 So hello everyone, we've got a special guest today, second time, surprise, surprise. So it's a professor of psychology, South and Federal University, Rostov-Ondon in Russia, and of course the author of Malignan Self-Love Narcissism, Revisited, welcome Sam. Thank you for having me a second time, you're a very brave woman, I just have to mention by my contract, I'm sorry, I have to mention that I'm a professor of finance and professor of psychology in the outreach program of the CS consortium of universities, CIAPS Center for International Advanced Professional Studies, I have a contract that says that I have to say in every video and whenever I don't say they complain and so I don't want any trouble with them, apologies. We don't eat that, so. Yeah, yeah, you don't want any trouble with them, believe me. They're Americans, you don't want any trouble, yeah. Okay, so welcome, welcome then. So today I would love to speak with you about parentification, parentified children, how does it affect us? And yeah, the main topic around this and why it's so important and so crucial for our development. So yeah, so maybe we can start to speak about what is this for our viewers or listeners that they can see if they experience this or you know, so. The problem is much bigger now because people don't grow up. Adolescents used to be defined as the years between 10 and 18 and then adolescence now is defined as the period between 10 and 25 years. Adolescents also starts three years later than in the 1980s and ends three to four years later than in the 1980s. Well over one third of people under the age of 35 live with their parents. In many countries it's 50%. 50% of people under age 35 live with their parents. 31% of people, 31% of adults are lifelong singles. Marriage rate had collapsed by 50% between 1990 and today etc etc. So what I'm trying to say, people take fewer driving licenses and even consumption of condoms is down four to five percent a year. What I'm trying to say is people don't grow up, people remain adolescents and they sometimes remain adolescents for life. They remain adolescents and yet they have children because there's no license needed to be a parent. You need a license to drive a car, you need a license to drive a motorcycle, you need a license for everything except the most important thing in life, being a parent. There you don't need a license. So these people who are still mentally adolescent, they have children and so they don't know how to raise the children and then we have the phenomenon of parentifying. I think the word parentifying is not good enough. I think the word should have been adultifying. Parentifying implies that a child is required to perform parental chores, parental roles. In other words a child is expected to behave as a parent would. But we have a much bigger problem. Children are expected to behave as adults do because there are no adults left, no one is adult. So children are expected to behave as adults and that's why I suggest the term adultifying. At any rate, parentifying is when a child is forced, that is important to understand, it's a coercive situation. No child wants to be a parent, no child wants to be an adult. So when a child is forced by his caregivers, by people who are supposed to take care of him or her, people like mother, father, grandparents, teachers, role models, when a child is forced by caregivers to behave as an adult, to behave in what we call developmentally inappropriate role, when a child for example has to act as a surrogate parent to his siblings, mother and father don't function, so the child has to raise his brothers and sisters. That's what happened to me. I had to raise my three brothers and one sister because both my parents were mentally ill and unable to function. So I raised them. I was a parent before I reached the age of nine and I continued, before I reached the age of five and I continued to the age of 16. So that's a form of parentification. Another form of parentification is when you have, when you have to become the referee, the judge, the obitur between two parents who are fighting. So like, sorry. Please go ahead. No, like a bufa, something like that, the role for the child. Yes, it's like the two parents are fighting and then each one of them wants the child to support his position or her position against the other parent and the child has to make peace. So the child becomes a peacemaker. He is always trying to find the middle ground, always trying to find a compromise, always trying to calm down everyone and so on. The next role is the, as a caregiver, the child becomes a caregiver mentally or physically to the parent. So the parent, for example, can be physically disabled or mentally disabled and the child has to take care of mommy because she is an alcoholic or because she is mentally, physically disabled or for some other reason, she's depressed, depressive and so never leaves bed. She stays in bed all day. So the child comes back from school and he has to take care of mommy and he has to take care of mommy or daddy as a parent. He has to parent his parents and that's why we call it parentification. Andre Green who was a psychoanalyst wrote, coined in 1978, he coined the phrase dead mother. But of course you can say dead parent. It's a parent who is absent, a parent who is emotionally absent or physically absent, a parent who is depressed, self-centered, narcissistic, disempathic, there's no empathy for the child, capricious, a parent who is dangerous, a parent who instrumentalizes the child, uses the child as some kind of tool, a parent who is abusive, all these parents, these types