“We’ll See”: Loving a Parent Who Sides with the Last Voice in the Room
Rosalind Lovelace writes about fibromyalgia and the reassurance that never quite arrives.
The parent who agrees with you in the morning and with your accuser by dinner, and how to stop building safety on the swing vote.
Not medical advice. These articles offer information and support for people living with fibromyalgia. Talk with your own care team before starting, stopping, or changing any treatment.
The pattern
The morning call goes well. You lay out what happened: the accusation, the meeting you were not invited to, the words your sister put in your mouth. Your father listens. He says the thing you have been starving to hear. That sounds wrong. She should not have said that about you. You hang up lighter than you have felt in weeks.
By dinner he has talked to your sister. Now there are two sides to everything. Now he was not there, so who can say. Now the sentence that ends every appeal in this family arrives, two words doing the work of a closed door: we’ll see.
Nobody screamed at you. That is what makes this pattern so hard to name. The screamers announce themselves. This parent loves you, asks about your appointments, worries when you sound tired on the phone. And still, every position he takes is on loan from the last person who sat across from him. His agreement has the shelf life of milk left out on the counter. You learned years ago to check the timestamp before trusting it.
Call it what it is: a swing vote. In a family fight over your illness, your treatment, or your marriage, this parent is the deciding ballot both camps campaign for, and the ballot goes to whoever spoke last. Therapists who write about emotionally immature parents describe a passive type that fits him closely: warm, often genuinely kind, and built to avoid or deny difficult situations rather than stand inside one. When life turns hard, the passive parent withdraws from the problem and leaves the aftermath to someone else. In this family, the someone else is you.
Then there is the dagger with the polite handle. You ask, plainly for once, whether he believes you. The answer comes back two words short of what you need. We’ll see. Time will tell. I just want everyone to get along. Each version withholds the one thing you asked for while sounding far too gentle to be called an attack. A parent who never takes your side can be grieved and routed around. A parent who takes it every other day keeps hope alive, and the hope is what keeps cutting.
You keep polling a voter who resets at every dinner. Stop staking your safety on that count.
Why it lands harder with fibromyalgia
Researchers have a name for the tie you have with this parent: ambivalent. Relationship science once scored a relationship on a single line running from good to bad. Newer work scores the positive and the negative separately, because both can run high in the same relationship at the same time. The four-quadrant review of relationship evaluations maps the combinations: mostly positive, mostly negative, indifferent, and ambivalent, the quadrant where love and injury arrive from the same person. The review argues that ambivalent ties behave differently from good ones and bad ones alike, with their own dynamics and their own costs for the people inside them.
Those costs have been measured in families like yours. The study of 158 families asked mothers, fathers, and their grown children about mixed feelings toward one another, then examined the well-being of both generations. Parents and grown children who reported more ambivalence showed poorer psychological well-being, and one party’s mixed feelings were tied to the other party’s poorer physical health. A relationship that runs hot and cold does its damage in both directions. Loving your father through this pattern is costing him something too, which is worth remembering on the days you feel like the problem.
The flipping itself has science underneath it, and the mechanism is more ordinary than betrayal. In the experiment where a third of participants changed a strongly held opinion, researchers separated the pull of new information from the pull of hearing it delivered face to face. Information alone moved ten percent of people. Social pressure alone moved another ten. Information delivered socially, in the room, by a person, moved a full third off an opinion they held as part of their identity. Whoever is present carries the day. Your father is almost certainly conforming to whoever is in front of him, and nobody is in front of him less often than the sick daughter who had to stop coming to everything.
Now add fibromyalgia. An unpredictable ally is a monitoring job, and monitoring is exactly the work fibro fog charges double for: tracking who he talked to last, re-arguing settled questions, redrawing the family map after every dinner. Each flip also lands as a fresh stress event, hope in the morning and the drop by night, in a body that already pays interest on every surprise. A weathervane standing where an anchor should be is a recurring bill, and your nervous system is the account it draws on.
The counter
You cannot fix the weathervane. You can stop navigating by it. Three moves.
Verify in writing
Every agreement with this parent gets a written echo. Two sentences by text, sent while the conversation is still warm: “Glad we talked today. It means a lot that you’re staying out of the middle and keeping this between us.” A recap, never a trap.
Writing does what his resolve will not: it holds a position still. When the flip comes, and it will come, you are no longer arguing over what was said last week. You are pointing at it. The record also spares your fog. The question of whether he really said it stops costing you sleep, because the phone remembers so your body does not have to.
Expect the flip
Budget for the reversal the way you budget energy for a long drive. The morning agreement is provisional until it has survived one dinner with your accuser. Do not build plans on it, announce it to the family, or spend the relief too fast.
Therapists who coach adult children through boundaries with emotionally immature parents return to the same point: the guilt and the folding arrive when you expect a parent to hold a line they have never once held. Expect the pattern instead. A flip you saw coming, with nothing riding on it, is weather. A flip you built your week on is a collapse.
Anchor somewhere that holds
Move your need for reassurance off the swing vote entirely. Clinical guidance on relationships with emotionally immature parents keeps landing on acceptance: work with the parent you have instead of campaigning for the one you need. Accepting him as he is takes him off the ballot.
Pick the people who have held steady, a partner, a friend, the one cousin with a spine, and give them the job your father keeps dropping: first call after the appointment, first read of the hard news. Love your father at the level he can hold, the garden, the ballgame, the grandkids. Stop applying for the reassurance he has never had in stock.
Word for word
Scripts survive fog better than improvisation, and coaches who write boundary scripts for emotionally immature parents keep them short on purpose. Save these.
