The ACOA Trauma Syndrome

by Tian Dayton, Ph. D.

  Withholding attention or simply ignoring or not seeing another’s need are forms of neglect and can hurt people deeply; we are wired for clan and connection, and shunning can feel like punishment. People who suffer from feeling neglected can be hard to treat as there is no obvious abuse to point a finger at. They often report feeling that they have too many needs for anyone to meet, and they can be mistrustful of deep connection. Consequently, they may push away the very thing—relationship—that might help them to heal.

  When we feel emotionally wounded, we may react by going to one of two extremes. We may anxiously cling to others through caretaking, or we may push closeness away by neglectful, abandoning behaviors . . . or we may alternate between the two. We get over close through unattuned caretaking or under close through neglect—both effective means of warding off our fears of our own neediness and emotional pain.

  Low Self-Worth versus Grandiosity

  Feelings of low self-worth and shame can be engendered by living with the discouraging and sad spectrum of addiction and trauma. Not feeling normal, feeling different from other families, and hiding the painful truth of family dysfunction can all contribute to those in an addicted family system feeling bad about themselves. When all of our best attempts to make a situation better add up to naught, we may start to wonder what is wrong with other people, with life, and with us.

  A common defense against feelings of worthlessness is grandiosity. Feelings of helplessness, frustration, and inadequacy get covered up with grandiose schemes and fantasies. Family members may not understand how to take baby steps toward success or getting their lives together. Frustrated and disheartened, they may take refuge in grandiose ideas about themselves as a way of warding off ever-growing fears that their lives are somewhat unmanageable or they cannot seem to get things to work out for them. We all know the big talker, or conversely the quiet, privately superior person who, to cover up feelings of worthlessness that they cannot admit to, feels in some way superior as a defense against feeling inferior.

  Abuser versus Victim

  Where the power balance is fairly even between family members, the roles of abuser and victim can be traded back and forth many times within the same interaction. Sometimes the roles become stratified and certain family members become the obvious abusers while others become the obvious victims. Entitled abusers who somehow feel they have the right to aggressively subjugate others damage the self-esteem of those around them. Living with them is destructive both emotionally and psychologically. Victims are those who may be being abused through no fault of their own; they are at the short end of a power dynamic either because of size, place in the family, or a power imbalance of some sort in the system. Certainly small children are sitting ducks for being abused and victimized by out-of-control parents and older siblings. But one thing is for sure: both roles are present in dysfunctional or addicted family systems. And both roles can become relationship dynamics that get carried along through life.

  Unfortunately, the abused child, the victim, is at risk, without recovery, of becoming an abusing parent, of passing on their pain to the next generation. The victim role can become dysfunctional and can be used as a convoluted and passive way of getting power. Entitled victims are also tough to live with—they may subjugate others through passive aggression by “falling apart” or “collapsing” as a way of getting someone else to rescue them; they learn that crisis gets them the attention that they long for. They can feel very entitled to nurse their grudges and demand more than their share of care and attention. And because they feel like they are victims, they do not want to see ways in which they may be victimizing others and flipping the role of the abused into the abuser.

  Denial versus Despair

  Families don’t fall apart all at once; they do it in excruciating detail. Bit by tiny bit, the seams start to split, the dam breaks, and bit by bit, they come up with excuses to cover up their ever-increasing anxiety—that what they fear may be happening is, in fact, happening. Denial is a dysfunctional attempt to ward off feelings of fear, anxiety, and despair. “My husband loves his ‘relaxation time’ before dinner; he just wants to be home with his family” (Read: where he can drink in peace); “My wife has the flu again” (Read: is drunk); “Our family is spontaneous—we don’t like to making rigid plans” (Read: we have learned that making plans is disappointing and futile as they often fall apart at the zero hour.) But eventually they can’t tell a lie from the truth. They become confused about what they feel and doubt their own best thinking.

  As despair and anxious preoccupation grow, so does the need for more complex forms of denial. And as denial takes the place of honest and measured self-disclosure, worries and anxieties remain hidden and unaddressed. Family members become increasingly preoccupied with managing their ever-increasing unmanageability and despairing of ever being happy again. And the more despairing they become, the greater their need to actively deny. Little by little, one situation at a time, reality gets rewritten as family members attempt to bend and adjust it, to make it less threatening. After all, what ordinary spouse or child wants to really know that the people they love are falling apart?

  The seesawing, confusing, conflicting dynamics that we have described can leave CoAs feeling lost and rudderless. As a result, CoAs may also develop the sorts of characteristics of relationship trauma that create problems for them later in life. Or CoAs may grab onto any form of warmth or acceptance that they can come up with. If this happens, dysfunctional patterns of relating and/or self-medicating can take hold in childhood and be lived out for decades to come.

