6 signs you grew up with a reactive parent who had trouble controlling their emotions, even if you're close with them

• Reactive parents are highly emotional, often expressing their anger or sadness with no filter.
• It teaches their children to be hypervigilant and put other people's feelings first.

Painful childhoods come in all shades. Some people are raised by emotionally absent parents, who ignore their needs and feelings. .

And then there are children who grow up with the opposite: a reactive parent who can't control their emotions at all.

Dr. Lindsay C. Gibson, a clinical psychologist who specializes in emotionally immature parents, told Business Insider that reactive parents have difficulty regulating their emotions, whether they feel anger, frustration, or sadness.

"They become the person in the family that everyone else tiptoes around because nobody wants to set them off," Gibson said. "Very emotional parents, psychologically speaking, are using other people as containers for their emotional upset."

Growing up in this kind of environment can have vast emotional consequences, shaping how you deal with conflict and how you experience your own emotions. Gibson shared some of the signs you grew up with a reactive parent.

1. You hold in your emotions without even realizing it

A parent having free rein on how they express their anger or anxiety comes at the expense of their child, Gibson said.

"The children feel like they have to take in and contain the parent's distress or the parent's rage," Gibson said. Even if the child feels scared, annoyed, or stressed, they learn from an early age that it's more important to keep it together on the outside and tend to their parent instead.

Because of this dynamic, "emotional parents often create very self-sacrificing children," Gibson said.

2. You're always on the lookout for any hint of conflict

One of the biggest side effects of having a volatile parent is becoming a people-pleaser, Gibson said.

Kids in these environments learn that "if they can calm that parent down or put that parent first, they stand a much higher likelihood of having a more peaceful life," she said. "But they have to constantly have one eye out for that parent's emotional status so that it doesn't escalate into some kind of outburst."

As they grow up, children of reactive parents become hypervigilant by default, even when they're not with their parents, and are excellent at reading people and situations. "When a person is about to get upset, they know how to come in and soothe things or make sure they don't say the wrong thing," Gibson said.

Often, these children don't even notice how often they scan their surroundings, she said. They become naturals at tuning into everyone else's emotions but their own.

3. You can be drawn to "loose cannon" friends and partners

Our relationships with our parents can heavily influence our other relationships, from romantic to platonic. Because these children are used to doing the emotional work for their parents, Gibson said they can end up choosing friends and romantic partners who make them feel the same way.

"They may pick a best friend who is kind of a loose cannon, or they might be attracted to a very passionate-seeming partner because that's attractive to them," Gibson said.

Part of it has to do with how kids of reactive parents define their own sense of self-worth.

Gibson said that everyone wants to feel useful in relationships, and "if your effectiveness is in the realm of helping other people to stay stable and to not get overly upset, you're going to be drawn into relationships where that's needed."

4. Your parent still tries to control your adult life

If your reactive parent is still alive, their explosive personality might still take hold of your life, even if you're an adult and live far away, Gibson said.

For example, if you find a partner, there can be "tremendous conflict" because your parent can berate and try to guilt-trip you into choosing between them or your new relationship.

Gibson said she's had several clients who still feel controlled by parents who are "still calling the shots and insisting that their child treat them as the most important person in their life."

5. Setting boundaries is difficult for you

You might want to set boundaries with your parent, but you know doing that will lead to screaming, name-calling, and relentless phone calls. It can be really daunting to actually go through with it, according to Gibson.

"When you begin to say 'No, that's not something that I'm willing to do" with that very emotional, very demanding parent, they can really react with a lot of shaming, maybe even making threats that are kind of scary," she said.

It can also be difficult because these parents raise their kids to feel responsible for them, versus the other way around, she added. "One of the things that person is going to have to come to grips with is do they deserve to have a life of their own," Gibson said, "even if it means that parent is going to have to find someone else to be dependent on."

6. It takes work to understand your own feelings

Gibson said that a traumatic childhood combined with continued hypervigilance in adulthood means it can be hard to uncover your own feelings sometimes.

"It can be quite a bit of psychological work to get that sensitivity back," she said. "The big job for these adult children is to gradually become more self-aware and able to contact their true feelings and sense of self."

She said therapy and reading books on the topic can be great starting points — and the effort is always worth it.

"It's so wonderful in therapy to see somebody undergo the transformation from this person who served the emotional needs of their emotionally immature parent," Gibson said. Eventually, they become "a person who has a strong enough sense of self to create the right kind of life for themselves," she said.