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Innovations and Psychotherapy Conference with Dr.

Lindsey Gibson. We are live in Anaheim. We are currently on a stage with hundreds of psychotherapists, healers, trauma experts. And we're going to be talking today about, I think I'm just going to welcome our guest, Dr. Gibson, welcome to the breakdown. Thank you for having me. It's a very different format for us, right there. Here we are. The first thing I wonder if you can kind of explain to us, what does it mean to say that someone is an emotionally immature parent? The first thing I think we have to understand is that emotional maturity has its own line of development. Like we're all familiar with people needing to develop their intellectual skills, their social skills. We have emotional maturity as one of those lines of development and it can be very independent of intellect or social ability. Okay, so a lot of times people will say my parent could not be emotionally immature because you know they run their own business, he's a college professor, her, she's the head of the PTA, whatever. But what they don't realize is that those are separate lanes of development. When you have emotional immaturity, it means that the things that you needed to develop to become a fully functioning human being in the realm of self-development, relationship development, and your relationship to reality. Something has gone amiss, and they haven't been able to attain the level of maturity that you would hope to see. It's not something that you would identify easily as, oh, this is what this is, they're different forms, but there are some key characteristics that when you have those, it kind of keeps you in a set of behaviors that is in a certain line on that development lane. And it's hard to get out of that if you don't really work at it. Something that's so important for me here is the difference between competency, high performance, and emotional maturity. It can be masked a lot. That because we prioritize this society, being competent, getting things done. That is not what we're talking about whatsoever. No, completely different entities. I mean, you can be highly successful in our culture. Now, a lot of the things that contribute to success in the society like ours actually are some emotionally immature characteristics. So we have to keep in mind that just because somebody made it to the top or they're very skilled in their area, just because someone's on a TV show. It doesn't matter. Em emotional immaturity is equal opportunity. Everybody gets to, you know, potentially have that problem. Quite early in the book, there's a little exercise called assessing your parents' emotional immaturity. It's like a checklist. First one says, I'm laughing because my mother loves listening to our podcast. She listens to every single episode of Hi Mom. So the first thing on the list, my parent often overreacted to relatively minor things. And I was like, okay, and we're done here. Thank you. That's great. And then I became a psycho. That's right. But I do want to highlight some of the rest of the things on this checklist. When I sent this to my first cousin, our moms, our sisters, she looked at it and she's like, how many qualifies? I said, I don't know if it's that kind of grading assessment. It's like, check them off and take them to your therapist. It's like, just check them off and be like, fix this, all this. My parent was often irritated by individual differences or different points of view. My parent often said and did things without thinking about people's feelings. My parent was inconsistent, sometimes wise, sometimes unreasonable, facts and logic were no match for my parent's opinions. My parent tended to be a black and white thinker, unreceptive to new ideas. Conversations mostly centered on my parent's interests. So if you look at this list, one of the first things I thought of was, how can any parent not be classified as emotionally immature, right? And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about sort of in terms of diagnostic criteria. You know, what are we actually trying to assess when we look at, you know, this kind of list? list? I mean, what you say is if there's one that you check off, it might be a sign of an emotionally immature parent, and I was like, what if you check off a lot more than one? Yes. So can you talk a little bit about, from a clinical perspective, is it like if you check them all off here in one category? And if you've got one, you could still have as many challenges. What does it look like? Yeah, so if you check one, it's going to be a characteristic that is hitting at like one of the main overall characteristics of

emotional imagery. That's why I can sort of safely say if you check even one, you're talking about one of the primary problems. Okay, that's there. If you check more than one, of course, there's going to be dealing with more of that stuff. But that, you know, of course, is not a normed or statistical. But what I found, I really did that off of psychotherapy sessions. People come in and talk about these very things. For instance, if you have one of those things, it could mean that the parents' empathy just wasn't there. Or you could say that the parents' egocentrism was sky high or you could say that the parents' thinking was very rigid because it's not maturely developed into an adequately complex level. I mean so all of those things are tapping into some of the basics. So you can have people at different levels of emotional maturity. But if they hit on some of these key things like egocentrism or empathy, lack of self-reflection and others, it's pretty hard to have other mature characteristics if you've got that going on.

So that's why I wanted to do it.

I felt pretty safe in saying if you check even one,

because I couldn't think of a way

that they weren't all connected anyway.

Right, and also, you know, I instantly jumped to,

well, which is worse, right, of all of these things.

Yeah.

And I guess it would depend so much

on the particular circumstance, right?

