clicked in, they're listening, they're switched on.

I don't know if I'll be able to articulate this well, it put me in mind of a kind of definitional question about emotionally immature people. Because you spent a lot of time in this interview dwelling on this concept of emotional enmeshment. They feel like they're drowning, they feel unsafe. So they co-opt other people as life rafts in a hostile world. They didn't get the support they needed,

perhaps as a kid, and so they're just constantly latching onto it now. And yet, when you listed the many hallmarks of emotional immaturity, there were other aspects to it, like interpreting everything through the lens of the self, being totally self-centered, believing that you're right all the time.

I think you mentioned that, but maybe you didn't, but at least Ayoka, you did mention it. So I feel like I know a lot of people who have those characteristics, perhaps even myself, in spades, and maybe they don't have the whole enmeshment thing, at least clearly. And so I'm just wondering, would they not qualify fully as emotionally immature?

What I look for is kind of the opposites of those hallmark characteristics. In other words, let's not forget that if we are nervous, sick, fatigued, going through an emergency, our emotional maturity will probably plummet. Nobody is at their most empathic, non-ego-centric best when they're really sick or things are really going wrong. So regression absolutely can happen to all of us. I certainly don't count myself out of that because I know how I've been when I've been in some rough situations. It's like you are not your best self. You're not thinking about other people in

the same way you would when all your needs are being taken care of. So we have to keep that in mind. But a person can show egocentric qualities, they can have poor empathy at times, they may not be great at self-reflection, they may get uncomfortable when things get too emotionally intimate,

and you have all these characteristics. But if you have the ability to be otherwise at other times, to me, that's a person who does have adequate emotional maturity because at times they are capable of true empathy. I mean, they're just doing it to get what they want. They really can't help but feel what somebody else feels. They really do take other people into account. Maybe they wouldn't do something because

it just wouldn't be right to the other people. They don't know these people, but they just don't think it's fair that they do this because they have that sense of, other people are just as real as I am. They may shy away from emotional intimacy at times, but when it comes right down to it with their good friend or their mate or whoever, or their child, they can be right there. They can be fully present in the moment. They can tolerate it well. They can be available for other people. So the way I look at it is you can maybe grow up in circumstances that teach you a lot of emotionally immature qualities that you may show as a matter of habit or familiarity. But if you have the other characteristics,

that ability to have enough of a sense of self that you can care about other people, care about yourself, be kind, that kind of thing, see reality for what it is, then I would consider that person fundamentally emotionally mature enough, okay? Even if they have some of these other characteristics. I mean, it's like a lifetime work if that's the case because you have that self reflection. So you're able to watch yourself and realize, oh, I didn't like how I did that or it's not really a great style.

That's not the way I want to treat people. So you can learn and mature and hopefully, people do do that across their entire lifespan. Let's get back to disentangling. Creating some distance from an EIP per your book can be quite difficult. It can lead to difficult interactions. You describe how some people on the receiving end of a difficult interaction with an EIP

can experience brain scramble where you just can't think clearly. What are some tactics and tools we can use if we're in a heated interaction with an EIP and we're trying to stand our ground? Yeah, I would say that many times when we're in a heated interaction with an EIP, and particularly if we're trying to stand our ground, we're probably going to come out of that interaction exhausted and frustrated because the more reactive that you get and the more you fasten on an outcome that involves their changing, the less likely you are to handle it in a way that is going to be best for you. So it's not a good thing to go into an interaction trying to sort of fight your way out of it because

the emotionally immature person is going to change and shift and evade and deny. You're going to be so frustrated because they don't fight fair. They don't fight objectively. If you're trying to stand your ground, you can read that as you're trying to set a boundary of some sort, that to them is like you're threatening them with kryptonite. There's an existential horror they have of someone who is insisting that they will not be controlled by them, especially with narcissistic types.

