This Is What Happens When You Have an Alcoholic Parent

The most common trait that comes up for me when I'm working with an adult child of an alcoholic and when I think about my own experience is an unstable sense of identity. So, the sense that I'm not really sure who I am or how I fit in here. I don't know that I belong. That's huge. The perfectionism falls more under don't create any more chaos than there already is. Don't create any more problems than there already is.

And at least it won't be because of me if something goes wrong because I did everything right. That one is especially tricky to disentangle from as an adult because perfectionism is so highly rewarded in our society. The harder you work, the more you get paid, the better your promotion, the more you get praised verbally and it can be intoxicating. It's its own form of drug.

Why do I always feel responsible for keeping everyone happy?

People-pleasing is an interesting, I call it an adaptation because it's something that I think is required for survival or at least there's a part of us that thinks it's required for survival. As a child in an alcoholic home, we don't want to be the cause of any more problems. We see the havoc that the drinking can wreak on the family. And the ripple effect it can have on other problems. And so, we don't want to contribute to those problems by being difficult or acting out or throwing tantrums, not following the rules.

So much easier to get on everybody's good side, appease, be pleasant, be conversational, maybe even be funny, be witty, be entertaining. A lot of people find that they have this internal pressure to be an interesting, intellectual, stimulating person in the conversation because that's what got them positive attention in their family. Or maybe it took the attention off of the alcoholic. There are so many different ways to be a people pleaser. But at the root of it is I won't be abandoned if I'm pleasing everybody because who would abandon somebody who is being so charming and nice and pleasant to be around, right? The downside is that a lot of people pleasers end up not having the assertiveness skills that they need to get them out of harmful situations, harmful interpersonal situations, work situations, friendships, relationships.

It becomes such an ingrained part of who you are that it's really hard to detach from it when it served you so well.

How is an emotionally immature parent different from an alcoholic parent?

I think the biggest difference between an emotionally immature parent and an alcoholic parent, while they have a lot in common in terms of inability to self-regulate, they can be self-centered, communication can be really defensive and based on self-protection rather than connecting. The difference is that the alcoholic will be in and out of altered states. And the altered states might be when drunk, when hung over, when dealing with health conditions related to the alcohol. That altered state of have they been drinking, have they not, gives a different sense of instability than the ones that you find in emotionally immature homes. They're both very destabilizing and can feel very unsafe for different reasons. An alcoholic may have insight.

That's another big difference. They may look at their life and go yeah, this is pretty bad. My family's upset with me. My work's not going well. people are confronting me about this. I don't physically feel good, right? Like all of that can lead one to insight. And the thing about a recovery program for alcoholism is that it will address the behavior that you want to stop. So, once a level of insight is reached, recovery is more possible for the alcoholic parent.

What happens to a child when they're always the one who has to hold everything together?

The hero, the scapegoat, the mascot, the lost child, those are some of the more common roles. I'd say the one that lands in my office the most is the hero. And that's because they've been holding up everything for so long. Oftentimes not only in their own family, but at work or with friendship or with other obligations that they become exhausted and burnt out. And ironically, a lot of them have very low self-esteem because they don't feel that they're living up to this role of the hero just because they're doing everything.

A lot of them actually feel like they have very low self-confidence and it's not really in line with their vision of themselves. And I think they end up in therapy because they're exhausted. And they're very hard to connect with outside of their role as the hero. So, it's really hard to know them because they're so focused on what they can do for other people.

Why do so many of us become over-functioners?

When I speak about over-functioning, what I mean is leaning into the skills that were successful in your family to the detriment of your own well-being in another way. I also think there's an element to over-functioning where the reason it's over-functioning and not just functioning is because it's become one of, if not, the only main identity that you are fused with. That makes it really hard to give up when it's the defining factor of who you are. The over-functioner takes an excessive interest in other people, remembers things about other people's lives, brings gifts, gives a lot of compliments, takes on other people's work without asking.

It's the over-extension of that again, that like root identity. And the purpose of that is so you don't have to feel the anxiety of wondering if you did enough. Because whenever you put the word over, like over-functioning, over-compensating, over-extending, in front of a word, you never have to worry that you did enough. And I think that's at the root of a lot of adult children of alcoholics belief system about themselves is that they aren't enough. So maybe if I can do more than enough, that will close the gap in between how I see myself and the reality of the situation.

Why do I always end up in relationships with men like my alcoholic father?

There are two main reasons why someone might come from an alcoholic home and end up with an alcoholic partner. The first is wanting to have a sense of redoing the narrative of what happened in childhood. And this doesn't mean it this happens consciously, that you're aware of it, that you're saying, "I'm going to pick this person because I can fix them and I can undo." It's more so wanting to have a sense of control in a situation again where, going back to your childhood, you didn't have that control.

