Kids Who Always Had To Hide How They Feel Growing Up Often Have 8 Avoidant Habits As Adults
Africa Studio | ShutterstockUnstable parents tend to neglect their kids' most basic emotional needs.
They discourage any emotional expression, so their kids often carry avoidant habits into adulthood. Because they always had to hide how they felt growing up, they become anxious, stressed adults.
Kids who hid how they felt growing up have these avoidant habits as adults
1. They try to anticipate the needs of others
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Most kids who walked on eggshells growing up tend to be hypervigilant as adults. They try to anticipate someone's needs as a form of avoidance.
They want to avoid upsetting someone or opening up a hard conversation, so they people-please based on what they think someone might want or need. For them, conversations about emotions were associated with fear, and now, they're wired to avoid them at all costs.
2. They suppress their concerns
Instead of being direct in their communication, which is a kindness in most healthy adult relationships, adults who grew up without a safe space to express themselves at home suppress it all. They'd rather exist with unmet needs and resentment than brave a difficult conversation where they have to advocate for themselves.
Their parents forced them to suppress things, usually because they didn't have the emotional capacity to handle discomfort themselves. And as adults, they continue to shape their own self-worth by handling it all on their own.
3. They stay busy to distract themselves
When slowing down enough to face the emotions you've spent so much energy suppressing feels scary, you stay busy. That's what so many of these adults do.
They lean heavily into work and they burn themselves out with a busy social calendar. They find any way to distract themselves from the emotions and quietness that feel like a threat to their safety.
It might offer a fleeting sense of relief in the moment, but this kind of busyness only creates more disconnection between someone and the people in their lives, and often also from themselves.
4. They overthink their emotions
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Instead of feeling their emotions as they arise, an avoidant person may rely on overthinking. If they can explain their emotions away, they don't have to deal with them. While it might work in the moment, over time these emotions still get suppressed in unhealthy ways because they were never fully processed.
For a child used to taking the blame and suppressing their emotions, it's their normal. They had to find some way to make sense of their feelings. And because their parents didn't support them in learning how to do it in a healthy way, they relied on avoidance to feel safe.
5. They hyper-focus on other people's problems
Many kids who hid how they felt at home were trying to protect their parents. They were parentified into a kind of third parent identity because they felt their parents couldn't handle everything on their own.
It was far before they should have taken on that kind of responsibility. And now, they're so used to deflecting attention from their own needs. They still hyperfocus on everyone else's problems. It's not just because they need to feel like a fixer, but because it's scary to look at their own issues.
6. They chalk everything up to 'I'm fine'
Without space to learn how to express their emotions as kids, many adults from these kinds of households don't have the language to verbalize how they feel today. So, even if they do want to ask for support and be vulnerable, trying to find the words feels disorienting and invalidating.
That's why they rely on "I'm fine" so often. It's letting them avoid the kinds of vulnerability they've been taught is bad in some way, so they don't have to face their own lack of emotional communication skills.
7. They change the subject quickly
Even though parents may believe they're doing their kids a favor by suppressing their own struggles and emotions at home, kids are more observant than they get credit for. Not only do they sense when something is wrong and feel more anxiety, but they sometimes adopt similarly avoidant behaviors when it comes to their own battles.
As their parents might have done at home, they spend their adult lives trying to manage the flow of conversations away from the vulnerability they fear. By changing the topic and deflecting the spotlight, they avoid it completely, but it comes at the expense of their own emotional stability and well-being.
8. They hide their mistakes
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On top of not learning how to verbalize and regulate emotions, kids forced to hide how they feel also missed out on cultivating the growth mentality they need to learn from their mistakes. Suddenly, being anything less than perfect feels like personal failure, even well into adulthood.
They feel stagnant and stuck in unhappy lives later on, because they make the same mistakes over and over again. They don't know how to grow from them and learn, because they spend so much of their energy hiding them altogether.
Zayda Slabbekoorn is a senior editorial strategist with a bachelor's degree in social relations & policy and gender studies who focuses on psychology, relationships, self-help, and human interest stories.
