1. I Had No Idea How Deep My Childhood Wounds Ran
Part of the “As Told to Bolde” series. Have a story to share? Contact [email protected]
Meet Lauren, 31. She shares how being raised in a dysfunctional home shaped her in ways she didn’t understand until adulthood.
“I grew up in a home where chaos reigned over stability. My parents’ fights were daily, explosive, and terrifying. One moment, we were a ‘normal’ family having dinner; the next, all hell had broken loose. I learned to tiptoe around the house and keep my feelings locked away in a safe. I also learned far too late that my dad had untreated mental illness and my mother was a pill-popping alcoholic.
“For years, I numbed my pain with drugs and alcohol and in toxic relationships. It took years to realize I had a deep fear of abandonment, an inability to trust, and a constant need to prove my worth. Therapy helped me unpack the trauma I didn’t even know I was carrying, and slowly, I learned to rewrite my narrative and find a sense of safety and self.”—Lauren Mitchell, Austin.
Continue reading to learn about the impact of childhood trauma and how to find healing >>
2. You Overthink Every Social Interaction
Ever notice how you replay conversations in your head for days, wondering if you said something wrong? According to Psyclarity Health, that’s not anxiety, it’s a trauma response—or the residue of growing up where one wrong word could shift the entire mood of your home. You learned early that words have consequences, sometimes unpredictable ones.
Your brain developed an advanced threat-detection system, constantly scanning for potential conflict. While your friends seem to move effortlessly through social situations, you’re running complex calculations behind every smile. This isn’t a weakness—it’s a survival skill you no longer need but haven’t figured out how to deactivate.
3. Your Stomach Still Knots When Someone Raises Their Voice
That instant physical reaction when someone gets loud isn’t just in your head—your body remembers what your conscious mind tries to forget. Your nervous system doesn’t distinguish between your boss raising their voice in excitement and the shouting that once signaled danger at home. That automatic tension is your body trying to protect you—more specifically, according to the National Library of Medicine, this physical reaction is linked to the amygdala’s role in processing auditory threats.
You might find yourself freezing, placating, or leaving rooms when voices escalate, even in perfectly safe situations. What looks like oversensitivity to others is actually an intelligent adaptation your body made to keep you safe. Understanding this connection is the first step to teaching your body that raised voices no longer signal incoming storms.
4. You Learned Early To Read Moods Before Anything Else
You became an emotional meteorologist by necessity, predicting storms before anyone else saw clouds. According to the CPTSD Foundation, your ability to detect the slightest shift in tone or facial expression isn’t random—it was essential information when your safety depended on knowing what was coming.
This hyperawareness means you often know what others are feeling before they do. While this sensitivity can make you an incredibly empathetic friend, it also means you rarely get to exist without absorbing everyone else’s emotional weather. Learning to distinguish between your feelings and those you’re picking up from others is a crucial boundary you’re still working to establish.
5. You Feel More Comfortable With Criticism Than Praise
Compliments make you squirm while criticism slides right into place like it belongs there. This isn’t a coincidence—it’s what happens when criticism was the primary language spoken in your home. Your brain develops more receptors for negative feedback than positive.
The discomfort you feel with praise isn’t modesty; it’s cognitive dissonance. When someone sees good in you that contradicts your internal narrative, your brain flags it as potentially false information. Breaking this pattern means deliberately slowing down to let compliments land instead of deflecting them—even when every instinct tells you to push them away.
6. You Struggle To Accept Help But Give It Away Freely
Have you noticed how offering support to others comes naturally, but asking for it yourself feels nearly impossible? When your needs took a backseat growing up, you learned that independence wasn’t just valued—it was required. Needing help became associated with burdening others or inviting disappointment.
Meanwhile, your caretaking instincts developed into your primary love language and defense mechanism. Being helpful meant being valuable, and being valuable meant being safe. The path forward isn’t stopping your generosity but extending some of that same compassion inward. Your needs deserve just as much attention as everyone else’s.
7. You’re Exhausted By Always Preparing For The Worst
That mental habit of running through worst-case scenarios isn’t pessimism—it’s your brain’s way of trying to protect you from being blindsided. As Psychology Today notes, when unpredictability was the only predictable thing in your childhood, preparing for disaster became a full-time job your mind still hasn’t quit.
This constant vigilance takes enormous energy that others get to spend elsewhere. While your friends seem carefree, you’re mentally packing emergency kits for situations that will likely never happen. Recognizing this pattern doesn’t mean forcing toxic positivity, but gradually teaching your nervous system that constant threat assessment is no longer necessary for survival.
