For first-gens, cycle-breakers, and adults of emotionally immature parents

When you grow up with emotionally immature parents, healing might feel like waiting for a moment that may never come:

the apology you deserved, the acknowledgement you needed, the change you hoped for.

For many adults, the painful truth is this:

your healing won’t come from your parents changing (even though this sounds amazing). It comes from you changing the way you relate to yourself, your boundaries, and your history.

Here’s what healing may look like when parents remain the same.

1. No longer trying to earn love

Children of emotionally immature parents often grow up believing:

• If I’m good enough, they’ll treat me better.
• If I explain it perfectly, they’ll finally understand
• If I achieve more, they’ll be proud of me someday.

In chaotic environments that involve emotional volatility, children may learn to make sense of what they are navigating by creating the “if I . . . then they’ll” statements to foster some sense of safety, consistency, or help navigate their environment as best they can. It is important to recognize that these were survival strategies rather than truths.

This can help increase awareness of parts of yourself such as the people pleaser, the caretaker, the peacekeeper, the performer, or the achiever (the list can go on) that are present when you relate to your caregivers. Instead, you begin relating to yourself with the love you hope they’d give you.

2. Grieving the relationship you wanted

This is the part no one really talks about.

Healing often feels worse before it begins to feel better, because it may require grieving or going through other emotions we as humans deem uncomfortable (anger, resentment, sadness, etc.):

• the parent you needed but didn’t have
• the conversations you’ll never get
• the emotional safety that wasn’t there
• the version of your childhood you deserved and didn’t experience

While navigating grief can be difficult, it can serve as a process in which you choose how to release or integrate pieces of your story into your life. This ultimately leads to a form of acceptance. And acceptance doesn’t necessarily mean approval of what happened. Rather, it means you stop hoping they will become someone they aren’t capable of being – yet or, sometimes, ever.

3. Detaching from their reactions

Emotionally immature parents often respond with:

• defensiveness
• guilt-tripping
• anger or coldness (shouting/yelling or silent treatment)
• dismissiveness or minimizing (“you’re too sensitive” or “it’s not that big of a deal”)

These responses and reactions are cues that give insight about their emotional capacity and/or unhealed emotional wounds.

As you heal, you’ll notice:

• being less triggered
• being less responsible for their feelings
• being less afraid of disappointing others

You learn you can’t control their responses – only your boundaries and choices.

4. Reparenting Yourself in small, consistent ways

You may be familiar with the term “inner child” that highlights how we carry young parts of us even as adults. Healing may involve giving these parts of you what they needed while growing up:

• compassion
• rest
• room to make mistakes
• emotional safety
• permission to be human

These micro-choices open up new ways to relate and speak to yourself.

I find that some of the best, most sustainable, changes aren’t the drastic, big ones. Rather, they are the small ones that compound overtime. They’re subtle. They’re daily.

5. Building relationships that feel safe

The ways in which we related to our caregivers during childhood serve as the way in which we relate to others, especially significant others, as adults. This is what can make intimate, deep, vulnerable relationships scary – they may be unfamiliar. Relational wounds require relational healing.

This can look like gravitating towards people who:

• listen
• respect your boundaries
• communicate openly
• don’t rely on you to regulate their feelings
• don’t punish you for having needs

The more exposure to beautiful relationships, the more of an opportunity you give your nervous system to learn safety within the peace.

6. Exposing the fantasy that healing requires their participation

This is a common place where I notice many adults can get stuck in. The belief that: “I can’t heal until they understand what they did” or some variation of this, including requiring an apology. While this, in theory, sounds great and definitely would be, it can be tricky because the focus remains on an external source (caregiver/parent) where there isn’t much control.

The good news is that healing doesn’t require:

• their apology
• their awareness
• their participation
• their approval
• their change

Healing is an inner process. This becomes liberating when the perspective shifts from:

“They need to change so I can be okay” to “I can be okay even if they never change.“

Healing when your parents won’t change

This is no easy task – especially within families that are collectivistic in nature where blurred boundaries and shared emotions are the “norm”. Healing from emotionally immature parents isn’t about fixing them – it’s about freeing, learning, and discovering yourself to become a version of you who is no longer controlled by their wounds, patterns, or limitations.

And you are allowed to heal, even if your parents remain the same. You are allowed to break cycles without their understanding. You are allowed to grow beyond the emotional maturity you came from.

You don’t need their change to begin yours.

Ready to break the cycle and curious how?

If you find yourself wanting to create distance from the reactions of emotionally immature parents or caregivers, explore parts of you that are present during interactions, or desire to begin your healing journey but don’t know how, reach out at The Internal Dialogue Therapy Co. to get started.