Growing Up With Emotionally Immature Parents: Healing as an Adult
It’s a strange kind of grief to look back on your childhood and realize:
“They were there. They fed me, drove me to school, asked about my grades.
But I don’t think they ever really knew me.”
Maybe no one screamed, threw things, or used words like “abuse.” On paper, your childhood might even look fine—even privileged. And yet, there’s an ache you can’t quite justify. A sense that you grew up too fast. A sense that your feelings were always “too much,” or that there just wasn’t room for you.
If this resonates, you might have grown up with emotionally immature parents.
As an adult in Denver (or anywhere in Colorado), you might find yourself successful on the outside while internally feeling lonely, anxious, or responsible for everyone else’s emotions. You might struggle to set boundaries, to trust your own judgment, or to believe you’re allowed to have needs.
This post is for you—the adult who is only now realizing that what you went through counts, even if no one else saw it.
What does “emotionally immature” actually mean?
Emotionally immature parents aren’t necessarily bad people. Many are doing the best they can with the tools they have. But their limited emotional capacity has real impact on their children.
Emotionally immature parents often:
Struggle to regulate their own emotions
Become overwhelmed by conflict or intense feelings
Center their own needs and perspectives, even when they don’t mean to
Expect their children to adapt to them, instead of the other way around
Avoid hard conversations by shutting down, minimizing, or deflecting
They might have been:
The parent who could talk about homework or chores, but shut down when you were sad or scared
The parent who made everything about their stress, their disappointment, their anxiety
The parent who said, “You’re too sensitive,” when your feelings showed up
The parent who leaned on you for emotional support, advice, or comfort when you were still a kid
You may not have had the language for it then. You just knew that being honest often made things worse, so you learned to manage yourself—and sometimes them.
What it felt like to grow up with emotionally immature parents
Children are wired to adapt. When the adults around you couldn’t consistently show up emotionally, you didn’t think, “They’re emotionally immature.” You thought things like:
“I’m too much.”
“I shouldn’t bother them.”
“It’s my job to keep them calm/happy/proud.”
“If I can just be good enough, they’ll finally see me.”
You may have learned to:
Read the room constantly, scanning for your parent’s mood before deciding how to act
Become the “easy” child—high achieving, low drama, taking care of things so no one had to worry
Swallow your feelings because your parent either dismissed them or became overwhelmed by them
Step into a caretaker role for siblings, or even for a parent, when they were struggling
On the outside, you might have been praised for being “so mature,” “so responsible,” or “wise beyond your years.” Inside, you were likely scared, lonely, or exhausted—carrying adult-sized emotional responsibilities with a child’s nervous system.
If you’re queer, trans, and/or neurodivergent, this may have been even more complex. Your parents may not have had the capacity—or the willingness—to understand your identity or your needs. You might have learned to mask, to play the role they could handle, rather than risk their confusion or rejection.
How those dynamics show up in your adult life
Decades later, you might still be living by rules that started in that childhood home, even if you’ve physically moved far away from it.
You might notice patterns like:
Over-responsibility. You feel guilty when other people are upset, even when it has nothing to do with you. You rush to fix things, soothe everyone, and smooth over conflict.
Difficulty naming your own needs. You can list everyone else’s preferences and stressors, but when someone asks what you want, your mind goes blank.
Confusion around “normal.” You second-guess your reactions: “Was it really that bad?” “Am I being dramatic?” You’re not sure where the line is between healthy compromise and self-abandonment.
Attraction to familiar dynamics. You might find yourself in relationships with partners, friends, or bosses who are self-centered, unpredictable, or emotionally unavailable—because that’s what you learned to organize yourself around.
Chronic self-doubt. Even when you’re objectively competent, a part of you expects to be criticized, dismissed, or told you’re making a big deal out of nothing.
Guilt for pulling back. When you try to set even small boundaries with your parents now, you feel intense guilt, anxiety, or pressure to fix their feelings.
On top of this, there can be a persistent, quiet grief: the grief of growing up without the kind of emotional parenting you needed.
You might grieve the birthday parties where no one really saw you, the accomplishments that went unacknowledged, the moments you needed comfort and got logic or dismissal instead. You might grieve the version of yourself that could have existed in a different environment.
That grief is valid.
Naming what happened (even if it “wasn’t that bad”)
One of the hardest parts of healing from emotionally immature parenting is believing yourself.
You might hear an internal voice say things like:
“They weren’t monsters.”
“They worked hard.”
“We had food, a house, vacations—other people had it worse.”
All of that might be true. And it can also be true that your emotional needs weren’t met in a consistent, attuned way—that you were left alone with big feelings, that you were used for emotional support, or that you had to shrink yourself to keep the peace.
Trauma isn’t measured only by how dramatic something looks from the outside. It’s measured by what it did to your nervous system, your sense of self, and your ability to feel safe and connected.
If your body still braces when a parent calls, if you still feel like a child in their presence, if holidays leave you wrung out and small—that says something real about what you went through.
