SENTIENT TIMES August/September 2002

A Childhood Stolen – and Redeemed

By John Darling

If psychology has one governing principle, it might be this fact—we suppress. We stuff and deny that which causes us (and others, especially family members) pain. We learn this in childhood as we try to survive and put together a world that works, a world in which we can be like other seemingly happy people.

As children, we don’t understand that most of those other seemingly happy people are also suppressing pain and doing what we’re doing: creating a secondary or false personality after the first one was not welcomed and validated by our parents and peers. This process creates a split in us which could be called “normal neurotic”—the me I show the world and the real me.

I’d tried all my adult life to be the real me and thought I’d succeeded. I’d done my deep work in the 1970s, doing primal screams in Reichian therapy, breathing through my birth trauma, parental disapproval syndrome and the unconscious death urge in rebirthing, plus tons of positive affirmations and visualizations, self-hypnosis, est, Wings, men’s groups, entheogens, truckloads of self-improvement books and just plain prayer.

It all helped but—and here we go into the embarrassingly frank disclosures of what hasn’t worked about my life that’s so familiar to the 30 million adult children of alcoholics—I’d left a trail of ex-wives, ex-jobs, ex-homes and ex-friends and it had happened over a long enough period that the pattern was painfully clear.

The only problem was: I didn’t know I was ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics). I thought I was cool, hip, wise, intelligent, self-sufficient (a big one for ACA), experienced, adventurous and truthful enough that I’d beaten the devil and wouldn’t turn out like my alcoholic parents. I did pretty well. I wasn’t an alcoholic or anything-oholic. I was conscious, evolved. My kids were happy, loved and smart. There was no “problem.” But denial is an ugly thing and it’s spell began to lift with my mom’s passing into the spirit world last winter. My younger sisters would go on and on about what a great lady she was but my older sister and I started talking over our nightmare memories of abandonment and shame that come when alcoholic parents disconnect from the basic instincts of love for the most beautiful creatures on earth—their own children.

My big sister Linda sent me some books on Adult Children of Alcoholics which, not wanting to even think I could be part of those 12-step (“I acknowledge my life has become unmanageable!”) programs, I let lay on my nightstand for a month. Finally I picked one up. I was on every page. It was one of those omahgawd moments. It’s all right here. I was never ready to see it. Till now.

The books were full of Linda’s underlines and margin notes: “Don’t talk, don’t feel, don’t trust” —the three rules of an alcoholic home. Ow! Was I still going to pretend that didn’t affect me? After all (denial here), my parents were high-performance alkies, afloat in the social, political and literary swirl of Michigan, my dad an author-historian, my mom a sort of Jackie Kennedy of the Great Lakes area. I grew up thinking maybe booze made you cool, happy and popular.

It didn’t. It only took parents away. Maybe they were gone already, I thought. I tried to fathom how they could override life’s most basic drive—to love and parent the next generation and ensure species survival. But what if they had their own big pain, too, I reasoned, like from two world wars, the Depression, and—their parents—the rigid and racist Victorian morality and class system, immigration trauma, the dehumanizing Industrial Revolution and the schizo Prohibition era that glamorized booze. Maybe my parents were ACA themselves—descended from generations of folk who loved the good, traditional “merriment” of Scotch and Irish whisky. And now, in the mid-twentieth century, life was changing fast—cars, appliances, tv, the cold war, divorce, juvenile delinquency, Elvis!

Fine, they had pain. The pain caused the alcohol and disconnection, not the other way round. Fine. But it didn’t matter. As I read further, I realized I was running a classic ACA coping mechanism: excusing the alcoholic parent and trying to patch together the family by rationalizing a system under which it all could make sense. But it couldn’t. Not to a child. For us kids, it was a Stephen King voyage into the soul of darkness. Mommy and Daddy aren’t here, even when they’re here. No one touches, speaks, looks at you, asks about your grades or friends or what you want to be when you grow up.

What do children do with this? They blame themselves and immerse into shame. That’s how innocent the kids are. The parents, godlike, are the source of all love and of life itself. We would die without them. Period. Therefore, we kids must be causing this. I will try to do better, be a better person, do more chores, never fight with siblings, not be loud at my games. The first casualty is play and laughter. We go from being 7 to being 30 and we lose that sense of play for good. Focusing on playing grown-up also carries us away from the parental war zone. We’re busy. We will (and do) win respect by overachieving. But we don’t win love. That’s the biggest casualty.

