Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents – by Dr. Lindsay Gibson

Not everyone had the best of parents, and the harm done can last well beyond childhood. This book looks at healing that.

Dr. Gibson talks about four main kinds of “difficult” parents, though of course they can overlap:

1. The emotional parent, with their unpredictable outbursts
2. The driven parent, with their projected perfectionism
3. The passive parent, with their disinterest and unreliability
4. The rejecting parent, with their unavailability and insults

For all of them, it’s common that nothing we could do was ever good enough, and that leaves a deep scar. To add to it, the unfavorable dynamic often persists in adult life, assuming everyone involved is still alive and in contact.

So, what to do about it? Dr. Gibson advocates for first getting a good understanding of what wasn’t right/normal/healthy, because it’s easy for a lot of us to normalize the only thing we’ve ever known. Then, beyond merely noting that no child deserved that lack of compassion, moving on to pick up the broken pieces one by one, and address each in turn.

The style of the book is anecdote-heavy (case studies, either anonymized or synthesized per common patterns) in a way that will probably be all-too-relatable to a lot of readers (assuming that if you buy this book, it’s for a reason), science-moderate (references peppered into the text; three pages of bibliography), and practicality-dense—that is to say, there are lots of clear usable examples, there are self-assessment questionnaires, there are worksheets for now making progress forward, and so forth.

Bottom line: if one or more of the parent types above strikes a chord with you, there’s a good chance you could benefit from this book.

Click here to check out Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, and rebuild yourself!