11 Signs You Grew Up In A Dysfunctional Family Even If You Didn't Realize It At The Time
Navigating adulthood is much easier when you recognize unresolved trauma.
Gustova Svetlana | Shutterstock Navigating adulthood is difficult enough without the nagging feeling of unresolved trauma influencing your relationships, impacting your self-esteem, and sabotaging your family dynamics — oftentimes, without acknowledgment. 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 childhood trauma, even if they haven't acknowledged the specific situations or relationships that have sparked them.
By considering the signs you grew up in a dysfunctional family 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 — from intimate relationships, to workplace success, and personal growth.
Here are 11 signs your grew up in a dysfunctional family even if you didn't realize it at the time
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 because they were forced to navigate harmful communication styles in their childhoods. According to a study published in Communication Monographs, the "silent treatment," driven by "withdrawal-forward" communication, 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 adult children of parents who struggled with healthy communication — and specifically, 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. There was substance dependence
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Children who grew up around parents with substance abuse struggles don't just learn and adopt similarly toxic coping mechanism, they also tend to have a lower socioeconomic status, increased struggles in work and academic settings, and more social and relationship problems than others in adulthood, according to a report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
Even if they felt like a facet of your normal daily life or seemingly innocent as a child, these substance dependence issues often split time in households they plagued, making children feel unwanted, unappreciated, and unsupported with endlessly unmet needs. In a constant battle for attention and support, they were forced to (sometimes, unknowingly) prove themselves worthy of true attention from their parents.
These same tendencies follow adult children into their own lives outside their childhood homes, making them incredibly important to acknowledge and address to prevent the cycle of generational struggle from plaguing their lives. Our relationships, personal self-esteem, and daily habits are intrinsically tied to how we grew up — that's impossible to ignore.
3. You were pressured to be perfect
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If you were held to unrealistic expectations, especially with a "perfectionist" parent, chances are you're experiencing the consequences of it while navigating through adulthood, even if you didn't realize it when you were a child.
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, like mental health experts at the Newport Academy explain.
As an adult, this unsuspecting sign, often viewed as misguided motivation or parental passion, can manifest as a tendency to be overly critical. Not only do these adult children struggle to give themselves grace, they're often hard on themselves when they struggle to reach impossibly high expectations and goals. They view themselves as a reflection of their accomplishments, suggesting they're only "worthy" of love, self-care, and comfort when they'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 2011 study on family dynamics 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. A 2013 UCLA study 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 around us, that reinforces our beliefs about typical behavior in a relationship, especially early in life when we're less prone to questioning and have less accessible outlets for comparison.
Of course, these signs on their own aren't always representative of the objective title of "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, LCSW 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 — that sometimes bleeds into more intimate and platonic adult relationship struggles, as well.
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 a sign of a dysfunctional family, especially as more and more families today are struggling, parents who couldn't pay their bills or buy necessities because money flooded towards substance use issues set an unhealthy standard for their kids. Not only did they actively choose to prioritize toxic coping mechanisms at the expense of their children's well-being, they took away important learning opportunities from them about financial literacy and spending.
While some children might have gotten comfortable with their dysfunctional family 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. According to an article on the impact of substance use on families and children, many children of parents who struggled with dependence issues or financial instability repeat the cycle in their own lives.
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 into them from an early age, according to experts at The Bowen Center. 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 — most of 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. As one of the signs you grew up in a dysfunctional family even if you didn't realize it at the time, 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 — not wanting friends to come over to the house their parents speak negatively about or expose peers to the family dynamics their parents constantly criticize. Again, these things can be subtle, but play into an adult child's behaviors and mentality in relationships later in life.
Like the Child Mind Institute argues, children learn how to deal with uncomfortable situations and emotions from their parents. 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, this lack of emotional intelligence can also be completely unrelated, but still massively influential on their children's emotional and physical well-being.
Like another 2017 study adds, our emotional availability characterizes the health of our relationships. 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.
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."
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.
Zayda Slabbekoorn is a staff writer with a bachelor's degree in social relations & policy and gender studies who focuses on psychology, relationships, self-help, and human interest stories.