How To Raise an Emotionally Mature Kids With Lindsay Gibson

Good evening. Welcome to all of you hopping on to our live popup event. I'm so super excited to be here with you. Um and for those of you who aren't familiar um with Dr. Lindseay Gibson, she is here joining me here today. I'm sure if you've been following my work for some time now, you have definitely heard me mention uh one of her first book um Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. — Definitely. — Can you shut that off? Sorry, I was hearing myself speak to myself in that. So, pausing for that technological. Um, so a little bit about Lindsay Gibson. Um, Dr. Lindseay Gibson is a clinical psychologist and best-selling author. Again, she is most known for her work dealing with emotionally immature parents. Again, the book that I am shouting from the rooftops far and wide is adult children of emotionally immature parents. I know when I personally read it, I had not yet had the language for what emotional immaturity is, how much I myself have struggled with it, how much I see that in the clients that I have historically worked with in the community. So, that book is so near and dear to my heart. It was so impactful on my own journey. So, I was super excited when I heard that. Um, Dr. Gibson has a new book coming out just this week. It is called How to Raise an Emotionally Mature Child. So, thank you for all of your beautiful, impactful work, Lindsay, and thank you for being here with us today. — Oh, it's my total pleasure. Thanks for having me. — Um, so, like I said, your work, um, I know for me it has been greatly impactful. I know other people who meet both of the concepts of emotional immaturity and now kind of the shift to focus on emotional maturity are really struck by it I think because it really illustrates um whether it's so much of our past struggles that are keeping us stuck and or the intention that we're setting whether it's for oursel those of us who are having children right the desire to be emotionally mature so I think that might be a really good place for us to start together where wondering ing um from your perspective in your words um if you could kind of define those two concepts for us, what is emotional immaturity and of course contrasting that with the topic of your new book, what does emotional maturity really look like both in a child but of course also in an adult. — Yeah. Yeah, that's a great place to start because um you're right about the language part. We really in popular psychology anyway, this idea of emotional immaturity and maturity was not something that was really out there at the time that I wrote my book. It was certainly in the psychology literature. Um, and if you were doing psychological evaluations like I was, I was always talking about where that person, you know, was kind of stuck on their developmental path. Um, and how they were immature in certain areas to give the therapist an idea of what to concentrate on. Um but yeah it was I think it was very helpful to people to have the realization that people could be you know 40 50 60 70 years old and actually could be less mature than they themselves were. I mean, that was like I think that was such a paradigm shift for people and it clicked and it was like something that they had always known that they had been the ones taking care of the parent or they had been the one that had been holding back to keep things stable. Now they had words to understand, oh, they look like an adult. they have society's um you know uh seal of approval as an adult but in my interactions with them I'm the one who seems to be exerting the self-control and empathy and whatever. So let me just mention what the cardinal characteristics are of emotional immaturity. If you just think of a big four-year-old, that that's pretty good right there because, you know, four-year-olds have language and so they seem to be reasonable because they're talking to you, but when it comes to dealing with their emotions or their desires, you know, they're pretty much little savages. I mean, they just do not have the personality structure yet uh to think of other people or uh to reflect on their own behavior, even to think about future consequences or to learn from their mistakes. I mean, their little brains just can't do that yet. So when a person emotionally kind of gets stuck around that point, they become very egocentric. Everything has to be about them and their emotional stability and they feel like everything is somebody else's fault

because that's how it looks to them from their egocentric pers perspective. So when you have a parent who's like that, your job as a child becomes to help them keep their emotional stability and also to kind of buff up their self-esteem so they feel good about themselves so they stay sa stable. So that's what I was roughly describing. Oh, and the other thing is they don't care beans about reality. It's not that they're psychotic. I don't mean that. I just mean that reality for them is optional. So they deny it, dismiss it, and distort it if it doesn't fit their story. Um, when I was thinking about the next book to write, which is this current book that just came out yesterday, I thought, you know, let's have a positive goal about what we're working toward with our children. If we're trying to get our four-year-old to make that transition to being an emotionally mature person, how would we think about that and how would we go about doing it? So, basically what we're trying to achieve is raising a child who is in touch with their inner world. You know, you one of