Narcissism vs. Emotional Immaturity: How to Set Boundaries with Family & Work on YOU with Lindsay C. Gibson
February 29, 2024
Glennon Doyle:
Welcome to, We Can Do Hard Things. Today we are continuing an incredibly important conversation that I think can actually change the way that we interact with so many people in our lives. The conversation is with Lindsay Gibson. It is about emotionally immature people. If you have not gotten the download about what an emotionally immature person is, please listen to episodes 263 and 264 and the last episode before you jump in here. But I am telling you right now, you are not going to want to miss this. This is like 50 minutes that will actually change the rest of your day. So today we have Lindsay Gibson, let’s hear from Dara.
Dara:
Hi, my name is Dara and I just finished listening to your episodes on emotional immaturity. And my question is, I have identified myself as a survivor of emotional neglect and I recognized myself in those conversations to some extent. And my question is, if I am somebody who is emotionally immature and I want to change that, what do I do? How do I grow out of this and what can I do to try to expand my emotional maturity? Thank you so much. I am a huge fan and I appreciate everything that you all do.
Glennon Doyle:
Dara, you’re the best kind of person in the whole world. I just love Dara. I mean, amazing. God, Dara.
Lindsay Gibson:
So good.
Glennon Doyle:
So great, right there in her name, Dara, brave, bold, honest.
Lindsay Gibson:
Yeah, absolutely. Yes, because here we go. It’s like, Dara, the first step has already been accomplished. All right? You’re self-reflecting. You’re wondering, “Do I have any of these characteristics of emotional immaturity? And if I do, what the heck am I going to do about them?” People who are going to be really hard to change are the emotionally immature people who have no capacity, no interest for self-reflection because they think that they’re right. They think that they know it all. They don’t know what they don’t know. They keep on moving in the same direction regardless of the feedback because this is what they know to do. And they are hell-bent on managing their stress by keeping things the same and by responding in ways that make them feel better, not necessarily the things that make the situation better.
So emotionally immature people get very locked and loaded in their own way of looking at the world, and this creates a kind of an echo chamber, okay? And their spouse can come and say, “I’m going to leave you if you don’t stop doing whatever.” And they’re like, “I am who I am.” Or, “Therapy is stupid.” Whatever, because they’re not interested in changing. But what I would say to you, Dara, is that yes, if you have the inkling that you may have some emotionally immature traits, there is so much that you can do to begin to change that. I mean, psycho-education is huge, I think, because then we have you giving yourself a language and a conceptual framework to create your own home study course. Like, “I want to work toward these things. Or, “I want to watch it when I do this, because now I can identify what these things are and I can pick the directions that I want to grow in.” So that’s huge.
You can listen to other people’s feedback. Let’s say, if you’re having a problem with your adult child or maybe you’re having a problem with your spouse or whatever. You can ask them for very limited feedback in one area at a time. Like, “What is it that I do, if anything, that really drives you nuts in this area?” And then you just listen. It’s a fact-finding mission. You’re not arguing about it. You’re not defending yourself. You’re just asking in this one area, we’re not opening this up to, “Five me a critique of my entire personality.”
Glennon Doyle:
Right. “I’m just talking about driving, people.”
Lindsay Gibson:
Just driving, yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Just driving.
Lindsay Gibson:
So you make it very limited because this stuff, feedback is hard to hear.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s hard.
Lindsay Gibson:
It’s hard to hear. Don’t do that to yourself. Don’t open the door to random reassessment of your personality. You want to ask them for a specific thing, tell them that’s all you can handle, but you just want to gather this information because you’re curious. And then after they tell you, you just thank them and go on about your business. “Thank you for telling me.” And then you can contemplate that and see what you think of it and what you might want to do. Of course, psychotherapy is wonderful, because there, you are in a relationship with someone, in individual therapy and group therapy too. But you can begin to see the dynamics. Group therapy is great for that.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Lindsay Gibson:
Because you’ve got all these different personalities who are reacting to you and whom you’re reacting to.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Lindsay Gibson:
And so that brings it in for examination in a very emotionally, real way.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Lindsay Gibson:
Okay, so right there, in VIVA, there it is. You can see what you’re doing. You can get feedback for how you’re coming across and maybe that person, that therapist, will have some ideas about how you could get the same needs met in a more emotionally intelligent way. In a way that doesn’t make other people feel bad or make them defensive against you. But in general, if you’re trying to move in the direction of more emotional maturity, I think that one of the things that is very helpful to look at is, “Where are the areas or when do I need to be right all the time.” Okay? You know that old saying about do you want to be right or do you want to be happy? Well, emotionally immature people, because of their low stress tolerance, always need to be right.
