Growing Up With a Parent Who Struggled: How Your Childhood Still Shapes You Today
Maybe your parent drank too much. Maybe they didn’t drink at all, but they were emotionally checked out, unpredictable, or just never quite there in the ways you needed them to be. Maybe the word “dysfunction” feels too dramatic for what your family was, and yet — something wasn’t right, and you knew it, even if no one said so out loud.
If you grew up in a household like that, some part of you has been adapting to it ever since.
What “Adult Children of Alcoholics” Actually Means
The term Adult Child of an Alcoholic — ACA — sometimes throws people off because they take it literally. But the concept is much broader than it sounds. It applies to anyone who grew up in a home where a parent’s addiction, mental illness, chronic stress, or emotional unavailability left them feeling unsafe, unseen, or responsible for managing the feelings of the adults around them.
Addictions to alcohol, drugs, food, work, or anything else that caused a parent to be physically or emotionally absent all count. So does growing up with a parent who was volatile, depressed, rageful, or simply too overwhelmed to show up consistently for their kids.
What these environments have in common is that they required children to develop sophisticated coping strategies just to get through. You learned to read the room. To be helpful, invisible, or perfect — whatever kept things calm. To anticipate other people’s needs before your own. To not want too much.
Those skills kept you safe then. In adulthood, they tend to create a different set of problems.
The Patterns That Follow You Into Adulthood
Women who grew up in these households often find themselves struggling in relationships in ways that feel baffling, even to them. Walking on eggshells with a partner. Working impossibly hard to keep everyone happy while quietly seething inside. Feeling a desperate need to make things work even when something clearly isn’t working. Loving people who need more fixing than they’re capable of giving.
There’s often a deep loneliness underneath it all — a sense of not quite being known, even by the people closest to you. And a confusion about your own needs, because for so long, your needs weren’t the point.
Anxiety is also extremely common. When your nervous system spent years on alert — scanning for trouble, bracing for impact — it doesn’t just switch off because you left home. That hypervigilance often follows women right into midlife, sometimes intensifying as hormonal shifts remove the buffers that used to keep it manageable.
This Isn’t About Blaming Your Parents
I want to say this clearly, because it comes up a lot: understanding how your childhood shaped you is not the same as blaming your parents or deciding they were terrible people. Most parents who struggled were doing the best they could with what they had. Many were carrying their own unprocessed pain.
But their struggles had an impact on you. And you deserve to understand that impact — not to be stuck in it forever, but to finally be free of it.
What Healing Actually Looks Like
Therapy for adult children of alcoholics or dysfunctional families isn’t just about talking through the past. It’s about bringing awareness to the patterns you developed to survive, understanding how they’re showing up now, and — gradually, gently — learning that you don’t need them in the same way anymore.
EMDR can be particularly powerful in this work, because so much of what ACA clients carry lives below the level of conscious thought. It’s not just that you think you’re not enough, or not safe, or that love comes with conditions — it’s that your body believes it, deep down, in a way that talking alone can’t always reach. EMDR helps the brain process and release those deeply held beliefs so they lose their grip on your present life.
What I see in this work again and again is women arriving exhausted — from performing, from managing, from holding it all together — and slowly discovering that there is a version of themselves underneath all of that, one who knows what she actually needs and is allowed to ask for it.
That discovery is worth everything.
If any of this feels familiar, please know that reaching out is a brave and worthwhile step. I’d be honored to talk with you about what’s possible.
