Emotional Dysregulation: The Hidden Cost of Parentification
Barbara Heffernan • August 14, 2025
Do you feel like you are the most emotionally regulated person that you know?
But is it emotional regulation, or is it emotional dysregulation?
If you grew up as a parentified child, it is likely that you were the most emotionally regulated person in your family.
However, most people who grew up as parentified children actually have significant emotional dysregulation. It just looks very different than what we picture when we think about emotional dysregulation.
This is a hidden cost of parentification, and it gets missed by everybody—often including the person who grew up parentified. Understanding this can help point you in the direction of a piece that might be missing from your healing journey. True emotional regulation has been tied to happiness in extensive research. When we feel emotionally regulated, we feel so much better.
What Actually Happens to the Parentified Child
The child who grows up emotionally parentified learns to suppress their own emotions in order to take care of others. They suppress whatever needs they might have—anger, disappointments, desires. Their emotions are not validated, acknowledged, or understood. They are just pushed down in order to not upset a volatile parent or to caretake for somebody else in the family.
Long-term, if you were parentified, you probably struggle with significant anxiety. It is also likely you feel substantial guilt and resentment that can weigh you down and be very depressing. And, often, numbness kicks in.
I think that when we suppress our emotions and we do not learn how to process them and understand them—when we are just pushing them down, pushing them down—the emotions that leak out are anxiety, guilt, resentment, and numbness. Anger as well.
These are the emotions I saw the most in my work as a psychotherapist with people who grew up parentified. They did see themselves as the calm one, the competent one—which they were. But the backlash from all of that was a struggle with anxiety, depression, or some of those other difficult emotions.
Why This Emotional Dysregulation Stays Hidden
One reason that this cost of parentification stays hidden—that we do not recognize the emotional dysregulation—is that most of us tend to think of people with emotional dysregulation as those who have huge swings in emotions: big angry outbursts, or moods swinging from manic to depressed.
Those are the situations we think of when we consider people who are very emotionally dysregulated, and they are. But that is the external manifestation of emotional dysregulation. We can also have significant emotional dysregulation that is all internal.
Consider somebody with obsessive-compulsive disorder—many people can hide it completely, but internally there is substantial emotional dysregulation. Or the high-functioning people we know who have significant anxiety but do not let it out.
Just because we appear emotionally regulated does not mean we are.
Why This Emotional Dysregulation Happens
Let me talk about why this emotional dysregulation happens in a child who grows up parentified.
Ideally, a parent helps a child learn to emotionally regulate. If the parent has reasonable emotional regulation and was nurtured themselves, this is very instinctual. This parent knows how to soothe an infant to help them calm down, or to energize and interest the infant when awake.
The parent's own ability to breathe and calm themselves is actually emotionally regulating for an infant (or any age child!).
As the child grows up, the "good enough parent" helps the child identify emotions, label them, validate them, understand why they are happening, and then also problem-solve what to do about them. (And remember, no one does this perfectly!)
Unfortunately, what happens if a parent is unable to emotionally regulate themselves? They will not have the skills to teach their child or the instincts to help the child regulate naturally.
Sometimes, a parent without emotional regulation will look to the child to help them regulate. This is "emotional parentification."
The parent regularly communicates to the child, verbally or not, "you cannot be upset, because I am upset." Or, "you have to take care of this for me because I cannot cope."
Sometimes, a parent without emotional regulation will look to the child to help them regulate. This is "emotional parentification."
The parent regularly communicates to the child, verbally or not, "you cannot be upset, because I am upset." Or, "you have to take care of this for me because I cannot cope."
I know people get anxious when I talk about this because they think, "well, in some situations you have to do that." And, yes, sometimes even the best parents have to do this.
But I am talking about a consistent pattern where it is unreasonable for the parent to require that the child suppress their emotions so that they can take care of the adult's emotions. It is a consistent pattern, and the child is not helped to learn any emotional regulation.
