Your Mom’s Fine… Until She Isn’t: A Therapist’s Guide

Send us Fan MailWhat if your nervous system learned that love required self-abandonment? We unpack emotionally immature parents with therapists Cristine Seidell and Taylor Strong, tracing how limited capacity, stress, and intergenerational patterns shape attachment—and how those early adaptations like fawning and freeze follow us into adult relationships.We start by defining emotional immaturity as a chronic struggle to regulate, reflect, and hold a child’s feelings without collapsing or retaliating. From there, we explore intention versus impact, why siblings remember homes so differently, and how “capacity” fluctuates with resources like sleep, workload, and support. The heart of the conversation is repair and accountability: what it sounds like when a parent owns harm, why that takes resourcing, and how to move from blame to compassionate clarity about needs.Cristine and Taylor offer practical steps for building self-trust and boundaries rooted in nervous system safety. You’ll hear how to identify fawning and freeze in couples dynamics, set “access levels” with family, and decide if limited contact, structured engagement, or a season of no contact fits your current capacity. We talk grief for the parent you needed, the self you postponed to belong, and the path to authentic connection when repair isn’t available yet.Along the way, we share tools, scripts, and recommended reads—Lindsay Gibson’s Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents and Meg Josephson’s Are You Mad At Me—for naming patterns and reclaiming your voice. The aim isn’t to punish the past; it’s to meet present needs with clarity, regulate through hard moments, and choose relationships that reciprocate. Press play for a grounded, nonjudgmental guide to healing attachment wounds, setting aligned boundaries, and creating space for real repair. If this resonates, subscribe, leave a review, and share your biggest takeaway with us—what boundary are you practicing this week?Thank you for tuning into And Still WE Rise! If you would like to learn more about me or the work our practice is doing, feel free to follow us on Instagram at:@atltherapygirl and @risetherapycenterOr check us out at www.risetherapycenter.comDisclaimer: And Still We Rise is meant to provide perspective and meaningful conversations around mental health topics. It is not meant to provide specific therapeutic advise to individuals. If anything in these podcasts resonates, ASWR recommends consulting with your individual therapist or seeking a referral from your primary care physician.