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Love doesn't require erasing yourself
Guilty children worry constantly that they are a burden or could harm people, so they defend against guilt by taking care of everyone else. Telling them to look after their own needs and set healthy boundaries does not land, because the urge to be a caretaker is too strong.
The practical work is expressing a need while staying connected to the other person, instead of hiding it or redirecting it. A sentence like I need to rest, and I care about you holds both at once.
One exercise is to pick a single need that would usually get redirected and say it out loud to the person it concerns.
Why do some children grow up worried about burdening others?
Psychologist Carolyn Zahn-Waxler and colleagues studied young children of depressed mothers in the 1980s. They reported that many of the children showed heightened concern for others and more guilt than comparison children. The researchers described this as an early form of caretaking in response to a parent's distress. The work helped establish that guilt and empathy can appear in children as young as two.
Does tone at the start of a hard talk matter?
John Gottman, a psychologist at the University of Washington, studied couples in his laboratory for decades. In a 1999 study with Sybil Carrere, the first three minutes of a fifteen-minute disagreement predicted which of 124 newlywed couples would divorce within six years. Conversations that began with harsh criticism tended to end badly, while those that began gently tended to go well. Gottman called the gentle opening a soft startup.