Adult Children Secrets of Dysfunctional Families

by John Friel

  Sooner or later, but inevitably nonetheless, you get depressed, tired, worried, anxious and desperate; and still, nothing makes sense. What you’re experiencing as a result of growing up in that alcoholic family is the end result of your denial system that protected you so well as a child. And our point here is that what took year after careful year of unconscious building for our own survival will not come tumbling down overnight in a flash of insight with trumpets and angels in the background. It may seem like that for some of us when we finally do break through, but in fact our first breakthrough is actually the result of perhaps years of internal struggle that only now is becoming external.

  Those of you who have been fortunate enough to seek help already for these problems will most likely be very familiar with what we have to say. For those of you who have not, we hope that you get something helpful out of it—if only a chance to take some time to think about yourself for a while, instead of always being caught up in the hustle and bustle of daily living.

  1. The first step in uncovering and admitting is to step back from your life for a healthy chunk of time and just look at it as if you were someone else. This cannot usually be done while you’re in the middle of your normal daily routine, so we don’t suggest that you try. We have provided an excellent system for looking at one’s life in our pamphlet entitled Life On My Own Terms: Stress Addiction Recovery Guide (Friel & Friel, 1986).

  If you find that you don’t have any time to be alone to do this, then there’s already a very good chance that you have a real problem in one of these areas.

  Step back from your life and paint a picture in your mind of what it looks like and feels like. Is it a good life? Does it feel whole? Fulfilling? Warm? Is it what you thought it would be cracked up to be? Is it challenging in a good sort of way, or is it something else? Boring? Too exciting for you to really handle comfortably? Stifling? Scary? Who is in it? Are there enough people in it? Too many? Are they the kind of people you really want to have in it. After all, it’s your life, not somebody else’s. Do you like them? Do they like you? Remember, you are doing this for you, not for anyone else. Also, remember that our feelings are in a very real sense who we are.

  2. The second step is to start talking to people about yourself. Get some feedback from your spouse and/or friends. Find out if the way you see things is the same as the way others see them. It is not necessary that we all see things the same, but emotional isolation, whether we are surrounded by people or all alone, is one of the key features of the painful lifestyle of Adult Children.

  Does your spouse feel that you are a workaholic? If so, what about your boss? What about your friends? In fact, do you have anyone other than your spouse that you can talk about “personal things” with? If not, then you can be almost 100% sure that you have a problem. Remember that our symptoms and our dysfunction are borne out of shame and the fear of being “discovered,” and that healthy people do have people in whom they can confide.

  3. The third step in uncovering and admitting is to get information. At first, this will only be through reading books like the one you are reading now. And perhaps attending a seminar or workshop in your area on Adult Children, Co-dependency or Addictions. This is a safe way to “test the waters” without having to disclose anything about yourself. You might also want to take our Adult Child/Co-dependency Inventory, or one of the many brief questionnaires published in popular magazines or provided by treatment centers, covering issues such as chemical dependency, eating disorders, sexual addiction, depression, and the like. If you suspect that you might have an addiction, go back to Chapter 4 and ask yourself how many of those characteristics you have. It only takes two or three of those warning signs to warrant having a professional evaluation.

  4. At the fourth step in this process, you will be making a decision about your current lifestyle and your past. This decision will not come all at once. You may go in and out of believing that you are an Adult Child of a Dysfunctional Family. In fact, we have seen many people actually go through a formal treatment program for an addiction, co-dependency or some other symptom and then return to their denial months later. The A.A. advice to take it “One Day at a Time” is sage advice, because recovery is a process, and part of recovery is admitting to yourself each day that you are an Adult Child.

  In summing up this first crucial step in recovery, remember that uncovering and admitting is itself a process. It is very common for people to get an initial burst of “recovery” in which their defenses come down and they hurt enough to say, “Yes, I am an alcoholic,” or “Yes, I came from a dysfunctional family.” This burst of insight will often be followed by positive actions such as joining a 12-step program group, getting into therapy or even going to inpatient treatment. But recovery must be lived a day at a time; and the pull of our past and our family systems is strong. If indeed we are alcoholic, sexually addicted, bulimic or chronically depressed (due to our family systems), etc., there will be tremendous pressure from forces within us and outside of us to go back to our old lifestyle.

  The glow can wear off. It is pretty easy not to drink while we are in inpatient treatment for alcoholism. It is part of recovery not to drink after we leave treatment. It is also part of recovery for many of us to “test the limits” of the new system.

  “I’m not really an alcoholic,” we tell ourselves. “I got a great deal out of treatment. It helped me see how my life and my family is dysfunctional. But I’m not really an alcoholic. I just drank because of all the stress.” In a few cases we have seen, this is actually true. In the majority, this is simply our denial taking hold of us again. It usually happens when we stop “working our program” of recovery. We stop going to meetings because we get “too busy”. Or we stop “checking in with our feelings” each day. Or we get into yet another addictive relationship that is a re-enactment of our original dysfunctional family system. And within only a few days or weeks, we are right back into the isolation, despair, addiction, depression, negative thinking and shame that led us to recovery in the first place.