So for example, I didn't get much attention or sympathy for my parent except maybe when I was really sick So then I was thinking well, what if you're dealing with a situation where you had a chronic illness, right? And you were always sick then it's gonna look a little bit different So I instantly do know what I'm talking about I was trying to look for like who had it worse, right? Like if you've got these four, but only, you know, but not this one, maybe you'll be okay. But it seems like you don't wanna have a lot of these checks off. You definitely don't wanna. You. I think if you have less, you don't wanna go bingo on this. It's the worst bingo game ever. And I would imagine that it's hard to classify one versus the other. Someone who is emotionally mature is likely going to have overlap between these definitional areas. Definitely, because if you're a super egocentric, if you never moved out of your self-absorption phase, which is very normal for toddlers and preschoolers, you never moved out of that. It's going to be really hard for you to develop empathy just by definition. Or it's going to be really hard for you to develop self-reflection. Because if I'm the world and I'm the most important person in the relationship, and that is the fact, as far as I'm concerned, why do I need to self-reflect? It's your problem. So I'm an expert in answering, asking very difficult questions that are too broad to possibly. This is kind of a rough audience to say you're an expert. I mean, that's working asking questions. Not answering them. Look at this. Where my brain goes is, what does this look like for people who have these parents? It's obviously very broad, but what are some of the core characteristics that people are struggling with in their life that might make them ask, wait a second, did I have an emotionally immature parent? Well, the problem is that if you grow up with an emotionally immature parent, they are the arbiter of not only reality, but also of whether or not you're a good person. You are basing your self-image, your sense of worth, your view of reality on what this emotionally immature person is telling you. That can be devastating in terms of the amount of guilt and shame self-doubt and outright fear. You know when you have somebody who is saying I know what's best it's all about me and you're bad if you're making me feel bad. So lots of times when they come to therapy they're full of selfoubt. There's probably been quite a bit of gaslighting that's gone on. And it's very hard for them to understand why their parent would be doing this if it weren't true. So there's a lot of reassessment, not only of how they feel about themselves, but they have to start thinking about reality, you know, on their own now, and assessing whether or not their parent may have distorted that. So much of what was their real experience gets invalidated by a nervous parent that doesn't want to go into the deep feelings. So that's how they come into therapy. And lots of times, I mean, I'm sure that everybody has had a person come into their office and start crying and apologize. You know, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. My MBS breakdown is supported by optimizers. You know, I struggled to get good quality sleep and I just assumed it was stress. But as I learned, during paramanopause and menopause, your hormones shift in a way that affect your magnesium levels. And low magnesium, it makes everything harder, not just sleep, focus, mood, your tolerance for stress. That's why I have added magnesium breakthrough by by optimizers to my nightly routine. It's a blend of seven different forms of magnesium designed to support relaxation and overall sleep quality. Try it, see if you wake up more rest and refreshed. You've got nothing to lose and a lot to gain. Bi optimizers offers a 365 day. No questions asked money back guarantee. Magnesium breakthrough is a huge breakthrough to improve hormonal balance, to help with focus, decrease brain fog, improve sleep hygiene overall. Bi optimizers makes it very easy. Jonathan, what do they get when they go to bioptimizers.com slash breaker and use the code breaker? You get 50% off your entire order and a free bottle of massimes. Bi optimizer's best selling digestive enzyme. That'll be added to your order automatically when you use our exclusive code. That's a $20 product free on top of your discount already.

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That's by optimizers, best selling digestive enzyme added to your order automatically when you use our exclusive code. That's a $20 product free on top of your discount. This is a limited time offer while supplies last. You cannot get this on Amazon. You can't get it in stores. The offer exists in one place. Our link, our code, that's it. So if you were already thinking about trying it, This is the sign.

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Grat- is in one place. Our link, our code, that's it. So if you were already thinking about trying it, this is the sign. Go to bioptimizers.com slash breaker, use the code breaker, grab it before it's gone. Make 2026 the year you finally start sleeping again. You identify four kinds, four different kinds of emotionally immature parents. And this was very, very interesting to me. This is something that the social media and TikTok universe is not necessarily focusing on the way that I think it should, if it's going to try and address emotional immaturity. What are the four different kinds? What do they look like? The emotionally immature parent that I identified were the emotional type, the rejecting type, the driven type and the passive type. Okay, these have no research other than my experience. Okay, behind it. But when you start using these, as I did, it was like people started falling into these slots. Now there's a neurological reason for that, I understand. But still, it seemed to capture these types of parents that I would be hearing about in therapy. So like the emotional parent, they all have emotional and maturity, but they're showing up in different ways. The emotional parent is the parent who really has trouble dealing with their feelings. Everything's a big deal. Everything's a big deal. Everything's about me. And overreactivity is huge. And everybody in the family will be tiptoeing around that person's emotional stability. So it's like, don't say that or you'll get you'll get that upset or you know, moms in her room don't disturb her because everybody's calm, everybody's sense of security is based on keeping that person on an even keel. So they rule the rules and lots of times they'll be married to another more passive type. And that person colludes with it by explaining to the kids about how we have to watch how we are with mom or dad. So that's the emotional one. Yes. Yes. Do we want to pause here? No. I'll be right back back. Keep going, okay. So then we have the rejecting parent. And the rejecting parent is the person that you're just sort of wondering, like, why did this person get into a situation where they have a family? Because, you know, they don't seem to enjoy relationships, particularly. They don't seem to like the kids. They just want to be left alone. They could be very gruff. Kids that come out of this family end up apologizing for the rest of their life for being a nuisance, a bother, and they worry about interrupting somebody from something more important, because that was their experience with that parent. One of my clients reported that at the end of the day when her dad would come home, she would run a greedy and she said it felt like I was hitting a slam door. And that's the experience. So it's like, if I have affection, if I have excitement, I'm bothering somebody. I need to learn to leave them alone. And then this is my almost my favorite one to talk about, because this is the driven parent. And this parent would win awards in a culture like ours for being very achievement-oriented, very on top of things. They get the kids into the travel soccer, they make sure that they get the best teacher in school. Meanwhile, they're getting a master's or two themselves driven. And they do a lot of good for their children because they are looking at for education activities that kind of thing. The problem is that this is not the kind of parent

...