What is Adult Children of Alcoholics Syndrome? Behavioral Health Community

Children start to believe that they’re responsible for any negative event that happens, but positive events are the result of luck. And feeling this way can lead to a dysfunctional sense of responsibility. It’s common for parents addicted to alcohol to show affection inconsistently.4 One moment they may be loving, while the next they’re cold or cruel. And when someone becomes addicted to alcohol, drinking becomes the priority.5 As a result, working, providing food, and attending school functions fall by the wayside. So many ACoAs quickly learn that they can’t trust people6 for love or survival.

Explore null Treatment Centers

There are several issues relevant to the effects of trauma on a child in these types of households. The most critical factors include the age of the child, the duration of the trauma during development, and the ability of the child to have support within the family or from an outside source. Also, Type A traits and being in control helped you survive as a child. Now, your anxiety and trauma negatively impacts your growing children and adolescents. At Wisdom Within Counseling, you can gain holistic, creative, and somatic tools to heal childhood trauma. Being an adult child of an alcoholic is a relief in a sense because now you have a name and label.

Until 1980, I had no idea that this was a category or that I was not alone in this strange feeling that I lugged along a past that was somehow burdening my present. I was perfectly functional, happily married, had kids I adored and work I loved. Our bodies are neurologically wired to process our emotions and our feelings by making us want to take action. For instance, we get scared so we run or freeze in place; we feel love so we reach out and touch or hug the object of our love. When we block experiencing or acting on powerful emotions, we may adult children of alcoholic trauma syndrome experience back pain, chronic headaches, muscle tightness or stiffness, stomach problems, heart pounding or headaches.

Overcoming the Lingering Effects of Alcoholic Parenting: Strategies for Healing and Moving Forward

When exposure to severe violence in adulthood was added to CM, odds ratios increased dramatically for mental health problems and health-related risk behaviors, suggesting that revictimization may moderate or mediate this relationship. I am here for you, as a creative therapist in Niantic, and would love to help you figure out your past to make the future better for your children. Creative painting, walking therapies by the beach, and meditation in yoga therapy support self-care. One of the most important aspects to healing complex post-traumatic stress disorder is self-care. At Wisdom Within Counseling, holistic, somatic, and creative therapies support self-care skills. Each counseling session, you can talk as well as use art, yoga, music, and creative therapies.

Most of the day, you tend to push these traumatic memories from your childhood aside.

You may feel angry a lot of the time or unable to control angry outbursts. The intensity of your anger may be disproportionate to the situation, such as being triggered by a small inconvenience. The adult child of an alcoholic parent can be triggered in their current life by events that remind them of the negative experiences of childhood. If this happens, your same coping mechanisms (fight, flight, or freeze) can be activated, even if the situation doesn’t warrant them. One review and analysis of questionnaires on family dysfunction, childhood abuse, and parental alcoholism assessed alcohol risk as it related to nine ACEs. All were linked to an increased risk of alcoholism in adulthood as well as the likelihood of marrying an alcoholic.

But they can establish boundaries around the addiction and for the addicted loved one, and start to move forward in the healthiest way possible with a recovery of their own. Children too can become traumatized by being trapped in a world that is frightening them. Stuck in homes where they feel scared and threatened, they too can be overwhelmed with emotions that are too scary or painful for them to feel, hurt that’s being caused by the very people who are supposed to be protecting them. And that monster was as frightening to me as the other side of him was beautiful. At different times of the month, the week, and eventually the day, the monster would take over my father, and I would have no idea where my “real” dad had gone. And the monster roared its terrible roar and sat in my father’s chair in the living room.

Adults and children of alcoholics are not alone and several resources and support are available. ACoA is a mutual support organization and a 12-step program to help those who grew up in homes affected by alcohol use disorder or other forms of family dysfunction. Studies show a correlation between malnutrition and physical abuse in adult children of alcoholics. Read on to explore the traits and characteristics of adult children of alcoholics, their struggles and their path to trauma recovery. You may start to fear your own anger, needing to control it at all times. Through rehab and therapy, you can develop the skills to be able to mindfully react to feelings without feeling threatened.

Now and then, the monster in him would break loose and dance with the monster in all of us. We all, at one time or another, shared his private hell with him until all of us lost our grip on normal. The more senses that are involved and attached to an experience, the more the brain and limbic system absorb and remember it.

