Parentified Children as Adults in Relationships (with Dr. Daria Zukowska)
Channel: Prof. Sam Vaknin
Date: 2022-02-05

Parentifying (better said: adultifying) is when a child is coerced by caregivers into assuming adult, developmentally inappropriate roles as: a surrogate parent to his siblings, a referee between his parents, or a caregiver for a mentally or physically disabled parent.

The child emulates his parents and their mental issues as it assumes parental roles.

Very often the parents of parentified children are, in Andre Green’s term, “Dead Mothers”: absent, depressed, self-centred, dysempathic, capricious, dangerous, instrumentalizing, or abusive.

The child is, therefore, forced to parent itself by internalizing his parents’ disorders, dysfunctional attachment styles, and trauma bonding. As adults, they regulate their sense of self-worth by caring for others.

The parentified child grows up feeling responsible for everyone around him. He is incapable of having fun, never have had a childhood. Parentified children grow up to be control freaks, are self-reliant, trust no one, and always get involved in conflicts as arbiters or peacemakers.

They feel the need to be “good, worthy, trustworthy, and reliable” even at the expense of their own needs (they are self-sacrificial). They always feel either that their efforts are not appreciated – or that they should do more. Consequently, some of them end up being passive-aggressive (negativistic) or even covert narcissists and “empaths”.

Parentified children resemble Borderlines in that they engage in compensatory behaviors that are not calibrated and proportionate: reckless promiscuity and substance abuse, for examples. Some of them end up being codependent, people-pleasers, and highly sensitive people (HSPs).

Dialog with the psychologist Dr. Daria Zukowska @zukowska.daria: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl_hm5r5Osb818eIB5t7j-g

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