People Who Didn't Have A Very Stable Childhood Often Carry 8 Habits Into Adulthood
SpeedKingz | Shutterstock Having a rough childhood often feels like a "takes one to know one" kind of deal. If you had an unstable childhood, you usually know the signs someone else did, too, as there are some long-lasting effects.
However, it's not always clear for the rest of us to see. There are plenty of highly functional people who are popular, have good relationships, and good careers but grew up in homes where things weren't very stable. While people hide the scars from their bad childhoods well, it's easy to spot when you know what to look for.
People who didn't have a stable childhood often carry 8 habits into their adult lives:
1. They're highly independent or super codependent and no in-between
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If someone has had a hard childhood, the biggest giveaway is how independent they are in their day-to-day life.
Having a bad childhood tends to mean one of two things: you either were neglected as a kid, or your parents smothered you. If you were a child who was neglected or a victim of parentification, you had to act like an adult from a young age. You may have acted like the parent for an immature mom or dad.
Or, in the case of extreme neglect, you had to raise yourself because your parents were nowhere to be seen. This often means that you carry yourself with a level of maturity that isn't normal for your age.
There are also people who were overly-controlled and never allowed to become who they were. Their parents were, in one way or another, incapable of living without their child's dependency (or so they made it seem).
People who grew up with these kinds of parents "had their legs broken so they couldn't walk away", so to speak. It was a push-and-pull between loving you and rejecting you and that sort of instability leaves a mark.
It's no surprise, then, that instability often leads to a lack of balance when it comes to being dependent upon someone else. It often takes these adults time bouncing between codependent relationships or emotionally isolating ones before they figure out how to be inter-dependent in a healthy way.
2. They don't speak casually about their family or background
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With people who had a healthy relationship with their families, you'll often hear how they recently talked to their mom or brother or hear stories here and there about something their family member said or did.
But if you had a extremely dysfunctional family, you tend to do the exact opposite, keeping mum on it. If people ask you what it was like growing up, you may even deny anything was wrong.
On a more obvious note, because you had a bad childhood, you likely severed ties with everyone from that time in your life. It's a matter of self-preservation, especially if you had abusive parents.
You may go no contact with your family members and, at times, may also choose to stop talking to childhood friends as a way to avoid revisiting the past.
3. They're chronic people-pleasers
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Most people talk about "fight or flight," but they forget the two other reactions people can have to trauma: freeze and fawn. Fawn is a particularly telling trauma response.
When you're a person who grew up in an unstable home, it's common to be a people-pleaser. It's a trauma reaction that looks like a survival skill.
The kid whose dad might hurt them if he's displeased soon learns to walk on eggshells around him. He'll do anything to make his dad happy or keep him calm, including lying and refusing to put up boundaries.
It's a common sense reaction. Not acting like a people-pleaser around abusers can lead to potentially lethal consequences, especially when your abuser is twice the size of you or if your abuser controls your food intake.
Even if the damage isn't physical, dealing with a parent flipping out or screaming in your face if you stand up for yourself is not something any kid wants to do. As a result, people-pleasing gets rewarded in these kinds of environments.
While being a people-pleaser might make your home life more tolerable as a kid, the truth is that you can't really snap out of it easily when you're outside of your home. You get stuck with that "fawn" response.
Similarly, if you had a very rough childhood, you may often allow others to abuse you or tear you down. You do it because you're used to it and often lack the self-esteem needed to walk away from people who are bad to you.
4. You apologize for everything
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Apologizing for everything (whether it's your your fault or not) is a big sign you had an unstable childhood. It also goes hand-in-hand with surviving abuse. When you have an abusive parent or partner, you get told that everything is your fault, even when it's not related to you at all.
Apologizing is often something you learn to do out of self-preservation. Your mom's angry and screamed at you? Start apologizing. The cat got sick? Start apologizing. You flinched? Apologize.
This is also highly rewarded as you grow into an adult. People are attracted to accountability, and you often get praise when you apologize. Sadly, over your adulthood, this can become a problem, as you end up attracting people who want to blame others for their problems.
5. You either hoard food or struggle with overly-controlled eating
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People who had unstable childhoods are often affected in different ways, based on the source of their instability.
Take Sandra and Marcus (names have been changed) as an example. Both had very different reactions to how their experiences changed their relationship with food and their food habits.
Sandra had a mom who was a "tiger mom" type. She grew up in a world of pristine lawns, overachievement, and exclusive country clubs.
Her mom demanded perfection and that included being pin-thin, dating Johnny Football Star, and getting into an Ivy League college. She developed anorexia and struggles with it to this day.
Marcus, on the other hand, was the polar opposite. His mother had substance misuse problems and an issue with shoplifting. She was more concerned with scoring than she was with feeding him.
As a result, Marcus learned to hoard food to prevent going to sleep on an empty stomach. He also tends to overeat, often because he still gets scared that he won't be able to afford food later on.
While these examples are definitely extreme, people who grew up with any type of food insecurity or unstable parents likely relate.
6. You can't remember much about your childhood
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In some instances, people who have had rough childhoods don't remember much about growing up. Perhaps you come across an old photo album of your childhood and flip through it. At one point, you may sigh and say, "I don't remember taking any of these."
When you experience really bad trauma, your brain might try to protect you by blocking memories out. Unsurprisingly, many people who had extremely abusive home lives can't remember their childhoods.
7. You're a perfectionist or are obsessed with achievements
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There's a stereotype that people who had an unstable or rough childhood are determined to be criminals and low-achieving. However, there is another side to a rough childhood that many people overlook, because it seems like a positive side-effect: hyper-achievement.
Depending on what happened in your childhood, you could end up getting obsessed with being perfect. It's not unusual to hear of children in difficult families who believe that they are only lovable if they overachieve. They wear their achievements like a shield sometimes, too.
One form of abuse that people don't really talk about is parents who offer conditional love based on their child's achievement. It was recently mentioned in pop culture through Jennette McCurdy's I'm Glad My Mom Died.
People who grow up with this type of parenting often equate their achievements with how much love they deserve. And they are desperate for love, so they end up breaking their backs achieving a bunch of things in hopes of being loved and accepted.
A rough childhood is what you see whenever you hear someone say, "I earn $100,000 a year and am a corporate CEO! Why won't women love me?"
8. You clamor for attention
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Go to any classroom and find the most attention-seeking kid, and it's likely they have some instability in their home. The more a person clamors for attention, the more likely it is that it's a cry for help, or at least an adaptive way to manage stress.
That's why it's surprising when people deride those who are begging for attention. If someone keeps asking for people to notice them, chances are that something went terribly wrong with them.
Attention-seeking behavior, particularly acting out, tends to be a sign of a person who grew up with extreme neglect. Getting attention is compulsory for them because they never had it when they needed it the most.
Ossiana Tepfenhart is a writer based out of Red Bank, New Jersey whose work has been featured in Yahoo, BRIDES, Your Daily Dish, New Theory Magazine, and others.
