Risk and Resilience

Adults Who Were the Children of Problem Drinkers

Richard Velleman, Jim Orford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135902070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Risk and Resilience looks at the issue of young adults who grew up in families where a parent, and sometimes both, had a drinking problem. Alcohol-related problems are now recognized as being near the very top of the world league table of health and social problems. Since the large majority of problem drinkers are adults aged between 22 and 55, many are parents with children or adolescents in their care. In the USA alone, there are estimated to be over six million children under the age of 18 living with a parent with a drinking problem, and over 22 million adults - one in every eight American adults - who were brought up with a parent who had a drinking problem. Clearly, many children who grow up in this sort of environment have a difficult childhood. Velleman and Orford examine the question of what happens to such children when they grow up. Risk and Resilience focuses on three main themes: What is the likelihood of such young adults developing drinking problems themselves? Wha

CHAPTER 1

GROWING UP WITH PARENTS WITH DRINKING PROBLEMS AND ESTABLISHING AN ADULT LIFE: FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS

This book is about young adults who grew up in families where a parent, and sometimes more than one, drank to an extent that caused problems for the families concerned. In this opening chapter four young women and men, who were participants in the research that we shall describe within this book, speak for themselves. We hope that in doing so the reader will gain an impression of the variation that is to be found amongst the recollections of childhood of people who have had parents with drinking problems, and the very varied patterns of adjustment that are displayed in young adulthood.

The four stories that follow have been selected to represent a range. They include, for example, the stories of both young women and men, of those with fathers and with mothers with drinking problems, those whose childhoods appear to have been seriously disturbed as a result and those less so, and those for whom transition to adulthood has been difficult and others for whom it has been apparently problem-free. Other than being selected to represent this range, they have been chosen at random from the project files. From our experience of interviewing over 160 young adults who had had parents with drinking problems, none of these four accounts is particularly unusual.

To preserve confidentiality the names used are fictional and many specific details have been changed. But in all essential respects these are real accounts.

ANNIE

Annie was approaching her mid-30s when she was interviewed for the project. Her father, who had died some years previously, had worked for many years as a manual worker after coming out of the armed services. He was a life-long heavy drinker and everyone knew that he drank. He went out drinking on Thursday and Friday nights and Saturday mornings and other nights too if he had the money. On Sundays he was irritable but never drank because of work the next day. On occasions when Annie and her mother would go to a pub with her father he would drink five or six pints of beer and a couple of whiskies which he said was moderate for him. In earlier years he drank much more. He was either drunk or completely sober.

When Annie was a teenager her father suffered from chronic stomach complaints and her mother made him go to the doctor. The latter never knew how much Annie’s father drank and her father never admitted he had a drinking problem. The doctor advised him to stop drinking cider and prescribed tranquillisers to stop his shaking. After that her father confined his drinking to beer and barley wine for a number of years, but then went back onto cider again.

Annie’s mother, who worked in a shop and also as a cleaner at a children’s home, also had a drinking problem, Annie believes in retrospect, from about the time that Annie was aged 10. Her mother never admitted drinking was a problem, but Annie knows that she drank every day, getting through two litre bottles of sherry in a week. When her drinking was at its heaviest she was drinking up to a bottle every day, and would often drink at home and sometimes at work. Her mother also had bouts of depression which Annie describes as definitely being a problem. When Annie was about 15, these bouts were getting worse; by the time she was 18, her mother seemed to be drinking more and more at home and taking prescribed tablets too. At night she would take a sleeping pill and a few sherries before going to bed. At about this time her mother spent some time as a patient in a psychiatric hospital with depression.

There were financial difficulties throughout Annie’s childhood and adolescence because of the money her father was spending on drink. She particularly noticed this when she went to grammar school at the age of 12. She realised that everything she had was always home-made, that she didn’t have a school uniform, that she couldn’t go on trips abroad, and that her parents didn’t let her stay on to do ‘A’ levels for the same reason. She realised her family was, “different in every way”.

