Parentification: What it is and Strategies for Recovery

Hey there everybody, and welcome to today's live Q and A and discussion of parentification. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. What is parentification? Is probably your first question. Well, when children become responsible for the caregivers that their caregivers or their siblings, physical and or emotional well being, that's something that some people call parentification. Now this isn't a DSM diagnosis. It's just a general term that's used to help people kind of understand what someone may be going through. What we're talking about physically. If the child is responsible for making sure that the parent or sibling eats well, goes to sleep on time, gets tucked in, or is responsible for regularly providing comfort like hugging or, you know, helping the person feel physically comforted, then that is a violation of boundaries. You know, the caregiver is supposed to do that for the child. The child is not supposed to have to regularly do that for the caregiver. Now I want to emphasize this is when something happens with regularity every once in a while, especially in a single parent household. The caregiver may be sick with the flu and the child is bringing chicken soup or peanut butter sandwiches or whatever to the caregiver who is sick in bed. That's totally different. What we're talking about is something that is happening all the time when, where the child has basically had to become the parent and the parent is acting in sort of the role of the child. Emotional parentification is when the child is responsible for identifying and responding to the emotional distress of the caregiver. Now, the caregiver may be acting as an adult sometimes, but the child has to rise to the level of a peer instead of being a child. So they have to again engage in these uncomfortable situations with the caregiver cognitively. In a situation where the child is experiencing parentification, they may be expected to help the parent make decisions, give advice to the parent, or serve as a confidant for, for the parent about things that are going on either in their relationship with the other parent or at work or whatever. And you can see how this could be overwhelming for a kid to have to try to deal with. They have difficulty dealing with what they're dealing with because they're kids. They haven't developed skills and tools to deal with life, especially adult life. So when they're expected to do it for their parents, it can be extraordinarily overwhelming and extraordinarily frustrating environmentally. You see parent parentification when the child is expected, for example, to wake the parent up with regularity because the parent can't be responsible enough to get out of bed when the child has to remind the parent or help the parent get ready to go to work, or, or even if the child has to start working to help pay the bills. You know, obviously this is when the child is 14, 15, 16, because the adult is not doing it. Now, there's a difference between the adult not being able to make ends meet and the child, you know, volunteering to go work. You know, there, there are some problems there too, but it's not nearly as severe as if the caregiver is just not taking responsibility for going to work. Paying the bills or doing chores sometimes will fall to a child in a parentification situation. Relationally, a child in a parentified relationship may be expected to mediate between adults, maybe mediate between caregiver and grandparent, or both caregivers. They're put in this situation where they may be having to act as adults when the adults aren't rising to that level. As I mentioned, this represents a significant and ongoing boundary violation for the child. In healthy relationships, caregivers are expected to provide secure attachment, not the other way around. In a parentified relationship, instead of the caregiver being consistently there, responsive to the child's needs, attentive to the child, validating what's the child's thoughts and wants, encouraging and providing safety, the child is doing this for the parent. You can see how this could be terrifying for a child because they feel like, well, if I don't do this, nobody's going to take care of me or I'm going to go into the system or something else traumatic and drastic is going to happen. Yet. I don't know how to do all of this. I'm kind of learning on the fly and that's exhausting. They're not able to be children. They're not able to do things that the other children are doing. They're not even able to really spend a lot of time checking in with themselves because they're so focused on trying to figure out how to be a parent at 5, 7, 8, 14 years old that they don't get the opportunity to actually develop themselves. Parentification can happen when a parent or a sibling has a physical or emotional impairment, such as depression, anxiety, ptsd, cptsd, addiction, or chronic debilitating physical health conditions. What we're looking at is when parentification happens, we're dealing with a parent or a caregiver who is unable to meet the needs of the child. It's not that the caregiver is Saying, you know, I'm going to let the kid take care of me. They in these situations, for one reason or another, emotional, physical, cognitive, the caregiver is just not able to do those things. So if they're going to get done, the child has to figure out how to do them on their own. And that's not fair, but it is what it is. Parentification can also happen when caregivers get divorced