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
That's a very common kind of thing that is carried over into future relationships. Another thing that happens is that people will doubt their ability to communicate. They will feel like, I just can't make myself understood. People who have emotionally immature parents have the experience of trying to communicate and that emotionally immature parent is not interested in what they're saying.
So when you're trying to tell somebody something that's important to you and you're trying to communicate it to them and they're looking at you like you have two heads and they are not processing what you're saying, the problem is not your problem itself. with communication, it's their problem with being willing to process what you're telling them.
If a person really wants to understand you, it doesn't matter how you say it. And if somebody doesn't want to understand you, it doesn't matter how you say it. So people get a very distorted idea about whether they make sense or not. They feel like they don't make sense because the emotionally immature person is not invested in trying to understand them.
They're invested in getting off the hot seat as quickly as possible.
Exactly. And you also identify the wrong problem. You think that you need to learn better communication skills. That's not the problem because of what I just said. If someone wants to understand you, they will knock themselves out trying to understand you.
Yes. And one of the most telltale qualities of that is when you experience what a colleague of mine, Jenny Walter, she's a coach out in the West Coast, calls brain scramble. So you get around people who are emotionally immature, and you're trying to explain yourself, or you're trying to communicate, and all of a sudden it's like, I don't feel like I'm making any sense.
I can't find the right words. I start to say it, and then I can't remember what I was going to say. Brain scramble. Because when we're talking... The other person's responsiveness actually helps our brain organize itself and stay on a track of thought because communication is not only intellectual and verbal, it's emotional.
The whole time we're talking, right, our hearts are going, is there a connection there? Our right hemisphere of our brain is saying, is there resonance? Are we on the same wavelength? That's being assessed the whole time we're yammering away with our words. If that's not there, it is an incredibly unsafe experience. You're getting a contradictory signal. They're looking at you.
They appear to be listening, but they're not processing it. And then it's like, whoa, the mismatch really pulls you away from the point that you're trying to make. And then it's like you can't remember even what you're trying to do.
It's the idea that the parent does change and does develop empathy and does stop sort of distorting and dismissing realities that they don't like and starts to be willing to listen to how it has been for the child.
The fantasy is that the parent will be capable of doing that at some point, maybe when they get older, maybe when they don't have so much stress, maybe when I have children as grandma, they will do this or whatever. And so we might say, well, where do they get this from? What would make them think that? Well, it's because sometimes emotionally immature parents can do better and do do better.
They can be fun. They can be loving. They can be available. They're especially good if you're hurt, sick, need something, you know, some material thing. They can be really Johnny on the spot with that stuff. But it's the emotional comforting and the emotional validation that they have trouble with.
Yes, because you've got the self-reflection going on.
And you have the empathy going on. Because when we lose our cool or we have been too egocentric with our kids or whatever it is, it hurts us. we realize that almost immediately we feel that altruistic need to go back in and repair it. And that is a huge part of being adequately emotionally mature.
Yeah, all you have to do is imagine what it would be like for your parent to come to you and say, honey, I am so sorry. I was so young. I was so green. I was so involved in this other thing. I didn't even know at the time what I was doing. I mean, you don't even have to be a parent to imagine what what that would feel like coming from anybody.
Anybody who says, you know, I've been thinking about how I treated you. I mean, is that not the most precious, unexpected gift that a person can get? It makes you feel so seen, and it also solidifies your The bond between you, and that's what the healing fantasy is. It's almost like the deathbed fantasy. Like, sweetheart, I am so sorry for everything I did. And now I see the light.
That's the hope. But, you know, children have to have that hope. They have to create that potential in their parent in order to keep adequate hope to keep growing and keep going on.
It gets in the way of your healing because it is essentially a kind of reality distortion.
It's because it's such a sad thing. You know, when you realize what you didn't get that you really needed and you begin to feel empathy for yourself, you then feel grief or loss over what you didn't get. The problem is that lots of times people have been talked out of their self-empathy. They've been trained not to take seriously how they feel or how they react.
Once we notice the reality of what has happened to us, The grief will help solidify this new understanding or this new reality of what we grew up in, which will give us a solid sense of security. Because now we've got something to put our feet on. We understand that.
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