of parents, they're dead parents. Psychodynamically, the child perceives these parents as non-existent. In every possible clinical sense, this child is an orphan. He is a virtual orphan and so he coaxes an orphan and that raises another very interesting problem and I call it self-parentifying. But I answered the first question so if you want I can talk about self-parentifying. I just don't want to monopolize the conversation. No, it's fine. I just want to maybe add that I know also parentification because I was a parentified child but in the other way not to be a parent for my parents because I didn't know my father so I was raised by other people mostly but I didn't share with viewers on my channel about that. So like my parents, they were absent for three first years in my life so I was raised by others just from my family or for Nani so yeah the problem with me and with parentification in my case was what you wrote in your last post that I want to quote your words that you wrote. It's a case that the child is parentified but what can happen also? They forced the parent itself by internalizing his parents like disorders, like dysfunctions, attachment styles, trauma bonds and so on. So as an adult they just resolved their sense of self-worth by caring for others. So yeah in a specific way we regulate emotions but in completely different ways and what I want to just add to this, to your words, it's like when you cannot trust to your inner object because the trust is destroyed because this inner object couldn't and wasn't unable to help you in a traumatic situation so you cannot resort to your self-regulation strategies in an emergency because it has failed so you know it's difficult to this and I think it's so important because I never heard about that before so I would like to if you can say something more about that. You made some excellent points. A child needs parents. It could be a single parental figure, it could be just mother, it doesn't have to be mother and father, that's a myth. It's not true that you need a male and a female but you need what is called in psychology a safe base. You need a secure base. You need to feel that you have a parent who sees you, sees you as you are and then loves you as you are. Loves you as you are doesn't mean that the parent forgives everything you do, spoils you. That's not loving. Spoiling is not loving. Spoiling is not allowing the child to be in touch with reality and that's not a loving thing to do but you need a parent who is present, loving, provides feedback and therefore allows you to internalize social values in a process known as socialization. A parent is needed. What happens when the parent is absent, depressed, sick, what happens when there's no parent? Well, what happens is the child parents itself, the child invents parents. If this goes to extreme situation, the child invents a false self because the false self is a parental figure. It's omniscient, it's omnipotent, all-knowing, all-powerful, brilliant, perfect, etc. etc. It's a godlike figure. It's a parental figure but that's an extreme case. Even when the child does not become a narcissist, even when the child does not develop a false self, the child develops an imaginary friend, an imaginary friend that is actually a parental figure. The child parents itself but how to parent yourself? The child is only four years old. It's the formative years, zero to six. The child is nothing, he's a toddler. So the child says to himself, I need a parent, I don't have a parent. Okay, I will invent a parent and now I will have a parent because I invented a parent and now everything is okay but the child needs a model. What model will he use for the parent, the imaginary parent, the real parent? When the child invents the imaginary parent, he invents an imaginary parent that looks exactly like his real parents because he doesn't know any other parents. He has no experience with other parents. These are the parents and now his parents have mental health issues and disorders. His parents have dysfunctional attachment styles. His parents are emotionally and psychologically immature. They are what we call puer a eternus, eternal adolescent. His parents are trauma bonded to each other usually and to the child sometimes. He's internalizing all this garbage when he's creating the imaginary parent. He's taking all the baggage, the sickness, the pathologies of his real parents and he puts it into the imaginary parent because he doesn't know any other type of parent. The only parent he knows. From that moment on, he will have an introject. He will have an internal parent that will be inside his mind for life. This introject will parent him for life, definitely as a child. Because this parent is dysregulated, unboundary, pathologized, narcissistic, defiant, reckless, stupid, immature, you name it, it's a bad parent, not good enough parent, but bad, totally bad parent. This is the kind of parent this child will continue to have in his mind and so he will have extreme difficulty, not necessarily with object constancy because he will have a constant object, but he will have extreme difficulty because the only constant object in his mind will be what we call a bad object. It will be a bad object. It will be a problematic object and so the child, for example, exactly as you said, will not be able to regulate internally because the object, the internal object, the introject will be dysregulated. The child will not have boundaries because the only constant internal object will be unboundary. The child will interact with other people via trauma. Trauma is an organizing principle. It's a