or one of them dies, or when one parent is away due to work or even incarceration, or when there is, when there are two caregivers and one goes away, then the remaining caregiver may expect the child to rise and take that person's place. In people who are, who get divorced. We also sometimes see where they may be living with one caregiver and when they go to visit the other caregiver, they are expected, they are parentified because that caregiver is feeling abandoned or lonely or resentful. They're again caught up and drowning in their own stuff that they can't meet the needs of the child. When you look at these, you know, I want you to really consider the causes here, and we've talked in multiple other videos about adverse childhood experiences and, and how they represent either parental neglect, that is the parent not meeting, or the caregiver not meeting the child's emotional or physical needs. And that neglect can either be because they can't do it for some reason physically, or because they are emotionally unable. Either they're emotionally immature and they don't have the skills, or they are depressed or struggling with another mental health disorder or an addiction where they are just not able to do it. We also see that in ACEs, abandonment is another issue that causes considerable childhood trauma. And in the ACES checklist, incarceration, divorce and abandonment, you know, one caregiver just leaving are all noted. So all of these things that can cause parentification are also related to adverse childhood experiences. What does parentification end up looking like in the adult? You know, we've already talked about this child who is totally stressed out and, you know, scared to death because they don't feel like they can count on their caregiver. They're just trying to hold things together with, you know, bobby pins and duct tape, so to speak, to get through until they can figure out how to survive. So as adults, people who've been parentified are often overly responsible. They're still operating from that standpoint of if I don't take care of it, nobody will. I can't trust anybody else. They may be hyper vigilant to other people's feelings and needs because they were expected to meet the needs of their caregiver. They were expected to be aware of what that person needed and wanted and oftentimes almost expected to mind read, which is not a healthy dynamic, obviously. But then this carries on into adulthood because that's what they were always expected to do. So why should they think it should be any different than in adulthood? Codependency and all the symptoms that go along with it are very common in people who were parentified as children because they were expected to be in control of what was going on as a child. So now as adults, they may try to control other people. They may need that feedback that they're okay from other people. Just like when they were children, if they did things right, then their caregiver would say, you're okay, I'm going to be here, everything's going to be okay. So if they took care of the parent sufficiently enough, then they were at least temporarily assured of their safety. That translates into adulthood. They may have grief or resentment for never having had a childhood. And that's really common to have a lot of undercurrents of anger or grief. And they may not remember being a kid. And this makes it for a lot of people really difficult to be parents themselves because they're like, I don't know what kids like to do. I was never a kid, I didn't have that opportunity. They may still feel responsible for their caregivers or if it was a sibling, they were taking care of their siblings well, being so even as adults, and they may feel that they're responsible for taking care of that person. Again, looking at what we're talking about here, this is different than the person who grows up in a healthy household and mom, dad, caregiver is now 85 and struggling with dementia. And they need to make sure that that caregiver is, is being taken care of. That's different. You know, that's something that happens later in life and that is a conscious choice they make. When children are parent parentified, then they always, from the time that they are knee high to a grasshopper until, you know, whenever they feel like it's their responsibility to take care of this adult human being who in all likelihood should be able to take care of themselves, they often have a lot of self blame and guilt. Well, when you're eight years old and you're trying to be a parent, guess what? You're going to screw up, you're going to make mistakes, bad things are going to happen occasionally when you are an adult and trying to be a parent, guess what? You're going to screw up and make mistakes sometimes, but as a child you'll probably make a lot more mistakes. And, and the parentified child can't cognitively understand that, hey, this is too much to expect of me, so I shouldn't feel guilty because I made this mistake. I mean, even as adults, we tell parents that, you know, you're going to make mistakes, but children have a lot of difficulty dealing with the mistakes they made or the fallout from it. Especially if it ends up they make a mistake and caregiver goes to jail or caregiver overdoses, or they get, you know, yanked out and put into, into foster care. A lot of times they will blame themselves for that because they didn't take care of the parent well enough. And as a result of this ongoing, incredibly intense fear and trauma that's going on, lack of a sense of