Family Dynamics: Roles in Dysfunctional Families #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I’m once again incredibly late writing my contribution for the #AtoZChallenge today. Today’s letter is F and what better word to choose than “family”? After all, with most people who experience complex PTSD as a result of childhood trauma, the trauma originated in the family. This, obviously, does not have to be a birth family, unless you’re talking about the experiences of a traumatic start in life. The traumatic experiences I’m going to talk about here, can affect children brought into the family at any time during childhood.

Often, there are particular dynamics in families in which at least one of the parents is abusive, addicted or otherwise dysfunctional. This is a reason siblings in dysfunctional families often have very different perspectives on their upbringing. In my own case, my sister retreated to her room whenever my parents and I had an argument. As a result, she didn’t see the way my parents reacted and she did hear my screaming. She also resents me for having gotten more attention than she got, even though most of this attention especially when we got older, was negative.

Children and parents/caregivers in dysfunctional families can have many different roles. Some of them, I’ll discuss in more detail later in the challenge. They include:


  • Golden Child: the child who “can’t do wrong”. They are often the family “favorite”, often experiencing being spoiled or having few limits placed on them.

  • Hero: the child who “proves” that there’s nothing wrong with the family. This ties in with the “lost child” role that my sister had: the invisible one.

  • Identified patient / problem child: the child/person being identified as the source of the family’s dysfunction or the reason the family enters therapy. This role shows that, even in families in which one person is clearly the one being obviously abusive, the actual problem is the dynamics within the family.

  • Scapegoat/black sheep: the opposite of the “hero”, the scapegoat is the child blamed for everything going wrong in the family. Usually they get the harshest abuse.

  • Enabler: this is the person, either the not-so-obviously abusive parent or an older child, who maintains the family’s outward appearance and tries to take care of the family at least to an extent.

For clarity’s sake, none of these roles are “good”, in that they all show that a family is dysfunctional. I mean, I was often raised as a mixture between the golden child and identified patient. I regularly tried to deny my golden child attributes, because too often the golden child turns out to become abusive towards their own partner and eventually children. Then again, being the golden child is not that child’s fault. Continuing the cycle once they’re an adult, however, is.

Emotional Abuse and Neglect: What If You Were Never Hit? #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. It’s nearly 10PM as I type my letter E post in the #AtoZChallenge. Today, I want to explore emotional abuse and neglect. After all, many people who survived trauma, wonder whether their experience of complex PTSD “counts” if they were never physically or sexually abused. Unfortunately, many clinicians fail to validate the fact that, yes, emotional abuse and neglect count. I can relate to this myself: I tried countless times to get support for my symptoms of complex PTSD due to childhood emotional neglect and abuse (as well as abuse within the care system) only to be told I was being negative, had probably brought it onto myself, etc. However, when I first shared about the physical abuse I endured as a child, my support staff were pretty quickly alarmed.

Guess what? Even though I was hit many times, it isn’t that which made the most significant impact on my experience of C-PTSD. The worst was the emotional abuse, which came in some quite insidious forms. I mean, losing your temper once and yelling at a child (or someone else dependent on you, like a client in a care setting) isn’t okay, but it doesn’t usually cause lasting effects. What does commonly cause C-PTSD is a longstanding pattern of disregard for the child’s needs. And like I said, this comes in sometimes quite insidious forms.

An example is the fact that, when I learned of the things a child needs growing up, “realistic limits” didn’t ring a bell with me. The reason it didn’t ring a bell to me, was the fact that I was repeatedly told I was being selfish. I also didn’t realize at the time that, if I didn’t get realistic limits set on me (and spoiler: I didn’t!), it wasn’t something I had done to elicit my parents spoiling me. I till this day struggle with this idea, because well doesn’t the fact that I was allowed to set my own bedtime from age nine on, never had limits on screen time, wasn’t made to do chores, etc., mean I’m one giant brat of a person? I can see why my sister, who did get some limits set on her, is sometimes jealous of me.

What else do children need from their parents? Like I’ve shared, they need to have their autonomy encouraged. This may contradict the idea of limits, but really, it’s a matter of balance.

