Dr. Marielle Bouquet

And so it's important to just really understand, you

Gender dynamics, birth order dynamics, there's a lot at play.

But even with those variables, siblings that follow the path together can actually feel like the path is less lonely.

No individual in your family and in that household can validate your experience because that's an internal job.

And so that person, any sibling that you have will not be able to mirror the experience that you've had because you've had completely different lives, even within the same household.

So it's going to be really essential for you to simply learn how to engage in that auto validation and not expect it from anyone else, including your siblings.

Yeah, you know, the eldest daughter is the prototypical parentified child.

It's the daughter that typically takes on a lot of the family burdens.

It's the daughter that is typically the fixer of the family household.

And it's the daughter that tends to have to act as a parent to younger siblings well before a time when she's ready to parent.

All of these things actually create really deep wounds in a person who's robbed of their childhood and who needed to feel a sense of security and dependence upon others.

And so eldest daughters have an opportunity to heal that

parentification, have an opportunity to really offer themselves a reparenting process and give themselves what they did not receive.

And they have an opportunity to rectify the relationships that they have had with siblings or with parents that may have been fractured as a result of the role that they were forced into.

Oh, wow.

You know, I'm going to take a circumstance that happens very often and that it doesn't have like malice embedded in it.

Right.

Like, for example, let's take into consideration a parent that has to work two, three jobs.

They're away for a long period of time.

And so the eldest daughter, in essence, has to step in and after school, feed her younger siblings, make sure they're tucked into bed, right?