Children of Alcoholics : Nationwide Movement With Orange County Origins Aims to End Pain, Denial

“I’m sorry,” wails singer Brenda Lee on the office speaker system.

“So-o sorry.

“Please accept my apo-o-logy. . . .”

The handful of clients in the waiting room of the Adult Children’s Center in Orange this evening don’t seem to be paying attention to the song. They just keep on perusing the magazines, pausing now and then to glance nervously at their watches. But they can easily identify with the words.

The song just happens to be on the easy-listening station’s playlist for the night, but it might as well have been dedicated to these people, and to children of alcoholics everywhere.

Bump into them on the street--step on their toes with all your weight--and they’re likely to say “I’m sorry” before you can open your mouth. It’s a reflex they learned as children. Now they’ve come here to unlearn that habit, along with other skills they once needed to survive in a home where something was terribly wrong, but no one could acknowledge the problem.

Lou Stoetzer, director of the Adult Children’s Center, says it goes back to one of the most-cited images in the alcoholism treatment field: “The elephant in the living room. Everyone pretends they don’t see it. The mother keeps cleaning up after it and saying, ‘I wonder where all this elephant dung comes from?’ ” But the children, he says, have their own problem. That invisible elephant, the parent’s alcoholism, keeps stepping on them, and they grow up pretending it doesn’t hurt. After all, it doesn’t exist, so how could it be a problem?

Just in case, when they can’t hide their pain, they apologize for it, figuring that since it can’t be the elephant’s fault, it must be theirs. Although they may never take a drink themselves, “these people get every bit as sick as the alcoholic,” Stoetzer says.

The tendency to apologize is only one common trait among children of alcoholics, the experts say. They often have a need to be in control--children of alcoholics don’t like roller coasters, for example, and they’d rather be the driver than the passenger in a car. They tend to be afraid of intimacy and have trouble trusting others or just relaxing and having fun.

As recently as five years ago, most mental-health professionals would have pegged this group as just about the least likely of any to need their services. Children of alcoholics also tend to be high achievers, eager to please and slow to make waves. They just didn’t seem the type to need therapy.

Now they’re the mental-health field’s fastest-growing market. “I’ve been in the field for more than 25 years,” Stoetzer says. “And I can’t remember any one thing that has identified the need for services as this has.”

The change is due in large part to the efforts of Orange County pioneers who saw through that controlled adult facade and recognized the wounded children underneath.

In 1981, therapist and consultant Claudia Black of South Laguna wrote and published the first book on the subject, “It Will Never Happen to Me!” and is now recognized nationally as one of the founders of the children of alcoholics movement.

A dog-eared copy of the book found its way to what Stoetzer describes as a “renegade” Al-Anon group in Costa Mesa in 1982 that departed from the prescribed format and evolved into one of the nation’s first adult children of alcoholics support groups.

The following year, the National Assn. for Children of Alcoholics was founded in South Laguna. This month, the organization is beginning its biggest public awareness effort. Information packets featuring posters with Marvel Comics heroes such as Captain America and Spiderman are being sent to every elementary school in the nation in an effort to identify and treat the problem at an earlier stage.

The movement’s strong Orange County base is no accident, Stoetzer says. “Orange County and the West Coast in general is full of people who fled to escape their family’s pain. But when they get here, it follows them.”

Several famous Americans, including President Reagan, actress Shirley MacLaine and comedian Carol Burnett have publicly identified themselves as adult children of alcoholics, and Stoetzer says that has made it easier for some people to move out of their own denial.

But the biggest impetus behind the movement is at the grass-roots level, says Gerald Myers, executive director of the National Assn. for Children of Alcoholics.

“When our organization was founded, we started contacting professionals and saying, ‘Listen, folks, you have to deal with this issue,’ ” Myers says. “We weren’t very successful. So we decided that if we couldn’t get through to the professionals, we’d go to the general public. There’s a tremendous groundswell now. And it’s the children of alcoholics themselves who are demanding that there be services for them.”

There are about 28 million children of alcoholics in the United States, according to the National Assn. for Children of Alcoholics. Most of those--about 21 million--are adults.

