From becoming a separate self to discovering what lies beyond it..

 

The Childhood Wound

 

The parentified daughter grows up quickly and misses out on a childhood. Due to volatile, neglectful, or unstable parents, she becomes implicitly enlisted in adult roles. With only a child’s brain and her own emotional needs largely unmet, she is asked to become things like a parent to her parents, a therapist for her mother, a leader for her siblings — perhaps even providing income for the family from a young age.

Despite the details, which vary from person to person, this form of childhood trauma has a core feature: for her survival, she has to disown or suppress her own pressing developmental needs as a child in order to meet an adult role in the present moment — to fill the void a parent has left.

Adult daughters who grew up this way struggle with over-functioning, over-giving, and people-pleasing, while feeling increasingly emotionally deprived, resentful, angry, and frustrated. Like a family mule, she is used as to perform functions within the family system, but never fully recognized as a separate person with her own feelings, needs, wants, experiences, values, and beliefs.

The Spiritual Bypass

 

Many parentified daughters in their twenties and thirties first approach spirituality from this place of emotional deprivation, shame about their own needs, and longing for connection. They may be in full denial about their childhood, or have some awareness of it — either way, spirituality can look like an answer to the suffering of feeling unseen, and to the sense that something is wrong with her. She has difficulty acknowledging her own needs, setting boundaries, saying no, asking for what she wants.

Spirituality can feel like a perfect balm. There’s structured community, language around ethics and unconditional love, a sense of being connected to something above and beyond the human world of pain and conflict. It’s easy to see why this looks like the solution. Spiritual language can also be interpreted as positioning itself ABOVE pain — treating it as something to transcend as quickly as possible rather than something central or necessary to confront. That’s a welcome message when it aligns with self-avoidance. It can make grappling with childhood abuse look like unnecessary rumination.

Spiritual maturity and emotional maturity don’t necessarily develop at the same rate.

 

Someone can have decades of spiritual practice and still be operating relationally from very early defenses. Spiritual concepts can function as performative shortcuts over lived, embodied truth. What hasn’t been lived or discovered first-hand becomes intellectual belief — a platitude one defends vociferously rather than a truth one has the capacity to embody. This isn’t something to be ashamed of, it’s just something to be aware of.

Healing helps create the inner structure through which spiritual truths can become embodied rather than unconsciously used to compensate for childhood deficits.

Without therapy, or in its early stages, while the sense of a separate self is still weak or underdeveloped, spiritual concepts can replicate the original parentification — a more sophisticated form of the same adaptation: self-erasure.

As a spiritual bypasser in my early twenties, I unconsciously adopted a spiritual identity to cope with my childhood pain, and got pulled into a group that closely resembled a shoddy cult. What got me there was a cocktail of true spiritual connection mixed with childhood trauma defenses: needing to belong, needing respite from fear and shame, needing tools to understand myself — and also NOT being ready yet to look at the painful truth of my family. At that point, I hadn’t developed enough trust in my own capacity to process the pain safely, so my unconscious kept it underground.

Spiritual concepts can become distorted through a traumatized, parentified lens:

 

  • “There is no separate self” becomes it’s right that I downplay my own needs.
  • “All is one” becomes I don’t need to exist, my wants don’t matter.
  • “Accept the moment as it is” becomes staying silent about my pain is virtuous.
  • The drive to save all beings — Christ’s crucifixion, the Bodhisattva vow — becomes it’s spiritual to rescue others and sacrifice, abandon myself.
  • “Letting go” leads to dissociation, derealization, depersonalization, even panic attacks. This dismissiveness can also keep someone in emotional immaturity.
  • Meditation and silence become My voice is a problem, I’m too much.

[Click here to continue reading this article on my Substack called Living Undaunted]