Raising Healthy Children in an Alcoholic Home

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Critical Praise for Raising Healthy Children in an Alcoholic Home published by Crossroads/Continuum Press in 1992

"Barbara Wood has done it again in this most important volume, as she addresses strategies for raising healthy children in a family in which there is an alcoholic parent. Her empathy, warmth and vast clinical understanding shine through and are lucidly captured in many poignant vignettes. Her book is an impressive contribution for everyone who grapples with this issue in their own lives as well as for practitioners helping their clients to become therapeutic parents." Marsha Vannicelli, Ph.D., Harvard Medical School, author of Group Psychotherapy with Adult Children of Alcoholics and Removing the Roadblocks

"Barbara Wood is a healing voice in the difficult and lonely world of parenting in an alcoholic family. Her book is both necessary and comforting. As a parent, I found it to be personally helpful in a practical way. I recommend it to any family member embarking on the road to recovery." Thomas Perrin, author of I Am An Adult Who Grew Up In An Alcoholic Family

An Excerpt from Raising Healthy Children

Alcohol, when used compulsively, and to excess, is an extraordinarily destructive drug. It not only attacks and weakens every organ system in the human body, but also distorts the drinker's ability to perceive and interpret reality, so that she is largely unable to recognize or resist the deterioration of her health and the deformation of her personality.

Many of the most harmful effects of alcohol addiction are rather easily transmitted to those persons who love the drinker, or who depend on her in some important way. This is why alcoholism is called a "family disease", and why families with alcoholic members so often become "dysfunctional" families. Partners of alcoholics may remain sober, yet become so desperate to rescue the drinker from blind compulsion that they neglect their other responsibilities, including self-care, and begin to suffer a serious decline in their own emotional, psychological, or physical health. Some become so obsessed with controlling and concealing their spouse's compulsive drinking that they cannot adequately care for children in the family. This preoccupation with the drinker and her disease is the phenomenon known as "codependence". A family with an alcoholic member is just a family coping with a major illness until codependence enters the picture. It becomes a dysfunctional, "alcoholic family" when the disease of alcoholism begins to dominate family life.

Children with alcoholic and codependent parents are extremely vulnerable. They become preoccupied with the illness, just as adults do, but they do so more easily, since their view of the world is a very "self"-centered one. Children, especially younger children, believe that they are the origin of all significant events. when their parents are in pain, they assume that they are responsible for it, and that they are obliged to "fix" it. A child's need to repair ill or injured parents is made even more urgent by his powerful love for them, and his realization that his own continued well-being depends on the health and the strength of the adults who love him.

Children of alcoholics may actually display a devotion to the alcoholic that is fiercer and more steadfast than that of codependent adults in the family. Driven by powerful feelings of guilt and responsibility, as well as profound love and intense fear, children often take extraordinary measures to meet a troubled family's extraordinary need. Although they feel small and afraid, they struggle to become sufficient unto themselves, if their parents are too ill to care for them. Then they turn to do whatever is necessary to provide nurture and comfort to their impaired caretakers. Some children of alcoholics become family "heroes", with achievements and honors intended to compensate for the family's "shame". Some become delinquent and compulsively destructive "scapegoats", if this is what is needed to distract parents from their own inner torment Some children simply withdraw into themselves as they recognize that their needs threaten the family's precarious emotional balance.

All of the methods that children employ in an effort to ease an alcoholic family's pain require them to deny some substantial portion of their own emotional realitly. Children from dysfunctional alcoholic families in which both parents are too preoccupied and too exhausted to provide their children with basic physical and emotional care, learn to ignore their fears, to deny their disappointment, and to swallow their anger and despair. Some children are able to suppress nearly all awareness of trouble in the family, and to block the perception of their longing for love, comfort and guidance as well Children do these things to accommodate the family's need, and also to enhance their prospects for emotional survival when they are emotionally and psychologically isolated from both parents. Those children who are able to obliterate the pain and need they feel are, for a time, less vulnerable to physical or emotional breakdown than are children who are keenly and constantly aware of their own disappointed longing.

