Growing Up with Emotionally Immature Parents

Growing up in a family with emotionally immature parents is actually a lonely experience. These parents may look or act completely normal, taking care of their child’s physical health and providing them with meals and safety. However, if they do not establish a strong emotional bond with their child, a huge void will appear in the child, where there could have been true security.
Loneliness due to the feeling of being invisible to others is a fundamental pain, just like a physical injury, only it is not visible from the outside. Emotional loneliness is a vague and personal experience, which is not easy to notice or describe. We can call it a feeling of emptiness, as if you are alone in the world. Some people have described this feeling of emptiness as existential loneliness, but there is nothing existential about it. If you feel it, it means it comes from your family.
Children have no way of identifying a lack of emotional closeness in their relationship with their parent. It’s just not a concept they have. They are even less likely to understand that their parents are emotionally immature. The only thing they have is an inner feeling of emptiness, which is actually how a child experiences loneliness. With a mature parent, a child’s remedy for loneliness is to approach the parent and feel tenderness. But if your parent was afraid of deep feelings, you may have been left with an uneasy sense of shame for needing comfort.
When children of emotionally immature parents grow up, the basic emptiness still exists, even though they lead seemingly normal adult lives. Their loneliness can also be transferred into adulthood, if they unconsciously choose relationships that cannot offer them enough emotional connection. She may regularly go to school, work, get married, raise children, but all that time they will be haunted by that essential feeling of emotional isolation.
When we are children, the basis of our security is the emotional bond with our guardians. Parents who are emotionally involved give children the feeling that they always have someone to turn to. This type of security requires genuine emotional interactions with parents. Emotionally mature parents almost always engage at this level of emotional connection. They have developed a sufficient degree of self-awareness to be comfortable with their own feelings, as well as with the feelings of other people.
More importantly, they are emotionally attuned to their children, notice their moods, and welcome their feelings with interest. A child feels safe connecting with such a parent, whether seeking comfort or sharing his enthusiasm. Mature parents make their children feel that they enjoy interacting with them and that it is okay to talk about emotional problems. Such parents have a dynamic and balanced emotional life and are usually consistent in providing attention and interest to their children. They are emotionally reliable.
Parents who are emotionally immature, on the other hand, are so self-absorbed that they don’t notice their children’s inner experiences. In addition, they devalue feelings, they are afraid of emotional closeness. They are uncomfortable when it comes to their own emotional needs, and therefore do not know how to provide support on an emotional level. Such parents can become irritable and angry if their children become upset, punishing them instead of comforting them. Such reactions extinguish the child’s instinctive need to seek support, closing the door to emotional contact.
If one or both of your parents were not mature enough to provide you with emotional support, as a child you may have felt the effects of that deprivation, but not necessarily known what was wrong. You may have thought that the feeling of emptiness and loneliness was your own private and unusual experience, something that made you different from others. As a child you had no way of knowing that this feeling of emptiness is a normal and universal response to a lack of adequate human support. “Emotional loneliness” is a term that already suggests a solution, which is to feel another person’s interest in what we feel. This kind of loneliness is not a strange or meaningless feeling; it is a predictable result of growing up with insufficient empathy from others.