Guest Post: Addictions and Development

Today's guest post is by Emma Haylett. She decribes growing up with an alcoholic father who literally tried to recruit her as his drinking buddy, and in the process put her smack dab in the middle (triangulation) of her parents' relationship. This may be a telling example of someone in the role of go-between.

A Revelation

My father bought me my first 6-pack of beer. I was only 14 at the time and drank it behind closed doors, away from him and the rest of my family. It was a late summer night and I remember my mother was already hidden away in her room, lights off, TV on such a low volume like she was whispering with ghosts. Dad sat in a broken recliner watching western violence, occasionally calling my name to come drink with him. Instead, I wrote. I started writing before I popped the first cap and continued to do so after all of them were empty and stagnant around me.

I knew the other kids at my school drank. I knew my dad drank. I watched him every day, but what I didn’t realize was the problem he held. Within the next two hours, I was dizzy and tired. The spoken words of my father were surrounded in quotation marks intermittently written down the page, phonetically spelled out: “Em-uhh,” “ehmm,” and “c’mon to the livin’ room, now.” 

As my state of clarity became more and more unclear, my dad’s stayed exactly the same. I didn’t know he was permanently inebriated until pouring over my notes the next morning. This revelation became something of an alcohol abuse study for years.

My mother never noticed the extra beer my father bought. I think she always assumed Dad was going to drink them, and it was a fair enough assumption. As he pressured me to drink them, I would sip slowly and watch him become more intolerable by the bottle. It didn’t taste good and I don’t remember it feeling good either. 

His speech slurred to the point of intelligibility and his breath was something similar to a laboratory experiment gone wrong. His actions embarrassed me – he would yell at the television if a star delivered a line poorly, and wrap his arm around my shoulder to tell me how to buy liquor underage. Whenever my mother entered the room, his face became tired and uninterested.

One evening, after Dad was snoring deeply in the chair, my mother sat me down and asked me if I drank with him. Of course I didn’t lie – I told her he would give me a few bottles and we would watch TV together. She told me Dad wasn’t healthy and that what he was drinking wasn’t, either. She told me he was always cracking cans since he was about my age, partying much too hard with his friends and family. I wasn’t old enough, she very sternly told me, “and your dad’s decisions reflect poorly upon this family.” I stopped drinking with him after that night.

Family Treatment

Dad was kinder in the early hours of the day and progressively became more incoherent and rude towards the time he usually passed out in the recliner. I come to realize, from lengthy trial-and-error experiments, that the trick to getting lunch money, permission to go out on school nights, or even a small favor was asking him in the mornings after his first coffee with a whiskey cream substitute. 

My mother took the opposite route and, when she thought I wasn’t around, suggested rehab programs later in the evenings, or else, she threatened, she would leave…again and again. But she never did. Their relationship became empty threats with the two of them screaming about whose turn it was to buy essential toiletries with the little money we had, and who was going to raise their daughter standing behind them unnoticed.

There was more hidden behind my father’s alcohol addiction than what was obvious: the empty bottles clacking together as he put another one down was always accompanied by false affection when we had father-daughter talks around the dining room table late at night about being a responsible adult, trust, and his image of love. I learned that being responsible was saving a bit of grocery money for a tall bottle of cheap alcohol. Trust was believing him when he said, “Just one more,” and love was “don’t tell your mother” followed by a bribe.  

Promises to attend my school-sponsored activities came to a screeching halt as the more dangerous drugs became the better part of him. I once found him asleep in the truck idling in the driveway with the windows down and a burnt cigarette between his still fingers. The long stem of ash flaked away as I shook him to remind him that he was supposed to take me to school.

Emotional Detox

I lied to my friends. I lied to my teachers, and I lied to myself - for years. It goes without saying that I don’t trust long or often. I had a hard time believing my ex-fiancé Jake was going for a quick run to the gas station without bringing home a brown paper sack around a bottle or plastic baggie of some substance. I am reminded of being alone when my new neighbor’s empty beer cans crash and echo against each other as she pushes her trash bins to the curb every Thursday morning. I am still angry at my mother who should have tried harder to get my father some help.