narrative. So the child will use trauma to interact with other people. Either he will create trauma or he will traumatize himself. For example, he will sacrifice himself. The child's sense of self-worth, the child's sense of self-worth will depend critically on other people, on caring for other people. The child will feel worthless if he doesn't care for someone. He has a need, a compulsive need to be needed. He needs to be needed. He is seen. He feels alive only when he's needed, only when he's caring for someone. And this is, of course, a form of self-harm. It's a form of self-mutilation, not very different to borderline personality disorder. The borderline cuts herself with a razor or burns herself with a cigarette. This parentified child harms himself by self-sacrificing in order to care for other people. In other words, the parentified child, when he grows up, destroys himself or herself, sacrifices her own well-being and happiness and regulation and everything. So in order to care for other people, because only then she feels alive and only then she can drown the negative voices in her head, which are the internalized parents. The self-parenting process is much worse, much more penicious, much more dangerous than the external parentified. The external parentifying is a role. You can get rid of a role, it's not a big problem, but you can't get rid of the internal parents. That's the core of parentifying, in my view. Yes, I agree. And then when you even spoke about that, you know, told about this internal parentified issue, then I realized when I was working on my own therapy, that's why I was struggling with so many things. I want to ask it a little bit later, but it has a lot of consequences and also it's really a challenge for psyche, external and internal body. Like you said already, we can remove the role, but it's a lot more complicated when it's inside. And I was also searching for some, you know, research about what children the adult, let's say adult, parents, choosing for this rule, like, you know, guardian, buffer or servants or therapist, partner, because we've got different types, right? Like Valentino wrote special maltreatment, like neglect or emotional neglect or sexual, physical, right? So, and I discovered that it's like, when it's like one child or the eldest one or the oldest most sensitive child, and yeah, and for me, it just makes more sense what was going on, that inside in caregivers is just a child. It's much, much worse than this, actually. If you want to go a bit deeper, it's much worse than this. The initial relationship between a child and a parent was well described, I think, by Melanie Klein. Melanie Klein's work, you can disagree, you can agree. There's a lot of fiction there. She was very creative, imaginary, imaginary person, but some things she got definitely right. You know, anyone who works with children knows, I raised my brothers and sisters and I saw it in action. I know she's right. So one of the things she said is that the initial reaction between a child and the parent, especially mother, is via splitting, a splitting defense mechanism. The child splits the bad and good aspects of the mother, internalizes some of these aspects and projects the other aspects of mother. If you have an internal parent, you don't have a real external parent, but you create an imaginary internal parent, you're going to split yourself. The splitting is internalized. The minute the splitting is internalized, you become the bad object because mommy can never be a bad object. Mommy is always a good object. It's life-threatening, life-threatening to think of mother as a bad object. Imagine that you think your mother wants you dead. That's very frightening. You would never think that. You would think that something's wrong with you as a child. The child never thinks, mommy's bad, mommy's frustrating me, mommy's evil. He never thinks this way. The child thinks, what did I do wrong? What did I do wrong? So when the parentified child internalizes the splitting because he has an internal parent, he splits the internal parent. He becomes 100% the bad object. From that moment, they are behavioral and effective implications. For example, parentified children can never have fun. They can never indulge themselves. They can never buy themselves a gift. They can never love themselves. They can never throw themselves a party. They can never, you know, they feel guilty. They feel guilty because they are bad. They are bad and worthy objects. There is internal splitting at work. Now, as healthy people, people who were not parentified as children, the splitting stops after some time. But when you have an internal parent in project, the splitting never, ever stops. You don't have to be, you don't have to have a personality disorder. You don't have to be, you can be totally healthy person otherwise. But there is internal splitting going on all the time as a background process. So you cannot love yourself, indulge yourself. You have to be self-reliant. You can't rely on other people because they're not reliable. You trust no one. You always get involved in conflicts as an arbiter, a peacemaker, or a therapist. It's the role of a peacemaker. You restore inner peace to people, you know, or between people. So the child, the parentified child perceives himself as a sinner, someone who committed a sin. And now he has to redeem himself. He has to work hard to be good again. He's bad. He has to become good again. And he has to become good again by healing people, taking care of people, catering to the needs of people. And he has to sacrifice himself because he's bad. He has