If you grew up in a home with a parent who misused alcohol, drugs, or who suffered from codependency themselves, you’re probably familiar with the feeling of never knowing what to expect from one day to the next. When one or both parents struggle with addiction, the home environment is unpredictable. Arguments, inconsistency, unreliability, and chaos are the norm.
Children of such dysfunction don’t get many of their emotional or social needs met due to these challenges, often leading to traits and behaviours such as low self-esteem, rejection sensitivity, over-reactivity, hyper vigilance, constant approval-seeking or people-pleasing, and co-dependency themselves.
Emotional well-being: If you were never given the attention and emotional support you needed during a key developmental time in your youth and instead were preoccupied with the dysfunctional behaviour of a parent, it may certainly be hard (or perhaps impossible) to know how to get your needs met as an adult.
Social well-being: If you were not able to establish healthy attachments with your caregivers as an infant, or experience stable interpersonal interactions, it may be difficult to develop healthy, trusting relationships or friendships with other people in adult life.
Children of alcoholics often have to hide their feelings of sadness, fear, and anger in order to survive. Since unresolved feelings will always surface eventually, they often manifest during adulthood.
Common Behaviours or Traits in Adult Children of Alcoholics
Many children who have been brought up in dysfunction, abuse and chaos, develop similar characteristics and personality traits.
In 1978, an adult child of an alcoholic who went by the name “Tony A”, published “The Laundry List,” a list of characteristics that can seem very familiar to those who grew up in dysfunctional homes.
Tony’s list has been adopted as part of the Adult Children of Alcoholics World Service Organisation’s official literature and is a basis for the article “The Problem,” published on the group’s website.
The Laundry List
Become isolated
Fear people and authority figures
Become approval seekers
Be frightened of angry people
Be terrified of personal criticism
Become alcoholics, marry them, or both
View life as a victim
Have an overwhelming sense of responsibility
Be concerned more with others than themselves
Feel guilty when they stand up for themselves
Become addicted to excitement
Confuse love and pity
“Love” people who need rescuing
Stuff their feelings
Lose the ability to feel
Have low self-esteem
Judge themselves harshly
Become terrified of abandonment
Do anything to hold on to a relationship
Become “para-alcoholics” (people who take on the characteristics of the disease without drinking)
Become reactors instead of actors
Adult Children of Alcoholics in Relationships
Many adult children of alcoholics lose themselves in their relationship with others, sometimes finding themselves attracted to alcoholics or other compulsive personalities, such as narcissists, who are emotionally unavailable.
Adult children may also form relationships with others who need their help or need to be rescued, to the extent of neglecting their own needs (co-dependency). If they place the focus on the overwhelming needs of someone else, it can give them a sense of self-worth, and they don’t have to look at their own difficulties and shortcomings.
Often, adult children of alcoholics will take on the characteristics of alcoholics, even though they’ve never picked up a drink: exhibiting denial, poor coping skills, poor problem solving, and forming dysfunctional relationships.
Many adult children find that seeking professional treatment or counselling for insight into their feelings, behaviours, and struggles helps them achieve greater awareness of how their childhood shaped who they are today.