How to Read Your Adult Children Results: What Your 6 Scores Actually Mean

Your CommStyle Adult Children result gives you six separate scores, one for each core pattern associated with adult children of dysfunctional families.^[1] This guide explains what each score means, what high and low results indicate in practice, and how to use your results constructively rather than as a fixed verdict on who you are.

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Before You Read: A Few Important Framing Points

These scores are not a diagnosis. The adult children concept isn't a clinical category in the DSM-5 or ICD-11 — your results describe tendencies, not who you fundamentally are.

High scores are not failures — if you score high on emotional suppression or distrust, that reflects a pattern that likely developed in response to real experiences, an adaptation rather than a character flaw.

Scores can change. Research on psychological flexibility, therapy outcomes, and neuroplasticity all point to the same conclusion: patterns that developed through experience can be modified through experience, awareness, and support.

High scores today don't determine your trajectory — the most useful thing you can do with these results is take them as an invitation to look more closely at your patterns, their origins, and what you want to do about them.

Emotional Suppression, Self-Responsibility, and Distrust

Emotional Suppression measures the tendency to suppress, minimize, or disconnect from your emotional experience — a strategy that made sense in a home where expressing upset met anger or dismissal, but often persists long after that environment is gone.

A high score looks like difficulty knowing what you feel, emotions surfacing indirectly (irritability instead of sadness), or being told you seem distant.

Research shows suppression, unlike cognitive reappraisal, doesn't reduce the internal experience of emotion — it reduces only its outward expression, while physiological activation continues.^[4]

Excessive Self-Responsibility measures the tendency to take on more than your share and feel responsible for others' emotions and outcomes. Children in chaotic homes often became highly responsible as a survival strategy, reducing unpredictability by managing or fixing things.

A high score looks like difficulty asking for help, guilt when someone around you is upset even if you're not the cause, and exhaustion from constant vigilance about others' needs.

This relates to what family systems theory calls differentiation — the ability to maintain a clear sense of self while remaining emotionally connected to others.^[3]

Distrust of Others measures the difficulty trusting that people are reliable or well-intentioned, particularly in close relationships. When caregivers were sources of harm or abandonment, the lesson learned is that people cannot be depended upon.

A high score looks like difficulty accepting help or positive attention, keeping relationships at arm's length even when you want closeness, and waiting for trusted people to let you down without reason.

This is often rooted in what attachment researchers call anxious or disorganized attachment — formed when attachment figures were simultaneously a source of comfort and of fear.^[6]

Over-Adaptation, Low Self-Worth, and Abandonment Fear

Over-Adaptation measures the tendency to read and adapt to others' needs and moods, often at the expense of knowing your own. Children in unpredictable homes developed hypervigilance out of necessity, monitoring the emotional atmosphere to anticipate problems.

A high score looks like difficulty knowing what you actually want independent of others, a sense of performing rather than being, and exhaustion from constant monitoring of others' reactions.

This closely relates to chronic hypervigilance — threat-monitoring originally developed for physical danger, applied in adulthood to social situations.

Low Self-Worth measures a baseline sense of inadequacy, often present even when external evidence suggests otherwise. When a child's environment delivers consistent messages that they're too much or not enough, those messages get absorbed before the cognitive capacity to question them develops.

A high score looks like a persistent internal critic, difficulty accepting compliments, and imposter syndrome — the sense that success is undeserved. Core beliefs about self-worth, formed early in life, are among the most robust targets in cognitive behavioral therapy.^[5]

Abandonment Fear measures a persistent fear that people will leave, that love is conditional, and that closeness cannot be trusted to last. Inconsistency or actual abandonment in early caregiving produces a reasonable adaptation: stay alert for signs this person is leaving too.

A high score looks like anxiety around conflict, seeking reassurance or paradoxically pushing people away first, and over-interpreting neutral cues as rejection. This maps closely onto anxious attachment as described in adult attachment theory.^[2]

How to Use Your Results

Look for your highest scores first — these are the patterns most worth exploring, the places where the adaptation has become most prominent and often most costly. Notice the connections between dimensions: these six patterns aren't independent.

Emotional suppression and over-adaptation often go together; distrust and abandonment fear often coexist; low self-worth can amplify every other dimension.

Consider context — these patterns often show up more strongly in specific types of relationships, like intimate partnerships or interactions with authority figures, so it can be useful to think about where they're most present in your life.

And take your time — these results can bring up strong feelings (recognition, grief, discomfort, relief), and that's normal; there's no need to process everything at once.

If you haven't yet taken the CommStyle Adult Children Assessment, your results are the starting point for applying everything in this guide.

This article was developed with oversight from a Certified Public Psychologist and is intended for informational purposes; it doesn't constitute clinical advice. If your results raise concerns about your mental health, we encourage you to speak with a licensed professional.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What does a high score on the adult children assessment mean?

A higher score indicates that patterns associated with growing up in a dysfunctional family environment are more prominent in your current functioning. Higher scores don't reflect personal failure — they reflect the degree to which early adaptive responses are still active.

The assessment helps identify which specific patterns are most present, so development effort can be directed effectively.

What does a low score on the adult children assessment mean?

A lower score indicates these patterns are less prominent in your current functioning — this may reflect a genuinely less impactful early environment, recovery work already undertaken, or differences in how patterns manifest for you.

It doesn't mean early difficulties had no effect, just that those effects are less visible in the specific patterns measured.

Can my adult children patterns change over time?

Yes. Research on recovery from early family dysfunction consistently documents meaningful change with deliberate effort, self-awareness, and often therapeutic support.

These patterns formed as adaptive responses to specific environments — they're responses, not fixed personality traits, and can be changed through developing new responses and building self-awareness.