If You Grew Up In A Truly Dysfunctional Family, You Probably Faced These 11 Uncomfortable Experiences
ViDI Studio | Shutterstock Navigating adulthood is difficult enough without the nagging feeling of unresolved trauma influencing your relationships and sabotaging your family dynamics. According to researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center, adults often experience harmful emotional, psychological, and even physical symptoms as a result of their being raised in a dysfunctional family.
Whether it was being unable to rely on your parents or never receiving affection, if you grew up in a truly dysfunctional family, you probably faced these uncomfortable experiences. Even if you didn't realize it at the time, you can feed into an important sense of emotional assuredness and self-awareness that surely benefits every aspect of your current adult life.
If you grew up in a truly dysfunctional family, you probably faced these 11 uncomfortable experiences
1. Your parents used the silent treatment
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Many adult children struggle with prioritizing their alone time and feeling comfortable in silence with themselves, all because they were forced to navigate harmful communication styles in their childhoods. According to a study published in Communication Monographs, the "silent treatment" often sparks this adult discomfort, as conflict, negative emotions, and mistakes were met with avoidance rather than open communication.
While it might have been subtle or even a practice you learned to adopt yourself as a child, in your relationships with your parents, the silent treatment only cultivates anxiety-forward relationships. Instead of communicating about issues and uncomfortable emotions, children in these households learned to repress them, left to ruminate and fixate on that anxiety in their alone time.
Many people whose who struggled with healthy communication and this avoidant tendency also develop attention-seeking and people-pleasing behaviors in adulthood, yearning to keep the peace in their relationships by protecting everyone else's negative emotions. They dull their own discomfort and emotions to protect the time spent with their parents, friends, and peers, afraid they'll be given the "cold shoulder" if things get uncomfortable.
2. You were hyper-aware of conflict at home
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For people who grew up in a dysfunctional family, conflict was constant and inevitable. Maybe your parents were always fighting and you were caught in the middle, there was name-calling, or your parents frequently threw blame around. Whatever the case, it had a profound impact on you.
As psychotherapist Kaytee Gillis explained, growing up in a dysfunctional family means learning certain rules along the way that are necessary to survival. However, as they become adults, those "rules" tend to revictimize them and affect their relationships.
"Growing up around people who are frequently arguing, or even avoiding communication altogether, teaches children that conflict is an inevitable part of relationships. And while this is partly true... dysfunctional families teach unhealthy and unsafe ways of dealing with this conflict, and that becomes the problem," she added.
3. You were pressured to be perfect
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If you grew up in a truly dysfunctional family, you probably faced immense pressure from your parents to be perfect, a very unfair and uncomfortable experience. You were held to unrealistic expectations and likely had a "perfectionist" parent. And now, as an adult, you're dealing with the consequences.
Instead of being comfortable with mistakes, you equate it to failure. Or you might be overly sensitive to your weaknesses and flaws, sparking an anxiety-inducing connection between your self-esteem and your achievements, as mental health experts at the Newport Academy revealed.
Experiences from a dysfunctional family can also manifest as a tendency to be overly critical. Not only do you struggle to give yourself grace, but you're often hard on yourself when you struggle to reach impossibly high expectations and goals. You view yourself as a reflection of your accomplishments, suggesting you're only "worthy" of love, self-care, and comfort when you're "successful."
4. Your parents didn't knock before entering your bedroom
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While children are the responsibility of parents — needing support, guidance, and tough regulations and boundaries from time to time — they're also deserving of basic human respect like privacy. Healthy boundaries in families, like knocking before entering someone's personal space, help to ensure children can feel secure, comfortable, and respected at home.
A study published in Child Development argues that healthy boundaries like this are essential assumptions to the "family systems theory" that informs balanced relationships between siblings, parents, and their children. Especially for young adults still living at home, a trend that studies from Pew Research Center argue is more common than ever before, this disregard for boundaries can be extremely detrimental to a healthy family dynamic.
Not only does this urge young adults to opt for more financially irresponsible housing situations to remove themselves from a dysfunctional household, it reinforces a toxic belief that their boundaries aren't worthy of respect.
5. Your parents avoided physical displays of affection
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According to multiple research studies presented by the Gottman Institute, children who don't have affectionate parents growing up tend to have lower self-esteem, anti-social behaviors, and tendencies towards anger or anxiety around affection, open communication, and emotions in their adult lives. An additional study from UCLA argues that children with affectionate parents who prioritize unconditional love are happier and less anxious than those who don't.
Our home environments growing up are often the only "normal" reality we know. When our parents don't show affection to us, or to each other while around us, that reinforces our beliefs about typical behavior in a relationship. That's especially true of early in life when we're less prone to questioning and have less accessible outlets for comparison.
Of course, on their own, not displaying affection may not always represent something "dysfunctional," but for many adult children reflecting on their own unhealthy habits and relationships in comparison to that of their parents or family dynamic, it can be impossible to ignore their impacts.
