The Glass Castle: Jeannette Walls on Loving a Father You Cannot Save

POP CULTURE & TRAUMA • May 20, 2026

Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

In short: The Glass Castle illustrates the psychological cost of loving a charismatic, neglectful father whose attachment alternates between brilliance and abandonment, and why that wound is so hard to put down.

Opening Vignette: The Magic and the Mayhem

The opening scene of The Glass Castle movie is unforgettable. Jeannette Walls, a young girl, watches her father, Rex Walls, light up the night sky with a dazzling homemade firework display. His eyes sparkle with mischief and wonder. For a fleeting moment, the world feels safe, joyful, and full of possibility. The children laugh, wide-eyed and enchanted, wrapped in the warmth of their father’s magic.

Yet this magic is shadowed by the chaos that follows, missed school days, broken promises, and nights spent wondering where their father will be next. The family’s fragile safety is repeatedly disrupted by Rex’s alcoholism and erratic behavior. This opening vignette encapsulates the paradox that defines the Walls family: a father who is at once a magic-maker and a devastator, a source of joy and pain.

This paradox isn’t simply a narrative device but a clinical pattern trauma therapists recognize in many families shaped by addiction and chaotic parenting. The parent is deeply loved and desperately needed, yet also a source of profound instability and harm. This duality shapes the children’s nervous systems, their sense of safety, and their patterns of relating to others for years to come.

The Chaotic and Unsafe Parent: Rex Walls as Lovable Wound

Rex Walls exemplifies what trauma clinicians sometimes call the “lovable wound”,a parent whose charisma and imagination captivate their children even as their behaviors create danger and unpredictability. His alcoholism fuels both his magic-making and his neglect, creating a fractured attachment environment where safety is inconsistent and often illusory.

In trauma theory, this dynamic aligns closely with Judith Herman’s foundational framework. Herman (1992) notes that trauma shatters a child’s sense of safety, but when the source of trauma is also the source of love and protection, the child’s brain enters a paradoxical state of survival. The amygdala, the brain’s alarm system, detects threat, yet the child’s survival depends on maintaining attachment to the parent. This creates a neurological bind that can manifest as loyalty traps, dissociation, and conflicted feelings.

Rex’s storytelling and grand dreams, like the promise to build the “glass castle”,are a form of magic-making that temporarily holds the family together. Yet these dreams also become symbols of broken promises and conditional hope. His charm draws the children in, but his alcoholism and emotional volatility create a home environment that’s unsafe and chaotic.

This “lovable wound” pattern is common in families where addiction is present. The parent’s positive qualities aren’t negated, but they coexist with profound impairment. Recognizing this both/and complexity is essential for survivor validation and healing.

Rex’s character also illustrates the challenges of loving a parent who is deeply wounded themselves. His struggles with addiction, abandonment, and his own unmet needs ripple through his parenting, creating an intergenerational trauma pattern. In clinical terms, one might say that Rex is both a perpetrator of harm and a person who carries his own unhealed wounds, an archetype that invites compassion without excusing harm.

How The Glass Castle Shows Up in Driven Women

In my work with clients. driven women who present as the most competent person in every room they enter. The stories we’re analyzing here don’t stay on screen. They walk into the therapy room. Two composite client portraits, drawn from common patterns rather than any individual client:

Sarah is a 44-year-old physician at a Bay Area hospital. She’s had three difficult cases this week. She hasn’t told her husband. She hasn’t told her therapist. She’s the kind of woman colleagues describe as ‘unflappable’. Which is another way of saying no one has ever asked her how she’s actually doing.

Driven women like Sarah often come to therapy not because something dramatic has broken, but because they’ve gotten so good at performing fine that they’ve forgotten what they actually feel. The Glass Castle gives that pattern a name.

Maya is a 35-year-old creative director. Her mother calls four times a day. Maya answers every time. She has built an entire career on noticing what other people need before they know they need it. She has not been able to write anything of her own in eighteen months and she does not know why.

