The stress and urgency of day-to-day challenges can become overwhelming if you let them. Bills, sickness, problems at work, arguments within the family, such stresses can exacerbate how you struggle with overcoming your problems.

If your early family upbringing was filled with dysfunction and abuse, the patterns that you fall into might be fraught with anxiousness and fear.

When you experienced fighting and arguments within your family, each person acted in a way to help them survive. Someone may have lashed out, another might have repressed their feelings and become detached, while another might have acted out in other ways.

When you think back to your childhood, how did you react when stresses hit you? If you live with someone with a drinking problem, how did you respond to being around that person while they were drunk?

Now that you are an adult, are you seeing the same behavior patterns being repeated in your daily life?

The fear and anxiousness that most adult children of alcoholics struggle with can become crippling if you allow it to overwhelm you.

A choice that you have is to embrace a new way and to find happiness through recovery. Actively choosing to set aside the reactive behaviors that helped you survive as a kid can feel overwhelming.

But if you want to grow and to feel happiness, then you need to find a way to go through the anxiousness and fear. How to do that?

First, take time to admit your problems. If you haven’t looked at the Adult Children of Alcoholics laundry list, take time to read through them all. Yes, doing so might be hard because you’ll see yourself in the behaviors listed, but hiding in fear and anxiousness isn’t going to make you feel better.

Take the first step. I know it’s hard. I do.