6. You struggled to rely on family members
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Psychotherapist Sharon Martin argues that children with unreliable or inconsistent parents in their youth often struggle with trust in adulthood. They may view their parents' unreliability, emotional absence, or irresponsibility as a fact of life growing up, but in adulthood it only manifests as a lack of trust. And it sometimes bleeds into more intimate and platonic adult relationship struggles as well.
If you grew up in a truly dysfunctional family, you probably faced these uncomfortable experiences on a daily basis. As a child, you might have been labeled as "independent" or "mature" for your age when, in reality, it was simply a coping mechanism for having to meet your own needs and show up for yourself emotionally and physically when your parents couldn't.
7. Your parents struggled to pay basic bills
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While financial insecurity in itself isn't necessarily indicative of a dysfunctional family, parents who couldn't pay their bills or buy necessities set an unhealthy standard for their kids, especially if those finances went towards items for themselves, rather than their family.
While some children might have gotten comfortable with this dynamic, grasping onto control with unhealthy coping mechanisms like people-pleasing or avoidance, many adult children's challenges illuminate what they lacked in their youth.
Whether it's irresponsible spending, other unhealthy coping compulsions, or simple ignorance to the financial literacy skills adults need to survive (like paying bills or setting up retirement accounts), many adults find it impossible to ignore the consequences of their childhood trauma.
8. A parent hyperfixated on their appearance or weight
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Many parents unknowingly project their own insecurities onto their children, instilling poor self-esteem from an early age. From their appearance, to their intelligence, to weight, they struggle with coping with their own emotional struggles in these areas, and instead hyperfixate on the same ones in their kids.
While this may have manifested as a constant diet in your childhood, comments about the way your clothes fit, or unachievable academic expectations, which become your "normal" in a household, the reality is that these beliefs about inherently "not being enough" early in life follow you into adulthood. This parental mindset often erupts in their children in adulthood when they're battling their own insecurities and toxic mindsets.
It may be easy to demonize a parent with this mindset in adulthood, especially if it's continuing in the new family dynamic. But at the end of the day, it's simply a means for them to cope with their own struggles. Set appropriate boundaries around negative self-talk and self-care and you can figure out a healthy balance for protecting your own peace.
9. You never invited friends to your house
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A parent's tendency towards negative self-talk and energy can greatly impact a child's perception of their reality. From their appearance, to their home, to their academic abilities, their parents' word often becomes their "truth" until they're old enough to question it. Especially in households that struggled financially, a parent's tendency to talk about struggle or what they lack can emotionally burden kids with uncomfortable feelings of shame and guilt.
While it might be unsuspecting, this can also feed into a child's feelings of embarrassment, which can manifest as them not wanting friends to come over to the house where their parents criticize or speak negatively about them, all to avoid exposing peers to their toxic family dynamics. These things can be subtle, but play into an adult child's behaviors and mentality in relationships later in life.
Children learn how to deal with uncomfortable situations and emotions from their parents. So, if their parents are overly critical and avoidant, their kids will quickly adopt similar behaviors.
10. A parent struggled to show and express emotion
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While licensed marriage and family therapist Jennifer Litner argues that emotional detachment in parents is sometimes linked to a mental health disorder, a parent struggling to express or show emotion with their kids not only indicates a lack of emotional intelligence, but is massively influential on their children's emotional and physical well-being.
Our emotional availability characterizes the health of our relationships. So, when parents refuse to discuss uncomfortable emotions, resort to avoidance at any sign of conflict, or struggle with expressing their own feelings to their kids, their kids miss out on opportunities to build their own communication skills and bond with their families. Unfortunately, if you grew up in a truly dysfunctional family, you probably faced these uncomfortable experiences.
Reflecting on your parents' communication styles and conflict-driven behaviors can be insightful for adult children, especially those who struggle to find and maintain healthy relationships.
11. You had a transactional relationship at home
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Like a business transaction with clear terms and rules, a transactional family dynamic can sabotage helpful communication skills and emotional bonding moments in a parent-child relationship. Instead of prioritizing unconditional love and loyalty, parents teach their children that they're only deserving of comfort, stability, or support when they do something "right."
In a transactional family, this can manifest in a million different ways, but oftentimes for children, it's ingrained in discipline and motivation strategies. If you do X, I'll do Y for you. If you finish your homework, I'll gift you with Z. Everything is transactional, whether it's material things, personal support, or love that's being wagered with.
Unfortunately, as relationship expert and coach Annie Tanasugarn explained, "These wounds are what get carried with us as self-sabotaging behavior. We often recreate the same patterns in our adult relationships that were modeled and conditioned for us in our childhood... Eventually, we wind up turning to more misery as 'comfortable' or 'familiar.'"
Zayda Slabbekoorn is a senior editorial strategist with a bachelor’s degree in social relations & policy and gender studies who focuses on psychology, relationships, self-help, and human interest stories.
