Growing up in a home with a caregiver or caregivers who abuse alcohol is setting up the child for lifelong challenges and is classified as one of the ten Adverse Childhood Events (ACEs) that can predict adult health problems. Often unresolved generational trauma and psychological challenges are hidden behind the seemingly casual or overtly abusive use of alcohol by an adult.
One of the most difficult things about being a child of an alcoholic is the unpredictability of your parent’s behavior, which inevitably leads to a deep rupture in the child’s ability to feel securely attached to his or her parent.
I grew up believing, like many of us in dysfunctional homes, that my upbringing was normal. My normal was an unpredictable and erratic mother in the grip of alcohol abuse, surrogate care from an aunt and a nanny, and a father who overindulged my whims but was an attentive and unconditionally loving caregiver. Like many parents, mine believe that they gave me everything I needed and did the best that they could. Only now do I have the space in my heart to accept that both our versions of the story are true.
Miraculously, I survived not just my childhood but many chaotic years of addictions myself. Somehow, I had the reserves to stay alive and keep on a mask of responsibility and achievement. I spent five years mostly waiting to get stoned and drunk while still doing reasonably well in university.
I needed to both sedate my emotional pain and control my angst and turmoil with alcohol, marijuana, and insecure relationships with the opposite sex. As I teetered on the fine line of “good” and “bad” girl I did not know that the unresolved trauma of my childhood was driving my behavior.
In the summer of 2000, I moved in with a childhood friend in Chicago. While she went to an internship, I attended a summer course at the University of Chicago called Cross Cultural Development. Included in the curriculum was a book by Dr. Robert Karen titled “Becoming Attached: First Relationships and How They Shape Our Capacity to Love.” The central question he asks is, “How much do our childhoods, and especially the quality of our first loving bonds, determine whether we can get love right as adults?” Even in the haze of my addictions I devoured the information on developmental psychology and the importance of a secure attachment for the healthy development of a child.
The founder of attachment theory, John Bowlby, believed that the earliest bonds formed by children with their caregivers have a tremendous impact that continues throughout life and an available and responsive caregiver gives the infant a secure base from which to explore the world. Attachment research shows the resilience humans could demonstrate in adversity if they had at least one caregiver who they were securely attached to even if, surprisingly, they were not a parent.
Research in this book also categorized the impacts of insecure attachment on adult life and I felt as if I was reading about myself. Even though I continued for years with self-destructive behavior “Becoming Attached” planted a seed of understanding of why I struggled when other friends did not.
Wisely, I kept that book. When my first child was six months old, like a ghost moving in the dark corridors of my parents’ home, unsure how my marriage was going to survive another day, let alone another child that I was already carrying, I was graced with the memory of the attachment theory.
I picked up “Becoming Attached” and read it again 15 years later. I was struck with epiphanies in every chapter. Why I couldn’t trust my husband. Why I couldn’t relax when receiving love. Why I had no ability to keep my rage and anger in check when something overwhelmed me. Why years of yoga and spiritual practice hadn’t dulled the emotional pain of my attachment wound.
There are no shortcuts in healing the core wound of being insecurely attached to a primary caregiver. Along with that, many other wounds compile and complicate one’s path to resolving trauma. In these past years my path to resolving my attachment wound has been circuitous because its traces are found everywhere in my adult life.
I understood how central healing my attachment wound is to my health and the health of my children. One of the greatest gifts the researchers who study attachment have given me is a language to understand the darkness that I carry and the hope that with self-awareness and self-compassion the next generation does not have to carry the same load that I am.