  Giving a child who is faced with these less-than-optimal choices a bit of help at the right time is worth its weight in gold. The smallest thing can save a child’s sanity. Faith-based institutions have a huge role to play in providing a safe haven; school programs (school itself), a grandparent, relative, or neighbor’s house where the child feels safe and comfortable can make all the difference in a CoA’s life. One does not need to create some powerful therapeutic intervention in the life of a CoA in order to make a big difference. An open door, a couch to curl up on, an after-school snack, or a place to play can make the essential difference for CoAs: they just need a place to go that isn’t in a state of chaos, somewhere where they feel they can relax.

  EIGHT

  Haunted: The Symptoms

  of

  Relationship Trauma

  All children wake up in a world that is not of their own making, but children of alcoholics and other drug-addicted parents wake up in a world that doesn’t take care of them. No matter what we name their risk factors, they still have to make their own breakfast and find their own way.

  —Jeannette Johnson, PhD

  ACoAs can feel haunted by a past that they cannot wrap their minds around. They feel confused.

  John is a client in recovery from sex addiction. He came home from school every day to a mother who was depressed and locked in her room with booze, cigarettes, and ­prescription meds, a mother who couldn’t help him to manage successfully in school and feel supported at home; she was a mother who did just the opposite. “But she wasn’t a real alcoholic,” John says. “She would get depressed and then just drink enough to feel ­better.” In role-playing himself as a child, he said, “But I loved my mother. I know there must have been good things. I don’t want to hate her. I only wanted her to open the door to her room and come out and talk to me.”

  John continued his role-play speaking to his mother. “I need you. I need you to be with me. I hate school; I don’t have any friends; the guys all pick on me. I need you to help me when I come home; the day is so long. I wanted to be home, outside playing. I missed you.”

  This combination of prescription medication, liquor, and cigarettes was what occurred “every four weeks” according to John. “I would know it. I could sense it. I would come home from school and it was like this dark cloud was ha
nging over the house. And she would be in her room. And I just couldn’t screw up the courage to knock on that door; I guess I didn’t want to see what was behind it, it scared me to see her like that.”

  This psychodrama I did with John shows clearly how, in a child’s mind, the parent is just the parent. Children just do not understand that drugs and alcohol might be driving their parent’s peculiar behavior. Even when playing the role of his mother, John resisted the idea that she was an alcoholic. In his child mind, she just was depressed and didn’t want to be with him. And it was somehow his fault; he was just not worth attention.

  I kept John in role reversal, playing his mother so that by “showing” us what his mother actually looked like and by my questioning him in role, he might come to better accept his mother’s obvious addiction. John, as his mother, sat on the edge of the bed, head hanging down, knees splayed, with a cigarette and a cup of coffee.

  John was a lonely little boy who needed his mommy to talk to about his day. When he came home from school, he would stare at a shut door that he could not screw up the courage to knock on. Eventually he would give up and slowly begin his afternoon process of getting his own snack, playing his own games, and going into the basement and making his forts to sit in. And wait. For something. For someone. He spent endless hours by himself in what he now sees as a dissociated state. He was nowhere really, suspended, lost in space. He tried to hold on. “I’ll wait for Dad to come home,” he would say. “And he’ll take me to the diner for a hamburger. But he’s so mad at Mom and I want to help her, to help her feel better. And I need him, but why doesn’t he help her? And I need her, but she isn’t there.”

  This is the kind of confusion that the child of an alcoholic/addict (CoA) carries: loving and feeling close to the same parent who is leaving him to manage all by himself. John found his solution with an older boy who took an interest in him. Carlos became his friend. They kept fish together in the basement. Carlos was John’s only friend. He was all that stood between John and his deep longing and loneliness. So when Carlos told John to take his pants down and let Carlos play with him, John couldn’t say no. He felt too scared. But he didn’t like it. It made him shiver inside both with stimulation and fear, and the whole thing make him feel bad. But Carlos was showing more interest in him than his parents were. He longed to tell his mother. But she was behind that door.

  This is often the dilemma of adult children of an alcoholic/addict (ACoAs). They long to love their parent, but their parent has transgressed so seriously that the love they long to feel is burdened with ghosts, haunting recollections, unresolved pain and resentment, and a feeling of loss. They feel guilty for their anger and resentment but are unable not to feel it. They feel sad for their parents because they know their parents struggled.

  CoAs would do anything to bring a smile to the face they love, even sacrifice themselves. They feel angry because their parent doesn’t see them, or neglects or abuses them. The little CoAs carry all sorts of feelings that they don’t know what do with.

  When these COAs grow into ACoAs and arrive at my office, they are often stuck in a state of emotional and psychological frozenness. They need to move through the feelings they never felt and complete actions that they had to hold onto because there was no safe way to cry, kick, scream, and say all that they longed to say but didn’t dare. And not just their angry, hurt, and guilty feelings, but their thwarted feelings of love as well; “I love you, it hurt me to see you suffer, to want to help, and to be able to do nothing to make you happy. I tried but it didn’t work, or I wound up feeling used, which made me feel like I failed you somehow—but didn’t you fail me?”

