Top 120 Lindsay C. Gibson Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “5. The Right to Clear Communications I have the right to say anything as long as I do so in a nonviolent, nonharmful way. I have the right to ask to be listened to. I have the right to tell you my feelings are hurt. I have the right to speak up and tell you what I really prefer. I have the right to be told what you want from me without assuming I should know.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

52. “Emotionally immature people are highly self-referential, meaning that in any interaction, all roads lead back to them. However, they aren’t self-reflective. Their focus on themselves isn’t about gaining insight or self-understanding; it’s about being the center of attention.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

53. “People often wonder whether their parents can ever change. That depends on whether their parents are willing to self-reflect, which is the first step in any change. Unfortunately, if their parents aren’t interested in noticing their impacts on others, they have no impetus to look at themselves; without such self-reflection, there’s no way to change.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

54. “8. The Right to Equal Importance and Respect I have the right to be considered just as important as you. I have the right to live my life without ridicule from anyone. I have the right to be treated respectfully as an independent adult. I have the right to refuse to feel shame.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

55. “9. The Right to Put My Own Health and Well-Being First I have the right to thrive, not just survive. I have the right to take time for myself to do what I enjoy. I have the right to decide how much energy and attention I give to other people. I have the right to take time to think things over. I have the right to take care of myself regardless of what others think. I have the right to take the time and space necessary to nourish my inner world.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

56. “To the EI parent, the important things happen in the outside world. They don’t see why children should be encouraged to become aware of their inner worlds. To them, the inner realm of thoughts and feelings seems vaguely subversive and certainly unproductive. They think it’s best if kids stay busy and focused on activities and externals.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

57. “No child can be good enough to evoke love from a highly self-involved parent.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

58. “If there’s anything emotionally immature people are keen on in relationships, it’s role compliance. Roles simplify life and make decisions clear-cut. As parents, emotionally immature people need their children to play a proper role that includes respecting and obeying them. They often use platitudes to support the authority of their role as a parent because, like roles, platitudes oversimplify complex situations and make them easier to deal with.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

59. “Pay attention to your internal physical sensations. Figure out the meaning of your feelings. Refuse to judge and criticize yourself. Identify what you need. Daydream about your life purpose and where you belong.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

60. “The idea of stepping back and asking yourself whether you really need your parents – or whether they need you to need them – might seem radical. But if it weren’t for family roles and fantasies, your parents might not even be the kind of people you’d seek anything from. So consider whether your need for them is real, or whether it might be a holdover from unmet childhood needs. Do they really have something you want now?”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

61. “Remember, your goodness as a person isn’t based on how much you give in relationships, and it isn’t selfish to set limits on people who keep on taking. Your job is to take care of yourself, regardless of what others think you should be doing for them.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

62. “When emotional parents disintegrate, they take their children with them into their personal meltdown. Their children experience their despair, rage, or hatred in all its intensity.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

63. “Growing up subject to others’ emotional immaturity can be frustrating and emotionally painful. Consequently, you may feel especially grateful when delightful people come along to make you feel like all is right with the world. Around them, it feels natural to be yourself. Your thinking is clear, your heart feels warm, and they draw the very best out of you. You simultaneously become more yourself – and more than yourself.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

64. “Your true self wants you to see what’s really going on. It tries to wake you up because it wants you to stop believing that your emotionally immature parents knew what was best for you and that creating a role-self is better than being who you really are. It knows better than to let a fantasy run your life.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

65. “Feeling inferior or unworthy is like a flashing red light letting you know an EIRS or a drama triangle may be sucking you in. If you learn to interpret inferiority sensations as warnings that someone is trying to use you for their own self-esteem needs, you can step back and maintain your autonomy and positive self-concept.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

66. “Only emotionally phobic, emotionally immature people believe that wanting empathy and understanding is a sign of weakness. Forging.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

67. “Because they’re so attuned to feelings, internalizers are extremely sensitive to the quality of emotional intimacy in their relationships. Their entire personality longs for emotional spontaneity and intimacy, and they can’t be satisfied with less. Therefore, when they’re raised by immature and emotionally phobic parents, they feel painfully lonely.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

68. “Like small children, EI parents want you to intuit what they feel without their saying anything. They feel hurt and angry when you don’t guess their needs, expecting you to know what they want. If you protest that they didn’t tell you what they wanted, their reaction is, “If you really loved me, you would’ve known.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

69. “They Can Feel and Think at the Same Time The ability to think even when upset makes an emotionally mature person someone you can reason with. Because they can think and feel at the same time, it’s easy to work things out with such people. They don’t lose their ability to see another perspective just because they aren’t getting what they want. They also don’t lose track of emotional factors when addressing a problem.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

70. “As we saw in the previous chapter, EIPs dismiss your inner world as if it were unnecessary and irrelevant. If you believe these dismissals, you will miss the wisdom your inner self offers you in the form of feelings, intuitions, and insights. But you can use the following five ways to establish a more trusting, respectful relationship with your inner self and its guidance.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

71. “Remember, you can’t expect immature, emotionally phobic people to be different from how they are.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

72. “Unfortunately, if their parents aren’t interested in noticing their impacts on others, they have no impetus to look at themselves; without such self-reflection, there’s no way to change.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

73. “Knowing your true emotions and thoughts probably felt dangerous if it threatened to distance you from the people you depended on. You learned that your goodness or badness lay not only in your behavior, but in your mind as well. In this way, you may have learned the absurd idea that you can be a bad person for having certain thoughts and feelings, and you may still hold that belief.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

