Adult Children of Alcoholics & Dysfunctional Families
Serving Clients in Florida & Colorado
Growing up in a home shaped by addiction, instability, conflict, emotional neglect, or unpredictable caregiving can affect how you relate to yourself and others long after childhood. Therapy offers a supportive space to understand these experiences, honor the ways you adapted, and create new patterns that feel more grounded and intentional.
Recognizing the impact of addiction or other dysfunctional dynamics in your family of origin is typically a complicated process. Whether it was a parent’s drinking or other addiction, a family member’s untreated mental illness, or other sources of unpredictability and unresolved conflict, it’s hard to recognize it as a problem when, at one point, it just was.
Many people who grow up in alcoholic or otherwise dysfunctional homes expect that they can simply put it all behind them once they leave the house. However, these experiences tend to cast a wide shadow that doesn’t just disappear when you become an adult.
The Adult Child Experience
Learning to navigate being part of a family shaped by alcoholism, addiction, and other forms of family dysfunction changes you. When your home environment is characterized by fear, confusion, and shame, you learn to survive by staying on high alert, reading the vibe of every room you walk into, and anticipating shifts before they appear.
Many adult children struggle with things like:
Isolation and a fear of being seen
High-achievement and perfectionistic standards
Chronic people-pleasing and approval-seeking
Emotional shutdown and disconnection
A sense of belonging and familiarity in chaotic situations and relationships
High self-criticism and struggles with self-esteem
A tendency to take on the caretaker/rescuer role
Therapy for Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families
Part of you may still be screaming at you to forget about the past and keep trying to carry on. If you’ve made it this far, I’m guessing another part of you is tired of carrying it all alone and is ready to find relief. We make space in therapy for all parts of you, mixed feelings and all.
Rather than treating these conflicting feelings as flaws to eliminate, we work to understand what they helped you survive and why they may still feel necessary now. Beyond understanding your childhood intellectually, we will work to offer all parts of you a different experience in the present.
Over time, therapy can help you feel more secure in yourself, trust your own perceptions and needs, build healthier relationships, and make choices from who you are now rather than from what you once had to do to feel safe.
This work typically starts with what is showing up in your life now…the relationship that leaves you second-guessing yourself, the part of you that feels responsible for everyone else, or the sense that you have spent so much time adapting that you are not quite sure what you want anymore.
Together, we’ll begin making sense of the ways you learned to survive within your family and build an understanding of why certain patterns still feel so powerful in the present. Over time, we can gently work with the parts of you that learned to keep the peace, stay silent, and carry more than was yours to hold. Therapy becomes a place to practice something different: trusting your own experience, making room for your emotions and needs, and discovering who you are when you no longer have to organize yourself around making sure everything is okay.
What to Expect in Sessions
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