Abracadabra: A Curious Thought About the Words We Live By
23 October 2026
Every family has rules.
Some are spoken: be home by ten, finish your homework, take your shoes off at the door.
Others are never said aloud.
Do not upset Dad.
Do not ask why Mum is not talking to us again.
Do not tell anyone what happens at home.
Do not make things more difficult.
Do not need too much.
Children are remarkably observant. They notice which subjects make the room go quiet, whose mood controls the evening and what happens when somebody expresses anger, sadness or disagreement. Long before they can explain the dynamics around them, they begin adapting to them.
For adult children of dysfunctional families, those adaptations can quietly become a way of life. You may leave the family home, build a career, form relationships and appear capable from the outside, yet still find yourself obeying rules you never consciously chose.
The word dysfunctional can sound dramatic. It may bring to mind obvious chaos, addiction or constant conflict. Those experiences can certainly be part of it, but family dysfunction can also be quieter and much harder to name.
It can exist in a home where appearances are carefully maintained. A family may look successful, respectable or close while emotions are dismissed, affection is conditional, one person’s needs dominate or difficult experiences are never discussed.
Sometimes there is unpredictability: a parent can be loving one day and emotionally unavailable, critical or volatile the next. Sometimes a child becomes a confidant, mediator or emotional support for an adult. In other families, nothing openly terrible happens, but warmth, reassurance and genuine interest are largely absent.
The important question is not whether your childhood looked bad enough from the outside. It is what you had to become in order to feel safe, loved or accepted within it.
Perhaps you became exceptionally responsible. Perhaps you learned to disappear. Perhaps you became entertaining, successful, useful or endlessly agreeable. Whatever role you found, it probably made sense at the time.
The difficulty is that childhood roles do not automatically end when childhood does.
In some families, protecting the family image becomes more important than acknowledging what is happening inside it.
You may have learned that certain experiences were private, that speaking honestly was disloyal or that naming a problem somehow made you the problem. Perhaps everyone knew that something was wrong, but nobody was allowed to say it directly.
As an adult, this can become difficulty asking for help or finding words for your experience. You may minimise what happened by telling yourself that other people had it worse. You may wait until you are completely overwhelmed before admitting that you are struggling.
You might also feel uncomfortable when conversations become emotionally honest. Part of you wants closeness; another part still expects honesty to cause conflict, humiliation or rejection.
Silence may once have protected your place in the family. Later, it can leave you feeling alone inside your own life.
What happened when you were upset as a child?
Were you comforted and helped to understand what you felt? Or were you told to stop crying, calm down, toughen up or be grateful? Did your emotions receive attention only when they became convenient for somebody else?
Adult children of dysfunctional families often become highly aware of other people’s feelings while remaining uncertain about their own. They can sense tension in a voice, a change in expression or a shift in the atmosphere almost instantly. Yet when asked, “What do you need?” the answer may not come easily.
This is not because there is nothing inside you. It may be because noticing yourself was once less important than noticing everybody else.
Later in life, feelings may be analysed rather than experienced. Sadness becomes something to justify. Anger produces guilt. Disappointment is quickly covered with understanding for the other person. Even happiness may be restrained if being visible once attracted criticism, teasing or envy.
The old rule says that emotions are dangerous, inconvenient or excessive. A healthier truth is that emotions are information. They can tell you when something matters, when a boundary has been crossed and when a part of you needs attention.
Some children learn very early that the safest way to remain loved is to become easy—or to be the “good child.” They hear, Be a good girl. Be a good boy. And being good gradually comes to mean staying quiet, agreeable, helpful and undemanding.
They ask for little. They solve their own problems. They avoid adding pressure to a parent who is already overwhelmed, unavailable or unpredictable. Adults may praise them for being mature and independent without noticing what that independence is costing them.
Years later, the “easy child” or “good child” may become the adult who supports everyone but struggles to receive support. You may feel guilty asking for time, reassurance or care. You may wait for people to notice what you need and feel quietly hurt when they do not. Or you may choose relationships in which you continue proving how little you require.
