Growing Up Hungry
If you're anything like me, just hearing the phrase "emotionally immature parents" can be activating. I notice myself bristling a little. The defensiveness kicks in fast:
Well, they weren't entirely immature. They did plenty of things right. Other people had it much worse. Um, RUDE, you don't know my family…
Honestly? That reaction might be saying more than any definition ever could. Feeling protective or dismissive often means something tender is being touched, something we learned to shield when we were young. It's also true that your parents likely tried in the ways they knew how, and succeeded in some. They just didn't have access to the emotional tools you needed to feel fully seen.
What I want to talk about is what happens in that gap. Not the dramatic failures, not the obvious abuse, but the quieter thing: the hunger that develops when a child's emotional world isn't met with enough attunement, enough curiosity, enough consistency, enough presence.
Hungry Ghosts
Gabor Maté borrows an image from Buddhist tradition when he writes about addiction: the hungry ghost. These are beings depicted with enormous, empty stomachs and tiny, pinched mouths. No matter how much they consume, they can never take in enough to feel satisfied. The hunger is bottomless because what they're reaching for can't actually fill the emptiness.
Maté is writing about substance use, but I think the image extends further. Many of us walk around with a hungry ghost living inside us, a part that is constantly reaching for something to fill a hole that formed long before we had words for it. We might feed it with approval, with achievement, with caretaking others, with perfectionism, with substances, with relationships that feel intense because intensity is what we learned to recognize as love. The ghost keeps eating. The hunger remains.
Roxane Gay writes about a different kind of hunger in her memoir. For her, the hunger was literal and metaphorical at once: a body that became a fortress after childhood trauma, an attempt to build safety through size, to make herself impervious to a world that had already proven itself unsafe. What strikes me about her work is the honesty about how the body tries to solve what the mind can't yet face. We eat, or we starve, or we numb, or we achieve, or we give ourselves away—all of it an attempt to manage a hunger that started long before we understood what we were actually missing.
This isn't a character flaw. It's what happens when our emotional needs were not met in the way we needed or enough of the time. In psychoanalytic terms, attunement is the experience of having your internal state recognized and reflected back by another person. When a caregiver sees what you're feeling and responds to it, you learn that your inner world is real and that it matters. You develop a sturdy sense of self, a capacity to trust your own experience.
When attunement is inconsistent or absent, something else develops. You might have become the responsible one, the caretaker who managed everyone else's emotions while losing track of your own. Maybe you walked on eggshells, learned to read the room before you could read words, carried the emotional weight of the household. Maybe you became invisible, learned that the safest thing was to need nothing and take up no space. Over time, you stopped trusting that your perceptions were accurate. You stopped trusting yourself. And underneath all of it, the hunger grew.
The Nameless Longing
The difficult thing about this kind of wound is that it rarely comes with a name. There's no single event to point to, no obvious villain in the story. Your parents may have been present, even loving. They may have provided materially, shown up to your games, told you they were proud. What was missing is harder to articulate: a feeling of being truly known, of having your emotional reality treated as valid, of being seen not for what you did but for who you were.
I see this in my practice often. A client will come in describing a childhood that looks fine on paper, then struggle to explain why they feel so empty, so ashamed, so hungry for something they can't name. There's often guilt attached to this, a sense that they have no right to struggle when others had it worse. Part of the work is helping them understand that emotional neglect doesn't require malice. It just requires a parent who, for whatever reason, couldn't show up for the child's inner world in the way they needed.
Sometimes I'll ask a client: when you were upset as a child, what happened? The answers are revealing. My mom would get more upset than me, so I learned to calm her down. My dad would tell me to toughen up. They'd fix the problem but never ask how I felt about it. They didn't really notice. These aren't stories of cruelty. They're stories of a child learning that their emotions were either too much or beside the point. The lesson lands in the body: something is wrong with me for feeling this way.
What the Hunger Becomes
The survival strategies that emerge from this are ingenious, really. The child figures out what works: maybe performance and achievement earn approval, so they become a perfectionist. Maybe caretaking others creates connection, so they become the friend everyone leans on (or even a therapist- nothing to see here!) Maybe staying small and undemanding keeps the peace, so they learn to want nothing. Maybe intensity and crisis are the only times they feel seen, so they're drawn to chaos.
In adulthood, these strategies calcify into patterns. There's the persistent guilt that accompanies any boundary. The people-pleasing that leaves you exhausted and resentful. The chronic second-guessing, the way you look to others to confirm what you feel before you'll trust it. There's the anxiety humming underneath everything, or the compulsive behaviors that offer temporary relief: drinking, restricting, overexercising, shopping, losing yourself in relationships that feel urgent because urgency is familiar.
Underneath all of it is a fractured relationship with your own knowing. You dismiss your gut and then wonder why you keep ending up in the same situations. You give until you're empty and then feel guilty for having needs. The hungry ghost keeps reaching for something external to fill a hole that can only be filled from within, but no one ever taught you how to do that.
Why Healing Feels Dangerous
Change, in this context, is terrifying. Your whole system was organized around the original adaptation. Saying no, trusting your own perceptions, choosing relationships that feel steady rather than intense—these aren't just new behaviors. They're violations of the old rules, the ones your nervous system still believes are keeping you alive.
Don't upset anyone. Don't need too much. Don't make things harder. Don't risk losing them.
Watching people go through this is difficult because it is heartbreaking. They'll start setting a boundary with a parent or partner and then feel a wave of anxiety so intense it seems to confirm they're doing something wrong. The body is remembering what happened, or what they feared would happen, when they had needs as a child. It's signaling danger even when the present situation isn’t necessarily unsafe.
This is why insight alone doesn't resolve these patterns. You can understand exactly where your hunger comes from and still find yourself feeding it in the old ways. The knowledge lives in one part of the brain; the survival response lives in another. Healing isn't about overriding those responses. It's about slowly, carefully, building a new relationship with yourself—one where you can feel the old fear and still trust your own judgment.
You're not doing something wrong. You're doing something new.
What Gets Fed
An old supervisor of mine once said: "Once you stop people-pleasing, expect people to be less pleased with you."
She wasn't wrong. Shifting out of old roles disrupts the family and friend systems and sometimes even your sense of who you are. It can feel isolating, disorienting, and definitely full of grief. You may find that some relationships don't survive your newfound boundaries. You may find that others deepen in ways you didn't know were possible.
The therapeutic work here isn't about declaring anyone "bad" or cutting people off, though sometimes distance is necessary. It's about finding a way to exist that actually works for you now, rather than the child version of you who first developed these patterns. It's about learning to recognize the hunger when it arises and to ask, with some gentleness: what do I actually need right now? What would genuinely nourish me, rather than just quiet the craving for a moment?
This is slow, unglamorous work. It involves tolerating discomfort, grieving what you didn't get, building trust with yourself in small increments, challenging yourself to try something new. Over time, things shift. We start to notice the old pattern arising and feel some space around it. We make a different choice, not because we've conquered the hunger, but because we've learned to feed it something real.
The hunger doesn't disappear. That's not how it works. But it gets quieter when it's actually met. When you learn to attune to yourself the way no one attuned to you. When you stop waiting for someone else to confirm that your inner world is real and start believing it yourself. The ghost is still there, but it's no longer running the show. You can feel it reaching, and you can choose what to offer it. Something nourishing this time. Something that stays.
If This Resonates
I work with adults and couples who want to understand the patterns they inherited and build something different. If you recognize yourself in any of this, I'd welcome the chance to talk.
