Which of the four “emotionally immature” parents was my mother?

[Anonymous]

If you’re familiar with the book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, I need your help!

My therapist suspects my mother was/is emotionally immature, and advised me to read the book. But I can’t fit my mother into either of the four categories.

I lean more towards Driven, but she wasn’t aiming for MY perfection, it was other things. The house, her body, her work. Her work came first. She sent me to school with chicken pox and told me to lie and say it was mosquito bites. Sent me to school vomiting, sick with the flu, and refused to pick me up, so I would sit in the nurse’s office. I was always the kid scanning the crowd for a parent. Her reasoning wasn’t financial, my father was breadwinner. She just refused to miss work for anything. Ever.

At home, everything had to be perfect. We would get up at 7am on weekends to vacuum and dust. Things had to be meticulous, inside and out. We would have to pick individual leaves from the landscape bark in the fall, shovel perfect edges in the winter, for example. And yes, my mother has childhood trauma.

Everything had to be perfect and work came first. Always. But she didn’t necessarily care to perfect us kids at all.

I want to continue with the book and go to therapy next week with some insight. Can you help me figure out who she is?

[Anonymous]

People just don't fit neatly into categories sometimes. I would go back to the therapist with what you have.

[Anonymous]

Why does it matter? I think I would be irritated with this therapist.

[Anonymous]

My parents had degrees of all of them, plus I recall the checklists had a lot of overlap. You are losing the forest from the trees. You don't have to figure out which one she was-just recognize the behavior, accept she won't change and figure out how to have a different kid of relationship where you don't expect her to meet any emotional needs and can have boundaries that are comfortable for you.

[Anonymous]

The book says most people don’t fit neatly into one category and have traits in all.

[Anonymous]

So you grew up on the 70s/80s with a parent who had high standards?

[Anonymous]

She sounds like someone who was raised in a emotionally and financially insecure household.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:She sounds like someone who was raised in a emotionally and financially insecure household.

You’re kidding, right? Go away. And please don’t treat your children with such little regard.

[Anonymous]

Your need to fit her perfectly into a category is a result of the way she treated you as a child. She was rigid and so now you’re trying to fit her into a rigid category.

It doesn’t matter which category she fits, OP. The point is just understanding her emotional immaturity and how it affected you and continues to affect you and finding ways to deal with that, heal from that, and use that to manage the type of relationship you have with her now (if any) and, if you have kids of your own, how to parent them better than you were parented yourself.

It’s a LOT. I read the book. My parents both have a lot of traits of emotionally immature parents but they don’t fit neatly into any category either. Usually people don’t fit neatly into groups 100%. People are complicated and everyone has their own unique background and experiences and genetics that affect their personality, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:She sounds like someone who was raised in a emotionally and financially insecure household.

You’re kidding, right? Go away. And please don’t treat your children with such little regard.

Not kidding. The drive to succeed and obsessive need to control your life can come from being emotionally and financially traumatized in childhood and youth.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:She sounds like someone who was raised in a emotionally and financially insecure household.

You’re kidding, right? Go away. And please don’t treat your children with such little regard.

You go away. You aren't the moderator of this board.

[Anonymous]

If OP is one of the "go away" posters please show this whole thread to your therapist. "Go away" is the whine of a traumatized person. It also makes everything "their" fault.
Going away now...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:She sounds like someone who was raised in a emotionally and financially insecure household.

You’re kidding, right? Go away. And please don’t treat your children with such little regard.

Not kidding. The drive to succeed and obsessive need to control your life can come from being emotionally and financially traumatized in childhood and youth.

+1

Money insecurity is a major influence in later life. (Just like neglect, lack of love, hoarder household, abuse, absence of parents and caregivers, sexual abuse, poverty, disease, death, war, famine, natural disaster)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:She sounds like someone who was raised in a emotionally and financially insecure household.

You’re kidding, right? Go away. And please don’t treat your children with such little regard.

Not kidding. The drive to succeed and obsessive need to control your life can come from being emotionally and financially traumatized in childhood and youth.

Right. That’s why the parent is emotionally immature. What does this have to do with OPs question, though? Are you saying she should just get over it?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If OP is one of the "go away" posters please show this whole thread to your therapist. "Go away" is the whine of a traumatized person. It also makes everything "their" fault.
Going away now...

Not OP but yeah, clearly OP is traumatized and is in therapy to feel better. What is your point? I don’t get why you are attacking OP for trying to better herself at the advice of her therapist. This board is so strange sometimes.