On the outside, ACoAs often have things well under control. On the inside, however, they may experience a low hum of negative feelings about the self, such as insecurity, inadequacy, phoniness, unlovableness, anxiety, or confusion. In times of chaos and crisis, ACoAs can be very composed and function well but they may have trouble when things go normally, too slowly, are not under their control, don’t go their way, or don’t go as they expect. (Woititz 1983).
ACOoAs and Intimacy
Soldiers who have PTSD may duck at the sound of a car backfiring, unconsciously fearing that it is the sound of gunfire. Even though they are no longer anywhere near a battlefield, they carry the scars and the fear that make that loud sound still feel threatening.
For ACoAs the battlefield is oftentimes intimate relationships, and the loud sounds or triggers can be as innocuous as a fight in the next room, a sudden change of mood, or a tense or aggressive vocal tone. Because they were traumatized in their home and by the people who they loved and depended on for care, nurturance, and even basic survival, ACoAs’ fear and hypervigilance tend to reemerge when they create families of their own. Intimate relationships such as partnering, and parenting are common ACoA triggers that reactivate childhood fears. As adults, when we encounter situations that feel similar to ones we experienced as kids, our fear gets triggered but we don’t really understand why because we never figured it out in the first place. We go back into a state of hyperarousal and hypervigilance and all of the tangled mess of confused and conflicting feelings we experienced as kids seem to swarm around our heads but we don’t know what got us there or how to get out of it. Often, we erroneously link our feelings of fear to whatever is around us at the moment. Actually, it isn’t so much those situations in and of themselves that are scaring us; we’re afraid that those situations will trigger unconscious and unprocessed feelings that we won’t be able to handle or make sense of. Beneath the level of our conscious awareness, we become a scared child all over again. Triggered by something that reminds us of a time in our lives when we might have felt helpless, scared, and vulnerable, we become lost in a wordless web of unprocessed or disequilibrating emotions, not knowing how to sort them out or come back from them. Many adults when in this state do what they did as kids: they freeze like a deer in the headlights; they try to become “invisible” until their feeling of danger passes. It is part of the natural fear response: if no one sees me, no one will hurt me.
How many times have I heard clients describe themselves as having felt invisible in their own homes? Was it that no one saw them, or did they find home a scary place? Were they invisible, or were they frozen in fear and experiencing themselves as “disappeared”? Still another part of the trauma response is aggression or withdrawal: triggered ACoAs may either intimidate people or avoid them in an attempt to avoid feeling vulnerable.
Of course these same intimate relationships can be the ACoA’s path to healing as they learn to back up when triggered and understand that within those triggered memories is the key to their unlocking and understanding just what hurt them most.
When Pain Goes Underground
Think of it this way: you’re a seven-year-old kid in a home where Dad gets drunk and rages. Mom stands, exhausted, and tries to protect you some of the time, gives up and hides in her room some of the time, and joins Dad in raging some of the time. You, the kid, are scared and quite trapped: you can’t really run away; this is home after all. If you talk back—or worse, try to fight—you might get hit or sent to your room, or worst of all, made to stay and live through one of those humiliating, soul-pounding lectures about how bad you are. Or you might get ignored and feel yourself literally dissappearing. So you feel helpless and you sort of collapse and go numb. Or you freeze, you “go away” somewhere into your imagination while your body still stands there.
In this scene, there is a power imbalance for sure, and you’re at the short end of it. You have little access to outside sources of support; you are, after all, only seven. And the person or people you would generally go to for comfort and solace are the ones who are hurting you. All of these factors make this a traumatizing moment for a child. And to add to it, you are making sense of it all through the eyes of a seven-year-old. You may wonder, as children do, what went wrong and how to fix it. You may feel inept at helping or blame yourself. So you can feel not only hurt but also confused, responsible, at fault, and unable to do anything about it. In other words, you feel helpless. And you may not have people you can go to for a quick “reality check.” So you swallow this scene whole. The picture gets frozen right there, and so do the feelings surrounding it . . . and that picture doesn’t necessarily change much over time. It lives inside the psyche where it becomes double- and triple-exposed with other similar pictures, and many of these scenes get blended together in a sort of inner portrait of the self and the self in relationship.
Later, these “inner pictures” get played out in our adult relationships. They template further experience. (So do the good pictures, by the way; they just don’t give us as many problems so we don’t worry about them). This is the dilemma of the ACoA, the dilemma that we will explore in more depth throughout this book.
