It most likely would not be much of a stretch to say that somewhere around 50% of North Americans come from a dysfunctional family background. Sex abuse, alcoholic parents, parents with drug problems, emotional abuse, physical abuse, and breakdown of the family structure though divorce all play a part in creating children who grow up as adults who end up having compulsive behaviors of their own. Thanks mom, thanks dad!

This is the legacy that many people inherit whether they like it or not. For many years, adults who grew up as children of alcoholics, drug addicts, or perhaps were victims of emotional, physical, or sexual abuse will strive for some normalcy in their lives. They will have careers, homes, and families and all will appear to be well on the outside. However on the inside there is often a disquieting, pervasive feeling of discontent that grows from a small seed buried in the sub-conscious and begins to have a profound effect on behavior patterns of adults who were children of dysfunctional families.

Children who are mired in families that abound with social problems have little recourse and become products of their environment. Yet through some miracle of creation, very disturbing and horrific events that occur in childhood are often pushed deep into the memory bank of very young children. It’s like children can have “selective” memories and will often remember very special and “uplifting” moments of their youth, but will block out everything that happened before and after the happy event. Sometimes, entire years go missing.  It’s a good thing in most cases, because most children would never make it to adulthood with without this remarkable ability to protect themselves from events and memories that are so emotionally damaging.

Things might be going fine for an adult who had a less than happy childhood, but then almost without warning behavior pattens start to develop for no apparent reason. For instance, a father and husband might appear to be perfectly happy with his life situation for years, then when he hits 28 or 30 or 35 years old, compulsive behaviors begin to rear their ugly head. Suddenly drinking, gambling or other forms of compulsive behaviors becomes a problem and the adult child of parents who were compulsive, adopts the same traits and begins to spiral out of control.

It’s easy for people to say, “you can’t just blame all your problems on your parents and your childhood”. Well maybe not and certainly there is a time when people must think for themselves and take control of their lives despite what happened in the crucial formative years of their lives. Yet, there are two sides to the coin. You can go to all the counselling you want, but there is no way to totally erase the effects of the environment one grows up in. For as long as a person lives, they will have to deal with these demons that will always be part of who they are.

Like it or not, they will always have leanings toward compulsive behavior that is never going to go away.

Yet there is a way to make the most of the situation and the albatross that will always be looking over ones shoulder. There are many people who take those compulsive behaviors and make the most of them. Instead of drugs or alcohol, they choose more positive, constructive compulsions. You see them every day. They workout, they run, they become triathletes and soon these activities become a big part of their lives. They run every day, enter races, go on healthy diets, quite smoking and drinking and basically use their compulsive personalities in a “positive” way. Sure some people go overboard, but when the choice is drinking yourself into oblivion, or gambling away everything you have, or heading out the door for a training run or race, then it seems like no contest.

I think the fitness addict gets my vote every single time.