Adult childern with alcoholics

The crippling effects of alcoholism and drug dependency are not confined to the addict alone. The family suffers, physically and emotionally, and it is the children who are the most disastrous victims. Frequently neglected and abused, they lack the maturity to combat the terrifying destructiveness of the addict’s behavior. As adults these individuals may become compulsively attracted to the same lifestyle as their parents, excessive alcohol and drug abuse, destructive relationships, antisocial behavior, and find themselves in an infinite loop of feelings of emptiness, futility, and despair. Behind the

Parents with deeply flawed self-structures and critically impaired self-esteem have reared many adult children of alcoholics. Parents who suffer from severe self-disorders are unable to mirror (affirm and support) distinctive and healthy aspects of a child’s unfolding self. An alcoholic and an enabling spouse are likely to thwart the natural course of self-development in a child by using a son or daughter as a container for parental self-loathing or by mirroring only those qualities of the child's self that are necessary to bind the parent’s anxiety and stabilize the parent’s self. The parent with a self-disorder may also try to crush elements in the child’s self that threaten the parent’s fragile narcissism. The therapist should look for opportunities to support the patient’s self-esteem and to encourage the expression and growth of parts of the patient’s self that were damaged and driven into hiding by parental neglect or aggression.

There are several general principles of psychotherapy that are designed to address, and redress, the critical failures of the alcoholic home. Each of these principles describes a relatively discrete aspect of psychotherapy with adult children. They are all ultimately concerned with the provisions of the calm, empathic, and strong self-object environment that was largely unavailable to the patient during childhood. The adult child's feeling of psychological safety in psychotherapy depends on the therapist’s capacity to convince the patient that they will not be subjected to the sorts of traumatic disappointments that were commonplace occurrences in the alcoholic home. Each patient has special sensitivities to particular kinds of disappointment however, these individual differences depend in large measure on specific traumas to which the patient has been subjected in childhood, and the amount and quality of support that the patient originally received in attempting to deal with these traumas. In general, however, there are certain basic conditions that must be met for every adult child in treatment, if the therapist is to become a “good object?who represents a viable alternative to the internalized abusive objects of the patient’s childhood. Emotional warmth and responsiveness must characterize the healing environment. The therapist must display an appreciation of the patient’s basic worth and an acceptance of the patient’s individuality.

There are many appr

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