Breaking the Pattern: What I Learned About Love, Chaos, and Self-Respect

I grew up in a dysfunctional family.

The kind where survival came first and selfhood came last.

The kind that quietly trained me to tolerate chaos, seek approval, suppress needs, and call it love.

A few years ago, I found something called the Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families Laundry List, a set of traits describing people who grew up in homes like mine. When I read it, it felt like someone had cracked open my inner world.

It wasn’t just familiar. It was me.

I didn’t know how to set boundaries.

I thought love meant rescuing people.

I was addicted to excitement, the kind that pulls you into emotional highs and lows and convinces you it’s love, it’s life, it’s healthy.

Calm felt foreign. Steadiness felt suspicious.

I was so used to managing everyone else’s needs that I didn’t know how to name my own.

I lived in those patterns for a long time, and like most things we inherit, they came with a cost.

Those patterns taught me to abandon myself.

To smile when I wanted to cry.

To stay when I should’ve walked.

To work for love I should have simply received.

But I didn’t stay there.

Over time, through intentional growth, healing, grief, leadership, motherhood, and choosing to break my patterns again and again, I rewired myself.

I started recognizing the difference between love wrapped in poison and love wrapped in truth.

I stopped chasing the highs of emotional inconsistency.

I stopped disappearing into other people’s expectations just to keep the peace.

I stopped calling dysfunction devotion.

I started listening to my intuition.

I started making decisions that honored my wholeness.

I started choosing calm over chaos.

I started trusting that peace isn’t boring, it’s sacred.

I still see traces of the old list sometimes.

But now I meet them with awareness, not obedience.

Because I’m not the list I was handed.

I’m the woman who rewrote it, line by line, with love.

I’m still learning.

I still catch myself in old patterns sometimes.

But now I notice. I pause. I choose differently.

I’m building a home inside myself,

one rooted in self-respect, emotional safety, and truth.

And every day I live in it, I feel more free.

There’s something powerful about naming the patterns and choosing to live differently. If you're in that place too, I’m rooting for you.

Resources that helped me start healing:

– Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families (ACA): https://adultchildren.org

– Running on Empty by Dr. Jonice Webb — a life-changing book about childhood emotional neglect and how it affects us as adults.

– Trauma and Recovery by Dr. Judith Herman — a foundational work on understanding trauma and reclaiming your life after it.

These helped me understand myself in ways I never had before. Maybe they’ll help you too.

By Katherine Tatsuda

Katherine Tatsuda writes from the fire—grief, loss, betrayal, survival—and from the quiet power of what comes after. Her work is rooted in radical vulnerability and the conversations most leaders and speakers avoid. She is the voice behind Reinvention Modeled, where clarity becomes strategy and healing becomes authenticity.