Were You the 'Responsible One'? How Parentification Creates Adult Anxiety
June 24, 2025
Do you find yourself constantly worried about other people's problems? Do you feel responsible for everyone else's emotions and well-being? If you're nodding along, you might be experiencing the lasting effects of growing up parentified.
How Parentification Creates Adult Anxiety (And How to Heal)
If you grew up parentified, you most likely experience a fairly high degree of anxiety as an adult.
This connection exists because parentified children are trained from a very young age to take care of other people's emotional needs—an impossible task—and often to handle household responsibilities that are far beyond their developmental capacity.
Being responsible for things that are beyond your ability creates a perfect storm for anxiety, both in childhood and adulthood. At its core, anxiety involves trying to control the uncontrollable. When we attempt to manage things we're powerless over—especially other people's emotions—we set ourselves up for chronic anxiety. This is a complex topic, and I'll explore it more deeply as we go.
Core Characteristics of Parentified Adults
Most people who grew up parentified share certain characteristics. While these traits can have positive aspects, they also create a foundation for persistent anxiety. Let's examine these patterns:
**Chronically Overcommitted**
Growing up, you had too much on your plate, and these patterns persist into adulthood until we actively work to heal them. As adults, we continue to take on more than we can reasonably handle. Being chronically overcommitted leads to overwhelm, constant stress, and persistent anxious feelings.
**Difficulty Relying on Others**
People who grew up parentified struggle to depend on others. As children, they learned they couldn't trust others to handle important responsibilities—they could only rely on themselves. This becomes an ingrained pattern that follows you into adulthood.
While developing strong self-reliance can be positive in many ways, extreme self-reliance creates unbalanced relationships. The healthiest relationships involve interdependence—sometimes we depend on others, and sometimes they depend on us. There's a natural give-and-take.
When we resist relying on anyone else, we prevent this healthy interdependence from developing. This leaves us without adequate support, which increases anxiety. Everything feels like it rests on our shoulders, and we end up believing that other people's behaviors and problems are our responsibility to manage.
Reframing Your Childhood Experience
In my 20 years of working with clients as a therapist, I often heard, "But I was
the most capable person in my family. I was
the only one I could rely on."
You probably were the only reliable person in that family system. Learning to depend on others as an adult will be challenging, but it's absolutely worth the effort.
However, believing you were the most capable and intelligent family member likely reflects seeing yourself through your parent's eyes. Your caregiver(s) viewed you as the most capable and you internalized that perspective. You are most likely not viewing the experience through a child's lens.
From a child's perspective, while you may have gained some self-esteem from taking care of others, you were also carrying an enormous burden far beyond your years. This responsibility limited your ability to play, prevented you from being carefree, and kept you constantly focused on what you needed to accomplish for others.
All of these factors contribute significantly to anxiety.
How to Heal Your Anxiety from Parentification
While standard anxiety reduction techniques can certainly help, I believe you'll find it very difficult to fully recover from this type of anxiety unless you address the root cause of parentification and understand how it has shaped you.
**1. Identify Your Negative Core Beliefs**
The first step toward healing involves understanding what negative core beliefs you developed as a result of parentification.
The most common belief is: **"My needs don't matter as much as everyone else's needs."**
If you were emotionally parentified, you learned very early that your parent's emotions (or perhaps both parents', or even the entire family's emotional state) took priority over whatever you were feeling. So the belief of "My emotions don't matter" is also likely to resonate.
Other common core beliefs include:
- "I can't trust others"
- "I can't rely on anyone but myself"
Before healing can happen and before meaningful changes can be made to your habitual patterns, you must genuinely believe that your needs matter.
{I've created a free PDF that helps you identify your specific negative core beliefs and provides practical methods for transforming them. You can access it by clicking here.}
You'll need a deep conviction that your needs matter to successfully implement the following steps and change your patterns of worrying about things beyond your control.
**2. Accept Your Powerlessness Over Others**
I understand that the concept of powerlessness frightens many people. Many people have an immediate reaction of, "No way, I don't want to admit I'm powerless!"
However, accepting reality is super helpful in many ways!
We are completely powerless over the weather (at least immediate weather conditions, not commenting on climate change). We are equally powerless over other people's emotions.
While we can influence others' emotions and certainly offer help, we cannot control how others feel or respond.
Consider this example: If a child grows up feeling responsible for preventing their mother's depression, they might occasionally succeed in cheering her up or motivating her to take care of responsibilities. These small victories feel incredibly reinforcing. However, the child cannot cure their mother's clinical depression.
