Adult Children Secrets of Dysfunctional Families

by John Friel

  16. Some were spoiled and smothered out of misguided love; seduced to stay in the nest years after our friends had gone out into the world and begun their adult lives.

  17. Many of us are afraid of people, especially authority figures.

  18. Others of us frighten people, especially our loved ones, and demand that our loved ones live in our isolated worlds— controlled completely by us.

  19. We are people who despise religion or who despise atheism.

  20. We let others use and abuse us or we use and abuse others.

  21. We are people who have only anger, or only sadness, or only fear, or only smiles.

  22. We try so hard that we lose; or try so little that we never live life at all.

  23. We are men and women who look “picture perfect” (Fry, 1987).

  24. We are men and women who hit skid row and feel like we finally belong somewhere.

  25. We have depression or we have rage.

  26. We think ourselves into emptiness or we feel ourselves into chaos.

  27. We are on emotional roller-coasters or in emotional vacuums.

  28. We smile while slamming the kitchen cabinets shut because we’re really angry or we slam the cabinet angrily when we’re really sad.

  29. We abuse ourselves but take care of everyone else.

  30. When we are unhappy, we are terribly afraid to acknowledge it for fear that someone will find out that we are human; or even worse, that we are even here at all.

  31. We have trouble relating to our sons, our daughters or both.

  32. We can make love, but we can’t get emotionally close or we can’t make love at all.

  33. We constantly watch others to try to find out what’s okay and what isn’t.

  34. We feel less than some and better than others but we rarely feel like we belong.

  35. We get stuck in lives our hearts never chose.

  36. We hang onto the past, fear the future and feel anxious in the present.

  37. We work ourselves to death for unknown purposes.

  38. We are never satisfied.

  39. We fear God or we expect God to do it all for us.

  40. We fear or hate people who are different.

  41. We get into friendships that we can’t get out of.

  42. We get hooked on things.

  43. We project our inner conflicts onto our children.

  44. We are embarrassed about our bodies.

  45. We don’t know why we’re here.

  46. We suffer as much as we can.

  47. We see a police car and feel like we’ve done something wrong.

  48. We sacrifice our dignity for false security.

  49. We demand love and rarely get it.

  50. We wish for things instead of going out and getting what we want or need.

  51. We hope for the best, expect the worst and never enjoy the moment.

  52. We feel like the rest of the human race was put here to make us feel intensely uncomfortable while eating at a restaurant alone.

  53. We ask “Where’s the beef?” but unlike Clara Peller in the TV commercial, we aren’t getting paid to ask. And nobody answers.

  54. We run away when we fall in love or we abandon ourselves for the relationship.

  55. We smother those we love, we crush those we love or both.

  56. Some of us will turn the tide of history by our actions, and some of us will live in obscurity.

  57. We will grow up to hate our parents, or we will keep them on the pedestals that we put them on when we were little, but we will rarely let them be the error-prone humans that we all are.

  58. We feel guilty about the way our brothers or sisters were treated compared to us or we feel jealous and slighted about the way they were treated compared to us.

  59. We hate Dad and overprotect Mom or we hate Mom and overprotect Dad.

  60. We were sexually abused by someone when we were five years old but blame ourselves, telling ourselves that we should have known better at age five.

  61. Some of us had a parent who was chronically ill when we were growing up.

  62. Some of us had a parent who was mentally ill when we were growing up.

  63. Some of us had no parents at all when we were growing up.

  64. We are survivors who deep down inside pray that someday life will be more than just mere survival.

  65. We are lovers of life whose little child is locked inside of us, waiting to be set free.

  Regardless of our symptoms or circumstances, we are Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families because:

  Something happened to us a long time ago. It happened more than once. It hurt us. We protected ourselves the only way we knew how. We are still protecting ourselves. It isn’t working anymore.

  Symptoms of Adult Children

  The symptoms that we develop as a result of what happened to us run the gamut of psychiatric and stress-related disorders, from substance use disorders and other addictions to depression, phobias, anxiety, personality disorders, sexual dysfunction, intimacy disorders, overactivity, eating disorders, compulsive behavior and obsessions. We will be the first to agree that not all of these problems in all cases have as their primary cause some kind of dysfunction in our families. Alcoholism, schizophrenia, certain kinds of depression, some forms of anxiety, and some types of obesity all seem to have well-documented biological roots. But it is curious to us that in all our years of doing therapy, we have encountered few if any alcoholics, for example, who did not also come from dysfunctional families and who were not also re-enacting that dysfunction in their own current family systems.

  In fact, we can think of two people who came from healthy families but seemed to inherit the biological predisposition to become hooked on alcohol, and they handled the problem in a very functional way. They both said to themselves, “I think I’m getting addicted to this stuff.” They talked to their family and friends about it, and then they sought help to stop the addiction. The difference for most of us is that we’re too dysfunctional to do that.

  The symptoms that we develop have certain characteristics that seem to hold true for most Adult Children.

  Our symptoms . . .