In every relationship through life, we struggle with intimacy—scarcely even know what it looks like. I read in the ACA books that it means trust, vulnerability, acceptance, empathy and genuineness. Cool. Sounds awesome. Seen it in movies. Finally experienced it, as most ACA people will say, when raising my children. But with an adult? Now there’s a storm-shrouded mountain to climb. I never understood what was running it, never saw the elephant in the back seat of the VW. I thought it was wild, the real, freedom-loving “me” distancing myself from intimacy and then scalding in the familiar childhood sense of shame and unworthiness. Or I would externalize, finding fault with the partner, engaging in fantasization that I just loved freedom too much and needed my space for spiritual growth—or I would look on societal codes about commitment and marriage as just unworkable attempts to suffocate the free individual.

Without the facts, this chaos rages in the minds and souls of ACA people for years. They think it’s their real personality, character and soul that does these things. They respond as they did in youth—finding ways to survive as an individual. They continue the dysfunction of self-condemnation and shame. This morphs into anger and, finding no cure or resolution, into isolation. Gee, maybe I’m a hermit, like that great philosopher Thoreau! Then back around to working on the false personality. I’ll someday cook up a really neat, positive, charming, brave (seemingly unwounded) front and then I’ll click with people!

But all this is not the real me. It’s attempts to use a childhood strategy to solve adult issues. I realized, hey look, here’s the real me, still innocent and good as I was at age 5, and here’s the overlay, a complex of symptoms and syndromes that someone finally described for the first time 20 years ago, ripping away the Sinatra-Dylan Thomas-Cole Porter-Bogart mystique of booze. Or rather, the mystique of treating the stuffed pain and fear of large numbers of singers, poets, politicians and all sorts of glamorous and ordinary people with good, old heart-warming likker. Or even a working-class six pack each night, my dad’s favorite.

I felt fury toward my parents. I screamed, with abundant profanity at the west, direction of the ancestors: “Goddam you, how could you do this to your five children?! You’d better be out there absorbing your lessons bigtime and seeing all the damage you caused!” I cried for days. Even in my pain, I cried for mommy to forgive me for dissing her with my rage. As if, in death, she could still abandon me.

I knew I had to see “Divine Secrets of the Yaya Sisterhood.” It was searing—the young, smart, creative woman with the boozy, crazy terrified childhood, her fear of having her own children, the dread it might get passed to her kids. I emailed my sisters. One told me I was “self-absorbed” and “get over it” —classic lines from alcoholic parents (and self-talk of an ACA person in denial). Another didn’t answer. But Linda congratulated me and sent me another classic on surviving the nightmare: Suzanne Somers’ “Keeping Secrets.” There it was on the first page: “My childhood was robbed…I was beginning to understand … Everyone thought I emerged from the family intact and ok … I didn’t drink … I did not understand why my life had been messed up for so long … I always blamed myself.”

It was the golden key, the thing that explained everything, the only thing that ever had. I realized then that I could love. And deserved it. I felt the skin was ripped off me. Everything hurt, but finally I could feel everything. Instead of feeling surrounded by this immense plastic wall, I could finally feel compassion for myself and for all the sufferings of all people. I was one of them, at last. I didn’t need no stinkin’ freedom, I needed love. And now I could comprehend how I’d systematically distanced it all my life. Love had always been for other people, for the “good” kids I saw at school who “deserved” it. But now I knew half of them were probably more like me than not, trying to comprehend that churning sickness in the belly, fearing going home, sitting there in class, smart enough but getting bad grades, warily looking out at the world, given up on hope.

The way back, the way home, I’m reading (and know instinctively) is self-love, lots of it, constantly, like a balm, a poultice—and gradually, one day at a time, letting in the love all round me, starting, of course with that happy, good and unconditional stuff from my children, from plants, nature, my cats and dogs, letting mom and dad have my forgiveness (I know they’re asking for it) and, getting beyond those self-hating notions that one can “ask too much” of the Divine Presence who made us all with love, letting myself pray and be loved by Her (I’m making this genderless presence feminine, I need that now, a mother), a constant mantra of prayer whispering out from me—thank you Linda, for those books, thank you for the people brave enough to write them, for my cat Merlin who sleeps on my chest, for this good day (one day at a time) and, finally—crossing that big line—thank you, mom, through your death, and your love, for helping this all happen and being here with me.

John Darling, M.S., is an Ashland writer and counselor. Note: ACA is now understood to encompass adult children of compulsive behaviors, potentially including drug abuse, overeating, gambling, religious extremism, chronic illness, adoption, foster care and other potentially dysfunctional systems.

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