your subtitles in one of your books is creating a self or creating yourself. We how can we help them create a self like build the structure through our parenting of them to be able to handle their inner experience, handle their emotions, deal with reality as it is. Just take it on face value and deal with it. have consideration and interest and caring for other people and find work that's interesting to them and pursue something that has a sense of purpose. That's what we're headed for. My personal underlying goal was let's try to raise our children so that we can have a positive relationship with them for the rest of our lives. That's what I really want at the end of all of this is a child that is happy to see you and is not sort of dealing with a bunch of stuff that might lead to feelings of wanting to be estranged. — Yeah, I appreciate that. And I want to just put a pin in this kind of this concept of relational health for a second because I definitely want to explore that in a minute. you've sparked my curiosity and I think maybe from my own lived experience is where this question is coming because right you're talking about this sense of self and I know for me in childhood when I didn't have a sense that I was worthy just for being me instead I got a very clear message that I was worthy in moments where I was doing something achieving and I'm clear that society has changed a little bit but not so much there are definitely things that are celebrated it in some societies more than others, right? Achievement is definitely one of those things. And so my question is right how do we whether the question is about us or the question about our own children how do we differentiate whether or not right the child is developing a healthy sense of self or whether they're just like me really good at projecting an image performance projecting achievement because I do think the reality for a lot of us is we are living in cultures that value right certain parts of our self And at least in my opinion, we can get very savvy at the parts that we show another person. So how is again as individual or as a parent can we begin to make that distinction? — Yeah, that is such a great point because gosh in at least in our American culture, it's all about uh the metrics. It's all about how you measure up. much you have done, how high you have gone, that kind of thing. that has zero to do with your emotional maturity and it really doesn't have a whole lot to do with the building of self. I mean it when you use that approach of course it's like a uh you know like a peanut M& M you have a nice beautiful candy coating you know that's fine but you may not have developed the sense of real selfawareness and being in touch with your own observations with your own feelings with your own inner experiences and that ability ility to tune in to how you really feel, how something is affecting you. That would be like the very deepest level of developing a true

sense of self. And of course, that's going to depend on what your relational experiences have been like because, you know, little children, I mean, from the time that they're infants, they are, and they're not thinking about it like this, of course, but they're just sharing what's going on inside of them. They're all their behavior is always communicating here's how I'm doing inside mom or dad. — So when your child is able to communicate their feelings and get back understanding from someone who says, "Oh, I know what that means. You're tired or you're hungry or you need a hug. " Then we begin to have a sense of knowing ourselves and that inner sense of self and that confirmation that we have particular feelings and desires at different times that is those feelings are literally what forms the core of the self. Now I think that we this just my personal opinion um but I think we come into this world with a self. I think that we have a kernel of something in us that is very individualistic and I think that spark is you know to use this in a secular way that is sacred meaning that you can't mess around with that too much without causing psychological harm to the child because that individual spark that forms the kernel the center of the self needs to be recognized. and given a structure for coming into relationship with other people and for functioning in this world of ours. — Yeah, I appreciate you explaining it in that way. All of your work, Lindsay, really does a beautiful job at expanding the definition of what wounding or trauma is. Right. So even you just describing this kind of sacred beingness that is inherent to each of us and if we don't have the space to express that self that is legitimately experienced as a trauma and just sticking with this kind of concept of emotions because at least again speaking from my age in my now 40s I know a lot of us were raised by generations that lacked a bit of clarity on what emotions were what the purpose of them is and I know that a lot of people might even have been parented themselves or maybe our parenting around this concept or belief in the importance of what I'm going to call tough love, right? This idea that develops a sense of resilience, strength around emotions in particular. So kind of a question I guess wrapped up in this is can you say a little bit about you know as you're kind of expanding this conversation of emotions um what are your thoughts on kind of just you know through the ages right how emotions have been thought about navigated what you make of I think the generation of tough love and what you really believe or what the connection is