The ACOA Trauma Syndrome

by Tian Dayton, Ph. D.

  Though Annette experienced a high level of trauma as a child, she was also able to make use of and mobilize the supports at her disposal. She is a classic example of having used them to her advantage. She has grown up to have a successful career in human rights and a committed, loving relationship with a partner, but she suffers with stress-related physical ailments and depression. Her awareness of her issues and her wish to deal with them are resilient qualities. Annette works with the international business community on ensuring that human (including child) rights, labor rights, environmental protection, and anticorruption standards are maintained. She has, in a sense, been able to stand up for herself in proxy; having had her own human rights trampled over, she has fought for others, for children, and gained a powerful sense of mission and meaning. Her interest clearly grew out of her ­childhood.

  My greatest passion was for other cultures, and one of my earliest memories is asking my parents to wake me up at 5 am on a regular basis when I was five to watch a show on TV about Africa. They thought I was nuts since they have no interest in other countries, but they were okay with it. I also took Swahili at the local public library and an African cooking class for kids when I was six. I also asked my teacher in third grade if I could be the official welcome guide for foreign students joining our class. We only had one person from another country join the class over the years, but the experience of learning about her culture and helping her integrate made me feel very fulfilled. When I was fifteen, I went on teen tours to different countries, and the experiences fueled my interest in cross-cultural relations.

  Though she is from a Protestant religious background, her family did not attend church, which is, for many children, a source of support, values, and community.

  My parents were, sadly, neither religious nor spiritual. We did not go to any house of worship, and the only gods we prayed to were Santa at Christmas and the Easter Bunny on Easter. I was envious of friends who did belong to a religious community as the congregation seemed like an extension of family who looked out for their well-being. As an adult, while I am spiritual and self-identify as a Buddhist, I have yet to relinquish control of my life to a Divine Presence. Instead, I live life ­vigilantly—­substituting faith for living on constant alert, with an arsenal of ­goal-orientation, will-power, and dogged determination at the ready to deploy at any time. I feel life will work out if I work hard enough to keep it safe. This means performing at inhuman standards that can rarely be met.

  A week ago, we did a psychodrama with Rick, an actor who has been in recovery from his ACoA issues and cigarette smoking. Rick’s work, as with any actor, is intermittent; he was in a dry period and feeling depressed. Annette participated for only a few minutes in Rick’s drama, but I was not surprised when I received these journal entries. She was both dotting every “I” and crossing every “t” and in typically resilient fashion, “soaking up” healing and recovery wherever there was an opportunity she could make use of.

  When I was asked to play Rick’s stand-in, kneeling down on the stage, I felt what stagnation and depression looked like, and it convinced me that I have been struggling with depression on and off for six months—since the end of my last consultancy. It seems no “co-inky-dink” that the depression set in when the working ceased. It is my distraction, my drug, my self-soothing . . . and provides me with self-esteem and validation that I am not worthless.

  In this manner, Annette was very appropriately making use of the ways in which she identified with Rick’s drama as she was absorbing her own learning, while still playing the role as requested. Her journaling continued:

  I am really struggling to arrive at a good balance, but it is tough since the work that I do generally means I need to be composed and have enough self-esteem to lead and act as an authority, and I can’t do that while having a dialog with my heart about the terror of childhood—let alone feel the terror. I guess I need to get more skillful compartmentalizing—switching between functioning in the present and processing the past—but it is tough and I am not at all sure I can switch between “leader” mode and “okay, let me lose my shit and feel all that I stuffed in for thirty years” mode well enough to do either well. As someone who suffers with perfectionism, not doing either professional work or recovery well creates a whole new set of issues that I am all too ready to beat myself up about.

  Annette has really put her own finger on her own issues. This is the beauty of psychodrama: in the process of breaking out—concretizing and experiencing life roles—we get clearer on what might be going onside inside of us. This can happen just as successfully whether it is our own drama or we are simply witnessing or playing a role in someone else’s drama. In fact, where trauma is concerned, sometimes we can see more clearly if it is not our own role-play.

  From here on, some of the heartbreaking details of Annette’s story begin to emerge. Annette’s father was a functional alcoholic, who she feels was probably self-medicating an undiagnosed psychiatric disorder. He was violent, sexually abusive, and clearly mood-disordered. He was also very focused on Annette; she says he was “devoted” to her but the devotion was both sincere and sick. It became a very confusing and painful legacy for Annette to untangle.

