Growing Up With a Parent With a Mental Health Condition: What It Leaves Behind

For too many adults, reflecting on childhood experiences unearths stories of parental mental health challenges. Growing up with a parent whose depression, psychosis, personality disorder, or addiction made them emotionally unavailable, unpredictable, or frightening is a form of family complexity that is often minimised. This is partly because the parent was not always unwell, partly because love for the parent coexists with the impact of their difficulties, and partly because the child often spent years protecting the parent’s reputation rather than naming what home actually felt like.

Children who learned very early to monitor their parent’s emotional state rather than attending to their own. The parent whose depression filled the house with a heaviness that everyone moved around and often nobody spoke of. The parent whose episodes of mania or psychosis made home feel unpredictable and frightening. The parent whose relationship with food set the stage for other family members’ challenging eating habits. The parent whose personality disorder meant that the emotional climate could shift without warning.

These common experiences are often overlooked by literature, families themselves, children who grew up in them, and by our culture which still struggles to speak openly about parental mental health challenges.

What it is like to grow up in that environment

The child of a parent with a significant mental health condition tends to develop a particular set of skills:

• Hypervigilance: the ability to read a room, to detect shifts in the adult’s mood before they are fully expressed, to anticipate what is coming and to manage it.

• Emotional self-sufficiency: the capacity to manage one’s own feelings without bringing them to the parent, because the parent does/did not always have the ability to recognise or respond to them.

• A premature orientation to caregiving: the child who learns responsibility for their parent’s emotional state also learns that their own needs are secondary to those of others.

These are adaptations rather than failures. Actually intelligent responses to genuinely challenging environments. The difficulty is that they tend to persist long after we exit the environments that produced them.

The complexity of loving a parent whose illness caused harm

One of the most psychologically complex features of these experiences is the coexistence of love and hurt. The parent was not only their illness. They were also, in some cases, a person who loved their child and who was themselves suffering. That complexity, the parent who was both loved and harmful, present and absent, the source of the difficulty and a person deserving of compassion, does not resolve neatly. These dynamics often produce a complicated internal landscape that can be difficult to navigate without support.

Often there is also the challenge of loyalty. Many adults who grew up with a parent with a mental health issue spent years protecting that parent’s reputation. Not speaking about what home life was like, managing the family narrative for the outside world, absorbing the impact privately. Speaking openly about ones childhood experiences can feel like a betrayal, even decades later, even when the parent is no longer alive.

What it tends to leave behind

The impact of growing up with a parent with a mental health condition tends to show up in adulthood in many ways. Difficulty trusting that relationships are safe and reliable, because the primary relationship of childhood was neither. A heightened sensitivity to other people’s emotional states, which can look like empathy but is rooted in hypervigilance. A tendency to take responsibility for the feelings of others, to over-function in relationships, or to find it difficult to receive care without feeling uncomfortable or undeserving of it.

There can also be a fear of becoming the same as one's parent. Of carrying the same mental health vulnerabilities, passing them on, maybe one day being the person whose difficulties shape a child in the ways their own childhood experiences were shaped.

What therapy can offer

Therapy can offer a space to explore and understand what growing up in a particular environment actually involved. To narrate it honestly, without minimisation. Therapy can also offer a space to grieve what was not available, to release the caregiving orientation that has outlived its original context. Therapy can also help you to develop a different relationship with the vigilance and self-sufficiency that were once necessary and may now be constraining. There can also be an opportunity to voice the fear of becoming one’s own parent.

If you grew up with a parent whose mental health significantly affected your experience of home and childhood. If that impact has followed you into adult life in ways that you are still navigating, therapy may be of benefit.

Dr Erin Reid is a counselling psychologist offering online therapy to individuals, couples, adolescents, and families across the UK and internationally, and 'Walk and Talk' therapy in Northwest London green spaces. Visit drerinreid.com to find out more.