I should say between emotional maturity and true emotional resilience. — Yeah. Well, resilience means bouncing back, okay? And it means that you I mean the way I always picture it is that the person, you know, descends and they hit something and they bounce back. Okay. Well, the thing that they hit on the way down, which is sort of like the net or the trampoline, so to speak, — that is the quality of their very early relationships. Um, it is what they came to develop within themselves as a result of their early connections. That's what the resilience is about. You do not not get resilience by having somebody treat you toughly or treat you roughly. You just don't. You can't make somebody strong by sort of coming in on them when they're still in a vulnerable state. And that's what childhood is. I mean, it's a vulnerable state. I mean, no question that you can get somebody to act strong and tough — and rigid. I mean, that's easy to do. Just, you know, don't treat them very well. Um, you can achieve that. But achieving that quality that allows you to you know go into a situation where something bad is happening for instance and you are quickly able to overcome your own startled response and able to move into problem solving which is really the the true I think description of resilience is that you

know you yes everybody goes down in hits. Okay. because everybody gets scared at first, but what do you have within you that propels you back upward? Okay. And that's not being treated in a tough way when you're very little. Um, so I think in the past, emotions in children were seen as things that needed to be controlled by whatever means. You know, uh, if you're crying, you get a spanking, that kind of thing. um or if you're angry or you talk back or whatever. I mean, we know what happened with us when we did that. So, that's that was kind of like how we were taught to socialize kids and teach them how to be a good citizen in our society. What wasn't realized there and which I think has caused so much sort of silent trauma — is that you're not teaching that child or helping that child learn how to be aware of their own feelings and find ways of expressing it or not expressing it but to not lose touch with the very good reasons why they're feeling that way at that particular moment. So, you know, the old way, did it socialize kids? Did it make kids well behaved? Yes. But our world is not the same world as it was back then. Now, everything is changing so fast. Everybody is having to kind of stand on their own and find their own way without the kind of job security or even opportunities that you know even 20 years ago were much more available. So we need this kind of personal resilience more than ever. And you don't get that by raising a kid to be afraid of what somebody else is going to have to say about their inside experiences. — That's so beautiful. I was really struck by this idea that historically we were taught maybe some of us even believe that. Would love for you to drop into the chat if you're here live. Right? How many of us still believe that emotions are to be controlled? Right? There's no value to them. we need to keep them suppressed or avoid them, ignore them entirely. And so I think it's so beautiful how you're kind of refraraming what I also agree to be the case around emotions is that they're inevitable. They're meant to be connected with, understood, maybe even utilized and integrated into actions, right? To find our way into safety. — Yeah. I mean just think about any important decision or action in your whole life and ask yourself was emotion a part of that or was emotion even a driver of that and the answer is going to be yes we're not you know brains in jars sitting around you know — I know there's hope people think but um yeah I think some of us are working towards heard that, but we're not there yet, thank goodness. Um, so we are we are motivated and driven by our emotions. We wouldn't have motivation or creativity or even the energy to go toward each other to have relationships if we didn't have emotion. I mean, there's a reason why that's the the, you know, the foundation of the brain. It's all about emotion. Um, so the idea that emotions are, you know, sort of an inconvenient um, needless kind of indulgence that we ought to be putting a lid on, no, we need to learn how to manage them and how to express them appropriately and helpfully, but to have the idea that we're going to go toe-to-toe with them, we will lose every time. And that that's what your work is about. It's like, you know, we have to know ourselves and we have to experience the feelings in order to get back our sense of self. — I mean, it's so beautiful. I couldn't agree more that emotions are foundational to our human experience. And obviously, after spending the last three plus years writing a book about childhood development on my own side of things, emotions are what childhood is about, right? Like you even said earlier, right? Children just are they're their being. They're their emotion. They're their energy. Then if they're young enough, there's very little filter or sensor between how they're feeling and how they're expressing it. And so I'm seeing a couple comments. I think a lot of us in the community have lived a similar experience in childhood. Kelly is sharing in my family. We weren't you just simply weren't allowed to have feelings. So understanding I think that

