Learn with the Best Therapist in Dhaka! There is a particular kind of childhood that is lived on a ship with a beloved but unreliable captain. Some days, the captain is brilliant, charming, and full of light, steering the ship with a steady hand under a sunny sky. On these days, the world feels full of love and possibility. But without warning, the storm can roll in. The captain can disappear below deck, lost in a fog of their own, or they can become a raging, unpredictable force, steering the ship directly into the heart of a hurricane. If you grew up as the child of a parent struggling with addiction or alcoholism, you know this ship. You know this storm. You spent your entire childhood learning to be a tiny, expert navigator, constantly reading the weather, bracing for the next lurch of the deck, and trying with all your might to keep the ship from capsizing.
You learned to live with a profound and heartbreaking paradox: the person who was your source of life was also the source of your deepest chaos and pain. You loved them with the fierce, unconditional love of a child, and at the same time, you were terrified, confused, and consistently let down by their addiction. You grew up in a home where the addiction was the sun, the powerful, gravitational center around which everything and everyone silently orbited. Your needs, your feelings, your childhood—it all became secondary to the immense, unspoken task of managing and surviving the chaos.
As an adult, you are likely a person of incredible strength, profound empathy, and an almost superhuman capacity to endure. You are the person who can handle any crisis, the one who is fiercely loyal, the one who never gives up on people. Yet, underneath this resilient exterior, you may carry a world of quiet pain. You may live with a constant, humming anxiety, a deep-seated difficulty in trusting others, and a relentless inner critic that judges your every move without mercy. You may feel a profound sense of being different from other people, as if you are missing an instruction manual for “normal” life. You may find yourself in relationships that are draining or chaotic, and you may wonder, with a sense of weary frustration, why you keep ending up back on that same stormy sea.
If this feels like your story, I want to welcome you into a space of profound and unwavering validation. You are not broken. You are not crazy. And you are not alone. The patterns and struggles you face today are not signs of your personal failure; they are the brilliant, logical, and deeply ingrained survival skills that you were forced to develop to navigate an unnavigable childhood. They are the echoes of the storm. This article is your comprehensive and deeply human guide to understanding the unique blueprint of an adult child of an addict, and to illuminating the gentle, hopeful, and courageous path of healing. With deep empathy and insights from the Best Therapist in Dhaka at Mind to Heart, let’s begin the sacred journey of coming home to yourself.
To truly understand your own experience, we must first name the unspoken rules of the home you grew up in. To survive the chaos, you and your family likely adopted a set of powerful, unconscious rules. These rules were not written on any wall, but they were enforced with an absolute and desperate necessity. The three great, unspoken rules of a family struggling with addiction are almost always: Don’t Talk. Don’t Trust. Don’t Feel.
“Don’t Talk” was the rule of secrecy. You learned that you must never, ever speak the truth of what was happening inside your home to the outside world. This was about protecting the family, protecting the parent, and protecting yourself from the immense shame and stigma associated with addiction. This rule forced you to live a double life, presenting a “normal” face to the world while carrying the heavy, agonizing secret of the chaos at home. This is why, as an adult, you may find it incredibly difficult to be vulnerable or to ask for help. You learned that survival depends on silence.
“Don’t Trust” was the rule of survival. You learned, from a very young age, that you could not trust the promises of the person you loved most. The promise to show up for the school play, the promise to be sober for a birthday, the promise of a peaceful evening—these were promises that were broken, over and over again. You learned that the parent’s mood could shift in an instant, that the person who was loving and safe one moment could be frightening and unrecognizable the next. This teaches a child’s nervous system a profound and painful lesson: the world is not a reliable place, and the people you love will inevitably let you down. This is why, as an adult, you may struggle so deeply to trust your partners, your friends, and even yourself.
