Adult Children Secrets of Dysfunctional Families

by John Friel

  While Frank could not identify the source of his gnawing, Tina could. It frightened her even more so because she could. For months she had shoved the feelings away until she could do it no longer. What she was feeling was resentment toward Frank, and as she told herself over and over and over again, that was unthinkable! And because it was unthinkable, because her marriage as she viewed it was the perfect marriage and all that she had ever hoped to attain, she entered deeper into a trap with Frank, nearer and nearer to the center of the trap where they would together step on the mechanism that was to snap the jaws of the trap around their deeply entwined lives.

  She followed Frank’s lead and poured herself into community activities and jaunts and projects with the children and all of their friends. She received praise after praise from friends and community leaders. She was elected to local boards and committees. Her life became a dizzying whirlwind of success, after wonderful success as a parent, friend and innovative community leader.

  At last their oldest child, Jason, entered the trap with them. At the age of seven he began to have problems in school. He was bright and both he and the teachers knew it, yet he began to forget to bring home his schoolwork for his mother to see. He started bullying other children and acting up in class. He did lots of things to get attention but very few of them were constructive.

  When the school finally contacted Tina, she reacted coolly and calmly, stating that her son wouldn’t be acting that way were it not for insensitive teachers. Within days, she transferred Jason to a private school which was funded in large part by Frank’s electronics firm, and things seemed to be under control.

  Somewhere inside of her complex brain, a tiny little voice tried to speak to Tina. It was the voice of a little girl; an innocent, spontaneous voice. It was clear, and bright as a diamond, but very weak. It kept saying over and over, “Something’s wrong, Tina. Something’s wrong.“

  With her friends and relatives and community colleagues loudly praising her accomplishments on the outside, this little voice kept getting stronger and stronger on the inside. It created an internal battle that finally burst forth one Thursday evening as she and the three children sat quietly eating dinner.

  Frank walked through the front door, bursting with enthusiasm about the new contract that he had landed just as Jason abruptly and loudly knocked over a glass of milk as he reached to hit his little sister in the shoulder. For a split second, they were in a surrealistic state of suspended animation. Tina’s eyes froze in shock then darted instantly from Jason to the milk, and finally rested in an icy glare, fixed and penetrating, on Frank. Her hands and face flushed with heat as a burst of primitive fury exploded inside her.

  All eyes were riveted on her as she leaped to a standing position, picked up her plateful of food and hurled it at Frank, grazing his forehead and splattering a mixture of asparagus and Hollandaise sauce over his suit and the foyer behind him. She screamed with a rage she did not know existed in anyone.

  “Don’t ever walk into this house again with that stupid grin on your face!”

  For another split second there was total silence, and then Tina simply crumpled into a ball on the dining room floor and began to sob deep heartrending sobs that began in the very center from which the little girl spoke to her and echoed eerily out into the night. She lay there and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed for what seemed like forever, and then she quietly walked upstairs to their bedroom and closed the door, locking it behind her.

  The children began to cry in fear and helplessness. It was the first time they had seen either of their parents do more than the occasional snapping that all parents do to each other. Frank just stood there in the foyer in absolute shock and disbelief. The trap had snapped around all of them months before—it was only now that they could all touch the pain. The pain was now real. They could smell it and taste it and see it and breathe it. This was to be the beginning, or the end, and not one of them knew which it was to be.

  Frank tried to quiet the children as best he knew how. Then he tried to get into the bedroom to talk to Tina, but the door remained locked the rest of the night. “Please just go away,” she would whimper whenever he tried to get into the bedroom.

  He slept on the couch in the living room that night, awakening several times with a knot in the pit of his stomach.

  Tina came down in the morning and fixed breakfast for Frank and the children. They didn’t talk at all over breakfast and the clink of the silverware on the china was empty and loud. Frank left for work dazed, tired and feeling lost. The children went to school with a sickness in their stomachs that lingered throughout the day.

  Tina cried most of the morning, alone and confused. The child inside of her had turned into a monster and she didn’t know what to do with it. In sheer panic and desperation, she picked up the telephone book and found the name of a psychotherapist. She spent most of the afternoon battling with herself over whether to call or not. But as the time neared for school to be out for the day, she picked up the phone and dialed the number.

  “I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” she told Frank and the children that evening, “but I’m going to get some help to find out. Something is terribly wrong and I can’t live this way anymore.”

  There are innumerable schools of psychotherapy and theories about why human beings run amuck for apparently “no reason,” and the formal diagnosis that Tina’s psychologist put on the insurance form for reimbursement came right out of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-III), but her brief summary notes, which she scribbled on Tina’s intake form, said it best:

  Thirty-three-year-old white female, married seven years, three children. Husband workaholic, wife experiencing severe co-dependent rage, depression, guilt and loss of identity following months of compulsive activity and several years of active denial.

