CALLING HOME with Whitney Goodman, LMFT - Parentification and the Price of Being the Problem Solver

Episode Date: October 9, 2025

Whitney shares three life-changing practices that reduced her anxiety—meditation with red light therapy, using Brick to limit social media, and consuming news only in written form. She then answers a caller's question about being the parentified golden child expected to solve all family problems while maintaining surface-level relationships with a mother and sisters who refuse deeper connection. Red light therapy: https://amzn.to/48i5OyN 00:00 October at Calling Home: Illness and End of Life Caregiving 04:40 Three Changes That Dramatically Reduced My Anxiety 14:28 Q&A: The Golden Child Who Had to Solve Everything 19:28 When Children Are Trapped Between Victim and Perpetrator Parents 22:51 The Golden Child Who Doesn't Feel Golden 25:42 How to Maintain Relationships Without Real Connection Whitney Goodman is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) and the founder of Calling Home, a membership community that helps people navigate complex family dynamics and break harmful cycles. Have a question for Whitney? Call in and leave a voicemail for the show at 866-225-5466 Join the Family Cyclebreakers Club⁠⁠ Follow Whitney on Instagram | sitwithwhit Follow Whitney on YouTube | @whitneygoodmanlmft ⁠⁠Order Whitney’s book, Toxic Positivity⁠⁠ Learn more about ad choices. Visit podcast.choices.com/adchoices This podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome back to the Calling Home podcast. I am your host, Whitney Goodman. Today we have a caller question episode where I'm going to be answering a question from one of our listeners. As a reminder, you can always send me a voice note or a written question to Whitney at callinghome.co. And I will answer your question on the show. I pick a different question every week. But before we get into that, I wanted to talk to you about the month of October at Calling Home. Some of you may not know this, but we have a membership community. for listeners of the show. And that is called the Family Cycle Breakers Club at Calling Home. And every month inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club, we focus on a new topic, and I create

a full content library that allows you to really walk through an issue from A to Z, learn everything that you need to know, and actually give you some tools and skills to work on it. And this month in October, we are talking about illness, disability, and end-of-life caregiving in dysfunctional or estranged families. Because we know that illness does not erase dysfunction, it really just complicates it. So if you're wondering, how am I going to take care of that family member or who's going to help me when I don't have any family? What do I do about siblings who won't help or who are pressuring me to help?

This is the month for you. The way that our membership works is that once you join, you get access to weekly content drop. So every Monday you're going to get an article, a worksheet, a script, and a video. And then you're also going to get access to our entire content library, which includes every course that I've ever made and sold in the last five years. We have the Emotions 101 course. We have a course for empaths and highly sensitive people. We have a course on supporting someone with a trauma history. Those courses I used to sell for like $300 to $500 a course. And now they are all available underneath the Family Cycle Barriers Club membership. So it's a really amazing deal if you haven't

taken any of my courses before. You're also going to get access to our live support groups. We have 12 groups a month at Calling Home that are run by licensed therapist, including me and our other Wonder facilitators, Samantha Dalton, who is the host of the Nuance Needed podcast. And then we also have Stephanie, who is the facilitator for our estranged family group. And that is a is a group where anyone who is estranged from a family member can go and talk about that process, get support, learn about estrangement, et cetera. I also run a monthly topic group. So this month, if you are dealing with illness, dysfunctional families, end of life care, I'm going to be running a special support group that will allow you to dive deeper into that content and work more on that

topic. I think that our groups are really like the reason why people join calling home and definitely the reason why they stick around. And I want to share some things that people have said about our groups. And they said this last month after our family secrets topic. So here are some things that people learned and took away from the content and the groups in September at calling home. I learned that family secrets don't have to be dramatic or sensational to be damaging or relevant. Thank you for helping me gain a deeper understanding and insight, not just about my family, but about myself. Joining the community has been warm and enlightening. Finally, I'm not alone and I don't feel like a terrible person for leaving my family behind. Keeping secrets gave me the impression that I was

part of a special club and that holding secrets meant you could be trusted. I learned to follow along so that I could keep the peace even if it meant it cost me mine. People didn't judge me when I shared my family stuff and I was afraid that would happen. I'm not the only only. I'm not the only only one with family secrets, and I shouldn't feel ashamed. I am so proud to say that the calling home community is really a judgment-free zone, and it is a place where you will find people who really understand what you're going through or who are already on the other side of it and can help you get through it. Inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club, you'll find weekly resources, safe community, and therapist-led groups to guide you through illness, care, and family

