The Long Term Effects Of Growing Up In Addicted or Alcoholic Home | ACoA

What are the effects on adults when you have a parent that has an addiction to drugs or alcohol? This question was recently posted by one of our viewers, and I thought it was a great topic, which is why we're going to explore that in this video. For those of you who are new here, I'm Amber Hollingsworth, and you are watching Put the Shovel down, the YouTube channel designed to help you understand the science and psychology of addiction so you can get your life and your family back on track, get back to living the life that you want to live. You know, there's actually a lot of literature out there about the effects of grown adults when they grew up in a household with an addicted parent. And most of that surrounds it's called Adult Children of Alcoholics, sometimes it's abbreviated by acoa, and they're actually support groups in person, in real life, in a lot of cities, and even online. But essentially, the thing that you really need to understand is that if you grew up in an adult addicted household, it no doubt has lasting repercussions and effects on you. And believe it or not, some of those effects don't even show up or you don't even recognize them as issues or problem areas until you're an adult. Now, of course, as you can imagine, this can show up in any kind of way, and you can have a number of issues. But in this video, I'm going to explore five of the most common types of issues that you might expect to see if you grew up in an addicted household. The first thing on that list is if you are an adult child of an alcoholic or addicted home, you may have great difficulty with change. Now, of course, no one likes change, but if you're an adult child of an alcoholic, you may have more difficulty with this than other people. Like, let's say the plans change at the last minute or something that you're really looking forward to falls through. And the reason for this increased difficulty dealing with that is when you grow up in an addicted household, you never know what's going to happen. You're living in, like, a constant state of fear and anxiety because sometimes you come home and everything's all good, and other times the stuff can hit the fan at any moment. When you grow up in a situation like this, you really crave consistency and stability. So in adulthood, when you get these curveballs thrown at you, it's actually retriggering some of your childhood trauma. Now, this isn't a symptom that everyone who grew up in an addicted household has. In fact, I Grew up in an addicted household. And I think that I probably have an even better ability to sort of deal with curve balls than others. But what you're going to see, as with the rest of these symptoms that we're going to go through, it's interesting because you're going to have these symptoms, but you probably fall on one extreme or the other. Just hang in there because I'll explain what I mean by that. The second symptom that you might notice as an adult child coming from an addicted home is that you might have an over sensitivity to other people's needs. Because as you could imagine growing up and a child in a chaotic or dysfunctional home, one of the ways that you learn to survive is to read the room and understand what's going on with other people. That's kind of how you manage all of those curve balls that gets thrown your way. Children that grow up in homes like this, they're actually so in tune with the people around them, they can pick up on the smallest change in vibrations because it truly becomes a survival coping skill. Now you can also see this in the opposite form, which is where you might be overly sensitive to your own needs, because as a child you may have been neglected, your needs weren't met, people were inconsiderate of you, and because of that, you had to learn that you are the only one that could look out for your own needs. So as a way of learning to protect yourself, you become overly focused on making sure that you get your needs met. Now the way you'll see this triggered in adulthood is you can be highly offended and even become very angry when you perceive someone around you as being thoughtless or inconsiderate or overwhelmed, oblivious. When you see things like that happen, it triggers that childhood experience you had. And you can be very, very sensitive to those sorts of things. So watch out for that one. You may have difficulty opening up and really, truly showing yourself to another people because on a deep level from your childhood, you don't really feel like other people can meet your needs or that you can really trust other people in that kind of way to take your shield all the way down. And on the other extreme of that, you may have difficult difficulties with being overly vulnerable. And you may see this show up in your life if you have a tendency to share too much too quickly or trust too quickly, or build relationships too fast. This is an over vulnerability and it's an adaptation of a coping skill that you likely developed in childhood as a way to survive. You see connection with other human beings is absolutely imperative and necessary for our survival. And if you grew up in a home where your parent or parents just didn't have the capacity to connect to you, an adaptive mechanism might be to start figuring out how to connect quickly to other people. However, in