  Frank was a workaholic, and Tina Davis did the only thing she knew how to do in the face of a loved one’s addiction—she let her own addiction escalate.

  At first she was addicted to Frank, waiting up for him when he was continually late at the office, reheating meals she had prepared hours before, nurturing and supporting Frank and his addiction, and denying the slowly-building resentment that at last burst forth in a flash of rage.

  In the end, she joined him in his addiction, taking on more and more work herself to try to blot out the frightening feelings that kept coming to the surface, and that she had never been taught how to deal with herself. And it is no coincidence that as the little child inside of her began to speak more clearly, her actual biological child began to speak up in the only way that he knew how—by acting out the unspoken, unrecognized tensions in the family while he was at school and at home.

  The fate of the Davis family has yet to unfold fully. Tina has entered into long-term therapy to begin the process of discovery and relearning necessary for her to avoid stepping into her own dependency traps again. Frank and the children, along with Tina, are all in family therapy.

  Frank’s awareness of the underlying dependencies in his own life is still very dim, and although he does not say it openly, he still believes that the problem is basically Tina’s. The family rules and bonds that gradually led him into his success-oriented work addiction are seductive and powerful, and the denial system that he took on by living in a family that “knows they love each other” but that has trouble expressing it spontaneously runs deep.

  In an addictive system of any kind, every member of the system is profoundly affected. For true health to occur in the new system that hopefully emerges from a crisis such as this, every member must change if the system is to remain intact.

  Sometimes, when only one or two members of a system become healthier, their only alternative to maintain their own health is to leave the system.

  The “Obvious” Family

  Sandy Dorset grew up in a suburb of Boston, the oldest of five children. Her father started drinking heavily soon after he married Sandy�
�s mother, and by the time Sandy arrived on the scene, he had been laid off from his job in a parts supply house due to financial problems within the company. Although he had a bachelor’s degree from a small state college in the area, his unresolved emotional difficulties and untreated alcoholism kept getting in the way of his finding a decent job.

  Sandy’s mother began working part-time as a licensed practical nurse to help ends meet while her husband went from job to job looking for the “right break.”

  During the next six years four more children were added to the Dorset household, and the combination of financial and childbearing stresses produced an explosive and draining situation at home. By the time Sandy was five years old, her father had become physically abusive to her mother, and was extremely verbally abusive with the children.

  Sandy recalls cowering in the corner of the living room, the younger children huddled around her for protection, as her father screamed and yelled, then hit her mother. These episodes would be followed by a few days, or even weeks of relative calm, then the whole cycle would repeat itself.

  Once, Sandy’s mother tried to get help for the family by talking to a friend who was in Al-Anon, and whose husband was making a successful recovery from alcoholism, but this enraged her husband so much that she never spoke to her friend again for fear of what her husband might do to her or the children.

  And so the Dorset family remained violently trapped throughout Sandy’s childhood, the periods of chaos interspersed with periods of gut-wrenching silence, with everyone holding their breath and walking on eggshells in hopes that it would get better—but it never did.

  Sandy learned to exist in this system by building a protective barrier around herself. When she was little, she played alone in her room for hours and hours, creating a fantasy world of imaginary friends and places in her mind. As she grew older, it became easier for her to block out the pain by staying away from home as much as she could, although this tore her in two directions at once, because a part of her felt the need to be at home to take care of her younger brothers and sisters.

  Like many children in alcoholic families, she became a star student academically, and she kept the family secret well. Everyone knew that the Dorsets were poor, but Sandy always managed to have a freshly pressed blouse to wear and she was always polite and eager to please. She never mentioned the horrible events that took place at home. Family honor is family honor, no matter what happens.

  In high school Sandy began to gain weight and had difficulty taking it off. By the time she entered the two-year nursing program she was 100 pounds overweight, but she never let it get her down. She excelled in the nursing program and was working full-time only three weeks after graduation.

  At the age of 25 Sandy Dorset started dating a young man who she felt must have been sent to her from heaven. He was gentle, caring, even nurturing, and he was attending the university to become a counselor. They never talked about her weight problem, but in the back of her mind she worried that it would eventually turn him off. Nevertheless, they dated continuously for several months, and then decided to get married.

  Two years into the marriage, Sandy gave birth to a baby girl. By this time her husband was working long hours as a counselor with disadvantaged youth, so she cut back her nursing duties to half-time to spend more time with the baby. It was also at this time that her husband had an affair with a friend of hers. Although she had sworn from as far back as she could remember that she would never drink any kind of alcoholic beverage, she began to drink to medicate the pain of a life that seemed to be crumbling all around her.

  As her marriage deteriorated, she drank more and more to deal with the horror of realizing that the whole pattern of her childhood was repeating itself. She became desperate and suicidal. And she was lucky . . . because the hospital staff where she was admitted after taking an overdose of sleeping pills was able to pick up on her chemical dependency very quickly.