dysfunction all month long this October at Calling Home. If you'd like to join, you can visit callinghome.cow and join the Family Cycle Breakers Club today. All right. So now let's get into those three things that I changed in my life. It helped me so much. If you're on my email list, which I hope all of you are, you can see that in the show notes. I send out emails on Monday. And that's one of the main ways that I keep in touch with all of you. You'll know that I shared some of these things with you. And I want to dive a little deeper into like what I've been doing and why I did this. But I noticed about six months ago that I was kind of headed down a path of anxiety that I did not like. And a lot of it had to do with how I was running my mornings. And so I decided to do some

research. My aura ring was also telling me that like my heart health was really bad and I was stressed all the time. And it just, it didn't make sense to me. And I was like, I needed to do something about this. So I think I told you all about this in a previous episode, but I did a lot of research on meditation and really how long you needed to do it, what type of meditation, how to track it. And I decided to implement this plan for myself. And I bought one of those red lights and that I've shared on my Instagram stories before that I'm like addicted to now. And decided I was going to implement this like as much as I possibly could. And so I, the first thing I started doing was meditating for like four to five minutes.

Sometimes I do longer this morning. I woke up feeling a little off and I was like, I'm going to do 10 minutes. And that's been an interesting shift for me is normally when I wake up feeling kind of funky, I would be like, oh, I'm not meditating today. I need to get up. Or if there was any excuse like I overslept my alarm by five minutes or one of my kids was up before me. Someone was crying. Like, it sounded like my husband needed help downstairs. I would find any excuse to like bulldoze past my self-care in the morning. And that's been a really hard thing

for me, especially with really young children that I've had to work through. So I started using my aura ring app, which has a ton of meditations built into it and this red light. And I'll link the red light in the show notes for you. It's on Amazon and it's one of the cheaper ones. And I do this right when I wake up. So I don't even get out of bed. And it's actually a good way to ease into waking up. My alarm goes off around 530, 545, 6. One of those times is when I set my alarm.

But I try to get up within those 30 minutes every day. I keep the red light plugged in underneath my bed, pull it out, put it on top of my bed. I get the app open and I pick a meditation that I want to do that day. I need to find another meditation app if any of you have good suggestions, though, because I've kind of used all of the aura ring ones and I'm getting kind of tired of it. But they're very good until you use them all like 100 times. So then I turn on the light. It's on my bed. And I just lean back in my bed and do the meditation and allow myself to like have those, you know, four to 10 minutes. And inevitably, my older child, typically, he always interrupts me. And he comes in and he wants

to be in my room. And I've started just saying, like, hey, I'm doing this right now. If you want to be in here with me, that's fine. And usually he'll just get in my bed and sit there. And I said this in my email newsletter. Like, I've even heard him, like, taking a few deep breaths with the meditation or, like, he'll just kind of sit in the bed and lay down. And I think it's good for both of us. And I'm trying to like model that and still take care of myself, even if there's something. And if he can't sit still, I'll tell him, like, you need to go back to your room or go downstairs with dad, whatever it is. But I'm trying to not get derailed. And even on those mornings where there's been interruptions or there's been chaos, like it still has been helpful. And I'm proud of myself for even like attempting

to do it. The second thing that I've been doing is using the brick, which I'll link to that as well in the show notes every night before I go to bed. And it's getting like earlier and earlier that I do it. And I brick on my phone, which means I disable all these apps. It's this thing that you scan your phone on. You can also just push the brick on your phone if you don't have the device with you. And you can decide which apps for it to lock. And so I block all my social media apps.

I do leave my email open because that's not really like a toxic. thing. Social media tends to be worse. And so that way I can still have my phone because that's how I use my baby monitor and like it's my alarm and stuff like that. But I cannot get on social media. And this has stopped me from scrolling before bed. It stopped me from scrolling when I wake up in the middle of the night and I can't sleep. And it stopped me from going on social media the first thing when I wake up, which then makes it even more likely than I'm going to meditate and get out of bed on time. Because when social media is part of your job, I cannot tell you how easy it is for me to open that up and be like, oh, I'm working. I'm not working. And especially

