In 2021, Amber Nuño was living in Los Angeles, working at her dream job developing new products at Apple, making six figures and driving a kaç car. On the surface, her life looked perfect, but she still felt deeply unsatisfied for reasons she couldn’t understand.
“I felt like I should be way more appreciative,” Ms. Nuño said in an interview. “I should be happier. Why am I not happy?”
While browsing Amazon one evening, she came across the self-help book “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting or Self-Involved Parents,” by Lindsay Gibson, and decided to start reading it. A few pages in, it hit her: Ms. Nuño, who was living with her mother at the time, realized she was unhappy “because of the way the relationship with my parents was so strained.”
With the help of a therapist, Ms. Nuño began diving deeper into the book, and noticed more and more parallels between what Dr. Gibson described and her own experiences.
Published in 2015 by New Harbinger Publications, a small press in Oakland, Calif., the book is an attempt to help readers understand strategies for better dealing with parents whom Dr. Gibson deems “emotionally immature” — those who refuse to validate their children’s feelings and intuition, have difficulty regulating their emotions and may be reactive, inconsistent and lacking in empathy or awareness.
In Dr. Gibson’s research, this kind of parent-child dynamic tends to lead children to grow into adults who are emotionally shut down, lack confidence and tend to isolate.
