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The category “emotionally immature parents” can include quite a lot of several types of parents. It can include parents who had children at a really young age and were thus wildly unprepared for parenting, parents who handled untreated mental health or substance abuse issues, and even parents with narcissistic traits. Here are six traits and behaviors chances are you’ll resonate with for those who were raised by an emotionally immature parent.
You needed to “parent” your parents, so your sense of childhood and maturity are skewed. Childhood, what’s that? You grew up in a short time learning easy methods to manage the emotions of others and caring for the adults in your life, so that you barely had one. This is often called parentification. You can have felt such as you “grew up” alongside your parents moderately than being raised by them. Now as an adult chances are you’ll either pursue fun, decadence, and pleasure excessively to make up in your lost childhood (which, to an extent, is perfectly valid) or may veer toward the opposite direction, becoming stringently self-disciplined, perfectionistic, and controlling in lots of facets of your life and relationships. You can have either rushed into becoming a parent at a young age or stayed away from being a parent in any respect due to what you went through as a baby. The strict markers of maturity and childhood were never demarcated in your life.
You may suffer from self-abandonment. When you were a baby, you were asked to make countless sacrifices for other people – the sacrifice of your personal mental health, physical health, and innocence, simply to make sure the adults in your life stayed afloat. You essentially were forced to desert yourself and your personal needs simply to survive and prioritize others while risking your personal welfare. As a result, chances are you’ll struggle with self-abandonment in maturity. This can present itself in some ways. Perhaps you’re a perfectionistic overachiever who strives to fulfill their goals even when it means not sleeping or eating. Or possibly you abandon yourself in romantic relationships and friendships, going overboard attempting to please a partner while betraying your personal basic needs. If you’re affected by self-abandonment, it’s time to start out returning to yourself and prioritizing yourself.
You have natural leadership abilities, resilience, and resourcefulness. Not all the results of emotionally immature parenting are completely destructive — some might be very useful, especially after you’ve undergone some healing. As a baby you needed to take initiative for those who desired to survive, so that you learned key strategies and developed an acute internal sense of resourcefulness and resilience that drove you to turn into a frontrunner as an adult. You may tackle leadership roles that pivot you into skilled and private success or be a natural leader in your social groups and the “planner” of each event, initiative, and gathering. With healthy boundaries, this sense of resourcefulness and resilience might be used to pave a victorious life.
You are hyper-independent and like to have control, sometimes to a fault, since you grew up having little to no control over your circumstances as a baby. Your parents can have subjected you to adult responsibilities before you were ever an adult, and you will have been forced to cater to the vulnerabilities and triggers of those that were meant to be authority figures in your life. Life “happened” to you and compelled you to grow up in a short time, and also you were forced to make use of your intuition and quick considering skills to beat even probably the most unbearable of circumstances. As a result, you will have turn into hyper-independent as an adult, all the time solving your personal problems without asking for help, and attempting to micromanage and control your circumstances now to have the extent of control you probably did not get to have as a baby. You even have a tough time asking for help since you grew up learning you may only depend on yourself.
You have a difficult time managing your personal emotions. As a baby, your emotionally immature parents likely didn’t model the healthiest types of communication or emotional validation. You can have grown up witnessing emotional outbursts, rage attacks, or emotional instability in some form or fashion, or brought into the arguments and conflicts of others. Chaos was “normal” for you, and you will have been expected to be the problem-solver or the peacemaker or the one who settled disputes. You were likely made to prioritize the emotional well-being of your parents while foregoing your personal. As a result, you’ve difficulty in recognizing, identifying, and validating your personal emotions since you spent a lot time absorbed within the emotional states of others. You may feel overwhelmed by anger or despair or feel emotionally numb as a coping mechanism.
You have trouble establishing boundaries. For you, boundaries may exist on extremes. You can have porous boundaries where you turn into passive, allowing people to trample over your boundaries, or try and handle others excessively and fix their mistakes, because that’s what you probably did in your emotionally immature parents. Or chances are you’ll go to the opposite extreme: you’re hypervigilant and distrusting, all the time waiting for the opposite shoe to drop. You are overprotective of your boundaries, and truthfully, nobody can blame you considering what you’ve been through. But consequently, chances are you’ll self-isolate and turn into detached from intimate relationships because you’ve a fear they are going to devour you. This might be kryptonite for toxic people and should serve your healing during your journey, but healthy social connections can be a significant a part of the healing journey, so a balance between self-protection and protected connections is usually needed.