When her father was drunk he was “disgusting” and Annie was “disgusted” with him. There were arguments between her parents several times a week. As a teenager she was aware that there was some violence; there were “a few black eyes” between her parents, on one occasion Annie was quite badly bruised herself, and on several occasions “it was pretty bad”.

Despite this, Annie described her parents’ relationship in mainly positive terms: “a very loving couple; very close; quite soppy over each other”. Her mother had no life outside the family and “thought the world of” Annie’s father when he was sober. According to Annie they made too many allowances and excuses for each other—her mother would try and get her father off to bed without an argument, and her father would encourage her mother to drink if she was depressed.

Annie herself was always very relieved if her father was not drinking and used to get terribly upset if he was. She would tell him that she hated him and wanted him to go away. She tried to get her mother to leave with her and her younger brother, but her mother said she still loved him. Annie got into arguments with her father because she was so disgusted.

Although Annie recalls her father as a man who could be very kind on occasions, and with whom there were “some very jolly” occasions on Saturday afternoons after the pub, there were too many “bad things”, not much sense of a family life, few shared activities and not much closeness. But at the time of the interview, Annie described herself as having a hot temper like her father and being, like him, “conscientious, a bit of a perfectionist”. She thought she was more like her father than her mother.

Annie described her mother as “a very good mother, very likeable person”, and someone she had a positive relationship with until her mid-teens when her relationship with her mother appeared to have deteriorated. She was always cross and irritable and a bit soft, and Annie was never able to confide in her. Things got worse as Annie became more acutely aware of the difference between her family and others when she went to grammar school and also because her mother’s depression was worsening.

Up to the age of 11, Annie described herself as having been shy but having friends including a “best friend”. When she started at grammar school and became aware that her home was inferior, she developed a lack of confidence. She had no one friend in particular, and thinks that she felt “quite lonely”. In her mid-teens she developed closer friendships, in particular one with a friend who lived quite near but who was “better off” and from whom Annie would conceal her father’s drinking. She didn’t like to bring friends home “in case”, and when her best friend was round Annie would be in a “terrible state”, wanting her to go before her father came home. Mostly, she didn’t want friends to come round at all, or even to know where she lived.

As a teenager, Annie got more and more timid, was “always unwell”, and was forever being taken to the doctor by her mother for “a bottle of tonic”. She remembers getting very shaky—for example she couldn’t lift a spoon easily—and at 16 she had what she describes as “a nervous breakdown” and stayed in a psychiatric hospital some months. After getting over the initial shock of this she says she felt quite happy there, although it didn’t get to the root of the problem and she couldn’t see the sense of the treatment she was receiving. Looking back, Annie says she thinks she suffered from anxiety and depression from about the age of 13 until her early 30s, feeling “ill at ease, getting in a state, shaky”.

At the time of the research interview, Annie was married with two young children, and was stably employed as a domestic assistant in a children’s home, sometimes doing relief care work when someone else was away. She also had shorthand and typing qualifications. She left home at the age of 22 to share a flat with women friends with whom she still keeps up contact. She enjoyed her job—the place, the rest of the staff, the children and being able to help them. She said she made friends easily and currently had a lot of friends—mainly women living nearby with young children—including a number of good, close friends.

Annie’s adult years had not been without their problems. In the early years of her marriage she had further periods as a psychiatric hospital inpatient and had been off work for several months with depression, once after her first child was born. Even now Annie was dissatisfied with herself, particularly with her lack of confidence and proneness to worrying and anxiety. She felt she had never been a “very open sort of person, I don’t always feel at ease; but I’m working on it”. At times she would find herself feeling extremely anxious and uncomfortable. Although she liked her work, she felt very self-conscious there, on her own in front of people. At one point recently she had felt she couldn’t cope with work and had phoned in to give in her notice. The woman she worked for had persuaded her to change her mind which had been important to Annie—feeling that she had got over it and that someone else had thought she was important. On a checklist of recent problems, Annie checked quite a long list as ‘regular’ and ‘major’ problems, including feeling panicky, worrying and feeling depressed, anxious, shyness, lack of confidence and phobias. The interviewer noted that Annie’s closest friendships were with other women who were quiet and unconfident and with whom she could talk over mutual problems of this kind.

