by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

On Not Letting Emotionally Immature People Ruin Your Life

Let’s be real from the get-go:

If you’ve ever found yourself feeling like you’re playing emotional Twister with someone – pulled up close one minute and then shoved away the next – then you’ve likely dealing with somebody who fears real intimacy.

There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with this as intimacy can be a pretty fear-inducing thing sometimes (seeing as it asks us to let go of our masks and illusions etc.) and so these ‘Twister Players’ aren’t necessarily ‘bad’ people – they’re often just deeply wounded and, as the old saying goes, hurt people hurt people.

Nevertheless these wounds might be a reason but they’re never an excuse and they can still cause relationships to be twisted into endlessly tangled games of control, confusion, and pain.

At the heart of all this is a simple but brutal truth:

Emotionally immature people don’t want connection as much as they want power and control.

This isn’t because they’re evil masterminds (not always, anyway) but because they’re terrified:

Terrified of vulnerability; terrified of facing their own emotions; and terrified of being truly ‘seen‘.

This article will explore why emotionally immature people tend to chase power and control rather than connection, how the dance between the Ego and the Shadow Self plays into it, and what you can do if you find yourself entangled in one of these painful dynamics and want to set yourself free.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Emotionally immature people fear intimacy because intimacy involves a lack of control

What Is Emotional Immaturity, Really?

Before we begin, let’s make a point not confuse emotional immaturity with naivety or light-heartedness:

Emotional immaturity isn’t about being playful, young at heart, or being in touch with your ‘inner child‘ -instead, it’s about an inability – or plain unwillingness – to face and process emotions in a healthy, conscious, and REAL way.

Essentially what this means is that emotionally immature people often haven’t developed the internal tools to regulate their own discomfort, communicate with honesty, or take accountability for their actions.

Instead, they try to manage their internal chaos by controlling their external world – most often, the people in it – so that they can keep their Ego (accepted self-image) in place and keep whatever is going for them in reality at bay.

The most common and seductive way emotionally immature people attempt to gain this kind of control over the world is tor try and acquire power.

Let’s explore this a bit more:

Why Power Feels Safer Than Connection

To really connect with another human being is to really be ‘seen’ and to be seen is to be vulnerable.

This is ‘good’ news if we have any degree of mastery over our emotional ‘stuff’ and our own inner world but ‘bad’ news when your emotional world is filled with unprocessed pain, fear, and shame.

For someone who has spent their life avoiding their inner wounds – perhaps due to childhood neglect, trauma, or shame-based conditioning and identification – emotional closeness can feel like standing naked in the middle of a battlefield.

This being the case, people who feel this way end up protecting themselves the only way they know how: by attempting to staying in charge (by any means necessary).

What this all boils down to is a simple principle:

Power lets them stay above you, rather than beside you.

If they’re ‘above’ you, they can’t be abandoned; if they’re ‘above’ you, they don’t have to feel their shame; if they’re ‘above’ you, they can keep pretending they’re safe.

The problem, though, is that “above” – in this context – is an illusion and if you let them drag you into it then you’re whole life becomes unreal.

The Shadow Dance (Ego vs. Shadow)

This is where the Shadow Dance comes in (see my book Shadow Life: Freedom from BS in an Unreal World for much more about the mechanics of the shadow self).

In short, it goes like this:

The Ego – the conscious self we like to present to the world wants to be seen as desirable, in control, lovable, even evolved but the Shadow – the unconscious storehouse of everything we reject or suppress (both ‘good’ and ‘bad’) holds the opposite: everything that’s actually REAL about us (because the ego itself isn’t real – it’s just a filter that we view reality through).

This is important to understand because emotionally immature people often project a highly-curated version of themselves, especially at the beginning of a relationship. This highly-curated version is just an extremely rigid ego-identity that they’ve created in order to hide from all of the emotions that they’ve sent into hiding into the Shadow Territory (often unconsciously based on whatever they went through in the past).

Because they really need you to see them in alignment with this curated self-image (so they can keep hiding from themselves), they put a number of control strategies to overwhelm you and to suck you into the myth they need to build around themselves:

You might’ve experienced some of these things yourself in romantic relationships:

Love bombing where they shower you with affection, intensity, and promises of forever.

