'My Parent's Keeper'

By Eva M. Brown

People who were raised by a mentally ill parent often share a similar set of feelings and behaviors. These similarities grow out of spending one's childhood trying to cope with a disturbed parent. Life in a dysfunctional family of this sort often encourages a child to enter into a role reversal with his or her disturbed parent. The child will frequently become a little parent, worrying about the needs and limitations of the adults. Since their own wishes for care and guidance cannot be met, such children tend to bury their needs in order to take on this caretaker role. The result is a "parentified child." In adulthood, having been forced to grow up much too soon, parentified children continue to pay a high price.

"Allowing myself to be a child, learning how to be one—since I wasn't a child for very long—knowing that it's okay is real hard for me. Sometimes when I catch myself being carefree, I feel bad about it. I feel, well, I'm an adult, so I'm supposed to be responsible."

"Every time I make a decision, I have to think, 'Who is this decision for? Is it for me? Is it something I really want to do? Or am I doing it for somebody else?"'

The first step in the journey toward recovering your "self" is to begin to look closely into yourself for all those missing needs and feelings. If you're someone who has tended to pay more attention to another person's needs than to your own, you may want to begin, in small and simple ways, to notice your own preferen-ces, to tune in to your own rhythms and needs. This may sound very easy for those who are used to speaking up about what they want. But for someone who has built a life around putting others first, it can be a frightening thing to do.

Graduations, weddings, and births are events where your friends and acquaintances gather together with your family mem-bers. Many of you face painful dilemmas over whether to invite a mentally ill parent to attend a ceremony, or how to explain the absence of one or both of your parents. Even holidays and birthdays can be problematic. One ACMI describes being the class valedictorian:

"I was on the stage and I was giving my speech. I looked around and I saw my mom. In a way, I wished she wasn't there. It was pretty embarrassing to have her there, but I couldn't stand not having her there either. It was a real double-bind."

These situations are difficult no matter how much you grow and strengthen yourself. They are made more difficult by unresolved conflicts about your past. Each Mother's Day or Father's Day may stir you up anew, not only practically (should you acknowledge the oc-casion?) but also emotionally (what is the event sup-posed to mean, what does it actually evoke for you in your feelings and memories?)

You will eventually face the difficult mid-life issue of your parents' growing old. This is a situation most adult children have to come to grips with at some point. But for you as an ACMI it involves the increasing need and dependence of a parent who always had some difficulty managing his or her own life. This increasing dependence reactivates all the old conflict in you about taking care of your parent's needs instead of taking care of your own. For many of you, this phase of your adult life evokes an enormous increase in your feelings of ambivalence and guilt. At times it may produce a set-back in the progress you've made in learning to take care of yourself.

"I learned how to be really strong-I can get through anything. And I don't think I realized the toll that so-called strength took on me. There was actual strength there, but some of it was really clenching your whole body, your fists and everything else, and just going through it. I had to give up a lot to do it, a lot of myself. So under all that strength was a lot of terror that I didn*t have anytime to feel. It was a way to survive, but it wasn't true strength."

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