safety, the child experiences the brain changes that we've talked about repeatedly that occur as a result of trauma and begin to have difficulty with emotion regulation. They may go from being feeling numb or flat to a tsunami of stress. There's no in between, there's no mildly irritated. They are either, you know, flat or furious. So let's talk about recovery for a minute. And there is a lot of stuff here, and I can only begin to touch on some of the things that a person who's been parentified may need to take a look at. The first thing can be becoming aware of the negative impact of being parentified physically. How did it impact your, impact you negatively? A child who is parentified probably is not getting adequate sleep because they're spending so much time trying to do homework and the stuff that they have to do as a kid plus being a parent. Additionally, the high levels of anxiety and hypervigilance also probably prevent them from getting good quality sleep. When sleep is disrupted in adults, we know it impairs the immune system and causes inflammation and depression and all kinds of stuff. When sleep is disrupted in children, not only does it do all that stuff, but it can also contribute to developmental delays and development of stress related physical illnesses and autoimmune conditions. Affectively, people who've been parentified often have a lot of anger at the world, at the situation, at themselves. You know, that guilt there, resentment, blame, and that undercurrent just keeps them feeling unsafe and unhappy all the time and it detracts from or it dims the brilliance of any happiness. Cognitively, people who are parentified often Think about the world and other people and their trustworthiness differently. Relationally, being parentified probably impacted the person's ability to set healthy boundaries because they never had any. They probably didn't spend as much time with other people, people their own age. So they may have difficulty feeling like they can connect with anybody their own age. They may have difficulty with self esteem. They may have difficulty with fear of abandonment because remember when they were a child, they were trying to keep their caregiver from disappearing, from either abandoning them or dying or something else. So in adulthood they still carry with them this fear that if they don't do everything right, that the person that they depend on is going to disappear. So that's the first thing. Become aware of all of the different permutations or all the different ways that parentification has negatively impacted you and then start making a plan to with your treatment providers to deal with each. Explore how you're still engaging in those behavior patterns today. For example, not letting anybody help you because you don't trust them to do it. You've got to do it yourself. Not trusting people to be there for you, and difficulty letting people be responsible for themselves. You don't trust they can do it right, so you need to do it for them. So not only can they not help you, but they can't even help themselves. So you're, you're going to step in and there's a lot of other behaviors. Those are just a few examples. So you want to start examining what patterns did you learn in childhood that you were responsible for taking care of others that you're still using today to the extreme that it's causing you distress? There's always a continuum here. Develop mindful awareness of things in the present that trigger your caretaker self or resentment for having to be a caretaker. So things can happen now, and maybe you've decided, I am not going to do that anymore. I'm not going to be a caretaker. And then something happens and you start feeling that anger like you used to feel at your caregiver. Well, it's important to be aware of what that trigger is because likely the person in the present has no clue that they did it. And they may not have even intended to do it. You may just be projecting on them or assuming that they are wanting the same thing your caregiver did. So being aware of the things that trigger those reactions in you is going to be really important. And then identifying distress tolerance and coping skills to help you deal with those triggers in the present context. And we've talked about this in so many other videos. It's important when you feel a feeling. Feelings are natural. Anxiety, anger, depression, all of those. We don't want to get rid of them. We just don't want to let them hang around and, you know, have a party. We want to use them as prompts to figure out what to do. So if you start feeling that anger, being mindful, checking in with yourself about what's going on, what are the facts of the situation in this present context? Is this person expecting this or is this just reminding me of my past and how can I deal with it? Connect with that traumatized inner child? And I do have a video on healing the wounded inner child and I'll be doing some follow on videos to that. But it is really important because when we experience a trauma as children, a lot of times there's a part of us, some call it an interject, a part of us that kind of gets frozen in time. And when that inner child is triggered as adults, we may act like that child. We may act like an 8 year old and throw a temper tantrum. There's a traumatized inner child in there that is angry that they didn't have a childhood, that is scared that they're going to be abandoned, that feels guilty for not doing everything right. So connecting with that inner child and validating