The child learns to read other people's moods so that they can help regulate them—calm this person down, help that person function, keep the siblings quiet so the parent does not get mad. The child develops significant emotional intelligence in terms of picking up on other people's emotions, but not much in terms of understanding their own emotions.
The Critical Insight: Suppression Disguised as Regulation
The most critical insight to take away here is this: when the emotional regulation system is reversed—when the child is supposed to help the parent regulate—the child is not learning emotional regulation. The child is learning emotional suppression. However, that suppression will be seen as regulation.
I would love to know if that makes sense to you and if understanding that is helpful for you.
The 7 Components of True Emotional Regulation
Let me talk about what true emotional regulation is. If you want more on this topic, please drop me a note—I think it is a super important topic.
So what is true emotional regulation instead of pseudo-regulation? As I go through these components of true emotional regulation, I also want you to keep in mind that nobody does this perfectly. And I do mean nobody. We are human. However, increasing your ability to do each of the seven things listed below can be very helpful.
With healthy emotional regulation, our moods still go up and down, but they stay within a zone of tolerance. The term "zone of tolerance" comes from psychotherapist terminology, but I think it is intuitive what that means. When people get manic or way too excited, way too anxious (way too up), or way too depressed (way too low), it can cause significant problems. People can stop functioning. Those states are very painful.
Allowing yourself to have whatever emotions you have—not suppressing them, not ignoring them—and learning how to listen to them and learning what to do when they are talking to you will help you stay within that zone of tolerance.
People who have healthy emotional regulation still get angry. They still get sad, they still experience grief and might have an extended period of grief. This is not about shutting off our emotions—it is more about learning to see them as information that is very valuable.
Emotions can guide good decision-making if we learn to think about them, understand them, understand when they are overblown and maybe were triggered by some event in the past. So we learn to calm down those overblown reactions, but not ignore them.
**Seven Components of True Emotional Regulation**
**1. Awareness**
Noticing emotions as they arise, noticing the physical feeling that goes with the emotion. The sooner we are aware of "oh yes, that is what I am feeling," the easier it is to regulate our emotions.
**2. Labeling the Emotion**
This can be difficult. Sometimes we do not know what we are feeling, and that is okay too. Often we have many feelings at once, so it can be very confusing. You can have conflictual feelings about different situations, but labeling emotions actually engages a part of the brain that helps you regulate.
I did a whole video on that topic, which I will try to link here. But label the emotion the best you can. Even if it is to say "I am feeling upset, I am feeling a lot of things, and I do not yet know exactly what"—that is okay too. It sometimes can take a few days to figure out what you are feeling. Allow yourself that time.
**3. Acceptance**
Accepting your emotions, not judging them as good or bad. Not thinking "I should not have this one, I should have that one instead." Accept your emotions. Validating them would be another way to say this—validate the emotions that you are having.
We tend to judge emotions as good or bad, reasonable or unreasonable, but honestly, it is the actions we take that can be reasonable or unreasonable. Right now we are just talking about listening to your emotions and accepting them.
**4. Processing Your Emotions**
Processing your emotions probably could be broken down into many other categories, but processing emotions is about understanding what information that emotion is giving you. All emotions give us information.
Processing could be understanding a trigger or understanding why you had an emotion that was strong or perhaps overblown. What triggered you? Why? Processing the events and the emotions that came out of those events is part of emotional regulation, and it does require some emotional intelligence.
Understanding what your emotions are telling you is crucial. I have many videos on different emotions—I have a playlist called "Emotional Intelligence." In my Roadmap to Joy
program, I actually have an entire section on deepening self-knowledge, which goes into what different emotions mean, why they come up, and how to interpret them.
That is actually section number five of that program because the first parts of the program are about emotional regulation techniques, learning mindfulness, meditation, and learning healthy boundaries. All of this definitely goes together.
**5. Self-Soothing**
These components all work together because self-soothing is going to help you with your acceptance of emotions. It is going to help you with your processing of emotions. These are not necessarily in the order you have to follow, but these are all components of healthy emotional regulation.