a lot of us are you know weren't modeled that level of attunement, safety and emotional expression. We maybe are continuing to suppress or not understand what our emotions what value they have or how to be more present to them. What then does that mean for those of us who are in the role now of wanting to perhaps parent and raise a mature child? So simply speaking, right, how does an adults past childhood experiences themselves in your opinion go on to then impact how they show up to parent or how they are able to execute maybe the intention of raising a mature child? — Yeah. Well, I I'm hoping I don't emphasize this um in a direct way in my book, but I I'm hoping that people will sort of absorb this from uh from other things that I'm saying. But as you become more aware of your emotional reactions toward your child, then you are going to have uh much more choice in how you're going to show up for them. And it it's important to realize that when uh when children are feeling things, they have no control over that whatsoever and they're not supposed to. It It's interesting that somehow evolution or whatever it is that is, you know, sort of pushing us along happens to think that emotions are like really important. it it's not trying to get rid of it in us. — Uh one of the interesting things I found when I was doing the research on teens for the chapter on uh raising teenagers was that it's the emotional parts of the brain that develop first or get that you know developmental boost in teenage brains. Uh and then of course we're you know desperately holding on waiting for the frontal part of the brain to come in and you know put a lid on it or at least let them show a little bit of discretion. — Right. — But there's a reason why nature evolution whatever thought it was really important to give people very intense emotional experiences as teenagers. you know like as a teenager one author said you know you'll never feel the same degree of pleasure or pain in your whole life because those parts of the brain are just blooming when you're in early adolescence. So the ability to recognize that children are not showing their emotions to get to make our lives more difficult. They're showing the emotions because they need our help in finding ways of expressing them, you know, to begin to use language, say, instead of hitting or, you know, something like that or to, you know, walk away or take a break when they get over stimulated. They have to learn all that from us. But the emotions themselves, we don't want to take away their motivation, their um ability to fall in love, their ability to be excited about things. Because, you know, that's like that nuclear power reactor that's inside all of us that fuels a lifetime of productivity and intense, rewarding, intimate relationships with other people. You've got to bank that fire and allow it to keep burning in our children so that they have that for the future because they're going to need a lot of it. Mhm. — And if they can make friends with their feelings and you can help them do that, they've got this ready source of of uh inner power to do all of that with. — So then let me ask you, if it if it's not about suppressing, denying, controlling, making emotions wrong, what does support look like? And does it change? Because you're kind of now talking about right these different development And does what support looks like change over the course of natural development, so to speak? — Yeah. Well, yeah, it absolutely changes or it should change over the course of development because kids, you

know, from the time that they're babies until they're teenagers are having all different kinds of levels of experience dealing with their emotions. I mean, yeah. So, so that's why it's important. I thought it was important to have the chapters in the book on child development at these different ages because they're going to need different types of responses from you in order to make that interface between what's going on inside them and what the outside world is going to expect of them. And you want to keep that balanced in a way that the child can meet the challenge, you know, without being overly um constrained or too permissive so that they never learn that, you know, there's an appropriate time and place for certain emotions. So, um let's see, there's another part to your question. Um, that's the developmental part about the different ages. But was there was another part at the beginning, Nicole. Do you remember? — I was asking what just true support um looks like and it sounds like you're kind of describing it as an awareness of what's happening inside and then kind of help and support and perhaps translating or communicating the inside to the outside. I'm paraphrasing, but please give us clarity on kind of that. — Yeah. Yes. The support. Yeah. And so what support looks like is you are a wise parent who understands that emotions are part of the package. Uh kids do not come equipped with uh coping mechanisms or knowledge about how to handle their emotions. They don't know it's not cool to do this or that. They have no idea. They're they are newcomers to the planet. — Just in — Yeah. Just in Exactly. So, we support them when we have a mindset or an attitude toward them of, oh, you really don't know how it works here yet, and you have all these emotions — desires, and that's really good because we want you to be a motivated person in life. But I need to show you that when you know, uh, Bobby, you know, takes your truck away from you, you don't haul off and hit him. um because we do it differently. We can handle this differently. So we have a mindset that kids are not being bad. All of their needs are going to be first expressed as demands. — You'll never have