  We believe that life tells us what we need to know about ourselves if we will only listen carefully. We also believe that whatever we need to make it on this earth is always available to us when we are open to it. So even if we slip back into denial and lose everything that is important to us (spouse, family, friends, job, values, meaning), we can get it all back (in a different form, perhaps) if we are again willing to admit that we are powerless over the demons in our lives and are willing to ask for help. Help is always there if we can take this first step.

  18

  Working a Program

  In 12-step circles “working a program” means sticking to a daily program of recovery. For those of you not familiar with “12-step programs,” we are referring to the original 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, upon which almost all other Anonymous groups have been modeled. But before we speak directly to the issue of recovery, we would like to share with you a typical recovery history.

  Jack’s Recovery Process

  Jack grew up in a middle-class suburban home outside of Denver, Colorado. He is the oldest of three children. He earned a bachelor’s degree in business and management in 1969 and then took a job with a local manufacturing firm. Three years after graduation, he married Betsy, and they started a family immediately.

  Seven years into the marriage, Jack started feeling “stale.” One day a friend from work invited him to go jogging. He agreed, hoping it might help pull him out of the doldrums. It did. Within a few months, Jack had worked up to running 10 miles a day, and by the end of his first year, he ran a marathon. His productivity at work had increased ten-fold and he had renewed vigor and enthusiasm for life. Everyone outside of his home saw him as a ball of fire. He was exciting to be around, was a go-getter at work, was generous and charming.

  At the same time that all of this was going on away from home, things within the home began to deteriorate. Betsy and Jack had grown distant from each other. She started to
complain to Jack a lot about his long absences from the children and her while he was training for marathons. They would fight for a few hours and then remain cold and aloof for several days.

  The children picked up very quickly on this covert tension and started “tip-toeing” around the house during the long periods of silence. Jack and Betsy’s sex life all but vanished. Beneath the excitement of his outer life there developed a deep numbness inside of him. Simply sitting down to dinner with Betsy and the kids became a cue for his wanting to escape—to run away from it all. He was bored with the idle chatter that happens at mealtimes. The little day-to-day things that were shared with each other irritated him. He lost interest in his children and his wife.

  Roughly two years into this phase of his life, Jack started gambling. At first he just bought a few lottery tickets but the rush of excitement soon overwhelmed him. He escalated to making several trips a year to Reno, where he began losing large sums of money. And towards the end he was taking incredible risks in the stock market.

  Betsy thought it was fun at first. She would never have taken the little risks that they were taking all by herself. She even bought a few lottery tickets on her own. But it wasn’t fun for long. She lost count of the sleepless nights she spent worrying when “the big loss” would hit and they would be bankrupt. She was absolutely alone, even when Jack was not out gambling, because he was always preoccupied with it. It became a nightmare for her. She finally became too numb to care. Jack had become numb, too, without even knowing it. His entire life consisted of work, running and gambling. He had become completely isolated from his family, his friends and from himself. His three addictions had a stranglehold on him.

  Jack’s recovery did not come easy. The family therapist that Betsy finally went to recommended that she start going to Adult Children of Alcoholics 12-step groups because her father was an alcoholic. The therapist also recommended that Jack enter inpatient treatment for his gambling addiction. Jack refused.

  “This is not a big deal,” he proclaimed. “I can deal with it by myself.”

  But Betsy did not give in. She told him that he would have to become involved in some kind of group therapy experience or she would ask him to move out.

  Jack’s strategy was to shop around town until he could find a therapist who would see things his way. The first two that he saw recommended treatment. The third said that he should join a men’s therapy group, and that he probably wasn’t gambling addicted. So he joined that group.

  Jack stayed with the group several months, and nothing really changed. But Betsy was changing.

  Four months into her therapy, Betsy attended an intensive short-term treatment program for Adult Child/Co-dependency issues. She did a lot of painful work around her family of origin and abuse and neglect issues. She emerged from that program somewhat “raw” but deeply connected to the Little Child inside of her for the first time in her life.

  At last a clear picture of her life was emerging for Betsy. She was not satisfied with being the wife of an unrecovering addict. Two months after her short-term treatment experience, Betsy approached Jack calmly but purposefully.

  “Jack, I care about you. We have shared a lot of our lives with each other. Because I love you, I can no longer watch and be a part of your self-destruction. I have made a decision that I will stay in this marriage for now if you go to inpatient treatment for gambling addiction. All I know for sure is that I can’t live this way anymore.” And then she cried honest, unashamed tears.

