Heal Your Lost Child Issues & Stop Hiding Out

Long before I changed careers and began working from home, I was a family counselor in the chemical dependency field. We worked with patients and their families to identify dysfunctional family patterns that were keeping them stuck.

One of the things we learned is that families developed certain roles that they played within the family and then, without meaning to, carried those roles out into the rest of their lives.

With each new family that came in, one of the roles I was most interested to identify amonsgt our new group was the lost child, because that was the role I most often played in my own family.

Lost Child

The lost child is the one in the family most likely to be overlooked. On a trip, if they stop for a bathroom break, this is the child they will forget. Lost children are quiet, withdrawing their energy because they believe they will be safer if they aren't noticed.

Unfortunately, they often become so good at being invisible that they continue doing it unconsciously, even after they have left home and become adults.

In the next post, I will describe how lost child issues translate into hiding out behavior in adulthood.