What happens when you realise your relationship with your mother has been shaped by emotional parentification, enmeshment, and emotional abuse?
In this week’s letter, a 48-year-old woman shares how much of her identity and behaviour was shaped around managing her mother’s needs. After setting boundaries and working through childhood trauma in therapy, she begins to recognise the familiar cycle of guilt, gaslighting, victimhood, emotional manipulation, and rewriting history.
Now she faces a question many adult children of toxic parents wrestle with: “Am I the cold, heartless bitch for not wanting to fly to her side and become her caregiver if she needs help?”
This episode explores narcissistic mothers, emotionally immature parents, parentification, enmeshment, toxic family dynamics, boundaries, estrangement, caregiver guilt, and complicated grief—and offers reassurance to anyone who has spent a lifetime questioning whether protecting themselves makes them a bad person.
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