Leaching and Leaking of Buried Pain
When we grow up and have families and relationships of our own, those inner pictures of the self and the self in relationship reemerge. Neatly filed feelings, actions, and imagery that we imagined were well hidden fly out of their envelopes and folders straight into and onto everyone’s faces. And those pictures have incredible detail. It is amazing just how carefully the unconscious records, remembers, and re-creates what has gone before. A random familiar smell, texture, or a few bars of music and we sail back into a forgotten moment of time in the blink of an eye. Past becomes prologue. At that moment when we are triggered, we become trapped by our own unresolved history and set up to repeat it. Though we may occupy an adult body, we return to this child-place inside of ourselves. In addition to the psychological and emotional bind we may find ourselves in when we’re triggered, our bodies are also reliving the trauma. Our breath gets short, our hearts may pound, our stomachs flip- flop, our throat goes dry, and our muscles tense up. We feel helpless and unable to make decisions all over again. In this way, the ACoA trauma syndrome involves both the body and mind and healing from it is a mind/body process.
Recovering from PTSD is just as important as recovering from addiction and needs to be taken just as seriously. ACoAs need to sober up emotionally and psychologically so they do not live out the sort of “dry drunk” patterns that mirror addiction-related thinking, feeling, and behavior, even when alcohol and drugs are not in the picture. Trauma and PTSD invariably become intergenerational. Even if the ACoA or traumatized adult does not become an addict (though many do), he or she passes on the kind of emotional and psychological thinking, feeling, and behavior that can engender trauma, addiction, and dysfunction in subsequent generations.
TWO
The Making of an ACoA:
Living Behind a Mask
You could have all the crazy thoughts you wanted,
as long as you smiled and kept them to yourself.
—Maqra Purnhagen, Past Midnight
Living in an alcoholic family system is like driving at night without your headlights on—you are always squinting to see a little better, wondering what lies ahead in the road or what might jump out at you from behind the bushes.
Visit the living room of the average family that is “living with”—or should I say “living in”—addiction, and you are likely to find a family that is clinging to its own emotional edges, one that’s functioning in emotional, psychological, and behavioral extremes. A family in which small things that might otherwise be solved smoothly become bigger than necessary or blow up and turn into minor catastrophes, while outrageous, self-destructive, or even abusive behavior may go entirely ignored and unaddressed. Where feelin
gs can get very big, very fast, or literally disappear into nowhere with equal velocity. There can be a low hum of apprehension surrounding even the smallest decisions, while major life decisions are barely focused on. A family where what doesn’t matter can get a lot of emphasis while what does matter can get swept under the rug, shelved, circumvented, or downright denied. A family, in short, that doesn’t know what “normal” is.
“All or nothing” characterizes the trauma-induced response. Those affected by trauma tend to go from 0–10 and 10–0 with no speed bumps in between. They have trouble living in 4, 5, and 6. Because they don’t have healthy ways of finding an emotional middle ground, they achieve balance by shooting from one emotional extreme to the other, over- or underresponding, and zooming right past middle ground as if it weren’t even there. They have trouble with self-regulation. They have trouble “staying present” or “in their bodies” and integrating thought with feeling; they live in their heads or in their feelings. This is part of why those within the family don’t learn what “normal” is; it reflects the loss of neuromodulation that can accompany trauma.
The “All or Nothing” Character
of Our Response to Trauma
A hallmark characteristic of CoAs and ACoAs who have been traumatized by the effects of growing up with parental addiction is a loss of neuromodulation (van der Kolk 1986). Children learn the skills of self-regulation and balance in the arms of those who raise them. When the family atmosphere is
full of mood swings that are rarely explained and put into an understandable framework, children are left to make sense of their surrounding circumstances with the immature reasoning of a child and to regulate their own moods in their own, childlike ways. Their thinking, feeling, and behavior all too often come to mirror what they see around them, and this is what they internalize as the norm.
Living with adults who cannot easily express and process emotion in healthy ways also leaves children to wonder about themselves as well as what is going on in the family. They sense that great wells of feelings exist but nothing is said out loud. Negative feelings leak out through criticism or withholding of affection. Children observe the sudden bursts of anger or tears that might indicate problems, but then all of those clues disappear into nowhere and no one talks about it or explains what they are feeling or thinking. In this environment, family members often develop the habit of hiding what they are feeling and not sharing what is going on inside of them, because sharing it gets them nowhere. Children in this atmosphere may come to feel anxious about their parents, their siblings, and themselves. As parents drop the ball, there are regular skirmishes among siblings for a sense of power and place. Siblings may turn to each other for support, but they also learn that they have to compete for the limited love and attention that their parents have to give. They may learn dysfunctional relationship habits such as manipulating parents to get what they need, jockeying for an edge over another sibling, or sidling up to one parent and taking sides against the other. Parents may co-opt one child as a surrogate partner and distance the other. Family factions, both overt and covert, can develop, creating an “in crowd” and an “out crowd.” Thus, not only the emotional atmosphere of the family becomes thrown off, but the relationships within the family become distorted as well. In this environment, it can be a challenge for the growing child to find his or her own emotional and relational regulation and balance.
Most relationships have stormy moments; it’s a natural and even healthy part of being alive, attached, adaptive, and growing. But alcoholic families get lost in the storm; they lose some of their ability to “right” themselves and find solid ground.
