← Trauma Rewired
Trauma Rewired
Parentification
00:37:41
When a child is forced to carry the emotional or practical burdens of their caregivers, it can result in lasting trauma that often manifests in adulthood as emotional repression, perfectionism, and various mental health challenges. Parentified...
Loading summary
Transcript39 lines
- [00:00]
A
Parentification is often referred to as an invisible childhood trauma. It happens when a child is forced to become the parent. This can happen emotionally, physically or both. And it's really a responsibility before the nervous system can handle it. And at what cost does this come at for the child? And it leads to a lifetime of chronic stress, relational struggles and even physical illness. Have you ever felt like you carried responsibilities that weren't yours to bear? Maybe as a child or even now as an adult? Welcome to Trauma Rewired, the podcast that teaches you about your nervous system, how trauma lives in the body, and what you can do to heal. I'm your co host Jennifer Wallace. I'm a neurosomatic, psychedelic and preparation guide and I bring the world of your nervous system into the potent modality of one of nature's most powerful healers. And we do that so we work with the nervous system so that we can accept and receive the truths and the felt sense of the way that the body expresses. I'm also an educator at the Neurosomatic Intelligence Coaching Certification.
- [01:07]
B
And I'm your co host, Elizabeth Kristof. I am the founder of Brainbase.com, an online community where we use applied neurology and somatics to process emotions, regulate stress response and even do trauma re patterning. And I'm also the founder of the Neurosomatic Intelligence Coaching Certification, an ICF accredited course for therapists, coaches and practitioners to bring the nervous system into all the powerful work that they're doing. So this is kind of an interesting topic because I think it affects a lot of people, but it's, it can be hard to identify. Sometimes it's kind of like emotional neglect in that way. It has this really big impact, but sometimes it can be hard to see. So just to define parentification a little bit so that people can hear that and see if part of them resonates with it, is when there's really a role reversal between the parent and the child. Right? The child is sacrificing their own needs for the emotional or physical needs of the parents. And that premature responsibility can really lead to a profound sense of loss, a loss of childhood identity, the ability to trust the world and feel like you're living in a safe, supported environment. And there's two big broad definitions or big broad types of parentification. There's instrumental, which is when the child has excessive practical responsibilities like caring for their siblings or managing household tasks or contributing financially. And that can really lead to some hyper independence, perfectionism. Obviously chronic stress as we're managing all of that and growing up feeling responsible for family's survival. And then there's emotional parentification too. This one's a little trickier. And that's when the child takes on the role of managing the caregiver's emotional needs, right? Acting as like a confidant or a.
- [03:03]
A
Source of support for their parents.
- [03:04]
B
Also, maybe their parent can't regulate their own emotions. And at a nervous system level, as a little child, we take that on too. We become the regulating force in that relationship. And that often leads us or the child to suppress their own emotional needs, leading to patterns of people pleasing or emotional burnout, loss of autonomy in adulthood. And really bakes in that deep pattern of emotional repression because we don't want to dysregulate our caregiver when they don't have the ability to regulate around that. And it can occur a lot of times in families that are impacted by mental illness or. Or addiction. When there's generational trauma, it can come from societal, structural things. A caregiver doesn't have the resources they need to be able to care for their child. And it can also come from just growing up in a family that doesn't have a lot of skills for emotional processing and emotional regulation, because a lot of people just aren't taught that.
- [04:07]
A
And in that way, it's generational, right? Because how can you know something that you weren't taught? So we just get into these cycles and you know, I have a client who experiences parentification with her mother, and she describes it as like her mother being an unruly teenager. The pendulum swings hard and fast. And you said something to me one time that I always say to my clients who experience parentification, when you grow up walking on eggshells, it changes the way that you walk. And this is one thing that parentification does. And it does it in a lot of the emotional ways. And you mentioned perfectionism a moment ago. And I think there's a lot of perfectionism rooted into the adult's role, right? The driving perfectionism of the primary caregiver is implicating the parentification of the child. And this gets pretty contentious as the relationship continues to grow on. Because when we look at unresolved trauma in the body over time, this chronic stress that is leading to mental illness and that driving inner critic, that driving perfectionism, the emotional repression that comes with perfectionism, the emotional repression that comes into emotional parentification. And even in instrumental parentification, where almost we're kind of talking about age ification, where a child has to like be the adult. Right. And grow up older and faster. That just comes with so much responsibility that once again denies our own self and our own progression. Evolution of really who we are gets suppressed. And all of this chronic illness, it drives the mental illness aspect and that driving perfectionism and that inner critic and emotional repression over time, that giant pendulum swing. I don't really know what I want to say here because I really do see it expressing into other, quote, personality disorders that we're going to talk about later on this season, like bipolar and borderline. Borderline, yeah. And so to tie parentification into complex trauma, it's deeply interwoven into chronic stress, emotional neglect, and nervous system dysregulation. These are all hallmarks of complex trauma. And it's. It makes for a really untrusting relationship and I think a relationship for the child that can't trust the adult. So it's like you have to start managing them and taking responsibility for everything that they do. Parents often overshare with children. And it's like, I'm not supposed to know these things about you and your relationship?
