E28: Dear Parentified Daughters

Listen to the episode here: E28: Dear Parentified Daughters - https://bit.ly/3BGNXDK

Hey there, friend. It is Dr. Tiffany and this is episode 28 of the podcast, Integrative Mental Health Therapy with Dr. Tiffany. And this is on the parentified daughter. And I teed this up in a previous podcast indicating that I had been training under Dr. Gibson, amazing books on EIPs, emotionally immature parents, and then later became persons, because you realize that people who were adult children of emotionally immature parents would often go on to choose emotionally immature people in their personal lives, because that's what felt familiar. So anyway, I mentioned previously that I had the blessing, so in my reflection for 2024, it was being able to emotionally tolerate going through her first book because I emotionally had a hard time navigating it prior to, gosh, um, not even just this year, like, like it was 2023, I first picked up her book, I guess, in 2022 and it hit such a nerve and I was hearing the book in my own internal voice. It was too painful to read. Mother hunger, similar kind of experience. So, um, just a pro tip for you. Um, audibles can help you with that. Um, but I've done so much in interior work myself, um, and confronted my own stuff so much over the last two years that I was able to pick the book back up and then realized that I had an opportunity to actually train in her approach, which was an amazing opportunity of healing for me and extra yumminess for my practice because it blends unbelievably well with IFS. She loves IFS in her model. It's a great approach for intensives, just doing deep healing work around the patterns that can show up. When you've been raised by someone who we're not diagnosing, but we're just saying has emotional immaturity because of their own trauma and their own stuff and all that. And as a result, you ended up maybe not having enough room in your childhood for your own emotional needs and ultimately ended up parentified.

And parentification can look like having adult responsibilities around the house where you were expected to, you know, do things like, you know, clean and wash clothes, do laundry, have adult responsibilities around the house at a very early age and help care for other, you know, children, siblings in the household, pick up responsibilities, cook, that kind of thing, but it could go so far as emotional parentification where you found yourself pulled into the relationships that your parents would have. One of the parents specifically might ask you to help support them and their emotional needs would share way too much about what was going on with them and their spouse.

You would just have emotional responsibility. There were no proper boundaries. So you were parentified. You didn't get a chance to be a kid. That's what that means. And what I find is it can be really challenging to navigate the holidays for people when this was their experience and they're now around those EIPs, those emotionally immature parents, because our parts, if not properly acknowledged and unburdened can just activate into old patterns. And if you've had some healing but not enough to navigate that experience with your parents, it can feel very disorienting. So I'm not going to be able to heal all of that in this podcast, but I just want to speak to it because someone that I absolutely love just in the therapeutic space is the holistic psychologist, Dr. Nicole LaPera, and she actually had sent out an email about this. And I just was just thinking, you know what? I wanna talk about this. I wanna speak on just this idea. 

So I'm gonna read some of what she said, and I just wanna offer my two sons because If you've been watching my posts on social media, if you've looked at my emails, I've been talking about the good girl health tax. And so all of this kind of connects together because I treat brain, body, mind, I believe in looking at root cause explanations for anxiety and traumatic stress reactions. And then you know, looking at what happens when someone is navigating neurodivergency and a mood disorder. And then what about these women who, um, are struggling with an autoimmune disorder and, um, and, and anxiety disorder or brain fog and just looking at that intersection of brain body mind. And when you talk about the good girl health tax, it is the research that has been done.

On the fact that parentified daughters, specifically, ASAPs, adult children of emotionally immature parents, often struggle with health issues later in life. The research is clear. The lack of having a normal childhood, being expected to engage in ways that raise one's cortisol, let alone trauma, change the immune system. And so this is an important conversation to be having because healing is possible at any stage and age. And the more you know, the more psycho edge you have, the more freeing it can ultimately be. So the parentified daughter has had a job since childhood, Dr. LaPera says. The job was to comfort a parent or to be their emotional support system to try to break up fights between parents, to take care of siblings. Be easy because the house was chaotic or unstable. And this one is a big one because I do find that ASAPs in my practice don't like to be extra, take up too much space, pick me. I hear all kinds of things about just like being even killed and not needing a whole lot of like extra attention or like um Being easy going for other people so and that was because everything around them was so chaotic. So they had to try to be the calm in the storm They had to monitor the mood of the one parent who controlled the emotional climate of the home Deny their own needs because they went unheard a lot of the times, right? So this could be anything as simple as like being a young girl and getting your menstrual cycle and being really uncertain about it, but not wanting to be a burden and ask too many questions or ask for too much help. And that's a real legitimate concern that ASAPs can have when they have a parent who has too much of a burden with their own life and doesn't have the space for their child, or having a parent with a mood disorder who just doesn't have the space to acknowledge your own internal world or on and on and on, it goes. So she goes on to talk about if this makes sense to you, and if you're listening to me, it probably is gonna make sense to you. It's really a silent epidemic in the culture and it really is at the root of making people, especially women, sick and the signs that you grew up parentified.

