Overfunctioning in Relationships, Parentification, and the Cost of Earning Love Overfunctioning in relationships often begins long before adulthood. For many people, it starts in childhood—when you learned, implicitly or explicitly, that love, safety, or stability depended on you. Sometimes this takes the form of parentification:...
I had a dream I was back in elementary school. No one would play with me. I kept wondering, why does this always happen to me? That soft ache from childhood — the loneliness, the not-belonging — was still there. I lay down to sleep...
For years, I called myself 'easygoing.' It took a long time — and a lot of work — to recognize that what I was really doing was disappearing. The body knows the difference between peace and silence, even when we don't. This piece is about...
I wrote this piece for Tiny Buddha, where it was originally published. The first time my kids saw me truly cry was Christmas of 2021. My oldest was sixteen and my youngest was twelve. They had just opened their presents. It should have been a...