Honor the power of your voice and begin your journey with us today!
Honor the power of your voice and begin your journey with us today!

Effects of Alcoholic Parents

Effects of alcoholic parents can be felt during childhood that can pass down addiction due to neglect, trauma, and abuse. As a result, it’s important to consider the upbringing of a child raised in an environment of alcohol abuse and take both parties into account. For parents, it is vital that you accept the problems your alcohol dependence has caused your children.

As a child of someone with an alcohol or drug addiction, you should be trying to recognize the ill effects that having an alcoholic or drug-abusing parent has had on you. No matter the role you may have played, each family member living with the effects of alcoholism will inevitably feel the damaging effects of alcoholic parents.

How An Alcoholic Parent Affects a Child

If you are wondering if you are currently being impacted by the effects of alcoholic parents, it’s important to look inward. Upon reflection, your current emotional distress may mirror the behaviors of your parent during your childhood.

When addressing your current situation, you will likely find clear links to the trauma that impacted your emotional development during childhood. This is because the negative experiences resulting from your parent’s alcoholism stay with you throughout your life. For this reason, the issues you face today are more than likely a direct result of the problems and pain you have felt as a child growing up—but probably didn’t realize it at the time.

Royal Life Centers offers an education and treatment program for adults who grew up in alcoholic or addicted families. By taking an objective look at his or her family of origin, each patient learns to identify feelings that require expression and behavior patterns that need to be changed.

The Dangerous Effects of Alcoholic Parents

Children of alcoholics often grow up shrouded in sadness. Unfortunately, just as the child learns to hide their parent’s alcohol abuse, they learn to hide their feelings too. The effects of alcoholic parents often result in rigidly imposed silence and denial. Commonly, this leads children to develop strict behavioral patterns that prevent them from changing and growing—until they get help.

It is also common for adult children of alcoholics (ACOA) to misunderstand the dynamics of a healthy relationship, as relationships with true reciprocity and functionality were trumped by relationships in which one person always needs to be in control.

In general, these adult children did not grow up learning healthy patterns of behavior. As a result, they invent maladaptive ways to feel safe in an unsafe environment. Unfortunately, these unhealthy behaviors may trick them into thinking they have some control over events, people, and their environment. However, they don’t protect them in the long run and result in toxic behaviors.  These unhealthy patterns of behavior may develop into personality types that allow them to function in their dysfunctional families. While they may help them survive the effects of alcoholic parents during childhood, the unhealthy behaviors turn self-destructive in adulthood.

What are the Signs of Alcohol Abuse in Adult Children of Alcoholics?

Many alcoholics and drug users are astonished when they recognize their childhood selves in their own children today. The more you can learn about children of alcoholics and addicts, the more you will learn about yourself—and the more it will help both their recovery and yours.

Repressed feelings may include:

  • Depression
  • Anxiety
  • Apathy 
  • Anger
  • Rage
  • Resentment
  • Fear
  • Guilt
  • Shame
  • Hopelessness
  • Helplessness
  • Insecurity
  • Inadequacy
  • Low self-esteem
  • Fear of abandonment
  • Confusion
  • Internal conflict

Self-defeating behaviors may include:

  • Denial
  • Isolation
  • Controlling
  • Caretaking
  • Perfectionism
  • Procrastination
  • Fear of failure
  • Blaming
  • Self-criticism
  • Difficulty with intimacy
  • Adopting a victim role
  • Inappropriate relationships
  • Approval seeking behaviors
  • Incapable of setting limits 
  • Inability to make commitments
  • Compulsions (food, work, money, or sex)
  • Poor relationships with authority figures

Royal Life Centers offers an education and treatment program for adults who grew up in alcoholic or addicted families. By taking an objective look at his or her family of origin, each patient learns to identify feelings that require expression and behavior patterns that need to be changed.

Am I an Adult Child of an Alcoholic (ACOA)?

No two children of an alcoholic parent are alike. This is just as true in that no two children are alike, nor any two sets of parents. No attempt to define “the addictive personality” has ever accurately  described every single person struggling with alcohol abuse. As a result, no adult child needs to fit a precise definition of an “the child of an alcoholic or addict.”

Yet all such children do grow up with certain very similar familial patterns and influences, and so they do share many of the shame problems and personality patterns. Two things in particular are very common amongst adult children of alcoholics: these children grow up with shame, and they are taught to hide it.

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