Making the best of a bad situation
“The Drunk Father”; lithograph;
George Bellows, 1923
Are you going home for Christmas with trepidation because it means dealing with a drunken parent? Are you not going home for Christmas because, after years of discomfort, you’re not willing to put up with it anymore?
Ever since I first wrote about alcoholism and addiction in the What Works column (Am I An Alcoholic?, Spiritual Recovery), people have asked about a parallel issue — when a friend, family member or partner is an addict or alcoholic. It’s too big a topic to cover in a single column, so for this family holiday, I’ll tackle the most relevant part of it: a parent who’s an alcoholic or addict.
Before my parents passed away, Christmas meant visiting their home. And, among other things, dealing with my dad’s alcoholism. My dad was usually a pretty harmless drunk, getting gradually mellower and eventually passing out. But occasionally he would get rageful instead. And though he never resorted to physical violence, that is all too common a result when alcohol simultaneously fuels anger and loosens inhibitions. (Being of a mix of pilgrim and pioneer stock, my parents’ form of punishment was not violence but shunning — the silent treatment — which could last for days.)
But family holidays meant more drinking than usual, and it meant my dad stayed up and engaged. This combination meant an “incident” or two — of anger or inappropriateness — was likely.
Unpredictability
All families are dysfunctional in various ways. We’re all flawed. But when a parent is an alcoholic or addict, it can pour gasoline on the mix. Perhaps the most difficult issue is unpredictability. Will the parent be mellow or rageful, happy or depressed? Having the rules shift under your feet creates a lack of feeling safe. You can think you’re OK, and next thing you know, you’re being yelled at. You can think you deserve to be in trouble and have it totally overlooked.
This unpredictability and the seeming arbitrariness of authority figures can also damage a child’s respect for them. From a pretty early age, I was aware that my father’s reasoning abilities were worse than my own (when he was drunk), removing most of the incentive to follow his rules or respect his guidance. Children need and want structure — not harsh or cruel structure — but an appropriate predictable framework.
You might have heard the term “adult child of an alcoholic/addict,” abbreviated as either ACOA or ACA. There is a whole subculture in the recovery movement devoted to it, though it was much bigger in the 80s. Unfortunately, much of the support out there is unhelpful — amounting to little more than feeding a sense of victimhood.
True forgiveness, true recovery
True recovery from the damage of growing up in an addictive home comes from getting to a place where it no longer continues to harm you. “Resentment” comes from the Latin sentire, to feel, and it literally means to re-feel an incident from the past. The only one being harmed is you. And as Rick Warren said so crisply, “Delay only deepens resentments and makes matters worse. In conflict, time heals nothing; it causes hurts to fester.” The damage to family relationships caused by harms done in the past rarely fades on its own.
The reason most people never let go of the hurt done by an parent is that they never take the essential step of forgiveness. That’s not surprising; forgiveness is hard. But forgiveness is not excusing what happened or defending it. To forgive means…
[Read the rest of What Works: When a parent is an alcoholic or addict at bustedhalo.com.]
