Childhood Trauma, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, and Alcohol Dependence Alcohol Research: Current Reviews

These rules of operation create an environment where trusting others, expressing your needs, and having feelings is bad. And learning these kinds of lessons when you’re developing your understanding of the world means you may carry them into adulthood. Perhaps to avoid criticism or the anger of their parent with AUD, many children tend to become super-responsible or perfectionistic overachievers or workaholics. On the other hand, people often go in the opposite direction, mirroring the same bad behaviors they witnessed during childhood.

Clinicians previously believed that trauma interventions were inappropriate until after a patient had been abstinent from alcohol or drugs for a sustained period of time (e.g., 3 months). This model, known as the “sequential” model, posits that continued alcohol use impedes therapeutic efforts to address and process the trauma, and that trauma interventions commenced before sustained abstinence would result in increased risk of relapse. Proponents of integrative treatments posit that unprocessed trauma-related memories and PTSD symptoms may, at least in part, drive alcohol use. Thus, attending to and treating the trauma-related symptoms early in the process of therapy may improve the chances of long-term recovery from alcohol (Back et al. 2006; Hien et al. 2010). Adult children of alcoholics (ACoAs) are people who grew up in a home with one or more parents addicted to alcohol. And while many ACoAs enter adulthood without any long-lasting effects,1 some people continue to experience problems stemming from trauma during their childhood.

Our study showed that the risk of mental illness, drug abuse, and suicide attempts in the household was strongest when the mother was an alcoholic and that the risk did not significantly increase when both parents were alcoholics. The pivotal role of an alcoholic mother in the emergence of household dysfunction may stem from the fact that the mother is generally the primary caretaker. Alcohol abuse may diminish a mother’s capacity to care for her children and to deal with household problems. In addition, women who abuse alcohol are more likely to marry chemically dependent men (70). An alcoholic mother’s difficulty in caring for her children may be exacerbated by the coexistence of affective, personality, and thought disorders (53). Growing up with a parent addicted to alcohol can make for a difficult childhood.

Promises Behavioral Health Addiction Treatment Centers

Often, people who grew up in an alcoholic home are hypervigilant and constantly alert for danger. Being aware of everything going on in the environment stems from the shame and pain experienced in childhood. While hypervigilance is a coping mechanism, it becomes a liability in adulthood when one is constantly waiting for someone to attack or something terrible to happen. Often, children feel trapped and unable to escape from families caught up in the tragedy of alcoholism in their families.

1. The ACE score has been shown to have a robust and graded relationship to unintended pregnancies (36), sexually transmitted diseases (37), numerous health risk factors such as smoking (10), and many of the leading causes of death during adult life (9).
2. In fact, issues stemming from addicted parenting can still impact older adults.
3. The adverse childhood experiences study was based at Kaiser Permanente’s San Diego Health Appraisal Clinic, where more than 50,000 adults receive standardized examinations annually.
4. According to Peifer, a mental health professional can help you connect deep-rooted fears and wounds stemming from childhood to behaviors, responses, and patterns showing up in your adult life.
5. “Adult children of parents with AUD may find closeness with others somewhat uncomfortable given a deep-rooted fear that becoming connected to someone else means a significant risk of emotional pain,” says Peifer.
6. But when a parent is an alcoholic, life can be chaotic and feels anything but secure.

Many rehabs offer trauma-informed programs to help you heal from your past, and learn healthy ways to communicate and cope. Through rehab and therapy, you can develop the skills to be able to mindfully react to feelings without feeling threatened. Another underlying cause is the theme of selfishness in an alcoholic home.10 ACoAs learn that lsd overdose their emotional needs are less important than everyone else’s and that they’re selfish if they prioritize themselves. But the truth is that your needs are important too, and learning how to communicate them is essential in adult relationships. It’s common for ACoAs to feel responsible for their parent’s addiction and its consequences.

Recognizing the long-term effects of growing up with alcoholic parents.

They start to believe that it’s their responsibility to “fix” their parent. They think that if they can behave—be a model child—and do everything right, they can make everything right. Addiction isn’t the child’s fault, and they don’t have the power to fix it. But, they see their inability to do so as a failure, and this can add to their feelings of guilt and shame. Children who turn to this kind of perfectionism as a coping mechanism often remain perfectionists in adulthood.

