However, also, thinking of yourself as an adult child of an alcoholic, you also feel scared because this opens a whole new roller coaster of emotions. Also, as a creative therapist in Niantic, my team and I specialize with traumatic memories. Often, these memories are about to growing up with parents who drank too much alcohol. When you look back on your childhood, you remember really happy times. Now, if you watched your parents go through any of the above, you may also have complex post-traumatic stress disorder. These steps are guidelines written from lived experience and reflect the concepts, language, and principles of our ACA literature.

One of these types, termed Awkward/Inhibited by researchers, was characterized by feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness. Lastly, if you are struggling with drug or alcohol abuse yourself, reach out to us. It’s possible to break the cycle of substance abuse and its impact on the family system.

Physical and Trauma Recovery

The impact of childhood pain on adult relationships can be profound. Research shows one of the characteristics of adult children of alcoholics is maladaptive attachment styles. As a result of the relationship dynamics in your family, you may feel terrified of abandonment or have difficulty with intimate relationships. Theses tendencies can wreak havoc on your connections with others. Additionally, some children of alcoholics unknowingly seek out partners that have similar traits as the alcoholic parent, creating little room for a healthy relationship. Limitations of this study include the retrospective nature of the data, which may entail recall bias.

In the U.S., there are over 76 million adult children of alcoholics,3 many of whom have shared experiences. Experts highly recommend working with a therapist, particularly one who specializes in trauma or substance use disorders. According to Peifer, a mental health professional can help you connect deep-rooted fears and wounds stemming from childhood to behaviors, responses, and patterns showing up in your adult life. There are several different signs and symptoms of PTSD and trauma exhibited by adult children of alcoholics. Similar to PTSD, any one symptom can be problematic and can have a negative impact on the quality of life for the individual.

Rates of IHD, type 2 diabetes and obesity are lower in Sweden than in the US and the United Kingdom, where a majority of the ACE studies have been conducted 34,35,36. As regression analyses are sensitive to group sizes, this may have been a contributing factor to the lack of significant correlations to these health outcomes in our material. To our knowledge this has not been studied and presents an interesting avenue for further research. The term “adult child of an alcoholic” describing adults who grew up in alcoholic, or dysfunctional homes with addiction. Overall, due to growing up around so much alcohol, now, you may also be a functional alcoholic. You’re also put in the position of having to “parent” yourself in a dysfunctional home.

• I offer somatic, holistic, experiential therapies of art, yoga, music, and outdoor walk and talk therapy in sessions in addition to talk-based counseling to fully support your PTSD healing process.
• This hyper-responsibility doesn’t disappear when you turn 18 or move out.
• Behavioral therapies are another option for ACoAs.23 Treatments like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can help you learn new ways to resolve conflict, communicate your needs, and cope with stress.
• Even if you don’t have a diagnosed mental health condition, the trauma of your childhood can affect you in many ways.

According to one study, 85% of reported child abuse cases involve alcohol.2 Child neglect is also common. Couples therapy can also have benefit, according to White, if you believe behaviors rooted in your childhood experiences have started to affect your romantic relationship. “In this process, you’ll process unresolved traumatic experiences and develop tools to formulate healthy relationships and communicate your needs,” she explains.

Why Is Alcoholism Considered a Chronic Disease?

The names change, but the pain and relationship dynamics remain the same. Growing up with addiction asks family members to live in two different yet overlapping worlds, a sober world and a using world. This is part of what makes living with addiction both traumatizing and contagious. The addict isn’t the only person who changes or whose thinking becomes confused or who suffers a loss of trust in relationships.

You have a higher risk of developing AUD yourself

For some, teen alcoholism becomes a negative habit longterm when living in a stressful home. To note, having parents who are alcoholics leads to a very chaotic home environment. Children who grow up around alcoholic parents tend to develop alcoholism themselves. And that the personality complications caused by this early pain and stress can and often do emerge years and years after the fact. This is what being an ACoA is all about–a post-traumatic stress reaction. Long after CoAs leave their alcoholic homes, they remain ensnared in repeating relationship patterns that are the direct result of having been traumatized in childhood.