None of the things a child needs from their parents are black-or-white when it comes to emotional neglect and abuse. I mean, obviously a parent should never lay a hand on their child and one incident of physical or sexual abuse can cause significant trauma. With emotional neglect, it’s a matter of “good enough”. What I mean is, a parent doesn’t need to be attuned to their child’s emotional needs all the time (no-one can realistically meet such a standard!). However, when a parent isn’t in tune with their child’s needs most of the time, chances are the child will develop complex PTSD.

Codependent (Fawn-Based) Trauma Responses #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone and welcome to my letter C post in the #AtoZChallenge. Last year during this challenge, I discussed codependency for my letter C post. Today, I want to talk about the same topic, but specifically as it relates to people who experienced complex trauma.

You are probably familiar with the fight or flight response when it comes to fear. However, there are several other ways people can respond to perceived threats. One of them is fawning. This has always been a confusing term for me, particularly because I’m a non-native speaker of English and there is no proper translation of this word in Dutch as far as I’m aware.

Fawning, if I’m correct, in the context of trauma means being overly compliant with the wishes of other people and being unable to protest. It’s similar to people-pleasing, for which I haven’t found a proper Dutch translation either by the way.

Pete Walker, the author through whom I know of the fawn-based trauma response, has an entire chapter on this topic in his book on complex PTSD. I just opened the book to the chapter on fawning and oh my did it hit hard! Walker starts out by explaining how he learned that he himself gravitates towards a fawn response when he apologized to a chair for bumping into it. I have done that too.

However, it’s harder for me when I find myself apologizing to people, because too often my apology gets seen as being insincere when I truly have a reason to apologize. That makes sense, especially because I can also show a fight-based response when triggered.

The thing for me is that I overadapt until I can no longer take it anymore and then I have an aggressive meltdown. This sometimes makes me doubt I actually fawn at all. It doesn’t help that my parents from a young age on ingrained the thought that I am selfish into my psyche. I can indeed be self-centered, but that’s not the same.

I am still unsure whether I am a primarily fawning trauma survivor rather than a fight type. However, reading Walker’s chapter makes me realize I’m probably closer to the fawn end of the fight-fawn continuum than many people, including myself, believe. I, after all, experience a deep-seated lack of understanding and even deeper lack of appreciation of myself. Walker calls this self-abandonment and self-abnegation. I wonder whether, because my most outwardly noticeable reaction when triggered is fight, I have been conditioned to see myself as primarily a fight-based type.

Birth: The Effects of a Complicated Start in Life #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone and welcome to my letter B post in the #AtoZChallenge. I’m doing this challenge on healing past hurts. Today, I want to go far into my past: I want to talk about the effects of a complicated birth.

As regular readers know, I was born prematurely and spent the first three months of my life in hospital. Of course, I have no conscious memories of this time, but that doesn’t mean my complicated start in life didn’t have an impact. There is evidence that many people who were born prematurely or otherwise had a difficult start to life, experience attachment problems into adulthood. Now of course I didn’t have the most positive childhood either and there is no way of knowing whether I would still have attachment issues had my parents been well-attuned to me. Of course, this is also a difficult question, since my parents experienced their own trauma having me prematurely.

The thing remains though, a child who was born prematurely, spends time in a clinical setting that they should’ve spent literally inside their mother’s body. There are attempts to lessen the burden this has on children (and parents). For example, kangarooing, in which a baby experiences skin-to-skin contact with their parents, is encouraged as soon as it is possible. However, for preemies and other NICU graduates who are now adults, this may not have been the case. Many older NICU graduates hardly saw or heard their parents for the first few weeks to months of their life. My parents, thankfully, lived in the same city I was in the neonatal unit in, so they were able to visit often.

One thing that haunts me though, and I’ve mentioned this several times, is the effect my being medically complex from birth on left on my parents’ attachment to me. Like I said, whether I would’ve experienced attachment issues had my parents not mistreated me as a child, is a difficult question because one of the reasons they treated me so poorly is their difficulty coping with my being disabled. My father quite literally asked the doctor whether it’d make sense to keep me alive after I’d had a brain bleed a few weeks after birth.

It’s telling, in my opinion, that when you look up “birth trauma” online, what comes up most frequently is not the effects a child’s own start in life could’ve had on them, but the effects of complicated childbirth on parents. And like I said, one goes hand-in-hand with the other.