Sex Bombing where you get to taste mind-blowing chemistry, fantasy-fuelled passion, and an inexplicable magnetic pull that convinces you this person must be ‘The One’.

Of course, love and amazing sex can both be incredibly real but when it comes to emotionally immature people it’s never about real intimacy.

It’s a performance designed to get you hooked:

They aren’t bonding. They’re baiting.

Once you’re hooked – emotionally invested, vulnerable in pursuit of more affection, attention, or whatever else you got hooked to, and perhaps even trauma-bonded – they flip the script.

Suddenly, they become cold, distant, upset at every little thing, and hard to read – they withdraw affection, start criticising, create confusion.

What’s messed up is that this isn’t random or just a case of a crazy person being crazy.

No, it’s strategic.

Just like a cat playing with a mouse, they enjoy the power of knowing they’ve ‘got’ you because it soothes their insecurity and keeps that shame at bay (though it’s always following them around like a ghost).

Once it reaches this stage, you’ve entered a part of the game where you simply can’t ‘win’ – you care more than they do.

You’re off-balance but they feel strong.

As far as they’re concerned they’ve got you exactly where they want you to be and you can now serve your purpose as being the supply of attention and validation they need to keep that shame and other emotional ‘stuff’ hidden from view.

You might have thought you’d found love but you found a dance between your ego (the thing that made you buy into the illusion) and theirs (the thing that made them act in this way).

Unfortunately, real love requires real self-awareness…and they haven’t got there yet.

(And if you’re in this situation, it might be worth asking yourself if you’re there or not too).

Communication or Obfuscation?

One of the most maddening things about emotionally immature people is their inability to communicate directly:

If you’ve ever tried to have a serious conversation with someone like this, you’ll know it often feels like trying to nail jelly to a wall whilst you go round in circles and lose your wits.

A typical argument or even just discussion will go like this:

They dodge the truth.

They avoid accountability.

They use manipulation and ambiguity to protect themselves from being ‘exposed’ (because that ego is protecting them).

They will pretty much say and do anything to avoid facing their inner reality which is the very thing they’re trying to outrun.

Instead of talking it out, they’ll drag you into all kinds of things you don’t want to be dragged into:

They’ll become passive-aggressive.
They’ll flip the script and make you the problem (even if you literally haven’t done anything).
They’ll ghost, gaslight, or guilt-trip you and anything else that makes you think you’re the problem.
They’ll create drama to distract from the real issue and to deflect any truth that may be coming their way.

Whatever the technique they use, you can be sure that the aim isn’t resolution – it’s self-protection.

Love Bomb, Withdraw, Repeat

Let’s look closer at the classic pattern many emotionally immature people use to get people ‘hooked’ and then get power and control over them:

The Hook

At first, they come on strong – you’ll feel like you’ve met your soulmate because they mirror your values, interests, and aspirations, say all the right things, and want to see you all the time.

They might even talk about future plans very early on (which – if they have no intention of acting on these plans – is called future faking).
The Shift

Suddenly, something feels ‘off’ (to put it lightly):

They pull away and become vague; they stop complimenting you and start criticising literally every little thing that you do. They cancel plans at the last minute and their attention starts to dry up as the love bombing begins to fade (because they know you’re ‘hooked’).

You start to feel anxious and confused, like you’ve done something wrong (even though you probably haven’t – though, of course, you should always be open to looking at yourself).
The Manipulation

You reach out, try to connect, and try reignite a conversation or to talk about what the problem might be:

Maybe they give you some breadcrumbs – just enough to keep you hoping and trying to win them over. Or they might criticise you for being “too much” or “needy”.

You internalise it and try harder to please them but this is totally pointless because it’s a game that you’ve been set up to lose from the get-go.
The Power Trip

At this stage you’re officially ‘hooked’:

You’ve lost your centre and they have emotional power over you (and know it).

Most likely, they’ll never fully return to the version of themselves you first met because this was a carefully created version of themselves based on the cues you gave them about who you are and what you’re looking for in life.

They’ll keep playing with you like a cat toying with a mouse so they’ll give you just enough hope to keep you invested (by occasionally giving you a glimpse of that version you got hooked to in the first place).

All they really want is for you to keep chasing them because it soothes their fear of abandonment and keeps that Ego in place and the shame at bay.

