This week we talked about Intimacy Poisons, specifically: Alcohol. It could be any drug, though. Remember the PSA from some years ago? About the Elephant in the Room? The whole family was trying to go about their lives and there was this elephant walking around and no one wanted to mention it. But it was there, and creating huge chaos, destroying everything, trumpeting about and killing people in the process.
Ok, so maybe all that didn’t happen in the PSA. It just sort of walked around, but I’m right on the reality of what alcohol or drugs do to a family.
It’s hard for family members to talk about. When you’re a child, you don’t get it. When your a partner of someone going through this it’s uncomfortable, and painful. You can’t much maintain emotional distance. You want to say things like: Why are you doing this to me? Or Can’t you just stop?
Our lecture talked about 2/3 of adults drinking alcohol, and 1/3 reported drinking causing family problems, and also that 10% of adults meet the criteria for alcohol dependence. It didn’t mention that those 10% buy 90% of all alcohol sold in the US. But it’s true.
I think one of the biggest problems for families dealing with this is that really seriously weird things become normal. The fact that your partner is drinking all the time, or that you need to manage them when you go out because they’ll be too drunk to function, or you have to start deciding when as a couple you’re going to drink. It becomes kind of an Addiction Dance, with one person generally becoming over functioning.
For kids I think it’s that the parent leaves. I don’t mean physically, but emotionally, they aren’t there anymore. And they react in ways that you don’t understand. You get in trouble for things that are either minor, or you don’t understand. Kids pull back emotionally after a while.
Alcohol dependence, or alcoholism as it used to be called is the only disease people get mad at a person for having. Think about that. I’m looking a lot at myself in this class, and my own fear of intimacy with people. All things that started in childhood. BUT, I am also a big proponent of I’m an adult now, and responsible for my own feelings and emotions and can change.
On the Adult Children of Alcoholics World Service Organization site there’s a handy Laundry List of 14 traits Adult Children have in common, generally. It’s pretty interesting, but there’s also a Flip Side of the Laundry List, which as a person in recovery from both family alcohol use AND my own, I really liked. In fact, I wanted to stand up and cheer.
The Flip Side goes like this:
We move out of isolation, and are not unrealistically afraid of people, even authority figures.
We do not depend of others to tell us who we are.
We are not automatically frightened by angry people, and no longer regard personal criticism as a threat.
We do not have a compulsive need to recreate abandonment.
We stop living life as victims.
We do not use enabling as a way to avoid looking at our own shortcomings.
We do not feel guilty when we stand up for ourselves.
We avoid emotional intoxication and choose workable relationships instead of constant upset.
We are able to distinguish love form pity.
We come out of denial about our traumatic childhoods, and regain the ability to feel and express emotions.
We stop judging ourselves and discover a sense of self worth.
We grow independent and are not terrified of abandonment.
We are dealing with out own alcoholic (or para-alcoholic) selves.
We are actors, not reactors.
As I said, this was a flip side Laundry List for ACOA’s, but I think that we can apply this to anyone who is in a relationship with an addicted person. I see it so many times, perhaps especially in women involved with alcoholic men. Men, with alcoholic wives too though, thinking on it. That walking on eggshells, trying to manage the drinking, the wet and dry periods. Also the anger. Also the helplessness.
What do you think? What’s it like being in a relationship with someone on drugs, or who is drinking? Did you grow up that way? Are you now? And remember, you can comment anonymously, please. I know it’s hard. I want to know your experience, sharing mine helps me, and hearing yours helps me more.
Tell me your story.
My daughter is an opiate addict. The hell it released in our family is something that we are all still recovering from, but the help of others who have been there has been at times the only thing that kept me afloat. My response to my daughters addiction was foreshadowed by my own parents addiction. Not only did I pass the genetic traits of addiction on to my child, escaping that particular hell myself, by I also learned how to completely enable my daughters use due to my own issues of abandonment, and inability to realize that I really had very little control in almost all aspects of my life, except my own mind and well-being. Its been a long road, but I feel very grateful for all that I have learned. I am also grateful that my daughter is in recovery, but my focus needs to continue to be on my own recovery.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing this. Every word is so true, and kudos to you for knowing yourself, and having the courage to heal.
ReplyDeleteThank you also, for the messages, email and stories today. These stories you're telling me are FREAKING HARD. And it's hard to say them out loud, and they're hard to write. Secrets go on top of secrets and everything becomes a twisted knot of WTF.
ReplyDeleteHowever you write, and whomever you tell, doing it is the most important thing and the first step in recovery.
when my uncle married his second wife, I was 9 or 10. I didn't know mommy was a drunk then, but I started to get an inkling because she was so loud and obnoxious at the reception. I decided I didn't want to go to family events with her (not that I could actually skip them or go with someone else)
ReplyDelete
when I turned 16, my birthday present was for my mom to get me up early and bring me to the living room. she and my dad sat on the couch and I sat on the floor across the coffee table from them and she told me she was an alcoholic and would be going to AA. She never went and my dad apparently never asked her why or urged her to try again. She is now proud of her status as an alcoholic.