It threatens their story about the world, which is that with enough pressure, with enough intimidation, with enough strength, they can have what they want and they can get other people to capitulate. So it's much better, I think, if people can, again, remain self-possessed, think of what the outcome is. Not trying to change the other person or change the relationship, but just think about the specific outcome that you want from this interaction, and then try to stay calm and oriented toward that outcome.

That tends to work better. And then it's a question of repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, because the emotionally immature person does not do well with a lot of repetition like that. Someone who just perseveres with their point of view, I mean, that becomes very uninteresting to the emotionally immature person. Lots of times they just back off or they bring it to a halt themselves because they don't know what to do with that. They're used to people giving in to them.

Either giving in or mimicking or engaging in the kind of histrionics that are perversely nourishing to them. Yes. So just to repeat it back to you, it seems like if you're in a difficult interaction with an EIP or a series of difficult interactions, it's helpful to have a very discrete goal that does not involve changing that person or permanently shifting

the relationship. You have a very discrete goal of maybe, like, I want to make clear that this one thing you're asking of me I'm not going to do just by way of an example and you repeat it clearly and consistently and it's likely that they'll just get bored and that's how you can get what you want. Well, that's how you can stick to your position. See, sticking to your position is a major accomplishment with emotionally immature people. I mean, if you can do that,

if you can go into an interaction with a certain goal in mind for yourself, and you walk out of that interaction with that same goal, I mean, hallelujah, that is a fabulous accomplishment because they haven't scrambled your brain or pulled you off of your own path to the point where you don't even remember what you were trying to do in the interaction, which is what happens a lot. You talk about in these interactions to have a discrete and realistic goal and not to, you know, be looking for changing the other person, the EIP

fundamentally. Can an EIP ever change? If they have self-reflection, if they have a little bit of self-reflection, I mean, that's what it takes for anybody to change. How can you change yourself if you have no desire or no ability to look at your own behavior? I mean, for me, that's the absolute essential. And sometimes it's only when things get really bad it's only when things get really bad that someone is able to be self-reflective. With substance abuse, we have often heard that thing

about hitting bottom and so forth, and it doesn't necessarily have to be hitting bottom, but it has to be some experience that brings self-reflection into the picture for that person, whatever that might be. Once they have a little bit of self-reflection, which may be brought about by a family member who says, if you don't get therapy,

I'm not coming home anymore. Or if we can't work this out, and if you can't change some of these things, I can't stay with you. Lots of times people are motivated extrinsically if they're emotionally immature, because they are realizing, this is what's going to happen if I continue on this path.

That's the beginning of self-reflection. People who enjoy introspection do self-reflection because it's fun for them. For the emotionally immature person, they may have to be dragged kicking and screaming into self-reflection, but once they start to do that, in therapy, you can actually nurture that curiosity about them and how they got to be that way. And so I think they can change. I just think that getting them to the point of self-reflection is really the very, very hard part.

Which is why you advise that we go into these encounters with realistic expectations, not like holistic change expectations. Exactly, yeah. Because if you expect the other person to change, I mean, you have zero control over that for one thing. And it's usually a goal that you're going to fail at, which is not a great way to go into an interaction.

As I keep saying, the book is about disentangling. One way to disentangle is complete estrangement. However, you say that there are some limits to estrangement. It may not solve everything. What do you mean by that? It seems like moving away from somebody or not seeing them anymore could be a perfect solution to a difficult relationship. But what often happens is that because human beings carry the patterning of their relationships

inside them—I mean, that's how we grow up. That is how we psychologically mature, is by internalizing interactions, internalizing other people's feelings and statements and so forth. We build our personalities from what's on the outside. But once it's in there, once we've patterned ourselves, we can move across the country, never see the person again, and still carry around the beliefs about ourself, the attitudes toward life, the sense of inadequacy that may have been our experience with the emotionally immature person. We carry this with us. So when people attempt kind of the