if I'm starting my day reading like mean comments about me, like who, no one needs to start their day. Like it's not, it's not worth it. So this has been the best. And honestly, I, I've been keeping it bricked from like 7.30 p.m. to 7.30 a.m. So once like I do the morning with my kids, like my older one is off to school, I'm not going on social media until that is over. And it's really, really great, extremely helpful. The third thing that I've started doing is I'm only consuming news in written format. I noticed that I was going down this really bad rabbit hole of like reading a lot on especially like Twitter or voices that I did not like that were just like rage bait type of voices. And you can go listen to my episode on breaking up with the rage

economy for more on that. And so to the people that have been commenting this, this is not me saying bury my head in the sand, I don't care what happens. Everybody else, you know, is on their own. I'm saying that I have had to create a way to consume this particular new cycle that's happening right now in the world that allows me to be functional, to be a good mother, and to create the type of world that I want to create. And so that means that I have subscribed to two email newsletters that I find to be very informative but not activating. And those are letters from an American and unbiased society. Both of them are just text, no videos, no spin, no like traumatizing images. And it's just like the facts, no

unnecessary commentary, no videos, no like just giving your opinion for the sake of giving your opinion. And I've almost completely stopped engaging with like news commentary on social media and I don't watch it on television. If there's something that I read and I should point out these newsletters are daily. So I get the information. that I need each day. And then if I want to learn more about something, I continue looking it up. And so I would definitely go listen to that episode on breaking up with the rage economy if you want more of my thoughts on that. Now, I made these three changes, I think about six months ago, something like that. And I haven't been perfect. Like I want to point that out that especially

the weekends, like I'm not great about meditating because I just get up with my kids and I'm doing that. I'm much better about it during the week. Sometimes I forget to break my phone, but it has become part of my regular routine. And I've noticed that my stress is so much better. And I can see that on my aura ring, but I can also just see that in how I feel. I'm sleeping better. I can focus more. And I'm not as like addicted to my phone. I've noticed myself really being able to like break up with that constant scrolling and consuming and like being, I felt very under threat all the time because of my phone and on edge. And it was not helpful, especially because the goals that I have professionally and personally, you know, require me to be very centered and like emotionally

level in order to do a lot of this stuff. And so this has been a great way for me to balance being informed, caring, doing something about it, and also like taking care of myself and my family and my children. So if you try any of this, or even if you just want to implement one of these things in your life, like, let me know. I would love to hear about it from you in the comments or in the reviews or you can send me a DM on Instagram or an email because I wouldn't recommend anything to you unless I really felt like it had been so tremendously helpful for me. And I think that these three things have made such a big difference. And it's not like I'm doing them every day perfectly at all, not even close. And it's amazing still how much that has helped. So I hope that

helps you too. All right. Now we are going to get to that caller question. You can always send me your questions to Whitney at callinghome.com in a voice note or in written form. And I would love to answer a question about your challenging family dynamics on the show. I'm going to play some of that question for you now. Hi, Whitney. Thanks for the content that you share through your podcast. It has helped me tremendously through my healing journey. I grew up in a dysfunctional family environment that included a hardworking father, stay-at-home mom, and three female siblings. My parents emotionally abused each other in different ways and levels. My father always extremely limited my mom financially and expected her to stay at home to take care of him and the kids.

My father, who is now deceased, was a very volatile person when managing conflicts with my mom. My mom has always been a very insecure woman and highly emotionally mature, who manages conflict through passive aggressiveness, silent treatment, and staying in bed while crying and feeling miserable. I strongly believe that both of my parents came from me. dysfunctional families, and they just repeated what they learned while growing up. I always wonder why they lack the motivation to learn better methods to manage relationships and conflicts and protect their kids from their own traumas. My parents never tried to hide their arguments and problems from me and my siblings,

although it was clear that we were expected to never share what happened at home with anyone. I think that was mostly out of embarrassment on my parents' side. Both of my parents made sure that our physical needs were met and we were never physically abused. I have always struggled talking about this because it makes me feel bad to carry trauma related to my childhood when there are other people that had it worst. It was not until my late 40s

when I couldn't handle the emotional pain and physical symptoms that come with it anymore. that I decided to start speaking about it. I always knew too much about my parents' marriage problems, and I felt responsible for saving my mom from her misery. She used me as her confident, and to complain about my father, which resulted in me having conflicts with my father for defending her.