The same principle applies to a parent with addiction or an anger problem. A child might sometimes prevent dad from losing his temper or temporarily stop a family member from using substances, but ultimately, controlling someone else's temper or addiction is impossible.
When we truly accept that something is impossible, this acceptance becomes profoundly liberating. It can bring enourmous relief to admit to oneself, "I really can't control this outcome, so I don't need to exhaust myself trying!"
**Creating Emotional Boundaries**
For people who still feel responsible for managing others' emotions, I recommend visualizing your emotions as existing within a bubble around you, while the other person's emotions exist within their own separate bubble.
I've developed a guided meditation on this concept, and I explore it extensively in my boundary program (Click here for the Ultimate Boundary Course). This work helps you develop a solid sense of your emotional boundaries—understanding where they begin and end, and clarifying what you are and aren't responsible for managing.
**3. Release Attachment to Outcomes You Cannot Control**
The third step involves letting go of excessive attachment to results
that lie outside your control.
Typically, people become most attached to outcomes involving family members with self-destructive behaviors. I completely understand the desire to help and make a positive difference. However, if you believe you're responsible for someone else's choices and behaviors, you'll remain trapped in anxiety because you'll continuously attempt to control something that someone else actually controls.
Other adults have agency over their own behavior, whether that leads to positive or negative consequences.
Real-World Examples
Let me illustrate how these three principles work together with concrete examples:
**Example 1: Your Young Adult Child's Career Choices**
Imagine you're a parent whose young adult child is pursuing what you consider a disastrous career path. You believe they won't be able to support themselves financially, and you desperately want them to choose a different professional direction. You spend enormous mental energy strategizing how to convince them to change course.
This constant worry is probably damaging your relationship because your young adult wants autonomy over their decisions, while you're consumed with fear about their future.
Your motivation stems from genuine care, but it's manifesting as anxiety and attempts to control something beyond your influence.
**Example 2: A Friend in What You Perceive as an Abusive Relationship**
Another common scenario involves a friend who remains in what you believe is an abusive relationship, and you feel an urgency to help them recognize this.
Speaking up and sharing your observations is appropriate and caring. However, if you become convinced that it's your responsibility to ensure they leave this relationship, you'll experience tremendous anxiety trying to control someone else's major life decisions while potentially damaging your friendship.
These situations are genuinely difficult. When we witness someone making choices that appear destructive, stepping back feels almost impossible.
The Healing Paradox: Embracing a Temporary Increase in Anxiety...!
Here's a crucial aspect of healing that many people don't anticipate: as you begin changing your behaviors and establishing healthier boundaries, your anxiety will temporarily increase.
Currently, your anxiety drives you to worry about others and intervene (or desperately want to intervene) or obsessively analyze their situations. Your anxiety is the engine behind these behaviors. This anxiety drives your actions. These actions reinforce the anxiety.
Examples of the actions that come from "parentification-based" anxiety could be: researching someone else's problem extensively, taking care of what they should be taking care of as an independent adult, lecturing and continually bringing up your opinion about what they should do, etc.
Changing these behaviors and restraining from interventions will be needed in order to lower your anxiety in the long run. However, restraining from these familiar responses will initially heighten your anxiety. Learning to tolerate this temporary spike in anxious feelings is essential for changing your behavioral patterns, which is what ultimately transforms this entire cycle.
Changing these behaviors and restraining from interventions will be needed in order to lower your anxiety in the long run. However, restraining from these familiar responses will initially heighten your anxiety. Learning to tolerate this temporary spike in anxious feelings is essential for changing your behavioral patterns, which is what ultimately transforms this entire cycle.
Your Roadmap to Freedom
Here are the essential steps for healing anxiety rooted in parentification:
1. **Understand how parentification affected you** and identify the negative core beliefs that developed as a result, then begin the work of healing those beliefs
2. **Accept your powerlessness over others** and develop clear emotional boundaries
3. **Release attachment to outcomes** involving other people's behaviors and choices
4. **Prepare for and tolerate the temporary anxiety increase** that occurs when you stop trying to control others—and learn to sit with this discomfort
Remember, if you grew up parentified, these patterns developed as survival mechanisms. They served an important purpose in your childhood environment, but they no longer serve your well-being as an adult. With understanding, patience, and the right tools, you can heal from this anxiety and build healthier, more balanced relationships.
Healing from parentification requires time and often benefits significantly from professional support. Please be patient and compassionate with yourself as you learn to prioritize your own needs and trust others to manage their own lives.
I'd love to hear whether this information resonates with your experience and what insights emerged for you. If you found this helpful, please share it with others who might benefit from understanding this important connection between childhood parentification and adult anxiety.
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.
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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?
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