geographical cure or the estrangement cure, you have to realize that it may still be necessary to seek out therapy for all the internalized patterns, the impact of that on you that you still carry around. You know, personally, inside myself in the therapy session, I'm not thinking, gosh, how can I get them to cut out contact with this toxic parent? I'm not thinking that. I'm thinking, how can we get this person to stay connected with themselves and stay in touch with their own needs and feelings even while they're interacting with this very difficult person. How can we get them to develop the inner strength and the sense of healthy entitlement,

to be their own person as they interact with this immature person? Let's do the necessary work on the inside to strengthen the person in their own individuality, not just take them out of the situation and still have them be living all of this inside themselves. What do you find generally works in terms of building up somebody's individuality? I think in therapy, when you go in and you sit with somebody who looks at you like you're really there and treats you like you're psychologically real, that somebody's in there, that you have something to say and that even your smallest feelings are important. When you get that experience with somebody, you begin to feel what it's like to feel like an individual.

And a lot of people haven't had that, unfortunately, in some of their major relationships. So in therapy, you're actually getting the experience of being treated like an individual. But this could happen with an excellent spouse. This could happen with a best friend. It's like people say that how important relationships have been in their lives. And this is why, because that person recognizes your individuality. They relate to you as a person who has their own thoughts and who has their own feelings, and they treat you like you're real. And it helps you develop yourself. I mean, you believe it when somebody sees that in you.

in you. And so learning how to reconceptualize yourself as an important individual who is real on the inside and who is just as important as everybody else is like a tremendous antidote to what you are conditioned to accept with emotionally immature relationships. The antidote to an EIP is an EMP. Yes, and also your own sense of individuality and worthiness. Yeah. Which is developed through interacting with the emotionally mature, who can attune to you, can mentalize, in other words, can see you as somebody who has their own psychological reality that can

wake something up in you and you see, oh yeah, I have agency as well. Yeah, I love that. That's so well said. To wake something up in you, that is what you hope will happen. Because a lot of times, emotionally immature people kind of put you to sleep. It's like you're under their spell, or it's impolite to notice things that they're doing,

or how you feel. So yeah, that sensation of being woken up to that is extremely important. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. Coming up, Lindsay talks about why she encourages what she calls alternatives to forgiveness, handling your own emotionally immature tendencies, and how to prevent brain scramble when you're talking to somebody who is not making any attempt to understand what you are actually saying. Divorced beheaded died, divorced beheaded survived.

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If you've interacted with an EIP either on a super deep level as, you know, having been raised by one or two, having had an intimate relationship with one, or even on a less enmeshed level, like working with or working for somebody who's emotionally immature, if you've had this experience, you may be pissed about it. And you know, I'm just wondering, like, is forgiveness the right move? You and your book talk about something you call alternatives to forgiveness. Yeah, I think it's really been a big cultural emphasis on forgiveness. And I mean, some of it is religious, but I think it's now kind of edged over into being, you know, sort of a recommendation for mental health. And I think it's so unfair because I don't think people have a lot of control over whether

they're able to forgive somebody. Forgiveness, I think, comes to you when it's ready, when you're ready. I don't think it's something that you can helpfully push yourself into or aspire to because forgiveness has to be something that genuinely comes from the core of yourself, at least in my definition of forgiveness. It's not lip service. It is almost a reconsideration of what happened to you, to where you can respond with compassion maybe for the other person or certainly for understanding

passion maybe for the other person or certainly for understanding that person's limitations that made them do that. Or maybe for some people, the wholesale religious forgiveness works. Okay, I'm not denying that that happens. I'm just saying to suggest that as a therapeutic approach or a therapeutic method, I don't think is fair to people. And I certainly tell people in therapy that that's not a goal we have to have right now. It has nothing to do with them being a good person,

has nothing to do with their recovery. What will influence their recovery is they're working through the feelings of what happened to them and owning that as a part of their new individuality. And when they can do that later on, they can decide whether or not forgiveness is in the cards for this relationship, okay? But it's not something that you can make yourself do. So we have to be respectful of that.