Learning various self-soothing techniques that are healthy—not, for example, alcohol or drugs, which might shift your mood very quickly but are biphasic and have a backlash—but learning how to breathe calmly, learning whether going for a walk helps you, petting an animal, or what helps you reregulate your physiology. I would put this into the category of physical regulation.
**6. Choosing Your Response**
Often our behavior is reactive—very reactive. For somebody who grew up parentified, the reactivity might be automatically helping somebody else, automatically saying yes to something you would rather say no to, automatically picking up that the other person is feeling anxious and then figuring out what you can do about it instead of recognizing your own anxiety.
These reactive responses need to be transformed into conscious responses. Figuring out "okay, I had this emotion. What do I want to do?" Not every time that we are angry at somebody do we need to say something. Sometimes it is helpful, sometimes it is not. Being able to choose your response is crucial.
Reactivity is where we go into fight, flight, or freeze mode. That is reactivity—the old patterns just triggering us and triggering our behavior. Once we have processed emotions and processed the situation, we can make a good decision about what behavior will come out of that situation. What response do we want to choose?
Obviously, that is a very complicated topic, but I think that just thinking about it this way and looking for "what is the best response on my part to this situation?" rather than "what do I automatically feel like I have to do?" can be helpful.
**7. Understanding Boundaries**
Developing healthy boundaries will help you remain emotionally regulated long-term. Emotional regulation also helps you have healthy boundaries—they work together.
Healthy boundaries involve understanding where you end and somebody else begins. What is your responsibility? What emotional realm is yours? Understanding that other people's emotions are their responsibility to take care of.
It is about boundaries in terms of a deep understanding of how we operate as humans. It is about cutting that enmeshment that happens with parentification that I talked about last week. It is about healing from that enmeshment, I should say.
Once we heal from that enmeshment, we can be individuated. We can be our own individuals, and we can care, and we can sometimes caretake and sometimes receive support. We can move toward more interdependence in our relationships.
Moving Forward with True Emotional Regulation
Understanding the difference between emotional suppression and true emotional regulation is crucial for anyone who grew up parentified. The skills you developed in reading others' emotions and maintaining family stability were survival mechanisms, but they came at the cost of your own emotional development.
True healing involves learning to:
- Recognize and validate your own emotions
- Understand that your feelings matter just as much as others'
- Develop healthy ways to process and respond to emotions
- Create boundaries that protect your emotional well-being
- Build relationships based on mutual support rather than one-sided caretaking
Remember, developing true emotional regulation is a process that takes time and practice. Be patient with yourself as you learn these new skills.
I hope this was helpful. Let me know—I am very interested to know your thoughts. Check out some of my other videos and consider the Roadmap to Joy
program, which also has a significant component on boundaries. Many people have found it helps them lower anxiety, develop healthy boundaries, and improve their relationship with themselves, which is, long-term, our most important relationship. We are with ourselves our whole lives.
What has been your experience with emotional regulation? Have you recognized some of these patterns in yourself? I would love to hear from you in the comments below.
Blog Author: Barbara Heffernan, LCSW, MBA. Barbara is a licensed psychotherapist and specialist in anxiety, trauma, and healthy boundaries. She had a private practice in Connecticut for twenty years before starting her popular YouTube channel designed to help people around the world live a more joyful life. Barbara has a BA from Yale University, an MBA from Columbia University and an MSW from SCSU. More info on Barbara can be found on her bio page.
Share this with someone who can benefit from this blog!
overwhelm has a cruel side effect. It shuts us down. Right when we feel like we need to get more done, not less, overwhelm makes our mind go blank or puts us into a freeze stateUnderstanding how overwhelm manifests for you can really help you calm it down.
Terrified to make eye contact? Constantly worried about what others think of you? You're not alone. These experiences are fairly common and often point to social anxiety disorder, which IS treatable. This blog explains this connection, provides treatment options and 3 self-help tools.