- [06:56]
B
Yeah, 100%. And as you were talking, I want to look at, you know, some of the ways that this really impacts our nervous system. But there were two things that really stood out to me. The thinking about, you know, when we walk on eggshells our whole childhood, it changes the way that we walk. And it really is all of these compensations. Like, our body is a master of compensations. And when we do that over and over again, it changes our physiology, it changes our posture, it changes our ability to emote and vocalize. Like we're patterning ourselves in that environmental water that we're swimming in. And when the caregiver has a big range of emotional dysregulation or emotional suppression, it's like we're always adapting to work around that and ensure our survival and safety as children. And then those patterns just play out throughout adulthood and all of our other relationships. And then that loss too, that you were talking about, like, you have to be a different age than you really are and carry so much responsibility. And there really is some grief there for the loss of that childhood. And I see a lot of clients that I work with would be self described as old souls. And this was my case too. Like, people were always like, oh, it was, you're so quiet. You're such an old soul. And, you know, you seem so wise beyond your years or whatever. It's like, I'm a 7 year old. Like, I shouldn't be an old soul, you know. And so there is this loss of play and laughter and kind of wildness that should be there in childhood to like, explore your environment and develop in another way. You're holding so much in to and having to be responsible for so much more than you have capacity for.
- [08:54]
A
It is so much to manage and it only builds over time. And then we get into these patterns that we are now, you know, unsafe in relationship. It's a chronic load that's really not manageable as we go through our lives. To be honest with you. It just creates too much stress.
- [09:13]
B
Yeah, I mean, that's really what it comes down to, right? It is the chronic stress load. That's how it affects our nervous system because we're having to operate beyond our capacity. And that leaves our nervous system in a state of. Remember, we always are defining trauma as like when an experience is such that the nervous system cannot adapt, it can't cope with that stress level, it can't reregulate, it can't positively adapt to the stress. And that amount of responsibility and stress is more than we can adapt to as children. And it leaves us in these prolonged states of hypervigilance. All of those stress hormones, the cortisol, the adrenaline, especially the cortisol, over time, this constant demand for emotional or physical caregiving, that doesn't leave us any time to like, regulate, to process, to express, to do the things that we need to do to complete our stress cycle in our animal bodies. Right. Because that might disrupt our caregiver, that might cause friction in the family unit. That's more than they can handle. And so it just places a lot of ongoing demands on a developing nervous system that keeps us in states of dysregulation, fight, flight, but especially, I think, freeze and fawn. That chronic freeze due to the overwhelm and the suppression of our needs, and then also to a diminished capacity for rest and recovery. We don't have any break from that chronic stress load and the responsibility. And so not only do we not get to physically express and re regulate through that emotional expression or physical movement that we need to to regulate our stress response, but we don't have time to take a break from that stress so that our system can adapt. And many of us learn rest is not safe. It's not safe to rest. And then that plays out in our life too.