74. “They never assume that if you love them, you’ll want the same things they do. Instead, they take your feelings and boundaries into account in any interaction. This may sound like a lot of work, but it isn’t; emotionally mature people automatically tune in to how others are feeling. Real empathy makes consideration of other people second nature.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

75. “Instead of having a well-integrated sense of who they are, emotionally immature people are more like an amalgam of various borrowed parts, many of which don’t go together well. Because they had to shut down important parts of themselves out of fear of their parents’ reactions, their personalities formed in isolated clumps, like pieces of a puzzle that don’t fit together.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

76. “The only way an EIP can take over your emotional and mental life is to get you to disconnect from your inner life. When EIPs spellbind you into passivity, they induce emotional immobility and dissociation from yourself. Now, however, you can use mindfulness to reverse that process.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

77. “We often project issues about our parents onto our partners; then we may become even more angry with them because, at an unconscious level, they remind us of the past, in addition to whatever is happening in the present.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

78. “A common fantasy among children of emotionally immature parents is that their parents will have a change of heart and finally love them by showing concern. Unfortunately, self-preoccupied parents refuse all invitations to fulfill their part in their child’s healing story. Focused on their own healing fantasy, they expect their children to make up for their childhood hurts.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

79. “Emotionally mature people show an inclusive, respectful, and coequal attitude toward other people. They elevate you with them, rather than make you feel less than.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

80. “Once you give yourself permission to be loyal to your thoughts and feelings, you can respond in ways that change the whole interactional dynamic.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

81. “When you know your own thoughts and are deeply in touch with your inner world, you gain a sense of inner wholeness and completeness that increases your sense of security. Your inner wholeness also gives you dignity and integrity, and anchors you whenever you face stress or discord. It also gives you confidence that your feelings have meaning and that your instinctual guidance can be trusted.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

82. “A good relationship with your inner world reveals what’s meaningful to you and directs your life’s purpose. If you don’t form that trusting relationship with your inner world, you will be dependent on whatever your peers, the culture, or authorities tell you to be. In part II of this book, you will learn more specific ways to get to know your inner world and how to engage in this process more deeply.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

83. “You develop enough inner complexity to make you resilient and adaptable. You get to know yourself and your emotions; your thoughts are flexible yet organized. You become self-aware.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

84. “At first, EIPs can “make” you feel things, but as you become more conscious of what they’re doing, their attempts lose power.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

85. “People who have been wronged by an emotionally immature person may start to think they’re at fault if they continue to feel hurt by what the person did. Emotionally immature people expect you to take them off the hook immediately. If it feels better to blame you for not forgiving them fast enough, that’s what they’ll do.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

86. “This is very different from the black-and-white, rigid, and often contradictory personality of the EIP. The inner world of EI personalities is not well enough developed or integrated to produce reliable stability, resilience, or self-awareness.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

87. “Because they aren’t self-reflective, EI parents have poor filters and say things without thinking. They can leave people stunned by their inappropriate comments. If confronted with their insensitivity, they might say things like, “I was only saying what I thought,” as if speaking all your thoughts out loud were normal behavior.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

88. “Children who try to be good enough to win their parents’ love have no way of knowing that unconditional love cannot be bought with conditional behavior.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

89. “Nothing hurts their spirit more than being around someone who won’t engage with them emotionally.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

90. “They are profoundly self-involved because their development was stunted by anxiety during childhood. In this way, their egocentrism is more like the self-preoccupation of someone with a chronic pain condition, rather than someone who can’t get enough of himself or herself.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

91. “Human rights defend people’s rights to feel valuable and good inside, not just safe on the outside.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

92. “EIPs take this to an extreme. The way it feels to them is the way it is.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

93. “Emotionally immature parents don’t try to understand the emotional experiences of other people – including their own children. If accused of being insensitive to the needs or feelings of others, they become defensive, saying something along the lines of “Well, you should have said so!” They might add something about not being a mind reader, or they might dismiss the situation by saying the hurt person is overly emotional or too sensitive.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

94. “Successful marital therapy often involves exposing how people’s healing fantasies try to force their partners to give them the loving childhood they always wished for.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

95. “Further, in an enmeshed family, if you have a problem with someone, you talk about that person to other people instead of going to the person directly. Bowen called this triangling and characterized enmeshment as the glue that keeps such families together.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

96. “In contrast, the most immature EIPs try to alter reality by denying, dismissing, or distorting facts they don’t like. At the lowest level of maladaptive coping mechanisms, a person might lose touch with consensual reality and become psychotic.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

97. “Rational inquiry will reveal that one EIP’s opinion isn’t the only way to look at things.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

98. “Emotionally immature parents don’t know how to validate their child’s feelings and instincts. Without this validation, children learn to give in to what others seem sure about. As adults, they may deny their instincts to the point where they acquiesce to relationships they don’t really want. They may then believe it’s up to them to make the relationship work.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

99. “The loneliness of feeling unseen by others is as fundamental a pain as physical injury, but it doesn’t show on the outside. Emotional loneliness is a vague and private experience, not easy to see or describe. You might call it a feeling of emptiness or being alone in the world. Some have called this feeling existential loneliness, but there’s nothing existential about it. If you feel it, it came from your family.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson

100. “First you detach from them emotionally and accept their right to feel whatever they feel, just as you hold that right for yourself. You don’t have to judge their feelings, nor do you have to do what they want. You understand that EIPs are upset when things don’t go their way, yet you don’t change your mind just because they’re unhappy.”

— Lindsay C. Gibson