I grew up in chaos and dysfunction - here are 10 patterns I had to unlearn to build a healthy adult life

Some patterns don't announce themselves.

They sneak into your adult life wearing disguises, pretending to be personality traits when they're actually survival mechanisms you learned before you could tie your shoes.

I didn't realize how much my childhood shaped my adult behavior until I was in my thirties, sitting in my Venice Beach apartment, trying to understand why I kept sabotaging good relationships and feeling anxious even when things were going well. Growing up in suburban Sacramento, my family looked normal enough from the outside. But inside our house, chaos was the baseline. I thought everyone lived that way.

Turns out, they don't. And those "coping skills" I developed? They were wrecking my adult life.

If you grew up with instability, unpredictability, or dysfunction, you probably developed patterns that helped you survive then but are holding you back now. Let me walk you through the ones I had to unlearn, and maybe you'll recognize yourself in a few of them.

1) Believing I had to earn love through achievement

In dysfunctional families, love often comes with conditions. You learn that affection appears when you perform, achieve, or make someone else look good. It vanishes when you fail or need something.

I spent years chasing accomplishments, thinking each one would finally make me worthy. First it was grades, then bylines, then freelance gigs that paid well. But no amount of external validation filled the hole because the problem wasn't my resume. The problem was believing I needed to earn what should have been freely given.

Adults who grew up in dysfunctional families often carry the burden of insufficient emotional validation and support from their formative years, which manifests as constantly seeking approval through achievement.

Real love doesn't have a performance requirement. I'm still learning this one, honestly. Some days I catch myself overworking, trying to justify my existence. Then I have to remind myself that I'm enough just sitting here, doing nothing, being myself.

2) Assuming conflict means abandonment

When conflict in your childhood home meant screaming, slamming doors, or someone leaving for days, you learn to associate any disagreement with catastrophe. Your nervous system gets wired to treat a minor argument like a five-alarm fire.

My partner and I had this issue constantly during our first year together. She'd want to discuss something I did that bothered her, and I'd immediately shut down or apologize frantically, anything to make the conflict stop. I was responding to old patterns, not to what was actually happening.

Healthy relationships require conflict. Not drama, but honest conversations about needs and boundaries. The difference is night and day once you learn it, but getting there requires retraining your entire nervous system to believe that disagreement doesn't equal disaster.

3) Taking responsibility for other people's emotions

In chaotic homes, kids often become emotional managers. You learn to read the room, anticipate needs, and regulate other people's feelings because the adults can't or won't do it themselves. This becomes so automatic that you carry it into every relationship.

I used to exhaust myself trying to keep everyone around me happy. If a friend seemed upset, I'd immediately assume I'd done something wrong and launch into damage control. If my partner had a bad day, I'd scramble to fix it instead of just being present.

This pattern is exhausting because you're taking responsibility for things you can't control. Other people's emotions are their own. You can be supportive without being responsible.

As I recently read in Rudá Iandê's revolutionary new book "Laughing in the Face of Chaos": "Their happiness is their responsibility, not yours."

That line hit me hard because I'd spent decades believing the opposite.

4) Staying hypervigilant even when safe

Growing up in unpredictability teaches you to constantly scan for danger. You learn to notice micro-expressions, tone shifts, and environmental changes because your safety depends on it. But when you're not in danger anymore, that vigilance becomes anxiety.

I noticed this pattern when I moved to Los Angeles in my twenties. Even in my own apartment, I'd startle at normal sounds. I'd compulsively check that doors were locked. I'd worry about potential disasters that had maybe a 0.01% chance of happening. My nervous system was stuck in threat mode even though I was finally safe.

Children in dysfunctional families often feel like they have to walk on eggshells in their own home for fear of upsetting their parents, and that hypervigilance can persist decades into adulthood. Learning to actually relax took me years of conscious practice. Sometimes I still catch myself bracing for disaster when things are going well.

5) Expecting chaos and creating it when things get calm

Here's a weird one: when you grow up in dysfunction, calm feels wrong. Your nervous system is calibrated for chaos, so when life gets stable, you might unconsciously create drama to return to what's familiar.

I did this with dating for years. Things would be going well, and I'd find reasons to pick fights or create problems. Not consciously, but looking back, the pattern was obvious. Whenever I got close to real intimacy and stability, I'd sabotage it.

