Bianca* sat across from me in therapy, knees drawn in, voice shaky. “I just feel like I’m always bracing for something,” she said, eyes flicking towards her phone. She wasn’t expecting a call, but we both knew who she was referring to: her father.

Growing up, Bianca could never predict what mood he’d be in. Jovial one day, explosive the next. “Sometimes I’d just hear the tone of his voice and my body would start buzzing,” she told me. “Like something bad was about to happen.” Even now, as a 35-year-old woman with a successful career and close friendships, a slew of missed calls from him could unravel her for hours, as his mood escalated.

I see this dynamic often; adults wrestling with anxiety, perfectionism, chronic guilt or emotional suppression, shaped by the unpredictable storms of emotionally immature parents. Bianca, like many adults I see in therapy, had spent most of her life trying to decode and contain the emotional chaos of a parent who could barely manage his own inner world. Her father was unpredictable and reactive. Then he would suddenly demand closeness, support or attention. The whiplash was constant.

Psychologically, emotional maturity refers to the ability to regulate and express your feelings in a way that matches the moment. Emotionally mature adults can apologise, reflect and hold space for others. They don’t make everything about them. Emotional immaturity, by contrast, is a persistent pattern of self-absorption, emotional reactivity and lack of insight. In a parent, this can lead to emotional neglect, boundary violations and unpredictable reactions.

Growing up with emotionally immature parents is disorienting. You learn early to read the room before you read yourself. The nervous system becomes fine-tuned to danger. It waits for the next outburst, the next icy silence, the next unexpected storm. It can make you question your reality. Your needs may have been minimised, mocked or outright ignored. You may have learned to repress emotions, to anticipate another’s mood before checking in with your own or to twist yourself into shapes that felt safer, but never truly authentic.

For Bianca, that danger most often came in the form of her father’s volatility. “If I didn’t pick up the phone when he called,” she told me, “he’d leave these horrible voicemails; screaming, swearing, accusing me of abandoning him. It didn’t matter if I was working, sleeping or just … not up for a conversation.” This wasn’t a rare occurrence. In fact, she admitted she had started leaving her phone on silent more often and blocked his number intermittently when she felt overwhelmed with his reactivity.

She had explained this to him calmly, more times than she could count. They had also had arguments about this topic over the years where she would try to explain to him the impact this had on her. But nothing ever changed.

This pattern wasn’t just hard on Bianca as a child. It followed her into friendships, romantic relationships and how she felt about herself.

In clinical terms, emotional immaturity is a persistent pattern of lacking awareness and insight about one’s emotions and how they impact others. Emotionally immature parents may be highly reactive, defensive, self-absorbed or emotionally unavailable. In practice, this can look like unpredictable outbursts over small issues; punishing a child for showing emotions; expecting children to provide emotional support; dismissive or aloof reactions to their child’s distress and a fundamental inability to empathise.

Bianca’s father was a textbook case. His high emotional reactivity meant small incidents like missing a call could spiral into days of stonewalling or angry rants. She recounted times he would angrily demand she make time for him and then cancel on the day they were to see one another. Her life and schedule were treated like inconveniences, minor unimportant details. When she dared express frustration, she would be met with accusations and rage.

One of the cruellest legacies of emotional immaturity in a parent is the way it echoes into adulthood, leaving children with warped templates for relationships. Many become people-pleasers, overly attuned to others but disconnected from themselves. Others swing the opposite way by becoming closed off, wary, suspicious of connection.

In Bianca’s case, the chaos with her father left her hypervigilant. In her romantic relationships, she struggled to trust. In therapy, we began with acknowledging this was not her fault, and that there were deficits in her father’s emotional capacity, deficits she didn’t cause and could never fix. Emotional immaturity, particularly when shaped by trauma, neglect or generational dysfunction, is complex.

From there, we worked to rebuild Bianca’s sense of agency. Key strategies included learning that it’s not her job to manage her father’s feelings or rescue him from discomfort, recognising that walking away from an unhealthy interaction is protection, and calmly and consistently expressing her boundaries.

These were not easy shifts. They required courage, patience and feeling grief when accepting that a parent may never become who you needed them to be.

Healing from emotionally immature parenting doesn’t always involve reconciliation, and all too often estranging oneself from a family member may appear to be reactionary. For many people, it is necessary.

Bianca no longer flinches when her phone notifies her of voicemails. She is still working on her aversion to phone calls.

*name and some other features have been changed to protect client privacy and identity

• Carly Dober is a psychologist living and working in Naarm/Melbourne