Am I the mom?
Am I the baby?
What is it to be the holder and the held?
Do we ever stop being both?
…
Both tender, afraid, surrounded by love.
Be the holder and the held.
Filled with limitless potential.
Be the holder and the held.
Prayer Poem by Bronwen Mayer Henry
Those adolescent urges that so many of us have for top approval, perfect security, and perfect romance — urges quite appropriate to age seventeen — prove to be an impossible way of life when we are at age forty-seven or fifty-seven.
Bill Wilson, Emotional Sobriety, — The Next Frontier
Parentification is the term used to describe the overloading of young children with burdens and responsibilities inappropriate to their age. It causes us to `grow up fast´, — so fast, in fact, that we may later feel that we had been cheated out of our childhood.
This dynamic is most often observed among children who have grown up under the supervision of parents or guardians who could be described as emotionally impaired.
What is meant by `emotionally impaired´ parents? This can include parents who had children at such a very young age that they were wildly unprepared for parenting. Or perhaps parents suffering from untreated mental health or substance abuse issues.
It could also include emotionally dependent parents who, having themselves grown up in adverse circumstances, experience trouble handling their impulses and emotions and thus in establishing closeness with their children. Narcissism, — the compulsion to achieve well-being at the expense of the well-being of others, — may also play a role in such scenarios.
Those of us who were raised by emotionally impaired parents may have experienced parentification and developed one or more of the following traits: Self-abandonment, higher-than-average leadership skills, and a tendency toward hyper-achievement. We may also exhibit hyper-independence, be challenged in dealing with our own emotions, and have difficulty in establishing healthy boundaries.
My first childhood memories are of responsibilities; household chores, looking after my younger siblings, and excelling at school. It was like growing up in a factory where even the youngest were expected to shoulder some responsibilities. Each year, we were `promoted´ to the next, more difficult assignments.
My search for memories of having been looked after, lovingly taught a new skill, or provided comfort keeps drawing blanks. I can clearly remember often being tasked with looking after toddler siblings in our back garden while my own peers all played out on the road. This was somewhere between the ages of four and seven. By that time, my yearning for freedom (escape) and the burden of resentment were already germinating.
My sense of childhood and adulthood is skewed. Among my fonder memories, there are snippets such as removing shoes and walking barefoot for the duration of our two-week annual holiday in the West of Ireland. Such memories warm and swell my heart.
It seems the usual daily routine with its strict roles and responsibilities was put on hold for this sacred vacation fortnight. Perhaps this was because my parents had the support of other members of the extended family (and house staff) while we stayed at our grandparents’ spacious holiday home, embedded in beautiful natural surroundings.
The dream came to a sudden halt, however, when we returned home to our chaotic and cramped home, — by then eight children and our parents living in a small three-bedroomed semi-detached on the housing estate. The promise of the next summer holidays kept me going for the subsequent fifty weeks.
I must have grown up very quickly, learning how to indirectly manage the emotions of others, in part by taking care of their responsibilities. Where did that leave my childhood? Was there one? This is a classic indication of parentification.
Incidentally, the dress code of the time in families such as ours is also revealing. Children were dressed as if they were miniature adults, boys with shirt, tie, and jackets, for example, on many occasions.
The next phase was to learn the ins and outs of managing a household, which was complete by the age of twelve. I could cook Sunday dinner for the entire family (now ten children, living in a more spacious house) while they were all out at mass, preferring to cook and later utilize the opportunity to covertly skip evening mass.
It seemed like a fair price to pay. Only there was always the guilt of breaking the family coda with respect to church attendance and the danger of being criticised, chastised, or overruled in the dinner project by my parents or older siblings, who apparently often felt the need `to put me in my place´.
This is a classic pattern that was often repeated later in life: Being given (and willingly accepting) the burden and responsibility to ensure the successful completion of a project without the corresponding level of authority, support, resources, trust, or reward.
My `growing up so fast´ was undoubtedly exacerbated by the illness and untimely death of my father in 1977. He was 51 and, at 16, I was the oldest child living at home. While grateful for the many gifts he gave me during his last months as cancer slowly drained the life out of his body, a pattern emerged which was undoubtedly unhealthy for me.
In those final months he began to lean on me, emotionally and spiritually. The problem was that I didn’t have what he needed and couldn’t set a healthy boundary to protect myself. A conflicted child, torn between filial loyalty (the call of death) and the call of my own life unfolding, how could I? This has become clear to me only recently.
There were some really twisted scenes in those final weeks, as when I would give him a wet shave (he was too weak to do this himself), all the time yearning for him to have taught me how to shave, as life’s choreography would, under different circumstances, have dictated.