And I will include these at the bottom of the podcast. I won't go into all of them because they're so long, but I did put them on my Facebook page and I will link it in the email. But a few of them, she notes that you have rescuer or fixer tendencies. So you might be called the glue of the family or be the person everyone turns to when they're having problems.

So kind of think of that. You're always the one fixing things for everyone else. You believe it's your responsibility to manage other people's emotions. You struggle to let people be upset or hurt and try to make everyone feel better even if it's burning you out and they expect you to. That's the other thing you've kind of taught people or attracted people to you that expect that. Right? Another one is You don't know who you actually are. You have an idea of who you are, but most of that comes through your job, your family, or something outside of yourself. It's hard to get a sense of who you actually are. And whew, I'm just gonna personally share here. Once you start realizing who you actually are, it may start to shift some of your relationships and it may not go over well. So I'm just gonna go ahead and give you a heads up. It's almost like a light bulb goes off. So as you start to do this work, and that's why I suggest that you kind of navigate through this territory with the help of a professional, it can scare you. It can scare you. It can feel very mentally and emotionally destabilizing because the way you're whole nervous system and mind and psyche is wired is not for your own benefit. And I have really had the unbelievable, I don't even know, gift, pleasure, blessing of sitting with women as they tried to figure this out. And only because I've been on this path myself and had some unbelievable mentors have I been able to hold that space because I personally understood, understood, excuse me, the choppy waters that these people have been trying to navigate. So, one other one. Oh, if you set a boundary, you feel incredible guilt. And I'm gonna add that people will make you feel guilty. So it's not just in your head. When you turn something down or you say no, your mind starts to race afterward. Your heart beats faster, your brain tells you.

You're an awful person, you're a cruel person, you're a selfish person, and you're covered in this overwhelming guilt. And here's the challenge, there are people in your life who will actually say this out loud to you. You're not crazy. It's actually like the belief system of the people around you. And it's heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking to not have your internal world matter to the people that are supposed to care about you and love you, for their internal world to be so much bigger than yours that they can make you feel this way. And people can make you feel some sort of way. It's not true that they can't make you feel. They can make you feel all kinds of things. We're social creatures. So I just wanna clear that up as well. The problem with parentification is it has us believing three main myths. I can change, fix, or rescue another adult.

When someone is upset, that means I'm bad or something has been done that's wrong. And being selfless makes me good. Whew, that one. Okay, so these myths that we believe without question, especially when we're aseps, drive our behavior and they drive our thinking. They make us choose the wrong people in relationships. We get into jobs that are not good for us. It does all kinds of things. But it also makes us physically...

And I talked about this in the people pleasing podcast you have mystery pain or illnesses that come and go when you're highly stressed Think about fibromyalgia chronic pain. You have gut and or digestive issues You have an autoimmune disorder many people who come to me have some sort of autoimmune digestive issue And let me just explain that when you turn on yourself you have trained your immune system to also turn on you

So when you choose everyone but you, your immune system literally starts to attack you. So when I teach women this work, I teach it from a place of deeply resonating with the need to do this to save yourself, to survive. When I see women physically exhausted, unable to lose weight with hormones in the toilet and all that, I am like, girl.

I am trying to help you save your life. Okay? Like that is the energy behind this. And I hope you can hear the passion around today's podcast. Because as you are trying to navigate the holidays, I want you to know I see you, I get you. This is really happening. And you can start to intervene and interrupt it at any time. No time like the present. And you don't have to be mean. You don't have to be unkind.

