When Your Pain Becomes About Theirs: Understanding Emotionally Immature Parents
A Moment of Recognition
In a recent episode of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, Bronwyn Newport did something remarkably brave. She sat down with her mother and voiced a pain she'd been carrying since she was 19 years old—the pain of having her pregnancy hidden and shamed by her entire community. What happened next was both shocking and, for many adult children of emotionally immature parents, painfully familiar.
Instead of acknowledging her daughter's hurt, Bronwyn's mom centered herself as the victim. She claimed that she was the most hurt person throughout that experience because she "had" to hide her daughter's pregnancy. In one response, she transformed her daughter's trauma into her own martyrdom.
For viewers raised by emotionally healthy parents, this moment might have seemed shocking or even incomprehensible. But for those who grew up with emotionally immature parents, it likely felt like watching their own childhood play out on screen.
The Common Thread: You're Not Alone
While Bronwyn's story unfolded on everyone’s favorite Housewive’s franchise, versions of this same narrative play out in living rooms across the world every single day. The details might differ - maybe it wasn't a pregnancy, but an illness, a divorce, a bad grade, or simply a need for emotional support. But the pattern remains strikingly similar: a child (regardless of age) reaches out for validation or acknowledgment of their pain, only to have that pain dismissed, minimized, or worse - reframed so that the parent becomes the wounded party.
This isn't just self-centeredness or the failure to show up. It's a consistent pattern of emotional immaturity that shapes how these parents relate to their children throughout their lives. And it leaves lasting marks.
What Emotional Immaturity in Parents Actually Looks Like
Dr. Lindsay Gibson's work on emotionally immature parents has given us language for what many people experienced but couldn't quite name. Emotionally immature parents share several key characteristics:
Inability to self-reflect: They cannot look in the mirror at their own behavior or take responsibility for how their actions have impacted others. When confronted, they deflect, deny, or counterattack rather than sitting with uncomfortable truths about themselves. Claiming the don’t remember or even challenging the adult child’s memory is common.
Lack of emotional reciprocity: Relationships with emotionally immature parents are one-sided. They expect their children to manage their emotions, anticipate their needs, and provide emotional support—but they cannot do the same in return. Bronwyn's mother demonstrated this perfectly: she couldn't hold space for her daughter's pain because she immediately made it about her own feelings.
Self-preoccupation: Everything circles back to them. Your experiences become about how those experiences affected them. Your accomplishments are either minimized or claimed as their doing. Your struggles become inconvenient impositions on their emotional landscape.
Poor boundaries: They may be invasive in some areas (demanding access to your private life, making decisions that aren't theirs to make) while being completely absent in others (unavailable during genuine crises, dismissive of your actual needs).
Avoidance of difficult emotions: Rather than helping children process complex feelings, emotionally immature parents often shut down anything that feels uncomfortable. Sadness might be met with "don't cry" or "you're too sensitive." Anger might be punished. Legitimate hurt might be reframed as you being "dramatic" or "ungrateful."
Role reversal: Children of emotionally immature parents often become the parental figures to their own parents, learning early to prioritize their parent's feelings over their own. You might have found yourself comforting your parent when you needed comforting, or hiding your struggles so as not to burden them.
The Lasting Impact
Growing up with an emotionally immature parent doesn't just affect childhood—it shapes how we see ourselves and relate to others well into adulthood. Adult children of emotionally immature parents often struggle with:
Difficulty trusting their own emotions and perceptions: When your feelings were consistently dismissed or reframed, you learn to doubt your own reality.
Hypervigilance around others' emotions: You became skilled at reading the room and managing others' feelings because your safety depended on keeping your parent regulated.
Guilt and shame around having needs: If your needs were treated as burdens, you learned that wanting support or care made you "too much."
Challenges with boundaries: You might struggle to set them (because yours were never respected) or swing to the opposite extreme, keeping everyone at arm's length.
Anxiety in relationships: Without a secure base in childhood, adult relationships can feel unpredictable and unsafe.
A persistent feeling of loneliness: Even in connection with others, there's an ache—a grief for the attunement and unconditional acceptance that should have been there from the beginning.
The Path Forward: How Therapy Can Help
If you're reading this and recognizing your own experience in these words, please know: what happened to you wasn't your fault, and you're not broken. The way you adapted to your environment was remarkably intelligent. But those adaptations that kept you safe in childhood might now be keeping you stuck.
This is where therapy—particularly with an attachment-focused therapist—can be transformative.
Attachment therapy recognizes that our earliest relationships create templates for how we relate to ourselves and others. When those templates were formed in relationships with emotionally immature caregivers, they're often characterized by insecurity, hypervigilance, and a deep fear of being too much or not enough.
An attachment-focused therapist can help you:
Experience what you didn't receive as a child: A therapeutic relationship characterized by consistency, attunement, and unconditional positive regard becomes a corrective emotional experience. You learn, perhaps for the first time, what it feels like to have your emotions witnessed and validated without having to manage the other person's response.
Grieve what you deserved but didn't get: This grief is real and necessary. You needed parents who could celebrate your joys and hold your pain without making it about themselves. Acknowledging this loss is a crucial step in healing.
Rebuild your relationship with your own emotions: In therapy, you can learn to trust your feelings again, to recognize that your emotions are valid information rather than inconvenient problems to be suppressed.
Develop earned secure attachment: Even if you didn't receive secure attachment in childhood, research shows we can develop it through healing relationships—including the therapeutic relationship. This earned security becomes a foundation for healthier connections in all areas of life.
Set boundaries from a place of self-compassion rather than guilt: As you internalize the truth that your needs matter, boundary-setting becomes less about defending yourself against attack and more about honoring your own wellbeing.
Break the intergenerational cycle: Understanding the patterns you inherited helps ensure you don't unconsciously pass them forward—whether to your own children or into your other relationships.
A Final Word
Watching Bronwyn share her story and seeing her mother's response, many of us saw our own experiences reflected back. The moment you recognize that "this happened to me too" is powerful. It breaks the isolation that emotional neglect creates.
You deserved to have your pregnancy (or your illness, your heartbreak, your fear, your joy) be about you. You deserved parents who could witness your experience without making it about theirs. If you didn't get that, it wasn't because you weren't worthy of it. It was because your parents' emotional limitations prevented them from giving what you needed.
But here's the beautiful truth: while we can't change what happened, we can change what happens next. Healing is possible. Connection is possible. Learning to take up space with your full emotional experience is possible. And you don't have to do it alone.
If you're ready to explore how an attachment-focused approach might help you heal from childhood emotional neglect, reaching out to a therapist who specializes in attachment trauma and emotionally immature parents is a powerful first step. You deserve to be met with the care and validation you've always needed.
