In this episode, Amee speaks with Dr. Lindsay Gibson, the author of "Adult Children of Emotionally-Immature Parents" about life with this type of parent and what happens to you as an adult. About the Book (From New Harbinger Publications) "If you grew up with an emotionally immature, unavailable, or selfish parent, you may have lingering feelings of anger, loneliness, betrayal, or abandonment. You may recall your childhood as a time when your emotional needs were not met, when your feelings were dismissed, or when you took on adult levels of responsibility in an effort to compensate for your parent's behavior. These wounds can be healed, and you can move forward in your life. In this breakthrough book, clinical psychologist Lindsay Gibson exposes the destructive nature of parents who are emotionally immature or unavailable. You will see how these parents create a sense of neglect, and discover ways to heal from the pain and confusion caused by your childhood. By freeing yourself from your parents' emotional immaturity, you can recover your true nature, control how you react to them, and avoid disappointment. Finally, you'll learn how to create positive, new relationships so you can build a better life." Resources: http://www.drlindsaygibson.com/ http://www.tidewaterwomen.com/insights/well-being Buy The Book: https://amzn.to/2AKFhvG
In this episode, Amee speaks with Dr. Lindsay Gibson, the author of "Adult Children of Emotionally-Immature Parents" about life with this type of parent and what happens to you as an adult. About the Book (From New Harbinger Publications) "If you grew up with an emotionally immature, unavailable, or selfish parent, you may have lingering feelings of anger, loneliness, betrayal, or abandonment. You may recall your childhood as a time when your emotional needs were not met, when your feelings were dismissed, or when you took on adult levels of responsibility in an effort to compensate for your parent's behavior. These wounds can be healed, and you can move forward in your life. In this breakthrough book, clinical psychologist Lindsay Gibson exposes the destructive nature of parents who are emotionally immature or unavailable. You will see how these parents create a sense of neglect, and discover ways to heal from the pain and confusion caused by your childhood. By freeing yourself from your parents' emotional immaturity, you can recover your true nature, control how you react to them, and avoid disappointment. Finally, you'll learn how to create positive, new relationships so you can build a better life." Resources: http://www.drlindsaygibson.com/ http://www.tidewaterwomen.com/insights/well-being Buy The Book: https://amzn.to/2AKFhvG
Hello, you are listening to one broken long podcast dedicated to raising awareness about mental health, parenting, and self improvement. I am the host when broken. Mom is not a family show. It is intended for adults only and may contain adult language. Sometimes the topics are serious, but you can count on the episodes to be entertaining. Also, one broken mom is not offering any psychiatric or medical diagnosis. We're just here giving away useful and important so you're ready to hear real talk like real people so that we can all get better together.
Speaker 2:Then you're in the right place and welcome.
Speaker 3:Okay, today I am really excited because on one broken mom I have with me Dr Lindsey Gibson. Dr Gibson is a clinical psychologist with a private practice that specializes in psychotherapy for adult children of emotionally immature parents. She is the author of the book who you were meant to be and writes a monthly column for tidewater magazine. In the past you served as an adjunct assistant professor of Graduate Psychology for the College of William and Mary, as well as for Old Dominion University. Currently, she's working on a followup to the book we're gonna talk about here today, which is adult children of emotionally immature parents, how to heal from distant, rejecting or self involved. Parents. Welcome Dr Gibson.
Speaker 4:Hi. Thank you for having me in May.
Speaker 3:Oh, it's my pleasure. I mean I've been looking forward to this for over a month because I think you and I talked to some time in late June, I believe it was. And you were in the throws and editing for your new book. My Gosh. Um, well I landed on your book doing a whole ton of research and reading at the end of 2017 and I just, you know, I described this process is kind of traveling through the rabbit hole. You know, you find something and you start pulling a thread and it leads you down there. And I'm in through the course of research came into your book, the adult children, emotionally immature parents and my copy of it sitting here in front of me is like highlighted like one of my engineering textbooks. Like everything in there just was like, oh my gosh, it's been an important piece of like my own life and my, you know, my reparenting and real healing and stuff like that and so having you here with me to talk about it, it is powerful for me, but I know the impact it had on me. It's going to be really powerful for a lot of people, so I'm just blessed that you're here.
Speaker 4:Thank you so much and I feel blessed to be here and I love your word re parenting because that's kind of the name of the game when you have these parents, you end up needing to repair it yourself, which fortunately can be done.