They get over in the left hemisphere of their brain that says, “This is this and that is that and I know what it is and that’s what we’re sticking with.” They don’t go over to their emotionally wise right hemisphere to get the lay of the land to see what the other person is feeling, to have empathy, to have imagination. They don’t go there. They stay over here where it’s safe. Like, “I already know what needs to happen.” So if you are that kind of person, you might want to give that a thought or two because that is classic emotionally immature behavior. Just like the four-year-old. They know what’s right. They know what they need. They know they need that candy bar before supper. They know they need to be able to play out in the front yard. They just know this. So question that tendency in yourself.
And the other one is, pay attention to the quality of your relationships, the interactions in your relationship. Is there good communication? Do you all listen to each other? Do you respect the other person’s individuality and maybe differing opinions? Just think about that.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Lindsay Gibson:
Do your own self-assessment because we want to see if you can respect other people’s right to think differently from you, respect their individuality. Like, maybe your kids are not going to do their life the way you want them to. That kind of backing up and seeing the other person as a true other, they’re not a reflection of you. They’re not a-
Glennon Doyle:
Threat. They’re not a threat to you.
Lindsay Gibson:
… missionary for your worldview. They are who they are. And if you can work on appreciating that, you’ll become much more emotionally mature in the way that you interact with them. So to practice things like empathy, staying calm, that’s stress management, less reactivity, and I don’t have to fight to the death for everything. I can let other people make a decision or be right sometimes. These are things that are very hard to do if you’re emotionally immature. But you can work toward that and it will improve your relationship immeasurably when you’re able to tackle some of those things. Things like meditation, any kind of stress reduction is very good for helping with building emotional maturity because you are turning yourself toward your inner world and you’re turning yourself toward a sense of self, which a lot of emotionally mature people have trouble with.
And the more you do that, the more you will grow. Because now you’re more aware of your inner life. That’s going to be reflected in your relationships with other people because you’re going to be more aware of their inner life.
Glennon Doyle:
Mm-hmm.
Abby Wambach:
That’s good.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s amazing.
Lindsay Gibson:
So there’s a lot you can do to mature yourself. I mean, I had a experience a few months ago with my husband where I was sitting at the dining room table working on a book or something, and I was deep into it, and of course I’ve plopped myself in the middle of the living space, at the dining room table because that appealed to me. Meanwhile, he’s going in and out to the deck behind me because he’s doing something out there. And I said something like, “Can you just stop shutting and opening the door so much?” And he said, “The way that you tell me to do that is making me feel like I’ve done something wrong. And I hate to say this to you, Lindsay, but that reminds me of your mom.”
Glennon Doyle:
Whoa, damn. Nuclear option.
Lindsay Gibson:
Well, he never, never says stuff like that, but I guess it was just low-hanging fruit.
Glennon Doyle:
Yes. He’s like, “I’ve been saving it for 20 years for that one moment.” God, it must be hard to be married to Lindsay Gibson. You always have to be fricking emotionally mature all the time, probably.
Abby Wambach:
Oh God.
Lindsay Gibson:
So when he did that, because he does it so rarely, it really stopped me and I thought, “Oh my gosh, not only is that correct, but I’m the one who sat down at the dining room table in the middle of the house to do my concentration work.”
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, interesting.
Lindsay Gibson:
It was an eye-opener. So I’m just giving this example because I’m somebody that thinks about emotional maturity all the time, and here I was acting in a way, like, “Why aren’t you revolving around me?”
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Lindsay Gibson:
Because I was stressed by my work. I was having to be very egocentric because I had to get this thing done by a deadline, and that put me in an emotionally immature spot within myself. Which is, “I’m so stressed, I need everybody to revolve around me.” He just reminded me, “Oh, there’s another person with feelings in this orbit. And how do you want to be Lindsay? Do you want to be a person who makes other people feel bad or do you want to be a person who says, ‘Gee, should I do my work at the dining room table or go downstairs to my office?'” Maybe that would’ve been a better decision.
