Alcohol Treatment Help Weblog

In the first three articles on children of alcoholics we started showing how alcohol abuse by parents affect children’s life both physically and emotionally. There are important consequences of drinking most of the time ignored by people simply because of lack of information and proper education since early ages.

You can read these articles here:

1. Insidious damages inflicted on drinker’s family. Children of alcoholics. (part 1)
2. Insidious damages inflicted on drinker’s family. Children of alcoholics. (part 2)
3. Children of alcoholics. Part 3 - emotional life.

Today we continue with drinking consequences on children’s emotional life. The first article on emotional life showed how very young children and infants are suffering from family violence in general and how alcohol is most of the time the primary cause for such violence. A simple scene of both parents arguing is perceived by the child with much higher intensity than we can imagine and the memory of that feeling does not disappear while he grows, affecting his emotional stability.

In what follows, I will lay down an example (A clinical case) which doesn’t refer to alcoholism but which proves the possibility of re-memorization of emotions related to incidents happened before the child is one year old.

The adoptive mother of a little girl has noticed that at the bed time when she was covering the little girl’s face with a sheet, this one had an unusual emotional reaction .She was screaming: ”No, no, mummy you are suffocating me!” Her face was whitening; she was trembling and was crying for hours. The adoptive mother had taken the girl from the orphanage when the latter was only 9 months old. Alarmed, she made investigations and found out that at the orphanage, a nurse annoyed by the babies who were crying was suffocating them with the pillow put on their face to shut up.

The example displays on one hand the unpleasant events happened at youngest ages that don’t disappear from the memory and affect the child’s behavior for the rest of his life.

Let’s get back to the idea mentioned above: the irritated and/or angry voice unwillingly and unconsciously evokes the ancient quarrels from the house of the former children of alcoholics after they have grown up.
Almost without exception, the adults who have assisted some other time as children to fights (either physical or verbal) provoked by the drunken and violent father have intense affective reactions when they hear such voices around them. This happens even if the voices are addressed to someone else, having no implication in. We talk about an associative stimulus that evokes the emotional part of remembrances without having the possibility to evoke the concrete event too.

Let’s take these hidden, perverse consequences of the drunkenness scenes happened in the family: the child who is an adult now will react in an irritating way when he is addressed in a load voice. The emotion is so unbearable that in order to calm down he will throw down objects, he will smash things, he will rush to people to beat them, and he will insult them due to an affect he is dominated by, regretting after that and being not able to explain it or to abstain from it.

But his life partner is not obliged to bear living next to a man who breaks windows with no reason apparently. She won’t understand these gestures as an unconscious defense reaction in front of an emotion hard to imagine and to repress. On the contrary, she will interpret it as an offensive, violent gesture by the type: “He broke my crystal vase that was a present from my mother”. Neither the boss from the working place, nor the owner, nor the colleagues, nor his friends are obliged to bear some reactions they don’t understand, perceiving them as gestures addressed against them. The consequences might be the following: divorce with bad consequences for children, difficulties at the working place, social isolation or undeserved repressions.

There are various cases of families within which a professional observer may see how the casualty chain is extended from an alcoholic, “brawler” father to the descendent families, going further along many generations.

An example:

An intellectual but an alcoholic and a violent person who was maltreating his wife had three children. The eldest son with university studies had self exiled on another continent on the opposite side of the world when he had the opportunity to go, to forget about the remembrance of “the hell” he had at home.

He has been traumatized since he was a little boy by the “show” of the scandals and fights from his family, having been beaten since he was 3 years old - for instance for the blame of falling down when he was playing. He displayed a strange behavior that was a regressive infantile one, excessively protective with his beloved reaching the edge of even terrorizing them with his care, excessively intellectualized, characterized by a snobbism got to the extreme of absurdity on one hand and mendacity in his attempt to save his deteriorated self esteem on the other hand. He was married twice, but both marriages failed due to his character. He had two daughters. The younger daughter suffers of deviant disturbances explained by her living together with a man having her father’s character.

The other child of the drunken intellectual we are talking about was a daughter. She suffers of Oedipal Pathology preferring to excuse and to deny the negative consequences of the paternal alcoholism, irrationally blaming her mother who has suffered all her life like a martyr, trying to help her children. But in fact, this daughter has developed an envious character, full of resentments, deliriously attributing bad intentions to those who were around her.

Perfectionist, obsessed by the others’ opinion about her and her family, she has always tried to make up for the shame of a denigrated child grown up in poverty in the house of an alcoholic. She has always raised the standard of performances for her and her children.

The direct consequence was that her son, an intellectual with a high level of performances has self exiled on another continent too. This son, in the fourth decade of life, is still hesitating to get married stating: ”I’m afraid of not getting a woman like mother and to suffer like father”. His sister, wildly “pushed” by her mother to be the first at school and to satisfy her mother’s ambitions has become a doctor but in spite of her excellent intellectual capacities she wasn’t able to overpass an inferior hierarchical level of activity, hence her refuge in a bigoted religiosity.

Her son (the alcoholic’s grand-grandson), having been imperatively and restrictively educated under his grandmother’s influence (the alcoholic’s daughter), after getting excellent academic performances, in his need of over passing his reduced self esteem and the difficulties he had in socializing himself due to the way he was grown up, he began to drink and little by little he became an alcoholic to close the circle and to start another cycle of misfortunes and of a low quality life again and again.

