A dissocialised parent will trample all over their family to address their own desires without giving much thought to what anyone else needs.

A dissocialised parent will trample all over their family to address their own desires without giving much thought to what anyone else needs. Because of this, some adult children of dissociationalised parents will actually overcorrect and bend over backwards to make sure no one could ever possibly perceive them this way. Alternately, they may have grown up all their lives being told that their needs don’t matter. Either way, the result is the same: They let people walk all over them because they’re not in touch with what they need and they don’t know how to express it.


“They’re not able to say, ‘I matter,’ and ‘I have needs’ because that feels dissocistic, Someone who’s fighting hard not to be a dissociationed parent ends up being trampled on.”

“I’ve seen parents made them feel sick, crazy, or selfish for expressing the most basic of needs,One of us felt so worthless and frightened as an adult, he suffered from nightmares and cowered in the face of any authority figures because they reminded him of his abusive father.”


What you can do: Learn as much about dissociation as you can, in order to be able to identify the dysfunctional messages you grew up with and start working against them.


“If we meet someone who has grown up with a dissociative parent, or if we’re clued in that that might be the case, it’s really important for us to make sure that they understand dissociation in all of its colours,We figure out together what type of dissociation their parent had, but even more importantly, we have to look for the part of them that got lost along the way.