I always wished he would have even considered alcohol rehab. I firmly believe our family life could have been different, saved even, with detox and therapy. As an adult, I hesitate to show affection and honesty. I have daylight visions of my father wrecking the truck. I lose hours of sleep over the conversations I should have had with Jake about trust and what it means to be loved without stipulations.

Looking back, it’s hard to know what it is I was feeling. From adulthood, it is easy to know that my father was using me as a crutch, as a tool with which to hurt my mother. And I dutifully played the part of loyal daughter to both of them. I was a substitute, in many ways, for their relationship—an embodiment of the good in my father as my mother saw him, a (albeit young) drinker still capable of offering love - and so she ignored it. For my father, I was a female who served as his caretaker and confidant, a secret-keeper who acted without judgment, an enabler. While my father was dependent upon alcohol, I was simply (or not so simply) using it—more on that here. This was my first experience as an enabler too.

I do remember feeling trapped in between them and, because they were my parents equally, wanting to please both. If I could do it simultaneously, even in secret, it felt like a win. I didn’t like the taste or feel of alcohol, but I also didn’t like the way my father breathed my name until I came out. For me, this drinking was easier, especially since I never outright lied to my mother. Like my father, I had my justifications.

Therapy

I’ve learned that addiction is better treated as a disease. With a non 12-step program, doctors treat addicts with proper medical treatment as you would any other chronic medical illness. Working with addicts in this program has taught me that sometimes you can’t rely on having faith or attending self-help meetings. Sometimes real help (however you find useful to define it) is necessary. 

Addicts can come to an understanding of trust and commitment, as well as formulating a self-betterment plan that is supported by people like me. I provide the guidance and encouragement as well as sensitivity to the issue.

My father would always get upset if the word “addiction” was even quietly muttered.

I realize what it is like to be an addict. I watched and recorded one my entire life. To approach the issue with proper intelligence and caution is critical – to provide them with real courage and motivation rather than standing idly by will push the addict towards getting the appropriate help and the chance of staying healthy will greaten. It’s a very rewarding opportunity to be there for somebody and to see them succeed.

I help myself by helping people overcome these dangerous addictions. I help them make that sensitive reconnection to their family and children. There is always hope that they can raise their kids to live without being exposed to the fear and emotional emptiness that that I hold inside and that is so overwhelming. Getting help can change more than one life. That first step is always the hardest, but I know in my heart of hearts it can make a difference.

Author Bio: Emma Haylett finds comfort in writing. When she’s not helping coordinate non 12 step recovery programs for addicts and their families, you can find her watching terrible made-for-TV movies.

Dysfunctional Family Roles Part II: The Best of the Rest

As promised in my last post, here is a rundown of dysfunctional family systems roles other than the previously described spoiler.

1. The savior: In this scenario, a parent has suppressed his or her ambition to excel at some endeavor in order to satisfy cultural mandates, leading the child to act out the parent's forbidden ambition. The savior role often leads to chronic depression in the patient playing the role. For example, a woman from a traditional culture who has been exposed to female professionals in the United States might secretly wish to become a doctor. She can admit such a wish to neither herself nor anyone else, for fear of being disowned by her traditional relatives who expect her to be nothing more than a wife and mother.

Because parents often live vicariously through identification with their children, the woman might push her son or possibly even a daughter to become a doctor. This child becomes the parent’s savior. Whether the mother’s “stage mother” behavior initially produces a conflict in the child depends on whether or not that child had a natural inclination to become a doctor. However, even if the child were so inclined, a conflict will develop as the child gets closer to the goal. If the son or daughter succeeds in getting through medical school, the mother may, for example, become depressed.

The reason that the mother becomes depressed is that the child’s success reminds her that she herself was not able to do what she had really wanted to do all along. When she reacts negatively to the child, she is in reality covertly thinking about her own disappointment. From the perspective of the child, however, it can easily look as if the mother never really wanted him or her to become a doctor in the first place. The child becomes depressed because success becomes equated with a sense of helplessness and futility over keeping the parent stable.

2. The avenger: The avenger acts out a parent’s forbidden anger and hostility. This often leads the avenger to develop antisocial traits. For example, a father who is angry at his own employer but who was expected by his own Depression-era parents to keep his nose to the grindstone may react with not-so-hidden glee when his son creates havoc for the son's boss at the son’s place of employment. If the son keeps it up, however, father then feels obligated to be critical, for two reasons. First, he was taught that such flagrant self-expression is wrong in employment contexts. Second, he really does not want to see his son lose his job.

