Understand that as ACAs, ever the good little, loyal soldiers, we spent our childhoods trying to manage the unmanageable disease of addiction. That means we were trying to manage a drug addict, but they still more or less look like Dad or Mom. So we don’t know that this isn’t normal; we don’t see the illness. Our parent simply keeps acting in strange and frightening or “fun” or smarmy ways. But we keep thinking it’s our parent, and our parent keeps using our name and wearing the same clothes and walking through our living room and thus, dragging us into their altered state.
We keep trying to relate, to connect, and to find them. Sometimes we get it right, and sometimes we don’t, but we keep trying. This becomes a set-up for not knowing what “normal” is, both in a relationship with another person and with our own inner responses. We, too, become out of whack on the inside.
As ACAs, we have been the first responders in a constantly unfolding crisis, always trying to put out fires and manage the chaos and confusion of a family in free fall; picking up dropped balls and making our own school lunches and maybe our kid sisters’ and brothers’, too. Lying about why our homework isn’t done, why our permission slips aren’t signed, and why our parent forgot to pick us up or to show up for the class project.
Schedules are firm one day and forgotten the next. Missing things becomes routine. Plans fall apart or never happen. And just when we felt we’ve figured out how to handle the situation, that we had gotten the new family rules of engagement straight, they change all over again, leaving us with a lingering case of emotional vertigo or psychological whiplash.
If we lived with addiction, we lived with dysregulation, with polarization—with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The grown-ups in our world were constantly changing before our very eyes. So we may have learned very young not to rely on or trust the people who were supposed to be in charge of us, or maybe worse, to trust them only sometimes (But which times, exactly?). After all, we were little kids making sense of the world with the developmental equipment we had at the time.
We loved and needed our parents just to survive. So, because of our proximity and neediness and our deep love and attachment, what went on with our parents went on with us, too. It affected us very deeply. Our parents, simply put, were the most important people in the world to us. They “ran the show”—they were the show. So our hearts were constantly being twisted into painful shapes, watching our addicted parent move in and out of reality as we knew it (or thought we knew it) and our other parent trying franticly to keep up appearances, put on a brave face, lie, distort, and deny what is going on right in front of us (or was it?).
💫 An excerpt from The Soulful Journey of Recovery https://www.amazon.com/Soulful-Journey-Recover…/…/075732200X 💫
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