How many times have you heard the phrase, “relationships are hard work?”
A lot, you say? Yeah, me too.
As a couples therapist and dating coach, I get a front-row seat to others’ relationship struggles, so I can’t argue with the sentiment. Relationships are hard for even the most well-adjusted among us.
That said, connecting with a romantic partner is harder for some than others. Individuals who grew up in dysfunctional families – sometimes called adult children – struggle to be happy in their relationships.
It’s a pattern I’ve seen so consistently in my practice that I generally assume my client’s relationship struggles mirror the depth of their childhood trauma.
In other words, the more dysfunctional your family was growing up, the greater the chances you’ll struggle with your relationships in adulthood.
If you grew up in a dysfunctional family, it might be old news to you that childhood trauma causes relationship problems. But do you know how or what to do about it?
If you’re wondering, How do you stop childhood trauma from affecting relationships in adulthood? you’re in the right place.
In this article, we’re going to explore:
How to tell if a family is dysfunctional, including common signs.
The dysfunctional family system on steroids, aka the narcissistic family system
Common signs you grew up in a toxic household.
What “adult child syndrome” is.
How people with unresolved childhood trauma tend to act in relationships.
How to stop childhood trauma from ruining your relationships.
To start, let’s clarify what we mean when we refer to a dysfunctional family and the relationship issues adult children face.
What is a dysfunctional family?
“A dysfunctional family is a family unit characterized by unhealthy relational dynamics that hinder its members’ emotional growth and well-being. ”
A dysfunctional family is a family unit characterized by unhealthy relational dynamics that hinder its members' emotional growth and well-being.
While every family experiences troubles and disagreements, dysfunctional families exhibit chronic conflicts, negative communication patterns, and a disregard for the boundaries and feelings of individual members.
This dysfunction is often perpetuated through generational cycles, with patterns of neglect, abuse, or emotional manipulation passed down through various family stages.
In other words, toxic dynamics in such families start with the parents, who typically learned their maladaptive ways of relating from their parents. They often place their needs above their children’s due to emotional immaturity and untreated mental health issues such as PTSD, addiction, or narcissism.
What are the signs of a dysfunctional family?
Let’s explore some key characteristics of dysfunctional families, which are often breeding grounds for unresolved childhood trauma that can profoundly affect adult relationships.
Unhealthy Boundaries: Family members often struggle to respect personal boundaries, leading to relationships that can be either overly enmeshed or detached.
Poor Communication: Family communication is often marked by hostility or criticism, preventing open and healthy dialogue between members.
Unpredictable Behavior: Members exhibit inconsistent behavior, creating a tense environment where others constantly walk on eggshells.
Denial of Problems: Dysfunctional families frequently deny or mask their issues, suppressing any attempts to discuss them openly.
Substance Abuse and Addiction: Substance abuse is prevalent, causing chaos and instability throughout the family and potentially leading to long-term psychological problems and attachment issues for children.
Parentification of Children: Children are frequently forced to take on adult responsibilities, disrupting the natural nurturing order and paving the way for relationship issues in adulthood.
Emotional Neglect: A significant lack of emotional support and validation is common, causing individuals to grow up feeling isolated and unworthy.
Power Imbalance: A clear power imbalance exists where one or more members exert excessive control over others, fostering resentment and hindering personal growth.
Conflict Resolution Failure: These families struggle with healthy conflict resolution, with disagreements often escalating into shouting matches, silent treatments, or physical altercations, teaching children negative interaction patterns they may carry into their adult relationships.
What is a narcissistic family system?
Dysfunctional families that revolve around one or more self-absorbed adults are called narcissistic family systems.
In narcissistic family systems, one or both parents are narcissists who always demand to be the center of attention. Their needs, desires, and opinions take precedence over others.
In my experience, these family systems can form even if the original narcissist is no longer central (e.g., due to death or estrangement) or the self-absorbed parent does not fully meet the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder.
