Starving for Affection

“Emotional immaturity in parents guarantees that their children will experience significant emotional neglect. However, this emotional deprivation is often a silent and invisible experience for children. These children will feel the emptiness but won’t know what to call it. They’ll grow up suffering from emotional loneliness, but won’t know what’s wrong. They’ll just feel different from people who seem truly at ease.” ^[1]Gibson, Lindsay C.. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents (pp. 112-113). New Harbinger Publications. Kindle Edition.

“The loneliness of feeling unseen by others is as fundamental a pain as physical injury, but it doesn’t show on the outside. Emotional loneliness is a vague and private experience, not easy to see or describe. You might call it a feeling of emptiness or being alone in the world. Some people have called this feeling existential loneliness, but there’s nothing existential about it. If you feel it, it came from your family.” ^[2]Gibson, Lindsay C.. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents (p. 7). New Harbinger Publications. Kindle Edition.

Andy

Growing up, my family lavished love and affection upon Andy, our beloved dachshund. He was a happy, albeit confused little dog, doing his best to make sense of the instructions he received from us about how to behave. Rules changed from moment to moment, leaving him perplexed for most of the time. To make matters worse, we did not establish any routine to keep Andy safe. For example, when Andy needed to go outside, we simply opened up the back door and let him out. No real effort was made to keep him contained in our back yard. If he decided to make a break for it, and run around in the neighborhood after dark, so be it. He was free to do so. It was all part of the “hands off” parenting style championed by my mom and dad. Unfortunately, the consequences of this arrangement were both tragic and predictable. When Andy failed to return one dark fall evening, my sister and I went out to find him. We discovered his body in the middle of a nearby street in our neighborhood. He had been hit by a car. We were too upset to handle retrieving Andy from the street. We enlisted the help of a neighborhood friend. He reluctantly helped lift Andy’s body into a cardboard box with a shovel and we brought him back home. It was all very traumatic. I carried a photograph of Andy around with me in my front jeans pocket for days. My mom and dad and sisters all grieved his untimely departure. Without him I felt so alone and vulnerable. I missed him so much.

Clamming Up

“Emotionally immature parents fear genuine emotion and pull back from emotional closeness. They use coping mechanisms that resist reality rather than dealing with it. They don’t welcome self-reflection, so they rarely accept blame or apologize. Their immaturity makes them inconsistent and emotionally unreliable, and they’re blind to their children’s needs once their own agenda comes into play.” ^[3]Gibson, Lindsay C.. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents (p. 1). New Harbinger Publications. Kindle Edition.

Growing up in my family was an anxious, lonely experience. My mom and dad were physically present and provided for us both food and shelter, but I have no recollection of feeling emotionally safe with either of them after about the second grade. I knew I was loved by my mom and dad. I also knew that, because of their own personal challenges, I was ultimately on my own. When Jennifer came into the picture, I was amazed at how close and affectionate she was with her own family. They hugged and talked and debated about everything without ceasing. They even talked in the bathroom!

In contrast, I realized at some point that any personal information I chose to share in my home would eventually be used against me. So I clammed up. As a coping strategy, I limited conversations with my parents, especially my mom, to matters that were superficial and innocuous. This, of course, had the distinct drawback of making me feel even more isolated and lonely. All human beings need meaningful relationships and a supportive social system. People are meant to be connected to others. ^[4]Is it any wonder that so many relationships have broken down in light of social media, which has made us wary and skeptical of even genuine attempts by others to reach out and connect?

Learning How to Live in a Safe House

“Instead of having a well-integrated sense of who they are, emotionally immature people are more like an amalgam of various borrowed parts, many of which don’t go together well. Because they had to shut down important parts of themselves out of fear of their parents’ reactions, their personalities formed in isolated clumps, like pieces of a puzzle that don’t fit together. This explains their inconsistent reactions, which make them so difficult to understand. Because they probably weren’t allowed to express and integrate their emotional experiences in childhood, these people grow up to be emotionally inconsistent adults. Their personalities are weakly structured, and they often express contradictory emotions and behaviors. They step in and out of emotional states, never noticing their inconsistency. When they become parents, these traits create emotional bafflement in their children. One woman described her mother’s behavior as chaotic, “flip-flopping in ways that made no sense.”^[5]Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents by Lindsay C. Gibson

I am still learning how to be more emotionally connected and physically affectionate with my family. I will be honest and say, even today, that being connected in healthy ways still doesn’t come naturally to me. I can easily articulate the benefits of living in a healthy, connected network of family and friends. Sometimes, however, I drop the ball. My coping mechanisms have deep roots in my childhood experience. I tend to swing back and forth between engaging when I feel safe, and withdrawing when I feel anxious, or overwhelmed.

Gratitude is a key part of healing. I am deeply grateful that people around me choose to accept me, in spite of my flaws. I am also grateful for my family of origin, and for all of the good times that we shared together. My mom and dad did a heroic job for providing for my sisters and me, even while fighting their own unique personal battles.

Accepting the good doesn’t require us to ignore the bad. Indeed, bringing the two sides of life together makes it possible to have a more nuanced view of the whole, which is the first step toward healing and inner peace.