The Therapy Buzzwords That Confirm Your Beliefs

On "emotionally immature" mothers (plus, the TikTok lady who fell in love with her psychiatrist.)

Photo by Kev Costello on Unsplash

A lot of people complain about the toxicity of platforms like Twitter and TikTok, but I feel like I never see people talking about how insane things can get on Facebook and Instagram Reels. Perhaps this is because, simply put, nobody is watching them. Typically, they show me all my worst OCD-fueled fears about scary diseases (my fault perhaps, for lingering too long on a few triggering videos.) After hiding this content, I stopped seeing it. But it was soon replaced with content that didn’t even seem relevant to my neuroses, let alone me as a person. I suddenly started seeing lots of videos intended for adult children of “emotionally immature mothers.”

To be clear, I’m on great terms with my mom, and I had not Googled anything about her or our relationship when I started getting this content. But it intrigued me, so I started watching it, and I noticed the general trend was that adults would “discover” their mother was emotionally immature later in life, after they pieced together all her bad behavior that wasn’t bad enough to stand out as abusive. First of all, the “emotionally immature” parents in question are always mothers. Fathers are seemingly immune from this label, ironically, by being less involved and therefore giving their adult kids fewer behaviors to label. Examples of things that “emotionally immature” parents might do include: being critical of their adult children’s life choices, getting angry or frustrated with their children (a sub-example was yelling at you for getting bad grades), preoccupation with their own goals, the desire to be a “fixer,” being either too close or too distant, and perhaps the most suspicious sign—the fact that you know more about them than they do about themselves. It’s worthwhile to mention that the people making this content are sometimes clinical psychologists, but are often not.

It was easy for me to look at all of this and imagine how it could apply to basically any parent ever, especially given that if you confront your parent about their emotional immaturity, and they get defensive and hurt, that’s apparently further confirmation that they were emotionally immature the whole time. Basically, if they admit you’re right, you’re right, and if they tell you that you’re wrong, you’re even more right. It’s giving “Lady Gaga is in love with me, and I know it to be true because took out a restraining order against me.”

It’s not that I don’t think emotionally immature parents exist, but rather that the criteria for someone to be emotionally immature is so vast and vague that anyone (especially a, dare I say, narcissist) could very easily decide that all their relationship issues are due to the other person’s emotional immaturity, and not their own behavior or mindset.

Then, I noticed something interesting—I went from seeing content for the adult children of emotionally immature mothers, to content presuming I was an emotionally immature mother myself, with even more troublingly all-encompassing “symptoms,” and trying to sell me expensive e-courses to fix it.