- [11:09]
A
And we're talking a lot about like, maybe some behavioral aspects of parentification, but it has real implications on our physiological body as well. And there's a Huge link between parentification and gut dysfunction. And so our gut is really deeply connected to how we experience life. Right. It's how we process our stress. It's about the lived experience in our body. And so parentification, it places chronic unrelenting stress on a child's nervous system that is going to directly impact the gut through the gut brain access. And so when we're talking about the gut connection, we really wanna talk about first the gut stress connection. And so we talk about the HPA axis on here a lot where we are talking about the releasing of cortisol and other stress hormones. While these stress hormones are good under short acute instances when they are constantly circulating, they are gonna disrupt the function of our bodies. And so when we are talking about the gut brain access, we're talking about a lot of inflammatory responses. There is a study in 2021 study published in the Nature Communications that found that chronic stress alters the composition of gut microbiota. It leads to intestinal dysbiosis. We're talking about the release of pro inflammatory cytokines. These create systemic inflammation that can affect everything from digestion to mental health. We cannot parse apart mental health from our physiological states of our body and from our gut. And that's because when we're looking at say a gut microbiome or even the way that our intestinal tracts and all the parts of the, the body that really bring together what we know as the gut brain access, the vagus nerve, even being part of that, when all the receptors that exist, all the cells, all the receptors that exist in your brain also exist in your gut. This is how your gut is so attached to your mental health. You've got serotonin in your gut that is a huge link to anxiety, to depression. We know that when our nervous system is activated, it pulls all of its resources and part of the places that it's resources are your digestive organs, all of your organs actually are impacted. When we have to pull the reservations from the body into one of the F activations.
- [13:37]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Because we're under resourced, right. And we're under resourced, we start to have these metabolic deficits. We'll do some episodes on metabolic health at some point, but yeah, we don't. All of our other bodily systems start to suffer because we're in these constant states of activation and our resources are going to stay in survival responses. And there are a lot of studies looking at parentification and gut disorder. Just like you were talking about. There's a great quote from Dr. Vincent Felitti, who was the co principal investigator for the ACE study, where he just emphasizes that parentification places chronic, unrelenting stress on a child's nervous system that directly impacts the gut through the gut brain axis. And then the prolonged activation of stress responses disrupts digestion, alters gut microbiota, increases inflammation, and then you have these gastrointestinal issues that persist into adulthood. And we both have experience with this as little kids. We had a lot of gut dysfunction. And I can look back now. You know, I was in and out of the hospital all the time. People couldn't figure out what was wrong with me. I would throw up for days on end and not be able to stop. I would spike a fever. Tested everything, allergy tests, spinal taps, and nobody ever found the answer. But I can look back now and just realize it was this chronic stress load that I was under, some unresolved big T traumas, and also just the chronic stress of my childhood. And now here I am in my 40s with celiac and persistent gut dysfunction. And I can connect those dots.
- [15:18]
A
I'm in my second year of really putting the focus into gut healing. And I mean, it's really a journey as we're talking about, like these inflammatory responses that could happen and like how immunity is also linked to our gut health. For me, I experience a histamine response that is. It's mcas and it's telling. My gut is receiving that food, that I'm allergic to food. And that is a missing piece of my puzzle that I could not explain from the inflammation. And now as I move through these, these healing, some of these primary wounds through emotional neglect, parentification and sort of the. More like emotional states, ways of being boundaries in my primary relationships and understanding too. This is something that just came up in our conversation that we had with Piper. We are often. I mean, we're being patterned through our survival by the way that we are developing and we are patterning to another person's trauma responses. Right. That we don't really understand quite yet. And so when we can start to come into a place of this deeper healing where we are, you know, working in the nervous system in particular areas like the gut, I mean, we're talking about an area that holds beliefs, that holds your thoughts, that holds your emotions. And when there's a backup in there or when you don't have a good gut motility, the storing of all of this limitation, all of this repression, it needs to be stored somewhere. And when you can work with your gut and get the metabolism going get into a good metabolic flexibility. You can actually release some of the stored repression that way. Some of the emotions, some of the thoughts, some of the beliefs, and really move into a place where you do have more boundaries and agency to understand. Like, I'm in the parentification right now because like you said in the beginning, this is very tricky.
