You told your mother last week that you can't take calls during work hours. It's 2:15 pm on a Tuesday, and your phone already shows four missed calls and a voicemail saying you've obviously stopped caring about her.

Setting boundaries with a narcissistic parent is deciding which behavior you'll accept and what you'll do when it shows up, whether or not your parent agrees. If you've been searching for how to deal with a narcissistic parent, boundaries are the place to start. This post explains how to set a boundary your parent can't argue away and why the pushback is so predictable. It also covers what to do when the boundary gets ignored.

You're 34, and you manage a team at a job where difficult conversations are an ordinary part of your week. Then you walk into your parents' house for a holiday, and within ten minutes you're standing between your mother and your brother, smoothing over an argument exactly the way you did when you were eleven.

Dysfunctional family roles are the fixed parts each family member plays to keep the household running when something inside it isn't working. If your family was under strain, it probably had several of them. This post explains how those roles develop during childhood and why you and your sibling ended up with different ones. It also covers what it takes to step out of yours now.