People who grew up in dysfunctional families always end up sharing some common traits among themselves, and they all likely experienced the same struggles while growing up.
A dysfunctional family creates chaos in which we never intend to put ourselves.
I met PB on a trip to the hills a few years ago. We didn’t talk much at first, but when we did, our stories reverberated in the same rhythm, echoing far and wide before us.
The silence was the abundance of punctuation marks, as we used to live, interact and understand. We were younger then and aside from finding common in our experience with emotions, we wondered what made our accounts so eerily similar.
Now I like to think, we simply didn’t have the vocabulary to communicate. Within five days, we talked about anger, sadness, numbness, shame, and separation, in ways we didn’t know we could.
Years later, one day it occurred to me that we had not divulged the obvious—we both had roots in dysfunctional families. Our facts were as different as chalk from cheese, while there were core topics that carried similar subtextual content. With time, I went to meet other people, colleagues, friends, and neighbors, and a space of mutual disclosure emerged.
What emerged were similar patterns separated by realistic differences. Those conversations and discussions led me to write this article
Here are 7 common traits shared by people who grew up in dysfunctional families
- Excessive self-blame.
It is typical for a dysfunctional family to be run by adults who display contradictory personalities – one passive and codependent, the other aggressive, individualistic and self-indulgent. In this utter bewilderment, the child struggles to make sense of his own set of experiences and events unfolding around him.
The aggressive adult oppresses and controls while the passive person is extremely fearful and submissive to protest.
On a subconscious level, the child must be unconditionally dependent on his or her primary caregivers for survival. It’s an evolutionary reaction.
Therefore, on a conscious level, when caregivers fail to fulfill their responsibility to the child, the child is left to believe that the fault lies with him/her and rationalizes himself/herself about not consistently providing good parenting—he/she is presumably not deserving of care and nurturing.
They remain so exhausted, afraid, and constrained in front of their emotionally conflicted parents that they are left with no other choice but to blame themselves for every disagreement between their parents, for the emotional and physical neglect they have caused. Because these children are simply not able to play the role of an adult and take care of their parents, they often experience feelings of inadequacy and guilt (1)
Now expand the picture, and you’ll see how we end up carrying these attitudes early into adulthood, especially if we’re not aware of them at first.
Feeling depressed and oppressed, and therefore feeling hurt and hurt, becomes the norm.
- Boundary issues.
Personal boundaries include the guidelines and limitations that one places on themselves to determine the reasonable and permissible ways for other people to behave towards them and their choices in response when people cross that boundary.
A person who grew up in a psychologically threatening environment of chaos and disorder will grow up to create a sense of vague personal boundaries for themselves. They will not have clarity in their choices, or their limitations, and will be very naive by nature.
It is often thought that only people who come from severely abused and manipulated families have boundary issues. The assumption is that the abuse must be of a sexual, physical, or emotional nature.
The presumption is often accompanied by “appearances of abuse.” However, in dysfunctional families, abuse can have a completely different appearance – it can occur in both overt and covert ways.
Consider caregivers who are overly religious and very authoritarian or who are self-centered by nature (taking advantage of their children to meet their own ego-satisfying needs), while it is the child who needs help emotionally, educationally, financially, and otherwise.
These instances, which are repeated throughout a person’s childhood and sometimes even during their teenage years, may not register as “abuse,” but the fact is that they are.
The young man is unable to express his preferences and gets entangled in the vague demands of his parents. This creates an enormous contrast between their ideals, the formative values of their teenage years, and the values and attitudes of their parents.
It negatively affects their ability to create a clear sense of their boundaries and respect for themselves as they grow and often leads them to act the same way even when they are older.
If you find yourself unable to say “no” where you would like, naive, fickle-minded, indecisive, or even clear enough about “safe choices,” you may be someone from a dysfunctional family group.
- Constant pursuit of validation.
Before we get too deep into this, let me make a secret claim: Everyone needs validation to some degree. The attention we seek from friends, the love we seek from partners, the recognition we seek from colleagues—they are all inherent in the validation of some kind.
Verification itself is not an error. However, when research is the result of paralyzing fear and feelings of inadequacy as is often the case among people with origins in dysfunctional families, this is a problem.
People who persistently and persistently seek validation usually have two concerns:
They don’t deserve enough.
They will be deserted or abandoned if they are not up to the mark.
These underlying fears are mostly rooted in a person’s childhood, during which they were meant to be nurtured unconditionally.
Parents from dysfunctional families rarely express their feelings. These repressed feelings will act as a template before the child will also give up on his or her emotions leading to an insecure attachment with the parents and issues such as low self-esteem.
An authoritarian parenting style can also result in not showing affection in situations such as love that was the result of academic achievements or to fulfill one or two conditions set by parents to convey the subconscious message that “if you allow, you appreciate.”
This insecurity becomes so deep as one learns that one’s worth is temporary and conditioned that he begins to feed his insecure self with constant validation.
- The constant need for support.
People who spend their early years with dysfunctional caregivers often struggle with a sense of responsibility for others at the expense of their own needs and desires. This is mostly a compensatory behavior towards what they lacked in childhood.
As children, they may have witnessed abuse, substance abuse, constant fighting, or neglect. And in a scenario where adults fail to display appropriate assertive behavior, they make themselves available as a substitute. Making themselves responsible for other people’s grief, happiness, upset, happiness, and every other state of feeling possible.
As adults, the same people may find themselves struggling to make choices without consulting parents, friends, co-workers, and the like. They may experience constant detachment from their dreams and aspirations because the latter requires them to give up selflessly.
Related: Do You Love An Abuser? How Can You Stop Being With One
- Anxiety issues.
For a moment, stop and imagine a child hiding from angry, screaming parents and cite this from a movie I watched a long time ago but whose name I can’t remember. What made me feel then, is exactly how I feel now – scared, terrified, and deeply anxious.
Anxiety as defined by the Oxford Dictionary is “a feeling of restlessness, nervousness, or restlessness about something of uncertain consequence.”
For anyone who has grown up in a dysfunctional family and an atmosphere of unsettling uncertainty, anxiety is the most natural response. It is normal for a child to feel sad in such an unpleasant situation. They were receiving a clear message – “The world is not safe.”
When a person is not working through these early experiences of intense fear, they always feel triggered by events even in the present.
From slightly loud noises, to aggressive people, from a lack of information to losing a job, anything can trigger them to feel a heightened sense of impending doom.
- Emotional volatility.
An emotionally volatile person has no control over their ever-changing emotions from one extreme to the other. Emotional volatility is characterized by being calm one second and feeling very angry or sad the next. People jump between emotional highs and lows in mere seconds. (2)
It is naturally understood that such an unstable emotional experience is extremely upsetting not only to the person experiencing it but also to the people with whom this person interacts. They act so unpredictably that they come across as unstable and shady to others – often opening floodgates of misunderstanding.
It is found that either parent in a dysfunctional family environment is emotionally volatile. They are even inconsistent in expressing their emotions if they do. Parents may take out their frustrations on their children when they least expected a love shower when they didn’t see it coming.
Children who grew up in dysfunctional families see this kind of shallow and unstable display of emotions, and this makes them pick up on this pattern of emotional instability and teaches them that adults’ responses can be unpredictable.
