Parentification: the dark art of turning a child into a parent

A fairly common practice of many parents is to make their child an intermediary when a quarrel occurs between husband and wife. When parents avoid assigning the child this role, the child will designate himself without being prompted. Trying the impossible and never giving up, as children often do, will always result in symptoms of some kind.

Children who are forced to put up with their parents’ fights or witness one parent being abused by the other will experience emotional upheaval, including fear, become withdrawn (so they don’t have to take sides), or behave as a behavior problem to get attention. Decoy himself and stop the menacing fight. Bedwetting, for example, or disagreement at school, can sometimes achieve a truce and also provide a way to vent the inevitable anger that the child feels as a result of what is happening.

If it is not the marriage itself that causes the child’s distress, it is often another type of unhappiness on the part of one or both parents. Any child who feels unhappiness, fear, or other distress in a parent will try to fix it. Not only will you believe that you are capable, but you will take it as your own personal responsibility, often for life.

Children are not aware that their power is limited. Thus, children undertake the task of rescuing the Mother or the Father or both. If they try to be a better boy or girl, do perfectly in school (or misbehave), shut up or make more noise when mom is upset, they go to bed earlier, stay up later, leave From fighting with the brothers, starting fights with the brothers, trying something different, or trying everything harder, they will achieve their goal. When they fail, and they always do, they believe it is their fault.

In one such case, I was the 30th doctor for a young woman. She came to me at the age of 19, never having been out of a psychiatric hospital for more than six months since she was 13. She came with the firm expectation that I would put her back in the hospital, like all the other 29s. doctors had done.

When the whole family was called to the office, everyone showed up except the father, who had long since abandoned them all. However, the patient, deep in his subconscious, kept waiting for the repeated hospitalizations to bring him back. Throughout all these years, the family had deteriorated due to the loss of the mother’s ability to govern, with the result that they were more ill than the patient.

However, they did not need to deal with this fact because they kept their focus on the patient, who fully cooperated. She was the end point in all the matters discussed, and the family was entrenched in a process of avoiding their own problems by projecting them onto the patient.

During the entire first family session, the patient was the only one openly upset. He spoke excitedly, wept, complained and argued, but the rest of the family remained composed as uninvolved observers. When all this was pointed out, that the patient was expressing all the emotion for them, they did not seem convinced.

I suggested that the patient felt lonely by being the only one to admit the pain, that she cried for all of them, that she was suffering instead. This arrangement was not fair, I argued, and it was too much for the patient.

Finally, one of the brothers jumped up and ran to comfort her. A sister followed; then, mother. Before long they were all crying and yet with great relief because it was good to have everything in sight.

The family dropped all resistance and denial and began to speak honestly about the true causes of their suffering. The patient was relieved of her obligation to continue as a mental patient. Instead, he began to guide his family toward some deep insights into how everyone had dealt with emotional pain in the past. She never returned to the hospital.

Mixing children into parental struggles is ubiquitously destructive simply because children believe what their parents tell them, no matter how absurd. They try to adapt to the role assigned or assigned to themselves. The children will participate in each and every one of the crazy things.

The dilemma for children is that there is no normal way to react to insanity. If only professionals could accept this fact, they could identify who really needs help in a family.