It’s hard to predict your parents’ next move and you never really know if your needs are going to be met or ignored. And that kind of unpredictability can create problems down the line. If your parent with AUD is willing to attend therapy with you, family therapy can often help rebuild trust and pave the way toward healing. Growing up with a parent who has AUD can create an environment of unpredictability, fear, confusion, and distress, says Peifer. These conditions can take a toll on your sense of safety, which may then affect the way you communicate with and relate to others.

Understanding Adult Children of Alcoholics

Teachers, therapists, friends, and relatives are cornerstones that provide assistance and resources. Support in ACoA is available to help people overcome adversity and lead fulfilling and sober lives. Fear of abandonment in relationships is another major challenge many children who had a parent struggle with addiction experience. This is because many children may have experienced their parents being inconsistent, unreliable, or even abandoning them to fuel their addiction, which can cause you to fear being abandoned in other relationships as you grow up.

Face and content validity of the questionnaire were evaluated by Statistics Sweden with the use of expert review and cognitive interviews with persons with and without a history of violence exposure. Following slight adjustments, the final Violence and Health survey instrument consisted of 97 questions with a total of over 300 sub-items 3, 22. • Whether or not it’s the parents, who they would normally go to for comfort and reassurance who are causing the stress.

Data analysis

Family members, too, experience the distorted world of the addict and internalize it as their own. Adult children of alcoholic trauma syndrome, or an adult child of an alcoholic (ACoA), as the term suggests is someone who grew up with a parent(s) who struggled with alcoholism. It can be difficult for anyone, especially a child, to watch their parent(s) struggle with addiction. Because many young children oftentimes don’t understand what addiction is, they may view their parent’s inconsistent parenting or abandonment of them as the child not being worthy of their parent’s love and attention.

Research on humans and other animals shows that stress or trauma early in life can sensitize neurons and receptors throughout the central nervous system so that they perpetually overrespond to stress throughout life (van der Kolk, 1987). The limbic system, which is part of the nervous system, regulates emotion. If a child’s limbic system becomes deregulated through living with the stress of addiction, it can lead to trouble regulating emotional states throughout life, which may contribute to depression. When our personal world and the relationships within it become very unpredictable or unreliable, we may experience a loss of trust and faith in both relationships and in life’s ability to repair and renew itself. It is also why having a spiritual belief system can be so helpful in personal healing because hope and a sense of a larger more perfect order tend to be part of such systems. Children are very dependent upon their parents who hold the keys to their world.

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 alcoholic parents are a population at risk for poor school performance, skipping school days, and school dropout due to the unstable environment that disrupts the child’s ability to focus on their studies. 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. Parental alcohol addiction increases a child’s risk of sexual and physical abuse.

As children living with parental addiction, CoAs often learn not to tell the truth about what they see going on around them. For the family that is in denial about the progressive illness of addiction in its midst, telling the truth can be ostracizing. Family members can quickly turn against the one who tries to make the growing problems of dysfunction and addiction evident.

Many ACoAs also have trouble regulating their emotions.11 You most likely didn’t grow up with a positive model of emotional self-control because you may have seen your parents use alcohol to cope with unwanted feelings. Or you may have witnessed them become extremely emotionally volatile while drinking. So you didn’t have a chance to learn how to manage your emotions or react to others’ emotions in a positive way. In addition adult children of alcoholic trauma syndrome to the higher rate of selecting an alcoholic partner, ACOAs are also more likely to experience the symptoms of trauma. Dr. Tian Dayton, a clinical psychologist, reports the impact of this trauma on a child and how the environment in which these children grow up directly reflects the major factors contributing to PTSD.

Lessons from Al-Anon: Learning to Start Your Own Recovery

When you don’t learn how to regulate your emotions, you might find it more difficult to understand what you’re feeling and why, not to mention maintain control over your responses and reactions. Difficulty expressing and regulating emotions can affect your overall well-being and contribute to challenges in your personal relationships. AUD is a mental health condition that can prove very difficult to manage and overcome. That’s why most experts now avoid terms like “alcoholic” and “alcoholism,” and why the most recent edition of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)” uses updated terminology to define substance use disorders. A parent’s alcohol use disorder (AUD) can have a major impact on your mental and emotional well-being — not just in your childhood, but also well into your adulthood.