Liberating the Parentified Child

The journey into the depths of complex trauma is a long and winding one. Every time I feel like I have arrived at some threshold insight that will make things right, I soon find that there’s another layer of damage.

I have ventured through suicidality and depression, attraction to abusive people and situations, outrage, shame, negatives beliefs about myself and the world, fear of people and aliveness, nameless terror in the preverbal parts of the nervous system. So many hurt parts understood and resolved. So many immature protective strategies unwound.

The path has gone through denial, grief, emotional releases, psychedelic revelations, somatic unwinding of fascial contractions, divorce, being disowned by my parents, change of career. I have put everything on the line for this. Hundreds of rounds of collapse and recovery, then grief and insight, then ebbs and flows of felt senses. The story revealing the truth, the body revealing what was taken away.

I have dealt with the murder of reality from abuse, the lost self from neglect. I have given up the rescue fantasy, the projections, the people pleasing, the self doubt. I have battled so hard to reach my stolen center. And more recently, I’ve been rearranging everything in my life around it: family, relationships, work and my body. No prize at the end. Just ordinary life (and financial insecurity).

And yet the journey is not over, I still find people incredibly challenging, overwhelming and, ultimately, disappointing. I’m still unable to enjoy the company of others and find even the most casual banter exhausting to the point of numbness. Why?

There is an answer. And it is that my fundamental relational model is built on over functioning. The model that was originated as a survival strategy for emotionally immature, inconsistent, violent, abusive people who raised me. I was made responsible for the emotional functioning of people who had power over me but did not take responsibility for themselves.

The pattern was not just that they hurt me. It was that their behavior assigned me a role. Here’s a long but not an exhaustive list:

And this is how I function at work and even in casual conversations and relationships: constant over monitoring, hyper attunement, responsibility for others’ emotions, taking on their anxiety, sadness and anger. Being extremely calculating how every word I speak might be received. It’s no fun.

Here’s a summary of what needed to happen and what happened instead:

So let it be written. So it may be undone.