Dear Rosie: How are you? I would like to read more from you. Perhaps you would like to reply to Natalia who posted in your thread today?

* Dear Natalia:

I am glad you posted for the first time and I hope that you post again.

“Since a very young age I’ve felt like I had to look after my younger brother and my parents instead of them looking after us children“-

– This is role reversal/ parentification: the child taking on or given the role of a parent. There is an article in psychology today. com, called: “The Pain of Parent-Child Role Reversals: 4 Core Themes Many things can go wrong when children are ‘parentified’ and grow up too fast” that may interest you. I want to summarize and paraphrase the article, with some quotes, and in parentheses comment on how it applies to me, and how it may apply to you:

When a child finds herself- or himself- in the position of giving the parent practical and/ or emotional support that is inappropriate to the child’s age, it is called parentification.

Practical parentification involves, for example, taking care of younger siblings, cooking and cleaning, and Emotional parentification involves the parent using the child as a confidante, friend or even a spouse-type figure, seeking the child’s emotional support.

In a study of 19 women who experienced this role reversal as girls, both practically and emotionally, the analyses of the results identified the following reasons for parentification: the parent has been physically or mentally impaired, and/ or lonely and lacking social support.

All 19 women reported that they were pulled into their parents’ relationships as mediators, hearing one parent’s complaints about the other parent, as a confidante, and the majority of the women said that they were manipulated by one or both parents, via being shamed and made to feel guilty (very much applies to me).

A participant shared about her mother: “She was a terribly fragile, disappearing parent. Like, no intimacy, no emotional world. My mother went out of her room at seven in the evening, made us an omelet and salad, and went back to her room“- (I wonder if this partly applies to your mother about whom you wrote that she “wasn’t really ‘present’“?)

One participant remarked: “I was always very attentive to my mother, she could collapse, fall apart, get into bouts of hysteria with crying and shouting, anger, and sadness. I had to make sure she was stable.“- (it is as if I said these words about my mother).

One of the themes that the study uncovered is that of  “Merging and enmeshment” with the parent, not having a separate identity, or a separate emotional existence from the parent. “One woman in the study recounted: ‘It’s simple, the inner experience was not mine. I did not exist from age zero, totally, there was nothing.’”- (this very much applies to me!)

Another related theme: “Nothingness and nullification…  On the more extreme end, the women expressed feeling…  that they were nothing more than an object, and their ‘self’ had been obliterated“.

Another theme: “Endless intrusion and aggression: Given the lack of boundaries and seizing of psychological control, participants felt that their world was an aggressive one in which their parents ‘plundered and swallowed’ them. They described the parentified relationship as intrusive, attacking, and devastatingly painful“- (very true to me. I felt that my life was a stolen life, stolen by my mother, and indeed my decades-long relationship with my mother was intrusive, attacking and devastatingly painful, for me).

All 19 women growing up parentified lacked the feeling of safety: “all of the women lived in survival mode. They were hypervigilant about their own safety and that of their family. A participant recalled: ‘It’s an experience of survival. All the time, you’re surviving, you are alert. All the time. All the time. You can never rest for one moment because you don’t know what will happen the next moment.’“- (again, this very much applies to me).

Another theme: “Extreme emotional swings; a dialectical movement between poles of the self... As one participant put things: ‘I felt brilliant and mature and interesting and at the same time worthless.’” (I relate).

(Do you relate to the above?)

Back to your post: “I remember saving every penny in my piggy bank and getting a babysitting job at 12 just to help out and my dad was an alcoholic and my mom was busy studying for her pharmacist exam and wasn’t really ‘present’“- reads like practical parentification. but of course, emotions are involved, so no doubt there’s a significant element of emotional parentification.

“Fast forward about 30 years and my parents are now long divorced , my dad lives on bare minimum, has numerous health issues and can barely afford rent in his tiny apartment…  He’s been renting the same place over 30 years now and it’s going downhill , the landlord is a slumlord who doesn’t turn on heat in winter and there are bugs in the building . It makes me so sad that my dad is so stubborn and wants to live that way… I wish he would just wake up one day and realize it makes no sense what he’s doing. He could live so much better“-

– this makes me think of the reason for parentification identified by the article, which is a parent’s physical and/ or mental impairment. I wonder if your father displayed mental/ emotional impairments since you were a child, and if he lacked social support, including support by his wife, when you were growing up..?

You mentioned that your mother was not “present“. I wonder if your father was present for you in comparison to your mother, and if you were therefore very present for him, very focused on his well-being early on.. and still?

I don’t know if you will answer my questions. I know that this is a painful topic, but maybe talking about it here will make it less painful…?

anita