Probing the Psyche of Children of Alcoholics : Conference Focuses on Ways to Change Behavior, Values

It was carnival time. An 8-year-old, flushed with excitement, stepped up for a spin at the big wheel. As it slowed to a stop, the child learned that he had landed on a 60-point question: “Name three things you can do to take care of yourself if Mom or Dad is drunk.”

The youngster had the answers--call Alcoholics Anonymous, call a neighbor, call a school counselor. The child who followed him scored 50 points by knowing that you can become an alcoholic even before you’re born.

These youngsters weren’t playing for kewpie dolls. They were playing for survival. This was a “Carnival of Recovery,” one of the programs for children of recovering alcoholics during this week’s conference of the National Assn. for Children of Alcoholics at the Sheraton Hotels at Universal Studios.

Common Illnesses

In nearby meeting rooms, the 850 delegates, among them a number of professionals who work in alcohol- and substance-abuse programs, were hearing about the anxieties and compulsive behaviors, the emotional crippling and stress-related illnesses common to adult children of alcoholics.

Although perhaps only 5% of CoAs (children of alcoholics) become totally dysfunctional adults, this 4-year-old nonprofit education and advocacy organization estimates that one in three American families is affected by alcoholism, that there are at least 28 million CoAs. This is a population at high risk of becoming alcoholics themselves--more than half of all alcoholics have an alcoholic parent.

As victims’ movements go, this one is a relative late comer. It has been known for years that CoAs exhibit certain behaviors--they are apt to choose alcoholic spouses, for example--but this probing of the CoA psyche and emphasis on “recovery” for CoAs is new.

One of the pioneers is Claudia Black of Laguna Niguel, a social worker who served as second chairperson of NACoA, which is based in South Laguna and now claims 7,000 dues-paying members. She views it as “a major social movement. It’s not a yuppie phenomenon, the mental health issue of the year.” Ten years ago, she said, “We weren’t dealing with the kids on the kids’ issues.”

Black, whose father was an alcoholic, drew instant nods of comprehension when she told conference delegates that, as children, “We spent so much time taking care of other people’s needs we don’t even know we have needs.”

To her, the definition of “recovery” is “being able to live your life today without the past dominating it,” without a “family script.” She defines an alcoholic as someone whose dependency brings on personality changes--the alcoholic becomes “a different person with a whole different set of values.”

“I’m real sick and tired of the hoopla that goes on for kids who turn their parents in” for drug abuse, said Dr. Timmen L. Cermak, a San Francisco psychiatrist who serves as chairman of the NACoA board. “When that happens, something has broken down already. I think that’s tragic, the last resort if a child is in mortal danger.”

Unfortunately, he added, “kids don’t know where to turn. To me that means we have failed. The safety net for kids in this country isn’t complete and isn’t working.”

Cermak, whose father was an alcoholic, was explaining the philosophical difference between NACoA and low-key self-help programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous, the need for an organization like NACoA to make the cause public, to take it to legislators and others who make funding decisions. “Promotion is necessary,” he doesn’t hesitate to say.

In any average classroom in America, Cermak said, there will be four to six children of alcoholics among the 25-30 students. “We need to help them be identified,” he said, “and one of the primary ways is to make sure all teachers and counselors have training in this area.” He wants funding, too, for posters to help primary school youngsters self-identify.

NACoA, Cermak said, “strongly supports” the concept of student-assistance programs that would place trained mental health workers in the schools to offer counseling with confidentiality and without parental permission. He asked, “What does it mean to have an OK from a parent who’s incompetent to judge?”

To specifically target children of drug and alcohol abusers, he would like, too, to see specialized training for those who work in juvenile justice, criminal justice, foster care and various social services for youth. Ultimately, Cermak said, “Maybe what’s needed is something equivalent to homes for battered women” for CoAs.

And he wants all drug and alcohol treatment centers to “be required to have age-appropriate treatment for all members of the family. It’s very difficult to find a group for kids 6 to 9 years old to meet other kids from chemically dependent homes.”

Research money is also needed, he said, to “understand better the consequences” of personality disorders resulting from parental alcoholism and how these affect the quality of life for adult children.

It was evening, after a long day of meetings and seminars, and about 40 people had gathered for a self-help group. They introduced themselves by first names only, in the tradition of AA. Nancy, who for years had lived alone with her terrible secret--an alcoholic parent--said, “I grew up believing it was OK to be told something was going to happen on Saturday” and not have it happen. As an adult, she now realizes, “I kept seeking people who wouldn’t show up on Saturday.” When they didn’t, said Nancy, who is extremely overweight, “I ate.”

Marjorie, who is in hospital administration, told of her need to blame herself whenever the hospital suffers a financial setback, her inability to take any credit when things go well.

John, who was both the child of an alcoholic and a battered child, told of his insecurities--”I’ll shoot my own work down before someone else gets a whack at it.”

Tom, who had an alcoholic father and a mentally disturbed mother, told of being reared in a chaotic household where, from age 9, he was in charge, the only stable element. Ever since, he said, he has had a compulsion “to make everything nice, to try to fix everybody else.”

These behaviors, and others common to CoAs, were discussed by Stephanie Brown, a psychologist who has been doing research on CoAs at Stanford University, in her presentation. She spoke of the need in chemically dependent families to “alter the logic in order to explain what is happening.”

Two Absolute Rules

Typically, she said, the alcoholic family has two inviolable rules: One, there is no alcoholism and, two, don’t talk about it.

“No human being can develop adequately without significant figures of attachment,” Brown said, and when a family builds “core beliefs” based on denial of alcoholism, the result is denial of feelings. “A child, and an adult, cannot have feelings about a reality that does not exist.”

