Random thought: The thing about having emotionally immature parents and that being a thing that messes you up is… I know emotional neglect is real and serious and so on but… like it can’t be your tragic anime backstory.
At the messed up people convention:
Anime hero: I’m here because my mother left me for dead and then I had to kill my brother to avenge the murder of my father. You?
Me: oh yeah, for me, it’s because my parents were bad listeners, emotionally distant, and kinda self-involved.
I wanted to share this checklist about emotionally immature parents with you, cohost. I think it's really great.
I had a lot of conflicts and problems with my parents but I had a hard time saying what the problem was outside of them being anti-LGBT Christians and me being trans. Which. You know. That's conflict enough to start building distance. I tended to describe my parents as "otherwise, giving me a good childhood" etc., but...... that didn't match how I felt at all.
Learning about emotional maturity/immaturity from books by psychologist Lindsay C. Gibson is something that has really changed the way I understood how I was raised but also the world.
For example, to me, the common internet advice is to "communicate" about one's relationship problems ("Well, did you tell the person in question the problem you're posting anonymously here?") Which is always a good place to start. I understand why it's the "first, restart your computer" of relationship advice.
But like. It takes emotional maturity to receive critical feedback, be self-reflective, and to try to improve. A lot of people do not have that maturity, and there is pretty much nothing you can do to change their behavior.
It's like asking a small child screaming in public to picture how their behavior is affecting the emotions of people around them. They are incapable of doing it. They will scream until their issue is addressed or forgotten, etc. It also helped me know that there's nothing I can say to get them to care about my feelings (I was often plagued by imagining I needed to say the right perfect thing to them, and give them time to process, and then say the right perfect thing a second time, etc.) But that doesn't make sense for the emotional maturity of the person I am dealing with. I can only withdraw and take care of myself.
I really like this framing because I think when you (as an adult) are stuck in some kind of relationship with an emotionally immature person (such as if you are related to them), it's unpleasant, but at least in my case, it didn't feel like "abuse" was the right word for it. It felt like being annoyed by someone else who didn't really care about you, rather than someone who was trying to hurt you. Understanding that this is about a person who is, emotionally, stuck as a teen or a child, helped make sense of their behavior.
(Btw, emotionally immature people emotionally neglect their children, because they are incapable of, uh, giving a shit, lol. This is a type of like, actual neglect, which is abuse. But being on the receiving end of that doesn't feel like what we typically picture as abuse. And also, I think a lot of Classic Abusers are emotionally immature. It's a venn diagram thing.)
(Oh yeah, and fun fact, being that emotionally neglected child fucks you up 😎👍 From my understanding from the books, it either 1. stunts your emotional growth in turn, continuing the cycle or 2. you, as a child, basically became your parent's parent in terms of taking care of them emotionally, which messes you up in different ways! Like it may make you feel like you aren't inherently loveable and must "take care of" people in order to earn love! So if this all is Resonating, uh, I'm sorry.)
Also, I read a couple books, I am not an expert in any way, lol. Your mileage may vary for this random one-page book report here.
If you want to learn more, I really recommend