Autonomy: Learning That I Can Do Things and That My Opinions Matter #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. Today is April 1 so this means the #AtoZChallenge is starting. I haven’t prepared any posts in advance, but since I am going to write on healing past hurts, the concept of autonomy spoke to me for my letter A post. Autonomy is the ability to be self-reliant and independent, both physically and emotionally. It starts to develop in toddlerhood.

As I learned about emotional development as it relates to developmental disability (I discussed this in 2023), I realized in many ways I’m not there yet. I struggle with even basic decisions like what clothes I want to wear.

When I was 30, I was told I have dependent personality disorder. This disorder is characterized by passivity and the inability to make decisions independently, as well as a pervasive need to be taken care of. It is often related to lack of encouragement of autonomy in childhood.

I don’t have many memories of my early childhood, but I do know I wasn’t given a lot of autonomy when I was older. It’s not that my parents didn’t try, but as soon as I got frustrated, they gave up. They genuinely believed they were giving me autonomy and that I was just too stubborn to want to be independent. For this reason, they claimed and to this day still claim it’s my choice to be in the care system.

My psychologist back in 2016, the one who diagnosed me with dependent personality disorder, sided with them. She said I did have the assertiveness to stand up for myself, but wasn’t doing things I was (thought to be) capable of. That’s not what dependent personality disorder is though: lack of confidence in one’s own physical capabilities is but one criterion out of eight. And please note: it’s specified that the reason someone isn’t doing something, is in fact lack of confidence, not lack of skill or motivation. In other words, unwillingness to do things independently that you can do, is not dependent personality disorder, but care misuse.

And for clarity’s sake: I am not and never was misusing care. However, that’s exactly what my psychologist thought I was and according to which presumption she treated me by kicking me out of the mental hospital with virtually no support. She once again didn’t encourage me to develop autonomy. Refusing to help someone who clearly asks for help, contrary to the current idea in mental health services, may be politically useful, but it is not autonomy-supportive.

I am only now, now that I’m nearly forty, learning that I in fact was conditioned by both my parents and the psychiatric hospital to disregard my own opinions. Yes, being able to do things independently, is one aspect of autonomy, but so is the ability to make your own choices. One can hardly exist without the other.

March 2026 In Review

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. It’s the last day of the month and that means I’m joining Natalie for her monthly wrap-up. March was a tough month. As I say this, I hear a little voice in my head saying I’ll never be happy anyway as I’m so negative. One of my staff on Sunday said I have nothing to complain about because I get regular support workers and my day schedule is followed. I still wonder how much of my dissatisfaction is indeed due to circumstances that can be changed, such as my day schedule, how much is due to the inherent nature of my being multiply-disabled and living in long-term care and how much is my attitude.

In any case, early in the month I heard that my activity-based day schedule would be taking effect on April 1. That’s tomorrow. Unfortunately, on the same day, the staff’s hours are going to change and this, even though the literal hours they are in the home won’t be cut, means my support will be cut a little. We’ll see how that goes.

I tried to adapt to the new support hours already and this was incredibly hard. I also tried to myself follow a schedule with more meaningful activities. This was partly successful, especially with staff who are already able to help me get more meaningful activities done. For example, last week, one of the staff helped me create a unicorn-themed card for a former fellow resident from the intensive support home, who had her birthday that day.

Thankfully, one staff, with whom until then I’d only been doing dice games and going for walks, herself took the initiative to ask a colleague to orient her to the polymer clay activity.

I have been cooking and baking more than I used to. For example, I baked so-called “healthy” brownies that I fully intended on handing out at the monthly local brain injury meet-up. They weren’t all that good though.

Later, I found out I had a Trojan on my computer that came with the recipe manager app I used to download random recipes off Facebook into, including this “healthy” brownie recipe.

Before I found out I had malware on my computer, I had been obsessing over the idea of cooking vegetarian curries. Most of the recipes, I got off English-language food websites like BBC Good Food, so I’m not sure I’ll be able to use them. After all, though my English is quite good, my staff’s might not be.

Last Saturday, I cooked a delicious cauliflower, tomato and chickpea curry. This recipe was in Dutch, by the way.