Fleeing on the Inside: When CoAs Dissociate
Picture again the child facing her drunk parent. She is short, he is tall. She thinks with a child’s limited reasoning, he’s been to college. She has her truck or teddy dangling from her arms. He is holding the keys to the house, the car, and credit cards. She could fight, but she knows that if she tries to stand up for herself, she will only come to her daddy’s waist. She could flee, but where would she go in her footy pajamas with no money? So she does what she can do. She shuts up. She stands there like a little soldier and takes it. She freezes, holds her pain, hurt, and tension in the musculature of her little body and flees on the inside; she dissociates. Dissociation—or “fleeing on the inside”—can be hard to see. After all, your body is still there—you talk and interact, you seem to be there, but you are not in your own skin. You’re not present. You’re on autopilot. Life appears to be happening out there, somewhere, but you’re not quite present.
Some of the factors that sear trauma in place and make it more likely that a CoA will develop post-traumatic trauma syndrome are:
Parent Is Causing the Stress
The same people who children would go to for comfort—their parents—are the ones hurting them. This is a double whammy for the children and makes abuse within the home all the more disempowering and debilitating.
Basic Power Imbalance
Children are trapped in a world created, run, and paid for by the parent, and they have limited access to other resources. If they fight back, they risk getting grounded, hit, or having their allowance taken away. Older siblings can also trap younger siblings in this power imbalance that can be part of a trauma bond. Being at the disempowered end of a trauma bond can mean that children are stuck going along, stuck saying yes even when they want to say no.
Lack of Access to Outside Sources of Support
Having somewhere to go that feels safe and offers a different model of how to live can have a lasting, positive impact on a child that counters the effects of growing up with trauma. ACoAs often talk about grandparents’ houses, spending time at the neighbor’s, the house of a friend or relative, or a job where they could regain their balance and recognize that the world is full of options. These experiences restore a sense of hope and direction for the CoA.
Developmental Level of the CoA
Psychological and emotional growth happen along a continuum. Children are always understanding their environment with the psychological equipment they have at any particular stage of development. Small children may come up with fantastical, magical solutions that are the product of their immature minds. They may learn to bend the truth, for example, to make it less frightening, creating “reasons” for their parents erratic behavior that are less threatening than the truth: “Daddy yells at me more because I am his favorite.” As adolescents, they have a greater ability to perceive reality but are still in the throes of their own individuation. Adolescents may have trouble figuring out how to separate from a situation and hold onto a sense of self when the circumstances of the family already feel fundamentally abandoning and confusing. Young adults can also struggle with families who “fall apart.” Once they leave, their home base disappears and is not there to return to.
Length of Time the CoA Spends in a Dissociated State
While dissociation may represent our best, albeit unconscious, attempt at managing the unmanageable when we were small and trapped, it can become a liability and is considered to be maladaptive if it becomes a pattern that we fall into without awareness. “Research tends to show,” according to the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, “that dissociation stems from a combination of environmental and biological factors. The likelihood that a tendency to dissociate is inherited genetically is estimated to be zero” (Simeon et al. 2001). While dissociation is most commonly the result of being in situations of physical or sexual abuse or neglect (Putnam 1985), dissociation may also occur even when there has been no overt physical or sexual abuse (Anderson and Alexander 1996; West, Adam, Spreng, and Rose 2001). “Children may become dissociative in families in which the parents are frightening, unpredictable, are dissociative themselves, or make highly contradictory communications” (Blizard, 2001; Liotti, 1992, 1999a, b).
Too much
time spent in a deeply dissociated state can contribute to PTSD. Additionally, lesser forms of dissociation can become an unconscious solution that can impair our ability to be “present” and to connect in other situations. For example, a child dissociating in a classroom where he’s scared may be a child who has trouble paying attention. Or an adult who dissociates in an intimate relationship may not be present enough to truly live in the relationship and understand it.
Perceived or Real Helplessness
Living with the mood swings or the abuse, neglect, or emotional and physical violence that can accompany addiction is terrifying for children, and they can feel helpless to protect themselves or those close to them in the face of it. Learned helplessness can be part of the ACoA trauma syndrome. In disaster situations, the smallest form of involvement can allow victims to be less symptomatic. Even cleaning up branches and debris after a hurricane can allow those affected to restore a sense that they can do something to improve their situation, which counters the PTSD symptom of learned helplessness. Children can counter their own sense of helplessness by doing positive things for themselves, whether writing in a personal journal, helping to restore order in the house, engaging in fun or meaningful school activities that build their sense of having their own life, or getting a job to earn their own spending money.
Organic Make-Up of the CoA
Basic intelligence is a factor in resilience along with the child’s own organic structure. Some children seem better equipped by nature to cope with adverse circumstances in spite of their gender or position in the family. Though it is virtually impossible to separate the combined effects of nature and nurture, there can be organic reasons that can influence a child’s ability to cope with adversity effectively.
The ACOA Trauma Syndrome Page 2