By Stephanie Boucher, Registered Psychotherapist | The Mindful Loft
The short version: Growing up with an emotionally immature parent does not only affect how you feel about your family. It can shape how you attach to partners, who you are drawn to, what you are willing to accept, and how you respond when something goes wrong. Most people figure this out in reverse. They notice the relationship pattern first, and only later understand where it came from.
You may not be here because of your childhood.
You may be here because something keeps happening in your adult relationships.
Maybe you keep ending up in the same dynamic no matter who you are with. Maybe you are exhausted from doing most of the emotional work. Maybe you feel jealous in ways that confuse you, or you find yourself constantly monitoring your partner’s mood, waiting for something to shift.
Maybe your relationships look fine from the outside and feel lonely on the inside.
If you grew up with an emotionally immature parent, the connection between that childhood and what is happening in your relationships now may be real. It is just not always obvious at first.
What emotional immaturity in a parent actually means
Emotional immaturity in a parent does not mean they were cruel, that they did not love you, or that they failed you in every way.
Many emotionally immature parents provided materially. Many were genuinely devoted. Many had good intentions. What they could not consistently do was regulate their own emotions in a way that allowed them to be a steady, emotionally attuned presence for their child.
Clinical psychologist Lindsay Gibson, who has written extensively on this topic, describes emotionally immature parents as people who tend to prioritize their own emotional needs, struggle with empathy, and react from emotional impulsivity rather than reflection.
That does not automatically make them bad people.
But it does mean the child often has to adapt.
In Gibson’s framework, emotionally immature parents often fall into four broad patterns. Some are emotionally volatile, creating anxiety in the home. Some are driven and value achievement or performance over emotional connection. Some are passive and avoid anything emotionally difficult. Some are rejecting, dismissive, or withdrawn.
Real parents are usually more complicated than one category. Many blend several patterns. But the common thread is this: the child’s emotional needs become secondary, and the child learns to manage around that.
The relationship pattern it can create
Growing up in that environment does not produce one predictable adult relationship pattern. In my work, I see it go in several directions, and sometimes in more than one direction at the same time.
Some people become anxiously attached. They become highly tuned to a partner’s frustration, distance, tone, or mood. They worry they are too much. They seek reassurance, but the reassurance never fully settles.
Others become avoidant. They become emotionally self-sufficient to a fault. They are uncomfortable depending on anyone. They disconnect before they can be left.
Some people experience both. They want closeness and brace against it at the same time.
What I see across many of these patterns is difficulty with felt security. Even in relationships that are fairly stable, there may be a background hum of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Watching for the partner’s mood. Tracking shifts in tone or energy. Reading the room before anyone has said there is a problem.
That hypervigilance made complete sense as a child.
It is expensive as an adult.
Research on adult attachment supports this. Attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance are not just private feelings. They shape how people communicate, handle conflict, seek support, withdraw, regulate stress, and respond to closeness in their most important relationships.
In other words, the pattern does not stay in childhood. It follows people into the relationships where they most want to feel safe.
The validation loop, and how it shapes who you choose
One of the subtler things I watch happen in this work is how the validation someone learned to earn from a parent can repeat itself in the partners they are drawn to.
If you only received warmth from a parent when you performed, achieved, stayed easy, looked capable, or did not need much, you may become especially responsive to partners who recognize and flatter that exact role.
It feels like being seen, because it is being seen.
But only in the narrow way you were taught to expect.
The connection can feel good at first. It may even feel like relief. Finally, someone notices how capable you are. How generous. How calm. How useful. How low-maintenance. How much you can handle.
What is harder to notice is that you may be working just as hard for approval as you always did, and the warmth may still be conditional.
This is not about choosing badly.
It is about what feels familiar being mistaken for what feels right.
The role you learned to play is often the thing a partner first responds to: the caretaker, the capable one, the easy one, the person who never asks for too much.
That role can feel comfortable because you have played it your whole life.
The problem comes later, when you are tired of it, or when you want more than the role allows.
Why people pleasers can end up with people who do not consider them
Gibson describes two broad responses to growing up with emotionally immature parents: internalizers and externalizers.
Internalizers, who are often the ones most likely to recognize themselves in this article, turn things inward. They assume they are the problem. They work harder, ask for less, become skilled at managing everyone else’s emotions, and stay quiet about their own.
They are the good child who becomes the overfunctioning partner.
People pleasers can be especially vulnerable to relationships with people who are comfortable taking up more space than they give back. They may find themselves with partners whose needs are obvious, whose dissatisfaction is visible, and whose moods shape the room.
And they may genuinely not understand why they never feel seen or considered.
Often, the answer is that considerateness requires reciprocity, and they may never have had much practice expecting it.
This dynamic can work for a while.
The internalizer gets to feel useful and needed. The partner gets someone who anticipates needs without being asked. Nobody is demanding change because the system is stable.
Even if the person inside it is quietly running on empty.
What clients think is wrong before they understand where it comes from
When people come to therapy with relationship pain, they often arrive with one of two stories.
The first story is about their partner.
They are not emotionally available. They do not communicate. They never consider my feelings. The relationship feels like a dead end, but leaving feels impossible.
The second story is about themselves.
I am too needy. I am too jealous. I push people away. I do not know why I react the way I do. There must be something wrong with me.
Both stories may contain some truth.
But both can miss the deeper pattern.
The issue is not only this partner, and it is not only a flaw in the person sitting across from me. It is often a relational template that was built early, when attachment to a parent meant learning to shrink yourself, manage their emotional state, and earn your place in the relationship rather than simply occupy it.
The moment that tends to shift something is when we look at the role the person played with their parent.
What did that role protect them from?
