Parentification is basically when the roles were reversed in your upbringing where you felt like you had to be the parent to your parents or you had to be the primary caretaker of your siblings. There are two types of parentification and that’s emotional where you are basically your parents sound bored and you are there for all of their emotional needs. So that means being a shoulder to cry on, listening to all their problems, and giving them love and guidance. You take the role of helping your parent through things and you also may have been put in the role to do the same for your siblings. You may have needed to attend to your sibling’s emotional needs, be a role model for them, and also come up with some rules or structure for them.
Then there is the physical aspect where you are taking care of all of the physical things. Maybe you have to clean the house and you have to take care of your siblings physically or you have to set up appointments, go grocery shopping or you have to get a job to help pay the bills. Your parents may rely on you heavily to take care of your siblings or take care of the things that you should not have to take care of. These both can be really detrimental to your mental health as a child and your physical health as well.
Now there’s a certain type of child that usually is parentified and this child is usually sensitive, empathetic, really compassionate, or very intuitive where they’re very in tune with that role.
How do you know if you are the parentified child? Here are some signs:
You felt like you were your parents therapist or even their partner. Your parent probably had no boundaries, shared way too much, maybe shared about their sex life, shared about things that are going on with them. Maybe they were someone who was really suicidal or they would share just their stresses and they would put it all on you. You then would feel like you had to be that sounding bored or you had to help them out out of those situations. What’s really hard about that is that you always felt like you had to be the one that was there for your parent but you didn’t get that emotional support in return. You didn’t receive any of that but you had to give that to your parent.
Even if your parent had said things like “I’ll always be here for you”, it doesn’t matter, their actions show otherwise. When it should have been about you, they made it about them. If you had a bad day, they had a worse day. It was ingrained in your brain from the time you were young that you couldn’t rely on your parents and your feelings didn’t matter and you didn’t matter. So what this teaches you is to bottle up your own emotions and that you have to put everyone else first before yourself. You have to care for your parent or for the people that are around you and it makes you feel like you don’t matter.
If you felt like you were your parents partner, they may have relied on you heavily to do things like discipline your siblings. Maybe they relied on you to help make the calls about what to do in your household or maybe they would talk about your other parent to you, treated you as if you were the other parent or another adult rather than the child you were.
You always felt like you had to be responsible. You know about things that you shouldn’t know about you, had to take care of grown people’s business. The only thing you remember is that you didn’t feel like you had much of a childhood. You felt like you had to go from being a child to immediately going into that adult state of dealing with things that you had no business dealing with. So when you feel like you grow up too quickly, you then move through life quickly.
So you may have had sex at a young age, you may even have gotten pregnant at a young age, you may have moved out at a young age. The things you would get into were things that older people would do because you completely skipped a grade. You skipped a whole chapter of your life and that stage you skipped is you getting to actually be a child where you didn’t have to worry. There was no time where you felt you could just hang out with your friends and just be a kid. So because of this, it may be hard for you to let loose or have an imagination. You may notice you take life too seriously sometimes.
You may suffer with anxiety, depression, eating disorders, you may self-harm or you may have obsessive compulsions. This is because from the time you’re young you have anxiety at the fact that you have to fulfill the needs of others. When you are not developed yourself you don’t know what to do about many different situations. Then when you’re put in these situations where you’re forced to figure out what to do, that can add a lot of pressure and anxiety.
So these tasks you’re given, they’re above your capabilities which then can cause you to feel shame, guilt and low self-worth. If you are constantly put under pressure. you will start to from fears around disappointing others, fear of rejecting and fear of failure. This will cause you to feel like you’re in a constant state of anxiety. You are put in a role to meet unrrealsitic expectations or pushed into a role that does not belong to you. This is why it will result in you having anxiety, depression or just doing things to give you some sort of control like self-harm, eating disorders, or having obsessive compulsions.
Also another aspect is you have a lot of bottled up emotions and they have to come out in some sort of way. So they will come out in you having anxiety or with you having negative thoughts and then dealing with depression. They even will come out in anger because you don’t know how to cope through all of these feelings. You were made to feel like you couldn’t have feelings so you will suppress them.
Since you were not validated as a child, you now feel that validation from people pleasing, from fixing, and from giving. You have completely lost the sense of knowing what you need and you really hyper focus on what everyone else needs. Enabiling others will be a common theme in your life because that’s all you know, that’s how you feel validated and good about yourself. You feel like you are being approved of or that you are gaining some sort of love from it.
Often times you will overly sacrifice yourself, whether that’s emotionally physically or financially because it’s another form of validation. Also you are not taught proper boundaries. You can become really compliant and t’s very hard for you to set boundaries because with boundaries, there’s that fear of “oh no one of people don’t like me if I set those boundaries.” It is hard to set boundaries when you don;t know how or that they are a thing. You have been brought up to take care of others and be the peacemaker. Putting out fires and avoiding conflict has been your job for so long that setting boundaries could feel like you are causing conflict.
When you go in a room, before you open up, you will observe everyone else to see if it is safe. You are able to accurately read other people’s emotions and vibe. This is because you always have had to read your parents emotions and react accordingly to please them and to take care of them. You made sure to make sure they were happy before yourself just like a parent does. So if you’re wondering why you’re so good at accurately reading people it’s because of you had to be hypervgilant to protect yourself.
