Integration and reconciliation: poetry therapy and the transformation of intergenerational parentification

When sixteen-year-old Sarah selected Khalil Gibran's “On Giving” from her school therapist's bibliotherapeutic library, she began a process that reshaped her relationship to family responsibility. This case study examines how poetry therapy addressed intergenerational parentification through integration rather than severance. Over a year of weekly therapy, it emerged that Sarah bore responsibility for three younger siblings after her mother transferred domestic duties to her and her father, a combat veteran with untreated PTSD, remained emotionally unavailable. Gibran's text, alongside the myth of Andromeda that Sarah encountered independently, sharpened her resistance to compulsory self-sacrifice. Through journaling and her own poetic creation, Sarah learned to distinguish “giving with pain” from “giving with joy,” shifting from inherited compulsion to conscious inheritance-a process echoed in a bibliotherapeutic poem the therapist wrote as part of her own reflective processing. Drawing on family systems theory, Mazza's RES model, and the psychoanalytic concepts of family instinct and repetition compulsion, the article demonstrates how culturally resonant literature can interrupt unconscious intergenerational transmission while preserving family connections.