“Don’t Feel” was the rule of emotional survival. The emotional landscape of your home was likely a minefield. Your own feelings—your sadness at the broken promises, your anger at the chaos, your fear of the outbursts—were often too dangerous or too inconvenient to be expressed. There was simply no room for your feelings amidst the all-consuming drama of the addiction. So you learned to push them down, to numb them out, to disconnect from your own heart because it was simply too painful to feel. This is why, as an adult, you may find it incredibly difficult to identify, name, or express your own emotions. You may live in a state of emotional numbness, or you may feel that your feelings, when they do erupt, are terrifyingly overwhelming. Best Therapist in Dhaka can be the first safe person to help you gently break these three sacred, but now life-limiting, rules.
These three rules created a blueprint, a set of survival characteristics that are remarkably common among adult children of addicts (ACoAs). As we explore them, please see them not as a list of your flaws, but as a testament to your incredible ability to adapt.
You guess at what normal is. Having grown up on a ship in a perpetual storm, you never got to experience what a calm sea looks like. As an adult, you may constantly feel like an outsider, like you are faking it. You watch other families and relationships with a sense of anthropological curiosity, trying to figure out the secret rules of “normal” life that everyone else seems to know instinctively. This can create a deep sense of insecurity and a feeling of not quite belonging anywhere.
You judge yourself without mercy. You grew up in chaos, and a child’s mind, in its desperate search for a sense of control, often comes to a heartbreaking conclusion: “This chaos must be my fault. If I were just better, quieter, or more perfect, I could fix this.” As an adult, this translates into a relentless and vicious inner critic. You hold yourself to impossible standards and berate yourself for the smallest of mistakes. This is the internalized voice of the chaos you endured. Learning to quiet this voice is the sacred work you can do with a compassionate guide, and the Best Therapist in Dhaka at Mind to Heart are deeply skilled in this process.
You have difficulty having fun and take yourself very seriously. Your childhood was not a time for carefree play; it was a time of serious work. You were a little soldier, a little parent, a little crisis manager. Your nervous system was wired for vigilance, not for joy. As an adult, you may find it incredibly difficult to relax, to be spontaneous, or to do things just for the fun of it. Leisure can feel frivolous or even anxiety-provoking. You may have forgotten, or never learned, how to play. Best Therapist in Dhaka can help you gently and safely rediscover this lost and vital part of yourself.
You have difficulty with intimate relationships. Your first and most powerful model for love was one of chaos, unpredictability, and often, abandonment. As an adult, you may find yourself unconsciously recreating this pattern, drawn to partners who are emotionally unavailable or who “need fixing,” because it feels familiar. You are often extremely loyal, even in the face of clear evidence that the loyalty is undeserved, because you learned as a child that you must never, ever give up on the person you love, no matter how much they hurt you. At the same time, you can be terrified of intimacy, because your nervous system screams that closeness is a prelude to pain and disappointment.
You are either super responsible or super irresponsible. Many ACoAs become hyper-responsible. You are the one who plans everything, worries about everyone, and makes sure nothing falls through the cracks. You became the reliable adult in your childhood, and you have never stopped. This can lead to burnout, anxiety, and a deep sense of resentment. Others, in rebellion against the immense pressure, swing to the other extreme and become hyper-irresponsible, struggling with commitments and follow-through, a subconscious refusal to take on the heavy burden of adulthood that was forced on them too soon.
To survive, you also likely adopted a specific family role, a costume you wore to help the family system stay afloat. You may have been The Hero Child, the one who excelled at everything—academics, sports, arts. Your achievements were a desperate attempt to bring some positive attention to the family, to prove that you were not a “bad” family. As an adult, you may be a driven perfectionist, whose self-worth is entirely tied to your external success.
You may have been The Scapegoat, the “problem child.” You acted out, you got in trouble at school, you became the focus of all the family’s negative energy. This was a brilliant, unconscious sacrifice: by drawing the fire onto yourself, you took the attention off the parent’s addiction and, in a strange way, kept the system together. As an adult, you may carry a deep sense of being “bad” and may continue to engage in self-sabotaging behaviors.
You may have been The Lost Child, the quiet, invisible one. You learned that the safest way to navigate the chaos was to have no needs. You retreated into a world of books, of fantasy, of your own mind. You were the “easy” child who never caused any trouble. As an adult, you may be disconnected from your own feelings and desires, a person who finds it incredibly difficult to take up space or ask for what you need.
