Your Adult Child Calls You a Narcissist: What Are They Really Trying to Say?.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Narcissism, emotional immaturity, family conflict, parenting skills, family systems, differentiation of self, multi-generational transmission, emotional attunement, clinical diagnosis, skill gap, generational shift, emotional maturity, family relationships, coaching program, growth edge.
SPEAKERS
Tina Gosney

Tina Gosney 00:00
I was talking with a friend recently, and they told me something that I thought was super interesting. They said something like, “Hey, my son called me a narcissist, and then in that same conversation, he told me I should read this book about emotionally immature parents because it explains our whole family. So, which 1am I? Am I a narcissist? Am I just immature? Because it feels like those are two really different things, and nobody can actually tell me what I am. So that topic right there is our whole episode today.

Tina Gosney 00:32
Welcome to Coaching Your Family Relationships. I’m Tina Gosney, a family conflict coach and a parent educator. On this podcast, we talk about what to do when your relationship with your adult child feels strained, confused, and sometimes even painful. And we do it through a family systems lens, which means we’re looking at more than just one event and one relationship in the family. We’re going to look at the whole system, and it gives us a lot more information about what’s really happening and why things are happening, because the hope that I want you to hold on to is that when one person in a family changes how they’re showing up and they become more steady, that means the entire relationship system can begin to shift.

Tina Gosney 01:18
Here’s what I’m noticing more and more as I work with parents of adult children, that adult children are having language that they have never used before, for patterns that they felt but they couldn’t ever put a label to, and two of the words that are getting a lot of use right now and a lot of traction, sometimes in the same conversation, just like with my friend, are the word narcissist and emotionally immature. Sometimes that second one is borrowed specifically from a book, a book that my friend mentioned. It’s written by a psychologist named Dr. Lindsey Gibson, and it’s about adult children who are raised by parents who struggle to be emotionally present with them.

Tina Gosney 02:03
Now, these two words or phrases, you know, narcissist and emotionally immature, they get used almost interchangeably out there in the world, but they are not the same thing, and they do not call for the same response from you. And if you mix them up, it can send you down the wrong path entirely, because one of them is a clinical diagnosis, and the other one is a description of a gap in skills. Today we’re going to work to sort all that out, and we’re going to talk about where each of these ideas really comes from, what’s genuinely different behind them, and why the distinction matters a lot more now than it did just a generation ago, and then we’re going to talk about what do you do next, and it really depends on which one are you dealing with.

Tina Gosney 02:54
So let’s get into it. We’re going to start talking about why these two words keep getting tangled up together. Why there’s so much confusion in the first place? Because on the surface, narcissism and emotional immaturity, they can look like they’re describing the same behaviors. Both of them involve a parent who seems more focused on their own feelings than on they than they are on their child’s feelings, both of them can involve a parent who struggles to apologize, or who gets defensive really quickly, or has a hard time seeing their child as a separate person with their own inner life and their own perspective and their own interpretations of things. So, if you only look at the surface behavior. It’s easy to see why an adult child might reach for either word and think that they’re interchangeable and that they could both fit. But underneath the surface, those two things are very different. One describes a fixed, pervasive personality pattern that makes meets specific clinical criteria, and it’s genuinely very difficult to change. The other pattern describes something closer to just having a skill that you never learned, like a capacity for emotional attunement that was never modeled for you, and it was never practiced in your home, and it was never expected in the home where you grew up, or in the home that you built, because it was never talked about until now. And I want to bring in a piece of family systems thinking here because I think it explains why this pattern shows up generation after generation.

Tina Gosney 04:38
So family systems, specifically the work of Dr. Murray Bowen describes something called multi-generational transmission process. That’s how long-term. Let’s break down what that means. So, in simple words, it means that our capacity to stay emotionally steady and think clearly under stress, which is. Called differentiation of self, that gets passed down through a family, and often nobody chooses it and no one notices it, and it just gets automatically passed down. So a parent who was never taught how to sit with a child’s big feelings usually wasn’t taught that skill because their own parents didn’t know how to do that either, and they never modeled it for them. This is not a personal failing that one generation just invented and decided to pass it down to their children. It’s just a pattern of education or lack of education, and it moved through an emotional system and the family system over time.