- [17:12]
B
It really is. I want to talk a little bit about it because the trickiness of it, the the nuances of it, because so much of it, it's not to like put blame on the parents because so much of it is so far beyond them. Right. It's when I think about my childhood with, you know, I grew up with a single mom and she had her own trauma coming in with a lot of trauma. When we left my family in Germany, that was a very stressful time for her as well, plus her own childhood trauma. And then we moved to the States and she's parenting single, you know, having to provide for me and work a lot. And so there was a lot of stress on me. We moved a lot, A lot of financial stress. She didn't have time or skills to process emotions, would dissociate. When I was younger, I would have big tantrums with a lot of emotional expression, a lot of rage and confusion. But as I grew up into five, six, seven, I learned to start repressing those. Right. I became pretty like emotionally numb and withdrawn because I could see and feel in my nervous system the stress that that put on her. Not cognitively as a little kid, but I could at a somatic level, at a nervous system level, respond to that and learn emotional repression. And so it's not that my mom did a terrible job and there was lots of times where she did really show up for me and she did an amazing job and was a very loving person. But her stress load was too high, her trauma was too much, and it just continues on. And so a lot of times, you know, in society, there's people that are just under resourced to be able to care for their kids and give them that safe environment to develop in where they can explore, express and be a kid. And that's, that's larger than just an individual issue sometimes.
- [19:17]
A
And I think it goes just even beyond like survival. There's a real desire to not want to disappoint this person. And that is like, it's almost impossible when you're trying to manage someone else's emotions or the environment and you're trying to manipulate. It's a lot of energy. You're walking a neutral line. Right. You're just trying to stay. In my own experience, as soon as you're just trying to stay neutral to something. Right. I don't want to get too excited, and I also don't want to get too far down and managing that. It's just a constant waiting for the other shoe to drop.
- [19:59]
B
Yeah. I think especially if your caregiver is really emotionally volatile, which was not necessarily my experience, but I work with a lot of clients that have that experience of caregivers that are unstable. And you really learn to navigate around that, to try to keep them regulated and to not disappoint them, to not set them off, to not have these times where you might get punished, iced out, rejected. And that is a very heavy load to carry and something that takes a lot of time to work through and re pattern as an adult. Because those relational patterns, that hypervigilance around disappointing people or saying something that might dysregulate someone or adding stress, conflict in a situation, and then it leads to those very, very deep patterns of not being able to express ourselves, set boundaries, show up in the world, be visible. Can be very limiting.
- [21:04]
A
I think, too. Shame becomes so baked in, it's hard to recognize when we start on these emotional journeys with people. Shame is one of the hardest emotions for someone to experience and to come into a truth about in their bodies. And shame is so linked to freeze, to shutdown, to fatigue, to dissociation, to the inner critic. Right. It is a part of complex trauma, of having complex trauma and having an ACE score and toxic shame is a hallmark of complex trauma. And the shame response in people with developmental trauma almost always becomes really highly reactive. And so I think that's often what's expressing in a parent that doesn't know how to express their emotions is shame.
- [22:04]
B
Yes, yes, yes to that. I think there's so much shame underneath that. And as you were talking about shame too, I want to touch on guilt as well, because this is something that I experience a lot in my relationship with my mother. And I'm still, like, working through it and figuring it out. And it's one of those things that I'm very repressed with it in a way, like, I don't identify with it. I can only understand that I was parentified as a kid because I read that guilt is one of the consequences of that. And then, and only then can I be like, oh, yeah, maybe I was parentified. Because I do like, even having this conversation, I feel guilt. Like, I feel, oh, my God, what if my mother hears? I Do too. What if it makes her feel bad? And then there's so much guilt I carry around. Like, what if I can't provide for my mother? What if I can't take care of her? What if I can't, like, provide her a place to live and take care of all of her? Everything that she could possibly need as she ages? Like, all of her emotional needs? Like, I really have a deep. I don't know if it's shame, but it's definitely guilt. And it's like this pit of the stomach feeling and this drive to like, make sure that I am providing everything emotionally and physically that my mother might need. And I know that that's not healthy. And I can only know that it's not healthy because I can read it somewhere and be like, yep, I checked those boxes.
- [23:41]
A
But.
- [23:41]
B
But it's hard for me to even like, reconcile that inside of myself. Does that make sense?
- [23:46]
A
Yeah, it does. It's.
- [23:48]
B
It.