This isn’t love. It’s emotional theatre.

And it’s all designed to keep them from having to face the one person they fear most: themselves.

The Real Reason They Fear Intimacy

Let’s strip this back to the root again:

Shame.

Emotionally immature people often carry deep-rooted unresolved, toxic shame – a belief that they’re fundamentally flawed, bad, or broken at the very core of their being.

This existential kind of shame creates a deeply rooted assumption that if they were truly known or ‘seen’, they’d be rejected.

So they wear a mask and try and get everybody else to act like it’s the real thing by using the kind of controlling behaviour we’ve been talking about.

This means that they only show parts of themselves they think are ‘safe’ to reveal – if they show anything at all.

And the parts they believe are unlovable? Those go into hiding, buried beneath defence mechanisms, manipulations, mind games to keep people chasing them, and a fortress of emotional avoidance.

Ironically, what they fear most – rejection – is what they eventually cause to happen to them with their behaviour.

Usually, they don’t have the maturity to connect the dots and so the cycle just continues over-and-over again until they either hit rock bottom or they lose something irreplaceable and have a wake up call (and even in these cases many emotionally immature people will still keep blaming the world and refuse to look at themselves).

Are Emotionally Immature People Narcissists?

Not necessarily. Narcissism is one possible outcome of emotional immaturity, but not the only one.

Many emotionally immature people aren’t grandiose or attention-seeking – they might be avoidant, passive-aggressive, or people-pleasing and have some narcissistic traits without being a full-blown narcissist.

What they do have in common is this:

They can’t handle emotional honesty. Not with themselves, and definitely not with you.

What You Can Do

Whether this is a parent, a partner, a boss, or a friend – if you’re in the orbit of someone emotionally immature, you need to ground yourself in reality because the bottom line is that they won’t.

Here are some tips:

1. Stop Playing the Game

Recognise the pattern we discussed above (love bomb, withdraw, repeat):

If you feel like you’re always chasing closeness, always confused, always the one trying to fix things then you’re probably in the game.

Step out because the only way to ‘win’ is to stop playing.

2. Strengthen Your Centre

Emotionally immature people thrive on destabilising others because it makes them feel powerful (they want you off-balance so they can feel steady and in control).

Reclaim your power by reconnecting to your realness – your boundaries, your values, your voice.

Start putting yourself first and learn to stay regulated and in control of your nervous system and the way that you interact with the world.

3. Don’t Chase Clarity From Chaos

You won’t get emotional honesty from someone who’s running from themselves because their words will often contradict their actions.

Trust the pattern, not the promises they make or the things that they say to appease you and try to bring you back into the game.

4. Hold Them Accountable Without Expecting Change

You can bring attention to their behaviour but don’t expect them to suddenly become emotionally fluent. The goal isn’t to change them – it’s to stop being manipulated by them.

Sometimes, it’s best not to say anything and to find a way to move on because they can’t take any accountability in many cases and will just flip it back on you somehow.

Again, accept that this is a game that you can’t ‘win’ so don’t play.

5. Work On Your Own Triggers

If this dynamic hooked you, then you probably have some work that you need to do on your own emotional ‘stuff’:

Often, emotionally immature people magnetise others who carry their own unresolved wounds -especially around abandonment, self-worth, or co-dependency.

Healing those parts by working on your own Shadow Dance (between the Ego and the Shadow) will make you immune to the game because you’ll become more REAL.

(And it’s only the unreal ‘parts’ of you causing you to get locked into the game).

Emotionally immature people are often terrified of themselves (even more than the average person)

Final Thoughts

Emotionally immature people don’t seek connection – they seek refuge from themselves and they’ll use you to do it.

The more afraid they are of intimacy, the more likely they are to try and control the relationship rather than participate in it.

Understanding this doesn’t mean you excuse the behaviour but it can help you stop personalising it because – at the end of the day – their emotional avoidance isn’t a reflection of your unworthiness but a reflection of their fear.

The moment you stop trying to decode them, fix them, or get back to the version of them you thought was the real deal – you free yourself.

Stay real out there,

If you’re dealing with any of the issues discussed in this article then book a call with me and I can help you find a way forward.

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Emotionally Immature People: Seeking Power Over Connection