34. Adults raised in alcoholic homes have special challenges

By Tom O'Connell

People who have been raised in the emotional shadows of alcoholic households enter adult life suffering from the profound effects of their upbringing. Psychologically, they have been scarred the way veterans of combat have been scarred. And to escape the pain of facing the emotional issues that haunt them, they often turn to addictive lifestyles.

Therapist Robert Subby has keen insight into the challenges adult children of alcoholics (ACOAs) face in adult life. The director of Family Systems Center in Edina, Minnesota, reports that most adult children are looking for unconditional love, but their unfinished business interferes with their current behavior, impairing their relationships. Co-dependency is a serious problem for them.

A candid man at the podium, Subby tells his colleagues, "Co-dependents are frustrating to work with because they keep repeating the same cycles." He describes co-dependency as "a fashion of coping learned from living in a dysfunctional family." Co-dependents have a difficult time knowing where they leave off and other people begin.

Subby says adults who were raised in the chaos of alcoholism often feel schizophrenic and have conversations with themselves due to their tendency to isolate. He also notes, "They're impulsive and when they decide to fix a relationship; they work it out alone, from a covert agenda."

Describing the emotional intensity ACOAs carry, he says, "They have to cope with free-floating anxiety and feelings without any connection. And they have to manage fears they don't understand." Considering what they have lived through, such anxiety is normal, but ACOAs find that hard to believe. They don't feel normal. In the lives they have experienced, dysfunction is the norm.

A major problem for ACOAs, says this therapist, is getting their hearts and heads together. "They live life by omission. They omit who they are, and replace it by who they think they should be." They are "divided spirits," he says. "They don't feel okay about what they think and feel."

Subby reports that ACOAs wonder about their place in the cosmos, whether there is a God, what God expects from them, and what their purpose in life is. Not that ACOAs are the only ones who do this, but ACOAs tend to do things more excessively than others. According to Subby, it's even common for them to dream they are showing up for an appointment with no clothes on, signing up for a course and not showing up, and running down streets that have no end. 

"They're attending life with only half of them there," he says. "They're looking for what normal is." And they're into pain avoidance. "To escape from pain, they build their lives on outside reality. But if you are what you do, and then you don't do it, you aren't!" So, ACOAs often have identity problems.

In relationships, they tend to be jealous because they fear abandonment, and are afraid of losing a piece of themselves and suffering humiliation if their loss becomes public. They also find it hard to leave home.

Since many ACOAs become alcoholics themselves, or take on other addictions, the goal of therapists with these clients is to help them recover their emotional lives. That is a splendid goal.

- Back -