Annie had married nearly 10 years previously and now says that her marriage was “dreadful” at first. She had had her own periods of hospitalisation and there had been continued problems with her parents—eventually her husband had not wanted anything to do with them. Over the past four or five years, however, things had gradually got much better. She thought she and her husband were now “very happy”, and it was getting better all the time. They got on well together and didn’t argue anymore. She confided in him about many things, discussed her feelings “from time to time”, but she didn’t talk to him about “silly little things like feeling awkward at work”. She described her husband as “very easygoing”, and this had influenced her towards the realisation that she had to live her own life—“he’s got a don’t care attitude, it’s gradually influencing me”. At the end of the interview, however, the interviewer recorded her impression that Annie and her husband were not particularly happy and that the relationship wasn’t all that close.

Annie had been a moderate drinker in her teens and early 20s, but in her late 20s had had two periods of three or four months when she would buy sherry because she was depressed, and would drink two bottles a week on her own. She saw this as a problem. For the last five or six years she had returned to being a moderate drinker and felt she was now in no danger. In the week preceding the first interview she reported consuming eight units, and in the week before the second interview, 14, which she said was a bit lighter than usual. How much she drank depended she said on how relaxed she was to start with: she would drink before going to a party, for example, in order to relax herself. Her husband had not liked it when she had been drinking more heavily, and it had also given Annie a lower opinion of herself. Regarding the influence of her family background, Annie said, “I can never understand why it didn’t put me off drinking. It’s not something I’d really thought about. I wouldn’t like to let myself in for the sort of family atmosphere I had”. Her parents, she said, thought it was really marvellous to have a drink and to get quite merry. They could see no harm in it at all, in fact they encouraged it, they wanted everyone to be like them.

Annie had taken tranquillisers or anti-depressants continually from late teens to early 30s, and sleeping pills off and on during the same time. Stopping taking pills had been “very traumatic” and it had taken her a long time to adjust. By the time of the second interview Annie had taken no psychoactive drugs or medication during the previous year, but had been taking Paracetamol about every other day for headaches.

Annie said that the past had been “so terrible” that she didn’t like to think back more than four or five years. But during that time things had gradually got much better and she was now happy enough with what she had in the way of family life and friends, although still dissatisfied with what she had achieved in her job. She also wished she didn’t have “all these hang-ups”. She thought of the future in terms of her children going to school, her having more free time, and being able to do the job she wanted to do—“I’m optimistic—I feel I’ve got every reason to be optimistic after having such a bad time in the past”.

JOHN

In his late 20s when he took part in the research, John described his father as having drinking and emotional problems throughout his childhood, problems which John attributed to his paternal grandfather’s excessive drinking and violence. The worst problems for John and his family were when his father had been both drinking and in a bad mood: he would get very irrational, and become verbally, emotionally and physically very violent. According to John he would rant and rave for hours. John described his father as paranoid, stubborn and arrogant, and inadequate.

John knew that his father nearly always drank a pint of whisky or more each day. “The drinking was constant, the central core of his social activities”, and overlapping considerably with his business.

Although John recalled his parents showing some warmth and love to each other when he was young, he felt that this was more from his mother. Essentially he described his parents’ relationship as “really very bad, extremely traumatic”. There would be terrific rows every approximately three weeks, followed by several days of tension and not speaking. Conflicts were never resolved and their social life was all “pure performance”. John believed that his parents stayed together partly because they liked the roles of persecutor and victim. His father had relationships with other women as far back as John’s memory stretched. John’s parents separated briefly when he was a young child, and finally separated at the time he left home to go to university.

John’s father was regularly violent towards him, hitting him with sticks and canes, kicking him—a “regime of terror” as John described it. Both John and his mother had been hospitalised following attacks. When John was 16 he “lost his head” and attacked his father, which finally put a stop to his father’s violence towards him. John described himself as stubborn like his father and hence resented his father getting away with unreasonable moods and “ranting on”, so eventually he felt he had to try and stop him.