their feelings and helping them grieve. And I know that sounds odd, but literally opening a dialogue with that younger self of yours, whether it's through an empty chair or writing letters or doing grief exercises, there are a lot of different ways to tap into that. Let that inner child come out and play too. It's not all doom and gloom and let's process stuff. There's a time for that. There's also a time to say, okay, you've done a lot of hard work processing this grief. Let's do something fun. Let that inner child come out, go get ice cream, watch cartoons, go to the park, play with your dog, whatever it is that the little child inside wants to do. I'm 50, 50 years old. I still like to go swing on the swings sometimes. I don't know why, I just like doing it. And help that inner child feel safe. When you start feeling anxious, you know, check for yourself and say facts. In the present context, am I safe? And if the answer is yes, then say, okay, well, my inner child, my spidey senses are being triggered for some reason. What's going on and how can I reassure myself that I'm safe? Explore and address your core beliefs that trigger Your guilt. And there's probably a lot of them. What things did you learn? What shoulds do you have? Shoulds are a good indicator of grief. I should do this, I shouldn't do that. And I say address them because not all of your core beliefs that trigger your guilt are necessarily unhelpful or wrong in the present. So explore them, write it out on paper, whatever that should is, and ask yourself, is this something that I would expect my child to do or not do? Is this a should that I would put on them? Is this a should that I would put on someone else? And if the answer is no, then you might want to start thinking, well, maybe I need to modify that guilt statement. One step to modifying, and I try to do it myself as much as possible, is to eliminate the word should. I will or I won't. I did or I didn't. Taking out the shoulds. I shouldn't have done this. Well, you did. You know, that's just the fact of the matter. Now what are you going to do to fix it? Or I should go to the gym. Well, that's kind of out here in la la land. Decide. Make a decision. You will or you won't. Give yourself permission not to. If you choose to learn how to develop secure attachments and maintain healthy boundaries, so figuring out not only how to give consistency, responsiveness, attention, validation, encouragement, and safety in a relationship, give that to yourself. Develop a secure attachment with yourself so you're being responsive to you. Give that to others. You know, that's something that you probably already do, maybe to excess, but also learn how to expect that in return. What does that look like for you? If somebody's being consistent in your life, what does that look like? And sometimes you might have to tell them. Don't expect them to know how you want them to respond. Communicate when I feel upset. It would be helpful if. Fill in the blank. So start learning how to develop those healthy relationships and secure attachments. Identify and address the adult you, Resentments toward the caregiver. We already talked about helping the child. You identify their anger and resentments and guilt and all that stuff. Grieve the loss of their childhood and start to move forward. But there's also the adult you. There's the adult you that's now a parent that is looking back at things going, oh, I can't believe you did that, or I can't believe you're still doing this. You know, I'm an adult and you're still expecting me to take care of you. So addressing those and Define your rich and meaningful life. Even if you're a parent, you're now yourself, so you are responsible for somebody else. It can't be all about you all the time. You're not expected to always put everybody else's needs first. And in actuality, by putting your own needs out there, you know, and there's compromise here, but by putting your own needs out there and making sure that you are engaging in self care, you're setting an excellent model for your children that say, you know, you are empowered to, to take care of yourself sometimes. Wh. Because sometimes I need to recharge. Are there any questions about parentification? I saw a lot of chat. Let's see. And yes, Kevin, you're right. I mean, a lot of the symptoms of parentification end up looking like either complex ptsd, cptsd, borderline personality disorder, or codependency, all of which significantly overlap. But yeah, it causes a lot of compensatory behaviors that have to be unlearned or replaced with healthier behaviors. In terms of letting grief go, that is multiple hours of videos. So I don't want to make you think that I'm going to be able to, you know, answer that in totality. The grief process, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. For the person who's been parentified, they may have denied or they may still be in denial that their childhood is negatively impacting them. So getting through that denial and starting to become aware of what's going on. Anger and depression, often people will bounce back and forth between those two because anger is that fight or flee. It's like, this isn't fair. I can't cope with this. I shouldn't have to be coping with, with this. There's that should word, anger is the fight part. But then at a certain point, the person gets exhausted and feels helpless and hopeless, moves into depression. They may stay there a little bit and then get their second wind and then go back to anger and they're like, and