The Alcoholic Family System

A lot has been written over the years about the roles family members play in the family of an alcoholic or substance abuser. Less has been written about the actual dynamics in the family - how the family flows together. I remember as a child going to my friend Cathy’s house on my way to pick her up to walk to school. She would often still be eating breakfast and I’d sit down at the table with her. Dotty, her mother, would offer me toast or juice in a natural, breezy kind of way. There was an easy and relaxed atmosphere at her house.

I envied Cathy. At my house it would have been a big interruption if a kid showed up early like I had, and the way meals were regimented, she never would have been offered food. My house had rules and roles and no outsider was welcome unless they’d been invited. And rarely was anyone invited.

It wasn’t until I was school age that I realized that my friends families were different. The parents liked having their kids come home from school and wanted to talk to them. My friends could be themselves at home and seemed able to tell their parents things, their feelings, which somehow weren’t welcomed at my house. There seemed to be so many unspoken laws in my family which we all knew, but no-one ever said. They didn’t have to. We all knew our places and we tried not to stray too far from them or risk getting in trouble.

There is a rigidity to substance abusing families. Sometimes they are rigidly disorganized or chaotic, but more often they operate like my family did - with a blanket of rules (don’t talk, don’t feel, and don’t trust*) which suffocates spontaneity and vulnerability. In the terminology of family therapy, they are closed family systems much like the Dead Sea: nothing comes in so there is little growing inside.

Good psychotherapy offers adult children of substance abusing families a neutral place in which a person can talk about things they couldn’t say and feel the things they couldn’t feel before. It can be a place of self-discovery and self-awareness, a place where they are met without judgement but rather compassion, kindness rather than criticism, and permission to be who they really are. It has been that for me, and I’ve watched many of my clients peel away their past to uncover strengths and dreams they’d long hidden from themselves and the people they love.

*From the work of Dr. Claudia Black, an expert in co-dependency, relational trauma and addiction focusing on addictive disorders and family systems. See her book, It Will Never Happen to Me, Bainbridge Publishing, 2001.