Glennon Doyle:
And the reason why self-reflection is so important to all of this is because those are the moments where we haven’t been in touch with ourselves, so we don’t know what our needs are, so we start lashing out, right?
Lindsay Gibson:
Yes.
Glennon Doyle:
But we were doing all the self stuff, we would be like, “Oh, this is when I get stressed out and I can be kind of an asshole, so I’m going to separate myself.” That’s where it really is real. The more you’re rooted in yourself and your bodily experience, and then you make decisions based on that instead of outlashing.
Abby Wambach:
One of the things that I’ve been toying with over the last six months or so, I have an intense insecurity around my intellect, and so sometimes I can get telling a story whether it’s completely true or false, feels a little bit less relevant to me at times. And so I’m trying to speak really only true things, and so when I’m in conversation with somebody, like Glennon, and I don’t know something, that feels like such a diminishing of power or control of some sort. And so I’ve been working on saying just these words, “I don’t know.” Period. And then I would not expand on why I don’t know it. It was just, “I don’t know.” And it’s been this exercise in getting comfortable and safe with A, not knowing everything and B, letting that be fine, right?
Glennon Doyle:
It’s been beautiful.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, and I think what you just said really made me feel good. It makes me feel like, “Am I or aren’t I?” And it’s neither. We’re going to have moments where we’re really connected with ourselves and we’re super high in our emotional intelligence, but then we might slip into a moment or a part in us will show up that dysregulates us and we go into immature. That’s the word, immature.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Lindsay Gibson:
Yeah, but here’s the thing. There’s a book by Ed Tronick, who’s a infant researcher, and I think it’s called, something Discord, is in the title. But he talks about how with mothers and babies, that you have these mismatches at time between your capacity for empathy and the baby’s needs. So you mess it up sometimes or you’re not there for your children, for your older children. So you make mistakes, but he says that creates a building block of trust. There’s the basic kind of trust, which is something will magically appear and make this hunger go away or this wet diaper go away. That’s one kind of trust, but another kind of trust is, “Hey, I landed on this planet with these people who notice when they have hurt me and they come back and they apologize.” Or they’re doing something and they seem to realize it and then they change.
Glennon Doyle:
Nice.
Lindsay Gibson:
And that builds a stronger relationship every time it happens. If you respond to it in a way that changes the course towards something more productive. That’s that missile analogy like, “Okay, you’re not going to stop the missile.” The missile has moved on. It’s no longer at this coordinate. It has moved on, but you can guide it. You can guide it.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s the comfort.
Lindsay Gibson:
It’s like, it doesn’t matter what you do so much as what you do next.
Glennon Doyle:
And you don’t have to fix it. It’s like a pattern. It’s the comfort.
Lindsay Gibson:
You can’t fix it, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that you’ve hurt somebody or you’ve disappointed someone or whatever. What do you do next? Because the missile is still moving, so when you come back with an apology or even an empathic recognition that the other person has been hurt or there’s been some problem, you are actually mending and making the relationship stronger because you’ve just built that bridge toward, “Hey, we can communicate when something has gone wrong.” Or I can say, “I don’t know.” Or I could say to my husband, “I’m sorry. You’re absolutely right. I don’t know why I didn’t go set up in my office.” Because I wanted us to get back to our happy place together, and in order to do that, I was going to feel better if I really looked at this objectively and owned my part of it.
Glennon Doyle:
And isn’t it the cycle of being human too? It’s like-
Lindsay Gibson:
Absolutely.
Glennon Doyle:
… you’re born and then there’s all that trauma of literally being born, and then the first thing that happens to us, hopefully, is we feel the trauma, we feel the terror, we feel it, and then comfort. It’s like fear, stress, unknown, uncertainty and then being held.
Lindsay Gibson:
We can do hard things, right?
Glennon Doyle:
Right?
Lindsay Gibson:
That’s what that made me think of immediately.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. And that’s all we need. We don’t need to know people are going to hurt us and we’re going to be scared, and then they’re going to nail it and fix it and intellectualize it, and it’s all going to be… No, we just need the pattern of life to be, we feel scared and hurt, and then the people that love us are there to comfort us, even if they’re the people that screwed up.
