Laundry List Of Adult Children Of Alcoholics

Adult children of alcoholics have particular traits that make life more difficult for them to live healthy and fulfilled lives. If you are the adult child of an alcoholic, you may be living in survival mode, unaware you are unaware. ACOAs are often super responsible and tend to attract those into their lives who need to be rescued, fixed, or healed. If you are an adult child, you won't want to miss this episode with Lisa A. Romano, the Breakthrough Life Coach.

Transcript

So today we're going to be talking about the laundry list for adult children of alcoholics.

I think it's important that we recognize the laundry list for adult children of alcoholics and this is why.

When I was going through my recovery journey,

This happened after a deep awakening because prior to me recognizing what was wrong with me,

I felt stuck in some type of quantum goop like it was the matrix quagmire,

Like I was unhappy,

I was resentful,

I was angry,

I was sad,

I was lonely,

My relationship with my ex-husband was getting worse,

I felt more and more out of my mind,

Things weren't making sense to me and my body was failing.

I became someone I didn't recognize.

It was sort of like I felt I was locked inside of a bird cage.

I was like this lion that was locked inside of this tiny bird cage I wanted out and I didn't see a way out,

I couldn't figure out a way out and ultimately what I realized was that the brain can only play with the tools that are in the shed.

If you are a mom and you have three kids and you are in a dysfunctional relationship and your parents were adult children of alcoholics or alcoholics or narcissists,

Well,

They did not prepare you for the world.

You do not have the life skills necessary to navigate a dysfunctional marriage.

You do not have the life skills to parent your children in a way that is not frustrating or in a way that's going to benefit your children and get them to feel seen and heard nor is it going to prove to be a really joyful experience for you because parenting is the most difficult job in the world.

If you go out and you buy a car,

They pretty much act all the same way.

If you go to an ice skating rink,

You pretty much know what you're going to get.

You know you have to lace up your ice skates.

You know that the rink is oftentimes a circular rink.

You know that you're going to be going in circles.

You know if you fall,

You get up.

You know that if your pants get wet,

You can change them,

But when it comes to raising children,

Every child is different and they don't come with their own little handbook and you are the one that is going to have to adjust yourself to this little person's personality and you are also the one that is shaping this child's personality.

The less life skills that you have and the less healthy parenting that you received as a child,

The less equipped you're going to feel to raise these little children.

So it makes sense to identify the hole in the wall.

It makes sense to say,

Wait a minute,

Why am I struggling?

What do I need here?

How has my childhood affected me?

And obviously,

What can I do about it?

What is the cost of me not doing this work?

It is tremendous because what happens and it's happened in my life is that what you don't heal,

Your children are going to have to heal and if they don't heal it,

Then your grandchildren are going to have to heal it.

And the good news is that if you stop to take the time to heal your life,

Well then you help equip your children with the life skills that they need to heal their life and you save them so much drama into the future.

And this is the way we become cycle breakers.

This is the way we become way showers.

This is the way we become healers in our own life and in our family's life.

We actually break the cycle of generational trauma and I don't think there's any other noble,

A nobler path because you are saying to the universe,

Enough is enough.

This stops with me and I'm going to chisel off of this wheel of karma and I'm going to create a new pattern and I'm going to arm my children with new skills so that this does not continue.

So that my children,

My grandchildren,

My great grandchildren and so on and so on and so on have opportunities to change this world and live in harmony and balance in a way that I didn't have or my parents had or my grandparents had.

I mean it's just tremendous.

It's so beautiful when you really take up the rod of healing.

So let's talk about the laundry list for adult children of alcoholics.

The first one,

We became isolated and afraid of many people and authority figures.

We became approval seekers and lost our identity in the process.

That's codependency.

We are frightened by angry people and any personal criticism.

This is tied to shame.

We either became alcoholics,

Marry them or both or find another compulsive personality such as a workaholic to fulfill our sick abandonment needs.

So if you are the adult child of an alcoholic,

You feel abandoned.

You end up replaying the abandonment issue in future relationships.

So you always end up chasing after someone else's love,

Their time and their approval.

We live from the viewpoint of victims and we are attracted by that weakness in our love and friendship relationships.

We have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility and it is easier for us to be concerned with others rather than ourselves.

This enables us not to look too closely at our own faults and et cetera.

Again,

This is very symptomatic of codependency.

So if you are codependent,

You are other focused.

You know how to take care of someone else's pain and in doing that,

You're avoiding your own.

You do not have the life skills to look within to deal with your emotions.

Why?

Because you were taught as a child,

Your emotions were invalid.

There was no one conditioning you to look within and that's not your fault.

We get guilt feelings when we stand up for ourselves instead of giving in to others.

So it's so unnatural to put ourselves first.

We have so much shame.

We have so much fear around saying I.

We don't have healthy ego boundaries.

Oftentimes our homes were erratic.

They were chaotic.

