Children of addicted parents who experience relational trauma can carry the imprint of that pain for the rest of their lives.

As adult children of alcoholics (ACoA), we can be perplexed about what we’re healing from and how we should heal it. Many of us think that we can read a couple of books, “understand” what went wrong, and be able to think ourselves into inner peace. Some children of addicts feel like victims and resent any implication that we need to do anything. Still, others who begin to realize how affected we were by growing up with adverse childhood experiences like addiction are incensed that we have to do all this work to get better from “someone else’s” illness.

We want to bypass the years of cumulative effects of relational trauma from growing up with an addicted parent. We want to think of ourselves better. We feel that if we understand what happened, we will get over it. We want to grieve once, sob, hit a tackling dummy with a Bataka, and eliminate all those years of pain. All too often, we sell ourselves the bill of goods we have. But make no mistake about it, like it or not, wherever the “illness” began, it’s ours to deal with and get better from in the here-and-now.

How the Brain and Body Process-Relational Trauma

The nature of trauma is that the extreme stress or even terror of living with the bad mood swings, rage, and chaos of addiction, abuse, or neglect, has a dual effect on shutting the mind down and creating lifelong hypervigilance. The fact that our thinking mind was not processing and making conscious sense of frightening or dis-equilibrating events and relational dynamics from our childhoods means that many of the feelings and information from those events remain unconscious. 

In other words, feelings never get processed and elevated to consciousness through words. We never talked them over, right-sized them, and came back to a place of understanding what was happening. I mean, how many of us as kids with drunk parents had someone telling us, “don’t worry about being raged at and hit, Mom or Dad is just drunk or high, you did nothing wrong, give it a few minutes, they’ll be fine.” 

The shame and unconsciousness associated with our parents with addiction generally meant that it never got discussed. More often than not, while we were terrified, we were also being blamed for their out-of-control behavior. Our fear, anxiety, and pain went underground. It remained locked within us in a frozen, unconscious state. That’s why as ACoAs, we don’t know what we don’t know or even that we don’t know.

Healing from Relational Trauma

We need to bring unconscious feelings related to the events of our childhood to a conscious level so that they can be processed, understood, and made sense of, brought into closure and understanding. However, this process hurt. It can catapult us back to the most painful parts of our growing up, the parts that we hid from because they hurt too much to feel. We threw out-of-consciousness parts because we found them so frightening. When we re-feel these forgotten emotions, we can feel young, vulnerable, and defenseless all over again, just as we did as kids.

This is why children of addicted parents want to get better in their heads, so we don’t have to white-knuckle our way through all the distressing and disturbing emotions we thought we’d left behind.

Here’s the test, do the things that used to and still trigger you? Healing has occurred when:

• You can direct your attention to or away from the trauma, at your own will.
• When your spontaneous response to situations that used to trigger you is fundamentally different when your spontaneous reaction changes and lightens (without lying to yourself).

Doing “all this work” can feel threatening to us as ACoAs. Repressed emotion was repressed for a reason; it was too overwhelming to feel at that time in our lives when we were kids, so we got rid of it by shutting down, going numb, or dissociating. Going back and feeling all those repressed or dissociated feelings feels scary. When the feelings get triggered, either in life or in therapy, we want to get rid of them today, just as we wanted to get rid of them yesterday. 

The easiest and most familiar or convenient way to get rid of them is to make them about someone or something else, “You hurt me. Therefore, I’m enraged, and my rage is justified.” or “You’re so mean that I’m in a flood of tears. How can you hurt me like this? My tears have a reason, and the reason is probably you.” Sadly, this does nothing to connect them to their source and doesn’t trace our reaction. More often, our overreaction to that child inside us who still longs to get angry, enraged, or collapse in a heap of helpless and angry tears.

Uncovering Unconscious Thoughts and Emotions

Unacknowledged emotions from growing up with addicted parents that have never been made conscious come out sideways. They reemerge and disturb our relationships in the following ways:

Projections — We get rid of pain we can’t sit through by making it about someone else; you’re the problem; if only you’d change, I’d be fine. I keep choosing the wrong people. We see belonging to another person, what we’re blind to in ourselves.

Reenactment Dynamics — In a convoluted attempt to avoid pain, we’re hypervigilant, or we overreact and see problems that could be managed easily as unmanageable. Our stress sensors are set too high. By over-reacting, we end up recreating old, painful relational dynamics in new relationships e.g., with partners and children.

Transferences — Transfer unconscious pain from past relationships to new relationships in the present. We see qualities in a person in the present in the same way we felt as children of addicts. Still, we fail to recognize that we may be transferring pain and the effects of parental drug use on child development to today’s relationships.

Channeling Childhood Pain and Abuse in Adult Behavior 

If we lived with rage (silent or overt) as a child, we became ragers with our children. If we were abused as a child, we abuse our children or spouse today. If we were neglected as children, we overreact or underreact by being either overbearingly absorbed in our children or neglectful. I find that framing this “work” as a spiritual challenge and a path towards greater enlightenment gives it a higher purpose and meaning. 

Getting Help

If you’ve grown up with parents with addiction, you’re more susceptible to becoming an addict. Pay attention to any warning signs that you’re developing a dependency on drugs or alcohol. If you catch the signs early, the world is full of resources for healing from ACoA pain. Read a book or two and get the lay of the land, but check out 12-step meetings in your area. They’re free, life-changing, and create a path to recovery. Meetings are different based on where you’re located. These meetings can be relevant for ACoAs, Al-Anon, Codependents Anonymous (CODA), or ACA or ACoA meetings. Check several of these groups out before deciding which meetings feel right for you. Healing is just around the corner.