Non-nuclear Family Alcohol Addiction

“Non-nuclear” is not meant to diminish the devastating, explosive effects alcohol addiction has on a family, but rather that, besides myself, the alcoholics I grew up with were part of my extended family. So that even if the parents in a family aren’t falling-down drunks, alcohol addiction echoes through generations

My mother’s family immigrated from Wales and she grew up in a little Vermont village where everyone spoke Welch. Neither she nor her father were alcoholics, and I don’t think her mother was either, though her mother died when mom was quite young. Genetically speaking, Celtic people seem to have a tendency to alcohol addiction. So I had that going for me.

My father came from a family of six children, three boys and three girls. My father was the only boy in his family who wasn’t an alcoholic. His brothers were “functional alcoholics”. One ran a
neighborhood cafe for years and the other was a dentist who, occasionally after a few drinks, would go on tirades about family members. Dad was a pharmacist and while he drank and used some of the prescription drugs he sold, he was never ‘owned’ by them. I didn’t hear much about his larger extended family until later, but then I found it was peppered with alcoholics. So I also had that going for me.

My dad was a ‘workaholic’ and so was gone much of the time. Each night when he got home from the pharmacy before dinner, he and my mom had a couple cocktails. It looked to me like a sacrament, almost religious...a way to relax and have a reward for a busy day. My dad had a liquor cabinet and a medicine cabinet in his bathroom that an addict could only dream about, of course, I didn’t have to dream.

My parents were examples of service to the community. Dad was on the city council for 12 years and mom spent years teaching people going overseas for the Red Cross and serving in PTA and on the School Board. My problem was that because of some difficult experiences as a child, my mom didn’t like girls and I was her only daughter.

Thus, I became one of the ‘walking-wounded’ and was so depressed that when I saw people laughing and having fun, I thought they were doing it to annoy me. I discovered that my parents’ ‘sacrament’ worked very well to totally black out my brain and release me from the horrible negativity in which I was living.

In addition to only allowing positive feelings to be expressed, another characteristic passed down through generations of alcoholics, is to totally ignore the problem. And so when I was stealing liquor from my dad’s bar, there would be pencil marks on the label showing the level of the liquid and I’d go ahead and steal some any way and no one said a word.

A couple years after I graduated from college I got a job with a woman who was the first person to say anything to me about my drinking. She told me that she could see that I was unhappy and that I didn’t have to be. She got me an appointment with her therapist and thus began my journey of recovery.

I had a son after I was six years sober and he has many of the “quirks” that I see in my friends in recovery. I like to call it “the junkie brain”. For example, his mind constantly goes to whatever the worst possible outcome of a situation could be. Also, he doesn’t seem to have an ‘off-switch’, though he is now learning to moderate his activities. Yet he doesn’t have a problem with alcohol addiction. His father was also in recovery, so he has the genetic predisposition that I had. It seems that addiction requires both genetics and environment to express itself in a person.

I learned in my family that alcohol was the way to cope with overwhelming feelings of despair. I came by the genetics honestly and that in combination with my family life was the ‘perfect storm’. It wasn’t until I stepped into the recovery community that I had the support and acceptance that has allowed me to flourish. Today family alcohol addiction is no longer a permanent curse to be passed down through generations. AA and alcohol treatment facilities hold the hope of recovery. And as a friend in recovery says...”Alcoholism is the only disease the treatment of which leaves the sufferer better off than if they had never had it.”