It seems like therapy fails a lot with clients who have a background of parentification. The therapist brings too many assumptions about what it means to be a “client” and the client is apparently the opposite of all those assumptions just like parentification is the opposite of how a child is supposed to be raised. Then you get role reversals, power struggles, and so on. The client never really learns to let go of control and preconceptions and be spontaneous. I think those therapists could probably learn to spot these issues if they just paid attention to what they are actually experiencing in the presence of such a client, rather than making so many optimistic normalizing assumptions and rationalizations to hold onto some notion that everything is going just fine and according to their plan and their training and to defend against feeling disarmed of their own expertise/essentially “lost.” Because the truth is often that they are dealing with a client and a human being who presents an appearance of having everything together yet internally is actually lost.