For the second episode of the podcast, I spoke to an anonymous Substacker called Your Own Mother. In her newsletter, she offers beautiful and insightful essays about her personal experience with estrangement, recovery from an abusive and traumatic childhood, and some of the overlooked but equally painful repercussions of estrangement.
She has two children, and like Gina in episode 1, becoming a mother was a trigger for seeing and acknowledging the abuse inflicted by her own mother. We get into that, but also the long-lasting effects of emotional and physical abuse, the primal need to have a mother who makes things better, and on coping when life doesn’t give you a “good” mother.
Resources:
According to Psychology Today: Parentification is a role reversal in families in which the child acts as the parent in the family system. For instance, emotional parentification can take the form of a child mediating between family members, acting as a parent’s therapist, or being privy to their parents’ adult problems, such as a single parent's dating struggles or financial woes.
Read to Your Own Mother here.
The book my guest recommends is Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, by Lindsay Gibson.
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