Compulsive Families

Excerpted from
Bradshaw On The Family
By John Bradshaw

Checklist for How Your Self-Esteem Was Damaged in an Addicted Family

After 17 bitter years of painful alcoholism, I put the cork in the bottle 30 years ago. In many ways the last thing I would have believed as a child was that I would become an alcoholic. I cried myself to sleep many a night because of my father's drinking and his abandonment. Frozen with fear in my bed at night, I waited for him to come home, never knowing exactly what was going to happen. I hated alcoholism and all it stood for. I obsessed about his drinking day in and day out. At 30 years old, I wound up in Austin State Hospital on a voluntary commitment for the treatment of alcoholism.

As paradoxical as it seems, many children of alcoholics become alcoholics. And if they don't become alcoholics, they often marry alcoholics or people with some other compulsive, addictive personality disorder.

This paradoxical pattern focuses on the truth of "families as systems" more than any other single factor. Some 20 years ago, persons from alcoholic families started realizing that there were commonalities in their lives that seemed to have less to do with them and more to do with their families of origin. Led by Robert J. Ackerman, Claudia Black, Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse, Janet G. Woititz and Wayne Kritsberg, the Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACoA) movement formed. With the Adult Children's movement, the family systems concept took a giant step forward.

During the first decade of my recovery from alcoholism, I knew nothing of the Adult Children's phenomenon. I had dabbled intellectually with family systems. I had incorporated the work of Virginia Satir, Jay Haley and R. D. Laing into my adult theology classes at Palmer Episcopal Church in Houston. But I never got the connection with my own alcoholic family of origin. I thought that my addiction to excitement, my people-pleasing and approval-seeking, my overly developed sense of responsibility, my intimacy problems, my frantic compulsive lifestyle, my severe self-criticalness, my frozen feelings, my incessant good-guy act and my intense need to control were just personality quirks. I never dreamed that they were characteristics common to adults who as children lived in alcoholic families.

Even though I was recovering from alcoholism, I was still acutely compulsive. My compulsivity was causing life-damaging consequences. I was working, buying, smoking and eating compulsively. This realization led me to seek further treatment for my still-addicted personality.

The work in chemical dependency and especially the ACoA movement has helped me understand the nature of compulsivity and how it is set up in families who use ineffective coping skills to deal with anxiety and distress.

Adult Children of Alcoholics

The fact that there are common characteristics of children who grew up in alcoholic families betrays an underlying structure of disorder. I've outlined some traits of ACoA using the first letters of the phrase Adult Children of Alcoholics.

Addictive/compulsive behavior or marry addicts
Delusional thinking and denial about family of origin
Unmercifully judgmental of self or others
Lack good boundaries
Tolerate inappropriate behavior

Constantly seek approval
Have difficulty with intimate relationships
Incur guilt when standing up for self
Lie when it would be just as easy to tell the truth
Disabled will
Reactive rather than creative
Extremely loyal to a fault
Numbed out

Overreact to changes over which they have no control
Feel different from other people

Anxious and hyper vigilant
Low self-worth and internalized shame
Confuse love and pity
Overly rigid and serious, or just the opposite
Have difficulty finishing projects
Overly dependent and terrified of abandonment
Live life as a victim or offender
Intimidated by anger and personal criticism, or overly independent
Control madness-have an excessive need to control
Super-responsible or super-irresponsible

From this checklist it's clear that as children of alcoholics, we are not just reacting to the alcoholic's drinking. We are reacting to the relational issues: the anger, the control, the emotional unavailability of the alcoholic parent. These traits are a response to the trauma of the abandonment and ensuing shame that occur in alcoholic families.