Grandchildren Of Alcoholics: What You Need To Know

Grandchildren of alcoholics don't always know their parents are adult children of alcoholics, nor do they appreciate what this means for them. Adult children of alcoholics have been raised feeling ignored, invisible, and in fear due to unpredictable home life experiences. They generally do not know how to have fun, or how to let go. Feeling such a loss of personal power as children causes them to become rigid in their thinking, which leads to the need for control. Adult children of alcoholics often struggle with needing to be needed, with fixing and rescuing others, which are classic signs of codependency. In this episode, listen in to how Lisa A. Romano helps us understand the importance of recognizing how our parents' childhoods have impacted how they have parented us, and what that means if we discover we too struggle with codependency traits and symptoms.

Transcript

Welcome to the Breakdown to Breakthrough Podcast.

My name is Lisa A Romano.

I am a life coach,

Best-selling author,

YouTube vlogger,

Meditation teacher,

And expert in the field of codependency and narcissistic abuse.

I am a believer in the power of an organized mind.

My aim is to help people learn what it means to live above the veil of consciousness rather than living a reactive life.

May your heart feel blessed,

Your mind feel expanded,

And your spirit find hope as you spend time with me here at the Breakdown to Breakthrough Podcast.

So today we're going to be talking about what it feels like and what it is like to grow up as the grandchild of an alcoholic.

So thank you so much for being here.

Thank you so much for wanting to learn more about your past and how you can evolve past the past,

Past childhood trauma,

How you can recognize programs and patterns in yourself and rise above them and make your life better than it was before you knew what was wrong.

Lots of us go through life and we don't even know that we're unaware.

We're unaware,

We're unaware.

We go through life thinking that the thoughts that are in our head are ours alone as if we generated thoughts.

And we very rarely question where are the thoughts originating?

Where did they come from?

What are their basis?

What is their basis?

Well,

We aren't taught to like question our belief systems.

Well,

Why do I believe that?

Why don't I believe in that?

Like what's going on?

Where did these beliefs come from?

Why am I codependent?

Why am I a fixer?

Why don't I know how I feel?

Why don't I go after my dreams?

Why do I feel like a victim of circumstance?

Why do I feel like I can't move from point A to point B?

Why do I keep attracting toxic relationships?

I am the common denominator,

But what is it?

What's going on?

What's happening here?

Why can't I ever be happy?

If you're the grandchild of an alcoholic,

You have a distorted family image.

Like the way you think about your family is actually distorted and that's not your fault.

Many grandchildren of alcoholics don't even know that their parents are adult children of alcoholics,

Which means that their parents were alcoholics.

Lots of times this is because adult children of alcoholics don't even know that it's a thing,

That it's wrong to grow up in an alcoholic family or growing up in an alcoholic family is damaging and it affects you.

Lots of adult children of alcoholics think,

Oh,

Well,

That was my childhood.

My mother drank too much.

My father drank too much,

But I'm just going to be better.

I'm going to change things.

I just won't drink.

I will live in a nice community.

I won't raise my kids in a bad community.

I will learn how to cook for my children.

My mother never cooked.

She left us to fend for ourselves.

So I'm going to make sure that my kids have three square meals a day.

And so what an adult child of an alcoholic will do is they will look to fix what they can in the physical world,

In the superficial world,

But they don't recognize how they have been wounded on the inside.

And how could they?

They were raised by people who taught them that they needed to live in a hyper state of awareness.

They were raised to become hypervigilant.

They did not have parents who were attuning themselves to the children.

So there was no healthy modeling for how do you feel?

What do you think?

What do you need?

Children are conditioned to fear negative outcomes.

So if mommy or daddy drinks way too much and they're getting drunk and the house is falling apart,

Children have to live in survival and they cope that the best way that they can,

They control what they can and what they can control is what they say.

They can make themselves very small.

They can make themselves very rigid.

They could cut themselves off from their needs to make sure that they're not adding to the turmoil in the home.

So children are forced to abandon the self when they are,

When they grow up in an alcoholic home.

Now,

If you're like me,

You had parents who really never complained about their childhood.

Maybe once in a while it came up,

But they were unaware that they were so impacted that they struggled with abandonment trauma that they didn't have a healthy sense of self.

They never learned how to deal with negative emotions.

Many adult children of alcoholics,

Like I said earlier,

They just want to not drink or they want to try to do things differently,

But they end up recreating lots of the family dynamics outside of their conscious awareness of it.

I can tell you as the adult child of two unrecovered alcoholics,

My mother was very frustrated because she,

I would imagine,

Thought she was doing everything right,

But she still wasn't happy.

She never learned how to process her emotions.

She couldn't identify her emotions.

She attracted a man who was highly narcissistic and she catered to him and thought,

Well,

If I just take care of him,

Everything should work out all right.

