Disentangling from Emotionally Immature People with Lindsay C. Gibson
December 7, 2023
Glennon Doyle:
Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. We have been holding our breath since last week.
Amanda Doyle:
And for the 40 years before that.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Abby Wambach:
Since the last episode.
Glennon Doyle:
The amazing, world-shifting Lindsay C. Gibson is here. She fixed our lives by helping us realize that we are not, in fact, as jacked up as we thought we were, we just may have been raised by emotionally immature people. We all had some eureka moments at the last episode that maybe we had some emotional immaturity in our families of origin. We might have some people in our lives who are emotionally immature people.
Abby Wambach:
You’re looking right at me.
Glennon Doyle:
No, I just thought you might have someone in your life. And last episode, we discussed how important that is, just that knowing.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
So go back and listen to the last episode to learn what an emotionally immature parent or person might look like, and what it might do to you if you are in close contact with that person. For anyone who is just listening to this episode, you might be able to do a little recap of the characteristics of an emotionally immature person?
Lindsay Gibson:
Sure. So what we talked about was that most basically, the emotionally immature person has a line of development emotionally that has not kept pace with their chronological age. And emotional maturity falls on a continuum, just like your intellectual development, your social development. And a person can be very well-developed intellectually, they can be very well-developed in their social skills, their social abilities, but in their emotional maturity and their ability to regulate, control their emotions, and to have deep, intimate relationships with other people, they can be very emotionally immature.
Lindsay Gibson:
So think of the four-year-old. That’s a good example, if you’ve ever met a 4-year-old, if you’ve ever known a four-year-old, they have just enough language to make you think that you could reason with them, okay? But emotionally, they’re like three-year-olds. Okay? So that’s the way emotionally immature people are. They have language, they can talk about things, but they are so vulnerable to falling apart, or feeling threatened that they’re very, very hard to get close to. They tend to be extremely egocentric, “The world is about me. Every interaction needs to come back to me. Let me tell you what that reminds me of in my life.” And they have very poor empathy for other people. If you have empathy, it’s an automatic thing. You just can’t help but wonder how that person felt about what you said. Once you get it, you never lose it. But for a person who is emotionally immature and doesn’t get that, it’s very hard to explain to them that they should be feeling what this other person is feeling, because that just doesn’t compute because it’s all about them.
Glennon Doyle:
Wow.
Lindsay Gibson:
Then you have very poor self-reflection, they don’t ask themselves if they were to blame for any relationship problems, and as a result, they don’t engage in repair or apologies, that kind of thing, which is a shame. Very afraid of emotional intimacy with other people, where people talk about their deeper feelings or they let themselves be known at a deeper level, they tend to shy away from that. And basically, they’re afraid of all kinds of deep, sincere emotion.
Lindsay Gibson:
They have a really contentious relationship with reality. They tend to deny, dismiss, or distort anything in reality that they don’t agree with or they don’t like, and that doesn’t bother them in the least. And they tend to be quite immature in their mental functioning, in the sense that they don’t tolerate complexity very well. Things are very black and white, cut and dried, right and wrong. They have a lot of those rigid thinking characteristics that can’t see that someone could be this and this, and that could be part of the same person. They tend to split, and categorize and then judge, according to what feels right to them, the worth of people, which leads to all kinds of problems with their kids when their kids start to individuate into their own personalities. So that’s just a little overview of what you can expect to see in them.
Amanda Doyle:
One important thing for folks who are trying to identify this, you said this last episode, is that your mom could have been the CEO of a huge company, and totally mature from a business professional perspective, and still not be developed emotionally. And also that it shows that emotional immaturity shows up most significantly under stress and in the super intimate relationships. So you could have grown up with a dad that all of your friends love, and thinks he’s the absolute best and you’re the luckiest, or your partner, everyone loves them, they’re great to everyone but in the stress, and most intimate relationship is when that shows up the most, which I really think is important from your work because that is like a gaslighting, when everyone else sees the wonderful, you receive the rough parts of that.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
So can you tell us, what do we do? I would really like, in this episode, to get into the specifics and the practical ways. If we have identified that we have an emotionally immature parent, or that we’re married to an emotionally immature person, or our boss is… Can you talk to us about the strategies that an emotionally immature person uses inside of a conflict? Because I think one of the things that is so hard about being in a relationship with an emotionally immature person is that you’re sitting in your little neurotic, internalizer head. You’re thinking, “I can make this better. I know if I just do this different, if I use all my self-help books about conflict, I’m going to go in, I’m going to say a thing, and I’m going to fix it.” If I go into a conversation with an emotionally immature person, it’s a little bit like getting sucked into a vortex of weirdness. Can you talk to us about that vortex of weirdness? What’s going to happen to me in that-
Abby Wambach:
Experience.
