On airplanes, we are told that if the cabin pressure drops, oxygen masks will automatically descend. If a child is seated next to us, we are to put on our own mask first, then the child's. Likewise, we parents who are frantically trying to save our children from the consequences of addictive disease must first take steps to save ourselves. We can be more help to everyone around us once we've put on our own oxygen masks.
At this point, unfortunately, the airplane oxygen-mask metaphor breaks down, for we cannot predict that a child will accept the oxygen of recovery or maintain recovery thereafter. There is no cause and effect relationship between a parent's getting help for living with an addicted child and that child's starting recovery. Some children get well, some don't. Moreover, a parent may be the last person from whom an addicted child will ever agree to receive that oxygen. However, regardless of what our children do or don't do, we parents can choose our own restoration to an abundant life -- a life not only worth living but full of serenity and joy. Anxiety and fear can essentially vanish for us. Sounds impossible, doesn't it?
When we first learned in 1978 that one of our daughters was an alcoholic, we were in shock and frantic with worry. We eventually took the advice of friends and professional counselors and began attending Al-Anon, the successful self-help recovery group for friends and families of alcoholics. As our other three children also succumbed to this dreadful disease, we continued our participation in the recovery groups in order to preserve our own sanity and balance.
The main reason most people, parents included, initially seek help is because they passionately want to find out how to cure the alcoholic or addict in their lives and how to stop the drinking and using. They're sure that they can then relax and feel better. Instead, they discover they have the power to change only themselves. It's an awful shock at first. Parents may feel cheated. Those accustomed to degrees of influence over their children are especially bewildered and often resentful.
As people learn about an addictive disease, however, they come to understand and welcome the limitations of powerlessness which produce strength and release, not weakness and constraint. Painful experiences further demonstrate the difficulty of making necessary changes alone without support and reinforcement from others.
The standard unofficial figure for the incidence of adult alcoholism in the U.S. population is 10 percent, or about 22,500,000 people; yet parents of alcoholics (POAs) are not well represented in recovery groups. The most common reasons are:
The basic feelings parents have for their children are universal regardless of socioeconomic, ethnic and educational background. Our children never stop being our children. We hurt when our children hurt.
Like so many others, we found that the common denominator of parental recovery is being in a group that both understands what the parent is experiencing and provides the tools for adjusting to a saner way of living. For us, Al-Anon and related 12-step programs became our lifeline. Through these groups, we have encountered more and more parents of alcoholics from all parts of the country. There is an obvious need for alcoholic parents recovery groups, although parents of alcoholics are still a distinct minority in the traditional recovery groups.
Sometimes the parents we meet are young, with alcoholic teenagers. Other parents are in their 60s and occasionally 70s, with middle-aged alcoholic adult children. These older parents frequently have additional heartbreaking concerns for grandchildren being neglected or abused in the home of an alcoholic son or daughter. One or both parents of alcoholic children may be recovering alcoholics themselves. Alcoholism is truly a family disease; but besides alcohol and drugs, addictions to food and nicotine are present in our own immediate nuclear family. This constellation of addictions is also found in extended family members of our generation, in some of our children's cousins and in our grandparents' generation. Several relatives have died of alcoholism, including a brother. Addictive diseases are widespread throughout the generations of families we encounter in our recovery groups.
Occasionally, neither parent has any known family history of addiction. In these cases, the disease seems to have surfaced unaccountably and mysteriously in an adult child. The alcoholic parent may be quicker to recognize and accept the existence of addiction in the adult alcoholic child, but all parents fear the consequences and grieve for their children.
While the recovery groups have been indispensable guides for us, some of the issues related to being the parent of an alcoholic/addict are not generally recognized or clearly expressed. This results in feelings of loneliness and isolation, especially for newcomer parents who may not immediately connect their own stories with the universal themes in the stories of distraught spouses and adult children of alcoholics.
In addition, we've found that parents of alcoholic children have some significant added concerns. For example, a primary parental instinct is to save a child's life, whether the child is four or 40. Fear that one's child could die from addiction severely affects the attitudes and behaviors of fed-up, frightened, confused parents. The strength of this elemental fear parents feel for their children seems to exceed the strongly felt fears for addicted spouses/partners, or even that of children for their addicted parents.
Besides fear, there are parental feelings of shame, anger and grief that a child can fall afoul of the law, disgrace a family's image, or not fulfill his or her potential. Many parents are baffled and mortified by what they perceive as unacceptable failures of morality, willpower, or self-control in their children. These parental responses are typical whether the parent is a true nonaddict, an unacknowledged addict or a recovering addict, especially if the parents are living apparently upright, productive lives. There are powerful issues of parental control and expectations, even when the child is fully adult.
The problems are compounded when the parent is uninformed or misinformed about the disease of addiction, not realizing that tried-and-true principles of parenting such as rescuing, scolding, threatening or protecting the minor or adult child in trouble won't work well in the case of addictive disease. Learning to let go and "detach with love" from a suffering child goes against every normal parental instinct. Everything within us as parents screams that we can't possibly allow a beloved child to spiral down into certain disaster or death. Parents aren't supposed to back off; we're supposed to help. But addictive disease is a strange, paradoxical beast that requires turning upside-down most of our notions of what it means to "help." A year from now, or five years, the story will be different. We need to remember the fluid nature of addictive disease and recovery in both parent and child.
Eventually, despite all your resistance, you may finally be propelled, as we and other parents have been, to seek relief from fear, despair and demoralization; from that wild sense of life spinning out of control; and from anger, confusion, and often somatic symptoms in ourselves, such as physical exhaustion, insomnia, headaches and stomach upsets. We urge you to set aside your pride, your shame, your fear of losing control, and let others who are walking your same path help you. Choose to live!
Sally and David B. have been involved for many years as consultants, presenters, lecturers, teachers and workshop facilitators in alcoholism. Sally has been sober over 20 years, and both she and David have been in Al-Anon nearly that long. Sally has an M.S. in Recreation and a Master of Divinity degree. David received his master's degree from MIT. They share their story and stories from other POAs (Parents of Alcoholics) in their book, "Our Children Are Alcoholics: Coping with Children Who Have Addictions," available from Islewest Publishing, 800/557-9867.