The Adult in the Room Was You

There is a specific exhaustion that comes from a certain kind of phone call with a parent. You hang up and you cannot say anything obviously terrible happened, no shouting, no insult you could repeat to a friend, and yet you feel scraped out, vaguely guilty, and convinced once again that you are the problem. If you have spent your life suspecting that the adult who raised you was, in some hard-to-name way, less grown-up than you were, this essay is an attempt to name it, to ground it in what researchers actually understand, and to offer something more useful than the advice everyone gives, which is to "just set boundaries" with a person who has spent decades teaching you that your boundaries do not exist.

A real thing, with a real literature

The phrase people reach for is "narcissist," and sometimes it fits. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a recognized diagnosis with specific criteria, a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, a need for admiration, and a marked lack of empathy, and it is less common than internet usage suggests, affecting something on the order of a few percent of people, with men diagnosed more often than women. Clinicians distinguish a "grandiose" presentation, the loud and entitled kind everyone pictures, from a "vulnerable" one that runs on fragility, resentment, and a wounded sense of being perpetually wronged. The vulnerable kind is harder to spot and, for a child, often more confusing, because it arrives disguised as the parent's suffering rather than their superiority.

But most people in this situation are not living with a diagnosable disorder, and you do not need a diagnosis to be hurt by a pattern. The more useful frame, developed by the clinical psychologist Lindsay Gibson, is emotional immaturity. An emotionally immature parent is not necessarily cruel. They are developmentally stuck, capable, often, in the practical world, holding jobs and paying bills, while remaining at something like a child's stage of emotional functioning. They are self-referential; the conversation bends back to them. They cannot tolerate much emotional intensity, so real feelings make them anxious and they shut them down. They deal in roles and appearances rather than genuine connection. And they are run by their own needs in a way that leaves little room to register yours.

Gibson describes several flavors, the emotional parent ruled by feelings and prone to overwhelm, the driven parent obsessed with goals and control, the passive parent who checks out and lets harm happen, and the rejecting parent who treats closeness itself as an intrusion. The labels matter less than the through-line: the child of such a parent grows up emotionally lonely inside a family that, from the outside, may look perfectly fine.

What it does to the child

Children are pragmatists. Faced with a parent who cannot meet them, they do not conclude that the parent is limited; that thought is unbearable, because they depend on this person for survival. Instead they conclude that they themselves are too much, or not enough, and they adapt. Often they adapt by reversing the roles, managing the parent's moods, anticipating the parent's needs, becoming the steady one. Researchers call this parentification, and it is associated with lasting effects: a hyper-attunement to other people's emotional weather, a faint chronic guilt, difficulty knowing what you yourself actually want, because wanting was a luxury the household could not afford.

This connects to a larger and very well-supported idea: attachment. Decades of research, beginning with Bowlby and Ainsworth, show that children build their template for relationships from the responsiveness of early caregivers. A caregiver who is consistently available produces a child who expects connection to be safe. A caregiver who is inconsistent, warm when it suits them, absent or hostile when it doesn't, produces a child who learns that closeness is unreliable and must be earned, monitored, and never fully trusted. That template does not stay in childhood. It rides along into your friendships, your marriage, your parenting, and your phone calls home.

There is a particular grief here that the psychologist Pauline Boss named ambiguous loss: mourning someone who is still alive. Your parent is right there, at every holiday, fully present in body, and entirely unavailable in the way you needed. You cannot grieve them, because they have not left; you cannot reach them, because they were never quite there. That suspended state, neither having the parent nor being free to mourn them, is its own specific weight.

The roles a family hands out

One more pattern is worth naming, because recognizing it can be its own relief. Emotionally immature and narcissistic parents tend to organize the family around their own needs, and one of the ways they do this is by assigning roles. There is often a favored child, the one who reflects well on the parent, whose successes the parent can claim, and a scapegoat, the one who carries the family's blame, who is treated as the source of its problems, and whose job, though no one says so, is to be the container for everything the parent cannot face in themselves. Family-systems thinkers have described these arrangements for decades. The roles are not about the children's actual qualities; they are about what the parent needs each child to be.