Glennon Doyle:
Experience. Inside of that conflict? You might know you’re in a conversation with an emotionally immature person if?
Lindsay Gibson:
Yeah, “The vortex of weirdness,” I’ll have to use that in my next book.
Amanda Doyle:
It’s yours. It’s the least Glennon could do.
Lindsay Gibson:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the vortex of weirdness is when you are trying, in good faith, to communicate, to make yourself understood, to understand them. In other words, you’re trying to activate good relationship skills to have a better communication with this person. So if you’re doing this with your parent, and it could be any number of things, maybe you need to set a boundary, maybe you want to tell them about something, maybe you want them to understand why you don’t get in touch more often. It could be many, many things. But as you try to communicate to them using your best communication skills, everything that you’ve ever learned, about iMessages, and saying something nice first, and all this stuff, and they come back with stuff that is either highly defensive, even aggressive, they get mad, or they act like they don’t understand what you’re saying, or they come back and they seem very, very hurt.
Lindsay Gibson:
Whatever it is, it’s not in the same spirit that you’re approaching them, which is, “Let’s share and figure out what’s going on between us, and then maybe we’ll come up with a solution.” It’ll be something tangential. It’ll take you away from what looks to you like a very simple process of, “Let me tell you what I’m feeling and what’s wrong, and then you tell me what’s wrong with what you’re feeling, and let’s see if we can repair this and move forward.” No, it’s like you get a bunch of confusing stuff that causes, what a friend of mine called Brain Scramble, which is you can’t figure out what this has to do with where you started out or what they’re trying to say to you. And it gets very confusing and you end up feeling shut down because your brain is just fried. They’re saying two things that don’t fit together. So it’s really sobering to people who try to go in and reach their emotionally immature parent through good communication skills, because communication has to go two ways. If somebody wants to understand what you’re saying to them, it doesn’t matter what you say.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Lindsay Gibson:
Okay? If someone doesn’t want to understand what you’re saying, it doesn’t matter what you say.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, just one more time.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Glennon Doyle:
Just say it again one more time.
Amanda Doyle:
Just keep saying it for the next hour and a half, it’s the best service we can do for anybody.
Abby Wambach:
This is the very thing that prevents me from going to my parents.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, because you know it won’t matter.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Lindsay Gibson:
If a person wants to understand what you’re saying, it doesn’t matter how you say it. If a person wants to understand what you’re saying, it doesn’t matter how you say it. Did I get that right?
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Lindsay Gibson:
I hope so.
Glennon Doyle:
If they want to understand.
Lindsay Gibson:
I think I turned it around.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, it doesn’t matter. I understand what you’re saying because I want to understand what you’re saying.
Amanda Doyle:
It doesn’t matter how you say it, we get you because we’re trying.
Lindsay Gibson:
Exactly.
Amanda Doyle:
Because we’re emotionally mature.
Lindsay Gibson:
Exactly. Right here, right here, in vivo. It’s happening.
Amanda Doyle:
You don’t have to keep struggling for the exact, precise words that you think are going to unlock a person, because if they want to understand you, they will, regardless of what you say. If they don’t want to understand you, they won’t, regardless of what you say. So that pressure, because it’s the exhaustion, right? The exhaustion of being connected to an emotionally immature person is exhausting because we believe at some level that if we just figured out the magical way to express ourselves correctly, that we would be able to engage with them in a way that they would be interested in understanding us.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
That is the exhaustion.
Lindsay Gibson:
Exactly.
Glennon Doyle:
Or not even that, just the right way to be. It’s like you’re trying to figure out the right words to say, but it can be deeper than that too. It’s not even just the right words to say, it’s like how do I be different? Me as a person isn’t right for this person. So how do I change who I am so that they will accept me, or not be afraid of me. It’s really cellular, it’s identity, it can be identity, not just like how do I have better communication skills? But how do I stop being so broken so that this relationship can stop being so broken?