This happens because dysfunction becomes your normal. Your brain literally expects chaos and interprets calm as "the calm before the storm" rather than actual safety. Breaking this pattern requires consciously choosing stability even when it feels uncomfortable or boring.

6) Struggling to identify my own needs and feelings

When your job as a kid is to manage everyone else's emotions and needs, you never learn to identify your own. You learn to ask "What does this person need from me?" instead of "What do I need right now?"

I spent my twenties having no idea what I actually wanted. I could tell you what my partner wanted, what my boss wanted, what my friends wanted. But ask me what I wanted for dinner or how I was feeling? Blank stare. I genuinely didn't know because I'd never developed that skill.

Children in dysfunctional families don't learn how to notice, value, and attend to their own feelings, which creates adults who are disconnected from their own inner experience. I had to literally practice noticing my feelings, naming them, and considering what I needed. It felt absurd at first, but it's essential.

7) Believing that asking for help means weakness

In dysfunctional families, needs are often met with anger, dismissal, or ridicule. You learn that asking for help makes you a burden. So you become aggressively self-reliant, even when you're drowning.

I wouldn't ask for help with anything. Moving apartments alone, handling major projects with no support, dealing with health issues without telling anyone. I wore my self-sufficiency like armor, but really it was just old programming telling me that needing people was dangerous.

My grandmother actually helped me see this differently. She raised four kids on a teacher's salary and still found time to volunteer at a food bank every Saturday. When I had the flu in college, she drove six hours to bring me soup. She showed me that needing help is human, not shameful. Strong people ask for support. That's how you actually build a life.

8) Defaulting to people-pleasing and losing myself

When your safety depends on keeping unstable adults calm and happy, you become a chameleon. You learn to read what people want and become that. Your own personality becomes negotiable.

I lost years of my life doing this. I'd mirror whoever I was with, adopting their interests, their opinions, their preferences. With my music blogger friends in my twenties, I was all about underground bands. With different people, I'd be someone else entirely. I didn't know who I actually was because I'd spent so long being whoever others needed.

Adults who grew up in dysfunctional families often face difficulty forming professional, social and romantic bonds, and may appear submissive, controlling, or even detached in relationships. People-pleasing looks like niceness, but it's actually a form of self-abandonment. You're erasing yourself to keep others comfortable.

9) Treating normal problems like catastrophes

When your childhood had actual emergencies, your threat response system gets miscalibrated. As an adult, you might treat minor inconveniences like disasters because your nervous system can't distinguish between "annoying" and "dangerous."

I used to spiral over things like getting stuck in traffic or making a small mistake at work. My body would respond like I was facing a genuine threat, full panic mode over situations that warranted mild frustration at most. Everything felt high-stakes because my nervous system was trained in an environment where everything was high-stakes.

Learning to calibrate your responses takes time. You have to consciously practice asking yourself, "Is this actually dangerous, or does it just feel that way?" Most of the time, it's not dangerous. It's just uncomfortable, and uncomfortable isn't the same as unsafe.

10) Struggling with genuine intimacy and vulnerability

When showing your real self in childhood led to rejection, ridicule, or punishment, you learn to hide. You might have relationships, but real intimacy requires vulnerability, and vulnerability feels life-threatening.

I've been with my partner for five years, and this is still the hardest one for me. Letting someone see the parts of me I'm ashamed of, admitting when I'm scared or hurt, asking for emotional support, these things trigger every alarm in my system. My default is to handle everything alone, present a capable front, never let anyone see me struggle.

But real connection requires letting people in. Not performing, not managing, just being honest about who you are and what you need. It's terrifying when you've learned that honesty gets weaponized against you, but it's also the only path to relationships that actually nourish you instead of just repeating old patterns.

Conclusion

These patterns don't just disappear because you recognize them. Unlearning them is ongoing work, some days easier than others. I still catch myself people-pleasing, still struggle with asking for help, still sometimes expect disaster when things are going well.

But here's what I've learned: these behaviors made sense once. They protected you when you needed protection. They kept you safe in an unsafe environment. You weren't broken then, and you're not broken now. You were adapting, which is what humans do.

The difference is that you're not in that environment anymore. You can choose differently now. You can learn new patterns that actually serve the life you want to build instead of the one you survived.

It's messy work, this unlearning. But it's worth it. On the other side of these patterns is a version of yourself you've never fully met, the one who exists without constantly bracing for impact, who can relax into connection, who knows their own worth without needing to earn it constantly.

That person has been there all along, waiting for you to feel safe enough to let them out.