When Your Parents Never Learned How to Feel

Understanding emotionally immature parents and the healing that starts with you.

You know those conversations that leave you walking away thinking, How are you this unaware?

You try to express something tender, disappointment, sadness, frustration and they shut it down.

They get defensive, change the subject, or turn it back on you.

It’s like trying to have an adult conversation with a five-year-old in an adult’s body.

I know some generations get a bad rap for this, and to be fair, many of them fit the bill.

But this isn’t about one generation.

It’s about anyone who grew up with emotionally immature parents, people who were never taught how to feel, only how to function.

They didn’t grow up in an emotionally safe world.

Most of our parents were raised in homes where emotions weren’t welcome.

Crying was weakness. Anger was disrespect. Fear was shameful.

Their parents had survived wars, poverty, or religious guilt.

They were told to get on with it, so they did. But at a cost.

When emotions aren’t allowed, they don’t disappear; they freeze.

Right at the age they were first shut down.

Imagine a six-year-old trying to express sadness and being told to stop crying.

That part of them, the one that feels, that needs, that longs to be comforted, gets locked away.

They grow up, but that part never does.

So now we have adults who can manage money and responsibilities, but crumble at the first sign of emotional vulnerability.

They never learned to process emotions. Only to suppress them.

That’s why it feels like you’re talking to a child.

They get defensive instead of reflective.

They lash out when you hold a boundary.

They minimise your pain because it threatens theirs.

They can’t sit in discomfort, because nobody ever sat in theirs.

It’s not that they don’t want to connect.

It’s that they don’t know how.

And it’s maddening, because you can see it, the shutdown, the blame-shifting, the blank stare when you try to go deeper.

You think, Surely you can see this? But the truth is: they can’t.

Their emotional development was interrupted decades ago.

They’re walking around in adult bodies with the emotional literacy of children.

This isn’t an excuse, but it is an explanation.

Understanding this doesn’t excuse their behaviour.

Because yes, they’re adults. They could go to therapy. They could choose to change.

And some do.

I work with clients in their 50s and 60s who’ve done the work, learning to name emotions, repair relationships, and finally hold space for themselves and others. But they are the exception.

Most people raised in emotionally unsafe homes never had models for reflection or repair.

They simply passed on what they knew, suppression disguised as strength.

What that means for you.

If you grew up with emotionally immature parents, you probably learned early that your feelings were “too much.”

You might have become the peacekeeper, the achiever, the caretaker.

You learned to earn love through behaviour, not belonging.

And now?

You might feel guilty when you set a boundary.

You might overexplain to avoid disapproval.

You might feel unsafe when things are calm, because chaos used to mean connection.

You might be incredibly self-aware, able to trace every pattern back to childhood, but still feel unsafe in your body.

That’s not because you’re broken.

It’s because your nervous system learned that emotion equals danger.

Healing is about becoming the adult your parents couldn’t be.

You’re not here to fix them.

You’re here to stop abandoning yourself the way they had to abandon themselves.

You’re learning to name what they couldn’t name.

To feel what they couldn’t feel.

To give your inner child the emotional safety they never could.

That’s the work, not to hate them, not to excuse them,

but to understand where the chain broke, so you can be the one who repairs it.

Because every time you pause before reacting,

every time you let yourself cry instead of shut down,

every time you hold space for your own feelings, you’re re-parenting the entire bloodline.

You’re showing your body, your children, and the world that emotional maturity isn’t something you’re born with, it’s something you build, one feeling at a time.