Growing up with violence: what a child carries into adulthood

A colleague in the next office slams a drawer shut. Everyone looks up for a moment and goes back to work. You don’t. Your heart is in your throat, your shoulders are up, your ears are straining, as if you had to work out whether anything else is coming. A minute later you are cross with yourself: “It was nothing.” And it was nothing — today. But your body wasn’t responding to today. It was responding to a kitchen where, twenty years ago, a sound like that was followed by shouting, broken glass, or a silence that was even worse.

We usually talk about domestic violence while it is happening: how to recognise it, where to find help, how to protect the children. We talk far less about what happens to a child who grew up around violence and is now an adult. Often there are no bruises, no diagnosis, and from the outside a perfectly well-ordered life. But there is something they can’t quite name: a watchfulness that never switches off, shame without any real reason, relationships in which closeness is both longed for and dangerous.

In this piece I want to describe what a child from a home like that may carry with them — and also what the research does not say. Because one of the most common and most painful misconceptions is that growing up with violence is a life sentence. It isn’t.

“But he was never there when it happened”

Adults who used violence, or lived through it, often say: “The children were asleep.” “We made sure he didn’t see.” “He never laid a finger on him.” What adult children tell us is something different. Children hear through walls, read the tension on faces at breakfast, notice the bruise their mother hides under a collar, and know exactly how footsteps sound when their father comes home in a bad mood. I wrote in more detail about everything a child picks up, even when they aren’t in the room, in Domestic violence and children: what they see even when they are not in the room. Here I am interested in what happens to all of that later.

One of the best-known studies of how childhood reaches into adulthood is the American Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study, published by Vincent Felitti and colleagues in 1998. Among more than nine thousand adults, more than half reported at least one of the adverse experiences studied — and one of them was violence against the mother, witnessed by the child at home. The more of these experiences piled up, the higher the risk in adulthood of depression, addiction and suicide attempts.

That study changed how medicine talks about childhood. But how we read it matters. It doesn’t say that everyone who grew up with violence will become ill. It says that childhood is not “behind us” once we grow up. It comes with us — into the body, into relationships, and into the way we look after ourselves.

A body that learned to stand guard

A child in a home where there is violence learns something very clever: to watch. When adults are unpredictable, safety depends on how quickly you notice a change — a tone of voice, footsteps in the hallway, the way a car door shuts in the drive. The nervous system adapts to this and stays on standby. That is how the child got through.

In adulthood this watchfulness often shows up as:

• a fast, strong reaction to loud noises, shouting or sudden movements, even when your surroundings are safe;
• an exceptional sensitivity to other people’s moods — you walk into a room and already know who is angry;
• trouble sleeping, because the body finds it hard to “switch off” at night;
• tension in the body that you don’t notice until it lets go — on holiday, after an exam, when you fall ill.

In therapeutic language we would say that the window of tolerance is narrow: the range in which a person can feel and still think clearly is small, and even a small trigger pushes them into overwhelm or numbness. This is not a flaw of character. It is a body that was once right. I described how experiences like these get written into the body, and how the body can slowly let them go, in How trauma stays written in the body.

The picture below sums up a few of the “lessons” a child in such a home learns without words, and the form in which they often carry them on as adults.

When the same person is comfort and fear

When a child is frightened, they run to a parent. This isn’t a decision, it’s biology — attachment theory describes it as a fundamental system that helps a small human being survive. But what happens when the person the child should run to is the same person who is the source of the fear? Or when the mother who should comfort them is so frightened herself that she can’t?

The attachment researchers Mary Main and Erik Hesse described this situation as fright without solution: the child needs closeness and fears it at the same time, so no strategy they have can work. This can give rise to a pattern we call disorganised attachment. I wrote more about it in Disorganised attachment: when the same person is both comfort and fear.

In adulthood this often shows up as a swing back and forth. When someone comes close, something in you pulls back. When they move away, panic grabs you. A partner’s tenderness can move you and unsettle you at the same time, because in your experience closeness was never truly safe. People who go through this often wonder whether they are “broken for relationships”. They aren’t. Their attachment system learned in conditions where there was no good solution.

The roles a child takes on to keep the home standing

In families where there is violence, children often take on roles that help them survive and that also try to hold the family together. Some become peacekeepers: with good marks, a joke or tidying up, they try to prevent the next outburst. Others become invisible — they need nothing, disturb nothing, stay in their room with the door shut. Others protect younger siblings or the parent who is being hurt, and put themselves in between. And some become “the problem”, and their anger or rebellion gives the family something it can talk about instead of the thing it mustn’t.

