Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOA)

Growing up in a home with an alcoholic parent(s) can be an enormously traumatic and stressful experience. As children, it is important to feel safe, attended to, and loved, and while many addicts love their children deeply, the depths of addiction do not facilitate good parenting. Parents who struggle with alcoholism or substance addiction may not have the coping skills to properly care for themselves, and often experience neglect during early childhood. Unfortunately, even the most well-intentioned and attentive parents can struggle with addiction, which inevitably leads to them lacking in some area of their child’s upbringing. 

While we often discuss how alcoholism in parents affects young children, we don’t often discuss what happens when the children of addicts and alcoholics grow up. Here, we want to share a story from someone that grew up in a home with a parent who suffered from addiction to explore what life looks like after you move away and begin your own life.

Let’s hear from Devon, who grew up in a two-parent household with her mother and her father, who suffered from alcoholism. Now, Devon is in her 30s and has finally overcome her struggle to set boundaries with people she loves: 

“I didn’t really understand that my dad was drunk all the time while I was growing up. He always just seemed goofy and happy when I was little, and our days were usually filled with trips to the playground, visits to the ice cream shop, and exciting movie nights before bedtime. My dad was a ton of fun, and he made me and my two younger sisters feel so special and loved. 

When I turned 11 or 12, something started to change a little. My dad lost his job during a round of layoffs. He started to spend all morning in bed, sometimes not getting up until late in the afternoon, and didn’t really have as much energy as he used to. My mom picked up a third job (she already had two) to make sure we could keep living the way we were used to. My dad started to lose weight and became more and more lethargic. He was still the same loving person, and always told me and my sisters how much he loved us, but he was getting more and more irritable towards my mom. 

A year after he lost his job, he and my mom sat us down and let us know they had decided to get a divorce, and that my mom was moving out. We were all told we would split time between the households, and that nothing would change, except that we wouldn’t all be in the same home. In some ways, we were relieved to see our mother looking relieved, but we were worried about how our dad would cope all alone. As far as we could tell, he was getting sick, and that’s why he was stuck in bed. 

As I entered my teen years, I quickly realized the truth. My mother moved into a lovely duplex where we each had our own bedroom, and we spent three weeks each month in a very stable environment with her. One week each month, we would go to stay with our dad. He did his best to make things fun with movies and the option to order in, but he also began drinking openly in front of us. Now a little older, we stayed up later and began to see the depths of his addiction. Deeply worried about his well-being, I spent those weeks at his home doing my best to clean everything, restock his fridge, wash his clothes, and go through the mail to make sure no bills were overdue. I became a sort of caregiver for my dad before I was 15, and continued to do almost everything for him until I was 18 and graduating high school. 

My mom encouraged me to go to college out of state, noticing how stressed I had become as I had gotten older. I agreed and applied to schools more than 24 hours away from my home state to ensure I would have adequate space. In college, I desperately wanted to feel free of the responsibilities of my childhood. I did my homework, but I also spent long nights out with my friends consuming huge amounts of alcohol, and long mornings cleaning up the mess we had all made during the binge.

I began struggling to stay awake in class and eventually started sleeping through my alarms. When I expressed to my friends and roommates that I thought maybe we should drink less, they all exclaimed “we’re in college! It’s normal to drink like this!” They were technically right. Many of our friends lived this lifestyle and seemed to do just fine. So, I didn’t mention it again, but I did begin to reduce my drinking. 

Instead of the long nights of partying, it became long nights of anxiously checking for my friends in the club, and scouring the bathroom stalls to try to find my roommate when she had been gone too long. I became nervous every time my friends went out and worried that they wouldn’t come home safe. This realization also forced the thought of my father into my mind, who I had blissfully been ignoring for the past three years. 

During the last year of college, I fell in love, and coincidentally my anxiety also reached an all-time high. The outrageous behavior of my roommates had become triggering for me, though I had yet to make the connection between their drinking and my father’s. Instead of following my friends to parties to try to take care of them, I withdrew from the group and eventually decided to remove myself entirely. 

