Supporting a Friend or Partner with their Emotionally Immature Parents
Explaining to your friends and partner why you act and react a certain way that developed from your years of survival as a daughter of emotionally immature parents (EIP) can be exhausting.
As someone with EIP, it’s hard to communicate that you were always in survival mode around your own parent(s). That they lacked the emotional awareness and maturity to show you empathy and compassion as well as the ability to model for you what healthy love looks like. It’s a hidden struggle that those with EIPs deal with.
It can be hard to communicate what you need. Friends and partners play such an important role in your healing and support and the best thing you can have is a trusted connection with others for your continued healing.
Here’s some ways you can share with your loved ones that they can best support you as someone with an emotionally immature parent.
Provide empathy and validation
The best thing your friends or partner can offer you as they support you with EIP is to just be a safe person to confide in.
Your friends or partner might want to help fix your problems when it comes to dealing with your EIP, but what they really need to know is that you just need a non-judgemental shoulder to cry on. Sometimes you just need to express your feelings even if there isn’t an easy fix.
If your loved one is dealing with an EIP, let them lead the conversations and try to just be there to listen. Listen actively and let them know you hear them and are there for them.
She developed these survival strategies to protect herself because the connection she needed felt unsafe or unreliable. In adulthood, she can still over-function, trying to keep you safe as if you’re still that vulnerable child in a dysfunctional home. Trauma causes her to focus on protection rather than connection, keeping you stuck in guarded, distrustful patterns and negative core beliefs about yourself and others.
This means your emotional bonds and attachment styles are often unconscious reenactments of childhood dynamics. Secure attachment, by contrast, grows from knowing there’s a safe base to return to, allowing genuine connection and exploration.
Understanding how your inner child shapes your emotional bonds helps you recognize these patterns and move toward healthier, more secure relationships.
Understand their Grief
It might be difficult to communicate that your unmet emotional needs left a void in you when you were growing up to someone who had parents who were emotionally mature and present. There’s a part of you that is still sad you never had the kind of parent in your life who made you feel seen and cared for.
There’s a kind of grief from this longing for the parent you wished you’d had and the one you actually had. People who might not understand how to support someone with an EIP might not think that you can experience grief for someone who is still alive, but you know better.
How grief might show up
Your loved ones should know that your grief may come in the form of anger, numbness, or emotional confusion and that it might show up unexpectedly when something triggers a memory or demonstrates what a healthy relationship should look like.
When they know you’re sad for the parent you didn’t have, they can begin to understand your feelings and can be better equipped to hold space for complex emotions as they come.
Things to Avoid Saying to those with EIP (and Why)
A caring and understanding word can really help you feel close to your friends or partner as they support you through your healing journey. But what might be seen as words of “tough love” to someone without EIP(s) could make things feel worse for you.
Your loved ones might need guidance in how they can best offer words of support. Here’s a short list of what not to say to someone dealing with EIP(s), how words might come across to them, and what to say instead.
“They did their best.”
These words make it sound like the parent is off the hook for your mistreatment, not to mention, your pain and suffering at their hands wasn’t important. When your loved ones say this to you, it can make it harder to express your feelings in the future because it feels like your pain will just be disregarded.
Instead of focusing on your parents, words that validate, acknowledge, and focus on your experience would be more helpful.
What they should say instead: “It sounds like this really affected you. It seems like your parent had their own issues and didn’t know how to deal with them, but that still doesn’t make this hurt any less for you. It makes sense what you’re dealing with.”
“Just get over it.”
If only it were that easy. When you hear these words it can really make you feel like your loved ones don’t understand you or the pain you’ve been through at all. Your feelings don’t feel important and your pain and experience is invalidated.
Though discounting your experience is probably not what your loved one was trying to do, it would be better to just have a bit of validation for your feelings.
What they should say instead: “I’m here for you. It’s okay to feel hurt by this.”
“You should forgive them and move on.”
A classic statement from your friends or partner that doesn’t really know how to best support someone with an EIP and just wants to help you fix the situation that’s causing you turmoil. Surely if you can just be the bigger person and forgive and forget, then you’ll feel better, right?
What they don’t understand is all the pressure this puts on you to hurry your own process of forgiveness when there is no need to rush. You might still be processing your trauma, and that’s okay. If they could show understanding for your experience, then you’d feel like you were in a better space to work on your healing.
What they should say instead: “Take your time with the process. Go at your own pace.”
“You’re being too sensitive.”
Ouch. This one hurts. Probably because it’s something you may be used to hearing from your EIP–the cause of your pain. Your parent already makes you question your feelings because they never take responsibility for any of their actions. It’s really frustrating to also hear this tired line from the people you care about the most.
Your feelings are valid and your loved ones should know how to communicate that to you instead of dismissing them.
What they should say instead: “Your feelings are completely understandable.”
“Everyone has problems with their parents.”
Tell me you’ve never dealt with EIP without telling me you’ve never dealt with EIP.
While even normal, healthy relationships have their snags and the parent-child one can be especially stressful even in the best of circumstances, your relationship with your parent was on a different level. It feels hard because it is hard. Your EIP wasn’t there in the way that you needed emotionally, and that has affected you in ways that others might not understand.
This response makes it seem like your pain is no big deal and doesn’t warrant support, but that’s not true. It just means your loved ones are trying to relate to your problems but might not be able to in the way that you need and deserve.
What they should say instead: “I understand that what you’re going through is really difficult and unique to your situation. I might not fully understand your experiences, but I’m here for you.”
Offer Consistent Support
Your loved ones should be there for you consistently to offer support when you need it. This consistency and emotional availability is something you lacked growing up, and this can really go a long way to make you feel seen and heard.
Your loved ones also shouldn’t pressure you to heal faster than what you’re comfortable with. Remember, your healing journey is a process unique to you alone and no one can tell you how much time is needed. Supportive friends and a partner who understand this will walk alongside you and respect your boundaries and pace of healing and processing.
Know When You’re Out of Your Depth
There might come a time when you need more support dealing with your emotions and experiences caused by your EIP than your friends or partner can provide.
If you find yourself using only one person, like your partner or one friend in particular, as an emotional outlet–then it’s time to move on to getting more professional help like a therapist. It’s not good for you or your loved ones to be the only ones taking on your emotional problems, especially when they don’t have the training or knowledge in how to effectively support you.
While your loved ones can’t force you to go to therapy, they can and should encourage you to seek professional help. It’s not fair to them to shoulder your emotional baggage as well as their own. Your loved ones should be able to take care of their own emotional well-being first.
Supporting a Friend or Partner with EIP: Final Thoughts
Your loved ones who really care about you want to be able to support your needs, but often just lack the knowledge of how to really help you. By providing them with information on how to relate to your needs, you can give them more context on how they can support their friend or partner with EIP.
Most of all, they can encourage you to have self-trust and autonomy through validating your feelings, affirming you to make good choices for yourself, showing up consistently for you, encouraging your own reflection without judgment, and supporting or encouraging you to do further work with therapy.
Empathy, patience, and informed support is important and not trying to “fix” you is key. Just the presence of your loved ones can be healing even if they don’t have all the answers (which they don’t anyway).
If you’re someone who has an EIP and find that your friends or partner don’t always understand your struggles, know that you’re not alone. Your journey is valid, your feelings matter, and you deserve support that honors who you truly are. Sharing this with loved ones is a brave step toward building the understanding and connection you deserve.