Interoceptive exposure can be transformative for people with somatic anxiety, specifically panic attacks, PTSD, OCD and health anxiety. Interoceptive exposure is a technique used within CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
If you view your emotions as something to be avoided, squashed or feared — you are activating your your amygdala, and setting off internal alarm bells. This makes everything worse. Research has shown there are six beliefs that drive emotional dysregulation. Which one is yours?
Emotional distress : its intensity and duration is driven by certain beliefs. Learn 3 tools to help regulate your emotions. This has substantial research behind it – and an expert explains.
The main thing that drives rumination is actually the BELIEFS we have about the FEELINGS that come up from a difficult situation. Rumination is driven by the habitual patterns of thinking combined with our judgments about whether we can handle the emotions, both of which can be changed to experience relief.
You can probably recall a time when you were with someone who was intensely anxious—and within minutes, you began to feel anxious yourself. Perhaps your heart rate increased. Your breathing became shallow. The knot in your stomach tightened. Or maybe you remember the opposite: a time when you were with someone who was truly grounded and calm, and their presence actually calmed you down. Your shoulders dropped. Your breathing deepened. The tension you had been carrying began to dissipate. This is not your imagination. This is emotional contagion, and it is scientifically proven. Understanding how your own emotional regulation—or lack thereof—impacts other people, and how other people's emotional states impact you, is essential for healthy relationships. Learning emotional regulation tools can improve your relationships significantly. Learning how to lower your susceptibility to emotional contagion can help as well. In this article, I will explain what emotional contagion is, how it impacts relationships, and provide five specific strategies for improving regulation in your own relationships. What Is Emotional Contagion? Emotions are contagious. Extensive research—both behavioral research and neuroscience—shows that we pick up the emotions of the people around us. The closer our relationship with them and the more invested we are in that relationship, the more this phenomenon occurs. This may not always feel accurate because we also tend to balance each other out. If someone is very upset, we might suppress our own emotions in response. But as I will explain, that suppression is actually part of the same dynamic. Three Pathways to Emotional Contagion There are three pathways that lead to emotional contagion: Pathway 1: Automatic Mimicry Unconsciously, when we see facial expressions in another person, we mimic them. If someone smiles, we tend to smile immediately. If someone frowns, we might make the same expression. This happens not just with facial expressions but also with voice, tone and body posture. Pathway 2: Autonomic Mimicry This involves our autonomic physiological system which works in synchrony with other people. Our heart rate, our breathing rhythm, and even our pupil dilation tend to mimic each other. Our nervous systems influence each other constantly. Pathway 3: Affective Convergence This is the convergence of feelings. When our facial expressions and body posture mimic another person's, and our physiological system aligns with theirs, we develop the same affective feelings. We end up experiencing a version of that emotion ourselves. The Suppression Trap: Why "Staying Calm" Can Make Things Worse If someone is extremely upset, you might calm way down. If this happens almost automatically, you are probably suppressing your emotions rather than regulating them. Extensive research shows that when one person suppresses their emotions, it actually makes the other person more anxious. And the person who is suppressing—while they might appear calm externally - is experiencing all the physiological signs and symptoms of anxiety or a heightened emotional state. Even when we are trying to be the balance in the room, we might actually be escalating the emotions present. This is particularly true for those who grew up parentified. Adults who were parentified as children often feel their emotional regulation is better than anyone else's in their families. While that might be true to some extent, without substantial self-awareness and genuine emotional regulation tools, you are likely using emotional suppression, not regulation. Where Emotional Regulation Patterns Come From The means by which you emotionally regulate—and whether you are highly regulated or highly dysregulated—is largely due to how you were raised. I am not saying this to assign blame, nor do I want you to spiral into worry about what you may have done to your own children. These are intergenerational patterns, and all we can do is work with the present. However, it can help to recognize that if you feel your own emotional regulation is lacking, you probably learned from dysregulated caregivers. If you have a partner who is very