They were unpredictable.

We were embarrassed by what was happening in our home and that shame made it impossible for us to look within and figure out what it is that we need.

So the shame trumps the confidence someone needs to say,

I think I feel I need,

I want.

We became addicted to excitement.

So our homes are chaotic,

Very unpredictable,

And that becomes our norm vibration or our resonance.

So when we meet people who are even keeled,

We think they're boring.

We don't want that guy.

We don't want that woman.

We want the woman that's making our head turn.

We want the man that's making our toes curl in bed.

We want the man that's charismatic,

That's exciting,

That has lots of problems that we can help resolve.

And that's because we are now resonating with unpredictability and chaos,

Which feels like excitement and it's our norm.

And that's why we're attracted to it.

And so the opposite of calm makes us feel like something's wrong.

We confuse love and pity and tend to love people we can pity and rescue.

When we are raised by unhealthy sick people,

We can love them and pity them at the same time.

And so you might feel sorry for someone that you love.

And I ask you to wonder,

Did you feel sorry for your alcoholic mom?

Did you feel sorry for your mom who was being really,

Really taken advantage of by your dad?

Did you feel sorry for your dad when he came home drunk and he lost another job?

So is your idea of love tied or mixed with this pity issue too?

Because if it is,

It's going to be really difficult for you to set boundaries with someone who is not doing what they're supposed to do in the future.

We have stuffed our feelings from our traumatic childhoods and have lost the ability to feel or express our feelings because it hurts so much.

So we're in denial.

And so not only does it hurt too much to express ourselves,

We don't know how.

This was a huge aha moment for me.

I had to teach myself how to get in touch with how I felt.

I had to get in touch with my true feelings,

With my inner child.

And then I had to learn how to honor those feelings and to give myself the space to cry and to grieve my childhood and to just allow myself to feel.

And that really was the process of re-parenting myself from a higher state of consciousness because I don't believe that you can heal trauma without increasing your state of consciousness.

And learning to do that masterfully and skillfully will absolutely set you free.

We judge ourselves harshly and have a very low sense of self-esteem.

I think that not only do we have a low sense of self-esteem,

We don't have a sense of self.

In order for me to develop a healthy sense of self,

When my personality was being shaped,

I needed an adult outside of me to mirror back,

Hey,

You're okay,

Or hey,

That's not good,

Or hey,

Watch out for that.

Lovingly,

Without withholding love,

Without punishing me,

Without withholding appreciation or validation.

So many of us were reared through the withholding of love or reared through guilt,

Reared through shame.

And so in order for me to develop a healthy sense of self,

I would have needed a consistent nurturing role model to help me see what I was doing wrong,

But also help me recognize what I was doing right.

So in order for you to develop a healthy sense of self,

You would have needed healthy mirroring from the outside,

And without that,

We can't develop a healthy sense of self.

So you're not crazy if you feel like you don't know yourself.

You're not crazy if you don't know who you are.

This is all the consequences of being raised by people who are dysfunctional.

We are dependent personalities who are terrified of abandonment feelings,

Which we receive from living with sick people who were never there emotionally for us.

Now if you think about abandonment,

It's really important,

It is so important because abandonment is akin to death.

And the human mind,

And I like to go into the mind because this is all science.

You could argue feelings and behaviors,

But you can't argue science.

And when we're thinking about the human brain,

We have to recognize that the brain is built to survive.

And the human brain associates abandonment with death.

And so if I am emotionally abandoned,

What is that telling my brain?

It's telling my brain that I do not have the support of the people that I need to survive this experience on earth.

If I am continually ignored,

Invalidated,

Left to cry,

Taught that my feelings are invalid,

I'm pushed around,

Love is being withheld from me,

I am denied medical care,

And so on,

If I am consistently ignored,

Then my brain considers that a problem.

I am now in survival mode and my brain then wires for protection.

My brain wires for fear.

I become hyper vigilant.

And so I am always on edge,

Afraid of the next shoe dropping,

Which is you abandoning me.

And so I will be codependent and I will enable you so that you don't abandon me.

I will look to please you.

I will be your biggest champion.

I will be your biggest cheerleader because the fear of you leaving me is tied to survival.

So this is neurological.

If you are the adult child and you fear abandonment,

You must understand you're not crazy.

This is neurological.

The good news is you can break through your subconscious programming,

You can change your life and you can break patterns and live an amazing life.

I'm proof.

Next one,

Alcoholism is a family disease and we became para alcoholics and took on the characteristics of that disease even though we did not pick up the drink.

What that means is that we lose control.

We feel like the person we're taking care of is in control of us.

So if we have someone who is drinking and is not paying their rent,

That makes us feel anxious.

So we feel out of control because that person's not doing what they should be doing.

Now this becomes a sense of paranoia.

It becomes the inability to think.

We may stop eating,

We may stop taking care of ourselves and these are all things that someone who's struggling with a addiction feels as well.