  Jack did go into treatment. It was the most painful thing that he had ever done, because it revealed all of the pain that he had experienced as a child growing up in a dysfunctional family system. He felt renewed and invigorated, though. He had some new hope. He learned quickly that treatment is just the beginning of recovery. He learned that he would always be recovering, rather than recovered. He learned that each day was new; and that each day offered the choice of being in recovery or of acting-out his addiction. He learned that he had work and running addictions, too, and that he would need to deal with those more as time passed and as his spirit healed. He had a few “slips” his first year, when he would buy lottery tickets, but he also kept going to his aftercare therapy group, honestly working his program and he kept attending a Gamblers Anonymous 12-step group. And he kept getting healthier.

  The first two years following Jack’s treatment were rough ones for Jack and Betsy. They had never been truly intimate before so they had a lot of learning to do. They became involved in couples’ therapy after a while to begin to learn how to share feelings with each other, resolve conflicts without hurting each other irreparably, and to learn how to get their needs met in non-addictive, non-controlling ways.

  Five years later Jack and Betsy have a marriage that is working. They still have fights, but the fights get resolved. They still slip into personal isolation, but they see it and do something about it before it becomes serious. They still deny their true feelings at times, but they are so well connected in the recovering community that it is much easier to get back to that Little Child inside of them. They have friends with whom they have shared their struggles. They can laugh and cry together without getting enmeshed in each other’s feelings. And they both enjoy immensely the idle chatter that they and their children share at mealtimes.

  The Process of Recovering

  There are some basic principles of recovering from Adult Child issues that we would like to outline, with the understanding that each person finds recovery in his or her own time and by his or her own means. This does not mean that we can recover alone! People who “recover” alone, by quitting drinking on their own, for example, are not in recovery. Recovery is much more than simply not drinking or not binging and purging food. For many alcoholics, not drinking is relatively easy when compared to the task of living a balanced, healthy life. Recovery is much more about dealing with our underlying co-dependency, guilt, shame and fear-of-abandonment issues. It is about not replacing one symptom with another. It is about not trying to control those around us. It is about having and trusting our feelings and of getting our emotional needs met in healthy ways. It is about feeling like we belong; that we are not better or worse than others. It is about feeling that the world is basically a safe place to be, and that we are okay in the world. Remember these points as you read through the principles of recovery on next page.

  1. Recovery is a Process

  This is so simple that it borders on being trite; but it is so easy to forget that we must remind ourselves of this principle from time to time. It is easy to feel great when things are going great for us. But when things are not so great, it is crucial to remember that we are on a journey of recovery, which includes ups and downs. Life presents us with stress and tragedy, whether we are bulimics or not. Life is unpredictable whether we are compulsive overeaters or not. Life is hard sometimes whether we are Adult Children or not.

  2. Recovery Cannot Be Done Alone

  As we have said many times already, trying to do it alone is one of the primary symptoms of our dysfunction. This has a lot to do with the core shame from our childhoods. We don’t want others to know what is going on inside of us because we are afraid that they will be shocked, will reject or abandon us or shame us further. It also has to do with our need to be in control in unhealthy ways. It has to do with the arrogance and moral superiority that is such a strong part of co-dependency.

  “She’s the addict,” we spout. “When she starts recovering, my life will be fine.” Translated, this means: “I am better than her.” Unfortunately, this feeling of “better than” also leaves plenty of room for feeling “worse than” others, which leads to social and emotional isolation.

  Recovery cannot be done alone because the experience of sharing our inner selves with others in a safe way is what we have been missing all our lives. True, we may have lots of people with whom we share our problems late into the night, but are they people who don’t get enmeshed with us? Are they people who let
us have our pain so that we can learn from it and do something about it, or do they enable us, and get secret satisfaction out of feeling that they are better than us? Do they need to be needed, or can they simply be there for us without trying to “fix” us and offer solutions all the time?

  We cannot recover alone but we also cannot recover if all of our time is spent with others who are not in recovery either.

  3. Recovery is Painful

  This is what keeps so many of us away from recovery. “It has to get worse before it gets better” is one of the key principles of therapy. Digging back into an abusive and neglectful childhood is not easy or fun. Letting down our defenses and feeling the deep pain inside of that Little Child locked up in us hurts. Cleaning out an infection with a scalpel hurts more than the infection, but it is often the only way to heal once and for all. We do not advocate a life of constant pain or martyrdom, but we do know that this pain of recovery must happen. And when it does, this pain will eventually subside.

  4. Recovery Means Changes In How We Feel,

  How We Act And In What We Believe

  It is not enough to just “think our way through it.” It is not enough to just “feel our way through it.” It is not enough to just “act our way through it.”

  Some of us are great at reading and thinking about recovery and so we tend to get stuck here. Others are great at expressing certain feelings, and this is where we get stuck. Still others of us are very adept at changing our behavior to fit what others expect of us. Recovery means making changes in all three areas, and in achieving a healthy measure of congruence among all three. That is, what we do is consistent with how we feel, which is consistent with what we believe about ourselves and the world.