Arguments are pervasive, and violence or even incest may play a part. Children in alcoholic families tolerate harm as intense as soldiers receive in battle; they also bear the trauma like an millstone throughout their lives.
Not only is the experience destructive, it’s frequent, says Stephanie Brown, founder of the Alcohol Clinic at Stanford Medical Center, where she devised the developmental model of alcohol recovery. 76 million Americans (approximately 45 percent of the U.S. population) have been exposed to alcoholism in the family unit in one way or another, and an estimated 26.8 million of them are children. “These children are more at risk for alcoholism and other drug abuse than are children of non-alcoholics, and more at risk of marrying an alcoholic as well.”
Getting the better of the legacy of a parent’s alcoholism can be hard partly since there is a long history of denial. “The family is dominated by the presence and denial of alcoholism, which becomes a major family secret,” says Brown, now director of the Addictions Institute in Menlo Park, California. The secret becomes a dominant principle required to keep the family unit together, the foundation for coping strategies and mutual beliefs, without which the family unit might crumble.
Claudia Black, a leading expert on grownup children of alcoholics and writer of It Will Never Happen to Me, says these children grow up with three dangerous rules: don’t trust, don’t feel, and don’t talk. Since alcohol-dependent parents are so self-involved, they forget birthdays and other important events, providing their children with the sense that they can have trust in no one. Since the parents impose so a great deal of hurt on their families, they teach their children to bottle up their emotions just to exist. Alcoholic parents often have angry or fierce outbursts that (combined with the drinking itself) they end up denying, and children in such a household may believe the illusion, themselves. Since the children are instilled to deny the reality around them, they acquire a resistance to discussing urgent, crucial, or important facets of life.
Brown adds that children of alcoholics might suffer depression, anxiety, and obsessions, all related to the punishing experience of growing up in such a household. Addressing the legacy of disruption means addressing the traumatic stress, she states that. First and foremost, adult children of alcoholics “have issues with control.” That means they are afraid of others and have problems with intimacy; they harbor anxiety that if they lose control, they may become addicts themselves.
The most crucial emotional leap for such a survivor: sorting out the past from the present. They need to recognize that when they overreact to something now, “they are really feeling pain from the past.” As soon as they have that skill, they can begin to progress.
Brown advocates psychotherapy for grownup children of alcoholics, and states that group therapy could work exceedingly well. “When family distortion is the problem, groups are ideal for bringing that out.” Brown particularly recommends looking for support from Adult Children of Alcoholics World Service Organization or Co-Dependents Anonymous, which provide 12-step programs. If a group is unavailable, individual psychotherapy, family therapy, and even psychopharmacology can be helpful..

The Signs

Thirteen characteristics of adult children of alcoholics Janet Geringer Woititz, widely recognized as the founder of the Adult Children of Alcoholics movement, lists 13 traits to look out for.

These people:

• Can only guess what normal behavior is
• Have trouble following a project from beginning to end
• Lie when they could easily tell the truth
• Mercilessly judge themselves
• Have difficulty enjoying themselves
• Take themselves too seriously
• Have trouble with close relationships
• Overreact to change when they have no control
• Constantly look for approval and affirmation
• Usually feel that they’re dissimilar to other people
• Are either too responsible or too irresponsible.
• Are highly loyal, even if loyalty is undeserved
• Are impulsive.

They tend to act without giving serious consideration to alternate behaviors or the consequences of their actions. This impulsiveness leads to mental confusion, self-loathing and loss of control over their environment and they spend an excessive amount of energy accounting for their actions.