July 11, 2025
Embracing Emotional Maturity: The Path to Better Adult Relationships
Send us a text Emotional maturity transforms our relationships with adult children, but what exactly does it look like in practice? In this powerful conversation with Dr. Lindsay Gibson, clinical psychologist and author of The New York Times bestseller "Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents," we discover that emotional maturity exists on a continuum that shifts with our stress levels and resources. When our adult children challenge our memories or share perspectives that differ from...
Emotional maturity transforms our relationships with adult children, but what exactly does it look like in practice? In this powerful conversation with Dr. Lindsay Gibson, clinical psychologist and author of The New York Times bestseller "Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents," we discover that emotional maturity exists on a continuum that shifts with our stress levels and resources.
When our adult children challenge our memories or share perspectives that differ from our own, our defensive instincts kick in automatically. But Dr. Gibson offers a revolutionary approach: temporarily set aside your need to be right and focus instead on understanding their emotional experience. This shift from "courtroom thinking" to empathetic listening creates space for authentic connection.
We're experiencing a profound cultural transition from what Gibson calls the "family age," where identity came from roles and external markers, to the "self-awareness age," characterized by greater psychological understanding and individual consciousness. This explains why so many parents feel caught between outdated expectations and new relationship dynamics with their adult children.
The most transformative insight? The very phrase "adult children" contains problematic contradictions. "My child" suggests ownership over another autonomous human being while failing to acknowledge their full adulthood. Instead, Gibson suggests approaching our adult children more like valued friends whose company we enjoy and whose autonomy we respect.
Self-awareness (recognizing our thoughts and feelings in the moment) and self-knowledge (understanding the patterns behind our reactions) form the foundation of emotional maturity. Together, they allow us to separate our defensive responses from our deeper desire for connection. When an adult child sets a boundary that feels hurtful, these skills help us recognize our feelings without reacting impulsively.
Have you noticed shifts in your relationship with your adult children? Share your experiences and continue the conversation by following us on social media or visiting biteyourtonguepodcast.com. The journey toward more authentic family connections starts with understanding ourselves.
Huge thank you to Connie Gorant Fisher, our audio engineer.
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00:00 - Emotional Maturity in Relationships
09:07 - Introduction and Personal Updates
14:10 - Understanding Emotionally Immature Parents
26:58 - Handling Disagreements with Adult Children
33:51 - Cultural Shifts in Family Dynamics
43:20 - Dealing with Estrangement and Therapy
47:48 - Surface Level vs Emotional Connection
52:14 - Building Self-Awareness and Growth
WEBVTT
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So many people look at themselves with such critical, judgmental, hopeless eyes because that's the way they've been raised.
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They've been shamed, made to feel terrible about themselves when they do something wrong and they carry that little internal critical voice around inside of them.
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And they carry that little internal critical voice around inside of them.
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So it makes it very hard for those people to begin to look at themselves.
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In order to grow, and first we have to realize that we have to love ourselves.
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Everything starts with accepting yourself, right where you are and knowing where you're at and, yes, where you hope to be, but not to beat yourself up because you haven't gotten there yet.
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Hey, everyone, welcome to Bite your Tongue the podcast.
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Join me, your host, denise Gorin, as we explore the ins and outs of building healthy relationships with our adult children.
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Together, we'll speak with experts, share heartfelt stories and get timely advice addressing topics that matter most to you with our adult children.
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Together, we'll speak with experts, share heartfelt stories and get timely advice addressing topics that matter most to you.
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Get ready to dive deep and learn to build and nurture deep connections with our adult children and, of course, when to bite our tongues.
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So let's get started.
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Welcome back to Bite your Tongue the podcast.
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We're back.
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Sort of I'm Denise and I'm flying solo today, making scheduling interviews a little bit easier, while I might bring Ellen or Kirsten back as a guest host later on, for right now it's just me.
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Connie Gorin-Fisher is still here as our amazing producer and audio engineer.
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As always, we're not sticking to a regular schedule.