another thing. So going through the grief process is not super easy. No doubt. It entails becoming aware of what you're angry about and figuring out what parts of that that you can control and what parts you can't and how you're going to deal with the parts that you can't control and the parts that you can. Depression. Even, you know, once you recognize all of those things, that is a lot of hard, intense, traumatic work, no matter what you're grieving. So you may go into a period of depression. And that's kind of like when everything is Solidifying your brain, your body is exhausted, and it's like, okay, I'm recognizing that this is reality now. From there, moving into acceptance, that's the challenging part. Well, all of it's challenging. And I'm a visual learner, so I tend to go more or respond better to narrative type things. So writing a story, you know, your life story, and grieving is ultimately figuring out, okay, how am I going to end this chapter and start the next chapter? Grieving is deciding to close that storyline and figure out how is that storyline, even though it's closed, it's going to influence the rest of the book. So how are you going to close it? And then how is it going to influence the character for the rest of the story? Writing letters to the caregiver and to the inner child and having the inner child write letters to the caregiver are all things that can be done. These letters don't get sent. But in order to get things out, sometimes once we're able to actually get things out, literally onto paper, out of our head onto paper, our amygdala, our brain says, okay, I don't need to hold onto that quite as tightly anymore. So that's generally where I start with the grief process. It can be really intense. So it's always recommended that you engage with support people, if not a counselor, if you are processing grief, especially grief surrounding childhood abuse and neglect, which can be extraordinarily triggering for people. Does it get easier to not feel guilty? One of the things. I'm trying to think how to answer that it can get easier to not feel guilty, but it takes practice. Because a lot of times when we initially start choosing and saying, I am not going to feel guilty. I don't deserve to feel guilty for this, there's a part of us that's screaming, yes, you do. If you don't feel guilty, you're a bad person. And until we can verify, you know, we say, I'm not going to feel guilty for this, and that's going to be okay. And we go through it and lo and behold, okay. Then all of a sudden we're like, oh, okay, maybe I don't need to feel guilty for that anymore. But it takes practice and it takes a lot of courage to allow yourself to not feel guilty for everything. Because you've always been taught that you should feel guilty. So you're silencing that inner critic, you're silencing those shoulds. And. And you are taking. You are being empowered, you are taking control of your destiny, so to speak. My anger and anxiety gets triggered when I hear my dad cough or sneeze. I'm a. I'm aware that it doesn't make sense, but, but I can't control it. How do I help myself? And when we hear sounds, when we smell smells, when we see things that remind us of the past, it can trigger those memories. Grounding can be extremely helpful in the as an immediate action. Identifying five things that you see, four things that you hear, three things that you smell. Getting your mind focused on the moment. Recognizing where you are in the present. Using a safety mantra. When you start to get triggered. Having something that you tell yourself to remind yourself that you are no longer in danger, you are safe and capable and empowered in the present. Those things can be helpful as, as stop gaps, so to speak. When, when you are triggered, it's important to start dealing with and processing those things and integrating those experiences. I know I say this pretty much every video anymore. EMDR can be very helpful with working through some of the amygdala based reactions, some of the neuropsychological reactions to triggers in the environment. Are there other questions? Thank you, Dee. You are always so supportive of us and our live streams as well as our on demand things. Okay, everybody, thank you so much for being here today and I really, really appreciate the support. I appreciate the questions. Love having y' all here and I will see you next Thursday, same bat time, same bat station. In in response to ion. That is a really challenging situation. However, now you can start looking at what's the difference when you are out of country versus living next door? What's the difference in how you act and react and what you do and what behaviors do you want to continue doing that you were doing when you were out of country and how are you going to, how are you acting differently now and the things that you don't want to do? Becoming more aware and you know, awareness is the first step. Kira. Identifying unhealthy patterns can be difficult because if you grew up with them, it's hard to identify what's unhealthy. It's like this is what I've always done. So looking at patterns that are causing you distress or causing difficulty in your relationships is where I would start. Also just learning about what a healthy relationship looks like and comparing that to how you interact with yourself as well as how you interact with others, and that can start giving you some clues as to what the unhealthy patterns might be. Okay, for real, I'm gonna go this time. I will see you guys next Thursday.