06/12/2025
This quote is from a friend in a therapy letter written to
one of their parents.
Many childhood trauma survivors have the surreal experience of
having a parent who acts like an uninvested neighbor.
They don't ask or know about:
*Who we are dating.
*What we do for work.
*What we studied.
*What we are interested in.
*Who our children are.
The parent can range from narcissistic to substance abuse to
being profoundly shut down and self-consumed.
It doesn't matter as much as what our inner child needs around
the weird dissociative experience of having a parent only on a
superficial level.
Our inner child will often not see the toxic dysfunction in the parent and think they are not worthy of being known or asked where they are moving to and how they feel about a new chapter, as a healthy parent would say.
Our inner child needs to know the parent is extremely off, and of course, it's confusing. But how could they NOT know who you're dating or what you're doing for work?
A continuation of this is to feel like we are knowable to the rest of the world. The parent set us up to feel anonymous or invisible because that is what it is like with them.
What do you think?