Lindsay Gibson:
Right, yes. And so they’re taking on more responsibility after they’ve already taken on too much responsibility for making this relationship deeper, more meaningful, more satisfying, more real. Yeah, and when you try to do that with an emotionally immature person, because they’re so afraid of emotional intimacy, you’re going to end up feeling defeated. That feeling of defeat is part and parcel of interacting with emotionally immature people. So with my clients, whether I’m doing therapy or coaching, we sort of anticipate that, before you go into the interaction with the person. It’s like that old thing from Dante’s Inferno. It’s like, “Abandon hope, all who enter here.” It’s like-
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. That’s my favorite quote by the way.
Amanda Doyle:
That’s the subtitle of all of Glennon’s work. We can do hard things, but also abandon hope-
Glennon Doyle:
Hope! Hope is what screws us, man.
Lindsay Gibson:
Well, that’s what Nietzsche said.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, I’m with Nietzsche.
Lindsay Gibson:
But when you are hoping for something that by the nature of its being is not going to happen, then you are, in effect, going to end up blaming yourself because you’re not in reality. Misplaced hope, and that’s based in this case on what I call Healing Fantasies about you have the fantasy about how your emotionally immature parent is going to heal and they’re going to mature themselves and they’re going to be able to communicate with you and relate to you in this close way. And when you have that kind of hope, you’re going to go into the interaction looking for them to be different from who they are. And I’m sorry, that’s also a setup for them because that’s not who they are. And you’re treating them like someone who would be interested in your feelings, and interested in working something out or want to know your boundaries. But that’s not probably true.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Lindsay Gibson:
Okay? So when you are about to go into an interaction, I tell people, “Do what you can do a little bit. Don’t set yourself up to have this be the turnaround moment for the relationship because that’s going to scare them. And when anybody gets scared, they’re at their worst. So just go at it from the standpoint of you’re going to A, stay in touch with yourself. You’re going to stay connected to yourself and your own observations of what’s going on, both inside you and in the outside relationship. And you’re going to maintain a healthy detachment from their emotion.” Now see right there, that tends to take you out of the emotionally immature relationship system, because if you’re kind of keeping an eye on what they’re doing, and how it’s going, you can’t be absorbed into their emotion to give them what they need to be stabilized, or feel better about themselves or whatever they’re recruiting you to do. So it’s important to have that healthy detachment, the ability to observe what’s going on. Like an anthropologist, I’m learning about these people. Let’s see what they’re doing. Oh, they just acted like I said this, but I didn’t. I wasn’t being disrespectful. All I said was that “I can’t come home for Christmas.”
Lindsay Gibson:
And so you are helping them to see what constitutes success in an interaction. Success is going into it realistically, staying in touch with yourself, treating that person who they are. In other words, not expecting them to be able to go very far into emotions, and then not expecting that your communication skills are going to right every wrong or take you to a place of closeness with them, and that’s no fault of your own. And you ask, what is your outcome that you want? Where are you heading? What’s going to constitute success?
Lindsay Gibson:
And a lot of times people will say, “Well, my father will understand what effect his words have had on me over the years,” or, “My mother will stop criticizing me because she’ll understand how much it hurts my feelings.” And it’s like, okay, do you have control over that outcome? Of course you don’t. So what else? Let’s work it down until we get to something that you have control over. And usually it ends up to be something like, “I told them what I wanted to tell them. I drew the line where I wanted to draw it, and I stayed in touch with myself the whole time. I didn’t dissociate. I didn’t unhook from myself. I didn’t go passive. I didn’t become immobilized. I ended the interaction before that point and I maintained a sense of being in control of myself.” Now, all of those things you have under your control, you try to get the outcome identified that the person can achieve.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay, the moment I really deeply started falling in love with your work is when I realized how deep all of this is. Because what you just said, “When you stay with yourself, you know yourself, you don’t get dysregulated,” all those things. For me, while that sounds simple, that has taken me 25 years to even know what you’re talking about. If you are someone who was raised by an emotionally immature person, you were raised to not have a self, you were raised to be a mirror to the other person. So you don’t know what that is. It might take a decade or a decade and a half of work to even have a you to stick with. So, in order to start this work of healing, the question of when you’re little, “Do you exist, do you matter?” Has to be answered before you go into the ring?