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We're on a mission to find the very best guests, not just fill slots.
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But before we dive in with today's episodes, I have some exciting personal news.
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I welcomed my first grandchild in April, a beautiful baby boy.
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I was able to hold him when he was just four hours old.
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It was truly magical.
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I took tons of advice from our episode with the grandmother doula, though I definitely overstayed my welcome.
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I've learned so much and I'll share a lot of that in a future episode, but for now, let's dive into today's topic.
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Today's episode truly is a must listen.
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We're exploring a crucial topic our role as parents and how it shapes our relationships with our adult children.
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This is it everyone an episode everyone must listen to and share.
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Today's guest is someone I've been wanting to talk to for a long time Dr Lindsay Gibson.
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She's a clinical psychologist and author of the wildly popular book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents.
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This book is a New York Times bestseller and has been published in 37 languages.
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I read the article about her that appeared on the very front page of the New York Times Magazine section I think it was in May and I thought now this is someone I really need to interview.
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I'll share a link to that story in my episode notes, but before you start thinking, wait, is that me?
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Don't worry, you're not alone.
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In fact, that's exactly what we're going to explore today how even the most well-meaning parents can sometimes fall into emotionally immature parents, and what we can do to grow beyond them and show up differently for adult kids.
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I saw some of myself as an emotionally immature parent during those early days of being a grandparent.
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Dr Gibson has more than 30 years of experience helping people untangle complicated family dynamics, and today she's here to help us look inward with curiosity, not judgment.
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This episode is about self-awareness, growth and maybe a few light bulb moments.
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So grab your coffee, maybe a journal to take notes and let's dive in.
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Welcome, dr Gibson.
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For listeners who might not be familiar with your work, can you explain a little bit about what you mean by emotionally immature parents?
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What are some of the key traits, and I'd love you to give us some examples.
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Well, emotional maturity.
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I like to think of that as being on a continuum, much as we think of someone's intellectual development or their social development.
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Think of someone's intellectual development or their social development.
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We start out at a very early age one way, and hopefully we develop along and become more mature as we get older.
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But that continuum of development, it has a movable marker.
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Depending on how good we're feeling, how resourced we are, for instance, if you are sick or fatigued or stressed, your level of emotional maturity is going to slide toward the more emotionally immature level.
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Okay, it's true for anybody, I don't care how emotionally mature you are.
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So I'm careful in my books to talk about relatively emotionally mature people, sufficiently adequately emotionally mature, because there's no pinnacle that somebody reaches and then hangs out there for the rest of their life.
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We're always, whoever you are, we're always struggling to maintain our relationships and really our state of being in as mature a level as we can muster.
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But for sure, all of us are going to act in ways that we regret and ways that we look back on with shame or, you know, just wishing that we had had it more together.
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So when we think about emotional immaturity in the sense that I write about, and you have to keep in mind too, denise, that I'm writing as a therapist who is seeing people that are coming to me, who, in this case, you know, given our topic, probably would be the adult children of those parents that are coming in.
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Once in a blue moon I might have a parent contact me about getting help for their end of things, but mostly I'm hearing the experience of the person who's had difficulty with the emotionally immature parent.
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So here's a difficulty that they tend to have.
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One is that they feel invalidated and two, they feel controlled or diminished or dismissed.
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They feel that they have not been able to be their full, true selves in their relationship with their parent, that the love and acceptance that they got was quite conditional.
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And I don't mean conditional, like you have to get all A's.
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I mean conditional also on the basis of how that parent was feeling that day.
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You know, was the parent able to be present enough with that child that day because of their own issues, their own problems?
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So there's a sense for these adult children that they have had to hide their true feelings and their true thoughts for fear of upsetting or angering their parent.
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The idea is that when you are relatively emotionally immature, you probably have had trouble learning how to manage, recognize your feelings, your emotions.
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So you tend to get reactive instead of pausing to respond to what your child is doing or saying.
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And you also have trouble with stress.