  1. Are part of our denial system.

  2. Give us the illusion that we are in control.

  3. Started out as a normal response to some perceived stress.

  4. Form as a way of protecting ourselves from a pain that we as children had no power to remove.

  5. Are about the denial of feelings.

  6. Are intimacy and relationship “blockers.”

  7. Are about shame.

  Our symptoms are born out of emotional denial and they serve to maintain that denial. They are ways that we allow ourselves to live one kind of life while convincing ourselves that we have a very different kind of life. And while they serve to give us the illusion that we are in control, they are in fact clear indicators that what we have really done is to give up healthy control of our lives to something outside of ourselves.

  By becoming trapped in an addiction or phobia, we actually trade true control over our lives for the illusion of control. It is this illusion of control that makes giving up our symptoms so frightening.

  The sex addict truly and sincerely believes that if he or she gives up unhealthy sex, life will crumble in chaos. The relationship addict, most often addicted to a person who is himself an addict, sincerely believes that if he or she tries to change in healthy ways, life will fall apart. The exercise bulimic who keeps his weight under control by running, who finds his only sense of “psuedo-inner peace” by running, and who shows all the signs of withdrawal when he isn’t able to run, truly and sincerely believes that his life will not be worth living without the ability to run.

  Our symptoms all started out as a normal response to some perceived life stress. It is our opinion that the breeding ground for them was introduced in childhood, when we were learning how to live with other people. When those family systems in which we grew up had some kind
of dysfunction, whether it be obvious (overt) as it was in Sandy’s case, or subtle (covert) as it was in Frank’s case, it is normal, logical and reasonable for a child in that family to protect himself or herself. Just as the physical body will isolate an infection and protect the rest of the body by creating a cyst around it if it is left untreated for too long, our childhood minds will isolate the source of psychological pain in a safe blanket of denial to maintain some kind of balance.

  These symptoms form as a way of protecting us from a pain that we as children had no power to remove. From the early beginnings of denial grows a pattern of splitting ourselves in two, like Sandy did. She was the competent, high-achieving child on the outside and the frightened, hurt, lost little child on the inside. The longer this dysfunction went untreated, the more adept she became at denying her true feelings. And the more we deny our feelings, the worse we feel.

  And so our symptoms are about the denial of feelings, too. We shut off the hurt and the fear. We bask in the praise of “outsiders” who can only see the public image that we present. We take pride in being “the strong one” or “the rebel” or the “cutie pie” and all the while we are dying inside because we feel that no one really knows who we are, and they probably don’t. Thus our symptoms are also intimacy or relationship disorders.

  By supporting our denial and by helping us to maintain our “family secrets,” they also keep us from ever getting close to anyone else in healthy ways. We always have to keep our guard up in the hopes that no one will find out what’s really inside, which means that our symptoms are also about shame. They are about the shame of “being found out,” of being “discovered,” of being emotionally naked in front of others and being laughed at, criticized or rejected.

  The list of symptoms that can develop in Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families is quite long. In many of us, there are several of these present at the same time. We have never met a compulsive overeater, for example, who does not have an unhealthy dependency on food. We have rarely seen a spouse of an alcoholic who is not literally addicted to the relationship with their spouse, who is not compulsive in several other areas of life, who does not have an unhealthy dependency on other people or things and who does not have problems with depression.

  It is not the label one puts on people that determines what kind of family problems they will have or what kind of parents they will make. It doesn’t matter to the child whimpering in her bedroom after being screamed at by her frustrated lonely mother whether or not her mother is labeled a relationship addict, a co-dependent or a compulsive overeater. What matters to that child is the fact that Mom and Dad aren’t happy, that Mom and Dad scream at her all the time, that Mom and Dad put her in the middle of their fights and that Mom and Dad won’t let her feel her real feelings.

  While our list is not all-inclusive, we believe it does provide a picture of what happens to so many of us Adult Children.

  Some Symptoms Developed

  By Adult Children

  Emotional/Psychological

  1. Depression

  2. Anxiety/panic attacks

  3. Suicide or suicidal thoughts

  4. Obsessions and compulsions

  5. Chemical addictions

  6. Low self-esteem

  7. Personality disorders

  8. Phobias

  9. Hysteria

  10. Sexual dysfunction

  11. Suspiciousness

  12. Intimacy problems

  13. Dissociation

  14. Flat affect

  15. Difficulty concentrating

  16. Excessive anger

  17. Low frustration tolerance

  18. Passive/aggressive personality

  19. Extreme dependency

  20. Inability to be interdependent

  21. Inability to play or have fun

  22. Inability to be assertive

  23. People-pleasing

  24. Approval seeking

  25. Identity confusion

  Physical

  1. Chemical dependency

  2. Eating disorders

  3. Accident proneness/chronic pain syndrome

  4. Tension and migraine headaches

  5. Respiratory problems

  6. Ulcers, colitis, digestive problems

  7. Constipation/diarrhea

  8. Sleep disorders

  9. Muscle tension

  10. TMJ (Temporomandibular Joint Disorder)

  Because they tend to be so common for Adult Children, we will take a brief but closer look at addictions, compulsions, unhealthy dependencies, depression, stress symptoms, phobias and anxiety.

