FAMILY OF ORIGIN

Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families (ACoA)

Grow up with an alcoholic or addicted parent? Raised by a parent with a mental health disorder? A self-absorbed, narcissistic parent? An emotionally unavailable parent? A controlling, angry parent? A completely absent parent? Grow up feeling like you were the adult and your parent was the child?

Specializing in Healing The ‘Adult Child’

Our family of origin is the origin of everything we’ve learned. If you grew up in a dysfunctional family you learned to become dysfunctional in order to function in a dysfunctional system. Becoming dysfunctional wasn’t intentional – it was necessary to survive. Being an ‘Adult Child’ does not mean you live in the past or are infantile in your thinking and actions. It means you meet the demands of adult life with survival techniques learned as a child. These survival techniques create relationship anxiety with characteristics such as poor boundaries, people-pleasing and approval seeking, fearing angry people and authority figures, co-dependency and rescuing others, over-achievement and perfectionism, judging yourself harshly and sensitive to criticism, guilt for standing up for yourself and fearing abandonment. While many people have some of these characteristics they may not necessarily be an Adult Child. What makes an Adult Child is when these characteristics are to the extreme. But you can become a healthy, functioning Adult!

How Will You Help Me?