If You Grew Up In A Chaotic Home, These 11 Habits Never Feel Normal As An Adult
When you grow up in a chaotic home, drama becomes a permanent part of your world.
PIMTTEL / Shutterstock While it’s always possible to heal and rebound, the truth is that growing up in a chaos-filled childhood home can be pretty devastating to a person. Even when you finally leave that crazy house, you still have the insanity imprinted on you.
In other words, you’re going to end up dealing with a chronic lack of normalcy. Things that are totally fine for others will never feel fine for you. As a person who’s known many people in that situation, I’ve noticed that these habits tend to feel super uncomfortable to people who had chaotic upbringings.
If you grew up in a chaotic home, these 11 habits never feel normal as an adult
1. Sitting quietly with family members
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Silence is golden when you’re confident and comfortable with the people you’re around. It’s a warm, fuzzy feeling of peace and quiet. However, this is something people with chaotic families never really experience at home.
For many adults with chaotic home lives, silence is scary. It’s the calm before the storm. So, it makes them feel agitated. They often will scan the room and analyze every little thing as a way to try to figure out when the blowout will be.
2. Looking through family scrapbooks
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Chaotic homes are often neglectful homes. Everyone is dealing with their own drama, which means that having tender-hearted moments becomes a rarity. Seeing a family photobook often feels foreign.
After all, chaotic families generally don’t treasure their time together. So seeing an entire album of memories like that just doesn’t make sense. Survivors are often trained to play “invisible chameleon” so they don’t draw too much attention to themselves.
3. Saying no
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Perhaps one of the most telling habits in terms of a person’s upbringing is the ability to say no. People from healthy, stable backgrounds often have no problem saying no. If you came from a home where neglect or abuse was common, “no” is the hardest phrase to say in the English language.
Saying no is difficult if you learned to people-please as a result of being punished or berated when you stand up for yourself. Even after you retrain your brain to have boundaries, it can be nearly impossible to shake off that feeling of guilt you may have for being unwilling to say no.
4. Playing host
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Many people love to be the “host with the most,” or at least, the host who has friends over. For some folks, hosting is a casual affair. People who came from chaotic homes or dysfunctional families don’t usually feel that way.
They may have been unable to have friends over, simply because their home lives were too embarrassing or too abusive. So for them, hosting is never a normal thing. It’s a major production.
5. Feeling 'normal'
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If you grew up in a family that was a mostly chaotic mess, then chances are that you wondered at how people could ever feel “normal.” They see people talk about trying to get back to feeling normal, but they don’t understand what it means.
There’s no real point of normalcy in a broken home. It’s just more or less a matter of survival.
6. Relying on your parents for babysitting
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Ah, spending time with grandma and gramps! Isn’t that the best? For people from healthy families, it’s almost a given that kids would spend time with grandparents as a way to give tired moms and dads a rest.
If you grew up with abusive, neglectful, or otherwise chaotic parents, that’s not a given. In fact, the idea of sending your kids to see their grandparents alone might just terrify you.
7. Wanting to go home
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After having escaped a bad family, the chances are high that you don’t want to go home after a long day of work. People who grew up in chaotic homes generally avoid going home because they want to avoid the craziness, the blowouts, and other issues.
If it’s really bad, the person in question might still have a habit of staying late at work even after they live alone because they just can’t get over the feeling of home being dreadful.
8. Splurging on yourself
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Ooh! A nice spa day! Sounds great, right? Well, not if you’re from a broken home. It’s likely that you struggle to actually give yourself a break or pamper yourself. People who grew up in chaos rarely ever put themselves first because they were often dissuaded from doing so.
Chances are, self-care likely was treated as being selfish… even when it wasn’t.
9. Eating slowly
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For most people, eating dinner over the course of half an hour to an hour sounds nice. In other countries, it’s normal for dinner to last as long as two hours or more. For people who grew up in chaotic homes, this is not the case.
Houses where food was scarce meant that dinners were competitions for nutrients. Houses where dinners turned into vicious arguments meant a race against the clock to finish and get away. Needless to say, eating slowly just doesn’t happen too often.
10. Not explaining everything
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When you live in a house where you don’t have many rights or are treated like a potential danger, it’s likely that you are going to have moments where every little thing you say turns into a challenge. You might be accused of lying when you’re truthful.
Dealing with this regularly often means that you tend to overexplain, simply because you don’t believe people will listen to you otherwise.
11. Keeping prized possessions out in the open
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You can tell a lot about a person based on how they treat their possessions.
If someone doesn’t keep their favorite belongings out in the open, it’s likely that they came from a home where theft or property destruction was an issue.
Ossiana Tepfenhart is a writer whose work has been featured in Yahoo, BRIDES, Your Daily Dish, Newtheory Magazine, and others.