“I am not asking you to pick a side. I am asking you not to carry messages.”
“You agreed with me this morning. If that changed after you talked to her, tell me what changed.”
“‘We’ll see’ is an answer about the weather. I asked whether you believe me.”
“I love you, and I am done debating my illness with you.”
Say one, then stop. A single sentence gives him nothing to spin toward, and the silence that follows is his to sit in.
The walk-away
You are allowed to retire from the election. If every visit ends with you re-arguing your illness to a man who agreed with you yesterday, the visits have become court dates, and your health is paying the filing fees. Step out of the race.
Demote the office while you are at it. The swing vote decides the outcome only if you keep treating his verdict as the outcome. Your illness stays real at dinner whether or not he holds. Your marriage, your treatment plan, and your limits do not come up for ratification because a weathervane turned.
And if the family keeps convening the tribunal, love him from one step further away: shorter visits, fewer subjects, the weather report and the door. The person who no longer needs the vote cannot be swung.
Inside the walls
Four steady moves for loving a weathervane.
- After your next good call, send the two-sentence recap text while the agreement is still warm.
- Choose the steady person who now gets the first call after appointments, and tell them they hold the job.
- Save two scripts in your phone: one for the flip, one for we’ll see.
- Pick the level your father can hold, and plan the next visit at that level. An hour. The garden. Home before dinner.
None of this asks him to change, and none of it costs you the relationship. The love stays. What moves is the weight: your safety, your reassurance, and your version of events now rest on people who hold still, and on paper that cannot be talked out of what it says.
The wind can have the weathervane. You are anchored now.
Clinical questions
For readers who want the science behind this article at full strength.
What does relationship research mean by an ambivalent tie?
Measurement separates it from a merely rocky relationship. Instead of one scale running from good to bad, participants rate positive qualities and negative qualities on independent scales, and the combinations map four kinds of tie: mostly positive, mostly negative, indifferent, which is low on both, and ambivalent, which is high on both. The four-quadrant review of relationship evaluations argues that each quadrant carries its own dynamics and outcomes, and it proposes a model of how a relationship moves between quadrants over time. The swing-vote parent usually sits in the high-high cell: real affection and real injury supplied by the same person.
How was the health cost of parent-child ambivalence measured?
The study of 158 families collected reports from a mother, a father, and one grown child aged 22 to 49 in each family, then used actor-partner interdependence models, a statistical design that estimates how each person's feelings relate to their own outcomes and to the other person's outcomes. Self-reported ambivalence tracked with poorer psychological well-being for parents and grown children alike, and one party's ambivalence was associated with the other party's poorer physical health. The design is correlational, and the authors note the arrow may also run in reverse: poorer health in one party may feed greater ambivalence in the other.
What did the conformity experiment actually manipulate?
The opinion-change experiment used a discussion-based design built around an opinion that was salient, politically charged, and tied to identity. It separated three conditions: new information alone, social pressure alone, and information delivered socially in a face-to-face discussion. Ten percent of participants changed their opinion in response to information alone, ten percent in response to social pressure alone, and thirty-three percent when the information arrived socially. The reading that matters for families: the social delivery of a message does more persuading than the message, so the position of the person in the room tends to prevail.
Is “emotionally immature parent” a clinical diagnosis?
No. It is a descriptive construct popularized by clinical psychologist Lindsay Gibson out of decades of practice, and it lives in therapy education rather than in any diagnostic manual. The typology behind it, including the passive parent described in this article, organizes patterns clinicians see repeatedly: conditional empathy, avoidance or denial of difficult situations, and self-involvement behind real warmth. Treat it as a planning lens for your own moves, and keep the label out of family arguments, where it becomes one more thing to litigate.
Glossary
- Swing-vote parent
- The parent both camps in a family conflict campaign for, whose position goes to whoever spoke to them last.
- Ambivalent tie
- A relationship that scores high on both positive and negative qualities at once, so love and injury arrive from the same person.
- Social conformity
- Adjusting a stated opinion to match the people present. Experiments show the social delivery of a message persuades more strongly than the message alone.
- Emotionally immature parent
- A descriptive term from clinical practice for a parent who avoids hard emotions, personalizes conflict, and struggles to hold a steady position. A lens used in therapy education rather than a formal diagnosis.
- Passive parent
- A type in the emotionally-immature-parents typology: warm and often kind, and built to avoid or deny difficult situations rather than face them.
- Fibro fog
- The cognitive side of fibromyalgia: slowed word-finding, slippery short-term memory, and trouble thinking quickly under stress.
Sources
- The Attachment Project. Emotionally Immature Parents: What They Are and Their Impact. Read the guide.
- Righetti F, Đurić M, Schneider I (2024). Beyond Good or Bad: The Four Evaluative Quadrants of Relationships. Personality and Social Psychology Review. Full text.
- Fingerman KL, Pitzer L, Lefkowitz ES, Birditt KS, Mroczek D (2008). Ambivalent Relationship Qualities between Adults and Their Parents: Implications for Both Parties' Well-being. The Journals of Gerontology, Series B. Full text.
- Mallinson DJ, Hatemi PK (2018). The effects of information and social conformity on opinion change. PLoS ONE. Full text.
- Annie Wright, LMFT (2026). How to Set Boundaries With Emotionally Immature Parents (Without the Guilt). Read the guide.
- Maidenberg MP (2025). How to Handle Relationships With Emotionally Immature Parents. Psychology Today. Read the guide.
- Terri Cole. How to Set Boundaries With Emotionally Immature Parents (Scripts Included). Read the guide.