when I was in my early 20s I lived at home and was dating a gent who lived in Canada. I made plans to visit him. I talked to both my parents about it and gave them dates and airline info a week or two before leaving. the day I had to fly out, I woke my mom up to say bye and she flipped out because she couldn't remember talking about the trip and thought I was trying to trick her somehow. we fought until I missed my bus, she drove me to the train station to get to the airport and then called my boyfriend's mom to make sure I was really going there. She called 3 times while I was in the air and then demanded, when I called to tell her I had arrived, to talk to him and his mom to prove I was in the same place they were.

my mom drinks and drives a lot. At a cousin's wedding she got trashed and my dad insisted on taking the keys. she shouted at him as we walked 2 blocks from the venue to the car and sulked the entire way home.
my freshman year in college, while at the beach friends from high school came by the beach house. My mom, wasted, grabbed the ass of one of my male friends while hugging him. she neither remembers nor believes this happened.
THANK YOU for sharing!
ReplyDeleteI have no experience on this type of things but I feel for you for having been exposed to that.
ReplyDeleteI was lucky to grow up in a family where people liked to drink every now and then but not get drunk. Getting drunk wasn't a done thing. And now that I live in Italy, it's even more so because there is a social stigma on drunkenness here (heck, there is not even an Italian word for hangover - which says it all!).
This reminds me of what I had been taught at school as a child: you can be an alcoholic - i.e. be dependent on regular intake of alcohol - but never get (visibly) drunk as your body adjusts to level of alcohol. Weird and scary.
This is true about tolerance, but at some point it starts going the other way, and even a little gets you loopy.
DeleteIt's interesting the different cultures, between Europe and the US, especially here in Wisconsin. The the drinking and drinking lots to get drunk, culture is so prevalent. We're the #1 drunk driving state. People drink at every event. No one learns how to drink safely, or in a low risk manner, which makes it really easy to develop an alcohol use disorder, or alcohol dependence.
It could be an effect of the Scandinavian roots for Wisconsin and Minnesota. Many of my Scandinavian colleagues are drinking sensibly when in Italy but tell me they are often expected to drink themselves senseless when they are visiting family. It feels so weird to hear this, over and over.
DeleteMy parents were heavy smokers, and belittled my attempts to get them to stop after I saw a documentary about how bad it was for you. I was afraid they were going to die, and was told not to be silly. I was about 8 at the time. By the time they both became alcoholics I was in my early teens, I already had a full worked out "how I cope if they both die" plan. They were very high-functioning addicts, both holding down demanding jobs for many years, managing their own lives and money, never needing inappropriate caretaking, but there was that absolute refusal to even think about my emotional reaction to it. I was the one who had to cope with my feelings. I was also an only child, with no other relatives we saw often, so I became very self-sufficient. A big part of my identity has remained being the person who can cope, who will work out how to deal with any emergency, who will have a plan and enact it. My biggest downsides have been being sure I was not enough, that most people who were healthy and sane were not going to be satisfied with me, and that setting boundaries for partners was not going to work. I have had some good relationships (including my current one), but have had two that were emotionally abusive in ways that mirrored that "but I'm so helpless, I can't stop or change, you have to stay with me to help or terrible things will happen" vibe.I have had periodic depression since (at least) my mid-teens, finally getting diagnosed in my 30's (I'm now 56).
ReplyDeleteThere was never physical violence at home, or in the relationships since, but the rows when my mother had had enough to lose her inhibitions were horrible, and never about what was actually upsetting her, because that would almost always have exposed her as less liberal in her views than she like to think she was. She would pick a random topic, and engineer a row about that - the classic example was, in a house of atheists, the relative merits of the Catholic and Baptist churches, three hours of shouting ending up with all of us in tears in different rooms. That sort of thing was a three times a week happening through my mid teens, and ended (for me) when I left home on the day of my last highschool exam. The alcoholism and smoking did kill them, but the family genetics are tough enough that I was in my 30's, rather than still at school as I had feared as a child.
I remember that, the engineering a fight about something that had nothing to do with anything, until everyone was in tears.. I'd kind of forgotten.
DeleteIt does make you cope too, doesn't it? Like you will take care of any problem, and yourself and never depend on anyone ever again. I wonder about that too in myself, that thinking I'm not good enough, and that others won't be satisfied with me.
Not as much as I used to, mind you. I'm learning. Sounds like you are too. Thank you for sharing your story and reminding me of things and perceptions I'd forgotten :)
The "weird things becoming normal" thing struck me again today - it always surprises me when people in their 50's have living parents, even though that's actually pretty standard unless they were older than average when they became parents.
ReplyDeleteExactly that.
DeleteIt's weird the big things and the little things that end up being normal.
Lena,
DeleteThere are so many parallels between your early life and my own. Only child, no extended family. Multiple moves (7 schools by 4th grade) Three packs a day per parent. I lost my Dad at 16, from a heart attack, and my mother at 21. I have always been enormously grateful that my mother managed to live past that crucial birthday, so I did not have to be saddled with the family she had asked to be my guardian if she passed before then. And my primary emotion, then and now, was relief for us both.
Both my folks were in AA for most of my life...but the description "dry drunk" was apt.
Mom had a serious depression when I was 14, ending up with ECT, which was the only time I ever saw my father drink.... he asked me tearfully "What are we going to do about your mother."
I learned most of what I knew as a young person from reading about families in books. Probably saved my sanity, such as it is!
And yes,I am still amazed when people have living parents, at my age.