🎠What it means to have grown up with a parent with mental health issues
At home, your parent's mental health problems became the center of family life.
You became a "mood detective," always scanning for trouble—suppressing your own emotions to stay in control. Their mood swings and struggles would dictate the entire household's emotional weather. You learned to absorb others' emotions like a sponge, constantly tracking your parent's unstable state to predict what version of them you'd encounter each day.
In your family, your feelings were consistently dismissed, minimized, ignored, or turned against you. You developed an uncanny ability to read the smallest shifts in expression or tone, becoming hypervigilant to emotional changes around you. Love meant being the stronger one, the caretaker, the one who holds everything together when everyone else falls apart.