You long for someone to take care of you. So because you always had to be the leader, the one that was the problem solver, the one that had to take care of thing, you may notice yourself just wanting someone else to take care of things. You may feel tired, sick of being responsible, and being in control. There are feelings of wanting to let go. So because of that you may wind up in unhealthy relationships where someone will show that they’ll take that control and take care of things. In reality, they’re just taking advantage of you and that’s why you may wind up with narcissists or manipulative toxic people. You’re just craving someone to take care of that hurt inner child that give you the things that you never received.
Since you were made to feel you weren’t really allowed to express how you’re feeling from not being validated or constantly having to worry about everyone else, you then learned that you need to hide your feelings. Maybe you needed to be a brick wall and not show any feelings because it results in something negative or you may belittle your feelings or make jokes of them. This is because that’s what you’re used to, being belittled or you were made to feel like you were a joke. You may make light of the situation in order to cope with your feelings and so you will put up a wall in order to keep yourself safe from being vulnerable. At a young age, you were taught that you cannot trust anyone especially your parents with these feelings so you keep them to. yourself.
This will cause you to become overly self-reliant where it’s hard to form deep connections with others and you’ll feel like you can’t form bonds nor trust with others. It’s very hard for you to trust others because you don’t even trust yourself. This results in you feeling isolated and feeling very alone. You don’t know how to open up or share these things with others so then you don’t and you’re just left with these feelings.
When we are young we don’t know how to reason. We don’t know how to identify the things that are outside ourselves. Our parents are the way they are because of them, not anything to do with us. We can’t identify that at that age. Since we always have to find meaning, instead we immediately will internalize it and blame ourselves. We do this because that’s the only way we knew how to cope. It’s also another form of control. You feel a lot more in control when you’re able to look at yourself, see what you can change and how you’re the problem rather than seeing someone else is the issue. It hurts a lot more and it’s out of your control so it’s another way for you to maintain that control by blaming yourself.
Also you are constantly made to feel shameful. When you feel a lot of shame, you will blame yourself. You may have had parents that constantly blamed you for things. So then that is what is taught, you learn that when anything happens you have to blame yourself. You were made to feel it has nothing to do with anyone else it’s only because of you.
Also when you grow up in that type of environment if your parents are this type of way where they don’t give you a lot of security and thy are abusive, you will try to protect them. This treatment is all you know and that’s all you have. So if your parents are abusive, when you’re a young child, you’re like “I can’t imagine what the outside world is like so I need to protect my parents and it’s not their fault why they’re like this, it’s me I have to do something about it.”
When you left your house you probably went through an explore stage. Since you were made to fit in this role and you had to be this certain person, you now have no idea who you are. You now have a need to explore who you are. There is a big world you want to explore and figure out what you like, what you don’t like, and who you are.
You may have went through a stage where you partied a lot. A stage where you did things that your inner child really didn’t get to do. You may have done a lot of different risky behaviors because it’s something that you didn’t get to do.The life you lived growing up was very much in a bubble. Also you didn’t really have parents to guide you so you always had to be your own guide. You may need to let loose where your inner child wants to act out.
There may be moments when you go back to that childlike state because your inner child is very hurt. You were not able to be a child and so your inner child is acting out. When something happens, specifically maybe a big trigger, you may react in more immature child like manners. So for instance, communication, you may have a really hard time communicating and you may be very immature when it comes to your communication. You may avoid communicating, you may mock the person when they’re trying to communicate with you. you’ll shut them down. You didn’t learn how to have that healthy communication. Maybe sometimes you react with extreme anger when you can’t handle something or you become very helpless when you feel overwhelmed and you don’t know what to do.
You know what to do for others but when it comes to yourself you may not know how to handle things. You lack skills that you would have developed if you went through that child stage. But from the lack of guidance and you having to figure out these things on your own, you didn’t get the time to develop those skills.
Since there was always a high expectation of you, you now feel like you need to be perfect. You are looking for that constant praise and for that constant approval. There is a need to feel that you are good enough. So in your mind, you’re like okay if I am perfect or I am good enough in their eyes then I will gain the approval and the love that I never received. You just want to feel accepted. So because of this you will always have those high expectations. You’re carrying on what was expected of you. You may notice that you won’t accept anything less than the perfect image you have in your head of what you expect yourself to be.
So how do you heal from this? Definitely acknowledge that inner child that’s hurting. It wasn’t fair what happened to you. Hold your parents accountable and acknowledge that it was not fair what they did to you. It’s important that you acknowledge what they did wasn’t fair to you and that you were put in positions that you should have never been put in. If you don’t you will continue to take blame and continue an unhealthy relationship with yourself and others. Your parents sacrificed your childhood because they were too immature to be able to take things on they should have taken on.
So you need to acknowledge that, you need to feel that and you need to give to your inner child what you never received. What your inner child never received was nurture and care. So you need to reparent that inner child, you need to visualize giving that little you the things that you never received. Go through events in your life and acknowldge a time when you were really hurt and you didn’t receive the things you needed. Be with that little you and then have your adult self give little you that nurturing, giving yourself the love, the attention, the validation, that you never received. Soothe little you and let yourself know that it’s going to be okay.
Allow yourself to explore the world and make it a safe place that you can explore because when you were growing up you didn’t feel like you were in a safe environment. You didn’t have that security back then but you can give yourself that safety and security now. Remind yourself ‘I’m in a secure safe place, i’m okay now, I can relax, I got me and I love me. I’m going to do what I feel is what’s best for me.” It’s also important to set boundaries for yourself and let go of always needing to take care of others and to give to others the things you need for yourself.
What do you guys think? Leave it all in the comments below!
