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My partner and I have been passing quarantine time by watching Showtime’s dark family comedy, Shameless. This is a great family therapy show and in this case, it is for mature audiences only. I admit, I do enjoy playing armchair psychotherapist as I watch the show and identifying the family dysfunction (and healing!) that takes place.
One of the main characters, Fiona Gallagher, is a great example of a parentified child. Have you heard of this term before? I’ll explain through the useful example Fiona provides.
Fiona’s parents have both been addicted to drugs and alcohol her whole life, in addition, Fiona’s mother is also diagnosed with bipolar disorder. As the eldest sibling in a family of five other children, Fiona has learned to be the responsible one, the caretaker, and the glue of the family. Through years of trauma and while still a child herself, she has become the parent, not only to herself, but also to her siblings, and to her parents. She has formed an identity around her role as the de facto head of the household. This role is often a source of extreme stress, but not unimportantly, the parentified child role also provides a much-needed source of pride, self-worth, and a seemingly secure and central role within the family. This makes the parentified child role a difficult one to give up.
As Fiona’s character grows throughout the show she still has to deal with all of the elements that landed her in the parentified child role in the first place. Poverty, low-paying jobs, and lack of a social safety net; a criminal underbelly that appears to offer a way out; addictive relationships to sex, drugs, alcohol, and even chaos that seem to offer much-needed distraction and connection but just end up making things worse. These are all external problems of our society, but they also become jumbled up and integrated into Fiona and her family’s internal worlds as they try to cope.
Here’s the rub. People can’t stay in the parentified child role forever, eventually, they have to grow up. And without the provision of many healthy scripts as to how to grow up, the parentified child often flounders. We watch as Fiona repeats many of the same mistakes that her parents did that landed her in the parentified role in the first place. We watch her struggle to let go of her siblings as they grow up and move on (sometimes to the detriment of their personal growth as well). In short, we watch Fiona try to create a whole new identity for herself that will serve her better than the parentified child role does, trying to retain what works, and let go of what doesn’t.
If I were to sum up Fiona’s (and of course, the many other parentified children out there’s) predicament in a nutshell it would be this: The coping skills that you learned to survive are not the same coping skills that you will need to learn in order to thrive.
So, is any of this ringing a bell? Do you think you might be a parentified child (or, to put it in plain English, that you have formed an identity around growing up too soon)? Your situation may very well be different than that of Fiona’s in many respects. It is important to recognize that parentified children can grow up in families of any socioeconomic status and can be any gender or ethnicity. Many people might shy away from identifying as the parentified child because their family situation growing up wasn’t “that bad.” That’s okay too. There is no level of trauma or dysfunction you need to surpass in order to have this role resonate with you. The main question is, does organizing your experience around this concept help you gain insight into where you are now and where you go from here?
So, what’s a parentified child to do? Therapy can help get into the nitty gritty of the situation, through a positive, supportive relationship with a therapist, you can start processing your experiences and creating personalized solutions that work for you. But for the sake of making a bullet pointed list, here are some things that might be helpful for the parentified child.
- Awareness. I call this “Name it to Tame it,” start noticing where the parentified child is coming into play in your day to day life.
- Connect to and honor the inner child that was there before the parentified child took its place.
- Move through the emotions that may come up along the way with as much patience and grace as you can muster. It is natural for anger, pain and hurt to resurface as you come into deeper awareness of your role as the parentified child and how you got there.
- Forgive yourself for the inevitable missteps that you make along the way (kindness and acceptance for the inner child– the part of yourself that is still innocent and vulnerable).
- Find a sense of calm in the center (a sense of safety) that lies beyond perfectionism.
- Learn how to have a balance between Structure/Responsibility and Fun/Playfulness that feels healthy for you.
- Recognize your motivations for caretaking/taking on the responsibility of others and learn the power of saying no (setting boundaries).
- Begin the imaginative process of letting go of the role of the parentified child and creating the new role(s) that better serve you that will fill its place.
