Hello,
My name is Yvette and you've heard me talk here about parentification before and parentification is where The child takes over.
The place of one of the parents.
And they form a sort of relationship.
However,
The child,
Of course,
Should be the child.
And today I want to talk about something similar.
But it looks a bit different,
So I want to talk about what is triangulation.
And of course,
What can you do about it?
I'm not talking about triangulation.
Where you do different methods.
I'm talking about triangulation with,
In this case,
The father,
The mother,
And the daughter.
And triangulation is.
.
.
It looks like you can see here,
It looks like a triangle.
And in a healthy relationship,
Parents have a little bit more distance and they are looking at their child.
Child has their own space and they are responsible for their own life and their own relationships.
But with triangulation what happens is,
Well.
.
.
The child becomes involved in this relationship.
And that can be for multiple reasons,
And I will give a couple of examples.
One example could be that the parents are having a difficult relationship,
So the child becomes a mediator.
They are meddling in their relationship so that they stay together.
Could also be the case that they are,
For example,
Constant fighting.
And the child becomes the protector.
For example,
Father does something to mother and the child is protecting mother,
So it becomes a protector.
So as you can see,
It can have different forms.
So how does this happen and why is it a problem?
It happens because of loyalty,
Because out of love.
A child doesn't even know it does it.
And the Paris.
Don't even notice it well,
Most of it.
It becomes part of their new normal.
And this later on can lead to difficulties,
Let's say,
When this daughter turns out to be a grown woman,
She wants to have a healthy adult relationship with someone else,
And she keeps failing to do so because,
Well,
She is already in a relationship.
And in systemic language we do this because,
Well,
We want to belong.
We want to belong and we love our parents,
Whether or not we are angry with them,
Whether or not we want to say it.
We love them and we do this out of loyalty,
So that we are not excluded.
And later on this might also form a pattern like I shared in relationship,
But this could also be something you will do in work for example,
In your professional life,
It will repeat itself.
And another example within triangulations is where there are,
Like I shared before,
Alliances,
For example.
Let's say mom starts to form an alliance with daughter because,
Well,
That is,
You know,
Not a great guy.
And the daughter starts to reject the father.
But anger will arise because daughter is rejecting 50% of herself,
Because father is 50% of daughter.
But you're still in a triangulation.
And it's very important that parents take on their own role of being a parent and taking care of their relationship.
And the child should be the child.
And take the role of being a child.
So what can you do about triangulation?
Well,
The parents first need to acknowledge a very painful thing,
That this has happened,
That they let this happen with their child.
They need to first acknowledge and then take on their own role as being a parent.
The child also needs to acknowledge and be aware of what has happened.
And take on their own role as being a child.
Sometimes that might look like this.
Take some distance.
I'm not saying we all should cut contact with our parents.
But there should be a healthy distance.
And become more aware where this pattern is also showing.
Be more aware of your own behavior.
And what you could do.
Is one of the things you can do is a constellation,
A family constellation.
For example,
Work with represents that someone is representing mom,
Someone's representing dad,
And someone is representing you.
And you then,
Of course,
Get into the constellation.
And there's a whole process there.
There is some healing part of it and some integration.
But I can tell you more about that.
That's a whole different video in itself.
And keep learning about what triangulation is.
Therapy of course and talk about it,
For example with ACT could be a great way,
Multiple things you can do but the first step like ACT is just see it,
See that it happens and what's going on and learn the difference between what I shared in the beginning,
What is parentification about this.
Triangulation.
And you already know the difference now.
So thank you for being here.
Thank you for listening,
Watching.
And go check out my profile if you want to know and learn more.
