Reclaiming You: A Healing Journey for Parentified Adults

By Tanisha R. Sanders, LCSW-C, LICSW

My hope is that someone read the first part of this two-part post, recognized themselves in it, and felt seen. Recognized the void. And now that same person might be sitting with it, eyes open, thinking, “Okay. So what are the nuances that make healing possible, Smarty Pants?”

Before we get into that, let’s talk about why healing matters.

Being a parentified person can be an incredibly gratifying role. Families depend on you. People appreciate you. You are the person who can be counted on, the one who knows what to do, the one who shows up when everything is falling apart. There can be tremendous satisfaction, pride, love, and meaning in being that person.

But it can also be terribly lonely.

Imagine never being entirely sure whether you have value in your relationships beyond what you offer. Whether people would still seek you out if you stopped solving their problems. Whether someone would take care of you if you were the one who needed help.

Imagine becoming so disconnected from your own feelings and physical needs that you don’t recognize when something is wrong. You have become so accustomed to pushing through discomfort, dismissing your feelings, and attending to everyone else that you may not even recognize when you’re physically sick until you’re really sick.

And then there’s trust. How do you learn to trust that someone will be there for you when you’ve spent much of your life being the person everyone else depends on? How do you allow yourself to need someone when experience has taught you that needing people can lead to disappointment?

You can be surrounded by people who love you, appreciate you, and depend on you and still feel profoundly alone.

That is why healing matters. Not because being helpful, dependable, or generous is inherently unhealthy, but because the parentified person deserves to experience relationships in which they are valued for who they are, not simply for what they can provide. They deserve to know what they feel, recognize what they need, and trust that care can move in both directions.

Now, about those boundaries.

“Boundaries” isn’t a bad word. It isn’t wrong to be told to have them. What’s missing is that the word gets handed out like it’s self-explanatory, as if everyone already knows what it means to hold a boundary with someone they’ve spent their whole life believing it was their job to keep okay.

It isn’t self-explanatory.

That’s what the rest of this is: not a redefinition of the word, but what it actually requires once it’s not a sentence in a session anymore, but a real choice in real life, with a real person whom the parentified person has spent their life guarding.

Building a Sense of Value

At the heart of healing for the parentified person is the work of building a sense of human value separate from being needed.

That’s a generous way to put it. The reality can be much more tragic: the parentified person may come to experience themselves as a tool, like any good hammer or screwdriver, valuable because of what they can do.

So what happens when the tool isn’t being used? Who is the person underneath all of that usefulness?

Everything that follows is part of building that person: a sense of self that exists outside of what they can provide, fix, carry, or accomplish for someone else.

Acknowledging Yourself

The first part of executing “boundaries” for the parentified person is learning to acknowledge themselves as a separate entity from all the people they have been guarding.

For much of their life, their attention has been directed outward.

What is happening?
Who needs something?
What needs to be done?
What can I do to make this better?

One way to begin acknowledging themselves is to learn to feel their feelings. For more on why therapists are always talking about feelings and why they matter, I wrote about that here.

It’s ironic that people who tend to be so attuned to everyone around them find it extremely difficult to acknowledge and feel their own feelings.

When a person acknowledges their feelings, they acknowledge themselves. They see themselves.

People who are parentified had to learn to put away and dismiss their feelings and just get sh*t done. So asking them to turn inward and see or observe even simple feelings not related to others is tremendous and a step on the path to healing.

Building Tolerance

The second part of executing “boundaries” for the parentified person is building tolerance for watching people they love do destructive things without immediately jumping into “fix it.”

At first, the parentified adult may want to jump in as soon as a situation begins heading toward “chaos or catastrophe.”

That makes sense. They have spent a lifetime believing that this is the moment when they are supposed to act. Maybe stepping in once earned a “thank you for your service.” But does it still? Don’t people get to have the life they worked for, be it positive or negative? (But more on self-determination later.)

I’m going to say something radical: the safety and well-being of a parentified person’s loved ones can be shared with the dozens of public and private organizations standing ready to offer support to anyone who decides to reach for it. That includes 911 when someone’s life is in danger. (It’s not all on your shoulders.)

The goal is not necessarily to get to a place where the parentified adult can stand by and watch anything happen to someone they love without being affected.

Instead, the parentified person begins to build their own cutoff. They identify and expand their capacity to allow loved ones to experience the consequences of their choices, while also recognizing the point at which continuing to watch, without responding to frantic calls for intervention, would become destructive to themselves.

But even then, before jumping in, they have learned to include themselves in the equation.

It is not enough to consider only whether watching the situation is painful. They also have to consider their own emotional, psychological, and physical needs and the resources they actually have available.