  Perhaps no one really has a carefree childhood, but ACoAs carry especially heavy burdens. They have all too often been traumatized by the experience of living with the abuse, neglect, and dysfunction that surrounds addiction. John found a solution with his friend Carlos, who was preoccupied with sex and initiated John into a world of “special knowledge” that made him feel powerful and less stupid and alone. This became

  John’s solution in life. He knew that he could feel powerful around women with whom he was sexual. As a grown man with two children and married to a woman he truly loved, John conducted the same secret life that he did as a boy. He was a devoted husband and father, but he had a side life that grew into sex addiction. He felt the same sense of power and the same sense of shame. His trigger was being ignored by his wife, who also suffered from depression; when she withdrew into her depression, he became that desperate, hurt, angry little boy again, and he acted out. Eventually the marriage fell apart and John sought treatment. What began as an innocent child’s attempt to stave off loneliness because he was living with parental alcohol, prescription pills, and cigarette addiction was passed along through the generations as a process addiction that caused another generation of havoc and hurt.

  Trauma can take many strange paths. With John, childhood trauma led to a sex (process) addiction. Living with neglect was traumatizing for him. He went through his childhood feeling lost and confused and likely somewhat disregulated in his limbic world. As the limbic system governs libido and bonding, John’s disregulated limbic system may have contributed to his becoming hypersexual and seeking to meet his needs for intimacy by using sex to soothe himself and self-medicate his emotional pain. Limbic disregulation can as easily lead to an inability to organize one’s self into meaningful work, workaholism, over- or undereating, or to over- or underspending.

  The effects of being traumatized in childhood don’t tend to disappear on their own; they tend to reemerge later in some form of overreaction, compulsive behavior, learning difficulty, intimacy issues, addictions, or process addictions. In this manner, pain from one generation gets passed along into the next. And no one knows quite how it happened. It seems as if each problem stands whole and on its own, but a closer examination reveals otherwise. John’s story is utterly predictable. But it didn’t have to be that way. Today he is a different person. But help came too late to save John and the family he loved from deep pain. So often this is the case—we wait for life to blow up before we address what needs addressing.

  Today there is help all around—articles abound on these subjects, 12-step rooms are around the corner, and help is down the hall in many schools and workplaces. But we have to reach out and take hold of the help. And we have to stick with it until we can create meaningful change in our lives.

  I see so many ACoAs who hurt inside but aren’t able to seek out healing because the very vehicle that would help them is the one that hurt them—namely, relationships, which makes entering a therapeutic relationship seem frightening. However, blended in with their trauma-related mistrust of people can be a powerful wish to trust and depend on someone, a need that went partially unmet in their childhood. If they are willing to trust themselves and their own gut and intuition and take a leap of faith, they can heal.

  Many ACoAs fear the feelings of vulnerability, sadness, and confusion that addressing their pain might bring up, and they want a quick fix. They e-mail me and wonder if I have a book to recommend; or they go to a one-week program, want to have a few appointments, and then be done with it. They want to think their way better, but they shy away from the deep developmental work that they need to do to heal. Their childhood trauma experience has left them feeling somewhat fragmented inside, and they fear falling apart if they let themselves enter too deeply into their early pain. For this reason, a strong network of support is an important part of recovery.

  Trauma-related Characteristics

  Following is a list of characteristics associated with trauma-related issues that I have complied and work with clinically.

  Unresolved Grief

  Grief is a process that takes time and includes many different phases and feelings. Stages of mourning that apply to loss of a loved one through death can also apply to the loss of a loved one through relationship rupture. Li
ving with addiction can lead to painful relationship dynamics within the family that feel rupturing, such as the loss of family members to addiction; the loss of family rhythms and rituals; the loss of a comfortable and reliable family unit to grow up in; or the anxiety of wondering if parents are in the position to parent themselves and meeting their changing needs. Stages of loss, according to British psychoanalyst Jonathon Bowlby, are numbness, yearning and searching, disorganization, anger, despair, and reorganization (1969). Others who have experienced loss through parental divorce, parental incarceration, or being removed from the home and put into foster care are also likely to suffer a profound sense of grief. Thus ACoAs often need to mourn not only what happened in their childhoods, but also what never had a chance to happen.

  Depression with Feelings of Despair

  Research in animals and in people shows that stress or trauma early in life can sensitize the neurons and receptors throughout the central nervous system so that they become “kindled” or oversensitized; kindling is the biochemical process where nerve cells that help regulate emotions are overfired repeatedly by trauma’s effects and thus we perpetually overrespond to stress of all kinds (van der Kolk 1987). Because the limbic system regulates mood, disregulation can lead to difficulty with managing emotional states throughout life, which may contribute to depression. Depression, in my experience, grows when we cannot express pain and anger; it relates to the emotional constriction or frozenness that is part of unresolved grief. The lack of sharing genuine feeling in the addicted home can also lead to isolation, a common feature of depression.