Speaker 3:Yeah,
Speaker 4:delighted that the book was helpful to you and I'm really looking forward to talking about it. Awesome.
Speaker 3:Well tell everybody where the idea for the book came from.
Speaker 4:Well, I'm a psychotherapist. I do adult, individual psychotherapy and I've been doing it for a long time. Um, and what I noticed was that as people were telling me about their parents, it clicked for me that they were describing people that were actually childlike in the way that they were dealing with my patients. I'm listening to them and I'm thinking that's a three year old
Speaker 3:behavior.
Speaker 4:Uh, that parent is not really angry at them. That separation anxiety, you know. So even though I knew a lot about emotional immaturity at that point in doing psycho diagnostics and testing and that kind of thing, and I had done a fair amount of that with children. So I was really up on my developmental psychology. It wasn't until I had how many session with uh, patient one day and it just hit me up. Their parents are like children and my patient is the one who is the mature one. My patient is the one who's showing forbearance and thinking before she's seeking and has the capacity for attachment and can take responsibility and you know, on down the list. And when I began to share that with my clients, this idea that their parents were emotionally immature and that maybe it wasn't them, you know, maybe it wasn't the patient's problem, maybe they were dealing with people that were very hard to deal with. It lifted this sense of blame and inadequacy that a lot of my patients had had, you know, that they, they got so frustrated with their parents or they couldn't make their parents love them or they could never do enough for their parents. So they were kind of chronically guilty. So it was just noticing the stories that people were telling you about their families and just having the penny drop from child development over to adult psychotherapy. And we were talking about emotional immaturity.
Speaker 3:When I read the book, that was the astonishing piece of it. And it changes your perspective. Then when you start to view other people around you and you go, oh, now I understand. I've found for myself. It gives me. I'm almost enhances my empathy for others because I can look and go, now I know what's going on here. By having this language and stuff that your, that your book revealed, one of the major impacts that you've seen in people who grew up with emotionally immature parents, is this thing that you call this feeling of emotional loneliness. Can you tell us more about what that is?
Speaker 4:Yeah, I sure can. And, and I, I bet a lot of people resonate with it. I'm emotional. Loneliness is this feeling that people have kind of in their core that they don't have the amount of secure connection. Um, some part of them knows that they need. So there's like a little part of the self that continues to feel lonely even as they may be interacting with other people or you know, putting on a good face or being effective at work. There can be these periods, maybe not all the time, but you can get triggered into this kind of, um, it's a very, um, it's a very lonely feeling. Like you're all alone in the world and you can't, you don't have anybody that you feel like you have a really good connection with. And this emotional loneliness comes from, um, this is how I understand it anyway, it comes from having a parent who wasn't able to really make that deep emotional connection when you're very small in a way that makes you feel like somebody's got you, you know, like, like this person sees you, they understand you, they're on your side. Uh, no one, we'll split you up. They'll always protect you. Those feelings are things that emotionally immature parents really have trouble going to if they can at all. And once they get in that place, they don't stay there long because they're frightened by it. They're frightened by the intimacy of it. So it ends up leaving people growing up with this little lonely place inside of them and thinking that there's something the matter with them. Um, but what's really cool, I think I'm really cool about that word that you used earlier I may re parenting, is that you can begin to, if you realize that's what's going on, that this was something that was not inherent to you, but this was a, an artifact of a relationship with a parent that couldn't really connect with you at a heart level. If you understand that's what it is, then you can repair it yourself and you can get that heart connection back with yourself and your inner world and that's, that's kind of the healing that needs to occur. From that, when you have that solid relationship with yourself, then you can go onto have more intimate relationships with other people and you can get over that emotional loneliness.
Speaker 3:Like from doing this myself, I'm a huge advocate for therapy. What I feel my messages here was in my mission, one broken mom, is to remove the stigma of reaching out for somebody to help guide you through that process because it's, it's really hard to get that just by reading a book. I mean, your book is fantastic, but I think as a clinical psychologist you also know that a book kind of should go hand in hand with having a personal relationship with a therapist who can get you through there because I know absolutely, yeah, because in the past we tend to fill that loneliness by just putting a surrogate person in that place. It might be the next boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, and that's not really repairing it. Right?
