This one is a mouthful, but it’s so often overlooked as a “valid” stressor that someone could need therapy for.

Emotionally immature parents include parents that struggle with major mental health struggles, such as alcoholism/addiction, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, to name a few. These things increase the likelihood that a parent struggled to give you the secure connection and support you needed.

This can also include things that aren’t necessarily diagnosable but were still very much a problem for the child, such as:

• Holding children to perfectionistic standards

• Struggling with their own regulation

• The child stepping into a “parentified” role, such as caregiver to siblings or the parent, acting as a therapist to the parent, or the parent expecting the child to be their best friend.

• Parents’ anxious, limited thinking gets transferred onto their child

• The parent isn’t able to tolerate the child having “negative” emotions (Guilt trips, severe punishment, being highly reactive, or just being unavailable to the child)

• The parent invalidates, dismisses or is even mocking toward the child’s emotions

These things can follow the child into adulthood and cause all kinds of struggles, including struggling within relationships, low self-esteem, and regulating your own emotions in a healthy way (that doesn’t involve avoidance, addiction, perfection, and people-pleasing).

The great news is that things don’t have to stay like this. Once you recognize this, you can specifically work through these impacts in therapy with a therapist that specializes in working with adult children of emotionally immature parents. Understanding the impacts, making intentional choices about how you would like to move forward, and giving yourself the love and attention you needed as a child can do. wonders for moving forward.

If this sounds like something that could be helpful to you, I invite you to reach out today to see if I might be a good fit to help you build the life you want moving forward.