  My dad often put pressure on me to sleep in his bed rather than in my own room. My housekeeper seemed surprised and concerned when she came in the mornings to see my bed not slept in. This happened often. I remember waking up on my dad’s side of the bed on my back with his hands on my breasts and his face close to mine. I never sleep on my back, so it is odd to sleep in this position. This happened often. I would ask, “What are you doing?” He would say, “Just tucking you in.” I would say, “I don’t want to be tucked in.” Then I would drift off again or get away to my room, but I think most of the time I drifted off again because I couldn’t get up even though I did not want to be there. I was very tired; it was like waking out of a deep sleep—that quality of heavy sleep.

  My dad walked around the house nude when I was eleven to sixteen, and when I complained; he invited me to do the same. I have dreams about my dad and me in bed in a sexual act, and I feel this awful feeling of shame.

  Annette is not sure if what she dreamed actually happened or not, but clearly her level of abuse was trauma-inducing and stole her sense of autonomy over her body and parts of herself. But nothing is simple; she also felt loved by her father and he gave her a sense of being a special and capable human being. Children have many different experiences with their parents, and one of the things that makes being abused by a parent so potentially trauma-inducing is that the same person who you love, who is making you feel good about yourself, is the one abusing you and inducing feelings of pain and shame.

  To my dad’s credit, he always told me I was smarter than him and worked harder, so if I put my mind to it, I could do anything I wanted to do as long as I applied myself. So this gave me a sense of confidence and being able to accomplish anything I set my heart to doing, regardless of the obstacles that stood in my way.

  I asked Annette if she had mentors who helped her in some way.

  Mostly I had “idols” rather than mentors and spent much of my lonely preteen years trying to reach out to them and be acknowledged. In retrospect, they were a rather sad array of Hollywood and Broadway “stars” ranging from a smart, entrepreneurial woman actor to a comedian who was a “goodie-goodie,” made people smile, and diffused discomfort with silly jokes. When I became old enough to expose myself to other cultures and value systems, I chose Gandhi and Thich Nhat Hahn as mentors, as well as various people who lead social justice movements in solidarity with marginalized communities in developing countries.

  I often see this with ACoAs; they soak up models from all sorts of sources to help them get pictures of who or how they might someday be. Trauma can affect a person’s ability to envision a future; it may be that by looking toward stars in the firmament, children are able to picture themselves
in a life beyond their circumstances.

  Recovery from trauma involves “remembering” traumatic moments and circumstances and processing them. But it also needs to involve remembering the protective factors that got us through. In the same way that resilient kids mobilized these “helpers” in childhood, we need to mobilize our memories of these “helpers” as adults so that we can make use of them mentally and emotionally as sustaining inner resources. I continued to ask Annette if she remembered any “protective relationships” that helped along the way.

  My housekeeper’s presence gave me a lot of solace. She was a large, warm African-American woman who filled the house with a nice mama-like energy. Often she made cookies and meals. I pretended she was my mom. The only sad part was she left at four every afternoon to go home to be a mama to her own child. I think she knew that there was hushed violence in the home, and when she was there, I felt safe because my dad did not rage around her, most likely because she left at about the same time he came home from work, but nonetheless, in my mind, she gave me protection.

  I asked if she had any friends whose families provided ­comfort.

  I had close friends and their families and tried to spend time in their homes since they were not often allowed in mine. This time provided me with a safe haven and exposed me to different cultures where I felt much more at home. The time spent with a diplomatic family and a royal family nourished my interest in diplomacy and cross-cultural relations. Also, the doorman in my building often was asked by neighbors to call up on the intercom and ensure that everything was okay during my father’s fits of violence. My dad would immediately answer in a calm voice, so no one ever intervened, but the presence of the doorman and the knowledge that he could potentially call up when things got bad gave me a sense of protection.

  It is clear that her “protectors” gave Annette some sense that what was going on with her father was somehow not right. It is touching to realize how much it can mean to a child in need to feel that someone in their immediate world has an eye out for them.

  “Was school a supportive community?” I asked.

  It was supportive academically and in terms of fostering my artistic endeavors, but not in terms of intervening in the manner in which my dad raised me. A few teachers did show concern from time to time, but never to the point of intervention. My art teacher took an interest in my work and seemed to see that I was using mixed media to process pain. She gave me a lot of support to continue to tap my creative spirit and even took my father aside once to tell him that I was very talented and that it would be good for him to allow me to pursue my interest in art rather than being coerced to play the team sports that he excelled at.

  I think my imagination and the fantasy life I expressed through art (painting and mixed media) provided me with protection from reality and gave me a socially acceptable way to process pain, fear, and grief while receiving positive attention for my work. It was a discrete way to tell people what was going on.

  A creative outlet can be enormously helpful to a child who cannot put what she is going through into words. Children think in imagery. It is useful here to note that for the child at risk, it may be the kinds of indirect interventions from housekeepers, friends, parents, doormen, and art teachers—people who touch the life of the child directly and daily—that make the critical difference.