Lindsay Gibson:
That harmed us, yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
But we as the people, we get it wrong because… I’ll say I get it wrong because I think my person is scared and I hurt them, and so I need to make sure that person does not think that I hurt them. I need to explain it away, tell them what I was thinking, make them understand completely. Which is not what they needed, and also a gaslighting, because that’s how we learn. That’s how somebody ends up in therapy going, “Should I want this? Should I need this?” Because I was in pain and in fear and somebody said to me, “No, you’re not. I didn’t do that. That’s not what happened.” As opposed to just, even if I don’t understand why you’re hurt, comfort. “I’m so sorry that you’re hurt.” And that requires humility and softness and embodiment and not intellectualization, and it requires a major courage and groundedness in myself that me saying that you’re hurt and I hurt you is not going to destroy my sense of self.
If I think it’s going to destroy my sense of self, I will panic and I will say, “No, no, no, no, no, I didn’t do that.” And I will do it in an attempt to be a good parent or a good friend.
Abby Wambach:
We’ve all done it.
Glennon Doyle:
And I will leave you abandoned, crying.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah, we’ve all done it.
Glennon Doyle:
As opposed to taking you into my arms.
Amanda Doyle:
But that’s why it’s so, it’s less about the repair of the relationship and it’s more about the affirming of the person’s needs, right?
Glennon Doyle:
Yes.
Amanda Doyle:
When there is a disconnection, which is all that is, over and over again. That’s what the attachment theory is like, “Now I’m disconnected, I’m coming back, I’m reconnecting.” It’s like you coming and saying, as Dr. Bucky says, “You were right to feel that. The thing that you felt, I am validating that that is a need.”
Glennon Doyle:
For you.
Amanda Doyle:
“That there was a disconnection. That that thing that was hurt in you is a real thing. It’s real and it’s right, and you should give it life instead of trying to kill it in you.” Which is why, Julie from the last episode, whose husband has the wall, the million points where there was opportunities for connection and that connection was unmet. The million times a day when it’s obvious that Julie is feeling something and her husband won’t go there with her. That is a million little disconnections where his lack of connection is saying to her, the opposite of your right to feel that way. It’s saying to her, “That thing in you that has a need, kill that thing.”
Abby Wambach:
That’s right.
Amanda Doyle:
Don’t keep it alive.
Abby Wambach:
That’s right. It’s good.
Lindsay Gibson:
Yeah, it’s good.
Abby Wambach:
You two just really did just good things. I mean you three, but-
Amanda Doyle:
You did good things. Thank you.
Abby Wambach:
Yeah. Glennon, your sister, what you guys just said was just so beautiful, smart.
Glennon Doyle:
Also, I just want to say that the fact that even Dara wrote that question means she’s fine. I remember when I was teaching and I would have these seminars, believe it or not, for the parents to come in to learn how to do their homework with their kids. Or learn how to talk to them about their feelings, and then all the parents would come and I’d be like, “None of you people need to be here.” The people who need to be here are always the people who are not here. Right? Dara, you’re here. You’re fine.
All right, let’s move on to sweet, sweet, sweet Jenna.
Jenna:
Hi, Glennon. My name is Jenna and I’m calling because I have been trying to untangle my relationship with my mother and the last couple of years I have been trying to work through her being possibly a narcissist, but I feel like that label doesn’t totally fit her. And when I listened to the podcast with Lindsay Gibson, the two podcasts about being emotionally immature, that label actually fit her to a T. It really resonated with me. So I’m wondering if she could differentiate between someone being a narcissist and someone being emotionally immature because I feel like there’s a lot of overlap between the two, and I’m trying to just maybe understand my mother a little bit better. So if she could help with that would be great. Thank you so much for all you do. Bye-Bye.
Lindsay Gibson:
A good way to think about differentiating between these different types of, maybe we might call them personality disorders such as narcissism and other things, and being emotionally immature, is to say that all narcissists are emotionally immature, but not all emotionally immature people are narcissists. Okay, so narcissism would be a type of emotional immaturity in my mind. It means that this is the flavor of the ice cream. This is the type of filter that your emotional immaturity is going to run through on its way into its interactions with you. So when we’re trying to decide what is narcissism and what is emotional immaturity, we want to think about some of the hallmarks of basic emotional immaturity.
