16 Signs That Your Childhood Home Life Was Difficult

This post was originally published on this site

Source: lexashka / Adobe Stock

It’s hard to pin certain struggles in adulthood on specific experiences in childhood. People with similar upbringings can turn out very different, and kids with completely different home lives can grow into adults who share many emotional or behavioral patterns.

Nevertheless, research studies consistently find that difficult experiences in one’s family of origin raise the risk for various problems later in life. My experience as a therapist confirms these findings, revealing many long-term effects of a difficult childhood.

In some cases, the painful past includes adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) such as a parent’s major mental illness or witnessing domestic violence. For others, childhood stress comes in the form of a chaotic environment, such as a disorganized and overly stimulating home and a lack of family structure and routine (Marsh et al., 2020).

The following 16 signs of a difficult early home life are based on research as well as my observations in therapy.

1. It’s hard to relax. You feel the need to be productive all the time. If you have a spare moment, you look for something to fill it. Relaxing feels like lowering your defenses, and letting down your guard doesn’t feel safe.
2. It’s easier to work than to rest. In a similar way, you struggle with vacations and holidays, and even weekends. Downtime means more time to feel uneasy and restless. It’s a relief to return to the grind.
3. Your trust is hard to win and easy to lose. You learned early on that the only person you can really count on is yourself. You don’t expect other people to be dependable and are sure they’ll let you down at some point, even those who so far have always been there for you.
4. You’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Relationships aren’t the only thing you don’t trust. In most of your life you anticipate disaster—for things to fall apart at work or school, for example, or to get the phone call that changes your life forever. Sometimes when things are going well, you feel the most uneasy. In one way or another, you’re waiting for the worst to blindside you, just like it did when you were a kid.
5. Strong emotions make you uncomfortable. The emotions could be yours or someone else’s, and they might be so-called negative ones like anger or sadness, or even positive ones such as excitement. You may have learned at an early age that strong emotions often don’t end well, so you’d prefer to exist in a fairly neutral range.
6. You’re hyperaware of others’ emotions. You never want to be caught off guard by another person’s anger, jealousy, or other difficult emotion, which you know can escalate into something worse. As a result, you’re constantly assessing how everyone around you is doing.
7. You work really hard to prevent problems. Not only are you aware of others’ emotions, but you take pains to make sure any problem is taken care of before it gets out of control. You’re still trying to find the safety and stability you craved as a child.
8. You’re a fixer. When there is a problem, you jump in to solve it. It’s hard to rest until the situation is under control.
9. You prefer to be in control. Speaking of control, you strongly prefer it. You’d rather do something yourself than delegate; even though it’s more work for you, at least you know it will be done right. Giving up control raises issues of trust and the possibility of being let down.
10. You struggle to feel secure in relationships. You often worry that your friends or romantic partners will lose interest or betray you. Your early relationships were unpredictable, and you can’t help but expect more of the same. At times you might even break off a relationship preemptively, leaving before you’re left.
11. You’re prone to spells of panic when stress is high. That same sense of insecurity can show up as panic when you’re feeling overwhelmed, or even out of the blue. You might have sudden spells of extreme anxiety and feel disconnected from your body or your surroundings, with a powerful sense of impending doom. Perhaps you struggle to drive or to leave the house.
12. You tend to be a people pleaser. Unhappy people have brought you a lot of grief, so you go out of your way to try to make people happy. Accordingly, you’re willing to sacrifice your own wishes and preferences to give others what you think they want.
13. You don’t trust that anything good will last. You seem to carry the implicit core belief that “nothing good lasts for long,” based on painful experiences of disappointment from your childhood. Your mind tends to discount anything positive as exceptions that are bound to disappear.
14. You have a tendency toward depression. You soldier on and keep your head up for as long as you can, but at times you reach a breaking point and it feels like everything is collapsing. During these episodes it’s hard to find hope or even the motivation to get out of bed (von Stumm, 2024).
15. You’re not very happy with how your life has turned out. Difficulties early in life often predict lower life satisfaction as an adult (Hughes et al., 2017), whether due to disappointment with how things have gone or because you’re not able to enjoy the good in your life.
16. You’re easily startled. Stress and trauma from your early years may have wired your nervous system to be highly sensitive to outside insults. Your hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis might be working overtime to flood your system with cortisol and other stress hormones (Crede et al., 2023), and you feel like you’re always on edge and under siege.

If you recognize yourself in many of these descriptions, take heart: You’re not alone. And while it might feel sometimes like you’re broken, you also have incredible strength. In spite of these early challenges, you’ve survived. And more than that: You’ve made friends and found ways to enjoy life. You’ve discovered what you’re good at. You’ve learned what it is to love.

Through everything you’ve kept going, just as you do now—even on dark days when your heart is broken and it would be so easy to quit. You haven’t given up. Persisting in the face of these challenges is a mark of your courage and strength.

So wherever you find yourself, be kind to yourself. You might consider speaking with a supportive therapist who can help you process the pain of the past and find more enjoyment in the present. Whatever your early life experiences, you are worth taking care of now.