What did it cost?
What did they get from it?
Where does that same role show up now?
That mapping is often the first thing that makes the pattern make sense.
What does and does not change, and when
Once someone understands where the pattern comes from, it is tempting to think the hardest part is done.
In my experience, that is often when the real work starts.
Understanding something cognitively and reorganizing how you live in relationships are not the same thing.
The trickiest transition I see is when people pleasers begin to become more assertive. They start asking for what they need. They stop absorbing what they used to absorb. They hold their position in conflict rather than immediately giving in. They stop smoothing things over just to get relief.
And then people around them push back.
Because many of their relationships were built on the old terms.
Partners, friends, and family members may have grown used to the person who adapts, anticipates, absorbs, and does not ask for much. When that person starts changing, the relationship has to change too.
Sometimes there is friction.
Sometimes there is anger.
Sometimes the relationship reveals that it cannot hold the new version of the person.
And the person who is changing is left confronting something painful: in becoming clearer about what they need, they may discover how few of their relationships had room for that.
This can feel like regression.
It is not.
But it is genuinely hard, and it is worth naming that clearly. People often interpret this friction as evidence that they were better off before.
They were not.
They were just quieter.
A note on whether the mother or father matters more
People ask this, and I would be careful about making a universal rule here. The research does not give a clean, simple answer by parent gender, and real families are more complicated than that.
A person may be shaped by a mother, a father, a stepparent, a grandparent, or another caregiver. Some people had one emotionally immature parent and one more attuned parent. Some had two unavailable parents, but in very different ways.
In practice, what often matters more than which parent it was is the type of emotional immaturity involved.
Was the parent emotionally volatile?
Emotionally absent?
Emotionally invasive?
Critical?
Passive?
Unpredictable?
Did the child have another adult who saw them clearly and helped them make sense of what was happening?
A child who had one attuned adult may carry the impact differently than a child who had no one helping them name reality. The question is not only “which parent was it?” The question is: what emotional role did the child have to take on, and what did they learn love required of them?
Frequently asked questions
Does everyone who had an emotionally immature parent struggle in relationships?
Not in the same way, and not equally.
The impact depends on the type and severity of the parent’s emotional immaturity, whether there was another attuned adult in the child’s life, the child’s temperament, and how early they were able to understand what was happening.
Some people carry this lightly. Others find it shows up in almost every close relationship they have had.
How do I know if this applies to me and not just normal relationship problems?
One clue is the pattern.
If the same dynamic keeps following you across different partners, that is worth paying attention to.
The same emotional role. The same imbalance. The same feeling of being the one who manages everything while still not feeling fully seen. The same sense that you are asking for too much when you ask for basic consideration.
Normal relationship problems tend to vary.
Patterned problems usually have a source.
My parent had a hard life and did their best. Does that change any of this?
It may change what conclusions you draw about your parent.
It does not erase the impact the relationship had on you.
Both things can be true. Your parent may have had a hard life. They may have done their best with what they had. And you may still have grown up without the emotional steadiness, attunement, or protection you needed.
Compassion for your parent does not require you to deny what it cost you.
Can I change these patterns without therapy?
Some people make genuine shifts through reading, reflection, journaling, and relationships that offer them a different experience.
For many people, though, the patterns are old and relational. That means they often need to be worked through in relationship, not only thought through alone.
Therapy can help because it gives you a place to notice the pattern in real time: how quickly you apologize, how hard it is to ask for more, how uncomfortable it feels to be seen, how much you expect disconnection when you have needs.
Understanding is important.
But it is not the same as rewiring.
If I have already been in a lot of painful relationships, is it too late?
No.
What changes in this work is not your history. It is your ability to read what is happening in real time, tolerate the discomfort of asking for more, and recognize earlier what a relationship is actually offering you.
That learning is available at any point.
If this is landing for you
A lot of people read something like this and feel a strange combination of relief and grief.
Relief because something finally makes sense.
Grief because they can see the cost of it now.
Both responses make sense.
You do not have to have had a dramatic childhood for this to apply. You just have to have grown up in a home where your emotional needs came second often enough that you stopped expecting them to come first.
If this is landing for you, therapy can help you understand the role you learned to play, what it protected you from, and what it may be costing you now.
Not because there is something wrong with you.
Because you should not have to keep disappearing inside relationships in order to keep them.
Sessions are covered by most extended health benefit plans. Fees are discussed in your consult.
Not ready to book yet? I write about relational patterns, childhood wounds, and what healing actually looks like in The Messy Loft, our monthly newsletter. No polish. Just honest.
Read or subscribe to The Messy Loft
Related articles
- The Guilt of Being an Adult Child of Emotionally Immature Parents
- Understanding the Impact of Complex PTSD from Childhood Trauma
- Five Unexpected Indicators of Childhood Trauma
About the author
Stephanie Boucher is a Registered Psychotherapist and the founder of The Mindful Loft, a psychotherapy practice in Ottawa, Ontario focused on betrayal trauma, infidelity recovery, childhood relational wounds, and relational recovery. She supports individuals and couples who are trying to understand the patterns they carry and build relationships that do not require them to disappear inside them.
Further reading
Gibson, L. C. (2015). Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents. New Harbinger Publications.
References
Overall, N. C., Pietromonaco, P. R., & Simpson, J. A. (2022). Buffering and spillover of adult attachment insecurity in couple and family relationships. Nature Reviews Psychology, 1(2), 101–111. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-021-00011-1
This article is for educational purposes and is not a substitute for individualized mental health care.
If you are in immediate crisis or thinking of harming yourself, please reach out to a crisis line in your area. In Canada, you can call or text 9-8-8.