Glennon Doyle:
Do you find that when you talk about how do you really heal if you’re an adult child of an immature parent, it’s not that you figure out how to have this conflict; the real healing is separate from the other person. It’s finally knowing that you are a real human being, with real experiences, and that you exist and that you matter. That’s step one, which might take a lifetime. Yes?
Lindsay Gibson:
Well, working on it could take a lifetime. Absolutely. And that’s one of the things that therapy coaching best friendships, good marriages, people are equipped to restart their growth to come to know themselves through relationships with other people. It’s like the British psychoanalyst, Wincott said, “There’s no such thing as a baby. There’s only a baby and a mother.” And so it’s like there’s no such thing as a self. There’s only a self and an other. So, yes, we do have to do that, getting to know ourselves and becoming aware of ourselves internally, and that’s kind of the inside job. But we also grow so much through our relationships, and having that bounced back at us, so that we come to know who we are and how we are through someone else’s reactions to us. And also, someone who helps us, who mirrors us, who loves us. It’s an ongoing thing. So it isn’t like you have to get yourself figured out first, then you go in and talk to your parents. No, it’s all happening at the same time. And each thing that we do sets us up to be maybe a little more self-aware or a little more capable.
Lindsay Gibson:
And that’s something that I keep trying to emphasize in my books is that these tiny little things are so crucial and they all have their little place in our development. Glennon, I was reading in your book recently and it said something about, “When something knocks on your door and it turns out it’s a package for you for your growth.” Well, each one of these little moments that we have is like that. It’s like it’s another little piece of the puzzle. It’s another little piece of the self. And if we keep open to that, it’s just amazing what we can develop into. So that part is very hopeful, but in my mind, it’s an ongoing life journey. Maturation, psychological, emotional maturation is a lifelong process.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. I’m trying to understand this. I very much relate to everything in all of your work in my personal life. And I think what I’ve just heard you say is so important for me to hear because, and correct me if I’m wrong. So we go in with not expectation of changing the other person, because I think what we’re all trying to do, those of us that were raised by maybe emotionally immature parents, is to actually figure out that we ourselves are real, apart from our parent, and that whatever happens in the relationship, and however the interactions go, the response that I get from them will not matter.
Abby Wambach:
Because what prevents me from going to my parents is the knowing that they’ve done absolutely no personal work. They’ve had no therapy, which I’m sure a lot of the listeners have parents in this situation as well. And so, I am scared to even approach them, because I actually don’t know if there’s any possibility of growth on their part in their maturity emotionally. And so, correct me if I’m wrong, but me doing this work isn’t about necessarily creating a better relationship between me and my parent. It’s creating a better relationship with the relationship I have with my parents.
Lindsay Gibson:
Nicely said. I love that. Yeah, “Better relationship with the relationship,” yeah. And I think it’s also a relationship with yourself. Whatever that happens to look like at the moment. I mean, it can be your adult self, it can be your child self. I do a lot of parts work with people around internal family systems. I love that approach. So we all have a multiplicity of aspects to ourself. But yeah, your relationship to yourself, your connection and your self-knowledge to yourself, and then your ability to be connected to your ideas about the relationship that are healthy, that are realistic, that are based in facts, so to speak. All of that is very, very important. And then the relationship with the parent, that’s going to have its own life and its own characteristics, much of which you probably are not going to be able to change. But I loved your comment about your relationship with the relationship.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. So good.
Lindsay Gibson:
Because I had a friend who said that she had the best relationship with her parents she’d ever had over the past 10 years, and they’d been dead the whole time.
Glennon Doyle:
We’ve heard that a lot.
Abby Wambach:
Oh my gosh.
Lindsay Gibson:
And so, she was having a relationship with her relationship with her parents in her mind, and she was changing herself around that, and changing her view of them around that. Or another friend said, “Now I just see them as two older people who I don’t have much in common with, but I still love them.” That’s changing your relationship with the relationship. I love that.
Amanda Doyle:
You’re not necessarily going to have to ever disentangle yourself from an emotionally immature person, but if you’re going to be healthy, you need to disentangle yourself from your own expectations of what that person will do, or not do, or what they will understand about you or the way they will connect with you. So it’s almost like you have to do that to have any kind of relationship, or else you’re going to be chasing that hope to which there is no door.
Lindsay Gibson:
Right.