8. Your Inner Voice Is Your Harshest Critic
That voice in your head that finds fault with everything you do didn’t develop in a vacuum. It’s often an internalized version of what you heard growing up, now running on autopilot without the external source. You absorbed the criticism until you no longer needed someone else to deliver it.
This internal critic convinced you it was keeping you safe—after all, if you catch your flaws first, no one can use them against you. But this voice that promised protection has become your primary source of pain. Transforming this relationship means recognizing when that critical voice speaks and questioning whether you’d ever talk to someone you love the way you talk to yourself.
9. You Feel Responsible For Everyone’s Emotions But Your Own
You automatically assume the role of emotional manager in any room, diffusing tension before others even notice it. This isn’t random—it’s what happens when you grow up believing other people’s feelings are somehow your responsibility. Their happiness meant safety; their anger meant you’d failed.
This pattern follows you everywhere, making you hyperaware of others’ needs while disconnected from your own. You find yourself apologizing for things that aren’t your fault and fixing problems you didn’t create. Learning that you’re allowed to experience emotions without managing everyone else’s feels like discovering gravity doesn’t apply to you—theoretically freeing but practically terrifying.
10. You Consider Every Disagreement a Threat To Your Safety
When someone disagrees with you and your heart races like you’re in danger, that’s your nervous system confusing past and present. In homes where conflict escalated unpredictably, disagreement wasn’t just a difference of opinion—it was the warning bell before emotional or physical chaos.
Your reaction isn’t overreacting; it’s a physiological response to a perceived threat. While others can debate comfortably, your body prepares for the fallout that isn’t coming. Healing means teaching your nervous system that disagreement doesn’t equal danger, that conflict can be healthy, and that different opinions don’t have to end in someone getting hurt.
11. You Feel a Constant Need To Please Everyone
That automatic yes when you want to say no isn’t just people-pleasing—it’s a survival strategy from when keeping others happy kept you safe. Your default setting became anticipating needs and meeting them before they were even expressed. What looks like generosity on the surface often has exhaustion running underneath.
This pattern follows you into adulthood, where you find yourself doing things you resent because disappointing others feels catastrophic. The path forward isn’t becoming selfish but recognizing that your needs deserve equal consideration. Every time you practice saying “Let me think about that” instead of an automatic yes, you’re rewriting old patterns.
12. You Learned To Make Yourself Small To Avoid Conflict
The way you physically take up less space in certain situations—speaking quietly, hunching shoulders, avoiding eye contact—these aren’t random habits. They’re physical manifestations of the emotional smallness you adopted to stay under the radar in chaotic environments. Your body learned that invisibility meant safety.
These physical patterns can follow you even into spaces where you’re valued and welcome. You might find yourself automatically shrinking in meetings or social gatherings despite knowing logically that you belong there. Reclaiming your right to exist fully in every space is both a physical and emotional practice—one that begins with noticing when and why you make yourself small.
13. You Realize Your Hypervigilance Was Never Normal
That constant awareness of exit routes, facial expressions, and potential problems isn’t something everyone experiences. While friends seem relaxed in public spaces, you’re unconsciously monitoring every change in the environment. What you once thought was normal attention is actually hypervigilance that developed when staying alert kept you safe.
This heightened awareness served you once but now prevents you from being fully present. You’re so busy scanning for danger that you miss moments of joy happening right in front of you. Healing doesn’t mean becoming oblivious but learning to dial back your threat detection system when it’s safe to do so. Your attention deserves to be directed toward what brings you joy, not just what might bring pain.
14. You Consider Trusting Your Feelings A Radical Act
When your emotions were once dismissed, minimized, or punished, trusting your own internal experience becomes revolutionary. You learned early that your feelings weren’t valid barometers of reality—that you were “too sensitive,” “dramatic,” or “making things up.” This disconnection from your emotional truth didn’t happen overnight.
Reconnecting with your feelings might feel uncomfortable or even dangerous at first. The path back to emotional authenticity isn’t linear—some days you’ll trust yourself completely, and others you’ll fall back into questioning your perceptions. Every time you honor what you feel instead of dismissing it, you’re rebuilding the connection between your experience and your truth.
15. You Use Perfectionism As a Shield Against Pain
Your relentless standards aren’t about excellence—they’re about protection. When mistakes meant disproportionate consequences, perfection became your armor against criticism and conflict. If nothing could be found wrong, maybe you’d finally be safe from judgment.
This defensive perfectionism follows you everywhere, making relaxation almost impossible. The exhausting standards you set for yourself were never about achievement but about preemptively addressing the criticism you were conditioned to expect. Real freedom comes not from doing things perfectly but from realizing your worth isn’t determined by your performance. You are valuable simply because you exist, not because you execute flawlessly.
