Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. Parentified Child’s Insecure Attachment: Internal Parents, Rebirth, Hyperintrojection

1. 00:02 I’ll give you a reason to feel bad, to grieve and mourn. I am back from Vienna. Yes, he’s back. Oh my god. The second half of November, that’s the last two weeks of November, I’m going to be in Croatia. If you want to organize a free seminar or free lectures in Croatia, let me
2. 00:28 know. If you want a paid consultation, face-to-face meeting, let me know. How to let you know? Go to the description and find my email address, samvaknaggmail.com. Write to me and we will take care of all the details together. So free lectures,
3. 00:52 pre-seminars, not free consultations, face-to-face consultations, all available in the last 20 days of November in Croatia. Today we are going to discuss parentified children as adults. What happens to parentified children when they grow up? or more precisely
4. 01:14 what is the deep set psychonamic or even I would say psychoanalytical reason causation of parentification we’re going to delve a bit deeper than usual now in the description you will find links to videos where I have already discussed parentification its ethology its causation its
5. 01:37 anticidence its progression throughout the lifespan and what happens to parentified children when they become adults. Everything is discussed in these videos and I encourage you to watch them. There’s also another video on the internal family system. Now in the internal
6. 01:54 family system, there is a child part. Every human being has a child part. The child part is highly reactive to abuse and trauma in early childhood. But I will not discuss any of this today. You can find all of it in the IFS internal family system video. And who am I to
7. 02:16 discuss all these issues? My name is Svaknin. I’m the author of malignant self- loveve narcissism revisited and I am the blue professor of psychology right here with you. Let’s start with the parents. Parents who parentify children. These are parents who conventionally
8. 02:43 are considered to be insecure, selfish, even narcissistic, maybe depressed, emotionally absent, afraid of intimacy, um overprotective. These kind of parents project a child vibe. The child of these kind of parents do not perceive them as parents.
9. 03:08 does not perceive them as parents. The child perceives them as children. These parents parentify the child because they infantilize themselves. They are in a regressed or regressive state. They’re not adults in any meaningful sense of the word. They’re
10. 03:29 highly dependent. They’re clinging. They’re needy. They blackmail emotionally. They are insecure. They need re constant reassurance. They have no object constancy. The child presence is a kind of guarantee of well-being. And so these parents are actually stuck
11. 03:53 at at a much earlier phase of development. They have what used to be known as arrested development or stunted development. They are children. When these kind of parents have children, the children naturally assume the roles of a parent. The children become parents to
12. 04:11 their own parents. The children are there to embrace the parent, to provide sakur, a shoulder to cry on, an ear to listen. The children are there to take care of the needs, cater to the needs of the parents. anything from food to you know entertainment. The children are
13. 04:33 there to serve to serve and to protect so to speak. These are children children who are parentified. But one thing that is often ignored is the fact that even completely mentally health parents, completely mentally health for example, mothers can and do infantilize, regress in the
14. 05:00 wake of an experience that is traumatic. When a completely healthy person, completely normal person with no shred or hint of a personality disorder, a highly secure person, very mature, an adult in the fullest sense of the word. When such an adult, such a person, such
15. 05:21 a human being experiences overwhelming trauma, destabilizing and disintegrating pain, the kind of hurt that is all pervasive, ubiquitous, all permeating. These adults, regardless of the fact that they’re mentally healthy, that they’re mentally put psychologically well put
16. 05:46 together, they fall apart. It’s very common. Trauma and abuse lead to infantilization and regression. And if at the same time they happen to have a child, then this child becomes automatically parentified. Even worse, childbirth often regresses mothers
17. 06:10 the mother to an infantile state. Many mothers react very badly to the process of pregnancy and childbirth. Postpartum depression is much more common than we admit. Probably onethird of mothers, that’s one of every three mothers experiences a modiccom of dysphoria
18. 06:37 after giving birth. In the wake of giving birth and these mothers and other mothers, they don’t cope well with the disability that is pregnancy. It’s an advanced allervasive systemic state of disability. In effect, it’s a the baby is like a parasite feeding off the
19. 06:58 mother. And so it’s very traumatic. Although no one would admit to it. It’s politically incorrect to say all this, but this is the truth. And so childbirth regresses many mothers to an infantile state. And at that point, the mother would parentify the child in order to regain a
20. 07:21 sense of secure base to regain a sense of mastery, control, safety, stability, predictability, certainty, determinacy, and agency. The mother would convert the child into a parental figure. She herself had been rendered an infant by the pregnancy and childbirth or by some