And I’m going to say a few of these, and then you can just imagine that those are very vague and abstract and they really could be filtered in all different kinds of ways, one of which might be narcissism. But it could come out in different ways, and that’s where those four types of emotionally immature parents that I broke it down into, come from. You can have an emotionally reactive parent. You can have a driven perfectionistic parent. You can have a rejecting or cold parent, and you can have a passive but benign parent who just isn’t mean, but they don’t protect you either.
They’re not really very active on your own behalf. So those are different types of filters for the emotional immaturity. But if you’re basically emotionally immature, you’re going to be very self-absorbed, very egocentric. All roads lead to you and your interests. You’re going to have poor empathy or limited empathy. You are going to have a very low capacity for self-reflection. You just don’t think about yourself in any kind of self-assessing way, and you interpret reality through your emotions. If something feels good to me, then this was a very loving thing for you to do because you made me feel good. If something happens that makes you feel disappointed, then it must mean that you don’t love me, that I’m not important to you.
Everything is interpreted through how it feels to me. Exactly the same situation as a four-year-old or a three-year-old. “I like it. It’s good. I don’t like it. It’s bad.” So these are some of the characteristics that you would find in all different types of emotionally immature people on a continuum, on a spectrum. But narcissism has a special quality to it. It usually has something to do with very exaggerated categories in the person’s mind about people are either ideal, wonderful, exaggeratedly good, or they’re worthless, shameful, useless. They degrade people. So there’s a tendency to either over-idealize people when you’re in their good graces, and then to devalue them when they’re not.
They tend to have a very grandiose self-image, like they just cannot admit that they made a mistake or they didn’t know something. They have to always be in a position of rectitude, so to speak, and that people should look up to them and keep them in the center of attention. But the quality of grandiosity and entitlement is what really sets it off. It just seems apparent to them that they should be the center of everything. I mean, it would be counterintuitive to think otherwise. When there’s a family celebration or a wedding or Thanksgiving or whatever, it just feels awful to them that the focus is on something else or someone else. It just hits them as all wrong and it makes them feel incredibly insecure and it prompts them to pick fights or say things that draw all the attention to them or causes chaos because they need to be the center.
And if I have to create chaos so I can be the eye of that hurricane, so be it. That makes me feel better than if I am on the periphery, floating in the void and nobody has their eyes on me, which is kind of the existential dark side of narcissism. Like, “I cease to exist if you’re not making me the most special person in the world.”
Glennon Doyle:
Lindsay, why? What happens in a person’s life that makes them feel that way? Or people aren’t born narcissists, right?
Lindsay Gibson:
There’s a difference of opinion on that. I mean, some people think that there may be some innate tendency toward narcissism, maybe genetic maybe in terms of brain chemistry. So I don’t know. What I understand is that whatever we’re born with, there are certain things that I think help narcissism along. For instance, if a child is alternately indulged and yet not seen for their own individuality. In other words, they have a role to play, like, “That’s my little man.” Or, “That’s my little princess.” They are idealized by their parent who often can have narcissistic tendencies too. They’re idealized into that, “You have to be the greatest if you’re going to get any attention at all.”
So they’re given a lot of attention for certain things about them like being handsome or smart, but they don’t really feel seen and held in that relationship with the important other. And so there’s a deep insecurity. If you’re not paying attention to me and giving me all kinds of positive feedback, then I become a speck that’s rotating in outer space with nothing to hold onto. All right, terrifying, existentially, non-existent, terrifying. So I have to come in and be who I think you need me to be to even pay attention to me, which is going to be very inflated, grandiose. I’m the best, I’m the most wonderful. Because that’s what it takes, the narcissistic person thinks, for me to be worthy of you paying attention to me. Because I wasn’t loved and accepted as just my own unique little person. I was accepted and loved because I brought this-
Glennon Doyle:
This thing.
Lindsay Gibson:
… to the family. I did something for my parents that really made them value me.
Glennon Doyle:
Wow. It’s like the story of narcissists looking down into the lake and then seeing the image of self. There is no self-love. I’m not in love with myself. I have no self. What I’m in love with and will continue to project for the rest of my life, is that image in the pond, in the lake?
Lindsay Gibson:
Oh my God, yes, absolutely.