There’s the 80-year-old man who still feels guilty because his alcoholic father drank himself to death when he was 12. The young woman who literally can’t say the words to take credit for a good deed she did. The 44-year-old daughter and wife of an alcoholic who’s so accustomed to taking care of everyone else’s needs that she trembles violently when a social worker suggests she do something for herself.

“We’ve got a lot of adults walking around who don’t understand why they’re angry,” says David Larson, Orange County director of the National Council on Alcoholism. “They don’t deal with that anger and resentment because they’ve grown up, haven’t they? But until they can deal with it, their lives are infinitely sick.”

Despite the problems children of alcoholics experience while growing up, counselors say most of them will experiment with alcohol themselves. Although most medical and mental health experts agree that alcoholism is a disease, the issue remains unresolved. The Veterans Administration refuses to pay for treatment for alcoholism, claiming it is a willful act. Whatever the cause, counselors agree that the child of an alcoholic is at special risk.

“According to one study,” Larson says, “the male offspring of a male alcoholic has a 50% chance of becoming an alcoholic. If alcoholism is on both sides of the family, he has an 85% chance. For a female it’s probably the same, but that study didn’t include females,” he says.

“We advise them to watch their use and tell them the symptoms (of alcoholism), because they may become addicted immediately.”

The problem for children of alcoholics is compounded, he says, “because, generally, these families marry each other and have children. If you’re the child of an alcoholic, you’re at risk, your children are at risk, and you have to know it. That’s the only way we can break the cycle of the disease of alcoholism. That’s why this is the greatest thing that ever happened in the field of alcoholism.”

But millions of children of alcoholics are so diligently following the unspoken rules of their youth that they don’t identify themselves as having any connection with the problem. The rules, Claudia Black says, are: “Don’t talk, don’t trust and don’t feel.”

The denial system is so strong that Black didn’t acknowledge that she came from an alcoholic family even after she got her master’s degree in social work and took a course on alcoholism, according to her husband and business partner, Jack Fahey.

On “The Process of Recovery,” one of several videotapes she has produced for mental health workers and children of alcoholics, Black offers an example of denial in an episode that occurred when she was 15:

“It’s 10 o’clock on a Saturday night, and my brother and sister and my boyfriend and I are all watching television in our living room, right next door to my parents’ tavern. The front door of the house flies open and slams against the wall. There is this huge man there, huge man, and I’ve never seen him before in my life. He looks at the four of us kids, and finally he moves into the middle of the living room and says, ‘Do you have a can of deodorant?’

“Well, I had spent 15 years learning how to meet people’s needs, so I quickly jump up and get him his deodorant. He very appropriately sprays himself and he walks back out the front door. We all turn around to finish watching our TV show. Actually, three of us turn around. One of us--the boyfriend--wasn’t raised in an alcoholic home. He keeps staring at the front door.

“Two or three minutes later, he says, ‘Claudia. Claudia! Who was that man?’

“I look around, I don’t see anybody, so I say, ‘What man?’ When you’re raised in an alcoholic home, sometimes it’s helpful to be able to change your perception of reality every 30 or 40 seconds.”

Of her own enlightenment, Black says, “I started out treating alcoholics. And even though I wasn’t an alcoholic, I could see a lot of me in these people. I could see myself in their spouses, and I could see myself in their kids. Back then--the late ‘70s--the profession had a real strong interest in alcoholics, but they simply gave no thought to children.”

After she recognized her own problem, Black says, “To me it was literally common sense that if these people had spent 15 or 20 years in a chemically dependent family, they needed to see somebody. It may have been the first time anyone sat down and said, ‘Let’s take a look at YOU.’ ”

But her supervisors didn’t agree. They reprimanded Black for putting too much emphasis on the family and not concentrating on getting alcoholics admitted to the program, Fahey says. Soon after that, she quit.

By then Black had written what has come to be known as “the little green book.” But she could not find a publisher. After 52 publishers rejected it, she and Fahey decided to publish it themselves in 1981. The book sold more than 400,000 copies before Ballantine Books picked it up this fall, and since then Fahey says it has sold 150,000 more. Other books by Black and other authors have followed, so many that a recent ad on the cover of Publishers Weekly calls the field “the hottest section in bookstores today.”