- [23:48]
A
Because it is inherently threatening to I think, even identify this. Because we are talking about breaking attachment on some level, even if it's for our own agency. Like we are still a lot of times in this healing work, I think what kind of happens is like, as you start to come into yourself, right, you can see the ways where you leak energy and the ties that are maybe not as healthy as you want them to be. And when those ties are linked to our primaries, it's doesn't matter how old you are. There is a biological need to want to be in these relationships. And then when they come with so much guilt and shame, maybe even fear, right? The fear of, like, I can't maintain this. I'm not gonna be able to provide. It's like once again, really driving chronic stress load onto the body and being able to perform in the way that you can keep an attachment secure. And at the same time, when we talk about like interoception being predictive, and you always give the example of like, the hill and riding the bike. When we're riding the bike and we see the hill, physiologically we're preparing to go up the hill. And when parentification is the hill that you have to climb, just knowing that you're gonna be around one of your primaries, the guilt starts before you even get there. The energy, costly, the little manipulation and controls and the shame, it starts before you get there. Cause you already know what's happening when you start to climb the hill.
- [25:18]
B
That's right, that prediction. And so it precedes those interactions. And I'll tell you what, it also plays out in other relationships, right? Relationships that might remind you of the parent relationship. And for myself, it has definitely played out in work relationships where I end up in situations where I'm over giving, over providing, over committing. Especially with mentors or people who might remind me there's something kind of maternal about that relationship, but it's not. It's a business relationship. But my body gets confused and my behavior starts to be driven by the sensations inside. And I end up developing relationships that are not healthy. And then setting the boundaries and course correcting is really challenging. And it's something I've made a lot of progress on over the past few years. But it's a load to start to let myself vocalize and speak my truth and honor that this is not my responsibility and this is where I end and another person begins, is it's a deep level of somatic work and nervous system regulation and processing those emotions. Otherwise the pattern will just keep replaying.
- [26:38]
A
And I feel this deep need to like that I have to solve the problems. And it could be anything. An appointment that they have, oh, my dad's presenting with this. And it's like, oh, I have to have all of the answers for this. And then when my answers are received, it can feel like rejection for me. And I wouldn't consider myself someone who's too rejection sensitive as like the dysphoria. I know that it exists in us inherently, but it for me, I really have to. I have really had to learn how to be quiet. I am not here to solve these issues. You are grown people.
- [27:20]
B
And I think another thing that I have learned from you and witnessed through you is also really working on re patterning our internal reaction. Like not expecting our primary to change for us to have a different reaction inside, right. Like they are gonna be who they are. And there's a part of us as a child that wants that change, wants the relationship to be different. And what I can do is work with my nervous system and my body so that when I'm in relationship, I can start to consciously create a different reaction inside. The inflammation, the bracing, the muscle tension, the activation. Like, can I work with my body in little moments to re pattern that over and over again so that my internal state is not so reflexively driven by these interactions with someone that I can't necessarily change or control.
- [28:19]
A
You know, I lived in this like, illusion, even with this, like, much as I know, even all these years that we've been recording on complex trauma and nervous system and all the medicine work that I do. And I Lived under an illusion that if I changed enough that it would change relationship dynamics would change in the parentification and in the emotional neglect themes. And that's not true. It's just not true. I can never do enough work that is going to change the dynamic if the other person doesn't change. In fact, I would call it more triggering that I do the work. Because as I do the work I start to pull myself out of the enmeshments of the codependency. And that is threatening when we're changing a relationship. And so it's really so nuanced because it really does come down to the way that I receive it. And if I can get to a place of neutrality with the prediction, right, the prediction can't come with such a charge because then I'm the one being affected by the charge. So the charge has to come with neutrality. And that's a game of mastery.
- [29:35]
B
It's like next level. It's a next level neuro to just give a shout out to Matt. A different kind of next level neuro and somatic processing. Because all of this healing that we've done and the journey that we're on and we work with people on, it's not really very cognitive because I can understand this. I can read all the things and like I was saying, like there's still pieces of it that I can't embody yet that I can't understand at that embodied level. Some of guilt and even the parentification, it's. It's a process. So to really internalize that and feel it and be able to work through it and move through it, I can cognitively understand it, I can read about it. But until I can start to bring those awarenesses into my body and re pattern the reactions like you were saying, to neutralize some of those responses over and over and over again in relationship. Maybe starting with lower stakes relationships, safer people to interact with, maybe not going right to the primary relationship and just begin that re patterning at a neurosomatic level, that's when things start to really change. And again, it's not gonna create necessarily the external change in that primary relationship, but it will change how the kinds of relationships that I engage in in the future, how I build my other relationships and the reaction inside of me as I'm moving through the world in relationship, even to my primaries.