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Stress tends to disorganize a person who is more along the lines of the emotionally immature.
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It's just something that's very hard for them.
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And, of course, how do we all act when we're stressed?
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We act in ways that we're sorry for later.
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Okay, Would you add anxiety to stress when you're anxious and stressed, yeah, when you get stressed, you get anxious, you're anxious.
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This is really where the maturity comes in.
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Depending on what kinds of coping mechanisms you typically use, that's going to determine how productively or how well you're able to handle conflict or some kind of disagreement with that other person.
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So the stress causes a kind of a feeling of being off balance.
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That creates anxiety.
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They feel disoriented, they feel out of control, they don't know what to do.
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By definition, I mean, that's like the little child doesn't know what to do when something happens that upsets them, and so they tend to lose emotional control.
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A very young solution to that is to blame the other person and to get very reactive and it gets into that well, you did this or I only did that because I get very defensive, and that of course you know doesn't go well when you're trying to work out a problem with another person.
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So we get that kind of reactivity and the anxiety and the stress that people feel when they have some level of emotional immaturity is so all consuming that they end up acting in a very egocentric way, that is, they just can't get their mind off of how things affected them.
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They're taken over by their emotional response to situations.
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They might prefer that they didn't, but maybe they never learned, or maybe they never had the opportunity to have somebody calm them down and teach them how to get a handle on their reactions so that they don't say or do something that alienates someone.
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You can imagine what that does to your empathy for the person that you're in the relationship with.
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It makes it very hard to have empathy for them, because you get very fixated on your own reactivity, your own anxiety, your fears, your sense of feeling lost or feeling out of control, and that makes it really hard for you to pay attention to what the other person's feeling.
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Oh, all of that makes so much sense.
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So put yourself in the place of an adult parent now who and as you've said in many of your other interviews, every parent is flawed.
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We've all said and done things that we know we shouldn't have said and done.
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Now you're in a situation where your adult child is saying something to you and the story that they're telling you goes completely against what you saw happen.
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You don't want to be that.
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Well, I said this and you said that.
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What is the best way to respond?
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Because part of you wants to say but you told me to do that, and they're saying why did you do that?
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How do you respond more maturely when a conversation like that occurs?
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Yeah, well, of course it's very threatening emotionally threatening when somebody that is the world to you I mean your own child, that you, you know so badly, want a good relationship with, when they're telling you something that you did wrong and you remember that you did not do that or you did the opposite of that, or whatever it is.
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Or you thought, you did, you tried your very best.
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Right Thought you did yeah.
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Your intention was good, right.
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So we all tend to interpret our own behavior according to what our intention was, not its effect on the other person.
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So we think that if we explain our intention, the other person will go.
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Of course.
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Now I understand.
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Sorry, mom, didn't mean to bring that up.
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I guess I'm wrong, but that doesn't work because it's not about what you intended, it's about what the effect was.
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So, the first thing I would recommend to somebody is keep your own history straight in your mind, write it down in your journal after you get off the call or you have the conversation, to write down your account of what happened and what your motivation was, so that you take care of that part of you that's saying yes, but I was intending to do this other thing.
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I really am a good person.
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I didn't mean to Save it for your journal, that self-validation, but when you try to get them to see what your intention was, you're now expecting them to switch horses and have empathy for you.
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Right Like you're saying put yourself in my shoes.
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This is what I intended to happen.
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So it's for the you know.
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For the time being, if you want to try to work something out with your adult child, lay aside what your intention was and lay aside the unfairness of being accused of something that you don't think you did because we got bigger fish to fry.
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We're trying to have a relationship, or improve the relationship, with that adult child, which means that you listen to them like a therapist in a way, meaning that you don't have judgment on what they're telling you or your own point of view.
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You're just trying to understand things from their point of view.
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You're trying to put yourself in their shoes and you'll notice that with your best friends, with your closest people, that's what they do when they listen to you.
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They are trying to understand what this was like for you and that makes us love them, because we all want to be understood, understood.