The roles are also not fixed, which is part of what makes them so destabilizing. A child can be the golden one this year and the scapegoat the next, and siblings are frequently set against one another, a dynamic sometimes called triangulation, where the parent communicates through and about the children rather than to them, keeping everyone slightly off balance and slightly competing for an approval that is kept deliberately scarce. If you grew up in such a system, you may have spent years believing your siblings were the problem, when the three of you were simply standing in the positions a single person assigned. Seeing the roles as roles, as a structure imposed from above rather than a truth about who any of you are, is often the first step toward stepping out of yours.

The fantasy you have to put down

The single most important shift, the one that everything else depends on, is also the hardest: giving up what Gibson calls the healing fantasy. This is the deeply buried belief that there is some combination of words, achievements, or proofs of love that will finally unlock the parent, that if you are successful enough, patient enough, wounded enough, or right enough, they will at last see you, apologize, and become the parent you needed all along.

They will not. Not because you have failed to find the magic words, but because the capacity you are appealing to is the very thing that is missing. You are asking a colorblind person to admire a sunset. The empathy, the self-reflection, the ability to hold your reality alongside their own, these are precisely the faculties that are underdeveloped, which means the apology you are waiting for would require the growth whose absence is the entire problem. Waiting for it is a trap with no exit, because the waiting itself keeps you a child in the relationship, forever auditioning for a part that was never going to be cast.

Putting down the fantasy is a genuine loss, and it tends to hurt more, at first, than the original wound. People often expect relief and feel grief instead. That grief is the correct response. You are mourning, finally and properly, the parent you did not get. Only on the far side of that mourning does anything else become possible.

What "dealing with them" actually looks like

The advice to "set boundaries" is not wrong, but it is usually misunderstood. A boundary is not a rule you impose on another person; you cannot control what they do. A boundary is a decision about your own behavior, what you will share, how long you will stay, what you will do when a certain line is crossed. "If you raise your voice, I'll end the call" is a boundary, because the action it names is entirely yours. "You need to stop criticizing me" is a wish, and wishes addressed to emotionally immature people are reliably ignored.

Gibson offers a stance she calls the maturity awareness approach, and its core is detachment without hostility. You stop trying to engage the parent at a depth they cannot reach, and you start observing them, almost anthropologically, as the limited person they are. You manage the interaction rather than emotionally invest in it. You aim for a specific outcome, a tolerable visit, a piece of logistical information, rather than the connection you have learned not to expect. People sometimes borrow the informal "gray rock" idea here: becoming so unrewarding to provoke, so flat and uninteresting a target, that the dynamic loses its fuel. It is a coping posture for hard interactions, not a way to live, but it can get you through a holiday.

And then there is the question nobody likes to raise out loud: how much contact, if any. The sociologist Karl Pillemer's research found that estrangement from a family member is far more common than the silence around it suggests, roughly a quarter of people have experienced it, and that it is usually not a tantrum but a considered, often agonized decision arrived at slowly. There is a whole spectrum between full closeness and full estrangement: limited contact, contact on narrow terms, contact with topics fenced off, long pauses, supervised visits. Pillemer's work also complicates the cultural script that reconciliation is always the goal; sometimes distance is what makes a person well, and sometimes it isn't, and the right amount of contact is the amount that lets you live as the adult you are. That is yours to decide, repeatedly, without owing anyone, including the parent, a justification.

The part that is actually hopeful

Here is what the research genuinely supports, and it is not nothing. The template laid down in childhood is durable, but it is not destiny. Attachment patterns can shift. People who had unreliable early caregiving can develop what researchers call earned security, a stable, trusting way of relating built later in life through other relationships: a steady partner, close friends, a good therapist, a community that shows up. The deficit was learned, which means it can, slowly and unevenly, be unlearned.

What you cannot do is get the water from the stone. What you can do is stop standing at the stone with a cup. You can grieve the parent you needed, lower the stakes with the parent you have, decide your own terms of contact, and then spend your real energy where it can actually be returned, on the relationships, including the one with yourself, where attunement and repair are possible. The cruelest trick of growing up with an emotionally immature parent is that it trains you to keep pouring yourself into the one place that cannot hold you. The work of recovery is mostly learning to pour somewhere else.