Naming that is not about demonizing your parents. It’s about finally telling the truth about your experience, so you can care for the parts of you that got left behind.
The complicated grief of realizing this as an adult
Realizing in your 20s, 30s, or 40s that your parents were emotionally immature can stir up a complicated mix of feelings.
You might feel:
Anger. At what you didn’t get, what you had to carry, how alone you felt.
Sadness. For your younger self, for the relationship you wish you could have had, for the parent you hoped they’d become.
Empathy. You might see how they were never really parented emotionally either, how lost they were, how little support they had.
Guilt. For feeling any of the above. For wanting space. For not wanting to be the “bigger person” anymore.
This is grief in layers. You’re not only grieving the past; you’re grieving the fantasy of the future relationship you might never have.
It’s okay if part of you still hopes they’ll change. It’s also okay if another part is tired of organizing your life around that hope.
Therapy can be a space where all of those parts are allowed to exist at the same time—where you don’t have to choose between understanding your parents and honoring the impact they had on you.
What healing can look like (it’s not about fixing your parents)
Healing from emotionally immature parenting doesn’t require your parents to admit anything, apologize, or change—though it’s understandable if you wish they would.
Instead, healing is more about:
Re-parenting yourself
You begin to offer yourself the things you didn’t reliably get: validation, comfort, encouragement, permission to feel what you feel.
That might look like:
Noticing when your inner critic sounds eerily like a parent’s voice—and gently challenging it
Letting yourself cry without immediately minimizing or explaining it away
Speaking to yourself in the tone you wish an adult had used with you: “Of course this hurts. You’re not overreacting.”
Over time, this creates a new internal template. You become someone who can be with your own feelings, rather than someone who abandons yourself at the first sign of distress.
Learning what you actually feel and want
If you spent years orienting around your parents’ moods and needs, turning your attention inward can feel disorienting. You might not automatically know what you like, dislike, or need.
Healing here can be incredibly simple and incredibly brave:
Pausing for a beat when someone asks your opinion, and checking in with your body
Noticing when your chest tightens or your stomach drops—signs that something isn’t right for you, even if you can’t name why yet
Experimenting with small preferences: what you eat, how you dress, how you spend your free time, what you say yes or no to
Your preferences are not selfish; they’re data about who you are.
Setting and maintaining boundaries (and surviving the guilt)
For many adults with emotionally immature parents, boundaries feel both necessary and terrifying.
A boundary might be:
Limiting how often you talk, text, or visit
Saying no to topics that always end in dismissal, conflict, or control
Leaving a gathering early when your body is clearly done
Choosing not to share vulnerable details they’ve historically used against you
Your parents may not like these changes. They may react with confusion, hurt, or even anger. That doesn’t automatically mean you’re doing something wrong.
Part of healing is learning that you can disappoint people you love and still be a good person—that you’re allowed to protect your own nervous system, even if others don’t understand.
How therapy can support you in this work
Doing all of this alone can feel overwhelming, especially when the old patterns are so deeply wired. Working with a therapist who understands emotionally immature parents, complex trauma, and (if it applies to you) queer and neurodivergent experiences can give you a more stable base to push off from.
In therapy, we might:
Name the patterns you grew up with and how they show up now, so you’re not gaslighting yourself about your own story
Validate your emotional reality, including the grief, anger, and loyalty that coexist when we talk about parents
Practice boundaries in real time, noticing what happens in your body when you imagine saying no or choosing yourself
Explore your identities—including queer and neurodivergent parts of you that may have been ignored or shamed at home
Use trauma-informed approaches (like EMDR, if appropriate) to help your nervous system update old beliefs like “I’m responsible for everyone’s feelings” or “My needs are dangerous”
Therapy becomes a place where you don’t have to parent anyone. You don’t have to manage the other person’s reactions. You get to be the one who is accompanied, instead of the one doing the accompanying.
For many adults in Denver and across Colorado, that reversal alone is deeply healing.
You’re allowed to want more than just “it could be worse”
Growing up with emotionally immature parents often teaches you to minimize your own pain. You become fluent in “It wasn’t that bad” and “Other people had it worse.” While perspective can be useful, it can also become a way to avoid recognizing that you were lonely, scared, or unseen.
You’re allowed to tell the truth about what it was like for you.
You’re allowed to want relationships that feel different now—relationships where you’re not the emotional parent, where you don’t have to earn closeness by being endlessly understanding.
You’re allowed to set limits with the people who raised you, not because you hate them, but because you finally love yourself enough to stop abandoning your own needs.
If you’re in Denver or anywhere in Colorado and you’re starting to see your childhood through this lens, you don’t have to sort it all out alone. Therapy can be a place to untangle what happened, feel what you couldn’t safely feel then, and practice new ways of being in your life and relationships now.
You deserved emotionally present parents.
You didn’t get that.
You still deserve care, attunement, and support.
It’s not too late to begin giving that to yourself—with help.
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