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That situation, where you have a different memory of an interchange, is so important to validate it for yourself.
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I am going I can't wait to write this down because I remember what really happened, but this is not a court of law.
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We do not have a stenographer who is taking down.
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What matters is the feeling that is going on between the two of you and if your adult child is trying to tell you something that bothered them, it works best if you lay that other courtroom stuff aside and just try to listen for their experience and let them know that you got their emotional experience and you see it from their point of view.
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Worry about whether it's true or not later.
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Yeah, all of it makes perfect sense, I think.
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The only thing is, I think with a friend there is a back and forth much more so, and I wonder what is the role of the adult child in being mature in this kind of situation?
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What is the role of the adult child in being mature in this kind of situation, allowing the mom or the father to express their feelings?
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I ran into a parent the other day who listens to my podcast all the time and she said to me why is it always on us?
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Why do we have to be the ones that are always walking on eggshells or working to make this relationship strong?
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What role does the adult child have to take in this.
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They don't have to take any role in terms of just thinking about interpersonal relationships, like if you have two people and one desperately wants the relationship and the other one you know they're, they've got one foot out the door Right.
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So when you start as the person who is feeling left or feeling rejected, when you start asserting your rights and you start thinking about what they ought to be feeling responsible for too to kind of even this up you're losing sight of the opportunity that you have, because you're being given an opportunity to bite your tongue and you're not doing that because you're knuckling under or you know you're a weak, spine, spineless person.
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You're doing it strategically.
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Gosh yeah.
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Okay, yeah, because that is going to get you more of the result.
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That you want is a continuation of the relationship and maybe some willingness and interest on your adult child's part to keep trying to communicate with you.
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That's what you're after.
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So, I understand, gosh.
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I totally understand the feeling like why do I have to be the one who's doing all the work?
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I would just posit as a thing to consider, possibly, that from that adult child's point of view and I'm speaking as the therapist of these people they feel like they have been doing a huge amount of emotional work on your behalf their whole life.
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They have felt like they had to watch what they said, or dad would get upset.
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They have to, you know, not tell their parent what they really did or what they really thought, because it would be a moral outrage.
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They have to do whatever their parents said, or else they would be failing a moral obligation and therefore they would be a bad person.
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I mean, the parent, of course, didn't see any of this, because they are the ones who are in the position of authority.
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For them, it's going to feel like that relationship through childhood and adolescence Well, maybe not adolescence, but for a long time the relationship went smoothly but they're not taking into account, they're the ones with all the power for those first 12 years, or 15.
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Well, 18 usually.
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Usually, when you're paying for things, you have more power.
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That's true.
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When they have to live under your roof, you have a little more power.
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Yeah, yeah.
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I agree.
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It's like how would you treat someone that you wanted to, that you liked that you wanted to be good friends with?
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You would be minding your P's and Q's.
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You would have your super tuned empathy out.
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You would have your antenna up because you would not want to inadvertently say or do things that are going to alienate this attractive potential friend.
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Quote unquote.
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If I were trying to set up the opportunity to be better friends with this person, it's going to be pretty far down the road before I'm going to tackle any kind of conflictual stuff with that person, if ever.
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I'm going to be, you know, trying to facilitate our connection.
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We all know how to do that.
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I mean nobody, well, I guess some people do and they end up not having very many friends.
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But most of us are very canny about what we have to do in terms of our own self-control and self-observation in order to have friends, and what we want to do with our adult children is we want to be peers with them.
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I mean, that's the whole, that's the secret.
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You mean I have to get dressed and put makeup on when I see my kids now, no, I'm just kidding.
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I'm thinking about, you know, a new friend.
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You do try to look nicer even when you're seeing a new friend.
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Yes, you do.
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Yes, you do Because you are in that self-reflective place.
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Like how am I doing collective place?
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Like how am I doing?
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How am I doing?
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Okay, Am I putting my best foot forward.
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Am I making this a pleasant experience for this new friend?
