😔 What it means to have grown up with a parent who had post-partum depression
Growing up with a parent who had post-partum depression meant that your earliest bonding experiences were shaped by their struggle to connect, leaving you with a complicated relationship to your own emotional needs and worth.
You may have learned to become a "mood detective" from the very beginning, scanning for emotional trouble and suppressing your own needs to stay in control. At home, your parent's mental health struggles became the center of family life, and you absorbed their emotions easily while learning that your feelings were consistently dismissed, minimized, or ignored. You became an emotional sponge, constantly monitoring where your responsibilities end and others' begin.
You may have developed conflicting desires for both closeness and distance in relationships, since love came with mixed messages from the very start. You feel overly responsible for others' emotions, as if their well-being depends on you, and when someone's mood shifts, you instantly wonder what you did to cause it. You believe that to love someone means to be their problem-solver, and you secretly believe you must be the stronger one in any relationship because everyone else will fall apart.