Now that I look over this post, I wonder what made the month so tough, given that I once again did more meaningful activities than I used to. I do believe part of the problem is the fact that I’m still not adequately supported when I’m struggling. I mean, highs and lows are to be expected even when you’re having the proverbial time of your life. When people expect me to have a positive outlook because “I have nothing to complain about”, that is horribly invalidating. Life in the care system isn’t great and it isn’t meant to be. I don’t expect to ever rate my days higher than a seven out of ten, but when staff do have this expectation of me, it’s incredibly frustrating. I’m hoping something can be done about this.

Of course, this was also the month I finally realized I’ll never have an okay relationship with my parents. It’s tough realizing I never experienced a proper bond with my parents and even tougher to know that no-one can replace it. However, I do think I’m more capable than I used to believe. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

Chosen Family #WotW

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. Today, I’m joining in with Anne’s Word of the Week linky, as well as Natalie’s #WeekendCoffeeShare. My word of the week (or rather, phrase, as it usually is), is “chosen family”.

First, as I usually do when writing my weekend coffee shares, I’d like to write about the weather. Over the weekend, it was good: relatively warm and somewhat sunny too. I even sat in the sun for a bit on Sunday. However, most of this week brought cooler temperatures and rain. Today, the daytime high was 9°C. That’s considered normal for this time of year, which I honestly believe is crazy but oh well.

Now here’s why my phrase of the week is “chosen family”: several things this week made me realize my wife is more like family than my birth family. Yes, even now that we’re officially in the divorce process.

You see, we had our first meeting with the divorce mediator and financial advisor on Tuesday. I won’t go into detail as to what we’ve been discussing, but it looks like we’re both going to be okay and we’ll find a way together to make this work. We’ll have our next meeting on April 14.

On Saturday, I was at our house too. I got strange queries in Chrome so had run a full virus scan two weeks ago and it’d found a threat. I initially brushed it off, but finally told my best friend/wife. She was a bit stressed, because I had not paid attention to the full implications of this and for example changed my passwords. I didn’t know what the malware might’ve done, so went to our house on Saturday so that she could check it over. It looks like no actual damage was done, thankfully. In case I’ve mentioned the name of the recipe manager I used though (I’m pretty sure I touted it as the perfect app) and anyone’s installed it too: that was the source of the malware. No more Chrome extensions for me.

Today, my mother texted me to check on me. I, stupidly enough, called her. We’ve been in very limited contact for years now due to her attitudes towards my childhood trauma. After I got more of the same shit, among which comments insinuating that I should move closer to my family because my friendship with my best friend may not be forever, I had had enough. I don’t know yet what will happen in the long run, but for now I’m genuinely done with my family of origin. My best friend feels more like family than my parents do and yes, I’m aware that our friendship might dissolve over time. Then again, no relationship is forever.

Ten Things I Hate to Love

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I’m joining Marsha’s 10 on the 10th linky once again. It’s been forever. Today, we’re sharing things we hate to love. You know, those things you secretly love but feel a little (or a lot of) embarrassment about loving. In no particular order, here are mine. I realize that many of these are not considered generally bad, but I’m choosing to write about things that I have cognitive dissonance about loving.

1. Tarot and astrology and the like. These are not necessarily weird per se, but I sometimes feel weird about loving them because I’m non-religious and grew up with atheist, strongly science-minded parents.

2. The Enneagram. Same as above, but with an added layer of it having pretty much been claimed by Christians. I’m not a Christian and one of the reasons for that is the fact that most mainstream Christians are openly queerphobic. I could, of course, call myself a progressive Christian, but then I’d not be playing by the rules of that religion, as indeed the Bible condemns homosexuality. I still read some Christian-based works and wonder whether that should be its own bullet point on this list. Anyway, I know that the Enneagram is not science-based at all, but I love it nonetheless.

3. Articles, blogs etc. about parenting and children. I don’t love these as much as I used to when I was in my late twenties, but I still find myself drawn to them. For someone who is happily childfree, this is a bit weird.

4. Scrolling online. I do it a lot and always feel bad about how it means my time has been wasted.

5. Gossiping. I don’t share as much info as I gather information that isn’t mine to gather. I honestly wouldn’t even call this something I love, but it’s something I do a lot and it’s quite distressing.

6. Online shopping. I love it, but it’s a pain to get things delivered here.

7. Lying in bed during the day. Again, something I do almost daily but feel bad about because it means I’ve wasted my days.

