Emotionally Immature Parents with Morgan Pommells: Episode 229

In this episode of The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, my guest is therapist Morgan Pommells. We explore the lasting impact of having an emotionally immature parent (EIP), including how to begin healing and how we can break the cycle with our own kids. We also talk about boundaries with our EIP parent, why children's big emotions aren't personal attacks, and what every child truly needs to thrive. Know someone who might appreciate this episode? Share it with them! And if you love the podcast, FREE ways to help us out:1- Rate and review the podcast in your podcast player app 2- “Like” this post by tapping the heart icon ♥️ 3- Share this with a friend. THANK YOU! You can listen wherever you get your podcasts or check out the fully edited transcript of our interview at the bottom of this post. We talk about: 00:00 – Introduction to Morgan Pommells 02:30 – What is an emotionally immature parent? 07:15 – Emotional immaturity vs. narcissism: What’s the difference? 09:00 – Why emotionally immature parents are often critical 10:30 – The biggest impact on children: Growing up without a strong sense of self 12:00 – How childhood with an EIP affects adult relationships and self-worth, and our own parenting 15:30 – Healing from emotionally immature parenting 18:30 – Why your child’s big emotions are actually a sign of safety 19:00 – Navigating relationships with emotionally immature parents as an adult 27:00 – Teaching children that feelings aren’t dangerous 27:45 – Emotionally immature grandparents: Do the patterns continue? 29:15 – The power of delighting in your child 32:45 – What if your parenting partner is emotionally immature? 35:00 – The parenting mistake we all make: Taking children’s emotions personally 36:00 – Morgan’s advice for every parent: Heal your own wounds before they parent your children 38:00 – Where to find Morgan and closing thoughts Resources mentioned in this episode: * Morgan’s Masterclass Protect Your Peace * Morgan’s IG @morganpommells Connect with Sarah Rosensweet: * Instagram * Facebook Group * YouTube * Website * Join us on Substack * Newsletter * Book a short consult or coaching session call xx Sarah and Corey Your peaceful parenting team- click here for a free short consult or a coaching session Visit our website for free resources, podcast, coaching, membership and more! >> Please support us!!! Please consider becoming a supporter to help support our free content, including The Peaceful Parenting Podcast, our free parenting support Facebook group, and our weekly parenting emails, “Weekend Reflections” and “Weekend Support” - plus our Flourish With Your Complex Child Summit (coming back in the fall for the 3rd year!) All of this free support for you takes a lot of time and energy from me and my team. If it has been helpful or meaningful for you, your support would help us to continue to provide support for free, for you and for others. In addition to knowing you are supporting our mission to support parents and children, you get the podcast ad free and access to a monthly ‘ask me anything’ session. Sarah: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Peaceful Parenting Podcast. Today’s guest is Morgan Pommells. Morgan is a therapist and coach who helps the adult children of emotionally immature parents stop seeing themselves through their parents’ eyes and finally come home to who they really are. Morgan and I discuss what an emotionally immature parent is, how that is—and isn’t—different from narcissism, and how people grow up to parent this way. Morgan also shares how having an emotionally immature parent affects us as children, how it continues to affect us once we’ve grown up, and how we can heal from having been raised by an emotionally immature parent. We also talk about the opposite of emotionally immature parenting and what our kids need in order to grow up whole and healthy. Morgan has so much wisdom, and so much of our work overlaps. I think you’re going to learn a lot from this conversation, and I think you’re really going to enjoy it. If you like this episode, please share it with a friend so more parents can learn about peaceful parenting. If you’re a fan of the podcast, you can also help us out by leaving a five-star rating and review in your podcast app. While you’re there, don’t forget to follow the show so you don’t miss an episode. Let’s meet Morgan. Sarah: Hi, Morgan. Welcome to the podcast. Morgan: Hi! Thank you for having me. Sarah: I’m so glad to have you on. We’ve been trying to schedule this for a while, and I think this is such an important topic for parents. I’m so glad we finally got to sit down and have this conversation. Morgan: Me too. It’s a super important topic for parents. Sarah: Tell us a little about who you are and what you do. Morgan: I’m a therapist and coach in Ontario, Canada, and I specialize exclusively in working with the adult children of emotionally immature parents. Whether that’s through workshops or one-to-one work, everything I do revolves around helping people heal from having emotionally immature parents. Sarah: So tell us: what is an emotionally immature parent? Morgan: Great question. An emotionally immature parent is someone who really struggles to manage their own painful internal emotions. Those emotions tend to spill out onto everyone around them instead of being worked through internally. These are parents who might struggle with shame, rage, or fear of abandonment, and instead of taking responsibility for those feelings and working through them themselves, they become everyone else’s problem. They take those emotions out on their children. They may recruit their children into never leaving them because they’re terrified of being abandoned. The child becomes responsible for soothing and managing the parent’s anxiety, which is really the opposite of what a healthy parent-child relationship is meant to be. Sarah: Yeah. What causes somebody... I guess you don’t become emotionally immature—you just never emotionally mature. What causes that lack of emotional maturation? How does somebody become an emotionally immature parent? Morgan: There are a couple of different pathways. A lot of emotionally immature parents have their own relational trauma. If we experience something deeply overwhelming at a young age and don’t have the capacity to metabolize it at the time, we can become emotionally stuck there. Our biological age keeps moving forward, but our emotional development doesn’t necessarily come with us. Our emotional defenses stay frozen at that younger age. In other cases, someone may have had the capacity to become emotionally mature, but emotional immaturity was all that was ever modeled for them. They don’t have another template. They don’t know a different kind of parenting exists because they’re simply working from the script they inherited. Sarah: So far we’ve been talking about this in psychological terms, but what does that actually look like in real life? Let’s focus on an adult child. What would a familiar interaction look like between an emotionally immature parent and their grown child? Morgan: One of the biggest dynamics is fear of abandonment. When their child grows up, goes away to university, finds a partner, or simply starts building their own life, emotionally immature parents can become very controlling. They can become very mean. They can use shame to pull their child back toward them and keep them emotionally close because they’re so afraid of being abandoned. When children are younger, it usually looks like a lot of control. That parent has a tremendous amount of fear and anxiety, but instead of working through it themselves, they try to control their child. As a result, the parent feels safer, but the child feels controlled and suffocated. Sarah: So they’re almost externalizing their own feelings? They feel scared, so they make their child feel scared? Or is that too simplified? Morgan: No, in some cases that’s exactly what’s happening. If you have a parent who’s very anxious or very fearful, it can actually feel safer if everyon… This is a public episode. 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