Glennon Doyle:
And it’s so true in terms of all you need to do to prove yourself that disentanglement isn’t just about physical relationship or boundary. You’re like, “I’m estranged from that person now,” or whatever is think about how many times you’ve put up physical boundaries, you don’t see the person and you’re still fucked in your head. Estrangement often fixes nothing because the patterns have still been laid in your brain. So this is a relationship between you and you. You’ve got to get your own self right, because if you have been raised not to have a self, separating from that parent isn’t going to fix that. You’re going to go into your marriage without a self. You’re going to go into your work without a self. This is really a lot of internal work, disentangling with an entire belief system that’s been planted in you, not with just a person.
Lindsay Gibson:
Right. And it’s also disentangling from the habitual behaviors and triggers of the emotionally immature person who is not deliberately, but very actively trying to draw you in to be who they need you to be for their own stability and self-esteem. And so yes, I think it’s both. I think you definitely have to disentangle from your own inner patterns, your own internalized patterns and all of that kind of learning that you’ve done, but you also, in the interpersonal world have to be alert to the ways that you are entangled, because of what this other person is actually doing. So to me, it’s both.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes. And can we go back to that practical, going into a potential brain scramble scenario? Because I think that’s right. We’ve been talking a lot theoretically about the relationship writ large, but we’re going into the holidays, there are many practical conversations that people will want to be having and they’ll probably be avoiding them, because they know as soon as they start it, they want to talk about X, they’re talking about Y, Z and A, and they don’t understand how, and they agreed to something that made them feel like complete shit afterwards and they abandoned themselves again. I think that it sounds so small. Like, “My goal for this conversation is to say, “I’m staying at a hotel when I come to visit for the holidays.”” That doesn’t seem like something that’s monumental, but it is because if you’re in that conversation, and the emotionally immature person takes it over here to Z, that has nothing to do with it, and you resist chasing them to Z, and you stay with what you came for, that is radical. It’s radical. And that is the way that you reconnect to yourself. That’s the way you dual track that, “I know I have a self and I can see this insanity from afar, from my safe place. I can see what’s happening.” Can you just walk us through the kind of radical things that happen in your, seemingly very modest goal of staying to the main thing?
Lindsay Gibson:
Yeah, staying to the main thing and staying in touch with yourself.
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Lindsay Gibson:
Because adult children of emotionally immature parents engage in these automatic self-defeating behaviors in order to get along with the emotionally mature parent. They become passive. They dissociate. They cut off from themselves, they get fuzzy, they get foggy, they’re kind of out of it. They get immobilized. They absolutely cannot think of what to say, and they beat themselves up for that afterwards because they’re like, “What was wrong with me? I couldn’t even think of a word to say.” And then, they can also feel like they’re in a state of learned helplessness. It’s like all of a sudden it feels like, “What’s the use?” They just give up. I mean, and they don’t want to give up and weren’t planning to give up, but it is a defensive mechanism. You flip into that because of the old pattern.
Lindsay Gibson:
So what you’re trying to do is, you’re trying to teach them that even a little bit of activity in the right direction is undermining that whole construction of passivity that you’ve been trained in. And it’s incredibly important, and useful, and healing for you to engage in any kind of activity that helps with that. So what I tell people is it’s repeat, repeat, repeat. Like if you want to set a boundary, you want to tell them that you’re not going to be staying with them or whatever it is, your goal is that you communicate that information. Your goal is not that they receive it well, not that they understand it, so on and so on, it’s that you communicated what you had power over communicating.
Lindsay Gibson:
And with emotionally immature people, it works best if you just keep repeating whatever the thing is that you want to get across because they don’t have a good defense against a simple repeated fact. They really don’t. They’re used to having people get flustered, confused, back off, argue with them, get hurt. I mean, that is a kind of interaction that they derail a lot of things into. And they’re very comfortable with that, because who is feeling close and emotionally intimate when people are going at each other like that? That’s their happy place. Well, I shouldn’t say happy place. It’s definitely their safe place, because there’s a kind of an enforced distance when there’s that kind of conflict.
Lindsay Gibson:
So when you just keep repeating what it is that you want to get across, they ultimately tend to kind of give up, or they get flustered and they walk away. But that approach tends to be much more effective than any strong arm tactics that people try when they’re trying to impress upon the other person what they’re there to tell them. So repetition. It works really well with emotionally immature parents, works really well with little kids. I mean, have you noticed that with little kids, you say, “No, you can’t,” or, “No you can’t,” or, “No you can’t. No, you can’t.” You don’t have to say, “I’ve told you 10 times.” No. “No, you can’t. No, you can’t.”