Glennon Doyle:
It’s like if we were going to make it into modern day, it would be like narcissists, there’s a version of themselves that is a hologram that they’re flashing out into space, and they constantly forever have to flash that hologram because they don’t know that what is inside their body. So it’s sad because we think of narcissism as such a self, self, self, self, but it is actually a complete lack of self.
Lindsay Gibson:
Yes. It’s like a no self, no self, no self.
Glennon Doyle:
Wow.
Lindsay Gibson:
And my best self, the self that is probably going to bring me love and acceptance, is in this image. Whether it’s in the water or in the mirror. I have to become that in order to be loved. There’s this thing in novel writing where one of the writing teachers that I read was talking about is the mirror moment. He said it occurs halfway through the book or halfway through the movie, whether some moment where the person sees an image of themselves. It might be a reflection in a door. It might actually be looking in the mirror, but that’s where that person has to decide, “Am I that image in the mirror? Am I who I have become? Or am I who I really am inside?”
Glennon Doyle:
I know those moments, Lindsay. I know those moments.
Lindsay Gibson:
Yeah. And so you have that mirror moment where the trajectory of your life can actually change. And that’s what we love about movies and novels and stories, is that there’s a transformation in the hero or in the main character that shows us that it can be done. That we can look at ourselves, going back to that thing about being emotionally immature. We can see that what I’ve been pursuing in the mirror may not be the most important thing. Maybe inside me that I need to contact.
Abby Wambach:
That was really helpful.
Glennon Doyle:
Okay. Let’s hear from Courtney.
Courtney:
Hi, my name’s Courtney and I have a question about emotionally immature parents. What if you’ve done the work and you’ve gone to therapy and you’ve grieved and you still feel like you actually are healthier, not reconnecting with that parent? What if I really love my dad and I’m really healthier when he’s not in my life? How do I release guilt from that and societal shame? I know you guys have all of the answers, so if you could just solve all of my problems, that would be great. Thanks. Bye.
Glennon Doyle:
I mean, I’m just dying to hear the answers.
Abby Wambach:
I don’t have any answers. I’m dying to know what the answer to this is.
Lindsay Gibson:
Oh, gosh. Yeah. But it’s really fairly simple. This goes back to that part about, “Should I be feeling bad?” Or, “Is this the right way to be?” Or, “Am I making a big deal out of this?” It goes back to that self-doubt about what it is that you’re really feeling. So Courtney, what you’re saying is that you have obviously processed a lot about your parents and your father, and yet there’s something in you that keeps speaking to you that says it doesn’t feel good being around him. I end up moving in directions that I don’t want to go in just to get along with him. Something along those lines. So that has to be listened to because you can come to some sort of understanding about their emotional immaturity.
You can grieve what you didn’t get. You can do that inner work of really accepting what your experience has been. But then there’s this other thing, and this other thing is that he’s a real person, and when you interact with that real person, you are still going to have the effects of his personality on you. Doesn’t matter how much work you’ve done, okay? You may be less reactive to him now. You may be more in touch with yourself and more connected, but it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t feel draining and maybe very unpleasant to be around him for any number of reasons. It could be so many things, but it’s like if you go to a restaurant and they serve you something that you just don’t like or someone said, “You can only shop in this clothing store even if it looks awful on you.” And it has nothing to do with your personality. You would have an embodied, visceral response to that. It’d be like, “I don’t like this. I don’t feel good in it. I don’t like the way this tastes.”
Can you change that? Well, maybe if you were starving somewhere or you didn’t have any clothes. Maybe you could make adjustments, but you’re not going to be able to turn yourself into the kind of person that enjoys or even is neutral around a person that, for whatever reason, you just don’t enjoy being around. It’s possible to really love your dad, and it’s possible to really be healthier when he’s not in your life. So that opens up all kinds of possible combinations there. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. I think people are afraid of admitting how much they don’t like somebody in their family because they think, “Well, now it means that I’ve got to get a divorce.” Or, “I’ve got to become estranged.” Or, “Now Thanksgiving is not going to be able to happen anymore.”
They get into these very polarized mindsets, but that’s not really what we’re talking about here. What we’re talking about is, we need to find the optimal distance, and by that I mean in time and space. If I go to visit them, I go and I stay in a hotel. That’s optimal distance. Or, I only visit them once a year, or I only visit them on their turf because I don’t really want him in my home. I mean, you create your optimal distance and set and enforce these boundaries. Another thing that you can do is in your mind, you can pick a length of time that you want to be your break from this person. Like, “For the next three months I just don’t want to worry about whether I see dad or not.”