The other possibility is simply that it's familiar and comfortable to you, which I think a lot of people can relate to. The dynamic of the uncertainty of the hot and cold, walking on eggshells, maybe they're very they're very charming, happy drunk just like your parent was and it feels comfortable to you. There's a sense of familiarity there that I think sometimes is really hard to ignore. And people revert back to that because it's what they know. The most important thing again is that you maintain your own identity separate from the relationship and not in a cold, distant way, in a I'm fortified by other people, whether it's your own Al-Anon 12-step meeting or just a hobby that you have, a group you're part of, other people in your town, in your community that you connect with, friends that you've kept in touch with, something to call your own that grounds you in a sense of who you are outside of the relationship. Because what you don't want is to completely fall back into that child role that you were in with your parent.

How do I know the difference between helping and enabling?

When someone's in active addiction, it's really hard to figure out how you are able to have them in your life while also taking care of yourself. I think those are the two tasks. And where enabling and helping differ is that enabling somebody almost always inevitably requires you to abandon part of yourself. And that might mean part of your home life, part of your friendships, your job, things that you enjoy, but the enabling will trickle into your sense of self.

And that can be where resentment starts to grow. There's an element of control to enabling. And I think people are surprised a lot to hear that. cuz it doesn't feel like control when you're trying to help, but you are trying to influence an outcome. That's a form of control. And there's a difference between I'm going to try to make somebody do something in a certain way compared with I'm going to tell you how I can support you if you meet these conditions. And that's where what I consider to be help or support, but it involves a boundary. Helping can look like when you're ready to go to a 12-step meeting, I'll go with you. When you're ready to take a break from drinking, you can come over and see the kids.

Something like there's a reinforcing element to it, but only if a certain condition is met that makes you feel safe and that makes you feel seen.

How do I avoid repeating my parents' patterns?

If you have self-awareness, you will be able to take note of your self-regulation. And what I mean by self-regulation is your ability to identify a feeling, sit with it, decide if it needs to be acted on, and then decide how it needs to be acted on. Those are really important skills that are often not taught in an alcoholic home because of all the chaos going on, but now that you're an adult, you get to decide what you do with your feelings. And sometimes that starts as simply as going into therapy and learning to identify what feelings are in your body. Do you feel anxiety in your chest? Do you feel dread in your gut?

Do you feel tension in your shoulders? Do you feel sadness behind your eyes? These are all things that basic therapy can really help with. And from there, communicating it when you need to, making changes in your life when you need to. Sometimes it's as simple as taking care of your nervous system in a situation where it might be difficult, like going for a walk, removing yourself, taking a moment to pause before you react. That can quite literally save a situation from going south. The other piece I would look out for is to what degree you're feeling isolated at the moment in your life because anything addiction related will thrive in isolation.

And I think it's important to remember that you can be surrounded by people and very charismatic and very tuned in with networking at work and you can still feel very alone. So, the degree to which your friendships, if you're in a relationship, your partner, the people in your life are satisfying that connection need. And do you feel that you can talk to them about any feeling, positive or negative? The wider your net of people that support you, the more people invested in your mental health, and the more people will recognize when you're not yourself. I have an amazing group of girlfriends who, whenever I fall off the radar for a certain amount of time, they're reaching out to make sure everything's okay. And sometimes I am because it's life and life is busy. And sometimes it's not okay and something's happened and I'm struggling to talk about it.

How do I give up the hope that my mom will ever get better?

I think the concept of hope is really interesting because when we think about wishing somebody would recover or or stop drinking or change their lifestyle, it's very outward focused. So, the hope is poured into that person and very contingent on them changing their behavior. But, our recovery as adult children of alcoholics focuses on our taking control of our own life and taking back the things that matter to us. But, the hope is built in the decisions you're making for yourself. That creates the hope. And you get to keep that hope. That's for you.

That's not dependent on whether your parent stops drinking or not. If you're surfing, if you picture the waves are the alcoholic parent's recovery. Are they going to treatment? Are they not? Are they relapsing? It's very chaotic and dangerous and maybe sometimes scary. But, if you have your surfboard, your routine of things that make you happy, your hobbies, your interests, your joy, the things that give you meaning, your spirituality, all of that. That's your solid footing.

And you can surf those waves and they can try to knock you down and maybe sometimes they will knock you down, but you have your your solid base that you can stand on and that's your hope. I think it's something that you create for yourself. And if your parent is lucky enough, they get to share it with you when they recover. But, in the meantime, you get to have it for you and you don't have to wait and make it contingent on them getting better.