20 Consequences of Emotionally Immature Parents and Tips to Heal

Hey there, everybody, and welcome to Today's presentation on 20 Consequences of Emotionally Immature Parents. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. I have resisted doing this video for quite a while, but it keeps coming up in the comments, so here y' all go. Let's start out by talking about the difference between emotional maturity and emotional intelligence. Emotional mature maturity is the ability to appropriately use your emotional intelligence skills to identify, tolerate, and regulate emotions in the best way possible to move toward your rich and meaningful life. There are a lot of times we have the knowledge, but we don't apply it. We react from feelings, from impulse. And I want you to think about children. Children tend to be much more impulsive. They react from their gut. Instead of getting their wise mind and choosing the mature response, think about times you had the knowledge but were so distraught in the moment you couldn't think straight to recall what to do. What's the mature response to this? And then later on, you look back and you're like, I knew better. I knew I shouldn't have done that. And there's that awful should word. But, you know, I digress. So it's important to recognize that you can have emotional intelligence without emotional maturity. However, they usually go hand in hand. Emotional intelligence is the knowledge of how to identify feelings, tolerate distress, regulate your emotions by using your energy to move toward your rich and meaningful life. Communicate for your feelings, not from your feelings. So you're getting into your wise mind and you're communicating about. About the anger, about the anxiety, about the threat. So you're communicating for those feelings instead of letting those feelings do the talking. And you identify solutions to the problem. Once you've identified the problem, you know, you get triggered. You get into your wise mind, you figure out what's going on. So you identify the problem. You can communicate to others what the problem is and how you feel about it. Then you identify solutions to it. You also respect boundaries. You can empathize with other people who may be involved, recognizing that they don't always feel the same way you do. You can validate emotional responses and thoughts in yourself as well as others. Again, even if they're not the same, even if you disagree, you can validate them as, you know, these are my feelings and thoughts, those are yours. And you can take responsibility for your thoughts and emotions and actions. It's not, you made me do this, you made me angry. You made me this. Okay, the person may have done something that triggered that feeling, but what you did with that feeling after that point is on you. And you're able to respond appropriately to other people's emotions. And I have here, don't poke the bear when somebody's upset, you don't come in and pile it on. Or likewise, you don't just ignore them if it's somebody you care about. And so it's important to respond appropriately. And if somebody's happy, you don't say, oh, that really must suck. It's complete non sequitur there. So it's important to be able to identify and respond in general to other people's emotions. You're not going to know exactly what they're feeling unless they tell you. But generally we have a good idea by looking at somebody's non verbals or listening to what they're saying, whether it's a distressed feeling or a eustress or a happy feeling. Now, radical acceptance versus blame. And this is where I really disagree with the concept of emotionally immature parents. Because yes, they were emotionally immature, but a lot of times it feels like that gets weaponized. And it's important for us to step back and instead of saying, why did you do that? We want to step back and say what happened to you that led to those behaviors. We want to use a trauma informed approach. We don't want to hold on to blame. Yes, they did things and yes, they may have contributed to problems in your future development because of reasons we'll talk about in a minute. But all right, past is past. We can't continue to. Well, you can, but is it a good use of your energy to continue to use your energy to punish them for what they failed to do? Or is it a better use of your energy to use it to remediate the deficits? Emotionally immature parents. These are people who may or may not have emotional intelligence, but they do not act with emo through emotional intelligence. They do not choose the mature response. They tend to choose the impulsive or immediate response. Most of these people have insecure attachment themselves. They have difficulty trusting. They didn't form secure attachments with their primary caregivers. They may have been raised by caregivers who taught them immature coping styles because that's all they knew. A lot of times we see emotional immaturity is passed down from generation to generation because people don't just spontaneously start learning new skills. You have to go out and find them. And a lot of times what we're also seeing is this emotional immaturity is actually the result of dysregulation because of intergenerational trauma. So the third reason is those caregivers experience so much trauma that they're unable to use any emotional intelligence tools they have because they are constantly hyper vigilant, exhausted and dysregulating. Unfortunately, children learn emotional intelligence through secure attachment and social interactions. So if the children are not regularly exposed to situations where they can develop that secure attachment, where they can have somebody teach them how to identify their emotions and tolerate them and those sorts of things, they're not going to develop those tools. And, you know, think about how powerful your anger, your anxiety, your depression can be and then think about it from the perspective of a five year old who has this rush of distressful neurochemicals and stuff and it's just like, oh my gosh, this feels overwhelming, this feels terrifying and I don't know how to control it. Help us continue to make practical tools available to everybody by supporting the channel. You can donate any amount@docsnipes.com donate or on cash app at Doc Snipes. You can become a member of the YouTube channel and get perks@doc snipes.com join. You can purchase