to sacrifice himself. And he never can never gratify himself or love himself because he's bad. And if he loves himself or gratifies himself or herself, then it's another sin because he should never do this with bad people. Bad people should be punished, not gratified. And part of the punishment is the constant need to feel good, worthy, trustworthy, reliable, and to self-sacrifice all the time. Essentially, the parentified child is constantly emotionally blackmailed by the introjected, by the introjected imaginary parent all the time. There's emotional blackmail all the time. And this resembles very much surprisingly, codependency. Codependency is exactly this type of relationship. So the child, the parentified child, when he grows up, he becomes codependent on an internal, introjected parental figure, which is imaginary, invented. And then he becomes codependent on people around him. It's a reflection of his internal codependence. It's a seriously pathological dynamic. It's not a joke. I told you before we started to talk that I consider these similar problems to be more serious in narcissism. I consider parentification, attachment problems. I consider them to be seriously more problematic than narcissism. I think more than, postmodern world, even so-called healthy people, they have these problems. And they don't have narcissism, but they have these problems. And these problems are destroying their relationships, making them unhappy, causing them to abuse substances, to drink, to make drugs, to do drugs. These problems are destroying them. They don't need to be a narcissist to be destroyed, or to destroy others. You can just have an avoidant dismissive attachment style, and you destroy other people. You can be parentified, and you destroy yourself and other people, because the parentified child had been coerced, had been forced to become a parent figure. So the parentified child does it to other people. He coerces them. He forces them. The parentified child insists that you need him. Even if you don't need him, if you tell him, go away. I don't want you. No. You want me. You need me. I'm going to take care of you. I'm going to force you. I'm going to force you to accept my care and loving. But I don't want you. I don't need you. I don't want you to care for me. No, I'm going to care for you. There's a famous movie, Misery, with Cathy Bates and Drifus. I don't remember. There's a famous author who had a car accident. He had a car accident and then there's this fan, fan of his work. She saves him and she takes him to her cabin. But then his injuries heal. He's healed and he wants to go home. She says, no, I'm going to take care of you. I'm going to love you. I said, I don't want you to love me. I don't want you to take care of me. I want to go home. No, she says, I'm going to love. I'm a fan. I admire you. I love you. I'm going to take care of you. I'm going to take care of all your needs. And he says, no, she breaks his legs. She breaks his legs so that he becomes dependent on her and she can continue to care for him. She tells him, I broke your legs because I love you and I can't let you go. I need to take care of you. I need you to need me. That's a parent affection. And this is what I was also talking in one of my videos about that codependent person. It's like doing these old things, not because they love the person, right? No, because this is neurotic. They just have to put through your mouth this because then they feel not worthy. So it's not because they are angel. And I was telling this from really, from the beginning of my channel that this is also absolutely not healthy because there inside is this parent-filed child who has totally immature caregivers or parents. And sometimes this child inside is hyper-mature or the interject parent inside. And absolutely agree with this. You see this absolutely happening. No, intimate partners of codependence. They describe this feeling of being in a prison or being blackmailed or being, you know, because the codependent broadcasts a message. If you don't need me anymore, I will die. I will die. I can't live without taking care of you. I'm going to infantilize. The codependent infantilizes her partner. By parentifying herself, she infantilizes the partner. And so many parent-filed children become codependents or people-pleasers. And many of them are highly sensitive people, HSPs. They are very alert to the environment and they are super empathic and so on and so forth. But it's a mistake to think that this is a positive thing because they put all this, they use all this, they leverage all this, sensitivities and capabilities in order to imprison and captivate and incarcerate an intimate partner. It's a prison situation, absolutely. The parent-filed child would tend to immobilize, immobilize his intimate partner, mummify it. And in this sense, it's not much different to the narcissist. It's exactly what the narcissist does. The narcissist wants to take your life away so that you will never abandon him and you will always be in his shared fantasy. And the parent-filed child, especially the codependent parent-filed child, essentially wants to do the same. But the narcissist wants to do it because he wants to use you in some way, sexually otherwise. The codependent does it because he needs you to be there so that he can take care of you. He needs you to be there so that he can continue the parental role. The parent-filed child knows to do only one thing, to be a parent. He doesn't know to do anything else. He doesn't know how to behave in an intimate relationship except as a parent. So he needs you to be a child. How can he