Detachrnent from pain and denial of reality are effective holding actions for the child who hurts, just as they are for the alcoholic. but children from alcoholic families eventually pay the same high price their parents pay for a defensive flight from self and truth. They cannot work well, and they cannot love well. Most importantly, they cannot love themselves. They are vulnerable to a variety of physical problems and psychological disorders that are either produced or exacerbated by the chronic stress associated with familial alcoholism. These include:

Problems in infancy and early childhood

Failure to thrive

Eating disorders such as pica and rumination

Attention-Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder

Fetal Alcohol Syndrome or Effects

Problems in later childhood and adolescence

Anxiety disorders

Obsessions and compulsions

Childhood depression and suicidal behavior

Eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia

Other addictive behaviors

Conduct disorders

Academic problems

The potential for emotional and psychological recovery, and renewed growth is quite good for the adult children from alcoholic families who enter treatment today. Mental health and addictions professionals are better informed about, and better trained to help with the problems faced by children who grow up with alcoholic and codependent parents. Still, recovery in adulthood is typically a lengthy and painful process. Many adult children are horrified to learn that healing can only occur in the context of intimate human relationships. They are terrified at the prospect of emerging from the citadels of emotional isolation, denial and seif~sufficiency that they constructed at such a cost during childhood. As they see it, their longing for love and care almost destroyed them when they were small, and it seems worse than foolish to let these feelings emerge once more. It can take extended time in treatment just to overcome this terror of depending on other people for emotional care and comfort.

Recovery is smoother, and unfolds more quickly, for those who have had some contact, during childhood, with a compassionate, supportive elder--someone who povided shelter from the emotional storms raging at home, who shielded them from extremes of abuse and neglect, and who helped them to an understanding of their parents' mysterious and frightening behavior. Any sustained effort to provide emotional support to a child in crisis is a powerful force for the health and continued growth of the child. It inspires feelings of faith about the basic goodness of the world and strengthens the child's feeling of personal value. Children from alcoholic families who have an opportunity to form a relationship with a healthy and helpful adult guide come to recovery with solid feelings of hope, and with far less fear, than those who were left to struggle alone.

Parents are, of course, the most powerful figures in the life of a young child. It is their love, and their guidance, that is most cherished, most curative, and most eagerly sought However, many parents recovering from alcoholism and/or codependency feel so miserable about mistakes they have made with their children, that they continue to pull away from their youngsters. They are so afraid that they cannot rectify their errors, that they surrender the game rather than face the possibility of heartbreaking failures and rejections. They find it impossible to believe that their children can forgive the past.

However, even when children are deeply hurt, and intensely angry, they do not insist, and healthy development does not require, that parents quickly and completely transform themselves and their families. Children are helped, impressed, touched, and healed by parents' willingness to acknowledge mistakes, to attempt change, and to make amends when their behavior has created pain for the family. In the end, most children will forgive anything, and they will return to a course of normal and healthy emotional and psychological development, if they believe that their parents are still trying to love them, and still trying to be their parents.

It is hard for parents to remain honest, stable, and emotionally responsive in the face of the common, ordinary calamities that human beings face every day. Parents in alcoholic families are challenged to do this and more. During the tumultuous, painful period of personal recovery from alcoholism and codependence, they must confront their children's pain directly and honestly. They must provide their children with the information, guidance, and support youngsters need in order to understand and cope with a deep family crisis. At a time when they feel they have very little to give, recovering parents must find a way to give more time, more tolerance, more understanding, and more love than ever before. The aim of Raising Healthy Children in an Alcoholic Home is to make this mission possible; to explain and demonstrate how parents can become "therapeutic" parents and create an emotionally honest, emotionally stable, and emotionally responsive home environment in which children can heal and in which they can learn to master the challenge of parental alcoholism.

Would you like to download Chapter One from Raising Healthy Children?

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CHAPTER.1a.htm

"Barbara Wood has done it again...an impressive contribution..." Marsha Vannicelli, Harvard Medical School, Author of Removing the Roadblocks to Recovery

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