Beyond Survival - The Therapy Podcast with Katie McKenna

What happens when you realise your relationship with your mother has been shaped by emotional parentification, enmeshment, and emotional abuse?
In this week’s letter, a 48-year-old woman shares how much of her identity and behaviour was shaped around managing her mother’s needs. After setting boundaries and working through childhood trauma in therapy, she begins to recognise the familiar cycle of guilt, gaslighting, victimhood, emotional manipulation, and rewriting history.
Now she faces a question many adult children of toxic parents wrestle with: “Am I the cold, heartless bitch for not wanting to fly to her side and become her caregiver if she needs help?”
This episode explores narcissistic mothers, emotionally immature parents, parentification, enmeshment, toxic family dynamics, boundaries, estrangement, caregiver guilt, and complicated grief—and offers reassurance to anyone who has spent a lifetime questioning whether protecting themselves makes them a bad person.
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A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing – When Your Mother Won't Protect You 
"I always thought my mom was the softer, kind parent."
"She would tell me to just ignore it, or apologise"
After finally setting boundaries with her abusive stepfather, this weeks listener faces a painful new reality: her mother still refuses to acknowledge the harm she experienced and instead pressures her to forgive, reconnect, and keep the peace.
As she struggles with guilt, grief, family exclusion, and the possibility of going low contact or no contact with her mother, she asks a deeply painful question: How do you navigate a relationship with a mother who didn't protect you—and how do you manage the guilt if you choose to walk away?
This episode explores childhood emotional abuse, family trauma, maternal invalidation, toxic family dynamics, setting boundaries with parents, estrangement, guilt, and the difficult journey of healing from an abusive childhood.
When Your Mother Won’t Protect You: Setting Boundaries After Childhood Abuse

Book: If You Knew Me, Would You Love Me? 
Author: A.J. Cosgrave
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BEYOND SURVIVAL - The Therapy Podcast

How do I build and maintain a boundaried relationship with narcissistic parents?
Or am I mad for even wanting to try?
This week, a listener asks: What happens when the parents who hurt you are finally trying — but still fall back into the same old patterns?
After years of being parentified, emotionally manipulated, and punished whenever she tried to assert her independence – this weeks listener went no contact and it gave her the space she needed to heal. She's learned to regulate herself, break old patterns, and show up differently in her own relationships and as a parent.
But now comes the hard part.
Her parents went to family therapy for 9 months – and the picture is mixed. She can now see the manipulation as it happens, rather than weeks later. There are signs of genuine effort, but the old patterns still emerge when they feel challenged or don't get what they want. 
In this episode, Ruth and I explore the complexities of reconnecting after estrangement, how to distinguish genuine change from attempts to regain access, and what it means to maintain boundaries when someone is making an effort but still isn't able to fully take accountability.
We also explore neurodivergence, intergenerational trauma, parentification, and the difficult question at the heart of this letter: How do I build and maintain a boundaried relationship with narcissistic parents that includes my children?

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"I feel stupid for tolerating it for so long"
This week's listener grew up in a narcissistic evangelical family where religion was used to justify fear, control and abuse. 
As the eldest child, she became a high-achiever, believing that self-sacrifice and obedience were the keys to love and acceptance.
Decades later, after her sister disclosed childhood sexual abuse by their father, everything changed. 
Therapy, reporting her own abuse and finally leaving her own coercive and abusive marriage brought freedom—but also devastating loss when another sister chose to defend the perpetrator instead.
Katie and Ruth explore why some siblings remain loyal to abusive parents.
How narcissistic family systems operate like cults. 
And why so many survivors unknowingly repeat abusive patterns in adulthood. 
You're not alone — and this episode explains why.

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SERVE  – My Lost Years At The Heart of Opus Dei – by Anne Marie Allen 
Uncultured – A memoir of growing up in a Cult – by Daniella Mestyanek Young
MonteMader on Instagram - Platform on deconstructing Christian Nationalism
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When you finally find the strength to go no contact with abusive parents, it can feel like the hardest decision you'll ever make. 
But what when of those parents becomes seriously ill?
This week we hear from a listener who spent decades trying to make sense of life with a covertly narcissistic mother and an enabling father before choosing to protect herself and her own family through estrangement. 
Over time, things have quietened, but the attempts to provoke contact have never fully stopped.

And then a brief letter arrives revealing her father's diagnosis, bringing with it an unexpected wave of grief, guilt and emotional conflict.

Together, Ruth and I explore one of the most painful questions adult children of narcissistic families face: 
Does a parent's illness change anything? 
Are boundaries possible?
Can you hold compassion for someone's suffering while still protecting yourself from further harm? 
If you've ever questioned your decision to remain no contact, worried that illness means you "should" go back, or struggled with the guilt that can surface when an abusive parent becomes vulnerable, this episode offers understanding, validation, and a compassionate framework for navigating one of the most emotionally complex situations adult survivors can face.

www.callaghancounselling.ie
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BEYOND SURVIVAL - The Therapy Podcast