- [31:09]
A
And we have to go against these patterns in minimum effective dose. And it all starts with creating safety in the nervous system first with a daily practice. But these gentle practices really help us connect with where I end and you begin.
- [31:26]
B
Right.
- [31:26]
A
Like that lives in your nervous system. That's your interoceptive system. And so when we can reconnect to our unmet needs, to our repressed emotions.
- [31:36]
B
Yes, the boundary setting is vital to the relationship. Even when the relationship is volatile, the.
- [31:42]
A
Receiving is a volatile.
- [31:44]
B
Even when the boundary is received with, like, conflict or.
- [31:48]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the intention here is to support the relationship, to have a healthy relationship. But it's not always received that way. It's received as sort of a direct hit.
- [32:00]
B
It really can be. Yeah. Because the truth is. And this is just like the real truth is that this is a very. Is a real deep layer of healing because it goes so much to early childhood development and some of those deepest patterns in our nervous system. And the relationship that we have to our caregiver is the most important one for our survival as young, developing beings. And so the response, how deeply imprinted that is into our brain and nervous system and body, and how the reaction is so big sometimes because it's from such a deep place of real survival and it's disproportionate. Often it really is. And I think a lot of this comes down to also, like you were saying, like, reparenting yourself and like you being the one to show up for yourself, to be able to hold the space for expressing those emotions. Yes. Also creating new relationships where we can practice that and have boundaries and be witnessed and express emotions, but also cultivating that relationship with ourselves where we can witness ourselves, we can meet our own needs, we can understand our own truths. And that is a really important part. And that also comes down to doing some healing work around dissociation and self abandonment.
- [33:24]
A
Yeah, Learning how to reparent yourself really is so important. But many of us are still in relationship with our primaries, even having the complex trauma that we do. And many listeners, myself included. And you really desire to have that relationship and are emotionally abused through parentification. And I think there can come moments where the primary, the adult actually starts to kind of understand that the control has been switched. And that can shift a reaction of conflict, even creating more eggshells for the child to learn to walk in. And I think when we talk about the wiring of patterns and the efficiency of patterns and relationships and the pathway of parentification, it gets more myelinated, it grows as the relationship extends. And so then we find ourselves in our 30s, our 40s, our 50s, trying to heal ourselves and are still entrenched in these relationships that are meaningful. I mean, I want a healthy relationship. And one thing experience for me is that because I thought that I would do all the changing, I thought it was all my fault. And it wasn't until I could get regulated safety grounded in my nervous system that I could even say oh, this is actually not me that is so powerful to get to that place. It doesn't mean anything's changed in the dynamic of the relationship except for my ability to separate myself now and know really in full body truth this is not my fault. This is not just me. Yes. Am I contributing to some of the relationship? Absolutely. But the responsibility of the relationship doesn't fall on me like it has the whole time as the responsibility of the parentification.
- [35:25]
B
It's a huge place to come to. It's really important. And I think at the end of the day it comes down to we talk about always on here, which is creating the capacity to be able to reexamine some of these relationships, have altitude to be able to process the emotions around it. To start to re pattern like all of this takes a lot of capacity. And so this is not the starting place where we began our healing journey. Right. Like we're still in it. You can hear as we're talking about begins by creating through little practices NSI tools, daily nervous system regulation and re patterning. The option to be able to stay present in your body, not dissociate, gradually start to express emotions and little by little getting to this place where we can start to make some shifts in these dynamics, in the way we respond to them, in the way we carry them out into the world, in other relationships and in how they impact our relationship with ourself.
- [36:38]
A
Absolutely. I think that's a great close. Thank you all so much for joining us today and if this conversation resonates with you and you want to join us on site, start training your nervous system. Elizabeth has prepared an incredible 90 day journey for you that is really, really easy to follow. And you can find that on rewiretrial.com.
- [37:01]
C
This podcast is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered medical or psychological advice. We often discuss lived experiences through traumatic events and sensitive topics that deal with complex developmental and systemic trauma that may be unsettling for some listeners. This podcast is not intended to replace professional medical advice. If you are in the United States and you or someone you know is struggling with their mental health and is in immediate danger, please call 911 for specific services relating to mental health, please see the full disclaimer in the show.
- [37:35]
A
Not.