A consequence of the infantile psychical traumas caused by an alcoholic father, may be, in girls’ case especially, the rush marriage, contracted by chance with an unfit person in most cases, in order to escape as soon as possible from the paternal house. Such marriage, at its turn, assumes the risk of a deep sufferance. The equivalent for boys in such cases is their going away leaving no address that punishes more the not-guilty parent than the alcoholic one.

Until the next article when we conclude this series, as always, I want to hear from you. Can you identify such cases ? There are differences in this evolution children of alcoholics take from culture to culture, from country to country or even from continent to continent. But the essence remains. Alcohol consumption by parents can affect their descendants for generations.

Let’s talk! Comments are open.

I participated to a group of Anonymous Alcoholics meeting one evening. The topic of the debate was about the troubles and the misfortunes alcohol generates to the Alcoholic himself.

That is, about the problems related to poverty, loss of job, improper qualification and limitation, the feeling of abandonment from the part of the partner or of his own children, the degradation of the person’s social relationship, and the release of his exploitation by the others; the loss of attraction, of stigmatization, fights and murders, driving and domestic accidents or of any other kin.

These have severe consequences such as: invalidity, death, loss of goods, the impossibility of succeeding in his own plans, projects or business affairs, the incapacity to manage his time with the loss of the deadlines, the incapacity to get and to use in his own benefit the outcomes and the success, the conflicts he has with the police, various civil and penal rights implications and many others.

I felt the need to intervene: yes, all these misfortunes frequently happen to the one who drinks a lot. But we are selfish if we complain only about what is happening to us.

Drinking consequences quickly overpass own persona and destroy beings and fates we would have never thought of. I am not talking here about the alcoholic’s partner, although the life spent with an alcoholic is so hard, and it could be understood only by the one who has lived such experience by himself. I neither talk here about the unhappy fate of that non alcoholic family whose parent was killed by a drunken driver on the zebra, after he had gone from the “Beer Festival” by car.

I am talking about children of alcoholics who suffer since before they are born if the mother drinks during pregnancy, who suffer when they are little and the parents fight, who develop most of the time heavy emotional and physical problems due to the fact that one or both of their parents are alcoholics. These children carry a burden all their lives directly inherited from parent’s deeds.

In the next articles we will start discussing the fate of the alcoholic’s children. We will try to list and discuss the damages the drunken persons inflict to their children without even knowing it. Before we start, what are your experiences on this topic ?

Read part two of “Insidious damages inflicted on drinker’s family. Children of alcoholics.” article here.

Alcohol is one of the most insidious drugs on earth. It builds the addiction without us even knowing it. Every glass of alcoholic beverage, be it a beer with the friends, or a cup of champagne at a festive occasion, modifies the nervous cells step by step, bit by bit, gradually increasing the appetite for the next glass.

From the first beer which most of the people do not like because of the taste and all the way to important daily quantities of alcohol, we cannot see the appetite increasing. And one day, when in the end we are forced to admit it, we are already ill of alcoholism, and by ourselves and without important help we are unable to stop drinking.

One thing, most campaigns against alcohol abuse fail to tell people:
It does not matter how long you have stopped from drinking. It does not matter if between two beers, for instance there have been months passing. The demand for alcohol by the nervous cells does not diminish in time!
If you take your next glass after three, or six, or twelve months, it will add to the existing appetite for alcohol. The physical demand counter does not reset like in nicotine for instance.

This is why, without proper knowledge and strong education since childhood about how alcohol really works and builds addiction, you cannot be held responsible for the fact that at some point you cannot quit. That point in time is - in most cases - too late to stop drinking without proper help.

This is why, only by developing and maintaining a strong and permanent desire to give up drinking alcohol, alongside with other medical and psychological methods - and not only by ourselves - but with help from others and from specialists, we are able to abstain and regain control over our lives.

Admitting that we might have an alcohol related problem is the first step to recovery. Because alcohol acts so undetected on us, it is good that from time to time we ask ourselves if we have not already developed addiction to it. It’s best to stay alert! Alcohol has tricked many great people into abuse, destroying many lives. Be curious and sincere to ask yourself! Try this self-administered test on alcohol addiction.

Welcome to AlcoholHelp.

This page tries to bring into discussion alcohol, alcoholism, drinking related problems, addiction, and most important: help directions and solutions, alcoholism treatment methods, what works and what not.

There are numerous popular beliefs about alcohol abuse and its effects. Some are true, some are just myths, and some are so obvious that we overlook them even if they are important when dealing with drinking problems.

When dealing with alcohol addiction, the medical profession is divided by various concepts, philosophical approaches, and - because we are error-prone - why not, numerous missconceptions. Different doctors will give you different explanations and different solutions.

One thing should be kept in mind: there is no final and omnipotent treatment method for alcohol addiction.

The truth is out there and has to be searched with an open mind and the best approaches come with experience in dealing day by day with alcohol related problems for many years.

Like in drugs addiction, dealing with alcohol addiction has some important characteristics to take into account when starting a treatment. We will try to outline and discuss them in this blog.

Do you think you might have a drinking problem? Try this alcoholism self-test in an attempt to find out.

Do you think you might have a drinking problem? Do you have someone dear who drinks too much ? Want to help someone quit drinking ? Are you a student willing to find out more ? Looking for alcoholism treatment methods ? …let’s talk.