jabberwockypie:

thebibliosphere:

cedarrunn:

angstriddentrashhuman:

misangremellama:

panda-pear:

misangremellama:

Reminder for parents that though you may be struggling, it is never appropriate to use your child as your therapist/counselor. It’s unhealthy for the both of you. 

Can I ask why? I’m genuinely curious

There’s a few reasons as to why its wrong.

For one, a kid is not equipped to handle a parent’s problems. I’m not saying to never express your feelings or say that you’re having a problem to a child. That can be healthy. But to use them to just dump on is too much. Children just aren’t equipped to deal with the heaviness of adult problems, especially if they’re already going through things themselves.

Two, the inherent power imbalance makes it really uncomfortable. Your child isn’t your friend, they’re your child. Even if they can offer advice, this sort of thing can become like a role reversal. They also would have a hard time separating themselves from it when it becomes too much. A lot of parents feel entitled to their childrens’ time and space, so the children can become overburdened with no reprieve and no way to express that this isn’t their job. 

There’s probably more and better ways to explain this, but that’s my two cents on this.

Because I was the oldest child when my parents marriage was collapsing both of them used me to vent about the other, forcing me to justify their negative feelings about a person that I loved by virtue of their place in my life. At 10 years old I was attempting to negotiate the workings of an adult relationship that had never worked and validate their emotions without being harmful to the other. All the while I was deteriorating into an even more depressed and anxious reclusive child, losing friends and and missing out on normal experiences. I felt like I was responsible for the survival of their relationship, above my own well-being I had to figure out how to save them from divorce, from splitting the family up. I never felt like I had the right to tell them I couldn’t handle it. So I shoved everything down and became weirdly mature, too aware of the fact that I was an adult even if I didn’t want to be. Now I have severe anxiety, depression, and PTSD and I can’t even keep a job. I’m 28. Don’t do this to your kids. Please.

This is one form of whats known as parentification.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/parenting/wp/2017/03/23/your-child-is-not-your-confidant/

My father, having zero support from my mother, would seek me out during his depressive bouts and tell me about how much he wanted to die, over and over. Sometimes I even cleaned and bandaged the wounds. He told me he couldn’t talk to anyone else and I was his entire lifeline. I was nine. 

In a similar vein my mother blames me all the time for not leaving my father when she wanted to. She would vent to me about how awful a man he was, how much she hated him and wanted to leave him. And then tell me it was my fault she didn’t because of what I had said. I was twelve. The fuck did I know about life other than it was awful and I was having to hide shit from social work and feeling like it was my fault. 

I’m 30 now and they still do this to me. They still try to find ways to other themselves from their failure to protect me and my brother from themselves and make it my responsibility, then try to sugar coat it with “but you were such a good child” or “you’re such a great listener” or “you were so much older than your years”, like yea, cause someone fucking had to be.

Please, do not do this to your children. Please. Get help from an appropriate source, for your sake and theirs. I cannot stress how damaging this shit was to my psyche.

It’s also sometimes called Covert Incest or Emotional Incest.

My ex-mom started telling me about all of her emotional bullshit around the time her marriage to my stepfather was falling apart.  I was 10 ½.  (This was after a period of about two years of being utterly emotionally ABSENT because she was depressed.  So on the one hand, being a child, it was kind of “Oh, hey! Mom’s paying attention to me again!  Wait, no, this is actually terrible, what the fuck.”)

She put herself on this pedestal of being Amazing for not “dragging lots of men through her children’s lives”, meanwhile I was 11 and was a PARENT to my infant brother, doing a frankly-insane number of household chores, and having to be reassuring AND the family scapegoat, while being – shockingly – depressed and anxious all the time.

“I’m just venting, I don’t want you to FIX IT.”  When you’re 12 or 13 and depressed-as-fuck yourself and your only PARENT has talked about being suicidal?  You want to FIX IT.  (If only because said parent has also told you horror stories about why foster care would be worse.)

Even later on, as an older teen and later an adult, when I saw a clear solution to a household problem or a budgeting concern, it went to “Well no, you’re just a kid”.  Like “… Yes, but you’ve been talking to me about adult shit for YEARS and I’m actually right”.   (Same thing with parenting my brother, really.  I read PARENTING BOOKS and shit, but it’d be “You are not Sam’s parent.”  Okay, but who has actually been here to witness more of his life?)

Yeah, guess who has Complex PTSD and severed contact with her biological family.  Guess who – upon having a bad flashback – still defaults to trying to act as something between a secretary (to anyone older) and a parent (to any child-type-people around)?  With a side of “Must shield kids if they are in trouble and deflect blame onto myself”?  (Though I’ve been better about that one.)

Because even if life was falling apart, even if I was exhausted, some things had to keep being taken care of because nobody else was going to fucking do it.

I mean those aren’t the ONLY reasons, but it’s a reasonable sized chunk of it, and it ended up acting as a catalyst for a lot of the other stuff.

After I disclosed my father’s sexual abuse of me, my mother used me in this way until I left home, aged 22. Among other things, she unburdened herself at length about her attempts to ‘save’ her marriage, including her sex life with my paederast father, through my whole teen years. She would do this often while driving, so there was no way for me to escape. I still dissociate regularly in her presence, and I seriously think she might have done more damage to my psyche than incest between the ages of four and twelve did. She forgets anything she doesn’t want to think about, so talking frankly with my brother in recent years has given me very much needed collaboration and validation that things I recalled actually happened, because her revisionist memory gaslit me hugely and made me constantly doubt myself. And she thinks she was a great parent, because she thinks my brothers and I are nice people. She’s proud of her work.