So no matter what comes up or what he invites me to do, I’m not doing anything for three months. This may or may not be done in the form of an estrangement, which is, “Dad, don’t contact me. I’m not up for emails. I just need some time to process my own life. Please do me a favor and don’t contact me until I let you that I’m back in the land of a living.” You can do it that way. And then when you come back, if you come back and want to have contact re-initiated, then that’s a really good time to set boundaries going forward. In other words, we just hit the restart button. We are going to move forward under these conditions, which you would put into place as occasions arose.
But you would be able to set these rules of engagement in a way that you can go forward feeling like you have some control over the amount of contact you have with this person. Like I said, it could be once a year. It could be three times a year. Just whatever you can really tolerate or what little bit of contact satisfies your love for your dad but doesn’t exhaust you or leave you recovering for a week.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah.
Abby Wambach:
That’s so good.
Glennon Doyle:
Or makes you unhealthy. When Courtney said healthy, one thing that I would like to throw into the conversation that I’ve learned is that when we’re little, we don’t have any power to deal with scenarios or create boundaries or make sanity or comfort ourselves through moments that maybe are hurting our feelings. So we develop strategies to survive all of it. So for me, eating disorder behavior, without getting into all the details of that, was very important to me as a coping strategy. One of the things I think is interesting when you’re trying to figure out whether you can have a relationship or whatever, Courtney’s trying to figure out, is to notice the thing about being an adult is regardless of how messy it is, you can make boundaries. You do have power.
You can say no to things, but sometimes when you’re in a relationship with an emotionally immature parent, you still don’t, for whatever reason. Those pathways are just burnt into your… You can be a brave, bold person all the time, but then you enter into the room and you just. And Lindsay, for me, it’s hard to just be like three times a year because for me, it’s kind of like drinking. It’s not how often. It’s how I am in those moments, even if it’s twice a year. If I become a different person during that time, if I start hurting myself again, then that’s too much, Courtney. What I have found is there’s no getting away with it. If I’m in a situation with a person that I don’t feel like I can use my agency with, I will revert back to old things.
I haven’t figured out how to do it a third way yet. I am either… People walk into their parents’ house and… I shouldn’t say people, me. I will find myself, I come to and I’m in a pantry, scarfing down food. If I don’t feel like I can use my agency, I revert back to that maladaptive behavior as a child. And so for me, I’m in this time of, it’s not how much, it’s how. And if I can’t figure out a way to maintain my agency, to maintain my adult self, to honor myself, then what’s the point of the difference between childhood and adulthood? I’ve got that little self, and I’m saying to that self, “I’ve got us now. We do have power now.” But then, it’s so scary. I feel for Courtney because the restaurant example, the clothes example, I’m not thinking one day someone’s going to die and I’m going to regret not having gone to that clothes store.
It’s like fear of future regret that I’m going to lose this parent and I’m not going to have done whatever it took to be with them, is ever present.
Abby Wambach:
Can I say one thing? So I have a very specifically similar issue going on in my life, and over the last, I don’t know, six months of therapy, I’ve been talking to my therapist a lot about the guilt and the shame. I should want to fix this relationship with my father. I should want to make sure that there are things that are not unsaid before he were to die. And one of the things that I realized that was so earth shattering to me, is that all along, because my needs were not met, which are valid, affirmed, totally agree on that for myself. But what then I was doing was that I was not adjusting my expectations of the relationship. I wasn’t doing anything proactively to adjust the way that we were interacting in our father, daughter relationship.
And my expectations of things changing without actually doing or saying or having a boundary. That’s my responsibility, that I, as an adult, and I’ve been an adult for many, many years, for decades that I never took upon myself. So the expectation of him to change in any way was me. I was putting this responsibility on him that he’s just been going around dadding, doing his way of life, his whole life. And so once I realized, “Oh, I have a little bit of responsibility here that I didn’t engage in, that I didn’t take on.” I was able to go home recently, and his behaviors are still the same. They’re not changing, and now I’m getting less triggered by them. Because I’m like, “Oh yeah, that’s just who you are.”
