10 Signs You Grew Up With An Overbearing Parent And It’s Affecting You Now
Acknowledging how their behavior affected you can radically change your life, relationships, and wellbeing.
dzmat.ph | Shutterstock Your relationship with your parents can be complex, especially as adults. With resentment from childhood, unresolved trauma, and a tendency to pick up on toxic traits and habits, it can be not easy to acknowledge your past, heal, and move forward.
In addition to shared trauma, there are several signs you grew up with an overbearing parent, and it’s affecting you now, even if you think you’ve moved on. Overbearing parents tend to lack emotional intelligence and confidence, so they use controlling tactics to parent their children, hoping to give themselves some self-assurance and peace of mind.
Here are 10 signs you grew up with an overbearing parent, and it’s affecting you now:
1. You’re a perfectionist
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Parental perfectionism and control often spark anxiety in children, as a study from the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology explains, but their attention to detail and unrealistic expectations for their children also significantly wear off onto their attitude and self-image.
Often insecure and struggling with self-confidence as a result of their parent’s controlling parenting style, otherwise known as “helicopter parenting” or being overbearing, these now-adult children hold themselves to an unrealistic standard and struggle to live without worry.
2. You struggle to express your emotions
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According to rehab specialist Ashley Graff with the Anchor Light Therapy Collective, overbearing parents tend to rely on a sense of control to parent their children. Instead of relying on emotional intelligence, they harbor a sense of rigidity, power, and coldness rather than compassion and empathy.
As these children grow into adulthood, they struggle to express and explain their emotions, oftentimes because they were taught to hide or ignore them to appease a controlling parent. It’s become an inherent defense mechanism for these adult children — which tends to connect with deep unresolved trauma and negatively affect the communication and health of their relationships.
3. You’re a people pleaser
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If you struggle with “people pleasing,” often at the expense of your well-being, that’s one of the signs you grew up with an overbearing parent, and it’s affecting you now. From carrying conversations to being the “therapy friend” and succumbing to emotional abuse, you sacrifice your sanity to ensure other people are comfortable, happy, and, most importantly, docile.
As an “Overparenting and Mental Health” study from 2023 argues, these adult children are experiencing simply “environmental mastery.” As children, they learned how to keep their controlling parents happy, even if it meant deception, sacrifice, and unfair compromise, and this knowledge has now carried over into how they navigate the chaos of adulthood.
4. You struggle with anxiety
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Research from the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology argues that there’s a link between the presence of a controlling parent in a child’s home atmosphere and their tendency to develop anxiety disorders later in life.
Especially considering the consequences of “an error” in these children’s lives often resulted in an unpredictable and highly emotional response from their controlling parents, they’re much more likely to suppress themselves and carry worry into adulthood.
It’s not just a fear of emotional outbursts, similar to their parents that these adult children struggle with; it’s an over-commitment to reading everyone’s emotions, ensuring everyone is happy, and overcompensating to protect the peace that drives their anxieties.
5. You have low self-esteem
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When nothing you do is ever good enough as a child in the eyes of your overbearing parents, with unrealistic expectations and unnerving standards, it’s not just frustration that follows you into adulthood; it’s also insecurity.
A study from the Journal of Family Theory and Review even argues that adults with overbearing parents tend to adopt insecure attachment styles with new relationships — sparked by the transactional and anxiety-ridden connection from their childhoods.
With such unrealistic parameters for success and happiness ingrained in your mind, you struggle to accept compliments from others, find peace with your physical and emotional being, and navigate your life without nagging insecurities.
6. You’re hyper-independent
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A study on dependency by the American Psychological Association argues that people who exhibit hyper-independent tendencies often have shared childhood trauma experiences with unmet dependency needs. Either their parents failed to provide adequate emotional support, they were controlling in less significant parts of their lives, or they boasted a transactional connection.
Any of these specific interactions with an overbearing parent reinforced your desire to control your own life and to have autonomy outside of the household. Like an aversion to the toxic tendencies of an overbearing parent, these adult children now find solace in being alone, controlling their own decisions, and being utterly reliant on themselves, even to a fault.
7. You self-sabotage healthy relationships
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Nearly 64% of people argue they’ve experienced “self-sabotaging” behaviors at least once in their life, according to a 2008 psychiatric study. However, those with overbearing and controlling parents are more susceptible to regularly letting this behavior harm their lives, relationships, and fulfillment.
While self-sabotage can look different in different scenarios, relationship therapist Nancy Carbone argues that it almost always revolves around a lack of trust in yourself and others. Adult children don’t trust their partners to fully support them, similar to how they felt as children, so they close themselves off, sabotage their connections, or create distance to keep themselves from getting hurt.
8. You struggle with trust
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It’s not just platonic and romantic relationships that these adult children struggle to prioritize trust in; they also find it challenging to trust themselves. From navigating their daily lives to making big life decisions and prioritizing their interests, their childhood — filled with self-blame, broken trust, and emotional abandonment — plagues their confidence and trust in themselves.
Whether you're consciously aware of your parental trauma or not, personal development coach Pamela Aloia argues there are ways to rebuild self-trust in adulthood, but it starts with self-awareness. Before you can learn to face your fears, experiment with discomfort, and rebuild self-trust, you have to learn the emotional intelligence you were never taught as a child.
9. You fear confrontation
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Whether it’s a friendship qualm, relationship argument, or confrontation with a stranger at the grocery store, adult children with overbearing parents struggle with conflict—partly because of their insecurities and partly because of how they were reprimanded as kids.
This fear of confrontation comes back to the tendency for adult children with these parents to have insecure attachments — any sign of conflict sparks anxiety that there will be an outburst or that the stability of their relationship will be compromised.
10. You struggle to set healthy boundaries
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With parents who constantly overstepped in their space and felt largely entitled to their thoughts, energy, and emotions, these adult children now have to find their own way when it comes to learning about appropriate boundaries and healthy relationships.
They may struggle with or even lose relationships because they were taught that dependent, all-encompassing relationships were the only way to grow up. Everything from healthy communication skills to needing space and taking alone time was foreign to them going into adulthood, and they’re not necessarily easy concepts to learn overnight.
Zayda Slabbekoorn is a News & Entertainment Writer at YourTango who focuses on health & wellness, social policy, and human interest stories.