Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents (Lindsay Gibson, 2015)
"Growing up in a family with emotionally immature parents is a lonely experience.
These parents may look and act perfectly normal, caring for their child’s physical health and providing meals and safety.
However, if they don’t make a solid emotional connection with their child, the child will have a gaping hole where true security might have been.
The loneliness of feeling unseen by others is as fundamental a pain as physical injury, but it doesn’t show on the outside.
Emotional loneliness is a vague and private experience, not easy to see or describe.
You might call it a feeling of emptiness or being alone in the world.
Some people have called this feeling existential loneliness, but there’s nothing existential about it. If you feel it, it came from your family.
Children have no way of identifying a lack of emotional intimacy in their relationship with a parent. It isn’t a concept they have.
And it’s even less likely that they can understand that their parents are emotionally immature.
All they have is a gut feeling of emptiness, which is how a child experiences loneliness.
With a mature parent, the child’s remedy for loneliness is simply to go to the parent for affectionate connection.
But if your parent was scared of deep feelings, you might have been left with an uneasy sense of shame for needing comforting."
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