Or you may have been The Mascot or The Clown. You were the one who could always crack a joke, who could defuse a tense situation with your humor and charm. You became the family’s emotional regulator, using your personality to soothe the pain and distract from the chaos. As an adult, you may hide your own deep pain behind a mask of humor, finding it terrifying to be truly serious or vulnerable with others.
If you see yourself in these traits and these roles, please, let it be a moment not of shame, but of profound recognition and self-compassion. This is not a list of your flaws. This is the blueprint of your survival. And the beautiful, hopeful truth is that you are no longer a child. You are no longer on that stormy sea. And you have the power to learn a new way of being.
The journey of healing for an adult child of an addict is a profound act of self-reclamation. It is the process of gently and courageously breaking the three great rules: you learn to Talk, you learn to Trust, and you learn to Feel.
This journey almost always begins by breaking the “Don’t Talk” rule. This is the monumental step of finding a safe, confidential, and non-judgmental space to finally speak the secret. This is the sacred role of a therapist. To sit with Best Therapist in Dhaka and to finally say the words aloud, “My parent was an alcoholic,” and to be met not with judgment, but with understanding and validation, is the beginning of the end of the isolation. It is the first step out of the shadows.
A huge part of this therapeutic journey is the work of grieving. A good therapist will create a safe space for you to finally feel the immense and complex grief you have been carrying for a lifetime. You will grieve for the parent you lost to the addiction. You will grieve for the safe and carefree childhood you deserved but never had. And you will grieve for the parts of yourself that you had to abandon in order to survive. This grief is a necessary and cleansing fire, and you deserve to have a compassionate witness as you walk through it. Best Therapist in Dhaka is trained to hold space for this deep and complex sorrow.
It is within this safe container that a therapy like EMDR can be so profoundly effective. The “targets” for processing are often not single, big events, but the thousands of “little t” traumas that defined your childhood. The target might be the memory of a broken promise, the sound of a frightening argument, a time you had to take care of your parent when they were incapacitated, or the pervasive, daily feeling of anxiety and unpredictability. Best Therapist in Dhaka will guide you to process these memories, allowing the stored fear, shame, and helplessness to finally be released from your nervous system. The most powerful part of this work is often the reprocessing of the core negative beliefs: “It was my fault” becomes “I was a child, and I was powerless over the addiction.” “I am not important” becomes “My needs are valid and I am worthy of care.” “I cannot trust anyone” becomes “I can learn to trust safe people, starting with myself.”
This deep, internal work is the process of re-parenting yourself. You are learning, as an adult, to give yourself all the things you were denied as a child: consistency, validation, compassion, and unconditional love. You are learning to listen to your own inner voice, to identify your own needs, and to believe that you are worthy of having those needs met.
What does life look like on the other side of this courageous journey? It is not a life where you forget your past or stop loving your parent. It is a life where you are no longer defined by your past. It is the quiet, steady peace of knowing what a “normal” life feels like, because you have built it for yourself. It is the freedom to have fun, to be spontaneous, and to not take yourself so seriously. It is the joy of being in intimate relationships that are based on trust, reciprocity, and mutual respect, not on caretaking and chaos. It is the profound relief of living with an inner voice that is your kindest friend, not your harshest critic. It is the liberation that comes from knowing that you are responsible for your own happiness, and only your own.
This journey from chaos to calm, from secrecy to authenticity, is your birthright. You have carried the weight of your parent’s addiction for long enough. If you are looking for Best Therapist in Dhaka to help you lay down that burden, the Best Therapist in Dhaka is one who understands the intricate blueprint of an adult child’s heart. Mind to Heart has the Best Therapist in Dhaka. Our top online and offline counsellors are here to help you break the old, unspoken rules and to help you write new, beautiful, and life-affirming ones for your own precious life. The Best Therapist in Dhaka at Mind to Heart is ready to witness your story and to guide you toward the serenity, stability, and joy you have always, always deserved.