a super thanks on helpful videos or if you're a counselor, you can get continuing education@allce.com so let's talk about the consequences of emotionally immature caregivers. Attachment trauma is one of the most common things that we see. The child cannot trust the caregivers to sensitively and consistently respond and teach emotion management skills. Sometimes the caregiver may be perfectly regulated and respond in a great manner and be aware and mindful and all that wonderful stuff. Other times the caregiver may not be. They may be dysregulated themselves and unable to respond appropriately. So one day Johnny may come home with a note from his teacher and the caregiver responds calmly and practically and maturely. And another time, Johnny may bring that same note home. Um, and the caregiver loses their, their ever loving stuffing. So it's important to recognize that that inconsistency is terrifying. Do I get Jekyll? Do I get Hyde? And caregivers, when they're disregulated, are often not emotionally aware of or available to their children. They're having difficulty managing their own stuff, right? Then they're on their own tornado. And it's hard to reach out and help anybody else without sucking them into that tornado. This results in one of three different attachment styles. Avoidant attachment, where the child is afraid to connect with others because it's just been so painful so many times. Anxious attachment, where the child has sometimes gotten some positive feedback and some comfort. And nurturance, but other times, not so much. Or disorganized attachment, where the child is sometimes avoidant, sometimes anxious, depends on the person, depends on the situation. All three of these are considered insecure attachment styles. But when people are insecurely attached, they have difficulty in, especially in childhood, they have difficulty feeling safe, which means they have difficulty learning new things. They have difficulty getting into their wise mind and developing those coping skills. This emotional immaturity in caregivers produces insecurity in the child, which produces a lack of trust and safety in the child, which produces hypervigilance, which leads to disregulation and immature responding. When people are disregulated, they are in their fight orf flight mind. They are in their stress response. They are just steeped in stress hormones. They are not able to think clearly, they're not in their wise mind. And in order to respond maturely, people have to be able to tolerate that distress and get into their wise mind. So these children fail to learn healthy skills. They fail to learn how to recognize and identify their emotions. You know, a lot of times it's just like, I feel bad, I feel awful, I feel disorganized. And it may be anger, it may be anxiety, but what the feeling is and what's causing it, nobody's there to help the child identify that or learn what triggers it for them. So those emotions largely kind of go unlabeled. So the child is just in this whirlwind of feeling and. And we're going to talk about somatization in a minute. They fail to learn healthy skills to tolerate distress. When children are young especially, it's incumbent upon the caregiver to be able to tolerate their distress when they're having a meltdown, to be able to tolerate it, help them feel safe, and help them learn how to downregulate. It's normal for a child to melt down, to dysregulate sometimes. It's normal for people to melt down every once in a while. But it's also important that we are able to recognize what we're feeling and tolerate that emotion. This feels awful right now. And you know, I am very, very angry, or I am very, very overwhelmed, distressed, But I can tolerate it. It's not going to consume me and then to regulate it. That doesn't mean making it go away. Sometimes we need to sit with an emotion for a little while because it's there for a reason. Sometimes we need to sit with it until we can figure out what's causing it and all the issues that we're going to have to deal with. Like when I got the phone call that my daddy was diagnosed with cancer, or when I got the phone call that my mom was diagnosed with cancer, you know, I got those phone calls, and I just had this rush of thoughts and fears and everything go through my head. None of them were clear because it was just so fast. And so it was like brain dump. So I needed to regulate that emotion, you know, sit with it, sit with the anger and fear and whatever else I was feeling for a moment or a few moments, and then clarify for myself, all right, what's going on here? What is the reality of this situation? I need to be able to tolerate it, regulate it enough to get into my wise mind, and then learn how to communicate for your feelings, not from your feelings. And this is where caregivers, emotionally mature caregivers, are able to explain the difference between assertiveness and aggression or passivity. When you're communicating for your emotions, not from them, you're able to say, I am angry. I am enraged. I am terrified. But you're not acting impulsively. You're not. And a lot of times when you are communicating from your feelings, you're. You're acting through. You're. You're communicating through behaviors. Emotionally immature caregivers are not able to help children find solutions if they are not able to get into their wise mind. If they are not able to manage their dis. Regulation to get into their wise mind, they can't find solutions either. They may have difficulty empathizing and difficulty respecting boundaries. They may have difficulty when they are dysregulated, recognizing another person's boundaries and saying it. I see that you're, you know, feeling anxious or angry or something right now because they're so caught up in their own stuff. Likewise, they may try to project their feelings onto other people, not intentionally, because that's what's safe. They feel angry, therefore, they assume other people around them are angry, and they have difficulty teaching how to take responsibility. Now, some of this is learned a little bit in school and through other social interactions, but the core of a lot of this is learned before children enter school. It's learned when they start becoming verbal, and it's learned when they start feeling those emotions and having those reactions and developing those skills from early on. It can be learned later. Don't