Something I’ve noticed when you bring a problem up to an emotionally immature person is they can’t actually hear you. And I don’t mean in the literal sense. I mean they can’t hear you because hearing you would mean that they have to sit with that discomfort—to sit with the guilt, the shame that maybe they got something wrong.
Because ultimately, emotionally immature people experience it as an attack on them rather than feedback of what actually transpired. So instead of listening to understand, they become defensive. They explain, they justify, they minimize, they turn the conversation back on you.
And I don’t think it’s inherently them trying to hurt you. Ultimately, it’s a coping mechanism. They’re trying to protect themselves from the painful feelings that will get brought up with this, rather than try and understand yours.
Why explaining over and over doesn’t work.
This is also why explaining your pain over and over and over goes unanswered, ignored, or it seems like they don’t hear you. Because ultimately, empathy requires self awareness. So that person can only acknowledge in you what they are able to acknowledge in themselves.
And this is something that was hard for me to grasp, especially growing up, because I always thought conflict was a communication problem. It’s not always a communication problem. Sometimes it’s a capacity problem. And no amount of explaining can make somebody emotionally available to feelings that they’ve spent a lifetime trying to avoid.
It’s not about your communication—it’s about their capacity.
This has been a tough learning curve for me because I always thought communication was the solution. And I’m learning that it’s not. It doesn’t matter if you know how to communicate. If you have somebody that avoids—if you have somebody that is an avoidant or is dismissive because they avoid their own feelings and they don’t want to face themselves—it doesn’t matter how well you communicate, because it’s not going to change the outcome.
They are going to do what they do. They’re going to be emotionally unavailable. They’re going to avoid because that’s how they cope and that’s how they’ve spent their entire life. Because ultimately, even though they come across self aware, even though they come across empathetic, they’re none of those things. They’re exactly who they show you in the times that communication fails—and that’s an avoidant person.