Maya brought The Glass Castle into our session the week after she’d watched it. She didn’t have language yet for why it had landed so hard. That’s often how these recognitions begin. In the body, before the words arrive.

Both Sarah and Maya. Or whichever pair I’m sitting with that day. Recognize themselves in the patterns the story is naming. That recognition is where the work begins. Not with diagnosis. With the relief of being able to put words on a pattern that had been operating in silence.

Loyalty Traps and the Parentification of Children

One trauma-informed reading of The Glass Castle is the exploration of loyalty traps, situations where children feel compelled to protect and care for a parent who is unable or unwilling to provide safety. Jeannette and her siblings often parent each other, stepping into roles beyond their developmental years to manage household chaos and emotional neglect.

Parentification is a well-documented trauma response. It occurs when children take on adult responsibilities prematurely, often in response to parental incapacity. This dynamic commonly arises in families with chaotic or unsafe parents, where children’s survival depends on their capacity to anticipate and manage crises (Hooper, 2007).

In the Walls family, sibling parentification is a survival strategy. Jeannette shields her younger siblings from their father’s outbursts, while Lori negotiates precarious living situations. These roles require emotional labor, vigilance, and self-sacrifice that no child should bear. Yet they become normalized within the family system, creating a loyalty bind that’s difficult to break.

Jennifer Freyd’s betrayal trauma theory offers a lens for understanding these loyalty traps. When the source of harm is also the source of love and protection, the brain may suppress full awareness of the betrayal to preserve attachment essential for survival (Freyd, 1996). This creates profound internal conflict, as children wrestle with love, fear, and resentment simultaneously.

Children in such environments often develop hypervigilance, a heightened sensitivity to emotional cues, and a tendency to put others’ needs before their own. This can lead to difficulties with boundaries, self-care, and trusting relationships later in life.

The parentification and loyalty traps depicted in The Glass Castle illustrate the complex emotional landscape of growing up with an unsafe parent. These patterns aren’t signs of weakness or failure but adaptive responses to untenable circumstances.

Scene Analysis: The Glass Castle Promise and Its Weight

A pivotal scene in the movie is Rex’s promise to build the “glass castle” for his family, a fantastical dream home symbolizing safety, creativity, and escape. The children cling to this promise as a beacon of hope amid instability. Yet as years pass, the glass castle remains an unbuilt dream, a symbol of both love and betrayal.

From a trauma lens, this scene illustrates the dual-edged nature of hope in unsafe environments. Hope can be a lifeline, providing a psychic refuge when physical safety is absent. Yet unfulfilled promises can also compound feelings of abandonment and betrayal.

Janina Fisher and Pat Ogden’s work on trauma and fragmentation offers insight here. The glass castle functions as a fragmented part of the children’s internal world, both a place of longing and a reminder of neglect. Their nervous systems are caught between yearning for safety and bracing for disappointment.

The glass castle also represents the weight of carrying a parent’s dream, a dream that may never be realized but which holds the children hostage to hope and loyalty. This dynamic is common in families with unsafe parents: children hold onto fantasies of repair or rescue that may never come, which can delay their own healing and growth.

This scene encapsulates the complex emotional landscape of children who love parents they can’t save. The hope invested in the glass castle is intertwined with the pain of unmet needs, a poignant example of what it means to love a parent who is both a magic-maker and a devastator.

Writing as an Exit from the Loyalty Trap

Jeannette Walls’s act of writing her memoir, and by extension, the film’s narrative, is itself a powerful trauma-informed intervention. Writing becomes a means of reclaiming agency, making meaning, and stepping out of the loyalty trap that binds her to her father’s legacy.

Therapeutic writing has been shown to help survivors process complex emotions, integrate fragmented memories, and re-author their life stories in ways that foster healing (Pennebaker & Seagal, 1999). For Jeannette, telling her story publicly allows her to hold both the love and the harm she experienced without being trapped by either.