But all it did was really make my dad worse and teach my dad that he really was the king of the castle and he didn't have to worry about anybody else but himself.

And so that taught us to do the same thing.

So the codependency just kept getting passed down from one generation to the next generation.

And as the grandchild of an alcoholic,

I felt crazy because I couldn't point at alcohol.

My family did a very good job of making everything look perfect,

But my dad went to work every day.

My mom stayed home and she cooked,

She cleaned,

She cleaned obsessively.

She was compulsive with her cleaning.

And I think that's one of the ways she ran away from her internal anxiety or her stuffing of her feelings or her inability to identify and express emotions.

So today I want to talk about how grandchildren of alcoholics have a distorted family image.

We feel like something's off and we oftentimes think there's something wrong with us.

Lots of us think like we're just making it up,

Like everything looks fine,

Like the feelings that I feel of disconnect,

Feeling like my mother doesn't love me.

I feel like I'm making it up or feeling like my father is never there for me,

Even though he's there on the couch every day.

I feel like I'm making it up.

This is a very common theme for grandchildren of alcoholics.

We don't trust ourselves.

And if you can't trust what you feel,

You end up with anxiety.

You can end up with depression.

You can end up drinking.

You can end up with eating disorders.

You can end up cutting yourself.

Like there are so many ways that the,

It manifests the inability to trust how you feel and acknowledge and validate how you feel.

And this is also the result of being invalidated by our parents and invalidated by grandparents.

We're told that we should just suck it up.

We're told like our life is perfect and we shouldn't feel the way we feel,

But we do.

And then it's a sort of gaslighting because I feel this way.

I can't access the emotions.

I'm being told by my mother that I'm just a drama queen.

I'm just,

I just want too much.

I'm selfish because from her perception,

She's doing everything right.

She's not drinking.

How could you want more from me?

If all I ever wanted as a little girl was for my mother to stop drinking.

And so she stops drinking,

But she never dealt with the trauma on the inside,

The feelings of abandonment,

The hyper-vigilance,

The inability to identify and connect to a feeling and to express a feeling.

She never dealt with that.

And so she has children who have feelings and she's frustrated by her children's feelings.

And the frustration leads to gaslighting and minimizing and mocking the children for having a feeling this very,

They're very emotionally immature.

And when you want to have something done in your life as the child of an unrecovered adult child of an alcoholic,

Or if you have a need,

It can frustrate someone who is unrecovered.

Sometimes unrecovered adult children of alcoholics that are highly religious will say,

Just pray about it.

There's no emotional connection.

Dad just told me to pray about it.

I feel abandoned.

I feel even more crazy.

We feel like our parents should be able to be there for us and connect to us,

But they don't.

And they can't.

When we are the grandchildren of alcoholics,

We have a distorted family image.

We are not seeing things clearly.

We have this contrast between our inner and our external reality and nobody in our environment is validating that for us.

And so without being validated,

We can feel like something's really wrong with us.

Some of the way that we'll feel is we are unable to see anything wrong in the family of origin,

Despite evidence to the contrary.

So we just,

Nope,

Nothing's wrong.

We often rave about how good our childhood was while they themselves are dysfunctional as adults.

So we are dysfunctional as adults.

That's evidence of a crappy childhood,

But we're telling the world that our childhood was perfect,

Which is definitely what a lot of grandchildren of alcoholics do.

And adult children of alcoholics do.

We have trouble attributing any of our present difficulties to our family background.

We're not making the connection to,

Well,

Why am I on my third marriage to an alcoholic?

Not even looking into the past.

It's like the past doesn't exist.

We're so disconnected from the idea that who we are today is a result of what we experienced that we stay detached from it,

But we're in the pattern and the program of it.

That's why I say,

It's not you,

It's your programming.

We tend to be positively diluted with rose colored glasses,

And we do not notice the dysfunction and insanity around us.

We just don't know how to acknowledge the dysfunction.

We don't know how to process it.

We don't know how to address it.

We are literally repeating the modeling that we learned as children.

We're accustomed to living in two realities and inside reality and an outside reality.

And we don't trust our instincts.

This is so profound.

It was me looking within and trying to figure out the landscape,

Observing my internal landscape.

And what I observed was that there was this outer reality where my mother and my father,

My sister,

My brother,

Where they existed and they looked pretty normal.

But on the inside,

I felt like everything was wrong.

I felt like I was breathing fiberglass and I would think there must be something wrong with my perception because they're acting like everything's fine,

But nothing felt fine.

And I couldn't go to my mom and I couldn't go to my dad because they kept telling me that what was wrong was me,

That there was nothing wrong.

It was very invalidating.

And so we are dealing with this,

Well,

I feel like something's wrong.

Am I crazy?

