When Strength Becomes a Trauma Response

On learning to receive support and healing your hyper-independence after parentification

Feeling the pressure to be strong, have it all together, or take care of everyone else’s needs are all themes I’ve heard from parentified adult children.

Art by Fitra Pranadjaja

Parentification, or the experience of role reversal in the relationship with your parents, happens when parents recruit children for adult responsibilities such as emotional caretaking or task completion. Some common examples of parentification I have observed in my clinical work over the years include:

• taking care of younger siblings because the parent is emotionally unavailable or chemically inebriated

• becoming the parent’s confidante or feeling like a second spouse

• feeling pressure to make the parent feel like a good parent instead of feeling safe enough to share your needs

• handling adult responsibilities like paying bills or making appointments because the parent is chemically inebriated or mentally ill

• walking on eggshells to avoid the parent lashing out and suppressing your feelings

When children are tasked with adult responsibilities, they aren’t allowed to be children. Innocence, playfulness, and connection get sacrificed for obligation, self-reliance, and independence. Many parentified adult children feel like they missed something essential in their childhood or didn’t have a childhood. If you relate to this experience, you’re probably burned out on the constant conscientiousness and responsibility you feel in relationships but struggle to access another way of being.

When parts feel this automatic and protective, we call them protector parts in IFS. Protector parts protect us from the vulnerability or trauma that wasn’t safe to experience. For parentified adult children, depending on adults, connecting with emotion, or asking for support were never options. We learned we had to be strong, independent, and capable of meeting our own needs to survive.

Some of us even go to an extreme of creating a complex around counter-identification with our parent. In other words, we strive to be the opposite of them. If you saw your parent constantly inconveniencing and overly depending upon others, you became exceptionally gracious and competent at solving your own problems. You learned to view vulnerability as weakness and protect yourself against it at all costs.

The trouble with these kinds of protective strategies long-term is that they often outlive their purpose. You may have had to become hyper-independent to survive a childhood with an addicted, financially irresponsible parent, but this hyper-independence creates issues in romantic relationships because being able to be vulnerable builds trust and intimacy, and your protector parts are still hell-bent against being vulnerable because it doesn’t feel safe.

In IFS, we never make protector parts go away. We start with the premise that they make sense in relationship to how they survived and that they deserve respect, curiosity, and support.

We don’t bypass protectors and insist on new strategies. We listen and follow the protector’s lead. When traumatized parts feel validated and understood for their stories of survival and resilience, they naturally become open to exploring new roles and ways of being.

I want to tell you a story about how one of my parentified protectors has been experiencing some healing:

As a child who navigated addiction and divorce in my home, I’m used to feeling like there aren’t enough resources to support me. If I had a goal, it was on me to make it happen; I didn’t rely on anyone to draft the vision or fund the project or help me figure it out. When I wanted to go back to grad school, or open a yoga studio, or get clean and sober, I didn’t ask for help. Asking for help felt foreign.

Finding my way on my own has always felt safest, most familiar, and most reliable, and that’s the path I’ve taken with most major events in my life.

Enterrr motherhood. Now, I am not the kind of mom who wants advice or asks for help unless I really feel like I need it. I’ve been fortunate enough to be home with my now-toddler during the day and work part-time at night, doing therapy, writing my book, and making content without having to hire a nanny or put my child in daycare. A few months ago, my husband mentioned how much I seemed to be struggling with all of the duties of parenting, managing a household, and working and suggested that we rely on my mother-in-law a bit for childcare.

Oh, how I balked. There was so much resistance in me! This had nothing to do with not trusting my mother-in-law or not wanting to give up time with my son. Something in me revolted against the idea of needing anyone in this difficult season of life where I am stretched thin every day. When I am stretched thin, my parts don’t look outward for support. They look inward and try to find a new solution or redouble my efforts.

Trusting someone to consistently support me when I really need support feels harder to my parentified protectors than not expecting support and handling something difficult on my own. Can you relate?

Eventually, my husband and I decided to have my mother-in-law come over for a few hours one afternoon a week. In the beginning of the arrangement, I felt a lot of anxiety. I couldn’t relax into the feeling of having a few hours to myself to catch up on admin tasks or errands or pour into my nervous system. Looking back months later, I think I was afraid to adjust to a new normal that could be taken from me again, only this time it wouldn’t just affect me, it would affect my son. I was afraid that me accepting help was me admitting that I needed someone and that felt worse than struggling and just doing it myself. But now I’ve settled into the weekly Grandma-comes-over routine. I see how positive my son’s relationship is with his grandmother and how much more resourced I am when she comes, like I’m able to take some deeper breaths and approach my son fresh and present.

This experience of receiving help and trusting in someone’s support has also offered some healing to parts of me that never had relational support as an option. I’ve realized receiving help isn’t as risky as my protectors think it is. Even if this arrangement isn’t forever, I trust that leaning into it will help me with the next learning experience on my parenting journey.

One of the ways we help our parentified parts heal is by giving them opportunities for what we call a “redo” in IFS or a “corrective experience” in trauma-informed terms. If we didn’t feel safe enough to trust, we build relationships where we can start to cultivate those skills. We do this slowly and in a titrated fashion so as not to overwhelm our protective system or veer too far outside our window of tolerance. In the personal example I offered, letting my mother-in-law watch my son for a few hours once a week is a low-stakes risk to the part of me that is anxious about receiving help. By respecting our parts’ needs rather than blowing past their limits, our protectors are able to actually witness and integrate a new experience.

As you reflect on your own experience with parentification and the theme of being strong, keep the following IFS axioms in mind:

♥ Protector parts always make sense in relationship to what they had to survive.

♥ The beginning place of healing is always offering respect and understanding to our protectors.

♥ We heal by moving at the pace our protectors prefer; we don’t blow past their limits.

♥ Traumatized protectors feel automatic and intense; healed protectors may prefer their strategies but become open to new options and perspectives.

♥ Protectors heal when you compassionately hold them and respectfully offer them experiences that show them other possibilities.

Always remember that all of you makes sense, all of you belongs, and all of you bears vital wisdom.

~S

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