a little kid that says, um, you know, mommy, I I think you should give me a hug now. Or uh mommy, I want you to pay attention to me now. never happen. It would never happen. What they're going to do is they're going to make a demand for your attention and they're going to do it in behavior. So, if you can cultivate the mindset that they are just trying to deal with these overwhelming emotions and needs that they have, they don't have the mechanisms for it. and you're there to teach them over a long period of time and repetition — how we go about doing that this very difficult thing to not just be you know um leaking our emotions all over the place but that we can come to our parent or to our caregiver. We can get support. We can get understanding. We can calm down. Oh my goodness. you know, we can get our uh self re-eregulated um through that contact. All of that has to be learned. And if you want it to stick, become an integral part of that person's personality as a parent, you need to cultivate that attitude that they're not being bad. They're just it takes a long time to learn this stuff and the emotions are pushing on the other side in very powerful ways. So, it's not a thing where you can tell them what's what and they're going to, you know, be that way forever more. You have to keep repeating and repeating and gradually it's like, you know, on hard baked ground. It starts to seep in. And once it gets in though, it's held. It's in there and that forms a very solid foundation for the self. So acknowledging the effort, the consistency I think the difficulty that many of us who are on a journey of creating change right have lived the experience of and the reality at the same time that I think a lot of us right are adults now in relation whether it's with our peer age partners or children we're carrying

wounds from our own childhood right we have our own unmet needs and so I think that very few of us right exist just in this perfect ideal where we get it right all of the time. So can you I guess speak to a little bit of the reality of trying because I'm seeing a couple questions in right the many of us who are like well my needs weren't met so in some ways I'm reparenting I'm learning emotional maturity for myself and yet at the same time right I have to show up and be all of this — for this little being. How do I do it all? And what happens when my own wounds take over and I either erupt with emotion, I shut down to my emotions, or simply I don't show up in this space to help cultivate emotional maturity. Kind of what happens on the other side? How important are these or what happens in these moments of rupture? And how important are the moments of repair? — Yeah. I mean I think what you're um what you're describing there is what happens when I revert to being uh a human being. You know, — speaking to a lot of humans in this chat right now. So — I mean so infancy researcher Ed Trronic uh looked into the um sort of the maxim that was offered by uh Donald Winnott who was a British psychoanalyst and pediatrician. And Winnott said you know you don't have to be perfect. You're a human being after all. You're going to make mistakes. You don't have to be perfect. you just have to be good enough. — So Ed Trronic um was the researcher who decided to find out what that meant exactly. — So like let's measure it. Let's find out what's good enough. — So what he did was he observed this happened to be mothers and children babies. Later they did uh I think other people did uh research with fathers too. So there there's a gender balance there. But they were they when they were doing this um research they found that as long as about a third of the time about 30% of the time the parent was willing to turn their attention to the child and show interest and sensitivity to align with the child and sort of make that resonant connection right brain to right brain with their child. the babies would calm down. They would be satisfied. They would feel better. And then they might, you know, mom might uh drift apart because she needs to go work on a report for work or she needs to go, you know, um feed the dog or whatever. It's not that you have to be 100% on and living some kind of ideal superhuman uh existence. It's that when you're there, you're really there. And it only has to be around a third of the time. That doesn't mean that you can go for a long stretch of 70% of the day not paying any attention to your child. Okay? These are interspersed. This is additive. — Crazy, right? — Yeah. Not giving you license that you get 70% of the day off. Um but what he found was that ability of the child to fuss or cry or scream or you know whatever to re-engage the parent was also teaching the child that they could trust this parent that it wasn't just that I guess I can trust mom cuz she's always there. She's always responding to me. She's always perfect. No, that would be like being married to somebody who was always there and always respond. It would drive us insane, right? — You got to wonder what is not being said or done here. — We all have that. We all have that uh we know that something's a miss when somebody's too perfect. So it allows the child to learn that um mom can be imperfect, I can be imperfect, this can be a you know honking mess and yet we somehow get ourselves back in alignment with each other and mom comes toward me to do that. So now I'm forming this inner map, this inner meaning of the world that it's a place where things come back together — where also I can be efficacious in bringing that about. I can be emotionally competent because I can cry, I can complain, I can demand attention