On a weekend, when my roommates had taken a day trip to a local festival, I packed up my items and moved out. The idea of facing them to tell them I couldn’t take it anymore had been making me sick, and I had barely been able to eat in weeks. My now boyfriend insisted on helping me, worried about the number of nights I called him sobbing on the phone. And so I moved in with him, just four months after meeting. 

After graduation, the boyfriend and I moved to a nearby suburb, closer to his family and the job he had been offered. Fresh out of college, I had no prospects and instead set myself to tending to the house. I had always liked the idea of being a stay-at-home mom, so why not test out the lifestyle now? 

Just a few months after my graduation and our move to our new home, there was an incident. My boyfriend drove drunk. He was fine, and he miraculously managed not to hit anything, but when I watched him sway into our front door and heard him slur his words the way my dad used to when he was really out of it, I realized we had a problem. I was absolutely terrified. I truly had no idea how to confront the issue, and my only instinct was to immediately beg him not to ever do it again and run him a cold shower. I made him some food, tucked him into bed, helped him drink water and take Tylenol, and then spent the night on the couch. 

For the next three years, I followed that routine almost every day of the week. He would come home drunk, I would beg him to not do it again, he would ignore it, and I would take care of him. Once, he crashed into our neighbor’s parked car. Luckily they were kind and didn’t call the police but let insurance handle it. Another time, he drove off the side of the road and into a ditch and had to call me to come to help him out. He didn’t want to call the tow company himself, because he knew they would hear the slurring in his words. 

Then I got pregnant, and I began to panic even more about the safety of my boyfriend. The idea of him crashing and dying or hitting someone and going to jail had become overwhelming, and the idea that our baby might not grow up with a dad was ruining my emotional health. Yet, I continued to push on and continued to take care of him in hopes that he would feel my love and get better. 

Our daughter was born, and for a short time, he seemed willing to change and was even sober for a few days at a time. Then, he lost his job, and suddenly it got much, much worse. By the time my daughter could walk, he was an almost permanent fixture of our couch, rarely to be seen upright unless it was to get in his car and drive to the local gas station. 

I was drowning in my responsibilities as a new mom, but I felt powerless to influence my boyfriend’s actions and unable to stand up to his pleas for help. My mother, who had recently begun therapy at the suggestion of her new boyfriend, told me one morning on the phone as I sobbed to her over my boyfriend’s reckless behavior: “I always used to cry when your dad would leave for work because I knew he had a bottle in the car.”

As strange as it sounds, that is when it hit me: I had been living out the same life my mother had lived, and had begun taking care of another man the way I had cared for my father. 

I immediately told my mom to come to get me, and she and my younger sisters drove more than 24 hours to where my boyfriend and I lived to pick me and the baby up. The night before they were set to arrive, I put the baby to bed, then went to talk to my boyfriend. I told him everything. I told him I was scared of what our life had become, scared of the role I had taken on, and scared for his health and wellbeing. I told him I needed to start doing some work on myself and unlearning the trauma I had faced as a teen. 

He was angry, defensive, and clearly upset, but this was the first time I had ever stood up to him like that, and he knew I was serious. The next morning, he was sober when my family arrived, and quietly helped to carry our things out of the house and into their car. He gave our baby a huge hug and told her he would see her soon, and did the same to me. 

Leaving, putting my foot down, standing up for myself, and setting a boundary for his health and ours was the best thing I ever did. It was a wake-up call, not just for him, but for me! Now, we are married, our daughter is happy and thriving, and we are both sober. I have spent years in therapy reconnecting to my inner child, healing myself, and learning how to do things that make me happy. My husband has been through several rehab programs, and though there have been difficult moments and times of relapse, he has become a far more confident person who loves himself for who he is. 

As the child of an alcoholic, my experience extended well into adulthood. While I was lucky enough to avoid developing an addiction myself, the strain of my responsibility as a child and the chaos of my early teen years impacted me greatly. Though I used to be praised for my maturity and responsible nature, I now realize that I was just a stressed, traumatized kid trying desperately to gain some sense of control. 

Now, I am a confident, happy, compassionate adult who knows how to say no and when to say yes. 

If you grew up in a home with addiction, you deserve to be heard. Our team of compassionate mental health experts at All of Therapy is here to listen and help.