Speaker 4:That children's book, the little bird goes around saying, are you my mother? Um, you know, you're trying to. You're trying to repair the, um, the thing that you didn't get by, you know, hoping that you get lucky enough with the next person that you have an attachment with. But by doing the work on yourself and my understanding what happened to you and its effect on yourself and doing that in a relationship in which that kind of reparenting is helped along because the therapist keeps pointing you in that direction. That's really what is needed. I see myself as offering the ideas and the language, like you said, so that you have the concepts and you have the words that will enable you to think about this stuff and a lot of this I don't think has been talked about in quite this way. So by having the language and having the concept, then when you go to therapy, you really have a headstart on kind of understanding what you're there to fix. Um, and you can zero in. Uh, I think after reading a book like mine or while you're reading a book like mine, you can zero in on kind of what one of the main problems might be. But yeah, I'm all in favor of having a therapist that can help you with the relationship part of that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, for sure. I'm a huge advocate for it because it is, it really is. When you start to, to fill that in and understand it, there's also these feelings as a person who's going through it have a little bit of anger of like, why do I have to do this? Why? Why me? You know, I've said this before, like, you know, you have this, you're sitting there going, I'm not a bad person, why do I have to learn how to repair it myself? And sometimes people just don't want to do it or they don't realize how hard it can be emotionally painful. It can be, especially if you're a feeling person to have to reset that missing pieces of you inside and it's, it doesn't, just night it goes up and down. Take one step forward, two step back sometime. And that's why, like I said, counselors and therapists are there sometimes mine just hugs me and just says, you're going to get through it even though we're going to get there. Yeah. So what are for emotionally immature parents, what are some of the common characteristics of the emotionally immature parents?
Speaker 4:Well, little kids, they start out pretty. I'm pretty uncomplicated. Uh, they want what they want, they express their feelings. They're very impulsive. I'm. Things are great, things are horrible, they're happy, they're desperate. And so if you just think about little kids, how, uh, they are, personalities aren't formed. Um, so they, they tend to be very general, very reactive things are very black and white and they're pretty simple. Um, in other words, they have characteristics that tend to be, um, kind of all or nothing. In other words, they're, you know, they're very happy or it's the end of the world, very extreme emotional states and not if you think of them as like a bag of marbles, okay. None of those marbles is a part of any other marvel. And they go in and out of these different little date where you know, now I'm happy. Now I'm sad now I love you. Now I hate you. Now I want to do this, now I want to do that. So they're there. Yeah, quite simple inside and none of these marbles or hooked up with each other. That's why they can move from one state to another. And if you say, well, wait a minute, 10 minutes ago you did this, and there'll be like, well, that was then. And this is because in the emotionally immature state, you live in the eternal now. So don't ask me to be accountable for what I did, you know, uh, two days ago because now I've moved on and you should accept me where I am right this second and don't be a bad sport about holding it against me, what I did two days ago because now we're not there anymore. So it's, this is a very young state of mind. It's also, it's also very non empathic because because they lack in our complexity because the red marble doesn't know what the blue marbles doing and it doesn't remember what it did. They don't have a way of putting themselves into another person's psyche to kind of guess how they're feeling or how things will affect them. And plus to them it's not really relevant because they're extremely self preoccupied. Um, the way I look at it, right. It's not like what we think of in common parlance as narcissistic like that they think they're so great and their self centered because they think they're so great. It's more like a lot of these parents, if not all of them usually have a great degree of some kind of wounding in their background. Like their relationship with their parents wasn't so great. They didn't get to develop themselves, they had trauma in their background and so they're like wounded souls that that have to keep checking themselves. Am I comfortable, am I okay and this makes them extremely self preoccupied and they really can't take in your problems too, so okay, they're not very empathic and they are not self reflective. So when you try to talk to them to say, you know, mom, this is how this made me feel. What they're experiencing is, oh, is she criticizing me? Well, wait a minute, I didn't do anything wrong. They go immediately into defense when you think that hopefully they're going to be able to listen to your feelings and then you'll be able to have this intimate conversation and make things better, but they're not really able to do that. And then the other thing is that because they're uncomplicated and because they're not hooked up well inside, they have very low stress tolerance, so they tend to be impulsive. They tend to say things without thinking. They tend to do
Speaker 3:do things with that thinking
Speaker 4:and if you call them on it, they might say things like, well, that's just the way I am, or I'm a, you know, something, something that excuses the behavior without any reflection on, huh, maybe I should look at trying to change that. Yeah. And they also, another thing they do is, besides thing defensive, um, they tend to rush a lot. Uh, they just can't stand. I'm tolerating stress for very long, so they, they're often quite uncomfortable to be around because of that, um, that uncomfortableness that they have in their own psyche and they're very inconsistent and contradictory to. Because if you think about the marbles in the bag, um, you know, I can be this way under these conditions and this other thing over here, so they can be very puzzling and confusing to deal with.
