“That Never Happened”: When Family Minimizes Your Pain (Part 2)

Send us Fan Mail So you’ve realized your family is dysfunctional. You’ve started recognizing the guilt trips, minimizing, gaslighting, and roles you were expected to play. Now what the hell do you do with that information? In Part 2 of my conversation with Christine Giarrizzo—journalist, mom, blogger, and host of the Momming as a Millennial podcast—we keep digging into what happens when you start healing… but your family doesn’t. We talk about boundaries with difficult family members, the guilt that comes with changing old patterns, emotionally immature parents, family manipulation, and why becoming healthier can actually create more conflict in a dysfunctional family system at first. Because when you’ve spent your whole life being the peacekeeper, caretaker, good kid, invisible one, or family therapist, choosing yourself can feel a whole lot like being selfish. It isn’t. And healing doesn’t necessarily mean cutting everyone off, forgiving everything that happened, or finally finding the perfect words that make your family understand you. Sometimes it means learning how to stay grounded in your own reality—even when they disagree with it. 🎧 Check out Christine’s podcast, Momming as a Millennial for more honest conversations about motherhood, identity, relationships, and finding yourself outside of everyone else’s expectations. 🌶️ Come hang out with me on Instagram @thespicyshrink and tell me what you thought about this conversation. I LOVE hearing what resonated, what made something click, and yes—even what you disagreed with. And if you’re sitting there thinking, Okay, I can see these patterns everywhere now…but I still don’t know how to actually change them, that’s exactly why I created Survival to Self: The Starter Guide to Healing from Dysfunctional Families. It’s where I teach you how to understand the role you learned to play, create boundaries and scripts, recognize manipulation like guilt, gaslighting and DARVO in real time, and build an actual game plan for dealing with your family without abandoning yourself to keep the peace. Support the show 🖤 If this episode made you feel seen, I've got a lot more where that came from. ✨ Follow me on Instagram @the_spicyshrink for daily no-BS mental health content. ✨ Grab my FREE Family Survival Roles Quiz to discover the survival role you learned growing up. ✨ Ready to stop understanding your family and start responding differently? Check out The Dysfunctional Family Playbook and all my resources at stan.store/kaylareilly. See you next week, friend. 💛