In the final episode of our book club, we explore the last few chapters of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. The focus shifts from recognizing emotionally immature people to seeking and building relationships that nourish us.

Skepticism may arise, as many of us have experienced emotional immaturity from our parents or caretakers in the past. Our survival system may make it feel like their behavior is still dangerous in the present, but we have the opportunity to work to build a sense of safety within ourselves.

Emotionally mature people are responsive, empathetic, offer safety, and make you feel seen and understood. They embody Self-energy of curiosity, compassion, calm, and connectedness, and can reflect on their actions. Emotionally mature people make relationships feel safer over time and allow us to feel safer in ourselves.

Through therapy, we can explore the patterns in our lives and our relationship with our own emotionally immature parent, and learn to embody emotionally mature qualities within ourselves.

Please feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you’re observing. In September, we will dive into Unlocking the Emotional Brain - I’m so excited! I’m brainstorming ways for us to connect even further - more live meetings? Discord chat? Let me know your thoughts!

(0:00 - 3:27 )

Welcome back book club friends to our final podcast episode about adult children of emotionally immature parents. We will have our final live meeting together on August 30th where we get a chance to come together, explore, ask questions, and just have that time of connection to integrate all that we've learned together from this depthful book. So as we come to these last chapters we're just kind of bringing everything together.

It's been a journey of exploration of what immature parents represent, how they show up, and what happens within us when we grow up in that kind of environment. And so chapter 10 introduces us to how we identify emotionally immature people. It can sound really simple and it can sound like well duh I just look for the opposite but I think it's actually a really profound exploration when you've grown up with emotional immaturity as your baseline.

You know we have to remember that what we experience repeatedly becomes very strong neural pathways within our brain and they can become the lenses through which we see the world. But it's all subconscious. Most of it's subconscious.

So we might find ourselves as we've talked about through this book over and over again getting into relationships or friendships or staying in connection with emotionally immature people. And again that's because with these lenses that we have learned to see the world we might say well it's me. I'm the problem.

This other person can't be the problem. I'm just not trying hard enough. I'm not working hard enough to figure out a solution for this person so that they can behave more kindly or be more connected to me or I just keep making mistakes and that's why this person isn't showing up for me.

Or we endlessly analyze it and intellectualize it but never being able to quite come to that moment where we recognize that it may not be about us. It may be about this other person's dynamic and we can choose not to engage in that dynamic little bits at a time. A lot of times in popular culture right now we talk a lot about cutting people off.

You know boundaries and then boundaries are this idea that it means we never talk to the person again or you know we have to set these really hard lines and I'm fully in support of whatever people need to do to take care of themselves but it's important to understand that to go from completely trying to make things okay for other people, family members or whoever it might be, to fully cutting them off can feel incredibly jarring and terrifying to our nervous system. And so I want to emphasize that if you have been told or have this idea that you have to jump to cutting your parents off or whoever the emotionally immature person might be, you can take things slower. You can take things one tiny step at a time and in fact we just know that that's how our brain works.

That's why I named this substack Tiny Sparks because neurons that fire together wire together. So just remembering that one little step at a time is just fine even if you're feeling an intensity of an experience. So as we come back into chapter 10 we are learning how the focus shifts from recognizing emotionally immature people and the way they've impacted us to starting to shift to our agency of seeking and building relationships that nourish us and that feel deeply connecting.

(3:28 - 4:06 )

So this chapter talks about something that children of emotionally immature parents often experience, which is this skepticism that a truly connected relationship where you can be yourself, be safe, be seen, have needs and have your own emotions isn't possible. That it really just can't exist out there because your brain is shoving in your face all this data. Times where you have attempted to have needs or be yourself or be seen and it has gone awry either from your parents or other people and it's all stuck up in there and it's not just from the past.

(4:06 - 6:28 )

Some of this might still be happening in the present and often it is. If you are still connected with your parents or if you are in other relationships that are emotionally immature that data is still coming into your data model. And when I'm working with people in therapy what I am always exploring with them is we're teasing apart the difference between it happening when we're children and happening when we're adults.

Because when it happens when we're children, as you've learned by now through our time together in exploring this book in a really depthful way, it feels like a threat to our lives. It's not just about a parent who withdraws or a parent who criticizes. It's about the fact that as children we rely on our caregivers to keep us safe and keep us alive.

We are biologically wired to do so. So every moment where we feel having a need, being seen, having an emotion, making a mistake, whatever the experience might be causes some discord for our parents that lands onto us, that actually creates a survival energy in the mind and body. Even if you don't remember that, even if you're not consciously aware of it, that fight, flight, fawn, freeze, those are survival things.

Those are things that should only come out when there's a tiger chasing you or when you come across a bear on the hiking trail or when you really need to protect your survival. Those things shouldn't be happening with our parents, but they do because it feels like, uh-oh, if my parent's not okay, I'm not okay. If I have to choose between my parent and myself, I must choose my parent or caregiver in order to keep me alive.

So the difference that we're teasing apart is we want to take that old emotional learning that having a need and someone getting upset about that is no longer dangerous. So we want to take the learning where it felt dangerous and we want to bring it into the present that even if your parent is still reacting aggressively or immature toward you when you have a need in the present, even if it's just saying, oh no, I'm not going to make it to that dinner, but thanks for the invitation. And then you get laid in with all manner of sarcasm or manipulation or immaturity or criticism that your life is not at stake here in the present.

(6:29 - 10:33 )

The emotional immaturity coming from your parent or whomever it is in the present is not dangerous, even though your survival system is going to make it feel like it's the same thing happening because of that predictive patterning, because of that old data model. And so that's why our work in the present is to notice it, observe it, build the part of us who is here in the present who has some sense of safety. And you might think, I don't know if I have a sense of safety.

Well, that's why this is a process. That's why I don't recommend jumping to cutting people off unless you decide to where there's a safety concern, because first you need to build safety within yourself in the present to be able to state and hold those boundaries. And so the work really is so deeply within us of unwinding those old neural pathways, those old learnings.

And that's why the next book we're going to read together is Unlocking the Emotional-Based Brain, which is all about these emotional learnings. And that's why in my guide to change that I created for Substack, I focus on observation within ourself and building safety. Because we have to believe that something different is possible.

And we have to believe that our safety is not at stake in the present if we have a need or if we express ourselves or if we do what feels good for ourselves. So it all comes back to the re-patterning of the neural pathways. So if you feel that skepticism, don't worry, that's normal.

Thanks for reading tiny sparks - trisha wolfe! This post is public so feel free to share it.

That's your brain trying to protect you. You feel like everything is emotionally lonely and you can never be connected because those predictive maps are built on the future. And so we're changing our neural pathways and we know that we can, and that's the hope and the power of neuroplasticity.

But know that it takes time. And so if you feel that skepticism coming up that things could be different with your parent, or that you could build an emotionally mature relationship with someone else, jus