Let's talk about how you can support yourself when you're actually in the conflict. Perhaps one of the most important things for the parentified child, the one who's learned to people please, is to have boundaries in place.

It can be uncomfortable to relax when you're used to being hypervigilant, when you're used to being the one in charge, the responsible, mature one. It can feel childish, silly, wrong to do these other things. But they are so necessary for survival, for thriving. You deserve to have a good time.

There's a time when we have to stand up from where we've been sitting, look ourselves in the mirror, literally or figuratively, and say, “I care about you and I'm here to help.”

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.

The goal is that you're in control of your decisions, that you have autonomy in this relationship, that it's no longer you having to act as the parent to your own parent.

You see, it's up to us to show people the real you, the real me. They won't know if they like you, if they don't know who you are. If we become the chameleon, we say the thing we think other people want us to say, we act in the way that we feel is appropriate or expected, and we never share our opinion. We never do what we would truly want to do - how expect people to like us? They don't even know who we are. It's only up to us if we will show up authentically. Nobody else can do that for us. 

Boundaries may feel like limitations at times. They may feel like ways to serve and protect ourself. Boundaries are a way to support ourselves. They're a way to come alongside and make sure we meet our own needs.

If you want to become more mindful about how you're doing, notice your physical sensations throughout the day and pause and breathe. Perhaps you want to deepen your connections and you want to start to notice more about other people. Whatever area it is for you, focus on that one area and slow down the process.

If I know spending time together with my children over the summer is a goal of mine, then it might mean naturally I have to work fewer hours. I have to clear my schedule of certain activities.

If you're a people pleaser, it's gonna be really hard to start asking for what you need because you're so used to focusing on what everyone else needs and meeting their needs, but it's so important to be able to start to meet your own needs and that's by asking, asking for help... Because again, it's so lopsided already. You've been doing for other people way more than you've been doing for yourself.

I'm gonna bring up three keys for change. The first one is empowerment. No one can empower us but ourselves. People can come alongside us, they can offer us a hand. They can say, I'll go with you, I'll run with you, I'll walk with you. But nobody can make us do what only we can do. 

Before I started this journey…it's like a different person…I think one word that would sum it up would be fearful. Every decision I made was based on fear for myself, for my children, for my family.

We look at the past so that we can grieve our losses... But when we never look back, we just push things down. We minimize. We turn a blind eye. We suppress and repress. We stay stuck. 

So consider, if you were to come just as you are, if you were to just be yourself, who are you innately? Describe that person. Pause the episode if you want, come back to it after I'm done. Journal, sit in quiet reflection. What would the authentic parts of you be if you let them to be?

We think that taking things into our own hands, we think that controlling will be a means of feeling safer, will be a means of getting the end result we want, but we really don't have control over any part of our life.

Having to keep it all together when I felt like crumbling. Taking it all on when other people weren't asking that of me. They were willing to take part of it off my plate but I wouldn't let him. I actually couldn't even see it.

As painful and as challenging as it is to feel the grief, it is necessary to moving through it. Within that grief is heartache and disappointment. It's anger and sadness. And that may be uncomfortable, but friend, I invite you to feel it. You don't have to feel it alone.

In many homes the full range of emotions are not tolerated. And certainly it's not modeled in knowing how to feel, what to do with our feelings, how to repair when there's a damage to the relationship.

I didn't want to disappoint. I didn't want to cause somebody discomfort. It crushed my heart to see someone disappointed because of my actions. Now I know that they're responsible for theirs and I'm responsible for mine. And what I do doesn't need to determine how they feel.

It’s very natural that we're gonna look at the caregivers, the parental figures we had, and in many ways we're gonna model them. We're gonna look up to them with respect and admiration, no matter whether they deserved it or not. And we're going to create a life that mirrors the one that we saw, the one that we experience, the one that we heard about.