Dear Lost1Flow,

I think perhaps deep down I’ve realized some of these things as well, but denied/refused to accept the truths because they are so hard to accept.

I am glad you’re now allowing yourself to accept some of those hard truths, even though they hurt…

So many therapist also say, ‘we cannot blame our parents for everything

We don’t need to blame them (as in forever, eternally resenting them and never forgiving them). However, we need to know how they failed to meet our needs. As Barbara Heffernan, a psychologist that I follow on youtube, said: “Healing is a fact-finding, not a fault-finding mission.” You need to know the facts, so you can act accordingly.

She was never in a happy marriage with my father. It wasn’t an actual arranged marriage, but pretty close. So yes, I was her everything emotionally and friendship-wise in place of him. She made excuse after excuse why she couldn’t leave him, but never actually did. So yes, there was definitely a lot of neediness even prior to my brother’s death (he was 15, I was 13).

Right… it’s pretty clear that she used you to meet her own emotional needs, instead of vice versa – to be there for you and meet your emotional needs. Role reversal happened, and you became like a parent to her – you were “parentified”.

There is a good youtube video on parentification, titled “Copying with being a parentified child“, by Kati Morton. She also talks about strategies how to heal. One is to grieve the childhood you’ve never had, another one is to allow yourself to be child-like and do things that make you happy, spontaneous and care-free.

But I think the most important would be to slowly get disentangled from your mother’s grip. You said:

My life is just such a sad existence of going to work, dealing with them, and being too exhausted for much else.

You’d need to change that, and introduce a time in a day for self-care: where you do things only for yourself, meet your own needs, do something you like and enjoy. Try to claim some time and space for yourself, don’t stay 100% dedicated to your mother. And don’t feel guilty about it, because you deserve it. It is your right.

So mu advice is to change your daily routine, even if ever so slightly, to include more of your needs and preferences, and less of your mother’s. She will probably object, but stay firm and don’t allow her to guilt-trip you. Remember: you deserve it and it is your right!