Adult Children of Alcoholics: When Instability Feels like Normalcy

One of the primary things that children look to their parents to provide them with is a sense that the world has a kind of order to it, that it is safe and reliable. When we're young kids we're not yet strong enough in our own minds to form a lot of independent beliefs about reality, so we tend to adopt those of our parents. Sometimes these strong core ideas stay with us well into adulthood, or even unto the end of our days.

The world can look intimidating to a young person's eyes. How much the more so, then, if the adults we seek to derive our sense of safety from seem just as frightened, or else hell bent on escaping the conditions of life through some artificial sense of cheer or oblivion - i.e., alcoholism or drug addiction?

What happens to a lot of us, in this scenario, is that fear becomes part of our Modus Operandi. We become habituated to the quicksand of instability to the point at which that is what feels normal to us. We adapt to a variety of roller coaster scenarios with our parents, patterns of vacillation between extremes: elation and depression, optimism and nihilism, cold withdrawal one moment and an outporing of emotion the next.

Where are we in the midst of this turbulent drama? Before long, there is little, if any, sense of "I am" in this picture at all. We may think of ourselves as the messenger between parents, as the caretaker, as a victim, as the invisible boy or girl. But there's not much room for any understanding of who we naturally are outside of the role we play in the addiction drama.

Rare is the child who could possibly have enough strength of ego and sense of self to say "No!" and refuse to define his- or herself in terms of the instability all around. Inevitably, we succumb. There is a death that occurs here, a death not only of innocence but also of so much potential that never had a chance to be fulfilled.

Fortunately, nothing is really forever dead to the soul, and many adult children of alcoholics and/or drug addicts discover that there are ways and means by which they can retrace their steps and reclaim what was lost. The process is not easy. A lot of times, it involves seeing through all the lies we've told ourselves since first we accepted instability as normal. But many of us discover that, for a second chance to live for ourselves rather than play out dysfunctional roles for others, the pain we encounter on the road to recovery is a small price to pay.