I feel that she did not allow me to have a normal relationship with my father, and it is hard not to resent it. I'm the oldest sibling and my two sisters and I have never had a close relationship. And I don't think that we ever developed a sibling's type of funding. My sisters have always referred to me as a golden child, which was taught for me to accept until a few years ago. It did not make sense to me that I was a golden child because I never received privileges that my sisters were not given

or preferential treatment. However, my sisters always complained that they were compared to me. One of my sisters' struggles with eating disorders and loves self-esteem, which I think is a result of the trauma that she carries from her childhood. I always felt that my mom demanded from me way more than from my sisters and expected me to be the problem solver for anything that comes up that involves her and my sisters. Her expectations towards me always felt higher than what I could accomplish, and I always felt guilty for not making her happy or doing what she wanted me to do. My mom followed the same practice when dealing with my siblings than what she did when she had problems with my dad.

She confided in me whenever she struggled parenting my sisters and asked of me to get involved to fix the problems. As in her mind, I was the oldest sister and the most mature. and experienced. That led me to act more as a mom with my sisters than as a sibling, as I believe that in order to stop my mom from suffering, I had to school and guide them even though I did not have the knowledge and maturity that being a parent of teenagers and young adults requires. I believe this dynamic plus the poor foundation that we have from our parents' relationship prevented us from developing a safe environment where we can open me share what is happening on each other's life. I want to pause here and talk some about some of the

themes that are coming up in this voicemail. And then we're going to continue listening. So we have an oldest daughter here that seems like she was very highly emotionally parentified and involved in her parents' marriage. And we have the typical dynamic that often happens in these types of families and these types of marriages where you have a domineering aggressive, obviously abusive type of father and a mother who is much more passive, crying, emotional, victimized. And we have this dynamic here of she is the victim and he is the perpetrator. And when children are trapped in this type of system, it's very confusing for them. Because while they do see that their father is victimizing the mother and is probably much more outwardly abusive and like engaging in hostile

behavior, there can also be quite a bit of resentment towards the mother. And I think you can hear that in this voicemail of like I was her confidant. I was always involved. She was always kind of beat down by my father. And I feel like I didn't get to have a normal relationship with anyone because of their dynamic. And so while you could feel empathy and sympathy for the mother and view it in that dynamic of like, okay, she is a victim also of the father, the children are victims of both people in this situation. And they are ultimately being robbed of a healthy and stable childhood because of how this marriage is functioning. This caller is also saying, you know, that she felt like she couldn't say that she had

problems in her family because other people had it worse. Or she had a roof over her head and things were provided for her. And I just want to say this is such a common feeling, you know, especially among people that join the family cycle workers club by calling home. We hear this all the time. And I think people are fearful of coming to our groups because they think, like, what if my situation isn't as bad as everybody else is? You know, what if people judge me for thinking that this is actually bad and they've been through

so much worse? And so I just want you to know that, like, a lot of people think that. And it's rarely actually the case. It's very common for all of you listening to this, I think to downplay things much more than to overly exaggerate them. If anything, you're very much questioning, like, am I allowed to be upset about this when you very much are allowed to be upset about it? There's also this dynamic being brought up about being the golden child and not feeling like

the golden child. And I think this is so important. I have an episode on the golden child that I recorded with Vienna-Faron, I think, in like early 24, where we talk about this feeling like sometimes a child. can appear like the golden child, but they're actually under so much pressure to perform and to meet the needs of the parent. And it can look like they're the golden child, but they're also being unfairly treated within this family system. And things actually aren't that good for them. They are being victimized in a different way. So maybe they're being parentified. They realize

they have to perform for love. They need to be the parents. therapist and confidant, like all of that can be true for that golden child. And the other ones that are being scapegoated and blamed or treated unfairly can look at that and say, look how good they have it. When in reality, everyone is being hurt by this system. All right, I'm going to play some more of this voicemail. There have been difficult situations such as death in the family illness and family affairs at different points in time. But I have a lot of felt completely alone because my mom and sisters have not given me a hand to solve whatever needed to be solved. On the contrary, my mom has expected me to solve everything for them.