adulthood, as you can imagine, this can definitely lead to some problems. Which leads me to the next thing on our list, which is difficulties with attachment. You see vulnerability and attachment. Those are two things that kind of go hand in hand. And so you may find that you either have a very difficult time for forming and sustaining long term relationships with people, or you may find that you have a difficult time because you attach too quickly or you're overly anxious about your relationships. The psychology of attachment is actually super fascinating and there is a lot to learn here. In fact, I have a few videos on this. I'm going to link one of them right up here for you in case you're interested in learning more about that. And the last thing on our list for adult children of addict or alcoholic homes would be you may have difficulty with issues around responsibility. Now, pretty often what you're going to see is that an adult child of an alcoholic can tend to be overly responsible for the other people around them because somewhere in their childhood they became almost like a parentified role. Because a lot of times if the parent can't function as the responsible one, one of the kids in the household will step up to that plate and assume that sort of care taking type of role. And that continues over into adulthood. The thing about over responsibility is it looks on the surface like it's a good trait and you're going to receive a lot of validation and recognition for this trait. But it can ultimately lead you to a very unhealthy place. Your relationships can be lopsided and you end up feeling very resentful and frustrated when you overtake responsibility for the people around you. And conversely, if you grow up in an addicted household, you may have difficulty accepting responsibility. So you can definitely find yourself on the other extreme of this, especially if your role in your family as a child was being the scapegoat. See, because a lot of times the scapegoat role, the person that's in that role is very angry and upset about what's going on in the house. They're not getting their needs met well, and it's kind of an acting out to call attention to the real problem, which is the addiction that's going on in the family. The acting out can result in, you know, not being responsible for your grades as a child or not being able to hold a job or making all kinds of other reckless or impulsive decisions. Now, I'm definitely wondering if you can connect to any of these signs and symptoms that were listed here today. Are there some that you might add to this list? You see, most of all, these symptoms show up to us as the person it's perceived as depression, anxiety, stress. So we see that problem area, but sometimes it's hard for us to really narrow down and pinpoint what exactly it is that's causing those symptoms. And a lot of times you can go back to this checklist and you can say, okay, that is the trigger here. That's what's hitting my button. That's what's taking me back to this old childhood place and really stirring up my emotions. Now, if you find that you're really struggling with some of these patterns and you're ready to break free of them once and for all, you might want to consider getting yourself a counselor, if you don't already have one. Because these are issues that your counselor or coach can help you work through. Dig through your past history, some things that happened in your childhood, so that you can best identify specifically what your triggers are. If you don't already have an individual counselor, one of the fastest, most effective and efficient ways to go about getting one is to use Better Help. BetterHelp is an online counseling service. Now, yes, Better Help is a sponsor of this channel, but there are many reasons why I'm recommending them to you. One of those reasons is that you can start the process at any times. When you're ready, you're ready. And if that's in the middle of the night or the middle of the day right now, and you want to get yourself signed up and you want to get that appointment, BetterHelp is the way to go. And bonus, if you use our link, you'll get a discount on your services. And the other thing that I really like about BetterHelp is that there are multiple ways that you can communicate with your counselor. Yes, you can have individual sessions virtually, and you can also have chat sessions and or email messages, Especially when you're trying to work through some of these triggers. You may find that you run across something or you experience something, life, and it triggers you right in the moment. And you may need to get some feedback or a piece of advice, but your session is days away. This is the perfect kind of circumstance to use those other communication options. And BetterHelp is super easy to use. Basically, you just go on, you create a profile it's going to ask you a bunch of questions and then it will match you with a counselor. Now, if you found the counselor that you're matched with doesn't feel like the right fit, it's super easy to change. If you're interested and you're ready to get started working through some of those adult child of an alcoholic issues, the link's in the description. Now, up next for you, I have those videos on attachment because I think that is a great next step for, for you in understanding how your childhood experience affects you as an adult.