So what would fall into the category of an alternative? Working through the feelings. I see, I see. There's not like a cousin of forgiveness that you're recommending instead. Hmm. Is there a cousin to forgiveness? That's a great question. Maybe like understanding the roots of it. Like if I can understand why you're in EIP

without forgiving you. Yes, actually the understanding or the insight to why a person is that way can lead to a kind of compassion. Now, as a good human being, maybe at some level a part of you could feel that compassion, but there might be this other part that is nowhere near forgiveness. I mean, we're a multiplicity of parts in our personalities. That's the way I look at it and a lot of people look at it. We're not one homogenous attitude. So yes, you can have compassion for them, you can have understanding, it can make you less angry, but as far as the forgiveness goes, again, that belongs to a part of you that we probably grow into that,

maybe is another way to look at it, but maybe we don't. And I just think that's all right too. One of the things you talk about in the book is handling your own emotionally immature tendencies, how we can notice when we're displaying internally, externally, or both. One of the hallmarks reminded me of a story of the time I was on my first vacation I ever took with my wife and my then girlfriend and now wife.

We were taking off on a plane going to London and I said, it's the Me and You Show starring me. It was definitely an emotionally, it was a joke, but it definitely an emotionally immature thing. I'm the more important person in the relationship. So what do you recommend when we're seeing this kind of tendency come up in our own mind? and in my life, it's such an ongoing discovery because half the time, these are things that we have learned either because we watched our parents do it or our own natural, developmentally appropriate grandiosity

wasn't helped to kind of come back down to earth and integrate with other people. And so, you know, we can have these pockets of old learning or incomplete developmental tasks that pop up sometimes in very surprising ways. And so we get to, when we're aware of emotional immaturity, we get to recognize that in ourselves or we get to see it and then ask ourselves, is that what I think? Is that or is that the way I want to be? Or, you know, whatever. And we can begin to choose, we begin to create ourselves. We're creating ourselves every day. I mean, maturation goes on the entire lifespan. And we get to choose which way we want to go. We always have these paths in front of us, these potential outcomes, and we can decide what we want to nurture in

ourselves and what we don't. Give you an example, when I was working on one of my previous books, I like to camp out at the dining room table. We have an open concept house. So I would camp out at the dining room table. When my husband would go in and out of the sliding door to the deck, I would shoot dagger looks at him because he was disturbing me. Now, I'm the one who's camped out in the middle of the house,

right? He brought that to my attention in his kind, reasonable way and pointed out that I was taking up all the room and then being mad at him for living his life in our house. All right. Now that was something that I had learned from my childhood, which was I learned not to bother anybody. You know, if somebody looked like they were busy, you, you know, walked on tiptoes around them so that they wouldn't get upset with you. Well, my husband isn't thinking like that, and so he's living his life, and I had to realize, oh, that's a pretty egocentric position where I'm sitting down where I want to work, and then I'm expecting and assuming that he's going to honor the fact that I need peace and quiet.

So when that was brought to my attention, self-reflection started. Choice started. Do I want to be like this? Do I want to make him feel rotten for opening the door? No, that's not who I want to be. I get to decide who I want to be if somebody will bring it to my attention. So, I mean, that's just a personal example, but there are a million things like that where it does get brought to our attention how we want to develop ourselves and which way we want to go.

Yes, and the good news is that if you're paying attention, you'll notice that it feels better to not be an asshole, and that's a very positive upward spiral. Absolutely. Because after that, when I decided to take my little laptop and go downstairs, I had a like little at a girl pat on the back because I'm becoming the kind of person who in my own house is considerate of this person I love more than anybody. Yeah. Now that feels good to me and it's meaningful. So I'm acting in line with my principles and

my self-esteem goes up as I'm living in that way as opposed to thoughtlessly. Are there things that I should have asked you but failed to ask you, any place you wanted to go that I didn't bring you? The only thing I would like to add is you had mentioned brain scramble earlier. And I do want to mention that there's this thing that happens with emotionally immature people where you end up not being able to get your thoughts straight, you're not able to say what you really mean, you lose your track of thought, you become confused, you start to wonder if maybe you're crazy. The effect on people by emotionally immature people can be so

