Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents
You never asked to feel this way.
As a Child…
You felt unseen and unheard—at best. Even at a young age, you felt like you had to change and conform to what your parents wanted so you could receive an ounce of love or attention.
You knew something in your family just felt ‘different’ and now the true issue is becoming more clear.
As an Adult…
As an adult, you are coming to know that what your parents provided you wasn’t love, care, and nourishment.
This realization gives you a profound sense of anger and sadness - to have your parents be so inept and not provide you with your most basic needs.
Even with this knowledge, you feel stuck in the next step of your healing.
You spend days feeling numb and disconnected, only to explode into irritability when your partner asks you what’s for dinner that evening. You apologize profusely and feel terrible for weeks after.
You are highly successful at work but are constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. Every meeting with your boss makes you think you’re getting fired, despite your stellar performance review last month.
You’d love to have closer relationships with healthy family members, friends, or coworkers, but you feel like a burden.
And let’s not even start with the daily headache of interacting with your emotionally immature parent.
The mood swings, hostility, entitlement, weaponized silence, degrading comments framed as ‘opinions’, and triangulation with others, and more.
What’s harder is it feels like you’re the only one who sees it.
Your sibling, complicit parent, or relatives make you seem like the problem for not bending to your emotionally immature parent's demands.
There’s nothing wrong with you. (No, really.)
It might feel hard to hear this, especially since many moments of your childhood and adult life have told you the exact opposite.
Loving relationships, true self-love, and respectful boundaries are possible for you.
By working with one of our specially-trained therapists, you can…
Gain control over your triggers with your parent and other difficult family members
Determine how you’d like to interact with your parent in a way that centers your safety and well-being (i.e. low-contact or no-contact)
Avoid harmful relationship patterns you learned from your parent—or catch yourself quickly when you notice them happening
Feel seen, respected, and cherished in the close relationships of your choosing
Learn how to identify emotionally mature people who will care about your needs, apologize when they are wrong, and be consistent and steady
Heal and recover from the scars of not being seen, and experience genuine hope and excitement about your path ahead
Growing up with an emotionally immature parent, you didn't know what to expect from one moment to the next.
With this in mind, here’s a flexible framework for how we might work together.
✔ Unpack Your Past
Allow yourself to fully feel, process, and honor the pain of the past.
✔ Uncover Your True Self
Reveal and embrace aspects of your authentic self. You don’t have to hide anymore.
✔ Reclaim Your Future
Take empowered steps to create the life and relationships you deserve and long for.
“But they did the best they could…”
As an adult child of an emotionally immature parent, it can be challenging to know how to feel about your parent’s actions.
You are told to practice forgiveness, or “that’s just the way they are.”. You might even say this to yourself.
At the same time, there is the true reality of the ongoing pain and harm caused by your parent’s behavior.
We won’t be another voice making excuses for your parent, but we do understand how complex this process can feel.
Therapy will be a space for you to center your own experience.
Full disclosure: we can’t promise you’ll feel immediately ‘better’
You’ve had to push down difficult feelings to survive being raised by your emotionally immature parent(s).
Once we start to look closer at your experience, there may be immense grief, anger, rage, abandonment, and betrayal.
All of those feelings are welcome and we are trained to support you with them.
Whatever emerges in our work, we can reassure you we’ve walked alongside many clients like you.
They have emerged on the other side with self-respect, self-love, and a renewed hope that they no longer have to be defined by their emotionally immature parents.
We can’t tell you how things will end, but we will bring endless compassion, empowering skills, and expert-level information to guide you through this healing journey.