There is no doubt in my mind that I enjoyed the `importance´ in my role growing up alongside my parents rather than being raised by them. My self worth having been hollowed out during the initial years, any attention or acknowledgement was very welcome.
There was also the constant anxiety that everything would fall apart, which ultimately happened anyway, if I didn’t perform to the high standards of fulfilling the responsibilities that never should have been mine in the first place.
After leaving home at eighteen, there followed the excessive pursuit of sex and drugs and rock’n’roll to make up for my lost childhood and deaden my pain. At the same time, there was the matter of proving my worth to the world by means of self-disciplined, perfectionistic, and controlling behaviour in many facets of my professional and personal life.
By the age of twenty-eight, living in a different land and culture, I was financially supporting a family of four and, with my wife, raising two young children to the best of my abilities, while attempting to establish my management credentials in the international corporate world.
My substance abuse was now accentuated by workaholism, in the familiar macho `work hard, play hard´ sense. The seeds of the later demise of my marriage were well watered during this period. My genuine belief was that my efforts were all in the service of my family.
In this Jekyll and Hyde existence, I was both child and adult, and neither. Exposed at a young age to inappropriate situations no child should ever have to endure, I had never experienced the healthy, good-enough parenting every child needs, leaving me both needy and overconfident, and blind to this contradiction. I relied on others, even my own children, for solace and comfort, while claiming self-reliance.
With parentification comes self-abandonment. The child who experiences parentification is asked to make countless sacrifices for others – the sacrifice of her own mental health, innocence, and physical well-being, just to ensure the adults in the family stayed afloat.
In this process, boundaries are constantly eroded. We children in such circumstances never develop a sense of our own welfare as we are forced to abandon ourselves and our own needs just to survive and prioritize others, especially those on whom we still very much depend.
This sets us up for self-abandonment in adulthood which can manifest in many ways. Perhaps we become perfectionistic over-achievers who, in our efforts to meet the goals of others, never learn self care in simple matters such as rest, nutrition, creative expression, or building a social network.
Or we may abandon ourselves in romantic relationships and friendships, going overboard trying to please a partner while betraying our own basic needs or even ignorant of their existence. This can lead us to becoming entangled in toxic relationships and friendships, which represent a further downward spiral until the underlying issues are eventually addressed.
On the positive side, parentified children often emerge from childhood with natural leadership abilities, resilience, and resourcefulness. Every cloud has a silver lining. As a children faced with the necessity of taking initiative to survive, we learned key strategies and developed an acute internal sense of resourcefulness and resilience that, later in life, drove us to become leaders. These skills can be nurtured gently and consciously, however, without the need of parentification.
How do we heal from parentification? At some point, we may realise that trying to `run the show´ is not a viable approach. We begin to recognise new possibilities. We can learn to surf the waves rather than continue to attempt to dictate the weather.
In his essay on Emotional Sobriety, Bill Wilson explores the path ahead in the following manner: Suddenly I realized what the matter was. My basic flaw had always been dependence — almost absolute dependence — on people or circumstances to supply me with prestige, security, and the like. Failing to get these things according to my perfectionist dreams and specifications, I had fought for them. And when defeat came, so did my depression. There wasn’t a chance ….. until these fatal and almost absolute dependencies were cut away.
By a process of establishing and maintaining a healthy degree of mental fitness, we slowly become liberated from our impulsiveness. As the gap between stimulus and reaction widens, we re-discover our agency and gain increasing autonomy in how we respond to life. This is called living life on life’s terms.
As this process unfolds, our emotional permafrost begins to thaw. Our Inner Child re-emerges, beckoning us to offer comfort for her pain and attention to her unattended wounds. We commence the inner dialogue we had so long avoided.
We can become the holder and the held, now providing the healthy parenting to our Inner Child which had been missing in our family of origin. This is a long-term process which will inevitably bring us into direct contact with the original emotional pain of our parentification experience and the dearth of comfort and protection to which we had been exposed. Allowing that pain to percolate to the surface and grieving our childhood losses are key elements in this re-parenting process.
The immature behaviour modelled by our parents begins to abate. We are no longer so easily drawn into emotional outbursts, rage attacks, passive-aggressive behaviours, or being brought into the arguments and conflicts of others.
The chaos which was our `norm´ is no longer the only option available to us and we move away from the compulsion to carry the burdens of the entire world on our shoulders.
As a result, we develop mastery in recognizing, identifying, and validating our own emotions because we no longer spend so much time absorbed in the emotional states of others.
We discover that while we have our emotions, they no longer have us. And we begin to blossom.