Sherry Gaba, LCSW, is a licensed psychotherapist/author specializing in addictions, codependency, and underlying issues such as depression, trauma, and anxiety. If one or more parents continue drinking heavily as the child is growing up, this can also have negative consequences. The logistic models were adjusted for age, sex, educational attainment, and race. The prediction equation developed for this screening tool uses responses to the questions from the DIS and the CES-D; we used a cutoff score of .009 to define a lifetime history of depression (39). Residential rehab programs give you access to multiple therapies and a supportive community to help you in your healing journey. For example, one of the 9 phases of Affect2U’s treatment program focuses on ACoA-specific challenges.

And even when these children become adults, it may continue to be a challenge to deal with their parent’s addiction and its lasting effects. To assess recent problems with depressed affect, we also assessed the relationship of parental alcoholism and adverse childhood experiences to the first question from the DIS. For each respondent we summed the number of adverse childhood experiences substance dependence to create an “ACE score,” which ranged from 0 to 9. The ACE score has been shown to have a robust and graded relationship to unintended pregnancies (36), sexually transmitted diseases (37), numerous health risk factors such as smoking (10), and many of the leading causes of death during adult life (9). Parental alcohol addiction increases a child’s risk of sexual and physical abuse.

It is important to remember that there is hope and healing available for those who have been affected by growing up in an alcoholic home. With the right kind of help and support from family, friends, and professionals, those who have been affected can learn to cope with the long-term effects of PTSD from an alcoholic parent and build a more positive future for themselves. With the right kind of help, it is possible to overcome these long-term effects and move forward with a more positive future.

How to Cope When Your Parent Misuses Alcohol

Alcohol treatment programs and child protective and welfare services have tended to ignore the likelihood that they share a population of clients (1,47). The tendency is probably even more pronounced in primary care settings, where despite guidelines established by the American Medical Association (75,76,77), clinicians’ inquiries about issues such as domestic violence are infrequent (47,78,79,80). The aggregation of alcoholism and depressive disorders in families has been observed (52,53), but its underlying mechanism is unclear. We found that depressive disorders were 30 percent to 50 percent more common among adult children of alcoholics, a finding consistent with a previous report (54). However, we also observed that parental alcoholism was not independently related to lifetime risk of current depression after we simultaneously controlled for adverse childhood experiences and a personal history of alcoholism. Furthermore, we found no evidence that adverse childhood experiences and parental alcoholism interact to increase the risk of depression.

In fact, issues stemming from addicted parenting can still impact older adults. Many ACoAs also grow up feeling like it’s their job to keep their family afloat. You may have started working to earn money for your family very early in life or taken on a parental role to younger siblings. Many ACoAs will continue to feel responsible for the happiness and well-being of everyone around them—an impossibly big task.

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a chronic health condition that can have a serious impact on a person’s life. The data reported here are from a retrospective cohort analysis of data from the larger study; the methods of the larger study have been reported in detail elsewhere (9,10). Explore rehabs that treat trauma to learn more about treatment methods, pricing, and more, and reach out to centers directly. You’ll find others who understand what you’re going through and can support your healing journey. Al-Anon and other organizations offer virtual meetings for your convenience. Aron Janssen, MD is board certified in child, adolescent, and adult psychiatry and is the vice chair of child and adolescent psychiatry Northwestern University.

Rehab for Adult Children of Alcoholics

ACoAs are up to 10 times more likely to become addicted to alcohol13 themselves. Having a father addicted to alcohol increases both men’s and women’s risk of alcoholism while growing up with a mother addicted to alcohol tends to increase women’s risk more than men’s. And ACoAs are also at greater risk for addiction to drugs other than alcohol. The adult child of an emotionally or physically unavailable animal therapy parent can develop a debilitating fear of abandonment and hold on to toxic relationships because they fear being alone. Some adult children of parents with AUD take themselves very seriously, finding it extremely difficult to give themselves a break. If they had a tumultuous upbringing, they may have little self-worth and low self-esteem and can develop deep feelings of inadequacy.