Speaker 3:Well, that leaves a kid spinning out of control.
Speaker 4:That's absolutely right. And so their kids become really kind of hypervigilance feeling like they've got to watch out and read mom or dad's mood because, uh, you know, things can get really bad if they're not kept calm
Speaker 3:narcissism. But yet it sounds sometimes, like sometimes an emotionally immature parent can be narcissistic though. Is that a fair statement?
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I look at it like you can have an underlying disorder and then you can have all these different symptoms. But what do they all have in common? That's what I was like. Things like narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, personality disorders, any social personality disorder, yeah, you can have all those symptomatic syndromes, but what they all have in common will be, uh, these emotionally immature traits. And you can also have people that are relatively mild on that spectrum. So you know, they, they look normal. Um, they go to work, they have, you know, quote unquote, you know, good family. But you start looking at the quality of the emotional relationships and that's where you really see it.
Speaker 3:I'm glad you touched on that because you know, like we had talked earlier, the emotionally immature parent isn't what you think in terms of the kid who's like Peter Pan or, you know, just bad. They're just lacking just a piece of it that's different. But they might be well educated, you know, very, you know, very well in their church, you know, or any number of social characteristics, but there are just aspects to them that, that are critical to emotional development of a child that they just think they can't, they can't deal with and don't know how to deal with it and kind of bail, you know, when, when things happen.
Speaker 4:I'm so glad that you put it that way because a lot of times there's terrific confusion. The people that come to me for psychotherapy because they'll say, well, you know, my parents were really good to me or I have a great childhood, or when I was sick they would buy me whatever I wanted. But when you get down to the quality of the emotional connection and the feeling of feeling supported, that that's where the problem is.
Speaker 3:Right? And, and growing up without that, um, that stability, you know, planted in your brain as you're, as you're developing. So, um, what kinds of problems and do you see in adults that they have in their lives as a result of having emotionally immature parents?
Speaker 4:Well, I'm, one of them is, of course the emotional loneliness that we talked about before. I'm kind of unpredictability or the emotionality that they grow up with while lacking the underlying, of have a close connection with their parents. That's really a, that's a ripe field for anxiety. Um, depression, uh, lots of times depression is coming up because you don't have your needs met, your emotional needs met, and yet everyone around you is acting like everything's fine. And what's wrong with you that you aren't happy. We just bought you that new whatever and very confusing why you should be so empty inside of these emotionally immature people. They don't have an emotional, a language. They don't talk about these issues as if they're real, but they are, you know, and, and we feel it. We just may not know what it's about. So that's, that's really a fertile ground for these kind of more vague problems like anxiety and depression. Then of course you have the problem with relationships because when people grow up with emotionally immature parents, they learned to take care of other people's emotions and they learn to put themselves on the back burner and make it all about the other person are unfortunately overly comfortable with non empathic self absorbed people. Um, that feels like home to them and a lot of people that I see are coming in, you know, kind of mid life and they may be a in the middle of the divorce or a relationship problem where they're really starting to understand what happened, that they signed up for a relationship that wasn't emotionally rewarding. And that's. And then that becomes very productive to work back through the kind of relationship modeling they had between themselves and their parents.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That's probably the yellow is highlighted and it made a lot because my first time I encountered a relationship where I had to be put in a position to tolerate some of the aspects of this. It was actually in business and then, and then it, it grew into the next romantic relationship was of that nature. And, and then of course when both of those just didn't work, you know, uh, you know, I did a lot of the self reflection on me and definitely, like I said, that's where your book kind of got me to a place of understanding kind of where the roots of all that that was. Um, and, and you spend like an entire chapter in your book talking about the Internalizer, which you know, is honestly, it's a sad chapter because it just, you know, you're talking about people like you said, that are trained to never ask for help when they need it. And they'll tolerate, you know, it. It's intense levels of emotional abuse because to them that's just how life is with people we love. And I know that that's the adult, you know, I had grown up into and now I'm trying to fix that person. Um, but for me, and I bet this is the same with some of your, your patients, is that I definitely had this, this need for an emotional connection. And so, you know, I viewed my kind of emotional thing is like a pendulum sometimes because of that. Not Feeling her heard, understood, regarded, you know, from the emotional maturity, you know, I swung towards the unhealthy end of narcissism at times, you know, when I got angry or whatever. But that empathy, that wanting, that connection and understanding people will kind of pull me back into it. Um, and so I feel like that whole chapter on internalize it really meant a lot to me there. What else do you notice about these people who you call the internalizers that are these, uh, these children of these, of these types of parents?