be a parent if you're not a child? So he needs you to regress. He needs you to lose your autonomy. He needs you to lose your agency. He needs you to be dependent. He wants you to be dependent because he needs to become the parent because he doesn't know any other way. And there are other similarities between parent-filed children and codependents and, I'm sorry, borderlines and similar pathologies, cluster B pathologies. For example, they have this perception that they are not fully appreciated. They have this, what you wrote to me yesterday, imposter syndrome. They know, as children, they know that they are not parents. They are just playing at being parents. They're acting parents. They know that the parental interjection is an imaginary parent. Even as four years old, they perceive this. So there is a constant feeling that they are acting. All the time they feel like they're acting. It's not real. It's a theater. It's a kind of theater production. It's not real. They don't have a sense of reality. They're totally derealized, this severe dissociative effect of derealization. And so consequently, they feel, either they feel like they are impostors. They're pretending. They're fake. They're fake. Or they feel that they are not appropriately evaluated, appropriately appreciated. So they become very passive aggressive. Even they become covert narcissists or they become so-called empaths. They become extremely aggressive. And like borderlines, exactly, they engage in compensatory behaviors. And these behaviors are not calibrated. They're not proportional. So for example, many parent-ified children can suddenly become recklessly promiscuous or abuse substances. And the reason is that there is no regulation, exactly as you said at the beginning. There's no internal regulation. And they engage in these compensatory behaviors, exactly like borderlines. So we see a lot of similarity between parent-ified children and several mental health disorders, dependent personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder. Absolutely. And it's not by coincidence that many, many narcissists and borderlines were parent-ified children. They started life as parent-ified children. They didn't have proper parenting. So it's not a minor phenomenon. It's a major, major mental health issue. I'm really glad that you mentioned about that, that this hypostensitive people, like, you know, it's not like a class or something like that. And sometimes I've got this feeling that people thinking that I'm a highly sensitive person and it's like, but then I can see what they cannot see, you know, the tragedy, tragedy behind this, right? So this is what is showing to survive emotionally. A child really needs to set up a care system for, for a caregiver and later for a partner instead of receiving it. And I think, yeah, this is what you said already, and it's not healthy at all. They feel safe when you love, when you love the parent-ified child. The parent-ified child grows up. And let's say you become intimate with the parent-ified child. When you try to love the parent-ified child become adult, when you try to care, they feel threatened because it's like you're telling them you're no longer needed as parents. I'm going to love you. I'm going to love you. I'm going to take care of you. I'm going to cater to your needs and they feel they're no longer needed and you're about to abandon them. Parent-ified child interprets love being loved as abandoned. So they're going to react very strangely to being loved. The minute you try to love a parent-ified child who had become an adult, he's going to walk away because he is going to feel that you're about to abandon him. And there is this issue of hypervigilance. Children without properly functioning parents, they develop a radar. They read the parent all the time. They try to read the parent. They try to see what is she going, what is mommy going to do? What is daddy going to do? So they're hypervigilant. They all the time they scan the parental figures because they're terrified. They're simply scared and they scan the parental figures. So they become hypervigilant but and they continue this whole life. They constantly scan people around them and they scan them and they say, oh, what do they need? How can I care for them? What are they going to do? And so there's this scanning. But on the other hand, when the child creates a parental interject, an imaginary parent, the child attributes to the imaginary parent powers and capabilities that the child does not have. Because don't forget that, I mean, I don't need to tell you that until a certain age, the child regards the parents as gods. They're omnipotent. They can never fail. They never make mistakes. So when the child tries to create an internal parent, an imaginary parent, he creates a god. It's a private religion. He creates a god. But this god is the child. So this creates a dissonance. On the one hand, the child knows that he's not godlike. He realizes these limitations. But on the other hand, part of him is godlike. So this creates enormous dissonances in parentified children when they grow up. Because they have this grandiose assumption that they know what you need better than you. That they can read your emotions better than you. They can take care of your needs before you know what you need. In other words, they have supernatural abilities. And this is why you have this phenomenon like empaths. And because they attribute to themselves the power, the supernatural but paranormal power to read other people's minds and to anticipate in advance what these people may require. This is of course a form of