  Addiction

  In the narrowest sense, an addiction is a physiological dependence on some substance, in which the dependence has got out of control and is affecting the daily functioning of the addict in some pretty serious ways. This definition, of course, would leave out the broader uses of the term as in work addiction, love addiction, television addiction, etc. We would prefer to use “addiction” more broadly defined because that is the way that it is being used quite often now. We suspect that the distinction between an addiction and an unhealthy dependency may simply be one of degree anyway.

  Compulsion

  Acompulsion is something we do that we do not feel we are able to control or stop, but gives us the illusion of being in control. The “out, out, damned spot” compulsive hand-washing to try to remove some imagined sin from one’s hands is a classic example of a compulsion, as would be getting up in the night seven or eight times to check to see if you locked all the doors and windows. Clinicians speak of compulsive overeating, compulsive gambling or compulsive cleaning and spending. Sound familiar? Am I a compulsive gambler or am I a gambling addict? Or does it really matter what we call it, as long as we know that it’s something out of control that is doing us and others harm?

  Unhealthy Dependencies

  Unhealthy dependencies grow out of our normal dependent state as infants. We are born totally dependent upon our parents for our survival. Without them feeding us, nurturing us and taking care of us when we are sick, we would literally die. Thus our dependency needs are rooted deeply and firmly in terms of absolute survival.

  As we grow older, these needs take on subtler and subtler forms. At the age of six, for example, it is possible for us to actually survive on our own, as many children have to do in impoverished countries, although we do not survive well at this age without continued help from adults. At the age of 15, we can survive quite well on our own, at least in terms of meeting basic biological and safety needs. But what about the less obvious emotional needs that we have? The needs that are less tangible but powerful nonetheless? It is most often these needs that don’t get met in dysfunctional families, which means that we are launched into adulthood with a reservoir of unmet needs.

  One of the major tasks of growing up is to learn how to become interdependent with others. Interdependence means being one’s own person, being able to maintain a clear and separate identity from others, while still recognizing the need for help and support from others. It also means being able to get that support in healthy rather than destructive ways.

  Am I interdependent if I have a “lot of friends“ but start to feel that I do too much for them and don’t get enough back? Am I interdependent if, like Sandy, I am high-achieving, responsible, and competent at work but feel like no one ever knows the real me? Or am I simply displaying the underside of unhealthy dependency?

  Friel (1982) wrote of a paradoxical dependency, in which the person having this problem appeared self-reliant and independent on the outside but was floundering on the inside. Paradoxical dependency is one form of an unhealthy dependency. Looking strong and “together” on the surface, while having unhappy relationships and low self-esteem underneath, is a clear sign of unhealthy dependency.

  Unhealthy dependency means that the attachment that we have to a substance, a job, a person, a pet or whatever is getting in the way of our happiness and contentment. These attac
hments, like addictions, prevent us from hearing the little child inside of us who wants his or her needs met in healthy ways, and who wants to be set free. They keep us in denial, they keep us from forming healthy attachments to friends and lovers. Beneath them is the same fear, sadness, hurt, loneliness and anger that is beneath addictions and compulsions.

  Unhealthy dependencies prevent the formation of healthy interdependence, and thus are destructive to us. And as many experts know too well, unhealthy dependencies, left untreated, will often deteriorate into full-blown addictions under normal life stresses.

  Depression

  Depression is something that we all experience at one time or another. It includes feelings of low self-esteem, sadness, feeling “blue” or “down,” being tired, apathetic, eating a lot or not much at all, sleeping a lot or not much at all and so on. Many long-term depressions are due to imbalances of neurotransmitter substances in the brain, so that the brain is not getting stimulated enough.

  Antidepressant medications have been very helpful in treating these kinds of depression. But we see so many cases of depression that are treated only with medications, when the true underlying problem is a lot of unresolved “junk” from childhood.

  We get depressed when we don’t know how to get what we need in life. We get depressed to punish others. We get depressed to get others to help us, so depression can be a way of achieving power over others. We get depressed when we’re afraid to express our anger. There are all kinds of depression.

  For every person who is not on antidepressant medication and should be, it is our hunch that there are several more who are on them and won’t need to be once they recognize and deal with the reality of being an Adult Child of a Dysfunctional Family.

  Stress Symptoms

  Stress symptoms, such as migraine or tension headaches, many forms of temporomandibular joint disorder (TMJ) (sore jaw joints from grinding the teeth), ulcers, colitis, skin disorders, backaches,muscle tension problems, asthma, etc., are extremely common among “Adult Children”.

  They are common because when we “hide out” and try to stuff what we believe are “inappropriate” feelings, they come out sideways anyway. Instead of crying, we get headaches. Instead of telling our spouse that we don’t like to go shopping, we go anyway and get stomach pains. Instead of admitting that we’re tired, we work ourselves into the ground compulsively to show how strong we are, and develop hypertension. Our bodies react to things around us whether we like it or not. It is up to us to express those reactions in healthy, not dysfunctional, ways.