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Children have to have a connection with their parents. That is their number one job. This goes back to caveman times. Human beings have a very long period of helpless dependency and so children made it. Bringing themselves into is closer relationship with them, the parents as they can. So some of them do this by, uh, getting the attention, like let's say they have an emotionally immature parent who's, who's not paying all that much emotional attention to them that's not as connected as they really need to be to make the child feel secure. Sound kids. I called them externalizers. They just start acting out, I mean, there's no way the parent can ignore them because they're always in trouble or they're always doing something. And so the parent is forced into engagement, right? Um, and those kids tend to be more impulsive and they just look at the external, but there's another type of kid, the internalized or what I call the internalizer. That's basically, I think they started out neurologically probably. Um, there's even a little bit of research to support this. They started out more sensitive and more perceptive. In other words, they see, they actually seem more. They've done experiments with babies. They seem more than the average baby respond and react quicker and with more intensity than the average baby. So these very sensitive perceptive kids, they have another way of dealing with the parent who's not as involved as they should be. They kind of figure out how to, um, become valuable to that parent. Like they become sensitive to the parent or they watch and notice this is not a good time to ask for what I want. So they begin to adapt and adjust around the parent by internalizing their own feelings. They don't, you know, scream and yell and demand like the externalizer, they just kind of figure out what are you, what do I gotta do to be loved by mom and dad? And they do that and that, that sort of a. and then because they're sensitive and they're perceptive, they can be self reflective. Uh, they can think about what they're doing. They can think before they act. Um, these are all wonderful strengths for any adult. So they tend to be more mature in their functioning when they grow up too. But it really well toll it takes on them, uh, the internal suffering, the, um, the amount of loneliness that they can feel because they're really like little adults. They're parenting themselves and then their parenting, the parents, parents can be a little more nurturing. I just have such sympathy for them because so many of the people that come in for psychotherapy, as you can imagine, are the internalizers
Speaker 3:yeah,
Speaker 4:yeah,
Speaker 3:yeah. It's a sad chapter to see that adults with some adults deal with. And then, and then you just get to a point in life where you're like, I can't do this anymore, you know, and I, I contemplate, I have no research to back this up, but you know, I look at numbers and Statistics and I think that, you know, when we talk about suicide rates peaking for men, like in their forties and fifties, it's like, you know, how many of them have internalized so much that they haven't been able to let go and you just, you know, you become and stuff. So you have in your book four main types of parents. Can you, can you tell us who they are? I mean, and I know that this doesn't fit everybody and it's not going to be like an APP that you've been able to kind of chunk them into four main categories of the emotionally immature parent.
Speaker 4:Yeah, that's a great way of putting it. These are, these are chunks,
Speaker 3:diagnostic category.
Speaker 4:Not Comprehensive, but it's kind of what I've noticed. The first type is the emotional type and this is the parent who just goes off the deep end, the least little thing. They're very, very emotionally reactive, often quite instant tile, feeling's completely rule them and in the most severe cases, and these are people who tend to be more like I'm borderline personality disorders where they're very extreme in their emotional reactions. They're extremely for a kid to deal with because they just are driven by emotion. Another type is the driven parents. This is the one that sort of looks like the perfect mom or is like the runs the perfect house or is the perfect volunteer, whatever they look like, they have it all together, but lots of times their goals and their, um, missions that they're doing get in the way of them slowing down long enough to connect with their kids. So they look great on the outside, are involved in a lot of stuff, but they may not have that quiet center that allows them to empathize and connect with their kids. Um, another one is, um, have this kind of A. I'll go to the other extreme and that's the rejecting parents and the rejecting parents. Frankly, somebody that should never have had kids. I mean, they didn't want kids. I don't like kids don't want to be around kids, it's sort of like go away, don't bother me. They really don't have much interest in their children. And uh, as one person told me, she said it's like I'm running toward a door that slammed in my face and that was the, you know, the tone of her relationship with her rejecting dad. Um, and then the fourth one is what I call the passive parent. And this is often the favorite parent because there are very kind of laid back. They, they can be fun loving. They can be like a big kid themselves. Um, they can be, they can be superficially warm and superficially nurturing, but when it comes right down to it, they don't take up for that kid and they don't show the kind of empathy for the kid that mobilizes them to protect them or to help them talk about their feelings or step in, in any substantive way. So even though they aren't, I'm really doing anything bad to the kid. And sometimes they're the most connected parents there just not able, because of their immaturity, it just not able to really be a good parent and they don't, they don't keep the emotional loyalty going to the point where they actually can be a protective parent.