21. 07:46 trauma and abuse. And in this very vulnerable state, she needs a parental figure and the person at hand, the person available is the child. The immediacy of the presence of the child serves as a soothing a self soothing mechanism and process. the the mother
22. 08:08 or the parent self soothes, self-comforts via the child. Now what happens is the parentified child internalizes the parentifying mother or the parentifying father. The parentified child creates an internal object, an introject, an avatar, a snapshot, a representation
23. 08:35 of the parentifying parent in his in its mind. The child ends up with having an internal parentifying mother, an internal parentifying father. And these introjects, these internal objects that represent real mother and real father, they continue to parentify
24. 08:59 the child forever basically. And because the child has a parentified um father figure or a parentified mother figure inside his or her head, this causes the child to want to give birth. The parentified child wishes to give birth to a new child. Now
25. 09:30 this is a very very complex web of interactions and self reinforced reinforcing feedback loops and you need to be very attuned to understand where I’m leading you and what I’m saying the child the the child who has been parentified bears in his mind carries in his
26. 09:58 an imago, an image, a representation, an introject of the parentifying parent. Could be mother, could be father. The parentifying parent. This internal object continues to regard the child as a parental figure. In reality, the parentifying mother or the parentifying
27. 10:23 father treated the child as a parental figure. They relegated to the child. They delegated to the child parental roles. The mother, the parentifying mother became an infant. The parentifying father became a toddler. And it is the child who took care of
28. 10:44 them. The child became a caregiver. Inevitably, the internal objects, the snapshots, the introjects that represent these kind of parents in the child’s mind treat the child and later on the adult treat this child even when the child becomes an adult as a parental figure.
29. 11:10 In other words, the child carries with him representations of his parents who demand which demand of him to act as a parent. These introjects, these imos, these internal objects that represent parentifying mother and parentifying father, they insist on a continuation of the
30. 11:38 parentification. They insist they demand from the child. They insist that the child must perform parental function. The child must act as a parent of these introj as a parent of these internal objects as a parent of these snapshots and representation. The
31. 11:58 parental role is never interrupted. It’s continuous. Obviously as a parental figure the child would develop parental aspirations for example to have a child. So the parentified child wishes to give birth to a new child. It’s not a real child. The parentified child later having
32. 12:29 become an adult. The parentified child wants to create an internal child. This internal child can then take care care of the internalized parents. In reality, there’s a real family. There’s a mother, there’s a father, and there’s a child. The mother and the
33. 12:51 father parentify the child. They become infantilized. They become toddlers. The child takes care of as the child takes care of a parentifying parents the child internalizes them, introjects them, incorporates them. The child creates two child creates representations of these
34. 13:12 parents. These representations are representations of parentifying parents. So these representations continue to demand parentification. They continue to demand from the child to perform the role of a parent in order to complete the family inside
35. 13:34 because outside the family is complete. There’s mother, father and a parentified child but inside there’s only mother and only father. So to complete the internal family system, to complete the internal family, the parentified child wishes to give birth to a new child, to a child,
36. 13:58 internal object, an internal child, an introjected child, not a real child, but a representation of a child inside the mind of the parentified child. And this representation of the child would take care of the representations of the parentifying mother and the parentifying father.
37. 14:21 This internal child would actually be a replica, a copy of the real child. But because it is inter an internal object, it would have access to the internal objects of the mother and the father. The parentified child therefore not only performs outside caregiving roles. The
38. 14:47 parentified child not only acts, not only makes decisions and choices in the real world, but the parentified child internalizes the total situation. He creates a whole environment in his own mind with a representation of the parentifying mother, a representation of
39. 15:07 a parentifying father and a representation of the parentified child. And this parentifi representation of the parentified child. is internal object. This introject of the parentified child takes care of the introject the internal object the representation of the
40. 15:28 parentifying parents. So there’s a complete resonance and conformity and correspondence between the external real life family, real mother, real father, real child and the internal family. The internal family comprise of a representation of the real
41. 15:51 parentifying mother, a representation of the real parentifying father and a representation of the parentified child. And of course this kind of arrangement, internal arrangement, internal landscape continues throughout the lifespan well into adulthood.