And that was, the way he were and the way that it affected me, I didn’t have my needs met. And that’s just like a reality. So I don’t know Courtney, I don’t know if that gives you any kind of help in the matter, but now that I see my parents that they’re just doing their way, didn’t really land that great for me. But when I do go home, which is very rarely, I can see my dad as just like a person. I just wanted to say that to see if that would ring true for Courtney.
Lindsay Gibson:
Yeah, no, that is so important because that’s where your power and your agency are, is in how you respond to the stimulus, which is the behavior of the emotionally immature person. It’s amazing what can happen to your feeling about whether you spend time with people, if you allow yourself to be more your true self when you’re around them. And that would include that ability to express yourself, to come up with your viewpoint on something, to not laugh along with a joke you didn’t find funny, to go home early when you were tired of the visit. All these things that basically, there are autonomous moments where you are responding to the situation with your own real true response and your own real true need.
And when you start fulfilling your own needs like that, even if it’s a bit of an iceberg moment where you begin to feel a little squirrely about whether or not they’re going to get upset with you, but if that becomes part of your mindset about how you’re going to do the visit. And then, this is important, you come back home, you come back to the hotel, you go back to your car, whatever it is, and you reflect and define what you did. You put words on it, you put concepts on it. “I did it differently. I paid attention to myself. I wasn’t intimidated in the same way. I didn’t think I was morally obligated. I didn’t think I was morally wrong.” Once we start putting words on what we did that was helpful and growth promoting, it becomes ours. You got to do that self-reflection afterwards to sock it in there so that you have this template that you can use again in the future.
But I love that having the sense of agency is what helps us to not feel so triggered. We are triggered when we feel frozen, like deer in the headlights. When we feel helpless, that’s what triggers us because that’s such an awful feeling existentially. So yeah.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah. It’s like there are situations where we dissociate and then it becomes a thing of sometimes, am I going to abandon myself? And then I think sometimes we think, “Okay, it’s fine. I’ll just abandon myself three times a year.” And then they happen to be on holidays. So why do we hate holidays? Do we have to abandon ourselves on the days that we’re told… Anyway.
Abby Wambach:
I don’t think you have to abandon yourself. I think that there’s also a separate space that you can… This is what I’ve learned recently, is that I don’t have to jump into the mess of and the chaos of a holiday moment with family. I became a little bit more of an observer, and at least that was my attempt at not missing the whole thing. At being there, but not, I don’t know. I didn’t get into the poison stew. I was just sitting on the outside of it. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but I just love you. I love you. I think you’re amazing. Love your work.
Glennon Doyle:
I know, Lindsay, thank you so much. I just love how you… Because this can be polarizing in terms of you’re this person or that person, and I love how you have so much grace for all of it. And it’s a big, messy, beautiful thing. And it’s cool to think about if you think that things are messy and you’re okay with things getting messy and you are willing to be in the muck of it, then this isn’t you. If you’re really confused, you’re not emotionally mature, because emotionally immature people are not confused.
Lindsay Gibson:
Right, right.
Abby Wambach:
That’s funny.
Lindsay Gibson:
Yes. And they don’t know what they don’t know.
Glennon Doyle:
Right, right, right.
Lindsay Gibson:
And they don’t want to know.
Abby Wambach:
Exactly.
Amanda Doyle:
And they don’t want to know.
Glennon Doyle:
Maybe they’re onto something, Lindsay.
Lindsay Gibson:
Yeah. Sounds pretty nice to me actually. And the next pod will be a tutorial on how to become emotionally immature.
Glennon Doyle:
Yeah, exactly.
Lindsay Gibson:
The easy life.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, Lindsay Gibson, you’re so amazing. Thank you.
Lindsay Gibson:
It’s such a pleasure to be with you guys. I end up being sparked by everything that you say and thinking about which trail I want to go down in my writing after I leave here today. So thank you for such a stimulating talk and I love all these questions from your listeners. They’re just perfect.
Glennon Doyle:
Oh, good. Well, we will be linking to Lindsay’s books. Just know pod squad that these are books that you’re just going to need them. Just trust us. You’re going to need them.
Abby Wambach:
Get them.
Glennon Doyle:
And we will see you next time, pod squad, we love you very much. Bye.
Abby Wambach:
Bye-bye.
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 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 Cadence 13 Studios. I give you Tish Melton and Brandy Carlisle.
Speaker 8:
(Singing)