Speaker 3:Right?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Go ahead.
Speaker 3:Well, I was going to say, it seems like you were describing the passive parent, you know, I've heard from some people where you could have, you have two parents maybe in your household and one is emotional and the other one's the passive. And so you're dealing with the same word. Maybe mom is the one you just kind of like lets the water flow off her back, you know, doesn't rock the boat while dad is driven or the emotional personality type and, and, and so, and it's possible even one parent can be a little bit of all of these things. Is that right?
Speaker 4:Certainly, uh, in our culture, um, we, we can all be driven one way or another. And Yeah, you can have parts of these characteristics when they get more toward the extreme. I think that's when, that's when you can see the different types starting to sort of chunk out.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and your book for everyone listening, you actually break down kind of a quiz that the reader can take to kind of figure out where their parent may have landed. If you're listening, hearing or feeling like, Hey, this might be something that actually is starting to make sense to me. Um, and so again, if you get the book, you can actually see several questions that Dr Gibson has that you can check off and go, yeah, my parents didn't. You might, like, I did find characteristics and all of them, but you're saying the dominant one will kind of bubble up to the surface.
Speaker 4:Yeah, they do. They do tend to clump.
Speaker 3:So you have also this process that you called the maturity awareness approach, which I guess is having this recognition of, of what you're dealing with and having a way of improving that relationship with that person that I imagined happened when you had those Aha moments with your clients when like you really might not be the problem here. This could actually be your parent. So let's help figure out how to relate to them. So can you describe what this maturity awareness approach looks like?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Well, first of all, um, the title of it thing,
Speaker 3:yeah,
Speaker 4:you understand that you're dealing with an issue of maturity or lack thereof that orients you to the situation. And then you want to work with these kinds of parents because they lived their life through emotion. They, you know, they may be very intellectual, they may be good business people, whatever, but they don't live their life through thinking they live their life through emotional reactivity. And if you just scratched the surface, you'll see that the way that they make some other decisions or how they react to, uh, the people around them, you begin to see that. So if you become aware of the issue being their emotional immaturity, you can step back and become more of a thinker about this. You can become more observational. Like I encourage people to pretend that they are an anthropologist
Speaker 3:when they go home for Thanksgiving.
Speaker 4:That gives you this place to outside of the family system. And you don't have to be cute into your old roles and your old rescue fantasies, you can actually just watch what they're doing and apply the stuff that you have read about in the book. And once you are doing that, you can approach them in a way where you're not trying to. Yeah. Um, you're not trying to engage them and get them to be the parent that you always wanted them to be. That's what people get really tied up in. They have these healing fantasies about, you know, Oh, if I could only communicate clearly enough, my parents would see it and then they would be able to meet me where I am and we could have a good relationship. But you really don't get far doing that because the parent is afraid of emotional intimacy. They really aren't. Um, they aren't attracted to that and it scares them. They don't know how to deal with really deep emotion. So a couple of things that I, uh, suggest that people try to do is be yourself. Express yourself. Say what you want to say, uh, in, as respectful and neutral a way as you can. And then let it go. In other words, you're not expecting anything from them. You're not, uh, doing anything except accepting where they're at, but you do get to be yourself. You do get to express yourself and the other one is in any interaction that you're going into with an emotionally immature person, you better know what you want the outcome to be that helps to keep you outside of there system that will draw you in and have it be all about you meeting their needs. So outcome focused is extremely important. And remember that you're having an interaction with them. Each interaction should have its, its goal, its outcome. You're not trying to have a good relationship with them. If you do that, you will scare them. You want to meet them with what they can tolerate. Express yourself, focus on the outcome and you want to manage it. You want to be the leader in the relationship, not keep trying to engage them at an emotional level that they can't handle themselves.