They feel like they're being controlled by whatever it is that they're addicted to and we feel like we're being controlled by whatever these people are doing or not doing.

So we take on the same symptoms.

Alcoholics are reactors rather than actors.

That means that we are reacting to what's happening outside of us rather than from a state of selfhood.

Remember we don't have a self.

Our childhoods have robbed us of a childhood.

We had none of that time and that space where adults were tending to us and making sure that our innate talents were fostered,

Were honored and were explored.

For instance,

I recently became a grandmother and I already have it in my head that I can't wait for my little granddaughter to start showing signs of what is innate and what is natural for her as opposed to being raised in my situation by parents who suppressed the fact that I wanted to be a writer.

My mother read my journals.

My mother laughed at my journals.

When I was 17 and my dad said,

What do you want to be?

And I said,

I'd like to be a writer.

He scoffed at me and said,

You'll never make any money.

You don't want to do that.

You want to do this.

So these are two prime examples of parents who did not value that since I was seven years old,

I wanted to write.

That was natural for me.

Healthy parents wait to see what's innate in their child and then they foster that.

Unhealthy parents say,

Oh,

You want to be a dancer?

No,

I want you to be an engineer.

Unhealthy parents say,

Oh,

You want to be a yoga instructor or you want to be a writer?

That's ridiculous.

You should be a lawyer.

You should be a doctor.

Why?

That's a parent who's got high narcissistic traits.

That's a parent who's saying,

I want to live through you.

I want to have bragging rights.

So your life is about me and me feeling better about me.

It's a covert conversation.

It's a covert relationship that a narcissistic parent has with the child sometimes before the child was even born.

So I hope that if you are struggling with who am I,

If you are struggling with what happened to me,

If you're struggling with where do I go,

That these traits of what it means to be the adult child of an alcoholic,

Which is called the laundry list,

Really help you pull some of the pieces of the puzzle together so that you can start figuring out what's wrong.

My catch phrase,

One of my catch phrases is it's not you,

It's your programming.

If you were raised by immature parents,

Then there have been consequences.

Dear one,

You don't have the life skills you need to live a clear,

Confident,

Peaceful,

Abundant life.

And that is not your fault.

You cannot play with tools in the shed that don't exist.

You cannot have life skills that you weren't given.

The good news is that once you know what's wrong,

You can start learning those life skills.

You can be put on a path that allows you to live an abundant life.

And I just think that is worth talking about.

It's worth shouting from the mountains.

So if you know the adult child of an alcoholic,

Or you know an adult child of an alcoholic,

Or maybe that's you,

Or if you know someone who's struggling with being the adult child of a narcissistic parent,

If you know someone who is struggling with raising their own children,

And you think maybe their childhood had something to do with it,

Share this with them.

Because this is information that can absolutely change and save their life and help them break unhealthy patterns so that their children can live an abundant life too.

Namaste everybody.

Until next time,

We got this.

Bye for now.

Reviews

Thank You!

these talks help me so much to deeply understand myself and why i am acting the way i am. everything slowly makes more and more sense. thank you for this, Lisa 🙏💗

Thank you for sharing this, Lisa. I have been listening for a long time to your meditations, podcasts and YouTube videos. I finally get it! This is the root of my problems. I am now attending the Twelve Steps of Adult Children of Alcoholics. I have you to thank for working on breaking this generational cycle. Thank you, my dear. You are an angel. Xox

So glad you added "no sense of self". You hit the nail on the head. I was just thinking about this very thing just yesterday. I am already in ACA and I love it and it was boggling my mind about the sense of self and lack of a self-concept thing wondering why I didn't know who I was but it makes total sense now! Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Wow!

Wow, this was spot on for me! Thank you! 😊🙏🏻

I’m so grateful for your work! Been following you for years. This episode showed me how far I’ve come and healed. The wound of being told I couldn’t be what I wanted to be brought me to tears when you mentioned it. Thank you for this comprehensive list. I shared instantly 🙏🏼

Thank you so much for this, very insightful and helpful 💜🌷💜🌷

Incredibly helpful. Thank you.

thanks for talking about ACA. I hope you do more talks about this issue 🕊namaste

Lisa, thank you so much for this confirmation that I am on the right path! I am an ACOA and have struggled my entire life with all of the items on this laundry list. My body finally broke down to the degree that I could no longer function and I knew it was time for me to heal my physical and emotional wounds once and for all. I have spent the last 3 years working diligently to end the cycle of abuse in my life. I am still a work in progress and it is incredibly difficult and painful work, but I am finally able to focus on myself, for myself, and not base my choices on what others think I "should" be doing. I am following my heart as an artist and I am living my life for me. So, thank you for validating that my struggles are not my fault and that I am not crazy and that I can and should put myself first! Namaste 🙏

Like the concise way that the information is presented

The shoe fits. Thanks for the clarity and acceptance.