Someone once said to me: “The worst part about growing up with an alcoholic parent was not knowing who would walk through the door: the nice sober daddy, or drunk daddy with those staring eyes and short temper. There was no consistency: Plans were made to go out for the day and then suddenly cancelled. Nothing and no one was dependable. The tension was always there.”

These words might have come from the mouths of many children brought up in an alcoholic or similarly dysfunctional home. But the coping mechanisms these children developed when young - and which worked pretty well as emotional shields during those often terrifying years - were found to no longer work for them as adults. These methods had now become an emotional liability.

It was not until the late 1970s that this specific trauma of being brought up in an alcoholic home was really recognised and a sister group to both AA and Al-Anon, Adult Children of Alcoholics, was born. It followed the same 12 Step principles of Alcoholics Anonymous.

By going back and examining their difficult and often painful childhoods, ‘adult children’(ACAs) learn to recognise where their dysfunctional behaviour has come from, develop strategies to alleviate the guilt and shame, and find ways to ‘unhook’ from the past in order to move on into more healthy living.

So what are some of the traits that worked so well in the early years for these children but went on to cause problems in adulthood?

Control: Adult children like to be in control because otherwise situations might return to those of their childhood with all the associated pain and chaos. The controlling child may well have played the role of rescuer within the family, intervening in parental arguments and even having to reverse roles by looking after siblings or putting the adult to bed. But the alcoholic is no longer present in the office or the new home and others can resent the ACA’s controlling behaviour. Adult children often have a fear of intimacy and have difficulty expressing their needs. Intimacy feels as if they have lost control.

Burying feelings: Feelings weren’t really listened to or given much credence in the alcoholic home and expressing them was often met with negative (or fearful?) reactions. The non-alcoholic spouse might have had their attention diverted in the direction of the drinker and the emotional needs of the children became ignored to some degree. Anger, as expressed in the family, was seen as an emotion to be avoided in both themselves and others. So the child learns to bury their feelings and this carries on into adulthood. Unexpressed anger (and the adult child usually brings a backpack) can lead to depression and to addictions of their own.

Consistency: The lack of consistency in the family leads to a fear of being abandoned which the ACA will do anything to avoid. And yet ironically they often choose partners who match those of their parents where the likelihood of abandonment may persist.

Don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel: So much safer to become a stump. Let the others do the shouting. The more invisible you are the less you’ll attract attention. And ‘don’t feel’. Feelings seem to start rows or tears. Avoid. Avoid. Learning not to trust becomes an everyday survival tool.

Through one to one counselling or programmes like ACOA, adult children can go back into that (not always) dark room of childhood and start to recognise within a safe environment what is making them act the way they do. This healing process can really help. Shutting the past away and trying to forget about it just doesn’t seem to work. Those feelings run deep. 

As Claudia Black says in her book It Will Never Happen to Me: ‘It’s never too late to have a happy childhood’.

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Article two: ACOA Unhooking from the past:

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Two years ago I wrote an article for the Counselling Directory on the problems experienced in adulthood by those brought up in alcoholic or similarly dysfunctional homes. (See: adult children of alcoholics and the problems that persist). I’d like to elaborate in this second article and focus as well on solutions.

I described some of the characteristics and defence mechanisms that ACOAs developed in order to survive the chaos and inconsistency while growing up. These worked brilliantly when we were children. But as adults - with the requirement to act and behave as adults – the failure to trust, the burying of feelings and emotions, and the need to always be in control became handicaps, particularly where relationships were concerned.

Most insidious in some children may have been the belief that it was not our parents who were at fault but ourselves. A strange survival technique took over as illustrated by writer Anne Lamott: accepting that we must be bad, wrong, defective at least gave us the hope that our parents were in fact (underneath it all) good, capable carers. This was important for us to know or at least believe as it gave us a glimmer of security and at the same time, a degree of control in the knowledge that if we were able to be good (or perhaps even perfect?) our parents wouldn’t need to drink and all would be well again. We were the cause of their drinking, depression, or whatever and thus had the power to do something about the situation. However erroneous this thought process may seem it at least enabled us to survive. Unfortunately, the belief that we are still ‘defective’ and undeserving may have survived as well; and perhaps that’s where the work is.

Other ACOAs may have felt the opposite seeing parental alcoholism for what it was: a destructive, chaotic force taking away any consistency, trust, love, and happiness from what might have been an idyllic childhood. The concept that their alcoholic parent was indeed sick but playing the best they could with the cards they’d been dealt has been helpful to some.

There is value in ‘going back in’ and recognising what happened in the past and its continuing effect on our lives today. Our needs and rights became lost in the chaos of looking after those of our alcoholic parent and we need to stand up and demand them back. Now!

The adult children of alcoholics solution is to become your own loving parent and by doing so recognise:

• That you have a right to your feelings - all of them – and that you can learn to trust them, your judgement and your intuition. As children, we may not have been allowed to articulate how we really felt – to ourselves or others - so we may have to learn how.

• That you can give yourself permission to say ‘no’ if something doesn’t feel right to you.

• That you have the right to make mistakes and not berate yourself for making them.

• You have a right to remove yourself from the company of people who put you down.

• You have a right to live your life the way you want to without having to wait for the alcoholic parent to get better or change.

If you can allow yourself to move out of isolation then this is the first step to revisiting the past, unhooking from it, and moving on. Whether that is by attending ACOA meetings (There are over fifty meetings a week now in the UK) or by starting personal counselling, it is taking action that starts the process. Closing the door on the past and trying to bury the pain doesn’t seem to work.

If nothing changes, nothing changes.

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Hugh Trethowan, 2017