Speaker 3:Right? Yeah. Because they ultimately are trying to control the outcome for them, you know, and they'll get their needs met.
Speaker 4:They think their needs are that they need to be the center of your concern and attention and it always comes back to that. So that's the, that's the dynamic that you're, you were stepping out of when you are aware of their maturity level and you're focused on the outcome and you're not getting emotionally reactive with them.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And that's, I mean, that's easier said than done because I, I admit, invaded into the tit for tat, you know, but then again, you know, what's encouraging is once this, that like you said, that, you know, the penny drops and the light switch comes on. Once you know your life changes, you know, it's because you can't unlearn what you just figured out. And you're the second person that I've talked to that's mentioned thanksgiving. So it's gonna be exciting for a lot of people at Thanksgiving
Speaker 4:when they go home.
Speaker 3:Observing a tribe from the outside there.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It feels better. Yeah, it's empowering.
Speaker 3:No. Um, so you and I talked originally like over a month ago and then we had to schedule this interview out several weeks because you were working on editing your new book and so you have a followup to this. So I'd love for you to talk about like what your next, your next book is on this topic.
Speaker 4:Sure, yeah. The next book is titled Recovering from emotionally immature parents and this book is, it's a combination of two things. One is that it has a lot more, um, practical tools that you can learn to be able to interact with them more effectively and to your, to your health and benefit. So it's a lot of practical advice. A lot of here's what you can say, here's what to do. That kind of a tool based approach, which a lot of people I haven't read. The first book had contacted me for help with. The second part is that I go a lot more deeply into the nature of the system. They get set up between you and an emotionally immature person. Now this was kind of new material that it was fascinating to see what's really going on and be able to, uh, see how it affected your relationship with yourself, your self image, your ability to be active on your own behalf. So it's, it's both a practical book and I would say an even deeper psychological book. So I'm really excited about it. I think that it'll be the perfect sequel to this one.
Speaker 3:Awesome. And then when do you think it's going to be published and ready to buy?
Speaker 4:It will be. It will be released in May 2019.
Speaker 3:Okay. Okay. So what I was suggesting is we do a Thanksgiving special and it was later and get everybody ready for Thanksgiving dinner with their families by reviewing it. But I might have like a refresher course on how to handle the holidays with your, with your.
Speaker 4:That sounds.
Speaker 3:Well Lindsey, Dr Gibson. I don't know what do you prefer, Lindsay or Dr Gibson.
Speaker 4:Oh, either one's fine.
Speaker 3:Okay. I have the belief that if they don't hand out, you know, doctorates to just anybody. So if you burned it and you want to be called Dr. I am totally okay with that. So I, this has been amazing and I, again, like I said earlier, I'm so grateful that you've taken the time to be able to talk with me and for the listeners to be able to, to hear more about what you've been doing in the work that you have. Do you have a website that people can visit to get more information from?
Speaker 4:Yes, that would be Dr Lindsey Gibson, that's Dr. l I n d s a y G I B s o n.com and there's a are articles on there and there's a blog terribly out of date because of working on this other book,
Speaker 3:but nevertheless it's there. Yeah. So that is available. And then you also are a monthly contributor to tidewater tidewater for women, right? An online magazine, is that correct?
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's, it's actually called tidewater women.com. Uh, there's uh, an online site for that now I've published articles. They are once a month.
Speaker 3:Cool. And I'll have all the links for everybody that's listening to this will be published in the podcast description in the note, so nobody jotted these down. So anyways, this has been amazing and again, I appreciate you, um, you being on one broken mom with me today.
Speaker 4:Oh, it's been my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. And I, I hope that, um, you know, our conversation will,
Speaker 1:it will be a help to people out there who've been struggling with this kind of name was a problem and I appreciate so much you having me on. So that was awesome. Thank you. Thank you for listening to one broken mom. You can find podcasts notes on my website,[inaudible] dot com, and they're all provide all links, all of the resources that we mentioned on the episode. Also, if you have any questions, comments, or ideas for other episodes, feel free to send me an email. And if you were interested in sponsoring the show, I'd love to have you be a part of the scene. Finally, if you like what you hear, please share the podcast and leave a review so that others can find it. You're all here to get better together. I am the host of need for us, and as always, I am super grateful to have you as a listener. Until next time, have a great day.