Name: Adult children of emotionally immature parents
ISBN: 9781626251700

Adult children of emotionally immature parents

If you grew up with an emotionally immature, unavailable, or selfish parent, you may have lingering feelings of anger, loneliness, betrayal, or abandonment. You may recall your childhood as a time when your emotional needs were not met, when your feelings were dismissed, or when you took on adult levels of responsibility in an effort to compensate for your parent’s behavior. These wounds can be healed, and you can move forward in your life. In this breakthrough book, clinical psychologist Lindsay Gibson exposes the destructive nature of parents who are emotionally immature or unavailable. You will see how these parents create a sense of neglect, and discover ways to heal from the pain and confusion caused by your childhood. By freeing yourself from your parents’ emotional immaturity, you can recover your true nature, control how you react to them, and avoid disappointment. Finally, you’ll learn how to create positive, new relationships so you can build a better life. Discover the four types of difficult parents: The emotional parent instills feelings of instability and anxiety The driven parent stays busy trying to perfect everything and everyone The passive parent avoids dealing with anything upsetting The rejecting parent is withdrawn, dismissive, and derogatory

What Hacker News says

david-gpuJun 2026

Congratulations to everyone who celebrates Father's Day.

And for those who had a particularly difficult childhood, for those who may still struggle with the trauma of abuse and neglect, here are some resources you may find useful:

* "Adult children of emotionally immature parents" by Lindsay Gibson.

* https://old.reddit.com/r/AdultChildren+CPTSD+EstrangedAdultC...

It takes time, but there are people and resources that can help you. You are not alone.

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david-gpuMay 2026

I am happy for all those who celebrate.

Quick reminder that not all mothers are good people that we must keep in touch with. For people recovering from a rough childhood, here are a couple of resources that may be useful to you:

1. "Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents" by Gibson.

2. https://old.reddit.com/r/AdultChildren+CPTSD+raisedbynarciss...

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DavidPiperMay 2024

There are many types of early relational trauma, but I strongly recommend the (audio)book: "Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents" by Lindsay Gibson, to anyone who thinks they might benefit from reading a book with that title.

I get that's a weird judge-a-book-by-its-cover metric, but it is excellent for working through and understanding those relationships.

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goatkeyMar 2023

Huge +1 to this. It sounds like they may need to switch therapists. I’ve had personal success with therapists that have expertise in CBT, DBT, and IFS.

OP may also want to explore mindfulness/meditation, which has been a huge QoL improvement for me.

Some resources I’ve found helpful: - Book: Adult children of emotionally immature parents - Book: How to meditate by Pema Chodron - Website on DBT: https://dbtselfhelp.com/ - Book: The Antidote: Happiness for people who can’t stand positive thinking - Meditation Apps: Waking Up, Headspace, Ten Percent. Also, if you don’t like one, try another. They all have distinct styles.

Seriously though, do therapy and hop therapists until one clicks. I read on here once “you can’t read the label from inside the bottle.” This type of work significantly benefits from a good outside perspective.

Also, OP, be kind to yourself and, as another poster said, allow yourself to just exist for a bit

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grepLeighMar 2023

Most posts offer the obvious suggestions (The Mom Test, High Growth Handbook, The Personal MBA, The Power Law, Hard Thing about Hard Thing, Will It Fly, etc), so I'll focus on some non-obvious suggestions.

For tactical advice, I find talks/podcasts and mastermind groups more useful than books. My favorite podcast (by far) is Rob Walling's Startups for the Rest of Us, which is oriented towards building a capital-efficient bootstrapped business. The archive is full of extremely valuable tactical advice.

The books I've found most helpful on my entrepreneurship journey are about mental health, emotional intelligence, and relationships of all kinds. Sharing a few that have had a profound impact, since they helped me metabolize and understand what drove me to become a founder in the first place.

1. The Self-Compassion Skills Workbook by Tim Desmond

2. Path of Compassion by Thich Nhat Hanh

3. The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read, Philippa Perry

4. Burnout, Emily Nagoski

5. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, Lindsay C. Gibson

6. Self-Compassion, Dr. Kristin Neff

7. How to Keep House While Drowning, KC Davis

8. Deploy Empathy, Michele Hansen

9. The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel A. Van der Kolk

10. Atlas of the Heart, Brene Brown

11. What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing by Bruce D. Perry and Oprah Winfrey

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_huayra_Jan 2023

First off, I would caution anyone about doing positive affirmations, or even forced journaling exercises (e.g. gratitude journaling). These exercises are incongruent with how one see's oneself; people who are already grateful or have health self-esteem don't need to do these exercises, and those don't have them and are trying to force it on themselves only see it as a lie (subconsciously). You can't really lie to yourself and will it into existence, and it usually only serves to point out the gap between where you feel you are (e.g. low self-esteem, bad, etc) and where you want to be. That's a hard way to start.

A better place to start is to understand how your undesired behaviors ("bad habits") are serving a purpose for you, and then through that awareness build a substitute habit or coping strategy. For example, you don't have a "video game addiction"; you have a coping strategy that worked well to buffet you against the pangs of failure as you struggled in high school. The reason failure hurt so much is that your parents only conditionally showed affection toward you based on your academic success, so you never learned how to unconditionally love yourself. As an adult with a job and a family, this coping strategy is maladaptive, but is the "best" way you subconsciously feel you can deal with the feelings that continue to well up.

Two books are How We Change [0] and Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents [1], although I'd recommend the former book much more to start with.

Side note: if you're picking books to read, make sure to avoid books with a big photo of the author on the cover. That's almost a sure sign of a useless personal growth book.

[0] https://www.harpercollins.com/products/how-we-change-ross-el...

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23129659-adult-children-...

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