What will this intervention require of me?
What will it cost me?
Do I have the emotional, psychological, physical, or financial resources to do it?

The answers to these inquiries shape how they are able to show up for others.

The intervention may now be for themselves.

The parentified person might, for example, pay someone’s rent to prevent them from becoming homeless, not because they believe paying the rent will make that person responsible or change the direction of their life, but because watching someone they love become homeless would damage their own sense of well-being. They have determined that paying the rent is something they have the resources to do without causing unacceptable harm to themselves.

The behavior may look like the old rescuing from the outside. But internally, something very different has happened.

They have considered themselves in the decision. And when it comes right down to it, they have made the decision to take action for this loved one as a way of caring for themselves. They have hit their limit, the point past which watching any longer would cause them personal damage.

This process can take years to develop.

So we can see why this is not as simple as having “boundaries” and attending to one’s own life. For much of the parentified person’s life, other people’s lives were their business and their life. Their attention, identity, decisions, and resources have been organized around serving others.

We are asking them to construct something different and separate from that. Not simply to stop doing what they have always done, but to develop a life and a self that can exist alongside their concern for the people they love.

Self-Determination

And then there is the reality of self-determination.

Other people get to choose the life they want for themselves.

This may be one of the most painful realities for the parentified adult to accept. They have spent a lifetime stepping into the void when things were going wrong. They have learned that effort matters, intervention matters, showing up matters, and often it has. But there is a limit to what any of those things can accomplish.

No one can defeat another person’s free will.

The parentified adult can love someone deeply. They can offer help. They can provide resources. They can see where their loved one’s choices are leading and desperately want something different for them. But ultimately, that person gets to decide what they will do with their own life.

Accepting that requires a kind of separation many parentified adults never had the chance to build. Not distance in the sense of not caring, but distance in the sense of being able to watch someone else’s choice as theirs, rather than experiencing it as an extension of their own worth or failure. That separation is built slowly, often only through real clinical work, because for much of this person’s life, there was no line there to begin with.

If someone they love wants to avoid responsibility, they may continue to avoid it. If they continue to make destructive choices, they may experience the consequences of those choices. The parentified person cannot work hard enough to make another person want something different for themselves.

This is particularly difficult because when the outcome is bad for this loved one, the parentified person may still instinctively turn the responsibility back toward themselves.

What else could I have done?

But self-determination requires accepting that there are outcomes that were never theirs to determine.

The idea that loved ones have self-determination isn’t something accepted once and then settled from then on. It’s a door the parentified person walks through repeatedly every single time someone they love makes another choice that feels misaligned with their ideals of what will be healthy or safe. The parentified person can arrive at real acceptance this month and have it tested again next month, as if it were the first time.

The loved one gets to decide what they will do.

And the parentified person gets to decide what they will do in response if it makes sense for their life.

That is where the work already described becomes important. They acknowledge themselves. They consider their emotional, psychological, and physical needs and their resources. They determine what they can tolerate and where their cutoff is.

The question is no longer simply, How do I stop this from happening?

It becomes, Given that this is what you are choosing, what do I need to do for myself?

For someone who has spent a lifetime believing that things are okay because they are involved, accepting that another person’s life may not be okay and that they cannot make it okay can be extraordinarily painful and eventually liberating.

The loved one’s choices are not evidence of the parentified person’s success or failure. They are evidence that each life belongs to its owner.

Grieving What You Thought You Could Create

There is grief in this work too.

The parentified adult may have spent much of their life working toward an idea of family.

If I can help enough, hold enough together, and solve enough problems, maybe we can finally have the family I have been trying to create.

Accepting other people’s self-determination can also mean accepting that the family they imagined may never exist in the way they hoped it would.

That is a loss, and it deserves to be grieved.

Because underneath all of that doing was often something very simple.

They wanted family. They wanted connection. They wanted to love and be loved. They wanted to be able to depend on the people they loved and have those people depend on them.

Part of healing is grieving what could not be created by working harder.

But grief does not have to mean giving up on family, friendship, or love.

The parentified person also has to begin believing that relationships can exist differently. That family, friendships, and intimate relationships can be built on trust and reciprocity. That care can move in both directions. That another person can be interested in what they need, how they feel, and what is happening in their life.

And perhaps most importantly, that they can be valued as a person rather than as a tool.

They do not have to earn their place in a relationship by being useful.

They can be loved when there is nothing to fix.

So the next time someone says this person just needs better boundaries, it’s worth asking which kind they mean. The one you can say in a sentence, or the one that takes years to build and, even then, continues to be a work in progress for maybe the duration of the parentified person’s life.