Sian Morgan-Crossley: How to manage emotionally immature parents at Christmas

Dial Emma

Emma Reed Turrell

Society & Culture, Relationships, Mental Health, Health & Fitness

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 8 December 2025

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Welcome back to Dial Emma! Each week, I'll be answering your dilemmas with honesty, empathy, and a few therapeutic truth bombs to help you make sense of life's stickiest moments. If you've ever wished you had a therapist in your back pocket, Dial Emma is here to help.

In this week's episode, I'm joined by psychotherapist, author and founder of Break the Cycle Coaching Sian Morgan-Crossley to unpack a festive dilemma around the challenges of dealing with emotionally immature parents.

Our listener writes about the feeling of being 'rewound' to her anxious, apologetic teenage self when visiting her family for Christmas, a dynamic that feels increasingly harmful and unsafe. Sian and I explore the complexities of parent-child relationships as children grow older and differentiate themselves from their family system, the damaging impact of emotional immaturity, and strategies for managing expectations and maintaining one's sense of self during family occasions. We also touch on the importance of self-care, setting meaningful boundaries, and understanding the difference between concern and genuine care.

Thank you so much to Sian for joining me! You can pre-order her brand new book, How to Heal from Emotionally Immature Parents, here: https://hayhs.com/hthfeip_pp_pb_az

If you have a dilemma for Emma, please fill out this form.

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Dial Emma is hosted by Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Lauren Brook.

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Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Right, you've been going on about this new thing all week.
0:02.8	So what is it?
0:03.9	The FCA hype type revealer.
0:06.3	It tells you what kind of investor you are. Yes, so how does it know that? Well, it measures how you respond to hype when you're investing to figure out your investor hype type. Oh, like those quizzes that tell you what favourite crispy you are. No, no, it's proper smart. So mine said I'm informed
0:19.8	So I do my research and I don't just follow the crowd
0:22.4	Alright, let's have a go
0:23.6	Right, get your phone out No, no, it's proper smart. So mine said I'm informed, so I do my research and I don't just follow the crowd.
0:22.5	All right, let's have a go.
0:23.9	Right, get your phone out and search hype type revealer.
0:27.4	Might even make you a smarter investor.
0:29.2	Nice.
0:31.2	Hello and welcome to Dial Emma, the podcast where your dilemmas meet my therapeutic insights.
0:37.8	I'm Emery Terrell, psychotherapist, author, and well-recovering people-pleaser.
0:42.4	Each week, I'll be unpacking real-life questions from listeners just like you.
0:46.9	The big ones, the small ones, the ones that keep you up at night,
0:50.5	offering practical tools and gentle truths to help you find your way through.
0:55.2	So if you've got a question, you don't know how to ask out loud.
0:58.7	You've come to the right place.
1:07.9	Welcome to this week's episode of Dial Emma.
1:13.7	I get to introduce you to someone here who I think is going to get to the heart. Well, of so many of those Christmas family moments, Sean Morgan
1:21.0	Crossley is a psychotherapist and author specialising in adult healing from childhood emotional
1:25.5	neglect and parenting wounds. She's trained in both
	...

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