🎠What it means to have grown up with a parent who had extreme paranoia or delusions
Growing up with a paranoid or delusional parent meant living in a reality where the outside world was always dangerous and your family operated under siege conditions that only you could see.
You may have become an expert at managing crisis situations before they exploded, constantly scanning everyone's emotional weather to spot the next fire. Your parent's mental health problems became the center of family life, and their mood swings and delusions would dictate how everyone felt. You learned to absorb others' emotions easily while suppressing your own to maintain some semblance of stability in an unstable environment.
You may have learned that love came with mixed messages—sometimes your parent was emotionally available, other times they were completely unpredictable or lost in their own alternate reality. Now you find yourself caught between conflicting desires for both closeness and distance, never knowing which version of someone you'll encounter. You feel overly responsible for others' emotions and secretly believe you must be the stronger one in any relationship because everyone else might fall apart at any moment.