9 Signs You Grew Up With Unhappily Married Parents And It’s Still Affecting You Today
Toxic family dynamics can follow you into adulthood.
MAYA LAB | Shutterstock.com If you grew up in a household with unhappily married parents, there's a good chance it's still affecting you now. Several studies, including one led by a team from Penn State and UNC, show that the family dynamics children grow up around significantly impact their ability to form connections and maintain relationships in adulthood. So if your parents were constantly fighting or putting each other down when you just a kid, now that you're an adult, it's only reasonable you may have trust issues or a fear of conflict in your romantic relationships.
It may not be fair, but the matter of the fact is that people who grew up with happily married parents often find it easier to have healthy relationships than even their closest friends who grew up with parents who always seemed to be hovering on the brink of divorce.
Here are 9 signs you grew up with unhappily married parents and it’s still affecting you today
1. You’re a people-pleaser
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Children with unhappily married parents tend to grow hyper-sensitive to other people’s emotions because they were often the peace-maker of their household. In adulthood, it’s difficult to unlearn those sensitive triggers and tendencies, so they continue people-pleasing to protect their other people’s emotions at the expense of their own.
This hyper-awareness not only sparks anxiety-induced obsessions, but keeps adult children from having genuine conversations and interactions without the burden of avoiding conflict.
2. Arguments and conflict emotionally drains you quickly
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According to a study on cognitive shifts in individuals who experienced childhood trauma, many adult children from similar environments have a decreased ability to process conflict. Not only do they tend to show heightened sensitivity to tense emotional conflict, but they often develop mental health struggles and anxiety disorders in adulthood.
Without healthy coping mechanisms for decompressing and handling arguments or disagreements, many adult children who grew up with unhappily married parents end up sabotaging their otherwise own healthy relationships.
3. You struggle with committing to long-term relationships
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Without a childhood example of a healthy long-term relationship, marriage therapists Phyllis and Peter Sheras say that many adult children struggle with commitment due to a fear of disappointment or uncomfortable emotions.
Commitment might feel like a trap to you rather than a stable support system. Perhaps you’re always wary of getting your heart broken, so you leave one foot out the door so you can be prepared to escape if necessary.
This inability to commit and dive head first into the potential for a committed relationship is both harmful to your ability to find a healthy relationship and a deterrent to developing a comfortable identity, even with a partner.
4. You try to ignore intense emotions and feelings
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An avoidance of intense emotions is another one of the important signs you grew up with unhappily married parents and it’s still affecting you today — whether you’re avoiding them in other people or you’re trying to cope with your own.
Ignoring intense emotions doesn’t dissolve them. Eventually, you’ll be forced to reap the consequences of avoidance — whether they bubble up uncomfortably all at once or continue to destroy healthy connections and relationships throughout your adult life.
5. You have high expectations for yourself
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Despite the range and diversity of relationships, many people who grew up with unhappily married parents hold their own to a standard of perfection that’s impossible to achieve. They see the first sign of conflict as a “red flag,” and they sabotage the potential for healthy relationships by micro-analyzing other people’s behavior.
According to a 2018 study published in the journal Psychological Bulletin, perfectionism is increasingly popular among adults, and these specific adult children use a perfection-oriented mindset to craft impossible expectations for their lives, success, and connections. They fear failure, like the toxic dynamic of their childhood, and prioritize avoiding pain over all else.
6. You struggle with anxiety
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Alongside the physical ailments and long-term pain that adult children with childhood trauma are more susceptible to experiencing, a 2020 study on adult anxiety found that many develop lifelong anxiety disorders and mental health struggles as a result of having their needs unmet when they were growing up.
As their parents’ toxic relationship deteriorated their own sense of emotional stability, these children quickly learned to protect the peace by sacrificing their own. If you struggle with anxiety, navigating relationships, interacting with other people, or simply sitting alone at home, it may be an emotional response to your upbringing.
While childhood trauma never fully dissolves — it’s a part of your unique identity and most valuable personality traits – experts suggest therapy, healthy support, personalized healthy routines, and creative expression can be helpful for mitigating the anxiety often associated with it in adulthood.
7. You isolate yourself to cope with conflict
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If these adult children's ability to people-please and protect themselves from conflict fail them, as it’s likely to every once in a while, they retreat to their own company to cope. This kind of social withdrawal is not only tied to the early development of mental illness, according to the Neuroscience and Behavioral Review, it’s also a means for them to hide their vulnerabilities.
With so much attention on their parents' emotional wellbeing growing up, many of these adult children struggle to make space for their own intense emotions in adult friend groups and relationships — they feel unworthy of accepting help and uncomfortable sharing their emotional burdens.
8. You’re protective over your independence
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Now that you’re an adult, out of a tumultuous household defined by your parent’s unhappiness and disdain for each other, you have the power to protect your own emotional well-being, health, and schedule. When friends disappoint you, work stresses you out, or a romantic partner sparks conflict, you retreat, with misguided beliefs that you’re better on your own.
Your coping mechanisms don’t allow you to rely on others, you struggle to accept help, and you try to support yourself by removing the potential for disappointment.
While independence is a virtue many people seek to exemplify, this hyper-independence can be harmfully isolating — a means of grasping control that harms your ability to make intentions, healthy, and loving relationships.
9. You live in ‘fight-or-flight’ mode
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Many children who experience emotional neglect or unhealthy parental relationships grew up in “survival mode,” as a review of research on childhood trauma argues, and often struggle to unlearn those coping mechanisms and emotional states in adulthood. They experience overwhelming stress and anxiety when their emotional stability is compromised in adulthood, channeling a similar “survival instinct” they were forced to use during their childhood to keep the peace.
Hyper-focused on emotional security, a result of having unmet emotional needs or less attention as a child, these adults often struggle to carve out intentional time for other passions and relationships in their lives that could spark healthy connection and community.
Zayda Slabbekoorn is a News & Entertainment Writer at YourTango who focuses on health & wellness, social policy, and human interest stories