How does parentification affect relationships?

[Intro] Hello and welcome to Empowered to Thrive. I'm your host Corinne Powell. I'm so glad you're here.

No matter what type of day you're having, you're always welcome. I like having you around. This space is especially designed for the person who goes about life focused on everyone else while neglecting their own needs.

The person who says yes when inwardly they want to say no. The person who is frustrated at all they do because they don't receive much in return. If that's you, I'm going to put out some great ideas on how you can change those patterns and get unstuck.

Life isn't meant to be tolerated. It should be enjoyed. So let's get to it.

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Corinne Powell: Happy Wednesday. I'm so glad to have you here with me. I know that you have many options for what you listen to, and I am so grateful that you tune in to Empowered to Thrive. Thank you for choosing to be here and allowing yourself to learn and discover and heal. You are offering yourself a gift that changes everything.

As you saw, today's topic is all about being the parentified child and learning how to function in a healthy way with your partner. The parentified child is basically the child who becomes a caregiver at too early of an age. When our parents are not able to emotionally meet their own needs, they of course can't meet our emotional needs.

Another element is that you become put in this role of caregiver, parent, one who starts to have responsibilities piled on top of them when you don't even know how to rightly perform those responsibilities.

Sometimes older siblings are asked to take care of their younger siblings when they're just too young to know how to do it. Or they're asked to cook and clean before they actually know how to do those tasks. Now they learn as they go. We're amazing human beings. We can learn so much. We're resilient. We can go through a lot of difficult experiences and still come out pretty well. It doesn't mean it's ideal. It doesn't mean there's not repercussions from it. So for those of you that think I'm doing pretty well, I'm all right.

It's worth offering yourself the compassion that perhaps you are doing really well considering what you went through. But are there ways that you deserve some extra loving support and how can you offer that to yourself?

Let's talk about how you might function in a relationship if you were parentified. And now you're supposed to be functioning as partner, as equal. I recognize that even in a partnership, there's times we give more or we take more.

There's seasons where you might need something, then you need it a different time and your partner might need mean more one season than they needed a different time, of course. But there's this give and take dynamic to it. Whereas a parentified child knows more of a give than a take. They know how to offer their support more than they know how to receive support. So when you show up in a relationship with your partner, you might be doing a lot more than you should be doing and you don't even realize it.

Takes for instance, the scenario that you have a day off, you have a day to meet your needs, to get errands done, to take some time for self care, to get an extra nap in. But even though that's high priority to you, you see the needs that now your partner has to meet and you have this feeling inside of you that overwhelms you. You don't want them to have to do too much. You don't want to see them suffering. You know that you're able to put your needs aside or even perhaps get most of your things done and also help them out. So you start taking on the responsibilities that weren't supposed to be yours for the day. This is such an unconscious pattern that you may not even realize it. 

First step is noticing, what your patterns are, witnessing yourself from a distance to observe, how do I interact in my relationships? How am I interacting with myself? How do I show up? What are the subconscious beliefs? The thoughts that are propelling what I do without me even realizing it, the ideas, the deeply ingrained ideas that caused me to function as I am. What are those? As you start to become aware of these things, then you can do something about it. You can choose to change a pattern. You don't even know what the pattern is until you know the pattern.

And then it's easier to look at and say, do I want to continue this? Is this supporting me? Is this helping me? Is this beneficial to our long-term relationship? Because for a time you can do extra for someone else. But if you do extra for someone all the time, you're either going to get worn out, become resentful, that person's going to rely on you in a way that isn't reasonable, and they're going to perhaps start to expect these things of you. In the whole scheme of life, it's much more enjoyable and much more sustainable to have a back-and-forth, give-and-take, mutually beneficial relationship that's not so lopsided.

So, do you do more for your partner because you're just so used to accommodating, to helping, you're so aware of the needs that you think this is just the nice thing to do, the right thing to do, why shouldn't I use my time to help them out if I have a little bit of free time? Why shouldn't a little bit of free time be your time to enjoy? Consider the opposite thought. Consider a different scenario, the one you didn't get to live out in childhood.

Perhaps even now, your parents still depend on you more heavily than they should.