This act of narrative reclamation aligns with Judith Herman’s stages of trauma recovery: establishing safety, remembering and mourning, and reconnecting with ordinary life (Herman, 1992). Writing serves as a bridge from the chaotic survival of childhood to adult self-awareness and healing.

Moreover, the memoir and movie create a container for the complexity of family trauma, allowing survivors and witnesses alike to witness the paradox of loving a parent who can’t be saved. This validation is crucial in trauma recovery, providing a roadmap for how to hold conflicting emotions with compassion.

Jeannette’s journey shows that breaking free from the loyalty trap may not mean cutting off love but learning to love with boundaries and self-protection. Writing helped her claim her own life and identity beyond the chaos of her upbringing.

What the Story Gets Right Clinically

The Glass Castle resonates with clinical trauma literature in several important ways:

• Unsafe Parenting and Chaotic Attachment: The film accurately portrays the impact of inconsistent, neglectful caregiving on children’s nervous systems, attachment patterns, and sense of safety. This aligns with Judith Herman’s and Bessel van der Kolk’s work on complex trauma and attachment disruption (Herman, 1992; van der Kolk, 2015).

• Parentification and Sibling Roles: The depiction of sibling parentification matches clinical findings that children in unsafe families often adopt caregiving roles prematurely to survive (Hooper, 2007). The Walls siblings’ mutual caretaking reflects adaptive but costly survival strategies.

• Loyalty Traps and Betrayal Trauma: The story illustrates Jennifer Freyd’s betrayal trauma concept well, showing how children suppress or minimize awareness of parental harm to preserve essential attachment bonds (Freyd, 1996).

• The Power of Storytelling in Healing: Jeannette’s memoir is a real-world example of therapeutic narrative work, supporting research on expressive writing’s benefits for trauma survivors (Pennebaker & Seagal, 1999).

• Both/And Complexity: The film honors the complexity of loving a parent who is both deeply flawed and deeply loved, avoiding simplistic villainization. This nuanced portrayal reflects best practices in trauma-informed care, which emphasize validation without excusing harm.

• Nervous System Impact: Scenes depicting Jeannette’s emotional reactions, dissociation, and hypervigilance reflect the nervous system dysregulation described by Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory and Pat Ogden’s sensorimotor psychotherapy approaches (Porges, 2011; Ogden & Fisher, 2015).

By weaving these clinical realities into a compelling narrative, The Glass Castle offers a rare window into the lived experience of trauma survivors, helping reduce stigma and isolation.

What Trauma Survivors May Recognize in Themselves

Many survivors of chaotic parenting and unsafe attachment may see parts of their own experience reflected in The Glass Castle:

• Conflicted Emotions Toward Parents: The mix of love, loyalty, resentment, and grief Jeannette feels is common among those raised by unpredictable or harmful parents.

• Parentification and Role Reversal: Feeling responsible for siblings or even parents as a child, and the burden of carrying adult responsibilities prematurely.

• Loyalty Traps: The struggle to acknowledge harm without feeling disloyal or betraying family.

• Unrealized Promises: Holding onto hope for repair or rescue that never comes, and the pain of broken dreams.

• Nervous System Dysregulation: Experiencing hypervigilance, emotional numbness, dissociation, or difficulty trusting others.

• Writing or Creative Expression as Healing: Using storytelling, journaling, or art to process trauma and reclaim identity.

Recognizing these patterns is the first step toward reclaiming agency. It’s important to remember that these survival strategies were adaptive at one time. Healing involves honoring that history while learning new ways to relate to oneself and others.

Both/And: Holding Truth and Compassion Together

What I want to be clear about, because it matters clinically, is that the Walls family story isn’t about villainizing Rex Walls nor excusing harm. It’s about holding the complexity of his role as both a deeply wounded man and a father who inspired fierce loyalty and love.

This both/and reframe is essential in trauma work. The parent was once a protector and caregiver, even if imperfect or unsafe. The survival strategies children developed were adaptive then, even if they carry costs now. Recognizing this duality fosters self-compassion and opens the door to healing.

