Hello and welcome to the Mathias J. Barker podcast my name is Mathias I'm a

psychotherapist here in Spokane, Washington and this is a podcast about

mental health and what makes life meaningful and today I'm actually on Tik-

talk live right now and I'm answering just a couple

questions before we get started with today's episode.

All right, let's see what we got here.

How do you deal with manipulative parents?

That's a great question.

I would say that you really want to spend some time thinking

about the boundaries that you have in place with your parents.

And boundaries, you could think of boundaries as the things that you're consenting to and then

the secret contracts that are at play within your relationship.

Meaning, maybe your parents have an expectation

that you come over for dinner.

And they enforce that expectation

with like a guilt trip around it, all the things that they've done to

help you along the way as a kid and to all the sacrifices that they've made for

you and so you owe it to them as our kid to spend weekly time with them.

And that's something that I would call it like a secret contract.

That's a contract that someone is holding on you or a parent is holding on you because of sacrifices they made for you as a kid.

But the problem with that is that you couldn't consent to those contracts and the problem with

that whole methodology, that whole strategy of parents may be manipulating their children into compliance with whatever expectations they have using

...