Dr. Lindsay C. Gibson

speaker

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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

oh my gosh, we didn't get our kid onto the right softball team, or they're not on travel soccer, or this other parent did the intensive language thing in preschool that we missed. And they're very on it in terms of what can we do to maximize our potential in terms of success, not in terms of hard stuff, not in terms of creativity or what. It's like, where can it take us?

That's a sign of emotional immaturity? It can be. The proof is in the pudding. Like, how does that affect the kid? Does it dovetail with the kid in such a way that everybody's happy? But I submit that nobody likes being treated like an object or like somebody's success object. I mean...

or having expectations put on you for where you need to measure up to in order for mom or dad to be really proud of you or happy with you. But I do want to say one thing about this, though. It's not only the kind of success that would be like intellectual success, monetary success. I mean, those are, you know, like scoring the goal, winning the game, that kind of thing.

We're very familiar with that. But sometimes that drivenness can be channeled into things like your religious beliefs or your social behavior or being the quote-unquote normal family on the block. What will the neighbors say? I

a lot of these parents do do things like they get advanced degrees or they are on their kids about getting into certain colleges, but they can also be on their children about perfecting their social role or their place in the church or it could be anything. It just has that quality of driving toward a goal and

whoops, like too bad that that isn't what you want to do or too bad that it's making you anxious and depressed because you will be happier and things will go better for you in your life if you just believe me and do what I say. So we get there. And then there's the punishment if you don't emotionally.

Oh, you're never good enough. Perfectionism, procrastination in response to the perfectionism, the feeling like I can't sit down and read a book or someone's going to call me lazy. They'll talk about their relaxing day as if they did something naughty to their friends. Oh, I didn't do anything. I just sat there with my nose in the book. I was really bad today.

There's that kind of judgment put on just being, just existing as a happy living thing on this planet. It's tragic because... We're not made, no animal is made to be pushed to the point where they're performing all the time. It's not healthy. And yet that's the kind of feeling that people get when they grow up under this. Dr. Gibson, can you describe what a passive parent is?

Yeah, the passive parent is usually the one that kids really like the best. Right. This is my husband. They are favorites of the kids, and they're often very attuned to the children. They can be playful. They can be almost like peers or playmates. I don't mean to say that they are irresponsible in that way, but they just tend to live and let live.

And because they don't have that motor driving them, they can be more accessible to the child. oftentimes they are more empathic than the other emotionally immature parent. Like I had a client whose father would always come to her room after the mother had exploded at her. Sometime later, dad would come down, sit on the bed with her, console her, whatever.

Would dad step in when she was being abused? No, no, that's the passive part. They're not protective of the child anymore. They let the other parent get away with murder because, in a way, they're like children who are benefiting from the other parent's energy and the other parent's sort of willingness to dominate the course of things. And they, you know, they live and let live.

But if you do that with your children who are not being treated well, you are not feeling the empathy and you're being really quite egocentric because it feels better to you to not take on that level of involvement. And that's for their benefit, not for their children.

Yeah, well, for one thing, you don't feel like you are worthy of protection. You feel like putting up with these things in life, in relationships, it's just part of having a relationship. It's just part of life because that's the way the passive parent is. demonstrated how to deal with this outrageous behavior. They just kind of went along with it.

So the child learns from the passive parents, like, what can you do? That expression, what can you do? They let it go and they learn not to stand up to it or to put boundaries on it.

Mm-hmm.

Yes. I had a client who said it very well once. She said that when her dad came home, she was always so excited and she would run to greet him. And she said, it was always like I was throwing myself against a closed door. Hmm. All he wanted to do was get in the house, read the paper, didn't want to be bothered.

The rejecting parent acts as though kids are a nuisance, a bother, and they never wanted them in the first place. So when you're the child of that kind of parent, you learn the best possible relationship with that parent. is achieved through not bothering them, maybe through serving them if you can find a way in, maybe going along with them on things that they like to do.

But it's not a relationship in which you're going to be allowed to have sort of equal status or even take up as much room as that rejecting parent because you're intruding. You always feel like you're intruding on their energies and interests.

One of the things that is going to happen as a result of growing up in this kind of household is that you're probably going to end up feeling very unsure of yourself and there'll be sort of an underlying sense of insecurity that doesn't match what The outside? Yeah. So you end up feeling like you're too much or you need to be thinking of other people overly much.

But it's really interesting that they will often feel very selfish. That's a word that they'll use. Like when you said earlier, oh, I can't do that or how can I? It's because they feel like they're being selfish. And that sense of, I overwhelm people with my needs. I'm too needy. I should be able to handle everything on my own.

Showing 41–60 of 107 · page 3 of 6