Parentification And Caregiving

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]teach us a little bit more about the term parentification. In healthy families, right, the parent is is teaching or or demonstrating healthy emotions to a child, and they're giving the child the the space and the room to explore their own emotions and to feel their own emotions and to make a mistakes with their own emotions. And that doesn't happen in these families.

[00:00:18]It gets flipped. It's the complete opposite. The child becomes the emotional regulator of the parents. You can control the parents' emotions based on how you behave and how you uh sacrifice yourself and what you do for them. To me, parentification is we become the emotional responsible ones in the home at a very early age. We put it all on our shoulders, right? Where it really should be on the parents' shoulders is to control the emotional tenor of the home. So, the roles get reversed. So many people, they never have the room or their space or their safety to really step into a version of themselves that feels authentic. It's always kind of outsourced to other people, and that's why, you know, the work I do is so focused on rebuilding identity. And in many cases, building identity, not even rebuilding identity, cuz we we never really had a full grasp on who we really were to begin with. It always felt safer to shapeshift and contort ourselves to kind of again suit the emotional needs of other people.

[00:01:09]That's that's the whole concept of abandoning ourselves, right? That we we learn that in relationships, it's always safer to put other people's emotional needs first. Other people come first, and that's how I stay safe.

[00:01:22]>> You can see how that pattern once you enter caregiving later on in life for loved ones can bring back so much of that dynamic.