dysregulated, the same is likely true for them. This understanding allows us to remove blame and accusation from the discussion. We can approach this with compassion, recognizing that these are skills that should perhaps be taught in school or more seriously in our society—but they are not. The good news is that you can learn them now. Five Practical Tools to Improve Emotional Regulation in Your Relationships It truly is possible to improve your own emotional regulation and have a postiive impact on your relationships. These tools are helpful even for the partner that feels they are the one who is more emotionally regulated. And as a heads up, Tools 1 and 5 require substantial work - but gradual improvement is helpful! Tools 2, 3, and 4 are easier to implement immediately. Tool 1: Develop Your Emotional Boundaries Because emotional contagion is so strong—particularly if you grew up in a caretaker role in your family—it is important to begin recognizing when the emotions you are feeling are the ones you are absorbing from someone else. Begin to visualize a see-through bubble around you which represents you and your emotional boundary. Begin to think of your emotions as existing within that bubble. And picture another bubble around the other person - give it a light, see-through color. Picture that all their emotions are within their bubble. Differentiate between what you are feeling and what they are feeling. Bring in your observer brain to look at what you are feeling. For example... "Wait a second. I am feeling anxious because my partner is anxious about their interview tomorrow. What is my anxiety about?" You can begin to see whether your anxiety is about getting them to calm down so they can perform well in their interview. Perhaps you don't want them to be disappointed, or you have a vested interest in them getting a job. Once you understand why you are feeling anxious, you can apply tools to reduce your own anxiety, rather than focus on theirs. Because if we get anxious about making sure someone else is not anxious, it simply escalates the anxiety in the room. Part of developing emotional boundaries is understanding that other people's emotions are not ours to solve. We can be empathetic without feeling responsible for calming the other person down or changing their emotional state. Your observer brain can help you think through, "I do not have to convince them. I can recognize the impact their emotional state has on me, but I do not have to spiral into desperately trying to fix something I cannot fix." Tool 2: Use Your Breathing Deliberately If you learn diaphragmatic breathing and use it during difficult moments in relationships, you can keep your physiology within a tolerable range. In EMDR therapy, there is a concept of keeping your emotions within a "window of tolerance." They can still fluctuate, but you remain relatively regulated throughout. Diaphragmatic breathing is a powerful way to help yourself do that. When you breathe in a calm, regular manner, it is actually helpful to the other person as well. Your regulated physiology can support theirs. Tool 3: Establish a Guideline for Taking Breaks Put in place for yourself a boundary about taking a break from a conversation if you become too emotionally dysregulated. What typically happens in couple relationships (and I saw this extensively during 20 years of couples counseling) is that one person is visibly out of control upset, and the other says, "We need to take a break until you calm down" (and there's usually a finger point that goes along with the "you"). Generally, this escalates the emotions in the room. In actuality, even if you are the one who appears less upset externally, you are probably very physiologically activated internally. There is a marriage and family therapist and researcher who has a rule: if your pulse rate is 10% above its normal resting rate ), you need to take a break. ( John Gottman, PhD, Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work ) The problem with telling the other person they need a break to calm down is that it will make things worse. It feels like criticism and attack. It makes someone defensive. It increases their fight-flight-freeze response. Instead, say: "I am having a hard time regulating myself in this moment. Can we take a 10-minute break? I will be right back. I just need 10 minutes to do some slow breathing. We can set our alarm." You must put a time frame on it. Take a five-minute break, a 10-minute break, or if you are extremely dysregulated, revisit the conversation in the morning. Without a time frame, the other person will feel abandoned, which escalates their emotional dysregulation. You may also be feeding into your flight mode—your reactive pattern of running away from conflict. Set the boundary for yourself, not for the other person: "If I get too upset, I will take a mini timeout to calm myself down." I recognize this does not work in every situation. You cannot simply walk away from a young child. But you can incorporate this thinking to develop creative strategies of your own. Tool 4: Validate Before You Fix or Problem-Solve One of the most regulating things you can do for someone