Narcissist or emotionally immature? (The difference really matters)
Is it emotional immaturity… or are they actually a narcissist? One feels annoying, childish, maybe even a little fun. The other feels like you’re losing your mind, questioning your worth, and walking on eggshells every day. This video breaks down the difference—because calling a narcissist “just immature” keeps you stuck in a cycle that’s doing real harm.
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DISCLAIMER: THIS INFORMATION IS FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY AND IS NOT INTENDED TO BE A SUBSTITUTE FOR CLINICAL CARE. PLEASE CONSULT A HEALTH CARE PROVIDER FOR GUIDANCE SPECIFIC TO YOUR CASE. THIS VIDEO DISCUSSES NARCISSISM IN GENERAL.
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I guess if we believe it’s just emotional immaturity then there is hope. With a narcissist there is no hope.
There’s no hope from within a relationship with a narcissist, but NPD is treatable. It’s just really hard to treat and it requires a lot of patience.
@@gamera5160 The narcissist doesn’t want to be treated, so good luck with that! Treatment depends on a person actually realizing they have a problem, they need help, and are willing to change things about themselves. Realizing the damage they are causing to others, and wanting to stop doing it.
With an actual narcissist, this will NEVER happen!
Never go there as he did go RED RAGE twice. I stood my ground even as he lifted me by my arm pits! Mind you,I am 110, but fit and would regret going full out and putting him down hard. He does underestimate my ability🎉NARC is out
My ex-husband is emotionally immature and I can tell you that they are not self aware so an emotionally immature person getting help on their own or even at the coaxing of their spouse is rare too – I tried for years and it didn’t work. I thought here was hope but it’s like this type of person is emotionally stunted and they have low empathy so don’t expect much self awareness from them. They play the victim game and see the rest of the world as the problem.
@@christinelamb1167 Narcissists, if they seek treatment, usually do so after experiencing narcissistic collapse. Basically, once they burn every bridge they have and they have no one to manipulate or feed off of, they kind of collapse in on themselves. When they hit that lowest point, they sometimes seek therapy and then it’s up to the therapist to recognize what’s going on and for the narcissist to want to change. Like I said, it’s really hard and you can’t “cure” personality disorders, but their behavior can improve.
Dr Ramani, your intergenerational traumatic knowledge once again reveals its actual mastery. What I have to relate to is not being afraid to confront familial delusional power. Guilt and fear. Those two are easily or not so easily dissolved by love and right perspective.
My father was a Narc he passed away in 2023 and my mother is emotionally immature. They both messed me up really badly. I’m in my late 20s and trying to heal but it’s extremely exhausting, effecting my productivity… I wish I wasn’t born to such parents. Every kid deserves parents but not everyone deserves to be a parent.
Really sorry to hear that… its very important to not ignore the self harshness / negativity / doubting that comes with it…
Sorry hugs 🫂
It’s one hundred percent a Rollercoaster with good days and not so great days. It’s helped me to find tenderness toward myself . Best of luck to you ❤
I don’t want to come off as a pretentious a-hole, as I know what healing is and what it takes to heal, but you might wanna look at “productivity” as a very toxic metric to gauge an emotionally and mentally healthy individual. It’s something that’s been pushed onto people by the capitalist society and nowhere near a healthy metric to measure your *anything* by. 🙂
That being said, hang in there.
I’m sorry sweetheart, I hope you heal even after all this has happend.
Take it as a reminder to never be such a horrible person to others nor involve yourself with people with similar behavior.
Emotional immature doesn’t play mind games, doesn’t lie, doesn’t gaslight, doesn’t give silent treatments. Words and actions match. Feel accountable one point or other
Interesting… yes. That fits
Emotionally immature definitely lie for self protection
@@TheHeartGuardener often from trauma yup !
@@Kris-sf2qf yeah. In the sense they lie from trauma which we can identify while conversing most of times but narcs can surpass polygraph tests . Their lies comes with motives and involves manipulation which is hard to detect
@ exactly !
The title of this discussion, alone, was like a time-lapse puzzle completion. Loose pieces just fluttered into place, and the big picture materialized in seconds. Incredibly helpful! Thank you!
I guess you could say all narcissists ARE emotionally immature, but NOT all emotionally immature people are narcissists (as Dr Ramani explained at the end).
I’ve long believed that my now-deceased ex-husband was emotionally immature rather than narcissistic (though the definition of “narcissism” still holds for other formative relationships in my life). But hearing you describe this distinction brought me such confirming relief. I often felt like the sole parent of two children. It was LONELY!
Important to choose the father of your kids carefully since it can really damage the kids to have an absent or abusive father and a stressed out mother.
Marcie, thats ideal and often not reality for many, as people tend to show what kind of parent they are when it is actually time to be one. I hear what you are saying, and also felt the shame of this along with the abuse he was rendering to me and my kids in many different ways from the time I became pregnant and as each of them were born.
This person isn’t usually pure evil. But, I also just don’t want to be responsible for their feelings wherever we go.
Tysm yet again! I’ve spent my whole life defending and supporting my mother and being her golden child (Golden girl, little lamb… yeah those were the nicknames through adulthood) and now that she’s gone I find myself *still making excuses or wanting to sugarcoat how she treated her kids. I really needed to see this, ty ❤
If I had to pick I’d take the emotionally immature over the latter in a heartbeat!
The problem is that too many people that are under educated on the matter, throw the term narcissist around to any person that disagrees with or doesn’t act the way they want people to.
Until you’ve actually experienced real narcissistic abuse, the shark eyes, the never ending competition where there isn’t any, the excessive mental gymnastics and gaslighting, the pathological lying, the devaluation, the sick smear campaigns, people shouldn’t be using the term.