get me wrong, it can be learned later. But my point is that when a caregiver is dysregulated enough that they cannot teach and model mature responding, then it creates a Sense of unsafeness and chaos and fear in the child, which leads to the following consequences. And I'm not going to go deep into each one of these because we'd be here for two hours. Anxiety, you don't feel safe. Then you're going to feel anxious. Anger, you don't feel safe. You may feel angry. You also may be angry at others. You may tend to feel threatened more often and have a more hair trigger anger response. You may have guilt for how you responded after you respond in a certain way, knowing that that wasn't the mature way to respond, but not knowing how to get from feeling threatened, anxious, angry, enraged, whatever, to choosing that mature response. There's a gap there between knowing and doing. You may feel depressed. Well, feeling unsafe and powerless is exhausting. And if you feel like these emotions are overpowering, if you don't feel like you have the ability to control or manage your emotions, it can also leave you feeling hopeless and helpless. You may also grieve because you recognize that you did not have a secure attachment. You recognize that you had a pretty crappy childhood. Come growing up and there's grief that goes along with that. And a lot of people that grow up in households where a caregiver is emotionally dysregulated and is unable to demonstrate emotional maturity, a lot of times those children end up developing symptoms of a variety of emotional problems. I don't like using the word disorders because those problems are responses to a traumatic environment, to a traumatic upbringing. They are functional. They or were functional responses for that child in the moment. Negativity and pessimism. Well, you learn what you live. And if the caregiver is dysregulated, then you may tend to notice the threats in the environment. Especially if you're hyper vigilant more than others, more than, more than the positive safe things in the environment. And that negativity and pessimism can enhance the anxiety, the anger, the depression, the grief. There may be numbing or dissociation. If you didn't learn how to label those emotions or tolerate those emotions, you may choose to do something to separate from them. And that can be through dissociation, that can be through addictive behaviors. There are a lot of different ways that people try to numb feelings that feel overpowering, that feel uncontrollable. Which takes us down to addiction. Very common in people who grew up in emotionally immature environments, if you will, because they don't. They never learned coping skills. It was either feel feelings and be overwhelmed or numb. And those were the, those were the responses. They watched their caregivers engage in addictive behaviors and I include in this codependency. Codependency is not uncommon in people who grew up in chaotic home environments. Hypervigilance, very common when caregivers are emotionally immature. They're unpredictable and unpredictability is terrifying. So the child often becomes hyper vigilant. To protect themselves, they're constantly scanning, they're constantly looking for micro expressions to give them a hint about which direction the wind is blowing that day. Executive functioning deficits are also common when you're hypervigilant. When you are exhausted, you are not going to be effective in your wise mind, you're not clearing out that adenosine, you are staying at some level of fight or flight most of the time. So you've got those stress hormones going. You're not going to be effective or nearly as effective at paying attention, at concentrating, at problem solving, at decision making, at organizing. All of those things that are attributed to th to disorders like ADHD may be the result for some people of trauma. And I think it's really important that we start recognizing the impact of trauma on people. Dysregulation of the HP axes and emotions Now I say axes because we have the hpa, HPG and hpt, but basically your stress response is your hpa. Your HPG includes your sex hormones and your HPT includes your thyroid hormones. And when your HPA axis, when your stress response system is out of whack, it pulls the other two out of whack with it. So it's important to recognize that they're interconnected. When one's not functioning properly, the other two are going to start having problems, which means people are going to start having more physical issues and more emotional dysregulation. We've talked in other videos about the HPA axis and how when people become dysregulated they often live in this state of what, what I call flat to furious. Either they're not feeling a whole lot of anything, they're just kind of going along to get along, or they are enraged or they're terrified. There is no middle ground. It's either calm seas or a tsunami. People who grew up in these environments often experience stress related illnesses and or what we call somatization, we which is a physiological expression of your stress, of your distress. If you didn't learn how to manage your stress and you felt like it was an unsafe environment, you, you're hypervigilant, you're scared, you're not, you don't know how to control things, you feel powerless, then that HPA axis becomes disregulated and you actually do start having physical issues. Increased inflammation, changes in nutrient absorption, you know, the list goes. But it's important to recognize and not minimize the impact of a traumatic environment on stress related illnesses and how they come out. You may not say I feel depressed, you may say I feel fatigued and I've got brain fog. And you may have a lot of physical symptoms, but you may not identify it as oh, this is depression because you didn't learn how to label those feelings as much. If you have a lack of emotional maturity, then you're often going to engage have relationship issues. It's going to be more difficult to have fulfilling, non chaotic, non conflictual relationships. If you respond when you experience distress, if you respond impulsively and gutturally and from your feelings instead of for your feelings. Low self esteem. Well, I think most of us can step back and recognize when our behavior is not what we want it to be. And that typically impairs our self esteem, especially if we don't feel like there's