Everything works fine until I complain about feeling alone, which results in me being judged as a bad person and full of resentment. It feels that things will only be normal if I solve the problems are happy and stay silent. Otherwise, I have to face the judgment and the silent treatment from my mom. She questions me constantly on why my sisters and I are not close and why we can make decisions together in harmony. For so long, I felt so guilty about not being able to have the close relationship that my mom has so harshly asked me to have with my siblings. It made me feel that somehow I caused my sisters not too like and love me. After years of therapy and learning about dysfunction in families,

I no longer believe that I'm the reason for the disconnection between me and my sisters. I would love to be close to them and be able to count on each other as almost siblings, but I finally understand that it might never be part of us. It hurts tremendously as I love my mom and my sisters, but none of them want to talk about it. and when I have tried to explain to my mom, what I have learned about our family dysfunction. Her responses are things like,

oh, I'm the worst mother, or you need to turn the page, using a sarcastic tone followed by silent treatment. My last resort was to write her letter, but she openly told me that she decided not to read it, which was extremely helpful for me. My questions for you, Whitney, are, how can I get rid of the pain that I carry and maintain a normal relationship with my mom and my sisters, knowing that we will probably never be able to really connect? Thank you. Thank you so much

for this extremely well thought out and insightful question. I think that you are spot on about the difficulties in your relationships with your sisters, not being necessarily your fault or a result of how you all are interacting as adults. I'm a firm believer, and I think that the research backs up this clinical opinion that relationships between siblings need to be fostered and cultivated by parents. And parents can do a lot of damage to these types of relationships when children are treated differently in the family, when they are not encouraged to learn to work together, to get along, and to solve problems. And it sounds like all of you had to find new ways to cope and deal with the family. And some of those ways disrupted your ability to bond with one another, which is really

challenging. And it makes it so hard to have those healthy family relationships. I think you said something so profound that I want to share again for anyone that might have missed it is like that you feel like I have to solve the problems, be happy, and stay silent. And I think that that is such an accurate view of what it feels like often to be the golden child in a family or the parentified one, the one that's always fixing things. It feels like people rely on you to play that role. And when you don't want to play it anymore, people get upset about that. And it's really, really challenging to, like, give up that role in the family and stop playing it. Now, you asked a really interesting question at the end about, you know, like, how can I have

these relationships if I know that there will never be, like, real connection? And I think that that's where you have to decide what are these relationships going to look like if this is the best that my mom and my sister or my sisters can give me. if this is all they can do you know it's not going to be a connected vulnerable like emotional type of relationship it's going to just be this like acquaintance or distant relationship what's that going to be like for me can you have a relationship with people that are brushing things under the rug like your mom was saying you know it's time to move past it and move on like can you have a relationship with someone that's doing that and we have a lot of

content inside the Family Cycle Breakers Club at Calling Home about parents who won't apologize accepting your parent and also adult sibling relationships. If you visit Callinghome.com and just type in parent who won't apologize, adult sibling relationships, you're going to get tons of scripts, checklist, worksheets to help you kind of work through some of these questions. And those are all available to our members of the Family Cycle Breakers Club. But I think that some of you will say, you know what, I'd rather have some contact, some type of relationship, even if it's not deep or connected or includes an apology. And I'm okay with that and I'm going to do it versus others will say, I'm not okay with that. I can't be fake. I can't have this

surface level relationship. Like, I'm just not able to have a relationship with you. And I think that there's, of course, a lot of shades of gray, you know, in the middle here of conversations. you can have boundaries you can set but I can tell by this caller that like you have a deep level of insight and understanding into what is going on here and it sounds like you're looking for permission to say like this works for me or it doesn't and I just want to give you that that it is ultimately your choice on what feels almost like good enough for you here if if you got to choose and it's hard to make that choice I think when you're still tied up in that parentified golden child like role. And unfortunately, people can only meet you as far as

they're willing to meet themselves, as far as they're willing to meet you. And sometimes it's really hard to have those types of relationships when all of this has happened already. Thank you so much to our caller for calling in. You can always submit a question to Whitney at calling home.com.co. And either send me a voice note or a written question. I will answer it on the podcast. I also host monthly Q&A's for our members in the Family Cycle Breakers Club once a month at Calling Home. Those are recorded and I answer as many questions as I can get to. So absolutely join if you would like to ask me more in-depth questions and you don't want to have it on the show. Those questions are also anonymous. You can join the Family Cycle Breakers Club at www.

Callinghome.com. Thank you all so much for listening. Please don't forget to like, subscribe, and leave a review, and I will see you for the next episode. Bye. The Calling Home podcast is not engaged in providing therapy services, mental health advice, or other medical advice or services. It is not a substitute for advice from a qualified health care provider and does not create any therapist, patient, or other treatment relationship between you and Colling Home or Whitney Goodman. For more information on this, please see Calling Home's terms of service linked in the show notes below. You know.