Dr. Lindsay C. Gibson

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107 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2025 last heard May 2025

Dr. Lindsay C. Gibson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Mel Robbins Podcast · 4 Signs of Emotionally Immature Parents & How to Heal · 15 May 2025 podcast

It doesn't surprise me because it's one of the foremost reasons, I think, why people look for help and validation from accounts and programs like yours, Mel, because they get so much validation from hearing somebody put into words things that they've been feeling that they've been told aren't really happening.

And this doesn't have to escalate to the degree of gaslighting. It just has to be that the emotionally immature person just doesn't see it. They don't perceive it that way. And so they can't validate the person. Dr. Gibson, what does it mean to be emotionally mature? So the emotionally mature person can think about their own behavior conceptually. They remain objective. And they can also...

think objectively and still maintain a strong emotional connection with other people. So you've got a person who can handle their emotions, connect with other people, and think objectively.

Let's say that a teenage daughter goes to her mother because she's just had her boyfriend break up with her, and she's distraught, and she's telling her mom about what happened. And the mother says, I know exactly what you're talking about. Your father does that to me all the time.

And then the mother derails the conversation because of her egocentrism, okay, because of her poor empathy, and makes it all about her because there is that kind of childish, ravenous hunger for being the most important person in the relationship at the moment. They didn't get their needs met when they were little for whatever reason, and now they're going to collect on their own children.

Can you give me another example? Sure. Let's say that a young man decides that he wants to go into writing or something in the creative arts, and maybe he has a lot of talent, but the parent hears this, and it hits up against their goals goal that they have for what it would be to be a successful parent of a successful child. And that's something that they can't stand.

And so they might not come out and say that to the young man, but they would make him start to feel bad about pursuing something that they didn't like. And they would start withholding approval for his choices in order to get him on a path that would again, align with their own egocentric view of who they want to be, which is the parent of a successful child in their mind.

That's a great example. Yes, because it's using emotional coercion It's using force on the other person to make them comply with something that they don't want to do. And they have told you that, and you are disregarding their right to have their own needs or their own opinions. And you're saying, in effect, my needs are more important than yours, and you are being a bad person.

because you are morally obligated to give me what I want.

Because what that does is it creates a false sense of emotional intimacy when you triangle like that and you confide in somebody about a third party. That feels really good to the emotionally immature person or the parent because it's a way of kind of talking about deep stuff, but it's not intimate between you and the person you're talking to. It's sharing a secret about this third person.

So it kind of hits a bunch of points simultaneously, but It's destructive to the relationship between, say, that child and that other family member, right? Because you're talking behind their back. And it's uncomfortable. And it's uncomfortable, right?

Exactly. Or they might even say... This is an example of a woman who actually confronted her mother and said, you know, don't talk to me about Aunt So-and-So because it ruins my relationship with her. I can't be close to her after you've told me all these things that she's done. And the mother said, I know that you've told me not to do this, but who else am I going to talk to? It's like...

Who cares? That's your problem.

I really hope that when people listen to this, they'll come away from it feeling like, oh, I knew this all along. I just didn't know what to call it. Or I knew I was right about that all But everybody was telling me that I was off the mark or crazy or whatever. But this is what I experienced.

So I hope that they will get that feeling of validation for their own experience because we want people to be able to trust their own subjectivity and their own inner life because that's one of the things that's taken away when you have an emotionally immature parent. you could live your life with a sense of trust for yourself as somebody who is worth being taken care of and protecting.

Yeah, it holds out the hope that you can be two adults together. After all this time, you may not be able to change them, but you may be able to maintain your own sense of self and your own boundaries with them adult to adult.

in which both parties are just as important as the other, by doing this kind of work within yourself, you have the option of creating a relationship after all this time where you can be you with your parent and they can be allowed to deal with that themselves, which is the proper alignment of responsibility for emotional experiences.

Yeah, well, part of the reason why we feel guilt is because we've been blamed, okay? That's pretty basic, but... Wait, what do you mean by that? What I mean is that if you have been blamed a lot or someone has told you that what you're saying or what you're thinking is wrong or it's morally bad, you take on an exaggerated sense of guilt about your own self-expression.

And that is a profound impact on a person. And when somebody comes back and reflects to you that there's something wrong with you for having felt that or having said that, and this is a person that you love and admire, that you look up to, your parent, you feel guilty because you don't want to hurt or embarrass somebody that you love, right?

So people have this sense of guilt, and it can really lean way too far over toward guilt and shame, heavy self-criticism, because they've learned that that's the kind of feedback that they often get when they're just being themselves. Right. Because emotionally immature people are very, very sensitive. Now, they will accuse you of being oversensitive.

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