I think of narcissistic family systems as the unbeatable champion of the Dysfunctional Family System Olympics. Those who survive these systems often need long-term, trauma-informed psychotherapy to recover their capacity to build healthy relationships.
In addition to the dysfunctional family system characteristics already listed, narcissistic family systems show the following:
Lack of Empathy: Narcissistic family members have a significant lack of empathy for other family members. They are often indifferent to the feelings, needs, and well-being of others unless it serves their interests.
Manipulative Behavior: Narcissists are known for their manipulative behavior, using tactics like guilt-tripping, gaslighting, and playing the victim to control and dominate other family members.
Conditional Love and Approval: In a narcissistic family system, love and approval are often given conditionally, based on compliance with the narcissist’s wishes and expectations.
Exploitation: Family members, particularly children, are often exploited for the narcissist's benefit, whether to gain a narcissistic supply, achieve personal goals, or maintain a particular image in society.
Emotional Inaccessibility: Narcissistic parents are emotionally inaccessible, incapable of providing genuine affection, support, or validation, leaving children feeling unloved and unseen.
Signs you grew up in a dysfunctional family
Still wondering, Did I grow up in a toxic household? Let’s review the traits of individuals who survived dysfunctional families, aka adult children, to help you gain some clarity.
The term “adult child” can refer to grown-up individuals who grew up in various types of toxic homes, including:
Adult children of dysfunctional families
Adult children of self-absorbed parents
Adult children of emotionally immature parents
Adult children of alcoholics
Adult children of narcissistic, borderline, or otherwise personality-disordered parents
What is adult child syndrome?
Adult child syndrome, often observed in individuals who grew up in dysfunctional or narcissistic family systems, refers to a group of maladaptive behaviors and characteristics that adults may develop from growing up in a stressful, abusive, or neglectful family environment.
These adults often carry the scars of their upbringing into their adult lives, affecting their relationships, self-esteem, and overall psychological well-being. Here, we explore some of the critical facets and manifestations of adult child syndrome:
Complex Trauma: Individuals with adult child syndrome may have experienced complex trauma during their childhood, encompassing multiple forms of abuse, neglect, or household dysfunction. This repeated exposure to distressing events can lead to various emotional and psychological issues in adulthood.
Difficulty in Forming Relationships: People with this syndrome often find building and maintaining healthy relationships challenging. They might fear rejection and abandonment or tend to be in codependent relationships.
Impaired Self-Identity: These adults often have a distorted sense of self due to their upbringing. They might struggle with self-worth and body image, frequently seeking validation from external sources.
Hypervigilance: Growing up in an unpredictable environment might make them hypervigilant, always looking for signs of danger or conflict, resulting in heightened anxiety and stress.
Attachment Issues: Many adults from dysfunctional families develop insecure attachment styles. Children of alcoholics, for instance, often display anxious or avoidant attachment patterns, which can cause relationship issues later in life.
Pervasive Feelings of Unhappiness: Individuals with adult child syndrome frequently struggle to find happiness and contentment in their relationships and lives, often rooted in their traumatic childhood experiences.
How Do People with Unresolved Childhood Trauma Act in Relationships?
Individuals grappling with unresolved childhood trauma often carry the weight of their past into their adult relationships. As a result of the unstable and unpredictable environments they grew up in, adult children typically struggle with the following in relationships:
Trust Issues: Difficulty trusting others and a fear of betrayal or abandonment often stemming from an unstable childhood environment.
Poor Communication Skills: A tendency to resort to defensive or aggressive communication styles, making open and honest dialogue challenging.
Emotional Unavailability: Difficulty expressing and managing emotions, sometimes resulting in detachment or apathy in relationships.
Codependency: A propensity towards codependent relationships, where one relies excessively on their partner for validation and support.
Attachment Issues: Often demonstrate insecure attachment styles, leading to turbulent relationships characterized by anxiety and fear of abandonment.
Difficulty Establishing Boundaries: A tendency to struggle with establishing healthy boundaries, resulting in relationships that can be either too enmeshed or too distant.
