Most people understand how tolerance works in the life of an alcoholic. Alcoholics over time have a diminished response to the poison that first-time drinkers react to immediately. Alcoholics' bodies actually learn to tolerate the poison.
Likewise, children of alcoholics develop a tolerance to dysfunctional relationships. It may be a whole lifetime before they realize that they actually could have some control over the poison of these dysfunctional relationships, instead of tolerating the dysfunction! When the same or similar dysfunctional characteristics show up in the spouse they choose, or the children they raise, it registers in the brain of the adult child of alcoholics as something that they don't like, but not as something they can do something about!
It's all about expectations. Children of alcoholics learn to lower their expectations that the alcoholic parent will ever fulfill a normal parental role. Society has high expectations for mothers, for example. If the mother is an alcoholic, or a narcissist, or otherwise mentally ill, the child learns that she cannot expect from her mother a reciprocal relationship. It becomes the child's role to take care of the mother in those instances. That dysfunction may last a lifetime.
However, it must be incredibly liberating to an adult child of alcoholics to discover that he can learn to protect himself by adjusting his expectations. He realizes that it is not realistic to expect the parental figure ever to provide what should have been provided to the child. He realizes that the parent is just not capable of fulfilling a parental role. He no longer gets lulled into expectations that are not realistic.
If not liberating, at least it may bring peace to the person who has suffered a lifetime of internal torment, because of expectations that did not fit the realities of his or her life.
1 comment:
It is stunning to realize how much influence a parent perhaps especially a "bad" parent has over their child and his/her future.
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