Are You Mad at Me?: How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You

by Meg Josephson

As a parentified child, she developed a harsh inner critic, which has served as a necessary stand-in to give her the parenting and guidance she wasn’t able to get while she was busy caring for everyone else. She also finds herself being critical of people who aren’t as self-sufficient as she is, in part because she’s envious that they didn’t have to grow up so quickly. Maybe you grew up with a single parent or had a parent or sibling with a disability or a severe mental health issue. Maybe you grew up with immigrant parents who relied on you to help them assimilate into the new culture. Maybe you experienced financial scarcity or just grew up with parents who couldn’t emotionally fill the parental role. There are so many circumstances that create the role of the parentified child, and that role is always the same: in order for you to feel safe and secure, you had to put your needs aside from a very young age. The Caretaker believes: I thought that if I cared enough for them, they’d eventually care about me. I need to manage other people’s emotions so that I can feel okay.