right? And this tells me that I have a sense of I have agency. I mean, look what happens when I create a fuzz. Mom comes over. She reconnects with me. She takes the time that I need. We get copathetic again. And then we go, you know, I go back to playing with my bubble map and she goes back to writing her report. It is a way of learning how to be imperfect with each other. And you can't do that if you're trying to be perfect all the time. So if you have I mean all of us know that when we have not lived up to what we hope to be it hurts us inside. I mean we feel bad inside. All we have to do is pay attention to that feeling. If we get that feeling about how we've been with our child or how we've treated our child, all we have to do is the next right thing. And I don't care if that other person is 40 or four. The next right thing is that you acknowledge your part in the problem. and you come back to them with some kind of apology or attempt at repair, which says, "My relationship with you is more important to me than me acting like I'm right. So, let's get ourselves back together, get back in sync together. I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have done that. " It's all you have to do. — I'm so struck by all of this. And I want to just go back and reiterate again for all of you listening. 30% of the time what is important are interest and sensitivity right not perfection and I think that's such a healing not only awareness statement to come to believe but also a practice because I know for me I have had an expectation an ideal of this perfection because when things went wrong and usually I was on the receiving end of the silent treatment and I didn't feel like I had efficacy to make changes. It was my mom would have to wake up on a particular day and determine that she wanted to talk to me again and then she would re-engage with me. So that powerlessness, right, has sent such a deep rooted meaning of you're only worthy when right I show you this worthiness. though how helpful I know for me personally it would have been to have someone model imperfection less than right having a parent come back and take ownership and say you know I might have been overwhelmed and I didn't have the words to engage with you in that moment so I went silent though I understand the impact and I'm saying this because not only from my own lived experience and the pain that it has caused me that I'm still healing from but I think that very few adults parents and I want to thank you for giving the permission. For some reason, I think it's really hard when it's a child involved to imagine an adult apologizing to a child, right? It's this idea that a child will just kind of get over it on their own. And right, these moments of repair that maybe we build into, right, our more peertyped relationships that maybe some of us has to practice um because we weren't modeled that. But again, I think for some reason there's maybe a lack of clarity or a lack of awareness that apologies and accountability go a very long way for children as well. For you to come back and say, "Hey, I acted in a way that was not how I wanted to show up and I'm sorry for that. It had nothing to do with you at all. " It is so beautiful. I'm like speechless. I mean, isn't that gorgeous that when we think of uh anybody acting that way? All we have to do is translate it to adult life and how we would feel if somebody had treated us badly or had been insensitive and they came back to us and said, "Uh, Nicole, I am so sorry. I just realized what I said. I wasn't thinking about how that would make you feel at all, and I feel really bad about that. I'm so sorry. Okay. How does everybody feel imagining that? You feel — great. — You feel relieved. You feel validated. You feel warmly toward that person. So, you know, children are no different from us. Children are emotional beings like we're emotional beings. So, they may not be as smart as we are and experienced as we are, but they have all the same emotions. um they're coming from the same place. So, they will respond emotionally in that same way, you know, that they know when they're being treated with respect and love and consideration like that. I did want to say, you know, on that topic of um why we think apology is giving up our parental authority or our parental power um you know, and I think sometimes

people wouldn't even put it in those in that big of a term. They would just say, "Well, I'll lose my parental influence. " But you would only that only makes sense if you are in a paradigm of absolute authority and absolute control. Okay? If if that's the deal and I can only parent because I'm maintaining the fiction that I am perfect and I am always right and I'm always in control, then yeah, you put an apology into that paradigm and it reads like, "I confess I'm the weak one. Um, you don't have to respect me anymore. I don't know what I'm doing. I never knew what I was doing. I'm so sorry I tried to be your parent. Forget it. " No, it's not that. It actually gives us more um credibility at an emotional level with our child if we go back in and we try to repair or we try to apologize for something that we know we did wrong. Okay. I mean, we know we feel it. — Yeah. Well, that's so beautiful. And I'm noting so many people in the comments. Um so many cycle breakers. Suzanne, I'm seeing you. I consciously practice apologizing to my son. Our relationship has grown so much as a result. And throughout this conversation, I'm just seeing so many people already showing