The both/and perspective helps survivors move beyond black-and-white thinking, beyond “good parent/bad parent” or “love/hate.” It allows space to grieve loss and celebrate resilience simultaneously. It acknowledges that harmful behaviors occurred without erasing the child’s need and experience of love.

This approach aligns with the work of Janina Fisher, who emphasizes integrating contradictory inner parts to heal trauma-related fragmentation (Fisher, 2017). It also resonates with Pat Ogden’s sensorimotor psychotherapy, which encourages survivors to hold complex emotional states in the body with curiosity and compassion.

The Systemic Lens: Why This Wound Is Not Just Personal

Looking through a systemic lens, The Glass Castle invites reflection on the cultural and familial contexts that shape trauma. Rex’s alcoholism is both a personal and systemic issue, influenced by intergenerational patterns, socioeconomic pressures, and cultural narratives about masculinity and resilience.

Addiction often functions within family systems as a way of managing pain and disconnection, perpetuating cycles of trauma and neglect. Understanding these systemic dynamics helps survivors contextualize their experiences without internalizing blame.

Bessel van der Kolk (2015) highlights how trauma isn’t only an individual experience but a relational and cultural one, affecting family systems and communities. Stephen Porges’s polyvagal theory further underscores the importance of safety and connection in recovery, explaining how nervous system states are influenced by relational cues (Porges, 2011).

The Walls family’s nomadic lifestyle, poverty, and social marginalization compound the challenges they face. The cultural valorization of rugged individualism and self-reliance also shapes Rex’s identity and coping, complicating the family’s dynamics.

A systemic approach invites survivors to consider not just personal or familial factors but broader societal influences, economic hardship, stigma, intergenerational trauma, that shape the conditions of unsafe parenting.

How This Connects to Recovery

Healing from the patterns depicted in The Glass Castle requires establishing new foundations of safety, both internally and relationally. This may involve nervous-system regulation practices, trauma-informed therapy, and compassionate self-reflection.

Janina Fisher’s somatic approach and Pat Ogden’s sensorimotor psychotherapy emphasize reconnecting with the body’s sensations to integrate fragmented traumatic memories and restore regulation (Ogden & Fisher, 2015). Deb Dana’s work on the polyvagal theory offers tools to cultivate nervous system safety and resilience, such as grounding exercises, breathwork, and co-regulation strategies (Dana, 2018).

For survivors of chaotic parenting and parentification, reclaiming agency often means setting boundaries, challenging loyalty traps, and nurturing the inner child who once bore adult burdens. It also means learning to differentiate the past from the present and cultivating relationships that offer consistent safety.

Therapeutic writing, like Jeannette Walls’s memoir, can be a powerful tool for meaning-making and integration. Narrative work helps survivors re-author their stories with empowerment and complexity, moving beyond victimhood to agency.

Healing isn’t linear or simple. It requires both/and: holding grief and hope, pain and resilience, loss and growth. It often involves repairing early attachment wounds and building new relational templates grounded in safety.

Clinical Deepening: What This Story Helps Us See

Scene-Level Depth: The Glass Castle Promise and Its Clinical Resonance

One of the most poignant scenes in The Glass Castle is when Rex Walls promises his children he will build them a glass castle, a shining symbol of hope, stability, and a better future. This promise, both literal and metaphorical, resonates deeply with what Judith Herman describes as the “recovery of safety” in trauma healing. The glass castle represents a yearning for a safe haven, a family structure where children can feel secure and valued.

Clinically, this scene illustrates the complex interplay between hope and betrayal that children of chaotic parents often experience. The promise itself is an attachment bid, a parent’s attempt to repair fractured bonds and offer a vision of safety. However, when the promise remains unfulfilled, it can exacerbate feelings of abandonment, shame, and confusion. Jennifer Freyd’s work on betrayal trauma highlights how children must navigate the painful contradiction of needing to trust a caregiver who simultaneously harms or neglects them.