Consider what you have not received, the deficit that is there for you. You don't need to compound that by now functioning that same way in your other relationships. I do understand this is no easy task to come out of a conditioning such as that, but it's possible. I am on the healing journey almost two decades, still working out of this pattern.

But I'm actively working out of this pattern where I witness myself, I'm more aware. And there are so many ways I've already changed. There's just more layers to it. The little girl I was, the very young toddler, learned how to notice what other people's needs were and to meet those needs. And she didn't have someone attuning to her and noticing what her needs were emotionally and meeting those. So when you not only see what needs to happen around you and you meet those needs, but you don't have a grown-up noticing what your emotional needs are and meeting them. That is a setup for a pattern as an adult that looks like the one I was just describing where you have a little bit of free time and you think why not I could help them out. I see they need help they might not have even asked for help or they might have but either case you think I see there's a need there I can meet that need.

And might feel well and fine in that moment, but what about down the road? Are you starting to feel irritated? Resentful? Exhausted? Do you have the thought, come on, why can't somebody help me? Why am I always the one helping other people? When perhaps they didn't even ask for your help, or if they did, you get to choose whether you'll say yes or no. Whether you say I could do it now or I could do it later, or let me think about it. Give yourself some time to consider. Boundaries are important. We've been talking about that a lot because it's very important to coming out of this lifestyle of living as that parentified child.

Setting limitations for yourself, so that others can respect those limitations. You have to be the one to enforce them, we have to do that. If we're going to sit here and blame someone else that they don't offer us the respect that we desire, we have to consider, are we actually making it clear what our desires are? And then are we seeing to it that we honor that within ourselves? If I don't want to use my little bit of free time to help somebody else, they're still allowed to ask me for help. It's up to me to say, sorry, I can't do that right now. I'll think about it and get back to you. I can't do that right now, but I could do that at such and such a time or on this date. We're responsible for our own response.

We sometimes get irritated with the person asking the question. But if we sit long and hard with that, I think it's worth considering that perhaps we're more irritated with the fact that we're not responding to them the way that we wish. We long to be able to stand up for ourselves, to speak our truth, to set our limits, and to hold to them. And we see that we don't do that. We give in, we change our mind. We always see things from their perspective.

Well, we get to choose if we want to change those patterns, those ways of thinking, those ways of being. So establishing boundaries, actually witnessing ourselves, looking at what are our patterns, how are we interacting, finding support, someone to be able to walk us through this process, myself or somebody else. There's a lot of resources available if we want them. And doing it, just actually putting in the effort. There is a natural resistance to change because you've been so conditioned in whatever it is you do, but change is always possible. 

There is a more satisfying life on the other side. There is an easier life on the other side. The journey there might feel challenging. But isn't the lifestyle you're currently living also challenging? It's hard to be exhausted. It's hard to give and give and give without giving to ourself or without receiving from others. So I've heard it said, there's two hards. Which one are you gonna choose?

And in the end, if you choose the one that takes you out of your condition pattern and allows you to form a new pattern that supports you, boy, does it get a lot easier on the other side. It's so much more satisfying I can attest to it, I live it. And it's true, I'm working through changing patterns still, but of the ones I've changed. It is so much easier to live. It is so much brighter a life. I am so much happier and much more at peace. 

If you want this also, I'm ready to link arms with you and help you experience it. I want it for you, but you have to want it for yourself before the change can happen. So we'll talk more on this topic as the weeks progress. If you have specific questions, you have a scenario where, hey, I was the parentified child, perhaps you still are, and you think this happens in my relationships, what can you say to that, Corinne? Send me those thoughts, send me those questions.

Lay out the scenario for me. I can give you my feedback if you're looking for that. You can always send me an email, corinne@changeradically.com

Find me on any of my social platforms. You can even drop a voice message through Spotify. I would love to hear from you. I'm always interested to hear from you. So until we meet each other again here next week, witness yourself. Notice how you're interacting, how you're responding, and allow yourself the opportunity to pause and respond a little more slowly, more deliberately, so you get to choose. You deserve that.

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[Outro] We've come to the end of another episode. I'm so glad you stuck around. As you consider what you've heard, what's the one thing that especially resonated with you? What's one way you can start to implement change into your life? Too much too soon isn't sustainable.

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