Amanda Doyle:
Yes.
Lindsay Gibson:
And they get bored with that and it’s no fun.
Amanda Doyle:
And when they start talking about some tangential thing that happened nine months ago that’s not relevant to this, we don’t follow them down that path for 12 minutes like we might do with our parents and wonder why the hell we’re talking about that now. We just say, “You can’t have the candy.”
Lindsay Gibson:
Exactly. Because we think that if you are 60 years old and you’re talking, you’re making sense. And I’m sorry, that’s not necessarily true.
Glennon Doyle:
Amen. Amen. So you say the goal is true to self, honest with them. I love that.
Glennon Doyle:
I’m thinking about this thing right now that I used to just, my strategy for family gatherings was to always have a hot cup of tea in my hands, and it always seemed so silly, but I’m wondering if it has to do with what you’re saying about maintaining a self? It was like, “I’m contained in this space. I feel the heat of the tea, which reminds me, I am a person, I’m feeling something. I have heat.” There’s a loss of self inside of systems, and is that why we leave and we’re like, “What just happened?” Because we haven’t maintained a self. So whatever you can do in these holiday times, tiny strategies to remember, “I am a person. I exist, I have boundaries. I have feelings that matter.”
Lindsay Gibson:
Yes. Because brain-wise, there’s a real reason for this, because if you are sitting with a cup of hot tea, the sensation of that, the presence that invokes, you become a person sitting with a cup of hot tea instead of a person floating in some Never Neverland between adulthood and childhood. You are you with the tea, and that puts you in a part of your brain that’s very present. It’s also the part of the brain that the sense of self comes from, which is the right side of the brain. It’s very hooked in with physical sensation, embodiment. And so that’s a great technique.
Lindsay Gibson:
Paying attention to your breathing, paying attention to your feet on the floor, rubbing your arm, squeezing your arm. These things bring us back to our body, which brings us back to the part of our brain that is connected to ourself, quite literally. I mean, that’s where it’s coming from. If you just try to argue by communicating verbally, that sends you over to your left part of your brain, which is very logical and very verbally expressive, but it won’t give you that feeling of being grounded. It won’t give you that feeling of self. And that’s what you really need when you’re interacting with them.
Amanda Doyle:
Don’t you feel so much compassion too, because you absolutely to survive, need to grow through yourself to have these very small, manageable, “I understand that I am not going to get this mutual understanding from you, so I’m going for the thing I really need, which is this concrete, small, manageable, maybe small, but huge thing. I’m staying at the hotel, I’m doing whatever.” And yet I understand why when we go into these, we get so amped up and so engaged. It’s like we’re fighting for our lives. It’s like your self-esteem, and your sense of self, and your peace feels so based on that human, and you’re so desperate for it to be reflected back to you. And so, undoubtedly you need to place your peace, and your sense of self, and your self-esteem in yourself, which will disentangle you from that person, because you’re going to stop pursuing it so hard with them.
Amanda Doyle:
But what do you do with the grief piece of that? That like, “I am never going to get that.”
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Amanda Doyle:
“That is not going to happen for me happen. I know I need to stop walking through fire with no boots on because that’s better for me.” But what about the grief part of that, that I won’t ever have that.
Glennon Doyle:
And what happens when that parent dies? I think most hold onto a healing fantasy, because we think in the arc of our story that clearly there’s going to be some kind of resolution to this. So I guess, the grief now or later, but yeah, how do you grieve that?
Lindsay Gibson:
Well, I think by the time you’ve gotten to a point of recognizing that there’s grief involved, your self-awareness has probably grown immensely because you have to know yourself very well to know that it’s grief that you’re feeling when you are working through some of these things with your emotionally immature parents. No child wants to believe that there’s anything wrong with their parents at all. They don’t think it’s right. They don’t think it’s fair. They don’t think it’s nice to see their parents in any kind of negative light. It just hurts a kid to see their parents in that kind of negative or critical light. Children are so protective of their parents. There’s even a story in the Bible about Noah where he was lying drunk on a bed or something, and his emotionally mature son walks backwards into the room with a cloak and throws it over his head onto his father. It’s that kind of sensitivity to the parent’s shame.
Glennon Doyle:
Ooh, that’s some heavy shit. Yes.