Am I making this up?

And we don't trust ourselves.

As a result,

I ended up with bizarre coping skills.

I used to count on my fingers.

So I would listen to someone talk.

I would repeat the sentence in my head.

And on my fingers,

I would count the letters of the sentence and I wanted it to land on a 10.

And so that's just a game that I played in my head.

I also memorized license plates on the way to school.

Or if we were driving in the car somewhere with our family,

I would look at license plates and I would just repeat the license plate in my head on a loop over and over and over.

I would pull my hair out of my head for a long time.

As I got older,

This morphed into an eating disorder and an exercise addiction and compulsive calorie counting and starving myself of calories and morphed into codependency and seeking approval and thinking that love was conditional and loving myself conditionally.

If I weigh a certain weight,

Then I'm okay.

If I go an ounce over that weight,

I'm not okay.

Like this black and white reality of my own personal worth.

If my boyfriend was nice to me,

That means that I'm good.

If my boyfriend's upset with me,

That means I'm bad.

If you follow along with that train of thought,

That means that you're not allowed to ever be yourself and possibly tell someone that you care about that you're upset with them.

You can't set a boundary if below the veil of consciousness,

You're operating and you believe that if someone's upset with you,

That means that you're not good.

When I was a little girl,

That was the pattern that stuck in my subconscious mind.

I cannot upset mommy.

I cannot upset daddy.

And so I walked around on eggshells as a little girl trying to control my emotions,

Stuffing my emotions in fear of upsetting my mother and my father.

The black and white thinking was,

Well,

If they're happy,

I'm good.

If they're unhappy,

I'm bad.

I don't want to be bad.

So let me look to make my parents happy.

And how do I do that?

Just stay out of their way.

Smile on cue.

Pretend I have no feelings.

And this is the way I live my life.

Try to do good in school.

Try to not give them too much trouble.

Have no needs.

Never ask for anything.

Never act like I wanted anything.

Tone yourself down.

Make yourself really small.

That seemed to make my parents happy.

Another thing that we do is we smile and we say yes,

Even though we're dying inside.

We say yes when we mean no.

We've learned that the way we look is more important than the way we feel.

Pretending that everything's okay,

Even though you feel like you're broken on the inside,

That's the name of the game.

Just people please.

Just acquiesce.

Just subjugate.

Just pretend you're not falling apart on the inside.

We don't seek help because we don't believe that we have a problem.

We think we are the problem and we're ashamed of it.

So we don't believe that there's a legitimate problem and so we don't seek help.

We oftentimes don't seek help because our family has conditioned us to believe that if we ask for help,

We're weak.

We get the feeling from unrecovered adult children of alcoholics that we should just know how to figure out our lives.

And if we want something from our parents and they're frustrated,

Then we get the message that it's wrong to want something.

We get the sense that we are good if we have no needs,

If we just figure it out for ourselves.

And so we're struggling,

We're suffering,

But we don't know how to ask for help.

We just have all of this cognitive dissonance.

We have all of these conflicts.

I feel like something's wrong.

I need help,

But I don't know what the problem is.

And if I'm the problem,

Then that's embarrassing and I'm ashamed of that.

And then if I ask for help,

Then that means that I'm weak.

And so we're overwrought with all of this dysfunction.

We're overwrought with all of these faulty belief systems.

In our intimate relationships,

We find ourselves taking on the role of the person who has it all together.

I'm the one that you can rely on.

I'm the one that can figure out all your problems.

That's the way we function.

We function to pretend that we're together.

It's the way we hold ourselves together.

We don't realize that we're falling apart on the inside.

That definitely happened to me after 12 years of marriage.

I could not pretend that I was happy any longer.

I had to tell my husband the truth.

I had to tell him I was miserable.

I had to tell him I was unhappy.

I had to tell him that there was just way too much stress.

I couldn't pretend that I wanted to be married to him anymore.

And something had to change.

Unfortunately,

Or fortunately,

Depending on how you look at it,

He wasn't too happy with that.

He became very angry.

He refused to change with me and we ended up getting a divorce.

But I transferred over this.

I'll just pretend that I'm happy.

Just like I learned to do as a child into my marriage.

I'll just try to take care of everybody else and I'll ignore myself.

Well,

Three children later,

A business later,

12 years later,

And I couldn't handle that stress anymore.

My body was falling apart.

I didn't even make the connection to being so sick.

I was so used to ignoring myself,

Even when I was sick that I drove myself to a doctor's office when I was breathing with less than 20% or about 20% of one lung.

I was so,

So sick,

But I was so used to being detached from my internal world.

I didn't even know how sick I was.

And that is also a sign.

If you are someone who ignores how you feel physically,

If you don't go to the doctor,

If you go to the doctor and you don't even realize how sick you are,

You really want to investigate that.