any way to change it. We don't know how we got here, we don't know how to fix it. We've just always been this way. We want to recognize that your behaviors developed as a response to something in your environment. We develop behaviors because they're rewarded. We develop behaviors to survive. So if you've developed some unhelpful behaviors, then get curious. In what way was that functional? Or in what way is this behavior in existence right now? Because I just never learned the tools to deal with it. And people who've experienced this sort of environment may develop a traumatized or emboldened inner child. And what do I mean by that? I mean you may have an inner child that is struggling with grief and trauma and hyper vigilance and feels completely powerless and just wants to crawl into a little hole or have somebody give them a hug and help them and keep them feel safe. Or you may have an inner child that learned that if they throw a loud enough tantrum that they get their way. So depending on what was rewarded in the past, the person may have a different inner child. Either way, the inner child probably has some has some trauma work to do because if they grew up learning that in order to get their needs met they had to throw a complete temper tantrum, then that tells me that their parents were not responsive, that their parents were not meeting their needs on a regular basis. And again, that's not because the parents were Trying to be neglectful. My guess is the parents either didn't have the skills and tools or were so disregulated as a result of trauma that they couldn't find, they couldn't actually implement the skills and tools. So what are the solutions? You know, I never like to leave a video without giving you some solutions. The first is awareness of the problem and its origins. If you grew up in a chaotic household where there was somebody with a mental health issue, with an addiction who tended, or somebody who tended to be very highly emotional and impulsive, okay, then that was probably evidence of an emotionally immature environment. Forgiveness and acceptance. Holding on to anger and continuing to nurture that resentment and that rage towards your caregivers is, is just disregulating your HPA access. Now, you may be make trying to make them feel guilty and stuff, and maybe it's working, but is that part of your rich and meaningful life is making them feel guilty and you know, just really using your energy for that? Is that part of your rich and meaningful life? And if not, okay, then maybe moving toward forgiveness slash acceptance. And remember, forgiveness doesn't mean it's okay. No problem. It means, hey, you did the best you could. You may have sucked at it, but you did the best you could. And I can't change the past, so I'm going to use my energy for me to move forward. And then forgiveness of yourself for the years that you've lost as a result of being traumatized, as a result of the behaviors you developed from growing up in that environment and then grieving for your inner child, for the child that grew up in that environment, that felt scared, that felt unsafe, and for what you lost as you grew up as a result of your deficits, for the relationships that you lost, for the opportunities that you lost, you will need to grieve. Because if you grew up in that environment and if you're watching this video, then you probably developed some after effects, negative after effects of that situation, which means you probably also experienced some losses as a result. And it's important to grieve those losses. Recognizing again, you're not a bad person, you were doing the best you could with the lack of tools that you had. And recognizing your symptoms are actually the result of trauma or adverse child, adverse childhood experiences. Recognizing the impact of this environment and lack of guidance and lack of security and structure and predictability in your childhood can help you understand what's going on, can help you understand why you react today to certain situations that you're looking at going well, that does only deserved a 2, but I reacted with a 5. What's up with that? And my guess is something happened in your past that was triggered and you were reacting from your past. That inner child was coming out going, oh no, we ain't doing this again. And you need to develop emotional intelligence. Like I said at the beginning, you may not have developed it when you were a child, but you can develop it now. And I have a lot of videos on that, so I'm not going to go into it right now. And finally, healing the HP axes, healing your body, healing your nervous system, releasing trauma to reduce your dysregulation. When as long as you are disreg, regularly disregulating, then you're going to have a very difficult time choosing the mature response. You're, you have to be able to get into your wise mind. So by healing the HP axes, you're going to start getting those graduations, if you will, so you can go from flat seas to choppy seas to decent waves to, and then the tsunami instead of just flat to tsunami. And that will help you start being able to regulate your emotions and get into that wise mind so you can choose the what you consider to be the mature response to that situation at that time. Emotional maturity is the ability to apply emotional intelligence in sit in a situation, to actively apply it. Emotionally immature caregivers either never developed emotional intelligence, they never developed the skills so they can't teach them, or were so traumatized that they could not apply what they learned. They had the knowledge, but they were too dysregulated to get into their wise mind to choose the mature response. So the child suffered for that. Emotionally immature parents are often unable to develop secure attachments with their children, which leads to attachment trauma. And it's important to recognize that part of secure attachments is the caregiver being able to be consistent, predictable, responsible, validating and encouraging and providing safety. And people who are emotionally dysregulated aren't able to do that for themselves. They sure as heck aren't able to do it for somebody else. So recognizing that if the caregiver couldn't do it, if the caregiver didn't have the skills that they needed, then they weren't able to teach it to the child, so the child wasn't able to feel safe and secure.