Dr. Lindsay Gibson
speaker
515 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 13 Jun
Dr. Lindsay Gibson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Yeah, yeah, no, that's a really, that's a great question. I can just tell you what tends to happen in therapy is that the person comes in and they have some immediate issue, right? Maybe they're having a problem in their relationship or their work. Maybe they just had a panic attack. They have no idea what's going on. And usually, first few sessions, you don't necessarily hear about the parent.
But then, you know, like five, six sessions in, you ask them, you know, before you begin feeling so low, what had happened that evening? And then, you know, you come to find out that their dad said something that was completely disrespectful or, you know, whatever. And you begin to, you know, like make those connections. What I tended to find out was that when we delved into the feelings of
we come to find out that, yeah, they were having very deep reactions to things that their parents did and said, but they had been trained to not see that as legitimate. That had been so invalidated, they thought that they were, you know, being disloyal or petty for even bringing it up. As a therapist, I would be sitting there and my mind would be going,
you know, oh my gosh, that person is so narcissistic that they're describing, or she sounds like a borderline personality disorder, but I'm not going to say that to my client. So I would have to find ways of elaborately translating that into behavior so that we could talk about it without labeling them in a way that made their parents sound pathological.
I think you could argue that. There's no way of getting around that you're boiling down this person that they love into a set of traits, and it calls them a name. It's pejorative. But when you say emotionally immature, it's not from the diagnostic manual. And although, yeah, it is a way of categorizing them, but it has a, to me anyway, it has a more explanatory kind of tone to it.
It doesn't, if you say your father is narcissistic, I get an immediate caricature of a narcissist. If I say, your father sounds like he may be emotionally immature, I don't know, there's a little bit of grace in that. But I can tell you, David, that a lot of people have a lot of problem when they first hear that idea about their parent.
I've had people come in because of the book that once we get into the therapy part of it, they begin to hedge and balk at calling their parent that because they're just so accustomed to giving their parents the benefit of the doubt.
Yeah, I think it's exactly the opposite. I think it really increases a person's sense of agency. Because what's really disempowering to them is the idea that I've been trying to interact with my parent using all the communication skills I know, using all the tact or the empathy that I know, and it doesn't go anywhere and we end up in a fight. So they feel...
The whole basis of a relationship with an emotionally immature person is that you often feel disempowered because they can't give either you or them the room to have you be understood. And when you realize that the reason that they're not listening, the reason that they don't seem to be responding to you is not because... you have poor communication skills, it's because they can't stand it.
They can't bear to be even mildly criticized. They don't have the emotional wherewithal to deal with that. And when you realize that, it's like, oh, this is not about my lack of skill or the fact that I get nervous around my parents. That's not the deal. And if I understand what's happening, I can change my behavior or I can change my responses because I understand what they're doing.
Back to the Sopranos. I mean, those guys were like masters of this. You complain to them about something, and the next thing you know, they're telling you that you're a crybaby victim, and they didn't do anything to you, and you're being unfair, et cetera, et cetera.
I can guarantee you I never said the smell test thing.
No, but it's good. Yeah, it has really not come up. I mean, if I heard emotionally mature behavior being talked about, I think I'm enough of a scientist that I would mention that to them or ask them to tell me in more detail what seemed emotionally immature to them about that. Because that would make me curious. Like, they're referring themselves for this, and yet I'm not seeing that.
But that's never happened.
If they would only say, tell me what you mean by that. That could do it right there. It would be the curiosity and the caring about what their child was expressing. Like just imagining that that might be that other person's truth. Like if you had a friend that came to you and said, you know, you really hurt me. You wouldn't say, hurt you? What about me? You would probably say, what do you mean?
Or tell me what happened. You would be curious and you would want to know because... you have enough of a sense of self and enough confidence in your ability to deal with emotional issues that you could afford to ask that person to explain it to you because you'd have a little bit of hope that maybe you could work it out.
And emotionally immature people just shut the door on that because they know they don't handle emotional things very well. And their best defense is just to not get into it at all and to point the finger back at you. So anytime somebody...
shows some capacity for self-reflection and a willingness to look at their part in things, you know, now you're out of the realm of emotional immaturity and you're back on track to have a more grown-up and emotionally real kind of relationship. But you've got to have that capacity for self-reflection, which most emotionally immature people really don't have. So if somebody...
Yeah, that is something that... Well, from my standpoint, I start thinking about whether or not it's good for them to have contact with their parent when they start having physical or emotional problems directly associated with their contact with their parents. Say a woman who had very demanding, very egocentric, emotionally immature parents.
And they expected her to, you know, come at the drop of a hat, help them out, do something for them, attend something. I mean, they were as needy as her own children and also entitled. So she was exhausted.
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