Why aren't you taking care of yourself?

Why is it so foreign for you to honor how you feel?

What is it about accepting that you need help?

What is it about accepting the fact that you don't feel well,

That's so frightening for you?

Well,

If you were taught that when you said,

I don't feel good,

You were called a drama queen,

Or your parents said,

Oh,

You're just looking for attention.

If you were gaslit by dysfunctional family members,

If you were raised to believe that getting sick meant that you were weak,

You couldn't figure it out.

Toughen up,

Toughen up.

If that was your conditioning as an adult,

That's your way of being.

And it's not serving you.

In our marriages,

We can become defensive about our families too.

We can want to protect them.

And we might be unwilling to admit that we have flaws.

It's so scary for us to admit that we're not perfect because we have been conditioned to believe in this perfectionistic facade.

And now when someone says,

Hey,

You know,

I think you're a little bit too rigid about this,

Or why can't you ever have fun?

We get very,

Very defensive because what are you talking about?

Like,

This is the face that I learned to believe was it,

Like this is the facade that has protected me since I'm a child.

Now you're telling me there's something wrong with it.

It does not compute.

And we can be very,

Very wounded by it.

And we can become reactionary.

We are people who have lived our life surrounded by pain and we can triage pain very well because it's what we're used to.

We're used to chaos.

We're used to craziness.

We're used to emotional upset and we're used to shunting our emotions.

And so something terrible can happen around us and we can actually spring into action.

And so these are some of the symptoms of being the grandchild of an alcoholic.

And I just want to encourage anyone out there.

I want you to know that there is help.

There is a way out.

I want you to know that learning about your family history is going to serve you.

I want you to know that there's nothing wrong with looking at your family objectively.

I think it's absolutely imperative that we all learn to look at our family objectively,

That we take our rose colored glasses off,

That we recognize there might be an inner child inside of us that feels like we're being disloyal to our families.

Especially if we have a mom who is an alcoholic and then went into AA,

There might be this propensity to like gloss everything over.

And we don't want to talk about how you were affected by mom's alcoholism or your grandmother's alcoholism.

And I caution you,

If that's the road that you take,

Because that most likely isn't going to end well,

Because if you've adopted coping mechanisms that kept you safe as a child,

Those same coping mechanisms are going to keep you stuck,

Repeating the past.

So you won't know how to show up your authentic self.

You won't know how to set a boundary.

You won't know how to identify your feelings.

You'll just keep working or you'll keep pretending that you're okay when you're not okay.

And so if this resonates with you and you believe that your family has been affected by alcoholism,

I really do encourage you to look at your family more objectively,

To recognize that your family system wasn't perfect.

It's not you.

It's not your fault that you were born into a family system that was affected by alcoholism,

Which was affected by denial,

The inability for people to acknowledge there is a problem and we need to address it.

You were not raised in a home that modeled how to get in touch with your emotions.

That's not your fault.

But I can tell you that if you develop codependency as a result of it,

Until you awaken and until you take stock of how your life has been affected by your past,

You're doomed to recreate it.

You may marry an alcoholic.

You may end up with addiction issues.

You may end up with anxiety.

You may end up feeling like life is just passing you by.

You may end up feeling like a victim of circumstance.

Things happen to me.

You may not know or ever learn that you can really get out ahead of these wounds.

You can heal your inner child.

You can learn to speak to your body from a higher state of awareness.

You can learn to change the way that you think.

You can change your goals.

You can create new dreams.

You can create new goals.

It's never too late.

We talk about how you were affected by feeling abandoned,

How you learned to seek approval,

How you have been hypervigilant,

How you haven't been allowed to access your emotions,

How without gentle accountability,

Without recognizing,

Well,

How am I showing up today?

You can't shift.

We talk about how you can tune your focus to things that you want.

Adult children of alcoholics and grandchildren of alcoholics are very clear about what they don't want,

But they're not very clear about what they do want.

I just want to encourage you that if you are the grandchild of an alcoholic or the adult child of an alcoholic to never give up,

To know that there is a way out,

To know that codependency is often a big part of the way that we relate to the world.

We just don't feel good enough and we don't even know why.

Sometimes we don't even know that we don't feel good enough.

How sad is that?

We operate below the veil of consciousness seeking approval,

Being a fixer.

We give ourselves conditional love.

We don't know how to love ourselves unconditionally.

We wait for someone else to tell us that they approve of us.

We wait for someone else to give us permission to feel what we feel.

We're literally the inner child in adult form and we don't even know it.

I hope this has been helpful.

Namaste,

Everybody.

Until next time,

Be careful out there.

Remember,

When you're out and about,

Don't forget to think.

Namaste.

Until next time.

Bye.

Reviews

I related to so much of that. Thanks

🙏🙏🙏