Children, she said, “cannot step outside of the reality presented to them by their parents. Children cannot say, ‘Hey, this doesn’t make sense. You guys are drinking.’ ” The child’s overriding need, she noted, is the need for attachment.

She spoke of the emotional confusion that develops in the child. Later, she said, the adult child will punish himself, feeling he was responsible for what happened at home. Brown spoke of one client who told her, “If there’s a cyclone in Bangladesh, I caused it.”

In adolescence, a period of fluctuating identity, the CoA may choose to imitate the alcoholic parent, Brown said. She told of a client who explained, “Drinking validated my membership in my family.”

She observed that those adolescents who do not choose to drink “most often believe that they are deeply out of control” nevertheless and often grow anxious and depressed “waiting for the next shoe to drop.”

“Breaking the Cycle: Parenting Issues for CoAs” was the topic of a presentation by two professionals in the field from New York state, Phil Oliver-Diaz and Patricia O’Gorman.

Oliver-Diaz, a recovering alcoholic whose father was killed in a bar fight, spiced his words of wisdom with a bit of irreverence, reminding those in the audience of their own childhood “fantasy” that sober parents would be perfect parents. So dad goes to the hospital to get well, he said, “and what does the kid get? Dad comes out talking about God and brings a bunch of weird guys with no last names over.”

Too often, Oliver-Diaz said, nothing has changed--the drinking has stopped, but the alcoholism is still central to family life. To children, he said, “The program becomes as much of a problem as the bottle was” unless the parents also become better parents.

O’Gorman expressed concern over the tendency to refer to alcoholism as a “family disease,” suggesting that might encourage children to start drinking young to find out “if I’ve got this family disease.”

Later, Oliver-Diaz said groups like NACoA have a tendency to “overfocus. You have to be careful you don’t traumatize your kids with information that’s only useful to yourself. You don’t wear the trauma as a badge.”

Poking a little gentle fun at NACoA, the organization of which he was a co-founder, was Robert Ackerman, a professor of sociology and anthropology at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He scanned the jam-packed five-day schedule and noted that it was obviously planned by compulsives.

Deploring what he views as “almost a mania” to create treatment and get ACAs (adult children of alcoholics) into it, he said it is important to know whether parallel behaviors exist in children who did not have alcoholic parents, to know why siblings are not always affected the same way.

He is not accepting the premise, he said, that ACAs are “the most catastrophic walking basket cases who ever existed.”

During 1985-86 Ackerman did a study, funded by his university, of 1,600 men and women from 38 states, 1,000 of them self-identified children of alcoholics. Subjects were asked whether they identified with certain behaviors known to be common among ACAs; about 20% more of the ACAs said they did than did those in the control group. Both groups pinpointed “taking myself (too) seriously” as the number one behavior with which they identified.

One of the things of which he is convinced, Ackerman said, is that many of the characteristics identified by the ACAs were “absolutely and positively” not alcohol-related. Children of alcoholics “don’t have the market on dysfunctional families,” he said--what is different is their “emotional motivation for development of that behavior,” their acceptance of it as normal until the world tells them differently. As adults, 35.5% of the ACAs and 48% of the control group said they are emotionally satisfied.

Ackerman said it would be “pedantic” of the organization to assume this early on that it knows the answers. For years, he said, children of alcoholics have survived, and today the vast majority of these children “don’t know we exist.”

According to NACoA data, at least 7 million children under the age of 18 have a parent who abuses alcohol or another drug, and drugs may be a significant precipitating factor in as many as 90% of all child-abuse cases. Further, their data show, there is a proportionately high number of children of alcoholics and other drug abusers in the juvenile justice system, in prisons and in mental health facilities.

Jerry Moe grew up in an alcoholic home and remembers “pouring out bottles, hiding car keys, getting all A’s in school. Nothing worked.” He could not convince himself that he was not the cause of his father’s alcoholism.

He knows firsthand how “alone and isolated” young children of alcoholic families feel, and since 1978 he has been working with these youngsters, currently as executive director of “Kids Are Special,” a private, nonprofit program in San Jose for children 4 to 17. About a dozen youngsters, all children of a parent in treatment, were participants at this conference.

Said Moe, “There’s a faulty assumption that because Mom and Dad get into recovery, the kids are going to be OK. These kids feel left out.”

For some, he said, there is a new trauma once the alcoholism is gone--”The 12-year-old girl who became head of a household now finds most of her self-esteem is gone. It’s not unheard of for her to say, ‘I wish Mom would start drinking again.’ ”

Through “Kids Are Special,” Moe said, they get the things they most need--”consistency, focused attention, someone really listening,” they have their feelings validated.

Beyond that, Moe said, “It’s an opportunity to simply be a kid. So much of our work is just play. These kids have been forced to grow up. The laughter and spontaneity and joy of growing up has been taken away.”

Moe has dealt with an “8-year-old going on 40 who has been balancing the checkbook, taking care of younger brothers and sisters and cooking the meals.” He has also dealt with the acting-out child and with children who become so withdrawn “they blend into the woodwork.”

This particular afternoon, about 10 youngsters, gathered in a circle with an adult leader, were role-playing. The paper shields they held identified each as a member of a typical alcoholic family. There were the people pleaser, the clown. And there was the blamer, the one who’d blame anything or anyone else to rationalize a drinking parent’s behavior.

The boy portraying the blamer was asked to give an example of how a blamer might react if a friend suggested coming over to play, a suggestion that is terrifying to many of these children. Without hesitating he said, “You ran over my cat with your bicycle and my dad doesn’t want you here.”