Adult Children of Alcoholics: 7 Signs and Effects
Even when a person grows up to become an adult child of an alcoholic, the meetings don’t necessarily focus on what it was like for a child to grow up alongside addiction and within a dysfunctional family. When you grow up in a home with one or more alcoholic parents, the impact of the dysfunction reverberates throughout your life. Growing up with a parent who has an alcohol use disorder can change how an adult child interacts with others. It can cause problems in their relationships with friends, family members, and romantic partners.
As painful as it is for someone to live with alcohol use disorder, they aren’t the only ones affected. And even when these children become adults, it may continue to be a challenge to deal with their parent’s addiction and its lasting effects. According to a study by the National Association of Children of Alcoholics (NACOA), there are over 11 million children in the U.S. under the age of 18 living in families with at least one alcoholic parent.
Emotional Struggles
Perhaps to avoid criticism or the anger of their parent with AUD, many children tend to become super-responsible or perfectionistic overachievers or workaholics. On the other hand, people often go in the opposite direction, mirroring the same bad behaviors they witnessed during childhood. After growing up in an atmosphere where denial, lying, and keeping secrets may have been the norm, adult children can develop serious trust problems.
With therapy and support, ACOAs can make changes in their life and treat the underlying PTSD and trauma. Talk therapy one-on-one or group counseling, somatic experiencing, and EMDR are highly effective in addressing the signs of trauma and developing new, healthy coping mechanisms. A 2014 review found that children of parents who misuse alcohol often have trouble developing emotional regulation abilities.
If you’re unsure where to start, you can check out Psych Central’s hub on finding mental health support. There are steps you can take as an adult to address the lasting impact your parent’s alcohol use left on you. One of the most common issues reported was a lack of trust in adults (more than 1 in 5). If one or more parents continue drinking heavily as the child is growing up, this can also have negative consequences. Studies show that a child of an alcoholic is 3 to 4 times more likely to develop that problem than a child who didn’t. “If you grow up in a family where everything is unpredictable, you tend to want to hold on to a feeling of control,” says Cara Gardenswartz, PhD, a clinical psychologist in Beverly Hills, CA.
- Children of parents who misuse alcohol are at higher risk for anxiety, depression, and unexplained physical symptoms (internalizing behaviors).
- Coping with the lasting effects of a parent’s alcohol use can be difficult, but you don’t have to do it alone.
- A mental health professional can help you work through your past traumas and experiences and address how these have affected you as an adult.
Growing up with a parent living with alcohol use disorder can have negative effects on children, including mental health issues, such as depression and anxiety, and behavioral problems, such as aggression. Growing up with a parent with alcohol use disorder has real-life alcohol addiction consequences for many adult children. Even long after leaving your parent’s home, you could still be dealing with the aftermath of their alcohol addiction. There are several different signs and symptoms of PTSD and trauma exhibited by adult children of alcoholics.
According to White, this may happen partly because children often learn to mirror the characteristics of their parents. The ACA has group meetings (based on the 12-step principles of “Alcoholics Anonymous”) that are specifically designed to help adult children overcome the lasting damage of parental drinking. Children who grow up with at least one parent with alcohol use disorder can have an increased chance of experiencing negative health and behavioral outcomes. 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.
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.» Research suggests that about one in 10 children lives with a parent who has an alcohol use disorder, and about one in 5 adults lived with a person who used alcohol when they were growing up. Parents with an AUD may have difficulty aetna insurance coverage for drug rehab providing children with a safe, loving environment, which can lead to long-term emotional and behavioral consequences. 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.
How Children Are Affected By Parents With Alcohol Use Disorder
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. In a study of more than 25,000 adults, those who had a parent with AUD remembered their childhoods as «difficult» and said they struggled with «bad memories» of their parent’s alcohol misuse. Some people experience this as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), like other people who had different traumatic childhood experiences. Some studies have shown that children of parents with AUD are more likely to misuse alcohol themselves in adolescence or adulthood. They may begin drinking alcohol at a younger age than other people and progress quickly to a problematic level of consumption.
Below, you’ll find seven potential ways a parent’s AUD can affect you as an adult, along with some guidance on seeking support. Adults who have parents with alcohol use disorder are often called “Adult Children of Alcoholics,” aka ACoAs or ACAs. In 2019, around 14.5 million people ages 12 and older in the United States were living with this condition, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). “Any time I thought about quitting, I looked at how my stepfather became a really angry person because he stopped drinking. I don’t blame that for why it took me so long to quit drinking myself, but it certainly didn’t help,” Harkes says.
It’s estimated that about 1 in 10 children (7.5 million) have lived with at least one parent with alcohol use disorder, based on a 2017 report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Sherry Gaba, LCSW, is a licensed psychotherapist/author specializing in addictions, codependency, and underlying issues such as depression, trauma, and anxiety. There are several issues relevant to the effects of trauma on a child in these types of households. The most critical factors include the age of the child, the duration of the trauma during development, and the ability of the child to have support within the family or from an outside source.
Adult Children of Alcoholics
But they can establish boundaries around the addiction and for the addicted loved one, and start to move forward in the healthiest way possible with a recovery of their own. Maybe your parent was irritable, easily aggravated, or verbally or emotionally abusive while drinking or in withdrawal. Experiencing these behaviors from a parent can also wear down your self-worth over time.
How does alcohol use affect children?
As a result, many will end up feeling conflicted, confused, and self-conscious when they realize that drinking is not considered normal in other families. A trained mental health professional can offer more support with identifying unhelpful habits and coping mechanisms and exploring alternatives that better serve alcohol dependence withdrawal and relapse pmc you. In the absence of a stable, emotionally supportive enviornment, you learned to adapt in the only ways you knew how. As an adult, though, you can learn to manage and change specific behaviors that no longer help you, which can improve your overall well-being, quality of life, and relationships with others.
If a child’s parent was mean or abusive when they were drunk, adult children can grow up with a fear of all angry people. They may spend their lives avoiding conflict or confrontation of any kind, worrying that it could turn violent. 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. Having a parent with alcohol use disorder as a child can have negative effects, such as your own issues with alcohol as an adult — but that’s not always the case. The solution for adult children is found in the relationship between a person’s inner child and parent, which are two different sides of self.
Even those with a higher genetic risk for AUD can often take a harm reduction approach when they learn to better understand their triggers, risk factors, and engagement with substances, Peifer says. When a woman drinks alcohol while pregnant, her baby has a chance of developing fetal alcohol syndrome disorders (FASDs). Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a chronic health condition that can have a serious impact on a person’s life.