magical thinking. When the child invents an internal imaginary parent, the child engages in maximal magical thinking. And it never leaves him. And the child stays this way for life. And so a typical parentified child, if you get married to a typical parentified child for example, he's going to be all over you all the time. And he's going to tell you what you need and what you want and what you wish. And he's going to tell you what your priorities are. And you're going to say no, you're wrong. And he's going to say no, just don't know it. You just don't know it yet. And so this gives rise for example in very extreme cases to what we call erotomania. Erotomania is a form of stalking where the erotomaniac stalker believes that he has access to the mind of his love object. So the stalker can come to a woman and say, you're in love with me, you just don't know it. You just don't know it yet. But I know it, you're in love with me. It's a very dangerous situation. In extreme cases, this can take, this can lead to aggressive and violent action. So there is this magical thinking coupled with hypervigilance, which render the parentified child the perfect parent, the godlike parent. So what I'm trying to say is that the child doesn't create a realistic imaginary parent. He creates an idealized godlike imaginary parent, which is a huge obstacle in life afterwards. Yes, I totally agree with what you said. And that's why I would like to ask you another question. You mentioned a little bit about that. How does this affect us? What are we struggling with in adult after when we are parentified child? So as I said, there's an inability to love yourself. In one word, I mean, in one sentence, there's an inability to love yourself. So you would self-sacrifice, you would be unable to have fun, you would not be able to spoil yourself and indulge yourself or reward yourself, even if you're entitled to some gift or something, because you had an accomplishment or you will not be able to recognize it or reward yourself. You will have essentially a sadistic, dysregulated internal parent interject, which will become a kind of inner critic. And you will always feel that you're on trial. You will feel that you're bad and unworthy if you don't care for other people and fulfill their needs. So you will force them, even if they don't want to, you will force them, because otherwise you feel bad. You don't want to feel bad. The only way to not feel bad is if people accept your help and your advice and your service, even if they don't want to. And so these are dysfunctional. Now in extreme cases, you may become a codependent, you may become a narcissist. That's what people, I think that's what many even scholars fail to understand. The parentified childhood can definitely lead to conditions and disorders that look like the opposite of parenting. They look like the opposite of parenting. But they're not because if the internalized parent is dysfunctional, pathological, then the parenting style later in life will be dysfunctional and pathological as well. Example, if the internalized parental figure is a narcissist, then the child will grow up and become a narcissist. It's the only way the child knows how to relate to other people. So there is a path through, there's a conduit. It's like the pathology passes through the parentified child and continues. The parentified child will treat his own children the way he had been treated as a child. So he will actually force his children to parentify as well. It's an intergenerational trauma, not a limited one generation. It's a form of abuse, of course, massive abuse. Yes, and what I would like to add, what I observed in my work with clients, when I see that and working with the clients that they are parentified child, they also struggle with like somatization. A lot of almost every single client is struggle with this. Dissociation also, or yes, they also, they don't give themselves the right to development also. They feel tension, chronic tension all the time in the body, like to know know, waiting for something. So yeah, and they also cannot feel the pleasure of the life or joy. So I agree with you. You just described the post-traumatic syndrome. Orientification is a trauma. And it has all the post-traumatic after effects, including the ones you described here. Yeah, CPTSD, absolutely. So the last questions that I have for you, it's like, what can we say to our viewers, how they can work with day therapist or what can they do when they listening this and they find out, this is probably about me. Like, you know, what can we tell them? There are two core issues that need to be tackled. The good news is that these issues, we know how, I mean, in psychotherapy, we know how to tackle them in a variety of treatment modalities, not only one. We know how to tackle them and we're pretty successful with both issues. Unlike, for example, narcissism, which is pretty hopeless, but this is not hopeless. So the first issue is separation and individuation. We need to teach these people to separate from their parents, finally, at age 60 or 50 or whatever, to become full-fledged individuals, to expel, I call it to expel the parental interjection. This can be done and it's frequently done in therapy. And the second thing is to develop self-love, not narcissism. Self-love. Self-love is a healthy thing. I have a whole video dedicated to it. What is self-love, defining self-love and so on. So given these two, a process of separating from the bed, from the dysfunctional parent and becoming an individual without the parental interjection, and then learning to love that individual, learning