Complex Trauma and Alcohol Use Disorder: What’s the Connection?
This lack of emotional support can lead to feelings of abandonment, loneliness and worthlessness in children. This emotional turmoil can result in emotional dysregulation, low self-esteem and difficulty managing emotions. They may struggle with feelings of guilt and shame about their family situation. Children of alcoholics (COAs) experience numerous psychosocial challenges from infancy to adulthood. Research has shown the deep psychological impression of parental alcohol use over COAs.
This hyper-responsibility doesn’t disappear when you turn 18 or move out. Many ACoAs will continue to feel responsible for the happiness and well-being of everyone around them—an impossibly big task. The Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACA) organization was created to help people who grew up with addicted parents or in dysfunctional homes. The group literature and meetings are meant to help adult children identify the problems that have arisen as a result of their upbringing and offer up a solution.
But bottling up your emotions or avoiding them isn’t healthy. Through rehab and therapy, you can develop the skills to be able to mindfully react to feelings without feeling threatened. 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. It may seem like nobody understands what you’ve been through, but you’re not alone.
Trauma, such as growing up in an alcoholic home, can leave the adult child of an alcoholic in isolation and at higher risk for depression. Growing up in an alcoholic home can also lead to poor self-care routines leaving the person open for disease. While many alcoholics are not violent, some are, and this behavior affects children significantly. Chronic trauma can develop due to neglect, emotional, physical, or sexual abuse, and domestic violence. While there is evidence of genetic predisposition to alcohol abuse, children of alcoholics can thrive with support and intervention.
The Impact of Growing Up with an Alcoholic Parent
Living with a parent who experiences AUD or SUD how to help someone with a drinking problem can be challenging. Addicts are often unpredictable, sometimes abusive, and always checked-out emotionally (and sometimes physically). You never knew who would be there or what mood theyd be in when you came home from school.
Being an adult child of an alcoholic leaves the person reeling and looking for answers. Sometimes ACOAs become alcoholics themselves or use other drugs to ease their pain, which is a remnant of growing up in an alcoholic home. Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a chronic and potentially severe medical condition characterized by an individual’s compulsive and problematic pattern of alcohol consumption. This disease extensively harms not only the alcohol user but also their families.
Adult children of alcoholics can be sensitive to any type of perceived negative feedback or criticism, leaving them suspicious of anyone who offers them a critique of what they are doing. Growing up in an alcoholic home meant the children learning to hide their emotions such as sadness, anger, and shame. Because of this stuffing of emotions in childhood, many ACOAs find they cannot express positive emotions. Often, children feel trapped and unable to escape from families caught up in the tragedy of alcoholism in their families.
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This sense of being trapped undermines a child’s sense of safety in the world and begins a lifetime of exhausting hypervigilance, where they constantly monitor their environment for possible threats. Children of alcoholics may struggle with employment, such as trouble maintaining a steady job due to emotional distress or instability caused by their home environment. They might also face challenges in setting and achieving career goals due to low self-esteem or lack of support. Children of alcoholics may struggle with trust, keeping friendships, communication and conflict resolution skills in their personal and professional relationships. Childhood trauma can increase the risk of developing alcohol use disorder (AUD) in adulthood.
They will come to understand that their past cannot be changed, but they can unlearn their harmful coping mechanisms, tend to their childhood trauma and find “a sense of wholeness [they] never knew was possible.” ACEs cover an extensive range of situations where children directly face lousy behavior by their parents while growing up. Alcoholism is one of these adverse childhood experiences, and it can disrupt the normal development of coping skills. Children growing up in an alcoholic home will experience in adulthood many adverse effects. At many rehabs, you can find support groups for people experiencing the same issues. You may attend meetings like Alcoholics Anonymous, which even if you aren’t addicted to alcohol could help you gain an understanding of what your parents have experienced.
What Kind of Trauma Do Children of Alcoholics Face?
They may see their parent act whippets balloons out of control or are too drunk to care for themselves. When this happens, the child doesn’t just experience the trauma of knowing that their parent isn’t able to take care of them in the way a parent should. They may be forced into a kind of role reversal, where they have to act as a parent to their own parent.
Children of alcoholic parents deserve and have the fundamental right to confront their past, speak honestly of its impact, and make a better future for themselves. However, when drinking alcohol becomes an addiction, the behaviors, and circumstances of the adult and ultimately their children are changed for the worst. In the first three articles, we have discussed that growing up in an alcoholic or other dysfunctional home changes the lives of the children involved forever. Alcoholism is a family disease that affects everyone and harms children. A treatment center will attempt to verify your health insurance benefits and/or necessary authorizations on your behalf.
- Addiction isn’t the child’s fault, and they don’t have the power to fix it.
- Shame is the feeling that youre bad or wrong and unworthy of love.
- Children of alcoholics may struggle with trust, keeping friendships, communication and conflict resolution skills in their personal and professional relationships.
- The full list of characteristics can be found in the Laundry List, the 14 common traits of adult children, which was written by the ACA founder Tony A.
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They can own their truth, grieve their losses and become accountable for how they live their life today. And they can show themselves the love, patience and respect they deserve. Often, people who grew up in an alcoholic home are hypervigilant and constantly alert for danger. Being aware of everything going on in the environment stems from the shame and pain experienced in childhood. While hypervigilance is a coping mechanism, it becomes a liability in adulthood when one is constantly waiting for someone to attack or something terrible to happen.
Given the heterogeneous nature of alcohol user disorder and the often co-occurring mental health disorders, helping and treating the complexities of families affected can be very challenging but not impossible. One 2022 review investigated the effectiveness of psychological interventions, such as exposure-based therapy and CBT, for people with adverse childhood experiences at risk of PTSD and SUD. “Emotional sobriety,”22 a term first coined by AA founder Bill Wilson, is what people in recovery gain once they learn to regulate their emotions. Because this is often a major theme for ACoAs, learning to feel and work through emotions healthily is a crucial step in the recovery process. But because ACoAs didn’t have the chance to learn positive resolution skills, conflict can quickly trigger aggressive behavior. Or you who are the most famous alcoholics may be conflict avoidant, meaning you handle conflicts by pretending they don’t exist.
Healing from Parental Alcoholism
The goal is to interrupt your regular patterns of reacting to emotional situations and replace them with more positive behaviors. Many ACoAs have trouble both forming and maintaining healthy relationships,15 especially romantic ones. Growing up without being able to trust others or even rely on your parent for consistent affection may make you fear intimacy in adulthood. And if your relationship model growing up involved somebody addicted to alcohol, you may not have a good blueprint for what a healthy relationship looks like. You may start to fear your own anger, needing to control it at all times.
Addiction Resource is an educational platform for sharing and disseminating information about addiction and substance abuse recovery centers. Addiction Resource is not a healthcare provider, nor does it claim to offer sound medical advice to anyone. Addiction Resource does not favor or support any specific recovery center, nor do we claim to ensure the quality, validity, or effectiveness of any particular treatment center. No one should assume the information provided on Addiction Resource as authoritative and should always defer to the advice and care provided by a medical doctor. 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.