Tina Gosney 05:45
What matters enormously for how you hear these two words, narcissism and emotional immaturity, is if what your child is describing is closer to emotional immaturity. You’re looking at an inherited pattern that can really shift when one person in the system, in this case that would be you, becomes more differentiated and more able to stay grounded and think clearly, even when the relationship is tense. And if what they’re describing is closer to true narcissism, you’re looking at something that sits more firmly in one personality structure, and typically requires really specialized clinical support to address this at all. This is also honestly, you know, why part of this conversation feels really urgent for parents right now, because your children are asking for a kind of emotional attunement that was not the expectation when you were raising them, and certainly was not the expectation when you were being raised either. And let’s just go back one more generation. It was even less of an expectation when your parents were being raised. This is a real generational shift that can feel very disorienting to somebody, especially when we are now being held to a standard that we didn’t even we never experienced, we had never had it explained to us.

Tina Gosney 07:10
We don’t even know what it is, but this shift in expectation is not automatically evidence of a personality disorder like narcissism. Most of the time, it’s just evidence that the family’s emotional system is being asked to expand and to grow into something new. So let’s talk about where these words come from, and why, when we’re really more specific, it’s very helpful.

Tina Gosney 07:38
So first, let’s do narcissism. This is a clinical term. It’s a personality disorder that is a specific diagnosis found in the DSM, and this is the manual that clinicians use to diagnose mental health conditions. To meet that diagnosis, a person needs to show a pervasive pattern. That means it shows up consistently across most relationships in most contexts, not just with one child or during one stressful or hard season. That pattern typically includes things like a grandiose sense of self-importance, a need for near constant admiration, a genuine and persistent lack of empathy, and a willing a willingness to use other people for your purposes for selfish purposes. It’s also expected to be a stable, long-standing pattern present since early adulthood, usually, and it’s not something that only shows up under specific stress. That diagnosis exists for a reason, and for the relatively small number of people who genuinely meet that bar, it describes something real and serious.

Tina Gosney 08:58
But it is a clinical diagnosis. It’s meant to be diagnosed by a trained professional after real assessment, not something that is assigned to you across the dinner table or in a text or from a checklist that your child googled at night or found on social media.

Tina Gosney 09:22
So let’s go into emotional immaturity, like Dr. Lindsey Gibson describes it. So in Dr. Gibson’s book on the adult children of immature parents, she describes something very different. She’s not offering a diagnosis. She’s describing a pattern of parenting where the parent struggles to be fully present and attuned to their child’s inner world, and that is most often because that same capacity was never modeled for them when they were young. So, in Dr. Gibson’s framework, these parents tend to be more comfortable with their own feelings than with their child’s, and they can be inconsistent or they can be defensive when their child brings up something hard, and they often have a real difficulty reflecting on how their behavior actually lands and the impact that it has on people around them.

Tina Gosney 10:19
She describes a few different flavors of this. Some emotionally immature parents are consumed by their own emotional experience, and they can swing between being really overly involved in their child’s life or in pulling away entirely. And some people are so focused on achievement and productivity that a child’s feelings become an inconvenience to them. Some parents are really passive, and they just simply don’t show up when things get hard. They just kind of check out. Some are more rejecting, and they struggle to engage warmly with their child.

Tina Gosney 10:57
But what connects all of these things in her framework is not malice, and it’s not this fixed diagnosis. It’s just an underdeveloped capacity for emotional attunement, one that traces often will trace back to more than one generation back. This is the heart of the distinction that I want you to hold on today: is that narcissism describes a person, emotional immaturity describes a gap. This is a skill that has not been built built yet. It’s in a specific in a specific relationship or across the parent’s whole life. One requires clinical treatment to to make any progress, the other in most cases can grow through awareness and practice and support, which is genuinely good news. Which this probably fits most of you that are listening to this.

Tina Gosney 11:55
I also want to name something that I think gets lost when this word starts to circulate around in our conversations. Emotionally emotional immaturity, in this sense, is extremely common. Most of us are working with some degree of it, because most of us were not raised by parents themselves who were emotionally attuned. Think about what it actually takes to be attuned to a child’s inner world. We as humans need to see things modeled for us. If we don’t have a map, it’s very difficult for us to create one.

Tina Gosney 12:34
So you, most of the time, need to have seen it done. You need to have had someone who sat with you during your own hard feelings when you were young, and that person didn’t need to rush in to fix them, and they didn’t dismiss them, and they didn’t make them about themselves. So a lot of parents listening to this simply never had that map, never had it modeled. That’s not an excuse, but it is an explanation because it means you are in very large company, and this is not something rare, and it is not a you’re not part of a shameful minority.