Being needed can feel familiar. Needing someone else can feel frightening.
This can create a painful contradiction: you long to feel known and supported, but revealing your needs feels exposing. So you remain capable, generous and dependable while a more vulnerable part of you wonders whether anyone would stay if you stopped being useful.
When tension could erupt without warning, being able to read the room was not merely a personality trait. It was a valuable skill.
You may have learned how to soften your words, anticipate reactions and prevent disagreements before they began. Perhaps you made people laugh, changed the subject or accepted blame because restoring calm felt more important than being understood.
In adulthood, this can appear as people-pleasing, overexplaining and difficulty setting boundaries. A simple “no” may carry an unexpected weight. Someone else’s disappointment can feel like evidence that you have been unkind. Conflict may feel less like a difference between two adults and more like a threat to the relationship itself.
This is why advice such as “just set boundaries” can feel frustratingly simplistic. The words may be simple; what they represent is not. For someone who learned that connection depended on keeping others comfortable, a boundary can feel like risking love, belonging and safety all at once.
Family loyalty can be beautiful. It can offer belonging, shared history and support. But loyalty becomes painful when it requires you to deny your own experience.
You can love your family and still recognise that parts of your childhood hurt you. You can understand what your parents went through and still acknowledge what you did not receive. Compassion for their story does not require abandonment of your own.
Many adult children of dysfunctional families struggle with this distinction. Looking honestly at the past may feel like betrayal. Anger may feel disrespectful. Creating distance may bring intense guilt, even when contact repeatedly leaves them anxious, depleted or diminished.
But understanding is not the same as excusing everything. Forgiveness, if it is meaningful to you, does not have to mean renewed access, forgotten boundaries or pretending that the past had no effect.
Sometimes loyalty begins to change shape. It becomes less about protecting the family’s version of events and more about refusing to carry harmful family patterns into another generation.
The invisible rules learned in a dysfunctional family rarely remain confined to family life. They can influence friendships, romantic relationships, parenting and work.
You may become the person who takes responsibility whenever something goes wrong. You might feel drawn to people whose affection must be earned, because inconsistency feels more familiar than steady care. You may mistake anxiety for chemistry, usefulness for closeness or self-sacrifice for love.
At work, you may overprepare, avoid asking questions or become deeply affected by criticism. Rest can feel undeserved. Success may bring only temporary relief before the standard moves again.
None of this means you are broken or destined to repeat the past. It means that patterns learned through repetition can continue through repetition—until they are noticed, understood and given the opportunity to change.
Healing from a dysfunctional family is not about placing every difficulty at your parents’ feet. Nor is it about remaining trapped in an identity built around what happened to you.
It is about becoming curious.
Which rules am I still following?
What do I believe would happen if I disappointed someone?
When did being useful become safer than being known?
Which parts of myself did I learn to hide?
Those questions are not invitations to blame. They are invitations to understand yourself with greater honesty and compassion.
Rapid Transformational Therapy and hypnotherapy can support this kind of focused exploration. Rather than treating people-pleasing, perfectionism or fear of conflict as isolated flaws, the work can help you consider the beliefs and meanings beneath them. It offers space to look at what you learned about love, safety, worth and belonging—and to begin developing beliefs that reflect the adult you are now.
The aim is not to rewrite history or force a particular feeling towards your family. It is to give you more choice in the present.
You may begin to discover that you can speak honestly without becoming cruel. You can have needs without becoming a burden. You can allow somebody to be disappointed without rushing to abandon yourself. You can care for others without taking responsibility for everything they feel.
The rules that protected you in childhood deserve understanding. But they do not have to govern the rest of your life.
You are allowed to keep what still serves you.
And you are allowed to write new rules for everything that comes next.
If growing up in a dysfunctional family continues to affect your confidence, relationships or ability to trust yourself, focused therapeutic support can offer a safe place to understand those patterns. LifeTherapy offers personalised online Rapid Transformational Therapy sessions for adults who are ready to move beyond old family roles and reconnect with who they are beneath them.
Book a free discovery call now and let’s start your journey together. Your path to personal growth begins here.