up in action to undo some of maybe the habits that they've learned in their own childhood and beginning to show up in new ways to help cultivate this type um of emotional maturity in our future generations. So, as we're kind of getting ready to end so that hopefully everyone listening has a takeaway, not only I'm hoping with some more insight or awareness around whatever they might be noticing popping up in their parental child dynamics or relationships or even just adult relationships. But for those listening, Lindsay, what are one or maybe two kind of quick and easy ways for other listeners who maybe are already aren't yet on the journey of creating emotional immaturity for themselves or for their children. What are one or two ways that we can get started right now? Whether it's focusing on cultivating our own emotional maturity or whether we're focusing on cultivating and modeling emotional maturity in our relationships with our children. — Yeah. Well, I think the really cool thing is that if you are trying to raise an emotionally mature child and you're looking at some of these attitudes and practices that are correlated with uh people growing up to be resilient and able to deal with their emotions, able to form lasting loving relationships, able to work as a functioning adult. If you're looking at um those kinds of behaviors, those parenting behaviors that are going to help you accomplish that in your child, you are already indirectly working on your emotional maturity. I mean, you you can't treat your child in a way that encourages their emotional maturity and be emotionally immature yourself in that moment. So, I could have called the book um How to Become an Emotionally Mature Parent. Um that wasn't what came to us as a title when my agent and I were talking about this. But that would scare everybody to death, you know? It's like, oh no, and we have to read this book and learn how to do that. No, all you have to do is focus on what would be some of the most helpful ways to be with your child. And you're going to find yourself inadvertently, unintentionally behaving in much more emotionally mature ways yourself as a person. Even some of these mindsets like um to see your child as a unique individual who's real inside, that their inner world is real. You know, it's not they're not little empty vessels running around. Just not a little bag of impulses acting out all over the place. There's a real little person in there. Okay, that's the definition of empathy, right? So, if you adopt that mindset toward your child, you don't have to worry so much about, well, what do I say or do when they do this or that? because you will already be in this point of view that is empathic and which says, "I see you. You matter. Um, I want to know you. I understand that you're not perfect and I'm not perfect, but I want to get to know you. " That's emotional intimacy. A cardinal characteristic of an emotionally mature person is that they can imagine that other people have an inner world and they want to share that.

That's emotional intimacy. So it's interesting. It's kind of it was sort of a backdoor way of going about this. But the principles in this book are going to make sense to people I hope in a way that they'll do it for their child and they're going to end up getting the benefit of it for themselves in their own maturation. It's a win-win. — Sure is. It sure is. And I truly um Dr. Lindseay Gibson want to thank you um for the beautiful work, the embodiment kind of the gifts that you are quite literally giving to the collective of cycle breakers. I want to thank all of you for taking the time being curious, tuning in, beginning to ask these questions and look at ourselves in a different way so that we can begin to truly break these cycles as so many of you are doing. So, as we're getting ready to end, um please do let us know where any listener can pick up um your latest book, all of your books, where we can find you, stay connected, and all of the things. — Okay. Um I'll just hold up the book. — Yes, hold up the book to prompt you. Yes. The book title. — There it is. — Yeah. Um and uh people can go to my website, which is lindscibson. com for more information. And then if you just do a search on any of the platforms, Instagram, YouTube, Tik Tok, I will come up. So there's a quite a bit of information at there. Cool. Well, I cannot suggest your books in general more wholeheartedly. I will continue to now add this one to the shout from the rooftops list um of all impactful books. Um I definitely suggest everyone get their hands on it. I was super excited, like I said, to hear that you had a new book coming out that it was the topic of parenting in this way. I think and I hear from so many parents within my own community. I'm hoping that many of you are on this event or tuning into this replay. Um because I know that so many of you are hungry for tools, for information, are committed to your own reparing journey so that you can show up and model true emotional maturity for a future generation. So, as always, thank you, thank you all for sharing your time, your presence, your energy, your interest um with us here. And thank you, um Dr. Lindseay Gibson. I know personally I am thrilled that I had this opportunity today and I will hold the vision of many more collaborative opportunities in the future. So, thank you. Thank you. And I will be sending love to wherever you are in the world. Until next time. — Thank you. — Thank you so much. Thank you everyone for tuning in. Thank you. Thank you. Have a good day everyone. Appreciate