When a child takes on the care of an adult, the professional term is parentification. A child like that grows up too fast and brings into adulthood an exceptional sense of responsibility — but often also a feeling that they never had a childhood. That is the subject of The loss of childhood: when you had to grow up too soon. Many of the roles are similar to those I describe in Growing up with a parent’s drinking — an unpredictable home follows similar rules, whatever it is that makes it unpredictable.

Roles are not bad in themselves. The peacekeeper grows into an excellent negotiator, the invisible child into someone who can be alone. The trouble starts when the role becomes the only way you know how to be in a relationship. When you can’t be with someone without rescuing them. When you don’t know how to need.

Shame that isn’t yours

Children explain what happens at home with what they have to hand — and very often that is themselves. “If I were better behaved, they wouldn’t argue.” “If I hadn’t spilt the juice, he wouldn’t have hit her.” This explanation hurts, but it has a hidden benefit: if it’s my fault, then I can change something. Guilt gives the child back a scrap of control in a world where they have none. I wrote about this mechanism in Guilt: the feeling that gives us a false sense of control.

Over time guilt can grow into shame — no longer “I did something wrong” but “there is something wrong with me”. An adult who grew up around violence may never say they feel ashamed. But they will find it hard to accept praise, will apologise before they say anything, and will be convinced that people will leave once they get to know them better. If you also experienced violence directly, you may find Self-image after abuse: when you believe it was your fault close to home.

One of the most important realisations that people in therapy sometimes only come to feel — not just understand — after a long time is a simple one: adult violence was never the child’s responsibility. Not when they were “naughty”, not when they kept quiet, and not when they failed to protect their mother or sister.

How the past speaks up in adult relationships

A child who grew up around violence carries a very precise map of what happens when people get angry. In adult relationships that map often leads in one of two directions. Some people avoid every disagreement at any cost: they give in, apologise, withdraw. An ordinary argument isn’t an argument for them, it’s an alarm. Others find themselves in relationships that feel painfully familiar, and only notice after a while that they are repeating the atmosphere of home.

In relational family therapy, which I am training in, we understand this as the repetition of a familiar emotional atmosphere. Not because a person wants pain, but because the familiar is predictable — and because somewhere inside, they still hope the story will end differently this time. There is more on how patterns pass from one generation to the next in Intergenerational transmission: how patterns pass on without us noticing.

A long-term study by Miriam Ehrensaft and colleagues, which followed children for twenty years, found that exposure to violence between parents increased the risk of violence in their own partner relationships later on. But a risk is not a prediction. It tells us the path is somewhat steeper, not where a person will end up.

This is how a conversation might sound when this layer starts to open up (a composite, not a real person):

“When my partner raises his voice, I just freeze. Then I start apologising, even though I don’t know what for.”
“What happens in your body just before you apologise?”
“It’s like I have to fix something quickly. So it doesn’t get worse.”
“Worse than what?”
“… Like at home. But he isn’t like that. I know he isn’t.”

There is a lot in this short exchange. The body responds to the past, the mind knows the present is different, and between them is a gap that people often experience as their own “overreacting”. But something else matters too: telling a trigger from the past apart from danger in the present. If your partner doesn’t just raise their voice but intimidates, controls, humiliates or hurts you, that is not an echo of childhood. That is violence in a relationship today — and you are not responsible for it.

What the research does not say

Up to this point, this piece might sound as if a child from a violent home is marked for ever. So I need to be clear here, because that picture is wrong and it does harm.

Growing up with violence is not destiny. A meta-analysis by Katherine Kitzmann and colleagues, which brought together many studies of children who had witnessed violence between their parents, found that these children had more difficulties than their peers on average. At the same time, a substantial share of them were doing as well as children who had not experienced violence. An average is not an individual.

Most people don’t repeat it. As far back as the 1980s, Joan Kaufman and Edward Zigler reviewed the research on abused children and concluded that most people who were abused as children do not abuse their own children. Transmission exists, but it is far less automatic than folk wisdom suggests. Breaking the cycle is more common than we think — that is the subject of Breaking the cycle: how a pattern stops with you.

Not everything comes from childhood. If you are struggling today with sleep, anxiety or depression, childhood may be part of the story, but it isn’t necessarily the whole story. Physical illness, current stress, losses and genetic vulnerability are just as real. An explanation that puts everything down to the past can miss something that needs a doctor or a psychiatrist.

