Being a parentified child who is overly enmeshed with a parent doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It also doesn’t survive without a familial, cultural, and societal structure that encourages its perpetuation.
And often, it is the product of intergenerational trauma, which makes it feel simultaneously like a birthright and an integral part of one’s identity within the historical context of the family.
All of this was absolutely true for me, which is why it took almost 40 years of life on this planet to see that it was happening and why to this day I continue to struggle to reconcile what happened, what I didn’t get and how those two things hurt me in numerous ways.
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