Dr. Lindsay Gibson

When you begin to get a little bit of self-insight and awareness of how you may have affected other people, there's a terribly difficult transitional time.

You can see the damage.

Yeah, that is a phenomenon that's been fascinating to me.

How is it that different children can end up with such different types of relationships with the same parents?

It's just fascinating to me.

One of the best explanations I ever heard was from a friend of mine, Tiffany Wentz-Root, who's also a therapist.

And her idea was that a lot of times the parent will sort of pick out one child to be almost like a co-parent or a caretaker.

The parent doesn't fuse or enmesh with that child psychologically in the same way that they might with younger children.

So that older child, or it could be just an identified child, it could be a particularly capable or responsible or sensitive child who automatically sort of by temperament steps up and starts to take on some of the responsibilities in the family or tunes into mom or dad and what they need.

And then that child kind of becomes parentified because the parents...

Notice that they have this asset that can help them run the family, so to speak.

So it can be a combination of all different kinds of things that this person just mentioned.

The problem is that when the person tries to go back to the parent and explain to them their particular experience and how it may have affected them, and the parent is saying, well, my other three children don't have any problems with me.

We get along great.

I'm not sure it's me.

Maybe it's you.

And there's no way for a person to come back.

to that with any kind of answer that makes them feel better.

They just wonder why they've been the one who's been picked out.

Well, this kind of goes back to what I noticed when I was researching the types of parents that my clients had who really fit the overall bill of emotional immaturity in terms of their egocentrism, their inability to reflect on their own behavior, their poor empathy, their avoidance of emotional intimacy.