Emotionally Immature Parents

26 November 2022

The origin of this blog is a psychologist’s thread of tweets seen while I was researching and writing about attachment. The causal relationship between emotionally immature parents and insecurely attached children was glaring, if in need of more rigorous exploration.

That psychologist, Dr. Nicole LePera’s argument begins with four premises: Emotionally Immature Parents (EIP) lack the ability to:

LePera maintains that the nervous system of a child grows in response to the signals children receive.  Those signals can be about consistently reassuring safety or inconsistent danger.  As LePera stated, “Emotional safety comes from affectionate physical touch, soothing voices, open facial expressions, and predictable behaviour.”  We can understand emotionally unsafe emotions as the opposites to those: harmful physical touch, hateful or hurtful voices, closed-down facial expressions, and unpredictable behaviours.

1. See a perspective outside of their own;

2. Reflect on how their behavior impacts those around them;

3. Meet the emotional needs of others; and

4. Regulate their emotions.

Some of the sad and harmful behaviours, of EIPs, are shaming and negating their children through comments about being too dramatic, too sensitive, too...instead of accepting that all feelings are real and that children test boundaries.  But of course, boundaries don’t exist in relationships established by EIPs because everything is ultimately about the parent’s (unknowing) emotional deficiency.  I used the word “sad,” above because, while it is easy to criticize these harmful parental behaviours, EIPs did not seek to learn these ways of being, they too came by them—almost certainly—without choice. 

The effect of feeling unimportant, on the children of EIPs, is to send them into a permanent state of high alert referred to as a dorsal vagal state.  Dorsal vagal means the back of the vagus nerve.  The vagus nerve “…also known as the vagal nerves, are the main nerves of your parasympathetic nervous system.  That system controls specific body functions such as your digestion, heart rate, and immune system.  These functions are involuntary, meaning you can’t consciously control them” (Cleveland Clinic, 2022).  They are one half of the autonomic nervous system with the other half being the sympathetic nervous system.  Here’s why this is important.

This is a multipart illustration and takes some time to understand.  What it’s saying is that as arousal (general level of activation or excitedness) increases (typically increasing from left to right), performance increases to a point and then slides as too much arousal is harmful not helpful.  The arousal curve is the black bell-shaped outline, above, in Fig. 1. 

Now look at the green, pink, and blue zones (horizontal bands).  Green is the ventral vagal state, the opposite of the dorsal vagal (blue zone).  You want to be in the green zone unless there’s extreme danger, in which case your nervous system will respond from within the pink zone activating the fight/flight response.  

The words at the bottom of the blue zone, “overwhelm” and “I can’t” provide indications of why you don’t want to spend time there.  Conditions and behaviours include “helplessness, conservation of energy, depression, numbness, dissociation...”  These are the experiences of children who can’t even define these terms.  And these experiences, unless well treated, continue into adolescence and adulthood.  If you were in this kind of trouble, feeling this kind of pain and panic—and sex, booze, gangs, or drugs could take the pain away—what would you do?

Not everyone succumbs.  Jay (2017) writes about the supernormal (adj., exceeding or beyond the normal or average; exceptional) who can come from such families and still create what look like successful lives—but the pain doesn’t go away.  So here’s the point: if you relate to some of the hardships discussed in this blog or in the two blogs dealing with attachment (https://understandings.ca/2022/11/05/attachment-a-life-long-forcefield/ https://understandings.ca/2022/11/19/attachment-as-life-long-forcefield-ii/), you could benefit from better understanding your own relationship to your childhood home and the relationships that formed in that home.  If “the Child is father of the Man” (Wordsworth, 1802) and I believe s/he is, then a better father comes about by knowing and loving the inner child.

Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies.  He works as a supervised psychotherapist at CMHA-Hamilton where his primary focus is trauma.  He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understanding of ideas.  Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.  Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the Bcc’d emailing list.

References

Jay, M. (2017). Supernormal: The secret world of the family hero. Twelve, Hachette Book Group.

LePera, N. (2022, November 13). Emotionally Immature Parents, Twitter.

Walker, R. J. (2022, 20 November).  Understanding the Effect of the Autonomous Nervous System on Children’s Behaviour.  Peer Reviewed Education Blog.  https://peerreviewededucationblog.com/2018/05/30/understanding-the-effect-of-the-autonomous-nervous-system-on-childrens-behaviour-guest-blog/

Cleveland Clinic. (2022, 19 November). Vagus Nerve. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/22279-vagus-nerve#:~:text=What%20is%20the%20Vagus%20Nerve,can't%20consciously%20control%20them.