Mohini Kundu

I came to my therapist with problems like extreme anxiety without a clear cause and outsized reactions to my family’s problems and opinions of me — something that had always been labeled in my as “being too sensitive.”

It alarms me how common the experience I had was: a parent-ified daughter who was told to put her family’s emotions above her own and ended up an annoying said family as a people-pleaser as a result. Is it truly the lot of daughters? (Or is my phone listening to my conversations and serving me content that confirms all my biases?)

I know it’s at least a bit bigger than that. Most every girlfriend I have can relate to the enmeshment I experienced: being looped into every siblings relationships and hardships, getting calls from the parents with an edict to set things right, somehow, some way.

I had no idea that there was a way to be other than this, until my therapist told me I didn’t actually have to take on everyone’s troubles. That in fact, that’s not a very healthy thing to do.

I remember fighting her and saying, “I do this because I care. I can’t just not care.” But the truth is, I didn’t just care. I would get a pit in my stomach worrying about my older brother, or stressing about my father’s impending retirement that didn’t seem to bother him much at all. I was overwhelmed with anxiety worrying about other people’s emotions, and half the time they weren’t even real.

She helped me see that I had gotten used to perceiving other people’s emotions in order to see how I could best accommodate them. This was how I created safety for myself in a changing environment that felt like quicksand. Part of reading other people’s emotions is assuming them based on my own experiences, and as we’ve established, everything was worrying me. So I was often imaging problems in my head and tasking myself with solving them like I had been taught to. And I was driving myself insane.

Once I had this realization, it still took literal years to unlearn the cycle that kept my stuck people-pleasing and worrying. Next, I’ll share three things that helped me break the loop.