3. The defective: This role often leads to somatization or chronic psychological impairment. It is often seen in families with traditional gender role conflicts. The parents may or may not be conflicted over the role of parent per se, but feel useless when they are no longer needed in their capacity as traditional family caretakers. Children of course grow up, and the empty nest approaches. During this period, the parents may have fantasies about being free from family obligations and indulging in their more individualistic tendencies. Unfortunately, they feel useless and vaguely guilty if they do indulge them.

The child of such parents fears becoming independent for fear the parents might develop a pathological empty nest syndrome. He or she responds by failing to become self-sufficient. So that the parents do not blame themselves for the child’s lack of independence, or feel as though they had been inadequate parents, the child blames this inability to take care of himself or herself on some physical or psychological disorder.

The actual disorder may or may not be present, and if present, may or may not be exaggerated. Often it is unclear whether or not the child is purposely exaggerating his or her apparent disability. This way, depending on whether the parent is feeling guilty or angry at a given time, the child can assuage one polarity and feed into the other. He or she attempts to regulate exactly how much of each their parents’ are experiencing, in order to provide maximum stability.

Diseases that were traditionally thought to be "psychosomatic" are usually the ones used by a defective in need of a physical impairment.  That is because they can be easily faked.  One can wheeze even when one is not having an asthma attack, or have a pseudo-seizure when not having a real seizure.

4. The go-between: In this situation, the child is triangulated into a conflictual parental marriage. One or both parents may use the child as a confidant to complain about the other parent. Sometimes the parent may even subconsicously induce the child to act as a sort of surrogate spouse - providing to that parent what the real spouse is not providing.  In the latter scenario, if the parent-child relationship has any sexual overtones, the child may exhibit histrionic traits. Sometimes, adult go-betweens are “on call” to settle marital disputes. Mother might come over and say to a grown daughter, “Go tell your father to do such and such; he won’t do it if I ask him but he will for you.” If the daughter complies, the mother may become jealous of her child’s relationship with the father.

5. Little man: This scenario is a variant of the savior role that leads to narcissistic issues. It is usually seen in males but may occur in a slightly different form with females. Gender role conflicts once again are the main culprit. In this situation, a woman who may have been taught as a child to be dependent on men and defer to men for most major decisions marries a man who is inadequate in some way. She may describe him as “never there for me.” He may be a poor provider due to a general unwillingness to work hard or may even desert the family altogether.

The woman then turns to her son to take care of her in all the ways his father did not. However, the son fails in this role for two reasons. One, he may be too young and simply lack the capabilities to look after her; he probably needs his mother to take care of him. Second, the mother resents his attempts at looking after her and subverts them. The reason for this is that she really is not - nor does she really want to be - as dependent as she may appear to be. The more the son tries to meet her needs, the more the mother emasculates him.

A male with narcissistic personality disorder may marry a female with BPD. Such a union is a common couple type seen in marital therapy and is an excellent example of a marital quid pro quo.  The female with BPD is almost a prototype of a woman who seems to be in dire need of someone who will take care of her, but who spoils any attempt by anyone to do so. The relationship of the narcissistic male with his mother is thusly re-created in an even more extreme form within the marital relationship.

6. Monster. These people become seemingly horrific people within the family through such reprehensible behavior as severe child abuse. Everyone loves to hate these people. They may even brag about their misdeeds so that other people are fooled into thinking they are actually proud of them and therefore hate them all the more. This role can serve various purposes, such as to take the heat off parents who were themselves playing the monster role.

The monster is in effect saying, “It was OK that you abused me because look how awful I am. I clearly deserved whatever it was you dished out. In fact, I even do the exact same things you did.” Such people rarely come to therapy, so I have mostly learned about this role indirectly when my patients have to deal with parents who played the role. I believe it is central in cases in which abused children become abusive parents themselves.

These are the major role types, but there are also supporting roles such as the circuit breaker, who distracts two warring family members just when their arguments are about to escalate into violence. There is also the switchboard, who relays messages between other family members who are playing the major roles and their parents when the two parties are not speaking directly to one another.