Lindsay Gibson:
And the parents’ loss of control or the parents’ loss of emotional stabilization. I mean, kids feel that. They are deeply embarrassed for their parents, and so it’s really hard for them to stay in touch with that awful feeling that the parent’s having a hard time or the parent’s not handling things very well. So when the child begins to work through some of these realities about their parent, yeah, at a certain point there begins to be a sense of grief because you’re coming to terms with the reality that parent, like any of us, can’t be more than who they really are.
Lindsay Gibson:
And in some ultimate existential sense, they really don’t need to. I mean, they’re doing their life. They’re who they are. The world’s not going to stop turning if they don’t change. And we can begin to acknowledge that their way of doing things is not ours. We don’t want to be that way. And we’re back to hope; we’re losing the hope that these people can change in ways that would give us what we need. And what I think we have to think about is stop trying to claw back what you didn’t get, and instead turn your attention toward what you can get from other people, from yourself, from your own pursuits. There’s a whole life waiting for you that, by recovering from your passivity, recovering from your sense of owing your life to other people, and making them feel better about themselves, when you recover from that, you have an opportunity to really have the kind of life that you wish your parents had given to you.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh God, that’s so beautiful.
Amanda Doyle:
You just said, “Stop trying to claw back what you didn’t get for your life and instead turn and accept what you can get.” Do you ever see that happening in the relationship with the emotionally immature parent? If the child has gotten to a place of true acceptance, letting go of false hope, really grieving what they lost and not trying to clap back anymore, are they able to sometimes truly accept what that parent has to offer because they’ve gone through that process?
Lindsay Gibson:
Yes, I think so. I had a client once who was pretty obsessed with getting her mother to change and just couldn’t turn loose of the idea that she would be able to get her mother to give her what she wanted. And I said to her, I said, “It’s like you have a box of diamonds and you’re obsessed with your mother’s bag of pennies.”
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Lindsay Gibson:
“The pennies aren’t going to add to your fortune. What if you didn’t keep trying to get those from her and just started focusing on the worth of what you already own?” And that was helpful to her because it put it into a perspective that she could relate to.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. Because pennies are also pennies. Pennies are something. They’re not nothing.
Lindsay Gibson:
True. That’s true. That’s true. And when you’re a little kid, pennies are even more something.
Amanda Doyle:
Compounding interest on those pennies if I had them 40 years ago.
Abby Wambach:
I mean, I think what you just said, it’s making me cry a little because part of what you just said that hit me so hard is that I’ve had that reversed for so long. That-
Lindsay Gibson:
Exactly.
Abby Wambach:
I was holding the pennies and my mom had the diamonds, and I think, and I don’t want to diminish my mom in any way here, but with her holding a bag of pennies, I just think it’s really important that I have to get comfortable with the fact that I have created a beautiful life, and I have to change my concept around what I thought was. Because when I was a kid, when we’re all kids, you grow up believing that your parents are these extraordinary gods, in a way. They are the doers and beers of your whole life. And I think that I’m reconciling with the fact that they’re just people with real problems, with real stuff, with real life situations and that-
Glennon Doyle:
And limitations.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Un-Goding, your parents is a lifetime of work.
Abby Wambach:
Our children will likely say that we are limited in some ways, as we grow older.
Glennon Doyle:
Sure. I mean, Lindsay, every time I walk by the couch, every time I walk by the couch and one of my kids is reading your book, I’m like, “Put that shit down. I cannot.” Because it’s on our coffee table. It’s our coffee table.
Amanda Doyle:
“That better be for a book report.”
Glennon Doyle:
I want to ask you something. I feel-
Lindsay Gibson:
That’s so funny.
Glennon Doyle:
We have had a lot of time to sink into your work, and I’m feeling actually for the first time, almost bad for the Pod Squad. I feel like we should have them all into my living room right now. All millions of them. I think that this is probably causing some real seismic shifts in people, and they might be feeling seen for the first time and they might want more. We’re going to link to all of your books, but also, can I ask you something? The Pod Squad’s about to go into the holidays. I’m wondering if we have the Pod Squad call in their real time questions during the holidays, would you come back sometime and answer some of these questions with us, with them?
Lindsay Gibson:
I would love to do that. That would be very fulfilling. I’d love to do that.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay.