“They say if you want to diagnose an ACA (adult child of an alcoholic), just go to the self-help section of your local bookstore and you’ll find them, looking for an answer,” Stoetzer says.

Self-help books are a relatively easy place to start because the “don’t talk” rule doesn’t have to be broken. “It’s so frightening to them, so unnerving,” Stoetzer says. “You’re an average citizen one day, an adult child of an alcoholic the next. When people come here (to the Adult Children’s Center), there’s a strong tendency to run for the door.”

Another fairly comfortable place to start is a checklist that has become almost legendary as it is copied and passed on. There are at least eight acceptable versions of the checklist, according to Myers. Thousands of children of alcoholics have answered the questions on the checklists and suddenly identified themselves as members of the group.

The next step for some is ACA group meetings, similar to Alcoholics Anonymous groups but focusing on the adult child instead of the alcoholic. More than 30 such groups meet regularly in Orange County.

The Adult Children’s Center offers educational programs as well as individual, marital and group therapy to nearly 300 adult children of alcoholics and is the largest such practice in the county. But Stoetzer says that not all adult children need therapy.

Black agrees. “Some people are affected to greater degrees by their parents’ alcoholism. Birth order can affect it, the parent’s drinking style, the other parent’s behavior, whether there was physical abuse, sexual abuse, whether both parents were alcoholic. But it’s my belief that anyone who’s been raised in an alcoholic family can benefit from getting involved in something in the community. Some people can do all they need for themselves in a short-term process. Others are going to need more help. But I don’t want people to think they’re scarred for life. They’re not. But for some the recovery process will be longer.”

“The first step is knowing you’re not alone,” Stoetzer says. “That awareness gives you the hope you need to go further.”

“Until you give people hope, they have no reason to make changes,” Black says.

The movement has had such an impact, Stoetzer says, that now “the ACA distinction is beginning to blur. We’re beginning to see that these same problems occur in all kinds of dysfunctional families, rather than just alcoholic families. If parents have eating disorders, if they’re workaholics or have chronic illnesses, the same things can happen. Alcoholic families aren’t the only ones with those rules.”

One researcher claims that as many as 96% of families are dysfunctional in some way.

“Much of what we found out is very true for other families,” Black says. “The commonality is the issue of loss. Did you, for whatever reason, experience loss on a chronic basis? But if we totally lose the distinction of the alcoholic home, we’ve really lost something. Alcoholism is the No. 1 cause of dysfunction in families. Ninety percent of child abuse occurs in alcoholic homes. And there’s a stigma to it. If you grow up in a workaholic home, there’s a lot of loss, but you don’t have the stigma. There is a difference.”

For more information on services for children of alcoholics, contact:

The National Assn. for Children of Alcoholics, South Laguna, (714) 499-3889.

The National Council on Alcoholism, Orange County, (714) 835-3830.

The Adult Children’s Center, Orange, (714) 633-2464.

HAS YOUR CHILDHOOD LEFT YOU A WOUNDED ADULT ?

I guess at what normal is.

I have difficulty following a project through from beginning to end.

I lie when it would be just as easy to tell the truth.

I judge myself without mercy.

I have difficulty having fun.

I take myself very seriously.

I have difficulty with intimate relationships.

I overreact to changes over which I have no control.

I feel different from other people.

I constantly seek approval and affirmation.

I am either super responsible or super irresponsible.

I am extremely loyal even in the face of evidence that the loyalty is undeserved.

I look for immediate as opposed to deferred gratification.

I lock myself into a course of action without giving serious consideration to alternate behaviors or possible consequences.

I seek tension and crisis and then complain about the results.

I tend to avoid conflict or aggravate it; rarely do I deal with it.

These characteristics are common to people from alcoholic and other dysfunctional families. If you identify with 10 or more, you may have lingering problems caused by growing up in such a home, according to The Adult Children’s Center in the city of Orange.