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Will they want to come back and, you know, go to the movies with me again, or have lunch, or whatever I mean?
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it makes perfect sense.
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Why does this make such perfect sense and we don't think about it?
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Oh, because we've had the luxury of the family role thing for years, where we were given our role, we were given our authority.
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They adored us, they loved us.
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They're so cute, they're so fun.
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We had all of that without really having to do a whole lot of emotional work in terms of maintaining the relationship.
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I don't mean we didn't have a lot of emotional work to do, but I mean in terms of like worrying about whether or not your child's going to love you.
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You know you don't have to worry about that for the first teen years.
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They need you.
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You are the most important person in their life and if you have trouble giving that up and transitioning out of that into a peer relationship, I think that's when you begin to feel the friction with your adult child.
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They grow up and have their own lives.
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Your book was published in 2015.
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So it's 10 years later now.
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Suddenly, it's become so popular.
00:21:38.315 --> 00:21:44.698
What has changed about our culture now that everyone's talking about this adult-parent-child relationship?
00:21:45.184 --> 00:21:52.234
Yes, I think we have to keep in mind that the book really took off.
00:21:52.234 --> 00:21:55.961
Started to take off around 2018, 2020.
00:21:55.961 --> 00:21:59.795
Ok, that coincides with when podcasts started.
00:22:00.135 --> 00:22:00.517
Oh OK.
00:22:01.886 --> 00:22:04.034
We already had an explosion of self-help books.
00:22:04.034 --> 00:22:10.038
The psychoeducation of the public was well underway.
00:22:10.038 --> 00:22:30.459
Then we had podcasts on top of that and then we had COVID, you know, which made everybody even more attentive to podcasts, and I think it sort of got a foothold in that world, because I know how many of those podcasts and things I did.
00:22:30.459 --> 00:22:31.925
So I think that was part of it.
00:22:31.925 --> 00:22:40.579
But the other part of it is there is, I think, a shift in the age that we're in.
00:22:40.579 --> 00:22:44.829
It's like industrial age, technological age.
00:22:44.829 --> 00:22:46.813
Now we're in the information age.
00:22:46.813 --> 00:22:59.957
In terms of our intimate family relationships, we were in the family age and I think now we are in the self-awareness or individual consciousness age.
00:22:59.957 --> 00:23:01.159
Is that good or bad?
00:23:01.159 --> 00:23:22.031
I think it's going to be very good, but I think the transition is going to be already is very confusing to people, very disorienting and probably will be quite conflictual for some time, because there's a transition from this would be in the family age.
00:23:22.404 --> 00:23:29.715
We know who we are by our roles, by what we do for a living, who we are to each other.
00:23:29.715 --> 00:23:41.405
It's quite externally defined and we define our worth from that.
00:23:41.405 --> 00:23:57.516
With all of this psychological education, the popularization of podcast information, et cetera, we are now finding ourselves to be exploring our own consciousness, our own individuality, in a way that, you know I don't know if it's ever been like this.
00:23:57.516 --> 00:24:06.221
It's really remarkable because people now are reading books, listening to podcasts and thinking of themselves.
00:24:06.221 --> 00:24:20.766
They're processing their own emotional experiences and then, as a result of that, we're getting this tremendous vocabulary and conceptual framework of all kinds of psychological issues.
00:24:20.766 --> 00:24:31.134
We're plugging ourselves into that as a way of understanding our experiences and deducing who we are and developing our self-worth.
00:24:31.134 --> 00:24:35.172
It's not coming from our roles and our family relationships anymore.
00:24:36.012 --> 00:24:43.454
I think we have gone past a point where, the more conscious you become, try to become unconscious.
00:24:43.454 --> 00:24:46.469
When you've become conscious of something, what does that mean?
00:24:46.469 --> 00:24:49.797
Try to not notice something once somebody's pointed it out to you.
00:24:49.797 --> 00:25:12.767
What does that mean?
00:25:12.767 --> 00:25:13.307
That now into account?