to love this core, this new core, in a functional, healthy way, not narcissistically. That generally is the path of treatment. And both things, again, the optimistic message is both things, I wouldn't even call them routine. It's what we do in therapy. We allow people to mature and to grow up. We play sometimes the parental figure ourselves as a therapist. It's called transference. We allow people to grow up and so on. And then we teach them how to accept themselves and via self-acceptance, how to love themselves, and how to treat themselves a lot more nicely than they had been treated before. Because parent-ified children tend to perpetuate the abuse, like all abuse victims. They continue the abuse. The internal voices of the abuser are inside their minds as introjects. And so the abuse continues long after the abuser had gone. And so we teach them to stop abusing themselves, to stop it, to stop it and simply love themselves finally. And if necessary, by repeating certain actions ritually and without understanding what they're doing, they don't always need to understand. Inside is overrated. Sometimes action, including somatic action, can lead to very positive results without full understanding what is happening. When I work with depressive people, for example, I tell them, you must get out of bed and you must go to the sea and you must swim. And they ask me, why? What's the connection? But I said, don't ask. Just get up and go to swim. That's all. So same with parent-ified, former parent-ified children. Sometimes they just need to act. So they need to go to the nearest shopping mall and buy the most expensive bag they can find. That's a great form of therapy. And they need to put boundaries as to how much they care for other people and how much they cater to the needs of other people. And that includes formerly parent-ified children who had become therapists, not only, you know. So boundaries are very important. So they need to say no, to learn to say no. And they need to learn to not feel bad and unworthy because they had said no, because they had placed a boundary. They need to learn not to pay the emotional price of setting a boundary, et cetera, et cetera. Everything I'm saying is pretty routine and well-known. There's nothing new there. There are dozens of techniques on how to accomplish each and every one of these things. So the good news is, if the person who had been parent-ified did not develop personality pathology, then the likelihood of recovery is very high. When there are personality pathologies, we're a bit more in trouble. We're a bit more in trouble when there are addictions involved. We are also a bit more in trouble because these are intractable problems. They're very difficult to treat. But if the only problem is that your people pleaser and you tend to sacrifice yourself to take care of the needs of your children or your husband or whatever, it will be okay. The prognosis is good. I would just love to finish the process, of course, of separation. Individuation really crucial, I think, for all of us, absolutely. Develop also the self-regulation and, as you said, we don't have to understand, to accept and doing the thing. I totally agree. Sometimes to feel and pass through the morning to this process and sometimes also when we are working with the body, but also body psychotherapy sometimes or just body work, it's also help. But agree, we don't have to understand everything, to cope with it and to change. So absolutely, yes. You raised a very important issue and that's the issue of mourning and grieving. Yes. Because giving up on the introjected parental figure is like giving up on your real parents. There is a process of mourning and grieving. But more importantly, you have to give up on who you used to be. But that's every transformation. Every transformation through therapy or otherwise, through life experience, doesn't have to be therapy. Life experience. A divorce. A divorce. Losing a child. Sometimes only traveling to another country. You have to always sacrifice who you are. The main engine of personal growth and personal development is loss. Loss is the main engine. Anyone who tries to avoid loss is avoiding life and the potentials of life. We are too risk averse. We're trying to avoid risks too much. It's not healthy. You need pain and suffering and loss as an integral part of your evolution as a human being. If you avoid them all the time, you impair your reality testing, you no longer grasp reality properly and you no longer have the feedback of reality which calibrates you and allows you to gain self-awareness. So Western society especially is so focused on avoiding pain, on avoiding hurt, on avoiding risk, on avoiding loss that people end up in small apartments watching Netflix. And that's all they do because everything else is so risky and there's so much pain and loss and they don't want it anymore. And that's a good definition of death, of dying. So majority of people today are dead. They just don't know it yet. And they are dead because they give up on life. And what did they give up on? The pain and the hurt and the loss of life because that's what life is. Life is suffering. You don't need to embrace suffering. You don't need to seek. You don't need to elevate suffering. You don't need to make it a value but you never ever should avoid suffering. Because if you do, you're dead. Dead people don't suffer last time I spoke to them. Yes, and thank you so much for this. I agree. Thank you, Sam, for sharing your knowledge and wisdom with us. And yes, thank you. My pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Sam. Bye.