8. Junk food. I could write an entire list of things I hate to love that are food-related: candy, French fries, large cookies (particularly stroopwafels), etc. Rather, I’m grouping them into one item. As regular readers of my blog know, I used to struggle with disordered eating, particularly overeating and some purging. I’m so glad I no longer binge, but I snack way more than I should.

9. Nail-biting. And many other body-focused repetitive behaviors I won’t go into on my blog.

10. So many things that are generally thought of as more suitable for (young) children. Think stuffed animals, chapter books, kids’ bedtime story podcasts, etc. I could say it’s my alters (I have symptoms of dissociative identity disorder), but I’m not so sure that’s true.

My Existence Is a Medical Miracle, Or Is It? #3TC

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I just stumbled across Today’s #3TC prompt. In response, carol anne shares about her premature birth. She was born three months prematurely in 1980 and considers herself to be a medical miracle.

I, often, believe the same. I mean, I was born just over three months prematurely, albeit six years later than carol anne. I weighed 850 grams or 1lb 14oz at birth. I spent three months in neonatal care.

When I was younger, I’d occasionally half-jokingly say that I’m a calculation mistake. The reason is the fact that I was born at sometime between 25 and 27 weeks gestation. The official paperwork says I was born at 26 weeks 4 days gestation, but this wasn’t always easy to determine back then. My mother claimed that, back in 1986, the line between actively keeping preemies alive and only treating them when they showed genuine strength, was at 26 weeks. I never cared to look up whether that’s true, but I do know that my doctor was adamant he was keeping me alive. In this sense, not a miracle.

In another respect though, I’m definitely a medical miracle, in that obviously I wouldn’t have survived without medical technology.

Yesterday, I read about the Dionne quintuplets, who were born in 1934 and the last one of whom had just passed away. Compared to them, I’m not a miracle at all. I’m glad about that, as they were on public display throughout their childhoods.

Like carol anne, I realize I didn’t just survive thanks to medical technology, despite the fact that’s what my doctor more or less said when my father questioned him whether I should be continuing to receive treatment after my brain bleed. I wouldn’t have survived had I not had the will in me to survive.

This is somewhat of an interesting realization in light of my suicide attempts over the years. In 2017, I survived two medication overdoses and, this past summer, I cut my wrist. Thankfully, I survived and, in the case of the incident this summer, without medical intervention. I realize this means I still somehow have a desire to stay alive.

Mother As the Giving Tree: Reflections on Conditional Acceptance

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. Last Monday, I attended an online meeting for adults who spent time in the NICU as infants. It touched me on many levels. One thing that was mentioned was the fact that most NICU parents go through their own emotional process, which then is passed on somehow to their child in the NICU and beyond. For example, many parents back in my day and before didn’t know whether their baby would survive, so they didn’t attach to their babies as they normally would have.

I was also reminded of something I read in the book The Emotionally Absent Mother. In it, motherhood is compared to the giving tree in Shel Sinverstein’s writing. I don’t think I’ve ever read this piece, but its point is that the tree keeps on giving and giving and expects nothing in return.

I have been thinking about my parents’ attitude to me as a multiply-disabled person. When I suffered a brain bleed in the NICU, my father questioned my neonatologist about my quality of life and what they were doing to me. “We’re keeping her alive,” the doctor bluntly replied. My father has always been adamant to me that he wouldn’t have wanted me if I’d had an intellectual disability, because “you can’t talk with those”.

I have always felt the pressure of conditional acceptance. I’ve shared this before, but when I was in Kindergarten or first grade, it was already made clear to me that, at age eighteen, i’d leave the house and go to university. I tell myself every parent has expectations and dreams for their child. This may be so, but most parents don’t abandon their children when these children don’t meet their expectations and certainly not when it’s inability, not unwillingness, that drives these children not to fulfill their parents’ dreams. Then again, my parents say it’s indeed unwillingness on my part.

I still question myself on this. Am I really unable to live on my own and go to university? My wife says yes, I am unable. Sometimes though, I wish it were within my power to make my parents be on my side. Then again, the boy in Shel Silverstein’s writing didn’t have to do anything to make the tree support him either.

I’m linking up with #WWWhimsy. I was also inspired to write this post when I saw Esther’s writing prompt for this week, which is “giving”.