00:25:13.307 --> 00:25:13.868
It doesn't just disappear.
00:25:13.868 --> 00:25:22.909
Okay, and that's a good thing, because if I learn that when I do this it hurts me or I get in trouble or whatever, I can't any longer be unaware of the effects of that behavior.
00:25:22.909 --> 00:25:24.711
I'm conscious of it now.
00:25:25.051 --> 00:25:25.873
I'm aware of it.
00:25:27.055 --> 00:25:36.673
But when you're talking about this in intimate relationships like with your child, that is a very hard kind of education.
00:25:36.673 --> 00:25:39.057
It's hard on the self-esteem.
00:25:39.479 --> 00:25:41.630
It's hard to get your head around it.
00:25:41.630 --> 00:25:46.886
It's hard to put yourself aside long enough to see it from the other person's point of view.
00:25:46.886 --> 00:25:48.832
It's very difficult.
00:25:48.832 --> 00:26:19.138
But I think it's going to be a good thing because when two self-aware or relatively self-aware people talk to each other or have a relationship with each other, the relationship takes on a depth and an intimacy that you won't find in relationships that are defined much more superficially, according to roles or social things or gossip or whatever more superficial things.
00:26:19.138 --> 00:26:21.409
So I think it's going to be good.
00:26:22.550 --> 00:26:28.510
I just think it's going to be very hard on the people who aren't aware that this is happening.
00:26:28.510 --> 00:26:55.134
It's like this change came along in the dead of night, you know, and we woke up the next morning and, all of a sudden, the things that we assumed we would always have in terms of our position or our relationships now our adult child is questioning that and they're questioning what they want to do with their lives or kind of relationships they want, and they're telling us about it.
00:26:55.134 --> 00:26:59.848
We're still thinking wait a minute, you know, I'm the mom or I'm the dad.
00:26:59.848 --> 00:27:02.694
What's happening here?
00:27:02.694 --> 00:27:12.587
We don't have a reference point, but if we can be aware that maybe this shift has occurred and we just didn't get the postcard in the mail coming.
00:27:13.148 --> 00:27:18.711
Next month, your child is going to start self-actualizing in a way that's going to be very hard for you.
00:27:18.711 --> 00:27:23.375
If we don't have that preparation, all we can do is respond defensively.
00:27:23.375 --> 00:27:35.049
If we learn about some of these things, we can respond in ways that help us to get a handle on our own defensiveness and our own fears.
00:27:35.049 --> 00:27:38.926
There's a book that's going to be coming out I think it's in September.
00:27:38.926 --> 00:27:41.313
It's called Parents have Feelings Too.
00:27:41.795 --> 00:27:42.436
Finally.
00:27:44.006 --> 00:27:45.891
Yes, isn't that a great title?
00:27:45.891 --> 00:27:48.597
Yeah, and I think it's available for pre-order.
00:27:48.597 --> 00:27:51.665
Yeah, and it's.
00:27:51.665 --> 00:27:52.406
I think it's available for pre-order.
00:27:52.406 --> 00:28:06.678
But she has, like, this whole system for how to catch yourself in a reactive mode and figure out if you're being defensive and what your true feelings are that you're scared of in the moment that's making you react defensively.
00:28:06.678 --> 00:28:23.510
And then how do you deal with those feelings and process them so that you can respond to your adult child in an authentic and validating way and begin to build a real relationship with them on that basis.
00:28:24.152 --> 00:28:24.532
Wow.
00:28:24.532 --> 00:28:32.874
So as I listened to you and this is going to sound defensive, I think so, don't judge me when I grew up, all the roles were in place.
00:28:32.874 --> 00:28:37.714
Everything you said I realized was my relationship with my parents.
00:28:37.714 --> 00:28:44.776
I was their daughter, they were my parents and I just did everything I could for them to make them happy.
00:28:44.776 --> 00:28:51.679
Now I think also our generation was the first generation to acknowledge our children's feelings and emotions.
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