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

And they will say, you know, why does this bother you? Why are you getting so upset? But they are like the most emotionally sensitive people on this planet. And when you get that kind of feedback, you begin to feel like, well, maybe there's something wrong.

And so when you pick up on those things, that's the first thing that comes to my mind is where did you learn to think like that, that your first go-to thought is, is, I'm doing something wrong. Oh, it's my fault. I didn't notice soon enough that this was going to offend you, or I wasn't sensitive enough to your needs, and now you're mad at me and not speaking to me for three days.

But why does your mind go to, what did I do like that? And one of the things that maintains that is they do this thing where you feel a moral obligation to give them what they want, even at great cost to yourself, even to the extent that it may harm your health or your mental health. I've seen this with so many of my clients.

Well, let's just start by saying overall, you might find them exhausting. Dead giveaway. Tiring, boring, because they tend to be quite superficial. They're very easily threatened. Their psychological defenses are not very sturdy. So they tend to keep things at a kind of a superficial level. It's like the how is the weather sort of thing, or what is Aunt So-and-So doing lately?

Because that's where they feel safe. Because emotional genuineness, emotional depth makes them very uneasy. And I'm not talking about a little bit nervous. I'm talking about destabilizing. You know, people... keep trying to talk to their parent and get them to understand how they're feeling. Well, this is like asking an emotionally immature parent to keep their hand on a hot stove.

They cannot do it. It's not because they are bad or they don't want to help their child. It's because it is so painfully destabilizing that they can't stand it. And that's something that I try to get across so that the person doesn't take it so personally. Maybe they would if they could, but they can't. They're going to change the subject. They're going to put it back on you.

They're going to give excuses. They're going to not understand what the heck you're talking about. That Difficulty in going into any kind of complexity or depth is something that ends up making people feel bored, exhausted. And also because there's a constant expectation that you're going to be a certain way for them.

So you're going to agree with them, you're going to see things the same way as they do, and... That is very tiring because you're always feeling like you're having to play this role if you're going to get along with them. All of this comes from their egocentrism, meaning all roads lead to them.

Yeah, I would want them to know that it's going to have an effect on them, whether they've ever heard of this or not. Because if we're treated like we are insignificant or that we're not real inside, we feel that. It's like if somebody steps on your foot, you feel that. We do the same thing emotionally. When people disregard us or treat us like we're not important, that has an effect on us.

And because, you know, such a huge amount of our learning is unconscious in childhood. We carry it forward and then we take it as, you know, what we've learned and it's a part of us and we give it to our children.

Yeah, that's the parent that emotionally rules the roost with their moods, with their reactions. Everybody orbits them. That's when dad comes home, everybody be quiet. Dad needs to relax. Mom's having a bad day. Don't anybody upset her. Mom's gone to bed for the week. Nobody make any noise. Everything is geared toward helping that parent regulate their emotional state.

through controlling your behavior, suppressing yourself, inhibiting yourself, everything ends up being in the service of helping that parent feel calmer or feel better. So I call it the emotional parent because they tend to be very emotional and they can be, I mean, some of them can be extremely volatile. Some of them can be violent. Some of them can be even mentally ill, okay?

But the emotional parent will make you feel like, you know, like you got to be vigilant. You got to be checking every second how they're doing, taking their temperature, so to speak. And the whole family does this. And often, the other parent colludes with this by being sort of the supporter and supporting

talking to the children as though it's the children's responsibility to make sure that mom or dad is staying calm. Whose responsibility is it that mom or dad stay calm? It's the emotional parent's responsibility. We all have the responsibility of managing our own emotions. That's how I look at it. Same. But lots of times emotional parents run right over their mate and

and end up with one of the passive parents that we'll talk about in a minute as someone who just doesn't protect the children from them.

you become very vigilant to how the other person is doing. So everything revolves around the feeling state of the other person. You will be very alert, very vigilant, very tired, because you're always having to guess at what could upset them. You're always having to kind of keep them on an even keel. And if you live with someone, you know how to do this. You know when they need a little boost.

You know when not to bring the thing up that you need to talk to them about. So it really does flow downstream so that in your dating relationships or your committed relationships, you're going to just assume that they need a lot of help dealing with their emotions, even if they don't.

Yes. And the feeling is, did I do something wrong?

Or have I been bad? Yes. Okay. That gets conditioned in there in a very deep way. with parents like that.

Yeah, the driven parent is, in many ways, one of the most popular versions of parenthood, at least in our driven culture, right? where things are so materialistic and so measured in terms of success, the metrics of success. These parents look like paragons of parenting, and we can compare ourselves to them because we're

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