Families
Losing the legacy
Mark Reid’s alcohol problems became
the focus of his own life. He describes
how Nacoa gave him the insight and
the tools to take control
I
am an adult child of an alcoholic. I am also an alcoholic. I stopped
drinking seven years ago. A key part of my current thinking about my
alcoholism is to look at the formative role played by my dad's
drinking. To do this, I have turned to the aspects of the issue covered
by the National Association for Children of Alcoholics (Nacoa) and
also Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACA).
Seeing what they do is a revelation and has brought me a new,
extra, peace of mind. It involved a pit stop from the full daily circuit of my
Alcoholics Anonymous programme, though that remains central to my recovery.
Its emphasis on personal responsibility is now nuanced by what Nacoa informs.
I have spoken to my dad about his drinking days. He doesn't really bother
with it now. I was brought up in a culture in which a lot of men went to the pub
every night – or more specifically in dad’s case, the working men’s club, partly
because the club offered the justification that there was more reason to go than
just alcohol; they needed committee members who had to attend, to make
important decisions and do the books.
My dad would go after tea and early evening telly. A daily dose of two hours’
drinking time. We’d always hear his key rattle ominously back in the front door
at eleven twenty precisely – except on Sundays when last orders was earlier.
After the strong Yorkshire ale, the steady and reliable father-of-five who came
home to the family from the office every day was gone. He was replaced by a
drinker, on edge and up for a verbal clash.
My mum, quieter and more anxious as closing time got nearer, would
disappear to bed before he came back. As we became teenagers, we might still
be up, listening to music. Sometimes we would stand our ground. It was a
hollow show of bravado from me. I remember with crystal clarity the night I
cried myself to sleep and vowed to myself to work as hard as I could at school so
I could go to university and leave home. Looking back now, I know it was not a
hopeful feeling, it was heavy and lonely. That is a word to sum up how people
who’ve grown up with alcoholics say they feel when they talk to Nacoa.
The Nacoa ‘checklist’ (see right), which I first read in their powerful literature,
outlines common themes and is a menu of all the anxieties I had as I grew up.
The reasons for rejection when my dad had been drinking were never set out. It
came late at night when I was tired and so was all the more disconcerting.
Family relations were almost always good by day. The ups and downs left me
16 | drinkanddrugsnews | October 2017
confused about how people were meant to
relate to each other. Were adult men all out
drinking and feeling better by coming back
and shouting the odds?
I concluded that adults you trusted will
disappear and come back different. Why
wait for that to happen when you could do it
to them first? At other times it made sense
to do the opposite and stay loyal to people
in the hope they might then be consistent –
except this approach just enables others to
treat you how they like. Being loyal, where
loyalty is undeserved, becomes a way of
resigning yourself to low self-esteem.
My inability to deal with all these
questions at the time fed into other
insecurities. To ease them I drank more or less
excessively for 30 years before reaching the
park bench. Alcohol engulfed everything I built
up along the way – my marriage and contact
with my children, my career and liberty.
Having seen how another person’s
drinking destabilised me, it would seem
madness to follow him to the pubs and
clubs. Yet learned behaviour is often all we
have. It doesn’t matter what your role model
does; you'll do it too. Nacoa has shown me
that the impact of uncomfortable thoughts
from living with an alcoholic parent leaves
an emotional and psychological deficit.
Nacoa identifies and clearly explains what I
term the ‘comfort deficit’ in children of
alcoholics. We begin by self-medicating and
some of us turn to the only coping
mechanism we see in use around us:
‘Learned
behaviour
is often all
we have.
It doesn’t
matter
what your
role model
does; you'll
do it too.’
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