The Parentified Daughter: When Childhood Needs Start Making Your Adult Choices
Updated: Sep 1
You can be a parentified daughter who grew into a capable, accomplished woman and still find yourself making choices from an emotional hunger that began in childhood. Sometimes, that hunger makes you believe your mother owes you something, especially when she is the person you have to turn to because you have nowhere else to go. But what your mother can give you now cannot fulfil what you needed from her at 3, 9, or 15. Until you can tell the difference, you may keep reaching for an adult substitute for a childhood need, asking the relationship to repair something it never could. I know this because, at 20, I moved in with my mother believing she owed me something. It took me decades to understand what was really driving that choice.
When I was out of army service, a young 20-year-old woman trying to make sense of how to build her life, my mother was released from a two-year forced admission at the psych ward.
She’d received financial and accommodation support from the government and had offered me a space to live with her.
My mother had sold our home and burned the money when I was 16, so I thought, “She owes me!”
And with that state of mind, I went to live with her.
It would take me decades of healing my mother wound to reflect back on that choice to realise that I was doing exactly the same things I hated that she did.
My mother treated everyone like they owed her something, and I despised that attitude from an early age.
Yet here I was, choosing to live with my dependent, destructive, abandoning mother because of the same attitude, unaware I’m replicating generational wounds.
What a Parentified Daughter Learns to Carry Into Adulthood
“But, she’s your mother, Shelly,” you might think, “surely if anyone owes you something, it’s her, isn’t it?!?!”
When the language of owing comes into the conversation — those taking shape quietly in your mind or those you hold openly — you already have a sign that this relationship is ruptured.
A relationship based on mutual trust, mutual care, and mutual understanding doesn’t run on owing things to each other.
Yes, your mother owes you emotional, physical, and psychological care and guidance, manipulation-free love, protection, and a relationship you can trust.
Yet mutual doesn’t mean equal.
Your mother had at least 20 years of life experiences and agency before you came into her world. You were never on equal ground.
If your childhood needs haven’t been fulfiled when you were young, now you need something slightly different to heal the mother wound and break the cycle of generational trauma.
Sometimes you don’t have a choice but to take what your mother can offer.
When I was twenty, I didn’t have the foundations to start an independent life fresh out of the army, with no other family member to give me a space to be, no boyfriend, no profession or a job.
I just needed a home.
I used it to start my studies and got out as soon as I was stronger financially, mentally, and emotionally.
Sometimes you make the choices you have to make:
💔 Perhaps you’re dependent on your mother financially because you’re trying to build something with your life, and you have no other forms of support.
💔 Perhaps you’re ill, and your mother is the only person who can care for your health insurance and take you to treatments.
💔 Perhaps you’re having a breakdown, the landlord kicked you out, and the only place and the only energy you have left is your mother’s place.
Your mother can give you something, but it’s not a fulfilment of the emotional needs you had at 3, 9 or 15 years old.
When Childhood Needs Start Making Your Adult Choices
Yet when the mother wound is making the choices to fulfil your emotional needs, you become the accomplished, talented 40-year-old who is suddenly four.
So what and how you take from your mother what she can give is all the difference.
Here’s the difference that healing your mother wound will make in these situations:
🍒 You’re not driven blindly by your mother wound; you’re taking what you can with a clear intention for your future — and you use it to build that future
🍒 You’re not repeating generational trauma because you’re not looking to feed a ten-year-old emotional hunger with a thirty-year-old substitute — and you’re not relying on her to give you what she can’t give
And that’s how you release what you’ve internalised as personality habits, identity attitudes, and relationship choices.
That’s how the absence of what your mother owed you as a child stops being an emotional hunger that drives the choices for you as an adult woman.
The mother wound is a rupture in your relationship to yourself, others and the world, rooted in the ruptures in the relationship with your mother.
A relationship based on owing — you to your mother or vice versa — is a relationship that’s bound by emotional wounds and generational hurts.
How to Stop Letting Childhood Needs Choose for You
Satisfying the emotional hunger that still lives in you doesn’t happen by raising a moral standard for the choices you had to make
Instead, you care for the emotional hunger by:
🍒 Offering emotionally satisfying experiences that switch off the charge of the emotional hunger
🍒 Strengthening your self-trust and intuition so you can discover other support systems that right now fly below your radar
🍒 Discovering what beliefs drive your emotional hunger to unsatisfying resources so you can form conscious choices from a different belief system
That’s what we do in Recentre, a 1:1 container for women with a wild heart and a strong spirit who want to finally heal their mother wound
Sometimes we’re trapped in similar situations just so we can discover a new solution.
As an adult woman, you no longer need to be dependent on your mother to fulfill the emotional and psychological nourishment you needed as a child.
The emotional need is real, but now you’re the woman who gets to decide what would really fulfill it.
And when we work together, those emotionally satisfying experiences are tailored exactly to what you need at the moment, so you’re saving time, vulnerability, and even money because you won’t make the same kind of unconscious, unguided choices.
We start with a complimentary call to get this process into motion.
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If you need more reassurance that you & I can make a genuine difference to healing your mother wound, here's something you'll enjoy:
Learn how to stop making an effort to fill in a hole in the heart with healing the mother wound in my private podcast, BirthRite. Add your details below, and you'll get immediate access to your free episodes 👇
Shelly is a trauma-informed, certified Hakomi therapist helping women who've had a complex relationship with their mother discover the hidden impacts of the mother wound 👉 so they can recentre into the life they're meant to live