Hypervigilance: A heightened sensitivity to potential threats or conflicts, often manifesting as excessive alertness and anxiety in relationships.
Repetition of Dysfunctional Patterns: Individuals may unconsciously replicate the dysfunctional dynamics they witnessed or experienced in their families of origin.
Body Image Issues: Childhood objectification can foster negative body image issues that affect intimacy and sexual relationships.
Emotional Volatility: Individuals might be easily triggered by situations that remind them of past traumas, resulting in heightened emotions or conflicts in the relationship.
How Do You Stop Childhood Trauma from Affecting Relationships?
That last list was a doozy, so let’s get to the good news, shall we?
With the right support, you can break the intergenerational cycle of dysfunctional relationships you inherited and finally enjoy healthy connections.
Here are concrete steps you can take to stop your childhood trauma from affecting your relationships:
Step 1: Acknowledge and Accept Your Family's Toxicity
The first and perhaps most challenging step is to recognize and accept the toxic nature of your family background. This will require you to break through the denial, which tends to run rampant in dysfunctional families. Acknowledging your family’s toxicity may feel threatening, so go slow and get help.
I recommend engaging a trauma-oriented therapist to help you revisit and process your childhood stories and experiences at a comfortable pace. They will help you navigate your memories and emotions so that you can rewrite your life story.
Step 2: Recognize and Rectify Repeating Patterns
The next step is to identify and address how you might be repeating the dynamics of your family of origin in your adult relationships.
Review the lists of dysfunctional family dynamics above and take an honest-yet-kind inventory of your tendencies in relationships, asking questions such as:
Do you hold yourself or your loved ones to rigid standards, unable to accept imperfection, just like your narcissistic parent?
When you feel upset, do you storm away or lash out, similar to your self-absorbed mom or dad?
Do you struggle to set boundaries or speak up when something feels off in a relationship because you had to adjust to an emotionally immature parent’s needs to survive growing up?
Self-compassion is vital while conducting your self-assessment. Remember, your tendencies developed in response to a difficult upbringing, not because you’re flawed.
Once you’ve identified the unhealthy behaviors you unconsciously repeat in your relationships, take opposite action. Try new, healthier approaches, such as directly communicating your needs and boundaries.
You’ll likely feel uncomfortable at first with these new ways of relating, so be sure to seek the help of an experienced relationship therapist.
Step 3: Reparent Yourself
As a person who grew up in a dysfunctional family, you likely missed out on the nurturing you deserved. To heal your capacity for deep, healthy intimacy, you must learn how to provide yourself with the compassion and kindness you missed out on in childhood.
Reparenting yourself is healing from complex trauma through emotionally attuning to yourself. You develop an inner nurturing parent voice that can soothe your inner child; by learning how to comfort your younger, hurt parts of self, you’ll find yourself less reactive and more capable of responding like an adult in your relationships.
In addition to working with an attachment-oriented therapist, you can learn how to reparent yourself through Mindful Self-Compassion, 12-step programs such as Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families, and the oodles of inner child meditations on the interwebs.
TLDR
So, can childhood trauma cause relationship problems?
Absolutely. Childhood trauma can significantly impact your ability to forge healthy relationships as an adult.
Adults who grew up in dysfunctional families, aka adult children, often bear emotional scars that manifest in their adult relationships, resulting in many challenges, including trust issues, poor communication skills, and difficulty establishing healthy boundaries.
You can break your family’s toxic cycles and foster healthy relationships. To do so, you must (ideally with the support of a skilled trauma-informed therapist):
Acknowledge your family's toxicity.
Identify the patterns you may be repeating in your adult relationships.
Learn to reparent yourself, nurturing the wounded inner child with kindness and compassion.
Building healthy, fulfilling relationships untainted by childhood trauma is possible with determination and the right support system.
Ready to stop childhood trauma from affecting your relationships? Apply for a free 30-minute consultation with our Care Coordinator to get matched with your best-fit relationship therapist. You deserve healthy connections, and we want to help you build them!