  Distraught but relieved to have someone finally take care of her the way no one ever had when she was growing up, Sandy Dorset gladly accepted the hospital’s recommendation that she enter chemical dependency treatment, and it was there that her life truly began.

  Her road to recovery has not been an easy one. As with many alcoholics, stopping the alcohol intake itself was not nearly as hard as she thought it might be, but the pain of dealing with the underlying dependencies (co-dependencies as we now call them), with the tremendous amount of relearning that has to take place and of having to face head-on the emotional tortures of growing up in an abusive alcoholic family was at times more than she thought she could bear. Her husband had divorced her by now, and yet she kept on working and struggling and confronting her fears, angers and hurts.

  She began attending Adult Children of Alcoholics Al-Anon groups in addition to her A.A. groups and continued her gradual but steady climb out of the depths of despair. With each new step out of the darkness, she seemed to find healthier and healthier friends. Her weight, which had climbed to 150 pounds above normal at the height of her crisis, slowly began to come off. Her daughter was growing up to be a happy, well-adjusted child. For the first few years following treatment, Sandy dated irregularly but never seriously. She had a job and her daughter to look after, and her own recovery to manage. In her early thirties she met a man who truly was different. He was caring without taking responsibility for her problems. He got crabby on occasion but it never went beyond that. They would fight about things but would get them resolved and go on, none the worse for wear. They each spent time alone as well as together. And they each had their own A.A. meetings to go to.

  Sandy and her second husband have been married now for 15 years. While they have had their ups and downs as any couple does, the nightmare of her first life has turned into something quiet, comfortable and whole. Although the nightmare will never completely leave her, it has taken a realistic place in her past and serves as a constant reminder that whenever she gets under too much stress, or feels too insecure, or feels like her emotions are overwhelming, there is a healthy way for her to respond. Sandy Dorset is living now.

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  Who Are We?

  What Are Our Symptoms?

  Who are these adult children of dysfunctional families of whom we speak? Where do they live? How much money do they earn? What kinds of problems do they have? Who are these people anyway?

  “They” are us.

  At least 90–95% of us, as we will show later on. Many of us are adult children of alcoholic parents who fit the characteristics listed in Janet Woititz’ bestselling book Adult Children of Alcoholics (Woititz, 1983). Or we are women or men who “love” too much, as described by Robin Norwood (Norwood, 1985).

  As Terry Kellogg (1986) states: many of us are not just the victims of alcoholics or child abusers or spouse beaters, many of us become alcoholics, child abusers and spouse beaters ourselves whether we are male or female.

  As adult children of dysfunctional families we operate in a world of extremes— always seeking that healthy balance, the Golden Mean, but always seeming to fall short of the mark. The pendulum swings to one extreme and we feel lonely, isolated and afraid. We tire of this, and it swings to the other extreme, where we feel enmeshed, smothered and angry. Then it swings back again. This is true in many areas of our lives, until we get into a solid recovery program.

  On our way to conduct a workshop in Texas a few months ago, we generated a list of our own which might help to begin to describe the troubles that plague Adult Children:

  1. We are people who hit age 28 or 39 or 47 and suddenly find that something is wrong that we can no longer fix by ourselves. It may coincide with the normal stage crises described by Levinson (1978), Gould (1978), Sheehy (1974) and others, but its intensity and accompanying pain and confusion suggests that there are Adult Child issues beneath the surface.

  2. We are people who gaze at our peers on the street or at a party and say to ourselves, “I wish I could be like her or him.”

&n
bsp; 3. Or we say, “If only he knew what was really going on inside of me, he’d be appalled.”

  4. We are people who love our spouses and care deeply for our children, but find ourselves growing distant, detached and fearful in these relationships.

  5. Or we feel that everything in our lives is perfect until our sons or daughters become chemically dependent, bulimic, run away from home or attempt suicide.

  6. We are the underemployed, never seeming to be able to achieve our true work potential—stuck in jobs we loathe because we’re confused, afraid or lost.

  7. We are the chemically addicted, the sexually addicted and the eating disordered.

  8. We are the migraine sufferers, the exercise bulimics and the high achievers with troubled marriages.

  9. We are the social “stars” who feel terribly lonely amidst our wealth of friends.

  10. Some of us grew up in chaotic families and were weaned on alcoholism, incest and physical, emotional and spiritual abuse.

  11. Some of us are especially paralyzed now because the dysfunction we experienced was so subtle (covert) that we can’t even begin to put a finger on what it was that happened to us.

  12. Some of us were compared to a brother or sister who did well in school.

  13. Others were led to believe that we could only have worth and value if we became plumbers or doctors, electricians, lawyers or psychologists.

  14. Some walked on eggshells throughout childhood because the family was poor, Dad worked two jobs, Mom raised five kids pretty much by herself, and everyone was tired and on edge most of the time.

  15. Many of us were emotionally neglected because no one was physically there for us; or because they were there for us with material things but were absent emotionally.