Similar with neurodivergence. People jumping on the bandwagon and claiming it like it’s a cool trend that makes them quirky.
I don’t believe we have to be qualified therapists (thanks to Dr Ramani educating us) to know a Narcissist and tobbe unable to diagnose one as victims(s) when we’ve been through the experience.
I think it’s a complex spectrum, and people move around on it. On the extreme end are the full malignant narcissists, psychopaths and such, who need to be identified and avoided at all costs, and on the mildest side are people who are simply immature and lack much self-awareness. But people can move up and down this scale, at least to some degree. One day they may be immature, the next day mildly narcissistic, and back again.
For me, this has come to matter less as I have aged and survived several relationships with toxic people, whether they are full-blown narcissists or not. I simply can’t tolerate bad behavior much anymore.
Nailed it! 👍
Therapist here. My mother is emotionally immature, as is my brother. I highly recommend the book “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents” by Dr Lindsey Gibson.
I didnt really find that book so helpful but prob bc my parents are straight up narcs lol
I’m almost done with that book and it’s been eye-opening – I second your recommendation!
(it’s also quite easy to understand, not complicated or dry at all)
This reminds me of my birther and I feel exhausted being reminded of my experience with her. Whenever I brought up my emotions or concerns, she would always make it about her and tell me ‘you hate me’. I had to reassure her that I didn’t but now I feel that I do, working towards indifference. This is a huge contrast with the relationships I have with my children. I have nurtured and empathized with my children. They feel safe to express themselves. I have made countless of mistakes but the difference is that I repair and took accountability for them. Something my birther could never do. The sweet cherry was seeing her show up to court supporting the perpetrator of my child’s harm and trauma but she couldn’t show up for me when I needed her.
You just explained my first marriage. Toward the end I felt like I was a single parent of FOUR teenagers with the eldest being the worse. The real teens were energetic responsible kids who were encouraged to disregard me.
My MIL is extremely immature. It took me a couple of years to figure her out. I found my inlaws frustrating and didnt want to be around them, then eventually came to the undstanding that the maturity beyond his years that i loved about my husband was due to having to be the youngest in his family and the resonsible one. He has had to take care of his parents and sibling his whole life. This video has helped me with that epiphany.
I had this epiphany today. I am 72 years old (scapegoat in a narcissistic family). I started to think about the endless hours I have spent in my life trying to understand other people while these same people have not given 10 seconds to trying to understand me or taken any responsibility for any of our interactions.
It’s scary to realiz
Thank you. Radical compassion for self and others wears thin in conditions of Radical responsibility, especially over long periods of time.
Well, as an emotionally immature person, I’d like to explain a bit. It’s not that I’m irresponsible or childish, I just have no idea how to be in normal adult relationships. I grew up with a sadistic sociopath and covert narcissist with ADHD “parenting” me. Where should I’ve learnt emotional maturity? So, I grew up being beaten into pulp by one parent (and it was the only communication I had with him, we literally didn’t talk, even to say good morning or smth), brainwashed that I must be grateful for what I have and parentified by the other.
So, I grew up, and I started observing how other people, whom I considered “normal”, functioned to fit in. For example, I discovered that other people make eye contact, so I started making eye contact. But not everything in relationships is public, so I couldn’t possibly learn how to get your needs met in a relationship, state boundaries, etc. I had no idea until my mid-thirties that I should express what my needs and boundaries are. I thought that if I had a relationship (from work to intimate), then everything would somehow happen, and I was unpleasantly surprised that it didn’t happen. In intimate relationships, I could get upset that my needs weren’t met. But I never expressed my needs as I didn’t know that 1) my needs are important and I don’t need to be ashamed to have needs, 2) an emotionally mature partner would like to know about them, and 3) this is literally how it works. So, when it comes to emotional volatility, my understanding of regulating one’s emotions was to shut them down until it gets too hard and then release everything at once. Not only about anger, but all sorts of emotions. I wasn’t allowed to cry when I was a kid, and when I grew up, it looked like I was totally unstable. At one point, I could make fun of situations where normal people cry, looking like a total a-hole (phew, why are you so upset that your mother has cancer). But then I could watch a sad movie or see a de*d cat on the road and cry so hard that I couldn’t breathe. It depended on how much I could keep in by pretending to be an a-hole.
With therapy, I got so much better that I, in some realms, consider myself more mature than the average, but others still require some work. For example, I can be genuine and vulnerable with my friend of 25 years, and have heartfelt conversations, because I’m not afraid anymore that I could get emotional. But I’m still having a very hard time believing that someone could genuinely be interested in my person, and that I have any value as an individual at all. To ease my social anxiety, I make stupid jokes, so I don’t have to face the harsh beliefs I have on myself. And the most interesting thing is that the more I mature, the harder it gets to communicate with emotionally immature people. I had a friend who is such a diva and shuts you off with every other sentence. We met 15 years ago, and we were an excellent fit. But when I learnt how it works, and started expressing my boundaries, and got a “this is who I am, get used to it” as a reply, I felt that this is not for me anymore.
I’m so sorry you had such a screwed up life too. Due to people who shouldn’t have been able to become parents. I got the two basically defective parents in different ways deal dealt to me too.
It’s hard work trying to discover or rediscover yourself pretty much from the ground up as an adult. It’s been so weird being told that I matter as do my wants and needs. I’m working on trying to actually believe it’s true.
@@Trammiliin_nr2 sounds familiar 😊Your not alone
This confirms my parent is a narcissist. This person is no fun ever. Just very hard work. Its a relief to get out of an interaction without being attacked while you have to pretend that they are a rational and exceptional humanitarian.