In other words, they don’t know that they don’t know, they really and sincerely think that the source of their pain is outside of them, if only they could fix that person who is bothering them, they would feel fine. It can take a lifetime for adult children of alcoholics to repair the emotional damage from their childhood. You can’t erase your past or the pain from it, but you can find ways to let go of its hold on you and live a joyful life. I offer a specialized family therapy and expertise with children, adolescents, teens, couples, families, and young adults unlike any other service offered in this area. I am a creative therapist in Niantic, CT, holistic in my headspace, and integrate my 500-hour yoga therapy certification with my masters and licensure in marriage and family therapy from Central Connecticut State University.

In this article, you’ll learn more about what adult children of alcoholic trauma syndrome is, and how having a parent growing up who struggled with alcoholism may impact your life today. Growing up with a parent addicted to alcohol can make for a difficult childhood. Some adult children of alcoholics, (or ACoAs) turn to alcohol themselves, while others find themselves disconnected from the world around them. Others may develop a mental health condition that holds them back from fully living life. No matter how your childhood affects you in the long term, rehabs that treat trauma can help you release the hurt of a childhood affected by alcohol. Healthy relationships are often hard to come by for adult children of alcoholics.

• The individual you should be able to go to for comfort, support, and protection is the same one causing you anxiety and harmful feelings about yourself.
• If however we’re willing to simply face, feel and share it, miraculous things happen.
• Whether your trauma experiences were ongoing or not, you can find a home in ACA with those of us who have similar life stories.
• That said, you are four times more likely to develop it than someone who doesn’t have a parent with AUD.

Common Traits of ACoAs

The idea of “looking good” becomes a critical survival strategy and keeps the family from having to endure the pain slipping ever further into dis-ease. Because of her need to “look good” to herself and her family, the CoA may take refuge in creating a persona that is workable and acceptable within the family as it exists, at the expense of her own authentic self. It may feel easier to the CoA to adopt this false self and feel like a clever solution to a pressing identity problem, although in the long run it can cost a great deal in terms of self-honesty, genuineness and clarity of mind and heart. We all, to some extent, cultivate a false self (Horney, 1950) for protection, but the CoA may become her false self and lose touch with who she really is on the inside. Beneath the false self lies the fear of exposure, which can make the CoA, once they have grown up and become an ACoA, want to cling to it at all costs. This can complicate recovery as it feel dangerous to expose the confusion and pain that the false self was designed to keep in place.

For Treatment Providers

If a parent is yelling at a child, telling the child that he or she is the problem, that if he or she would only change everything would be better, the child tends to believe it. Children are disempowered by the very nature of their youth and dependency. The child learns to stand there in the situation that ensnares them, but on the inside they flee, they dissociate. The child is trapped in a world that is run and paid for by the parent; and the CoA has limited access to other sources of outside support and sustenance. Their ability to understand, process and manage this situation is dictated by their dependency and their limited intellectual equipment at any given point of development. The combination of these factors can contribute to PTSD, the symptoms of which may lie dormant in the unconscious for years.

We question our self worth and many times feel disconnected from life. Syndrome, as defined by the dictionary, is a group of signs and symptoms that are characteristic of a specific disease or other disorder. It can also mean events that form a recognizable pattern, especially of something undesirable. If a person is raised in a home where alcoholism is prevalent, certain patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving can emerge from that upbringing. Many who embrace recovery come to experience the journey of self-discovery, one of expansion into a new sense of self, self in relationships and meaning and purpose in life.

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. You’ll find others who understand what you’re going through and can support your healing journey. Al-Anon and other organizations offer virtual meetings for your convenience. Residential rehab programs give you access to multiple therapies and a supportive community to help you in your healing journey. For example, one of the 9 phases of Affect2U’s treatment program focuses on ACoA-specific challenges. And if you’re not sure if a rehab you’re looking into offers informed support, you can always call their admissions team to ask.

Data availability

In order to ensure that this set of steps would meet the traditions and spiritual principles of the original 12 steps, they were sent to attorneys for the Alcoholics Anonymous World Services Intellectual Property Administrator for review. They indicated that this set of steps is a “sufficient alternative to the original 12 steps”, for uses other than AA’s singleness of purpose. There has been the childhood loss of family members to addiction and the disruption of family rhythms and rituals. There is the daily loss of a comfortable and reliable family unit to grow up in and often the anxiety of wondering if parents are in the position to parent the child and meet the child’s changing needs. ACoAs often need to mourn not only what happened in their childhoods, but also what never got a chance to happen. When the same people who children would normally go to for comfort and to put their fear into perspective are the ones actually hurting them, it’s a double whammy for the children.

Many ACoAs experience the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result of their childhood. And studies show that ACoAs learn to be hypervigilant20 from a young age to protect themselves. Descriptive statistics for exposure to severe violence in a lifetime perspective are presented in Table 2.