You don’t have to go looking for a wound. Some people who grew up around violence don’t feel it holds them back today. That can be true. It is nobody’s job — not a therapist’s and not yours — to find damage where there isn’t any.

The psychologist Ann Masten called children’s resilience “ordinary magic”: not an exceptional quality of a rare few, but something that grows out of entirely ordinary things — at least one reliable adult, a sense that you can do something, and a community that notices you.

When violence isn’t only a memory

So far I have written as if the violence were in the past. For many people it isn’t. Some adult children are still in contact with a parent who is violent, and every visit home reopens the old wound. Some are in a relationship of their own where what they watched as children is being repeated. Some are parents and are afraid they will repeat it.

In all of these situations one rule applies: safety first, understanding second. Understanding your childhood doesn’t help if you are in danger today. Nor is this piece a tool for judging how dangerous your situation is — that is the job of people who work with violence every day. If there is violence, you can turn to:

• the SOS helpline for women and children victims of violence: 080 11 55 (in Slovenia, free of charge);
• the police: 113 or emergency services: 112 (in Slovenia), when you are in immediate danger;
• Klic v duševni stiski, the mental health crisis line: 01 520 99 00 (in Slovenia, every day from 7 pm to 7 am) and the Samaritans line Samarijan: 116 123 (in Slovenia, 24 hours), when things are so hard that you can’t manage alone;
• your local social work centre, counselling organisations and women’s shelters, which help you plan the next steps.

If the violence is in your own relationship, couples therapy is not an appropriate form of help — I explained why in Why couples therapy is not the right help when there is violence. Safety comes first; only then, perhaps, something else.

Exercise: a map of your watchfulness

This exercise is not about reliving memories. It is about starting to notice when your body is responding to the past, and what calms it in the present. It takes ten minutes. If it becomes too much along the way, stop — that is an important piece of information too.

1. Write down three moments from the past week when you suddenly tensed up, froze or started apologising. Just the event, no explanation: “a slammed drawer”, “my manager went quiet in the middle of a meeting”.
2. Next to each one, write down what your body did. Heart, breath, shoulders, stomach, gaze. The body often knows before the thoughts do.
3. Ask yourself: how old was I in that moment? Don’t think about it for too long. The number that comes up often says a lot.
4. Find three things that tell you where you are now. The name of the street, the date on your phone, something you can touch. Say out loud: “Now is now.”
5. Write down one thing that calmed you that day — and next time, use it on purpose rather than by chance.

After a few weeks you may see a pattern on the page: which situations set you off, how old you feel, and what helps. This is not treatment. But it is a map that makes it easier to talk — with yourself, with the people close to you, or with a therapist.

What helps later on

The good news that attachment research has been repeating for decades is that safety can be learned in adulthood too. People who did not have a secure childhood can, through reliable relationships, develop what researchers call earned security. There is more on this in Secure attachment can be learned.

What helps is a partner who stays calm when you are overwhelmed. A friend who doesn’t leave when you show weakness. And sometimes therapy — a relationship in which you can check, slowly and at your own pace, whether closeness really is dangerous.

In therapy with adults who grew up around violence, it isn’t necessary to tell everything in detail. Often it matters more that a person learns to notice when the past pulls them back, and that in the relationship with the therapist they experience, perhaps for the first time, that they can say “no”, get angry or be disappointed without being punished for it. In relational family therapy, in which I am training as a therapist in training under supervision, a large part of the work is exactly this: recognising old emotional patterns in present relationships and giving them room for a different ending.

Sometimes it helps to look at the whole family story. In the longer session A Look into the Past we draw a genogram together, and it sometimes shows that the violence didn’t start with your parents — and that it can end with you. This makes sense when you are safe and the violence belongs to the past. I also work with English-speaking clients, in person in Ljubljana.

Let me be honest here: I am not a specialist in violence. If the violence is still going on, the first port of call is a specialist organisation or the social work centre. But once safety is in place and the question that remains is how to live with what you brought from childhood, therapy can be a place where that question slowly unravels.

What to remember

• Children pick up violence at home even when they don’t see it — and can carry it into adulthood as watchfulness, shame and unease around closeness.
• These responses are not flaws of character but adaptations that once protected you.
• Adult violence was never the child’s responsibility.
• Growing up with violence raises the risk but does not decide your fate — most people break the cycle, and safety can be learned later on.
• If there is violence today, the first step is safety: the SOS helpline 080 11 55, and in an emergency 112 or 113 (in Slovenia).