Tina Gosney 13:14
I also want to say something about the word immature itself because I know that can be really hard to hear, so it can sound like an insult, like something you know, lazy or embarrassing, and that is not what I mean by it, and that is not what Dr. Gibson meant by it either. So when she used this word immature, it just means underdeveloped. It describes this capacity that never had space, it never had room, or even the expectation to grow. This is not a character flaw. Think of like a plant that never got sunlight. That plant is not lazy. We shouldn’t be embarrassed about that plant. It’s just underdeveloped because the conditions for its growth were not present. The same is true here. If nobody around you, when you were small, ever made room for your own big feelings, if they never modeled how to sit with your pain, and they never expected you to do that too, then there’s just simply a piece of you that did not get to be developed yet. That’s a very different starting point than being told that there is something that is fundamentally wrong with who you are.

Tina Gosney 14:31
Let’s take a pause right here and talk about why getting this distinction right actually matters beyond just picking a label that seems to fit the situation the most. The research on family estrangement consistently shows that adult children who pull away from a parent often describe feeling like their inner life, their emotional life, didn’t have a lot of room in their relationship when they were young, like.

Tina Gosney 14:59
Conversations constantly circled back to what the parents needed, or their feelings were treated like an inconvenience. So that pattern, when it’s repeated across years, that’s exactly the kind of thing that eventually gets a name attached to it. And right now, the two names that are most available in our current culture are a narcissist and emotionally immature, and here’s at stake in what you believe about yourself.

Tina Gosney 15:29
If you hear your child’s frustration and you privately decide, “Well, I must be a narcissist, then one of two things tend to happen: either you spiral into the kind of this hopeless shame, deciding that you’re a broken person and that you can’t be fixed, and you just stop trying, or, understandably, you reject that label entirely because it feels so extreme and so untrue, and in rejecting it, you also reject everything real that your child might be pointing to underneath it.

Tina Gosney 16:01
But if you can accurately identify a pattern as emotional immaturity instead of narcissism, then something different entirely becomes possible. You are no longer looking at a diagnosis; you’re looking at a skill that you can build in a family’s emotional system, and when you build that skill, it genuinely shifts the the whole system of the family. When you become more steady and you become more attuned within that system, now this is not a small difference. It’s the difference between a story that ends in you giving up and a story that actually ends in growth. Now let’s talk about the difference side by side. Let’s lay this out plainly-a side by side look at narcissism and emotional immaturity, because I think that’s really helpful to look at these things side by side and see how they compare. So let’s start with empathy. In true narcissism, the lack of empathy is persistent. It shows up across nearly every relationship over many years, regardless of who is involved. In emotional immaturity, the capacity for empathy is usually present. It’s just underdeveloped, or inconsistently accessed.

Tina Gosney 17:26
Many emotionally immature parents can be genuinely warm and attuned with a friend, a spouse, even one child, or in one situation, while you’re still struggling with another child or another kind of emotional conversation. The capacity is there. It just hasn’t been built evenly and consistently and steadily. So let’s look at self-reflection. A person who meets the clinical bar for narcissism tends to experience any suggestion that they’ve hurt someone as a threat to their sense of self, and they typically resist looking at that very long. A parent who is emotionally immature can often see the impact of their behavior. They don’t often know what to do with it, and often they’re very surprised and they can express remorse about it once that they’re calm and feeling safe, and they’re not defending themselves in the heat of the moment, but it takes that that pause and that going back and reflect reflection after after the calming down to really see the impact of that.

Tina Gosney 18:32
So the resistance in emotional immaturity is often about never having practiced this kind of reflection. It’s not about being unable to do it at all. It’s just an underdeveloped skill. And next, let’s look at the capacity to change. This is one of the most important differences between narcissism and emotional immaturity. True narcissistic personality disorder is so difficult to shift, even with really sustained, consistent clinical treatment, because it’s a deeply set personality structure. Emotional immaturity, on the other hand, can genuinely grow. It’s a skill gap, not a fixed structure, and skills can be built at any age with the right awareness and the right practice, and the right type of support around you.

Tina Gosney 19:28
Okay, next, let’s look at where does it come from? Where is its origin? Narcissistic personality disorder is understood to form in early in life. It’s tied to specific developmental factors, it requires clinical assessment and treatment to address. Emotional immaturity is usually best understood as a pattern that’s been handed down through families and generation after generation, the same way that Murray Bowen. Describes the multi-generational transmission process is that that pattern of handing these things down through the generations. It’s it’s giving it to it’s passing on the same thing to the next generation. It’s less about one person’s fixed wiring and more about emotional inheritance. We don’t really mean to pass it on, but we do. And finally, let’s talk about intent.

