Parents really need to realize—or be taught—that they are exocortices for their children, one of whose primary roles is to process things that the child cannot and be a sink for big emotions, NOT a source of them. When parents push their own emotions onto a child, that invariably is traumatizing—as in the case of parentification or “emotional incest”, or narcissistic abuse, etc. This is another example of that. Arguably, telling a child they ought to feel worse about something that has happened to them is itself a form of abuse.
Parents really need to realize—or be taught—that they are exocortices for their children, one of whose primary roles is to process things that the child cannot and be a sink for big emotions, NOT a source of them. When parents push their own emotions onto a child, that invariably is traumatizing—as in the case of parentification or “emotional incest”, or narcissistic abuse, etc. This is another example of that. Arguably, telling a child they ought to feel worse about something that has happened to them is itself a form of abuse.