Lindsay Gibson:
I just want to say one other thing on the topic of when a person gets over their grief, and they sort of resolve their issue with their parent, that theme, I just want to re-accentuate that the key to that is your own self-awareness and your own self-development. It’s easy to get into how to practically handle the misbehavior of the emotionally immature person, but as you develop yourself, and you have better relationships as a result of that, you have a better sense of yourself, you will develop an allergic reaction to emotionally immature behavior. You won’t want to be around it.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Lindsay Gibson:
It sort of takes care of itself because you can no longer make yourself engage in those kinds of interactions and relationships, but that comes from the work on yourself, on your own self development. And at a certain point, what tends to happen is that it’s almost like you see the parent for who they are and how they’re functioning. It’s a very distinct moment for a lot of people. I’ve had people describe it as almost like a twig snap. It’s like there’s a moment where it’s like, you’ll never go back to seeing them as the God again.
Abby Wambach:
Yes.
Lindsay Gibson:
I don’t know what it is, but there’s a transition moment where the gestalt shifts and they become this person that you understand in a completely different way, and they lose that God-like power, because the person who’s dealing with them now is your adult self instead of your terrified child. So I just wanted to mention that because with the grief comes a process that helps to get you to that point, and then when it happens, it comes about because of your self-development. You really can’t plan that, but you can grow to the point where you just can’t go back and enter into that anymore.
Abby Wambach:
So good.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s the breaking of the spell, and that’s the hope. That’s the healing.
Lindsay Gibson:
Ah, thank you. Thank you. The breaking of the spell. Absolutely. Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
And the healing process is that, that’s what I mean by, that’s why hope drives me nuts so often is because hope is the fake barrier. It’s the thing I don’t want to let go of, because I know there’s grief, hope is the blockage of the grief, but the grief is the necessary thing to walk through to get you to reality, to get you to the un-Goding of the parent. And I think the reason why I feel worried about everybody is that un-Goding your parents is scary as shit. It’s not just like, “Oh, that’s the thing. Yay. Now we’re good.” It’s like, “Oh no. That’s scary too.”
Abby Wambach:
It’s like you’ve revolved your whole life around the maypole of your parent.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s like losing your religion, it’s-
Abby Wambach:
And then you’re like, “Wait, I got to jump over to my own maypole?”
Glennon Doyle:
I’m a person.
Abby Wambach:
“I have to do this whole thing myself.” It’s terrifying.
Amanda Doyle:
But that’s the only way you can actually love them.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Amanda Doyle:
I do think that you-
Glennon Doyle:
Amen.
Amanda Doyle:
You can love the person that actually is, if you can stop love-hating the phantom dream of what they could be.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes, yes, yes. That’s so good.
Lindsay Gibson:
Really good. Love that.
Glennon Doyle:
Your work is phenomenally important and I’m so grateful for you, deeply grateful for you. All my friends are deeply grateful for you.
Lindsay Gibson:
Well, I feel the same way toward you.
Glennon Doyle:
Well, and now we don’t even have to say goodbye. We’ll just-
Abby Wambach:
See you soon.
Glennon Doyle:
We’ll see you soon and Pod Squad, I know, I know. Okay, I know. Just take yourself to your little computer and write down your feelings right now. Okay. Write your feelings-
Abby Wambach:
Or call in.
Glennon Doyle:
Write your questions. Take these conversations in your hot cup of tea through your holidays. When you’re in the middle of a brain scramble, call the We can Do Hard Things hotline.
Amanda Doyle:
It is 747-200-5307. 747-200-5307. Call us. Well, mostly call Lindsay Gibson.
Glennon Doyle:
And we’ll just reconvene and we’ll have more conversations about this. We are not dropping this thread. We’re in it with you. We love you. Lindsay, thank you. And we will see you back here next time on We Can Do Hard Things.
Glennon Doyle:
If this podcast means something to you, it would mean so much to us. If you’d be willing to take 30 seconds to do these three things. First, can you please follow or subscribe to We Can Do Hard Things? Following the pod helps you because you’ll never miss an episode, and it helps us because you’ll never miss an episode. To do this, just go to the We Can Do Hard Things show page on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and then just tap the plus sign in the upper right-hand corner or click on Follow. This is the most important thing for the pod. While you’re there, if you’d be willing to give us a five star rating and review and share an episode you loved with a friend, we would be so grateful. We appreciate you very much. We Can Do Hard Things is produced in partnership with Cadence13 Studios.