You don't have to be cruel. No is a complete sentence, but you're a people pleaser. So you can add a few more words because that's gonna make you feel better. So headaches, skin problems, rashes that come out of nowhere are other indicators. So steps that Dr. LaPera recommends, right? Break the fix. Breaking the fix is about noticing the impulse that you have to fix an adult's problem or issue.

If you have that best friend who calls you at all hours of the night and you're on vacation and she's calling you with her latest breakup story and her latest drama at work, I need you to break the fix, okay? Same thing with your mom. If your mom is calling you at all hours because of problems with whoever it is, I need you to break the fix. Say no. As a child, you couldn't say no. You had to adapt to your environment to survive, but sweetheart, you are an adult now and you can say no.

I give you full permission because I understand what I'm asking you to do and you can still say no. And it doesn't have to be in that aggressive hyper masculine assertive way that you were taught to and cognitive restructuring. You can say no in the way that you know makes sense for you. Ask for help. You weren't allowed to and I am imploring now that you do ask for help. Get yourself some help. Whatever it is.

Move past that deep fear of asking for help that you have and get some. And the one small promise plan. You've probably not focused on yourself for a long time and that has broken your trust with yourself. It's time to restore that trust. Make one small promise to yourself that you're going to do every day. And I want you to start over the break. Examples would be drink one glass of water.

Go for a walk around the block. Do not go on your phone before 8 a.m. Eat one healthy home cooked meal. Don't impulse spend, whatever it is, okay? I want you to do that thing for yourself. You want this to be something that's not a lot of effort, not high effort for you, and that you know you can do daily. Cheer yourself on.

And remember that when you take care of yourself this way, you can actually be there for other people because I'm not asking you to stop being there for other people. I talked about my morning routine in the previous podcast. Some of you may notice that I start my day much later. I used to start my day insanely early. I would see clients very early and I would see clients very late and I would see clients five days a week. And now I start my day much later. I still get up early but I do all these really yummy, amazing things for me and I do it unapologetically, and sometimes I wish I had more time. That's how good I have gotten at taking care of me. And I don't see clients face to face on Fridays. I close out my practice on Fridays, and I say no to Friday requests all the time, because I have to say no for me, because I said yes for way too long in my life in general, right? I take way more days off and coming next year, I will take more days off. I give myself lots of little gifts so that I can still love on the people that I am privileged to take care of and give my best. Doing all this has made me sharper, smarter, clearer, more emotionally regulated and I have better boundaries. So I'm a better clinician than I was years ago, right? So it makes even better at taking care of other people.

And I think that's enough to say, because I know that at the heart of this, many of us are loving caretaking people and I'm not asking you to be hard and to stop doing that. I'm just giving you the permission to take care of yourself first.

Healing from parentification means better physical and emotional health. It means you won't be exhausted and burn out. It means that some relationships might change. Amen on that one. But it also creates room for the healthy reciprocal, amen on that one too, relationships that you've always wanted. You got this. I'm here. I understand. And if you have a friend who is an ASAP and you need her to talk to me.

Please send her my direction. I hope this has touched you. It's a gift that I have wanted to give and when I saw dr lapirez Newsletter I was like I'm just gonna share her her message and my voice Connected to my own training and experience from this year connected to everything I talk about with brain body mind Please share this Share this with the women

Share this with the young women in your life. Share this with the girls who have the maturity to listen to it. There are so many people pleasing parts in the 18 to 25 year old young ladies that I work with that I am so grateful that I get to help unburden because I know that the work I get to do with the daughters of the women in my practice and the daughters of their neighbors and so forth is changing the epigenetic expression of autoimmunity and chronic fatigue and chronic pain. And as I say that I get goosebumps because what a blessing it is that I get to do this work and walk this walk. And it is because I was a parentified daughter that I get to help others and know what I'm talking about. So don't spend this time being down or frustrated or angry. You're gonna have a grieving period but know that you can take this trial and make it your testimony. I hope you have an amazing holiday season. This is my last podcast release until 2025 because I'm going to go somewhere and take care of myself. And thank you for giving me your attention. Until next time, be well.