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.

In the first article in this series we started discussing the consequences of parental drinking to the family members. The secondary article focused on physical stress alcohol consumption by parents causes to their children.

Now it’s time to discuss how emotions from an environment where alcohol abuse takes place affect the children of alcoholics for their entire life.

Alcohol abuse in the family causes intense emotional abuse to the children. Usually the fact that a child cannot remember what happened to him at very early ages it is associated with lack of sensibility at those ages. This is a mistake. A child lives threats and fears at a much higher intensity at early ages than the adults. He is subject to emotional stress much more than an adult is. Only that the child will not remember later the facts that caused the stress. But the feelings lived in infancy are very well recorded.

A Clinical case-

An acquaintance of mine admitted that he had beaten his wife when he was drunk before the divorce and that he had a 3 years old child at that time. I asked him if his son was the witness of those violent scenes. He answered: “Yes, he was the witness but that was no problem because the child was little and he didn’t understand anything”. However, when clinically investigating his boy who now is a 19 years old young man, he was exhibiting obvious signs of emotional abuses he was submitted to as a child.

Let’s see what is happening in such situations: first of all, the breast-feeding baby is tightly close to his mother. He feels all the threats his mother is exposed at, as if these threats were addressed to his own life. He understands not only when his mother was threatened and aggressed but he even perceives them with such high intensity, an adult isn’t able to imagine.

Another clinical case:

A clerk, an alcoholic, was frequently provoking violence in the family. His wife says that one day when her husband was sober he told her: “Look how the little one is reacting!” …and then the man simulated that he was moving towards his wife with his hands raised up threatening her. The baby who was only a few months old, and who was swaddled in his bed and was looking to them, immediately started to cry.

The baby’s painful memories are not disappearing over the ages. Although as he was growing up he won’t be able to evoke what happened at that time. But in an associative way, the emotions related to this trauma in infancy will invade the person’s mind on various occasions. The person will occasionally notice that he is invaded by intense, unusual emotions or that he reacts in a much more intense way, loosing his temper in situations in which the others would be indifferent. For instance when someone is talking to him in a loud and angry voice, the ancient quarrels in the family he was a witness of, are unconsciously appearing in his memory.

Before we move on with explanations in the next article, I want to hear from you… what are your experiences in this area ?