Parentification Before I Knew There Was a Name for It

In the late 1990s, the Oprah Winfrey Show aired every weekday at 4 p.m. on Dutch commercial television. Whenever I could, I watched it. I almost always found the topics interesting.

Of all the many episodes I watched, there is one in particular that has stayed with me.

It was an episode from 1998 featuring Caroline Myss — nearly thirty years ago now.

You can imagine how much that episode must have affected me for it to have stayed with me all these years.

The Episode

Caroline Myss presented herself as a “medical intuitive.” She said she had a gift that allowed her to “read” people’s bodies when she focused on them. She claimed she could see what kinds of problems people had in their bodies. These could be illnesses, but she could also see where someone’s energy was out of balance.

(I’m not quite sure how to express that last part.)

The reason that episode has stayed with me for so long is because it gave me an answer to a question I had been struggling with.

There was a young mother of two children in the audience who received a reading from Caroline Myss. The young mother, Amy, was 23 years old, but she felt 80. She was that exhausted.

I have searched for that episode online many times over the years, but I have never been able to find the original broadcast again. I did, however, find an audio recording.

The Reading

When Caroline Myss focused on Amy, she said:

“I think your childhood wasn’t long enough. In other words, you grew up too fast — by demand and by the stress in the household. What I see in your energetic pattern is that you had to be the mother to your mother.”

Oprah: “Is that true?”

Amy (crying): “Very true.”

Caroline: “You see, your mother didn’t have what it took to be a mother to you. And so there was a lot of abandonment, and a lot of you having to take care of yourself, and a lot of explaining why she couldn’t be there for you, and a lot of making you feel guilty when you reached out with your needs. And so by the time you got to 23, you’re exhausted.”

I could understand so well why Amy started crying. Finally, there was recognition of what she had been missing. And finally, there was an explanation for why she felt so completely drained.

A Young Mother

The reason I could understand her so deeply was because, at that time, I was also a young mother myself, with a two-year-old child. And I, too, felt completely exhausted.

I was barely able to take care of my child. I managed the essentials: I made sure she had enough to eat, that she was bathed every day, and that her room and clothes were clean. But often, that was all I could manage. Reading her bedtime stories or playing games with her was often more than I had the energy for, let alone taking her on fun outings.

“Enjoying motherhood,” something I sometimes heard other young mothers talk about, was something that felt completely foreign to me.

So yes, in Caroline Myss’s reading, I also saw an explanation for my own total lack of energy. And I was relieved to finally have one. At that time, I didn’t have internet access yet, so information like this was almost impossible to find.

Of course, I had always known that my childhood had been far from ideal. But it was only after I became a mother myself that I truly started questioning my parents.

. . .

Becoming Aware

Because alongside all the other emotional processes I was going through at the time, I had also begun to become aware of what my own childhood had meant — and of the long-term consequences it had had for the rest of my life.

I looked at my little daughter, that small, innocent, vulnerable child I wanted to protect.

And only then did I realize:

How could my parents have treated the small, vulnerable, innocent child that I once was the way they did?

Because it was only after becoming a mother that I was able to see that I, too, had once been such a small and innocent being.

I could not understand how my parents apparently had not seen in me what I saw in my own daughter: something precious that needed to be protected.

As far back as I can remember, I knew nothing other than that there was a great deal of tension in our home, a lot of alcohol, and frequent violence — sometimes verbal, sometimes physical.

And indeed, things became even worse for me around the age of eight. My parents divorced. And one striking similarity between Amy’s story and mine is that from that point on, I also became, in a sense, the adult in my relationship with my mother.

My mother began relying on me emotionally. I often felt as though I had been placed in the role of a partner rather than a daughter.

In that sense, Myss’s explanation also made sense to me: because it felt as though the energy I would later need for my own motherhood had already been taken from me. As though it had already been used up — almost “stolen” from me — leaving me without access to it when I needed it.

Because at that stage of life, care is supposed to flow from parent to child.

Not the other way around.

A Name For What Happened

It was only years later that I learned there was a name for what had happened between my mother and me:

Parentification

You could interpret Caroline Myss’s statements about the energy taken away from you as a child — energy that you would later need for your own parenting — by a parent who parentifies you, as a metaphor.

But for me, those statements have always carried a very literal meaning in terms of my own experience. That is how I understood them at the time. That is how I experienced them: as a plausible explanation for the way I was experiencing motherhood in that moment.

And that is still how I experience those words today.

They have always been deeply meaningful to me in understanding the ways my development was affected and the long-term consequences that had for my life.

. . .

The Recording

Here is the audio recording I was able to find of the episode in question. In my opinion, it is an edited version of the original broadcast. I remember details that I do not hear in this recording.

Perhaps you would find it interesting to listen to it? The full recording is 35 minutes long, and the segment I am referring to begins shortly after 13:40.

What, if anything, did this story bring up for you? I’d be curious to hear your reflections, whether they are personal, general, or simply a thought you would like to share.

Photo: Rod Long