Therapy Resources and Support for Your Mental Health

Dysfunctional families promote very specific “thinking errors” that cause others difficulty in adapting to change and finding new ideas and directions. These errors in thinking cause a number of problems.

Dysfunctional families never admit their problems. The rules are simple: Don’t talk, think or feel. As a result, we feels insecure and can only depend on ourselves. In order to survive this lack of trust, we end up creating a rigid way of dealing with life. Yet when we go out into the real world, these dysfunctional rules for living end up blowing up in our face.

Growing up with any type of neglect or abuse can warp our reality and affect our future in catastrophic ways. We’re left with some really unhealthy rules or patterns of how to live our lives, which actually cause us more problems than they solve. To escape this unending torture, we have to learn some new critical rules for living.

Individuals that relate to the patterns of Adult Children tend to struggle with codependency.  This is defined as a relationship where you do all the work and suffer all the consequences, yet the other person never grows, changes, or even notice all that you do. You don’t feel appreciated and you end up worn out, exhausted, and blamed.

We usually “mean well” and want to be “helpful.” In fact, in many ways this helps us to work and solve problems together. However, there are times that the ways in which we help other people may actually cause more problems that we solve. This can happen even if we do it out of genuine love and concern. Understanding this concept is critical to our ability to develop healthy lives, friendships and families.

Many of us often wonder why our needs are never considered or why they are taken for granted. To fix this, we beg, plead, and try to do more, only to find that the more we do, the less we are noticed. The key to solving this puzzle is to learn a few simple concepts that can dramatically shift the balance of power and help to change the responses we receive from other people.

It is hard for Adult Children to ask for professional help and therapy, even though this is the very thing that will help to free them from the “prison” of the past before they pass on their problems to the next generation. It is important to start to be aware of these potential traits so that one can start to “observe” themselves. The more one becomes aware of what they are doing, the better the chance that one can start to change, adjust, and “file down” some of these extreme ways of doing things.