Why Do I Feel Responsible for My Parent’s Emotions?
Many adult children feel responsible for their parent’s emotional wellbeing.
They may feel obligated to comfort their parent, protect them from emotional distress, or prioritize their parent’s emotional needs over their own.
This emotional responsibility often develops during childhood and can persist long into adulthood.
It is especially common in families affected by covert emotional abuse by parents, where emotional roles and boundaries become unclear.
Emotional Responsibility Is Not a Child’s Role
In healthy families, parents provide emotional support to children.
But in emotionally unhealthy environments, this dynamic may reverse.
The child becomes responsible for supporting the parent emotionally.
This role reversal disrupts emotional development.
The child learns that their emotional needs are less important than maintaining emotional stability for the parent.
This can create long-term emotional burden.
Emotional Parentification
This dynamic is known as emotional parentification.
The child may comfort the parent during emotional distress, listen to adult problems, or feel responsible for maintaining emotional stability.
Instead of receiving emotional support, the child becomes the emotional support system.
This can interfere with emotional development and create difficulty identifying personal emotional needs.
How Emotional Responsibility Creates Guilt
Children who are emotionally parentified often develop strong feelings of guilt.
They may feel guilty asserting independence or prioritizing their own emotional wellbeing.
This guilt reflects emotional conditioning rather than actual responsibility.
It developed in an environment where emotional stability depended on the child’s emotional availability.
Long-Term Effects of Emotional Responsibility
Many adult children who felt responsible for their parent’s emotions experience:
Chronic guilt
Difficulty setting boundaries
Difficulty prioritizing personal needs
Emotional exhaustion
Difficulty trusting their emotional experience
These patterns reflect emotional adaptations developed during childhood.
Recognition helps survivors separate past emotional roles from present emotional reality.
Host
Hi, I'm Brandon Chadwick!
In 2019, I began interviewing survivors of narcissistic and domestic abuse on my podcast, Narcissist Apocalypse. In that time, I've published over 120 survivor stories, interviewed countless experts in the field, from therapists, to lawyers, to domestic violence advocates and agencies.
My philosophy for the podcast was to be different, and to me, that meant to be real, not clinical. My goal was to help survivors tell/validate their own stories, but to also validate and teach other survivors through those stories. And a crazy thing happened, it worked.
Narcissist Apocalypse has grown beyond my wildest dreams. It now reaches upwards of 10,000 listeners an episode and it keeps growing every day. If you read the reviews on Apple Podcasts, you can see just how much of an impact the show has made in the lives of our community members. Yes, we are now a community.
Narcissist Apocalypse has evolved into something bigger. We've taken the philosophy of the podcast and have extended it to power our support groups. Narcissist Apocalypse isn't just me anymore. We are now a community. And that community is here to support you at every step of your healing process and beyond.
Being part of your lives and watching people grow in our support groups has been quite an honor. So I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for listening. And a big thank you for helping everyone feel less alone. Welcome to our community.
With Much Love,
Brandon Chadwick