disorienting and make you feel so much self-doubt. It's important for people to know that that's normal. When you try to maybe talk to an emotionally immature person about something difficult, you should just expect that you may fail to get your point across, you may fail to do the kind of argument that you had planned because when somebody is not interested

in what you have to say, when they're not listening to you, when they're going off on tangents, when they're acting like there's something wrong with you, that you're disagreeing with them, that is very disorienting and destabilizing. Okay? So I just want to mention that because I don't want people to continue to feel like they're weak or can't keep their thoughts straight when they have an encounter with an emotionally immature person. I want them to realize that's part and parcel of their interactional way of doing things. And if you're aware of that, then you can change it,

then you can go into it, again, with a simplified, focused outcome in mind where you don't get pulled off into these things that don't make any sense. So I just wanna mention that because a lot of people don't understand how discombobulating it is when another person is not listening. It's like if a person wants to understand what you're

saying, it doesn't matter how you say it. They're going to do the work to understand you. If a person doesn't want to understand you, then it doesn't matter what you say, because they are not even going to be listening to what you're saying. So it's not like you can ever find the perfect way to approach them, because they're not going to be taking it in in the first place. So I just want people to know that that sensation of brain scramble or not being able to get your thoughts together, not being able to express yourself, that is probably a side effect of interacting with an emotionally immature person.

That's helpful. What do you recommend in terms of preventing the brain scramble and is it helpful? You talked earlier about having a simple goal going into one of these interactions. Would that be helpful in terms of preventing brain scramble and what would an example of a simple goal be? Let's say that you want to tell somebody

that you can't host Thanksgiving at your house this year. That you want to tell a parent or a good friend or whatever. And you know that this is going to upset them because you always host Thanksgiving. So you're going to have to tell them something they don't want to hear. When you go into that situation, you have to decide what is an achievable outcome.

Now the achievable outcome in that case is not that my mother, my best friend, whatever, are going to be happy with my decision or they're going to gracefully accept my position because maybe the opposite is going to be true. They're going to be upset, they're going to try to persuade me, they're going to try to guilt me. But you can have a goal that can be achieved, which might be, I'm going to tell them what my preferences are, what I'm going to do or not do. And then if they try to persuade me, I will repeat myself. And if it keeps going on and it seems like

we're getting upset with each other, I'm going to ask if we can table this and talk about it later. Okay, there's my game plan. I'm gonna say it, I'm gonna repeat it, I'm gonna ask to table it if it's not going well. Now I'm prepared. And that's all, every one of those things

is under my control. I like that. And that's all, every one of those things is under my control. I like that. Before I let you go, can you just remind everybody of the name of your new book, maybe the names of your prior books, any other resources you've put out into the world? Yeah, the new book that's coming out July 1st is Disentangling from Emotionally Immature People.

And it's really geared toward all kinds of relationships with emotionally immature people. And it's really geared toward all kinds of relationships with emotionally immature people, not just with parents. It's, gosh, this is like the fourth book, I think, in the series that began with adult children of emotionally immature parents, which was the best seller that really made the big splash. And it's a natural evolution of that book. I do want to mention to Dan

that if people want to go to my website to see additional information, they can go there to Lindsay Gibson, PSYD, PSYD.com. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. Meantime, Lindsay, thank you very much. Always great to talk to you. Thanks for having me, Dan. It's been a pleasure.

Likewise. Thanks again to Lindsay C. Gibson. Thanks as well to everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. With additional pre-production support from the great Wombo Woo, our recording and engineering is handled by the folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our managing producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Island's Rodar theme. If you like 10% happier, and I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now

by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. From Wondry, this is Black History for Real. I'm Francesca Ramsey. And I'm Conscious Lee. And every week, we're going to be chronicling a lot of trials and triumphs from Black folks who ain't never heard about, even though we've been

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