I remember as a twelve year old, sitting alone in our living room after one of our by then typical family melt downs …….trying to make sense of the pain and general devastation of our once very happy family……trying to understand how kind, decent and loving people could cause each other such unrelenting pain, how we could say the things we were saying, hurl insults, act out in anger and rage……I recall saying to myself “wars do these things to people, separate loved ones, wound hearts,tear families apart. But somehow, we’re doing this to ourselves.”
Just as in a war people are forced to witness the dark side of humanity……those of us who live with addiction come up against it as well. It was my beloved Father, the man who loved and nurtured me, who gave me café au lait from his spoon, held my hand when we walked and took such pleasure in sitting me up on the kitchen counter to watch while he squeezed fresh orange juice for me. My Darling Dad who worked hard to give me a life with so much more than had ever been given to him. It was exactly this father who would sit with a glass of scotch in his hand and slowly, glass by glass, descend into becoming a monster. Who would become cruel and terrifying, tearing down what he had worked so hard to build; devastating those he loved the most, making the house shake with his rage and doing to us with his own hand, those very things that he had spent his life protecting us from.
And eventually the gravity of his illness sucked us all in, we all at one point or another shared his private hell with him until all of us lost our grip on normal.
To read the rest of this blog post by Tian Dayton, PhD, please go to:
https://medium.com/thrive-glob...-parent-5ecd5930e861
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