else is help them feel truly heard. Acknowledging their emotional experience before moving to "let's fix this and problem-solve" will de-escalate their emotional response and prevent the conversation from escalating out of control. I know I said you are not in charge of their emotional regulation—and you are not. However, knowing strategies that benefit the relationship benefits you. These are basic relational tools. If you have a partner who has difficulty validating your emotions, and you are emotionally regulated, you can say: "I am very upset about this, but I do not want to jump into problem-solving. I simply want to feel heard." There is an element where we sometimes have to help train people how to be in relationship with us. If you are in couples counseling with a therapist facilitating this, excellent. But if you are not, sometimes it helps to explain these concepts to your partner. Let them know what will help you calm down when you are upset. You might have to remind them, and I know that takes substantial emotional regulation on your part. But honestly, that is the big picture here: the best thing you can do for your relationships with others—as well as your relationship with yourself—is learn emotional regulation tools. Tool 5: Practice Honest, Regulated Communication This can be understood as assertive communication that is also compassionate. If you are feeling overwhelmed, I understand. These concepts can seem complex and somewhat unattainable. I have an online boundary program that addresses emotional regulation as the foundation for healthy boundaries. It includes an exercise on visualizing emotional boundaries to strengthen that skill, and an entire section on assertive communication so you can set and maintain boundaries. Healthy boundaries are not about keeping people away or controlling other people's behavior. Healthy relationships actually require good boundaries. Good boundaries are about knowing yourself—where you end and the other person begins—and knowing it is acceptable for you to have needs. Compassionate, assertive expression of whatever needs to be communicated will help the relationship. It can be done in a way that supports your own emotional regulation and possibly helps the other person—or at minimum, does not contribute to escalation. Suppressing your own emotions and needs will escalate the negative cycle of conversation. This is not about suppression. It is definitely not about lashing out, exploding, or releasing everything you have been suppressing because you are angry and frustrated. If you have taken that timeout when needed, if you have been aware ("my heart rate is way up; I am in fight-flight-freeze mode"), you will not reach that explosion point because you will have taken your break and calmed down. All these steps are interrelated. Expressing what you feel in a regulated manner keeps you in connection with the other person. Remember: it is not just what you say but how you say it, and even how you are feeling when you say it. A statement like "I am feeling overwhelmed right now with too much to do" will enable you to stay in connection far more effectively than exploding because your partner has not done what they were supposed to do. Anytime we explode with attack or criticism, we contribute to emotional dysregulation in the room. Bringing It All Together Consciously keep track of your own emotional regulation Visualize your emotional boundary Use breathing techniques to stay within your window of tolerance, aware that you might need to take a mini timeout for yourself if you cannot stay within that window Validate the other person's feelings, emotions, and experience. Pay attention to: "This is me and my emotions, and that is them and theirs." Practice assertive communication which includes compassion for yourself and the other person This is not easy work. I know that. But what I want you to understand is that emotional contagion is real, and there are tools you can use to work with it. You can understand the other person without fully absorbing their emotional state. We are not individual emotional islands. Each one of us impacts those around us. Let me be very clear: Impacting others is not the same as causing their emotions or being responsible for their emotions. They are not responsible for ours. We are responsible for our own emotions and what we do with them. Yet there is this framework of interconnectedness among us, and knowing how to work with it can improve your life and your relationships significantly. Please share in the comments if you found this valuable. What resonated with you? What questions do you have?
Said yes but regret it? This blog provides scripts for How to Say NO After You Said YES. You can change your answer gracefully and stop people-pleasing.
Is it risky to stop worrying about your health? Or is the anxiety the main problem? Here's why health anxiety itself may be the problem—and how to recover.
Anxiety Recovery requires somatic techniques and cognitive techniques and two pieces that are frequently missing from the discussion: the observer brain and behavioral change. Learn the complete approach to help anxiety.