This scene also invites reflection on the ethical complexity for therapists working with survivors who carry such fractured attachments. It’s vital to honor the child’s experience of hope and the parent’s love, however flawed, while simultaneously validating the hurt caused by broken promises. As Janina Fisher emphasizes, healing requires holding these paradoxes, the “both/and” of love and harm, in awareness without forcing premature resolution.

Clinical Nuance: Navigating Loyalty Traps and Parentification

The Walls children’s navigation of loyalty traps and parentification is a critical clinical theme woven throughout the story. Loyalty traps, as described by Judith Herman, occur when children feel compelled to protect and defend an unsafe parent, often at the cost of their own emotional needs. In The Glass Castle, Jeannette and her siblings internalize a profound sense of responsibility for their father’s well-being and survival, which is a hallmark of parentification.

Pat Ogden’s sensorimotor psychotherapy framework helps deepen our understanding here by illuminating how these dynamics are embodied. Children in parentified roles often develop hypervigilance, somatic tension, and a chronic state of readiness to respond to parental crises. These survival strategies, while adaptive in childhood, can become maladaptive patterns in adulthood, manifesting as anxiety, difficulty setting boundaries, or challenges in trusting others.

Therapists working with survivors of parentification must tread carefully, recognizing the survivor’s deep internalized loyalty and guilt. Recovery involves gently disentangling these complex emotional bonds and fostering a compassionate internal witness that can hold both the pain of neglect and the love for the parent. This process is slow and requires attunement to the nervous system’s capacity for regulation, as Deb Dana and Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory underscores.

Recovery Interpretation: Writing as an Act of Agency and Integration

Jeannette Walls’ act of writing her memoir can be viewed through the lens of trauma recovery as a powerful reclaiming of agency and narrative integration. Janina Fisher highlights that trauma survivors often experience fragmented self-states and dissociation; telling one’s story coherently is a critical step toward reintegration.

Writing enables survivors to externalize internal chaos, create coherent meaning from disjointed memories, and re-author their life stories with newfound strength and clarity. This process aligns with Judith Herman’s three-stage model of trauma recovery: establishing safety, remembrance and mourning, and reconnection. Jeannette’s memoir exemplifies the mourning and reconnection phases, where painful truths are acknowledged, and new identities are forged beyond victimhood.

However, clinicians must also be mindful of the potential retraumatization that can occur in narrative work. Jennifer Freyd cautions that revisiting betrayal trauma can trigger overwhelming emotions and dissociation if not paced carefully within a supportive therapeutic context. Ethical trauma-informed care involves ensuring survivors have sufficient grounding and resources before engaging deeply with traumatic memories.

Ethical Cautions: Balancing Empathy with Boundaries

The Glass Castle invites profound empathy for Rex Walls as a flawed human being shaped by his own wounds. Bessel van der Kolk’s work reminds us that trauma is often intergenerational, and problematic parenting frequently stems from unresolved trauma in caregivers themselves.

Yet, ethical clinical practice requires maintaining clear boundaries and avoiding romanticizing or excusing neglectful or abusive behaviors. Survivors’ safety and autonomy must remain paramount. Therapists must validate the survivor’s pain and betrayal without minimizing the harm caused or pressuring forgiveness before it’s ready.

Additionally, there’s a risk of pathologizing survivors’ coping strategies if clinicians view parentification or loyalty as mere dysfunction rather than adaptive responses to untenable circumstances. Pat Ogden’s somatic approach emphasizes honoring these survival mechanisms while gently supporting transformation.

Finally, clinicians should be cautious of imposing a one-size-fits-all recovery narrative. As Deb Dana highlights, nervous system regulation and trauma recovery are highly individualized processes. What works for one survivor may not for another, and cultural, familial, and personal factors shape healing trajectories.