  Annette also made great use of extracurricular activities that are so helpful to all children. For the child at risk, outside interests and after-school programs serve the purpose of keeping them out of the house and giving alternative sources of ­friendship, support, community, and self-esteem.

  I always had a very strong interest in social work and social justice and was the head of the Social Service Committee at my school for a few years. We did outreach work in the community and it was natural for me to lead these efforts. Additionally, I was a gifted swimmer and always the captain of the swim team. It was rare for me to lose a race, so I developed a lot of self-confidence and leadership qualities. At one point, I was recruited for a pre-Olympic training camp, but I chose to stay in New York rather than move to Florida to train since I wanted to spend my time doing arts and academics rather than swimming twenty-four hours a day.

  Therapists and researchers Steven Wolin, MD, and Sybil Wolin, PhD, observe in their book The Resilient Self that resilience seems to develop out of the challenge to maintain self-esteem. Troubled families often make their children feel powerless and bad about themselves. But resilient children find ways to feel good about themselves and life in spite of the powerful influence of their parents. Understanding these resilient qualities and how they develop helps to counter what the Wolins refer to as the “damage” model—the idea that if you’ve had a troubled childhood, you are condemned to a troubled adulthood or you are operating without strengths. In fact, resilience helps us to acknowledge that adversity can actually develop strength.

  Personal Qualities of Resilience

  In their research on ACoAs, the Wolins identified some of the following factors as contributing to ACoAs who were able to live successful lives in spite of any deficits they may have grown up with. They found that resilient people tended to:

  • Find and build on their own strengths.

  • Improve deliberately and methodically on their parents’ lifestyles.

  • Marry consciously into happy, healthy, and/or strong ­families.

  • Fight off memories of horrible family get-togethers and create new, more satisfying holidays and rituals.

  • Live at least at a “magic two-hundred mile” radius from their families of origin, enabling them to be connected but somewhat apart from the daily fray of potential family dysfunction (1993).

  Wolin and Wolin found that the liabilities of resilience tended to be physical/health related issues and relationship issues. Their research also revealed a number of personality and behavioral ­characteristics shared by resilient adults who moved through early family trauma and became thriving, successful adults:

  • They can talk about and share their problems with those willing to listen or who may be able to lend a helping hand.

  • They can be wonderfully creative; for many, creativity was a way to meet their own needs, or to make sense of, express, or even escape from what was going on around them.

  • Graveyard humor, as any ACoA or addict can show you, often gets honed to a fine art as a coping skill. Thus, this can be a very funny population.

  • Children from troubled homes often become very independent from a young age because they learn that they cannot necessarily depend upon their parents.

  • The ones who thrive often do so because they have exercised initiative and have taken the reins into their own hands, recognizing that if they didn’t do it, no one would or perhaps could.

  • Oftentimes morality is developed as much from seeing what should not be done as what should. Those who have been wounded can have clear life lessons on what hurts and may feel determined not to hurt others in similar ways. They may even become altruistic, dedicating parts of their own lives to helping others.

  • The inventiveness of those who have thrived in spite of the odds can be quite remarkable in dealing with problems. Because they have had to “think outside the box” to solve complex family situations, these thrivers can be highly creative and original, which are real assets both at home and in the workplace.

  • This group has also had to develop courage and grit. They don’t expect to be handed things and have long ago absorbed the reality that we don’t always get what we want in life and that life isn’t always fair. Indeed, those who grew up with emotional trauma can sometimes be quite dogged, working hard even if the rewards are not always forthcoming.

  One of the cardinal findings of virtually all research on resilience is that those who thrived had at least one secure bonded relationship, usually within the family sys
tem.

  Researchers like Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith, who conducted the famous long-term studies in Kauai, Hawaii, on resilient children, and Steve and Sybil Wolin, who studied resilience in children who grew up specifically with addiction, provide some valuable insights and answers about the general characteristics of the resilient children they observed (Wolin and Wolin 1993, 1995; Werner 1992; Werner and Smith 2001).

  • They had likable personalities from birth that attracted parents, surrogates, and mentors to want to care for them. They were naturally adept recruiters of support and interest from others and drank up attention and care from wherever they could get it.

  • They tended to be of at least average intelligence, reading on or above grade level.

  • Few had another sibling born within two years of their birth.

  • Virtually all of the children had at least one person with whom they had developed a strong relationship, often from the extended family or a close community member.

  • Often they report having an inborn feeling that their lives were going to work out.

  As adults this group shows the following qualities.

  • They can identify the illness in their family and are able

  to find ways to distance themselves from it; they don’t let

  the family dysfunction destroy them.

  • They work through their problems but don’t tend to

  make that a lifestyle.

  • They take active responsibility for creating their own ­successful lives.