Tina Gosney 20:27
Genuine narcissism can involve using other people, including a child, to meet your own needs. Sometimes with awareness, often with awareness that this is happening. Emotional immaturity almost never involves that kind of exploitation. It looks more like a habit of defaulting to one’s own emotional experience, simply because that’s the only pattern the parent ever had modeled or practiced. Now, if you’re listening to this and you are recognizing yourself somewhere in the emotional immaturity column, far more than the narcissist column, that is a really hopeful place to be standing. It means the the work that you have ahead of you is so learnable. And now, what do you do next? Where does this leave you practically?

Tina Gosney 21:20
Let’s just walk through a few of these clear steps because first, you need to get really honest with yourself about the pattern, not just the label. Set the word that your child used aside for a moment, and just ask yourself plainly: Is this a lifelong pattern of using people and needing constant admiration, or is this like a capacity that I never built, one that shows up unevenly, inconsistently, depending on who I’m with and how safe that I feel? Most parents, when they’re honest, find themselves pretty solidly in that second category.

Tina Gosney 21:59
Second, if it’s emotional immaturity, get curious with your child about the specific moments that they are thinking of. Let your response be about staying connected while also thinking clearly about your own pattern, rather than just reacting from old habits. That is differentiation of self in practice, staying close to your child instead of pulling away or collapsing into guilt, while also being honest with yourself about what you need to do differently, and ask them directly. Can you help me understand a specific time this showed up? Let their their answer actually land, and don’t prepare your defense while they’re talking.

Tina Gosney 22:54
Third, treat this as a skill that you’re building, not a character flaw that You’re confessing, emotional attunement, noticing a feeling in someone else and staying present with it instead of redirecting to your own experience. That is a genuine skill, and like any skill, it improves with deliberate and consistent practice. But at first, expect to be pretty clumsy at it. Expect old habits to show up during stress, especially during stress. That’s totally normal for anyone building a new capacity at any age. It is not a sign that you are failing.

Tina Gosney 23:38
Fourth, if something about the pattern still genuinely worries you. Something that feels more pervasive, more rigid, more resistant to any kind of change when you’re calm and reflective-that is worth bringing to a licensed mental health professional that can actually assess what’s happening for you. This is not something you should self-diagnose, and it is not something to diagnose based on you know one hard conversation with your child. Let’s be honest about the other direction too, because pretending that narcissism never happens does not serve you. If a pattern in your life has been genuinely pervasive across nearly every relationship, not just with your child, and it’s been there for decades. And it has involved real difficulty ever accepting responsibility. You have a constant need for admiration and a track record of using people close to you for your own benefit, even when you can clearly see that, that’s really worth taking seriously and bringing to our professional, rather than deciding on your own one way or the other.

Tina Gosney 24:53
The same is true if your adult child describes patterns that sound less like emotional, like an emotional skill. Gap, and more like sustained manipulation or exploitation over over a period of many years, and I say this not to add another thing to worry about, but just because real clarity here protects both you and your child. Most parents who hear the word narcissist from their adult child are dealing with emotional immaturity and not a personality disorder, but if you genuinely aren’t sure, a licensed professional can help you find out, and that is a very useful step. It’s a lot more useful than living for years under a label, thinking that it applies to you when it might not even be accurate. What does it look like to move into growth? Because most parents move through, you know, this predictable pattern when these words get used.

Tina Gosney 25:56
First, they have this jolt, and then this flood of shame or defensiveness, and if that sits there long enough without some support and without some clarification, it tends to lead to us giving up on the relationship or quietly just deciding that your child is being unfair and is unfairly categorizing you. There is a steadier path through this though, and it starts with the family systems idea that I mentioned earlier. When one person in the family becomes more differentiated, they’re more able to stay emotionally present and think clearly, even when things get tense.

Tina Gosney 26:34
Then the whole emotional system around them tends to shift too. You don’t need your child to use a more precise word. What you need is to become someone who can hold a hard truth about your own patterns, without collapsing into shame or hardening into defensiveness. Let’s talk about what happens and what actually changes once we build this skill, because I don’t think that really gets said often enough. What does it look like when a parent is working and has developed differentiation and emotional maturity? Well, that parent has learned how to sit with someone else’s hard feelings without having to fix it, without having to defend themselves against it, and without having to redirect the conversation back to their own experience, and when that happens, something different begins to happen in their relationships.