42. 16:10 By creating an internal child,
43. 16:16 an internal child who is parentified, the real life parentified child secures the approval of the parental it introjects. the the internalized child that is taking care of the internalized mother and the internalized father, the internalized child, the introjected
44. 16:43 child, the repres the representation of a child who caters to the needs and to the well-being of the representation, the internal object, the introject of the parentifying mother and the intro project of the parentifying father. This internalized child secures the love, the
45. 17:08 conditional love, the performance, the performance conditioned love and the approval of the parental introjects. The internal child gains the love and approval of the internal mother and the internal father because he keeps on parentifying them. He keeps on parenting
46. 17:30 them. I’m sorry. This internal child keeps acting as a parent. He the internal child is parentified. Exactly the same way the external child who is parentified secures the love, attention, acceptance and embrace and the approval of the real life parents by parenting them, by
47. 17:56 catering to their needs, by being constantly available, by being subservient and pleasing. the internal environments. This theater, this shadow play, this theater play inside the parentified child’s mind is a complete clone and replica of what is happening in the real life of the
48. 18:23 real parentified child. It’s it’s not a mirror, but it’s like a reflection. The internal child takes care of the internal mother and the internal father thereby gaining love and approval. The external child takes care of the external father and the external mother
49. 18:44 thereby gaining love and approval. Of course, it’s not unconditional love. It’s performance-based love. The child needs to be performative in order to secure the love. And so the child grows up with an insecure attachment style and a propensity to people please.
50. 19:08 Children generally react badly. They dread they dread the mother’s absence or the mother’s presence. When the child dreads the mother’s absence, that’s that’s a problem we call object con in object inconstancy. It’s not only the mother, of course,
51. 19:31 it’s the father as well. Children dread the parental absence. What children do in due time when they are about 18 months old and so on, they create a representation of the parental figure in their minds so that they’re never alone. They’re never abandoned because even if the real
52. 19:52 parent is away, the imaginary introjected internal parent is there and this is known as introject constancy. So, but there are some children who fail to generate stable introjects and these children are terrified of abandonment and rejection. They’re
53. 20:13 terrified of losing the real life parents, the presence of the parents because they’re unable to compensate for this absence. But there’s another group of children and these children dread the presence of the parents. when the par parent is physically abusive and sexually abusive,
54. 20:33 emotionally abusive in a variety of ways. When the parent is on the very contrary overbearing and overprotective, um in all these situations, the child is actually terrified of the presence of the parent. When the child dreads the parents absence, we end up with a codependent or
55. 20:55 someone with borderline personality disorder or a people pleaser. And most parentified children are exactly this. When the child dreads the presence of the parent, this child usually displays what is later called in adult life an insecure attachment style. That is the famous
56. 21:18 work of Mary Ainsworth. So parentified children clearly dread the absence of the parent, not the presence of the parent. And because they dread the absence of the parent, they hyper introject. They compensate for for the parental absence, real or anticipated or imaginary. They
57. 21:46 compensate for parental absence by multiplying the parent, replicating the parent over and over again until the parent populates their entire mind. Why would the parentified child be so terrified of the absence of the parent? Because there’s no parent there.
58. 22:08 The parentified child has no parents. The parentified child has no mother. He doesn’t have a father. The parentified child is the parent. The the adults who should have served as mother and father, they’re children. They’re infants. They’re toddlers. They
59. 22:27 cannot be relied on. They can’t provide object constancy. And so from the get-go, from the inception, the parentified child is besieged by separation insecurity, also known as abandonment anxiety. From the get-go, from the very inception, the parentified child is trying to
60. 22:46 compensate for the absence of functional adult mature parents. And the the compensation, the form this compensation takes is hyper introjection. The creation of a vivid vivid internal landscape vivid theater play internal imaginary theater play vivid movie in one’s mind where the
61. 23:14 parents are replicated cloned repeated adnosium populate the entire space. It’s a form of fantasy of course and because the parentified child doesn’t have any other experience except parentification in this fantasy play in this movie the child is again parentified
62. 23:39 this time by his own devices and this parentified child in the theater play in the movie in the fantasy is taking care of parents who are in need of parenting. takes care of immature parents. The only kind of parents the parentified child knows. Ironically,
63. 24:01 the solution that the parentified child chooses in order to avoid separation insecurity, in order to establish object constancy, this very solution undermines the child the child’s capacity to establish object constancy and to create a secure attachment style.
64. 24:24 There’s no secure base there. Not even when the child pretends that there is in the fantasmagoria the paracosm within his own mind. No amount of imagination and prearication and confabulation can compensate for re harsh reality. And in harsh reality this child is an orphan in
65. 24:48 all but name.