If you grew up with a parent who had unpredictable bursts of anger or if you felt like you were responsible for managing their emotions, you may have had an “eggshell parent.”
An eggshell parent is not a clinical term, but is instead a way to describe a host of personalities and behaviors displayed by these kinds of adults, according to experts.
“An eggshell parent is a parent who struggles with regulating their own emotions, and as a result, their children feel as though that they need to walk on eggshells around them due to fear of that parent maybe having an explosive episode, or shaming them in some way or expecting them to do something that’s outside of the range of what’s developmentally normal or developmentally expected,” said Natalie Moore, a licensed marriage and family therapist in California.
And since therapists more often see the children of eggshell parents in therapy and not the eggshell parents themselves, this term is “shorthand for not diagnosing or giving a diagnostic label to something that doesn’t fit fully a diagnostic label,” explained Noelle Santorelli, a licensed clinical psychologist in Atlanta.
“I would say, on the extreme end, an eggshell parent would be someone who suffers from an untreated personality disorder, such as narcissistic personality disorder or borderline personality disorder, and then on the lower side of the spectrum would be a parent who is emotionally immature,” Moore said.
Being raised by a parent who you have to walk on eggshells around is damaging and can lead to some challenges that persist all throughout your life. Below, therapists share common signs, personality traits and struggles that adult children of eggshell parents deal with:
1. You’re hypervigilant.
“You might notice an inner hypervigilance if you were raised by an eggshell parent,” Santorelli said. This could look like “constantly scanning the room for signs of conflict, tension or emotional eruption,” she added.
While you were (and maybe even still are) hypervigilant around your eggshell parent, this hypervigilance also often shows up in other situations, like at work, Santorelli said.
“You might be at work, sitting around a conference table and you might notice you’re hypervigilant. You have a heightened sense of anxiety, or a heightened sense of just sort of being on call, because you’re waiting to read how everyone else in the room is doing because your job is to put out emotional fires,” she explained.
2. You’re a people pleaser.
“People pleasing is a huge reaction to eggshell parenting,” Moore said. “You would be monitoring the moods and the needs of the people around you, and doing everything you possibly can to keep the people around you pleased with you.”
This could mean suppressing your needs or holding your own opinion back so you don’t set someone off, Moore noted.
In this case, people-pleasing is an example of the “fawn” trauma response, which is another side of the fight-or-flight response, Moore explained. This is when you respond to a threatening person or situation by acting in a way that puts you in a positive light.
When falling into the fawn response, “You will actually do things to try to curry favor with [your eggshell parent],” Moore said. “You’re going to do things to try to appease their behavior, have them see you in a more positive light.”
3. You have trouble expressing ― and even naming ― your own emotions.
People who were raised by eggshell parents often have a fear of emotional expression, according to Santorelli. “They’ve learned that it’s best to suppress their own feelings or emotions because having big emotions or any emotions that can offset the eggshell parents emotions, and then that leads to more conflict, so they might just suppress their emotions at all costs.”
If you don’t have experience expressing or understanding your emotions, you may also have a hard time trusting your emotions. Say you feel disappointed in a friend who wronged you. Instead of letting yourself feel that disappointment, you may question why you feel it all and if it’s even OK to feel that way.
Children of an eggshell parent may also find themselves second-guessing their own needs, Santorelli said. This is because they’re so used to putting their emotions on the back burner or totally numbing them out.
“You also might have a very narrow emotional vocabulary, so you might label every emotion you have as overwhelmed or uncomfortable, not even a real feeling word,” said Santorelli, who added that “crazy” and “anxious” are also used as an emotional catchall. “All the emotions … get put in this uncomfortable or ‘bad’ bucket,” she said.
In therapy, you may work on identifying the emotions you’re actually feeling, she said.
“Sometimes people end up having a catchall word that was safe for their eggshell parents. So maybe anxiety was safe, but anger wasn’t,” Santorelli said.
“Any time they feel any emotion, they just jump to anxiety. Then you start to uncover you’re actually not that anxious, you’re actually pissed.”
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4. You feel a heightened responsibility for other people’s emotions.
According to Santorelli, someone who was raised by an eggshell parent may feel overly responsible for other people’s emotions. This is a natural reaction for someone who spent their childhood (and even adulthood) making sure their eggshell parent was content. This behavior also likely follows you into other relationships, too.
“If we use a work context: Your coworker walks in and they look like they’re in a bad mood. I’m assuming I did something wrong maybe yesterday, maybe in my email. I don’t assume that they had trouble commuting to the office,” Santorelli gave as an example. “I’m going to take over responsibility for how people feel and assume it’s on me … it’s my fault, or it’s my job to fix it.”
5. You may notice chronic discomfort when you’re with your eggshell parent.
It’s safe to say that spending time with an eggshell parent who requires extra coddling wouldn’t be too enjoyable. Moore said it’s common for people who have an eggshell parent to feel chronic, low-level discomfort when around that person.
You may find that you avoid this person, and even engage in a pattern of avoidance. “Anytime something uncomfortable comes up, you just find a way to flee and get away from it,” Moore said.
6. You struggle to set boundaries.
If you dealt with an emotionally unpredictable parent as a kid, you likely did whatever you could to keep them calm. So pushing back by establishing your own boundaries likely wasn’t a common, or even safe-feeling occurrence.
“If they tried to set [boundaries] as a kid, there would either be intense pushback to the point where it becomes not worth it, or a blow up to the point where it becomes not worth it,” Santorelli said. “Or even in extreme cases, it could feel dangerous, certainly emotionally unsafe, to set a boundary.”
This could make boundary-setting now feel really tough, and you likely find that you struggle to set boundaries with your eggshell parent, in addition to other people in your life.
If this sounds like you, there are ways to deal with it.
Both Moore and Santorelli noted that being aware that you were raised by an eggshell parent is the first step. With awareness, you can acknowledge that this pattern is going on and examine how it might have impacted you throughout your childhood.
From there, you should determine what you need to do to feel more comfortable around your eggshell parent, according to Moore. This could mean establishing boundaries around certain conversation topics that could trigger you or not agreeing to certain activities that result in you feeling bad. As you set these boundaries, it’s important to check in with yourself.
“When we start changing our behavior, especially when we start setting boundaries with people, is we get pushback, there’s going to be some resistance,” Moore said. “People don’t generally like it when we make changes, because they have a certain expectation about how we’re going to behave, and when we change that, it’s not matching their expectation.”
When it comes to setting boundaries with an eggshell parent, they tend to have rigid ideas about how you should behave with them, and when you set boundaries, you’re “essentially breaking the rules of that relationship and breaking the rules of the family system,” Moore noted.
This is going to feel hard and sad, and could even bring on feelings of guilt and shame.
“It’s not going to be easy. It’s probably going to require you having some support, whether that be some professional support, like working with a therapist or a life coach, or whether that be the social support of talking to a supportive friend who maybe has gone through something similar and can be a cheerleader for you,” Moore said.
As you heal and make changes, it’s important to have self-compassion if you struggle to stop people-pleasing or find yourself questioning your new boundaries, according to Santorelli.
All in all, it’s important that you recognize that “you have emotions, that your emotions are OK, and that you are not responsible anymore ― and never really were for [your parent’s] emotions,” Santorelli said.