Tina Gosney 27:34
Conversations that you that used to end in silence, a slammed door, non-response text. or or phone calls, you know, they start to end in both people staying in the room. Your child starts to bring you things again, pretty small things at first, probably, because they learn that you can hold those small things, and over time, those things get bigger, and you stop bracing for the next difficult conversation because you know how to handle it now. You’re not just hoping that you’re going to wing it and everything will come out the way you want it to. You have skills. You know how to handle difficult things.

Tina Gosney 28:15
This is the specific work that I support parents doing inside the Bridge to Connection. This is my coaching program. This is not a personality overhaul. This is not a list of things to feel guilty about. What we do are concrete, practicable skills. How to notice when you’re about to redirect a conversation toward yourself, and how to sit with a feeling that makes you uncomfortable without rushing to make it go away, how to apologize in a way that actually lands and they feel heard and understood. These are teachable, repeatable skills and moves. And like any other skill, they get stronger with real practice and real feedback, and not just good intentions.

Tina Gosney 29:05
Here’s what I really want you to hear, though, because it does not matter how old you are or how long this pattern has been running in your family. This capacity can be built at any age, as long as you are willing to look honestly at yourself, as long as you’re ready to practice, actually practice something new, even when it feels awkward, which is something that’s going to happen. You know, I’ve watched parents in their 60s and in their 70s build this skill from very little to work on. They didn’t have a map. They didn’t have a model for them as they were children, you know. But they’re willing to show up and practice the skills. Age is not an obstacle. Willingness and practice are the ways that we do this.

Tina Gosney 29:55
So let me go through the three most common mistakes. That I see parents doing when this comes up in their relationships, mistake one: totally rejecting or totally accepting the label that your child hands you. If you swallow that word whole out of guilt without checking whether it actually fits, that tends to lead to collapse and shame. Also, if you reject it outright because it feels extreme or unfair, that tends to lead to defensiveness and resentment and dismissal. Both of those responses skip the work that needs to be done, which is honestly looking at the pattern underneath the word.

Tina Gosney 30:43
Mistake number two. Taking language that you just recently learned yourself, like emotionally immature, maybe a projection is another one that we might use here, and we turn it around on your child without any introspection on your own. This happens a lot more than people expect. A parent picks up on a term like narcissism or emotionally immature, and instead of using it to look at their own patterns, they turn it around and apply it to their child, or they might even turn it around and apply it to their child’s other parent, as a way of ending the conversation, rather than really digging into it and opening it up. If you notice yourself reaching for a label to describe someone before you’ve honestly looked at yourself, that is worth pausing on.

Tina Gosney 31:39
Mistake number three: trying to build this new skill entirely alone, without any practice or support. You know, this is not just something that we grin and bear it and just willpower willpower our way through. This is genuinely learning a new skill, and that means learning a new way of responding by building new neural pathways in your brain. This kind of change is really hard to do from the inside. It’s hard. Your progress is hard to gage from the inside without somebody reflecting that back to you. It’s very difficult to know whether you’re doing something, actually doing something different, or just believing that you’re doing something different.

Tina Gosney 32:28
Support isn’t a shortcut; it’s often what makes the difference between insight and actual change. Getting it right looks like this: you hear this heavy word, your whole body wants to either collapse or defend, and instead you slow down and you get honest about which pattern is actually true. And it’s entirely possible that the pattern that is underneath what your child is trying to tell you, that there is some truth there, and that there is some things that don’t apply to you, and it’s not yours to own.

Tina Gosney 33:04
And it’s very difficult to parse those out by yourself. It’s very helpful to have a person there to help you with that. So we need to treat this as a change, is as this this is a skill that you are building. It’s not something that you hand to somebody else to solve, and over time, not just in one conversation, you become a steadier person in the emotional system that your family shares. Here’s what I want you to take with you today: narcissism and emotional immaturity are not the same thing. They are not the same word, even though they can feel like they’re interchangeable to some people.

Tina Gosney 33:46
One describes a rare fixed clinical pattern; the other describes a skill that so many of us were not taught was often passed down through more than one generation before it ever reached you. And when you know the difference, it does not erase the hurt that your child is describing. It just tells you which path forward is available to you. Now, the fact that you’re here listening to this tells me you’re already choosing a path of growth, and that’s over the path of giving up or being defensive. That path matters so much more than you know.

Tina Gosney 34:24
Thank you for being here with me today. Remember, you don’t have to do this perfectly. You just need to keep on working on how you’re showing up, because when one person in the family becomes more grounded, the whole relationship system begins to heal. This is coaching your family relationships, and if this episode helped you tell the difference between a label and a growth edge, then please share it with a parent who needs to hear it.