Integrating Polyvagal Theory: The Nervous System’s Role in Healing

Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory offers a valuable framework for understanding the nervous system states depicted in The Glass Castle. The Walls children oscillate between sympathetic hyperarousal, alertness to danger, anxiety, and fight/flight responses, and dorsal vagal shutdown, numbing, dissociation, and emotional collapse.

Recognizing these states can help survivors and therapists develop trauma-informed self-regulation strategies. For example, grounding techniques, safe relational attunement, and paced exposure to difficult memories can help shift the nervous system toward the ventral vagal state, associated with safety, social engagement, and connection.

Deb Dana’s practical work in applying polyvagal theory to therapy provides helpful tools for survivors to understand their physiological responses and cultivate resilience. This neurobiological lens complements cognitive and narrative approaches, emphasizing that healing isn’t solely intellectual but embodied.

The Systemic Context: Addiction, Family, and Societal Influences

While The Glass Castle centers on individual and familial trauma, it also implicitly critiques broader systemic issues such as addiction, poverty, and societal neglect. Rex Walls’ alcoholism is both a personal struggle and a reflection of interwoven social determinants of health.

Trauma-informed care must therefore consider the systemic context shaping survivors’ lives. Judith Herman’s advocacy for a “politics of trauma” reminds us that healing requires not only individual therapy but also community support, social justice, and structural change.

Clinicians can support survivors by validating the systemic dimensions of their trauma and connecting them to resources that address housing, financial stability, and community belonging. This holistic approach fosters empowerment beyond symptom reduction.

References

• Dana, D. (2018). The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation. Norton & Company.
• Fisher, J. (2017). Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Internal Self-Alienation. Routledge.
• Freyd, J. J. (1996). Betrayal trauma: Traumatic amnesia as an adaptive response to childhood abuse. Ethics & Behavior, 6(4), 307, 329.
• Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and Recovery. Basic Books.
• Hooper, L. M. (2007). The application of attachment theory and family systems theory to the phenomena of parentification. The Family Journal, 15(3), 217, 223.
• Ogden, P., & Fisher, J. (2015). Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Interventions for Trauma and Attachment. Norton & Company.
• Pennebaker, J. W., & Seagal, J. D. (1999). Forming a story: The health benefits of narrative. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 55(10), 1243, 1254.
• Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory. Norton & Company.
• van der Kolk, B. A. (2015). The Body Keeps the Score. Penguin Books.

Thank you for joining me in this exploration of The Glass Castle through a trauma-informed lens. May it bring you validation, insight, and hope on your healing journey.

Related Reading

• van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014.
• Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence. From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
• McBride, Karyl. Will I Ever Be Good Enough?: Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers. New York: Atria Books, 2008.
• Wolynn, Mark. It Didn’t Start With You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are. New York: Penguin Books, 2017.
• Freyd, Jennifer J. Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. Cloitre M, Stolbach BC, Herman JL, van der Kolk B, Pynoos R, Wang J, et al. A developmental approach to complex PTSD: childhood and adult cumulative trauma as predictors of symptom complexity. J Trauma Stress. 2009;22(5):399-408. doi:10.1002/jts.20444. PMID: 19795402.
2. Gómez JM, Smith CP, Gobin RL, Tang SS, Freyd JJ. Collusion, torture, and inequality: Understanding the actions of the American Psychological Association as institutional betrayal. J Trauma Dissociation. 2016;17(5):527-544. PMID: 27427782.
3. Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions. Clin Neuropsychiatry. 2025;22(3):169-184. doi:10.36131/cnfioritieditore20250301. PMID: 40735382.
4. Ogden P, Pain C, Fisher J. A sensorimotor approach to the treatment of trauma and dissociation. Psychiatr Clin North Am. 2006;29(1):263-79, xi-xii. PMID: 16530597.
5. van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295926. PMID: 38198456.

Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)

• Dana, Deb. The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy. Norton & Company, Incorporated, W. W., 2018.
• Dickinson, Emily. The complete poems of Emily Dickinson. Little, Brown, 1960.
• Fisher, Janina. Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors. Taylor & Francis Group, 2017.

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