John would be very tense and anxious if his father was drinking heavily and in a bad mood. A sense of insecurity pervaded the family atmosphere most of the time, and John felt a great difference between his own and his friends’ families, and also between the family life that they had to appear to lead, and that which in fact was occurring. Holidays were very uncomfortable, invariably involving awful scenes. John’s father had no treatment for his drinking until several years after John left home, but at about the time John was starting university his father was eventually referred for treatment after threatening to kill himself.

John respected his father’s intelligence, but his feelings for him were largely negative. At the age of about 14 or 15 he decided he had to try and make something of his life in spite of his father. He tried to have as little contact as possible with him and by the time John was 17 they had a very cold, formal relationship, with little closeness and confiding. John believes they had some attributes in common, including stubbornness and aggressiveness.

John describes strong loving feelings towards his mother and lots of shared activities and closeness with her as a child. But he also described her as very protective and suffocating, and said that he felt he had been indoctrinated in childhood with her view of his father as mentally ill. He felt she had played on their loyalty, made his father very jealous, and reinforced the children’s feelings of guilt.

At the second interview a year later, John described his mother even more positively. Although her “emotional demands” were very great, they got on “extraordinarily well”; she was basically the symbol of security within the house, a main support which the family relied upon. He described his childhood attitudes towards his parents as, “mum was white and dad was black”, but now he realised it was his views that had been polarised. Although his father “used to beat me up quite frequently”, he wasn’t all that bad, “a maligned character”, “a very nice person on occasions”.

John recalled no difficulty in making friends as a child, but did describe a definite division between home life and friends. He brought friends home with great trepidation and mainly went round to others’ homes. Out of loyalty when outside the home he would not admit to anything being wrong.

Throughout childhood John said he had nervous ticks, was neurotic and emotionally disturbed, and very obsessive and anxious, but had no treatment. He failed his ‘A’ levels because of a big row between his parents at the time.

John now saw his life as having had three distinct phases. First, childhood which he hadn’t enjoyed at all owing to the impact of his parents, but, “I don’t believe in having regrets—it’s all part of the learning process”. Second, university and the following years which have been “very formative, cathartic”. Third, moving to another city and having good career jobs, and a great deal of change not only involving people and places but also “in my head”.

Throughout much of his 20s John had been a smoker, a comparatively heavy drinker reaching a maximum intake of 40 units or so a week in his early 20s, a regular weekly user of marijuana, a regular monthly user of ‘speed’, and a regular weekly consumer of ‘magic mushrooms’ when they were in season. He had taken cocaine more than weekly for a period of six months in his early 20s. By the time he took part in the research he had given up smoking, cut his drinking down to around 20 units a week, and had stopped taking all other drugs. He had worried when he left university that for a couple of years he was drinking a lot as an integral part of his social life. Now he felt in no danger from drinking and enjoyed it, although he didn’t like spirits and thought he never would. Because of his father, he felt drink was more “an issue” with him than with other people, and also being a “nervy” type of person who tended to “go the whole hog” with anything, he had used to drink quite a lot and also admitted to having taken a lot of drugs in the past. He took no drugs now because it was totally incompatible with his work and lifestyle, although he had “nothing against them”.

John was in a stable cohabiting relationship which he described as very loving and open. His partner too was “from a broken home” and they had a lot in common and were very well matched. He had had a previous long-term and very “stormy” relationship with someone who was a heavy drinker, and John was concerned that his playing the “role of rescuer” was a theme in his relationships. At the first interview he was worried that he might undermine his partner’s independence by being too protective, but by the time of the second interview he felt the balance of their relationship was right. He referred also to his partner’s “optimistic and light” outlook on life balancing his rather “black” outlook.

At present, John described himself as having a hectic social life and was able to describe close friendship relationships. He was particularly positive about a relationship with one male friend whom he described as having a “more female outlook” on life—John had always felt closer to women or to men with a feminine outlook, he said.

John admitted devoting a lot of attention to his own personal development and felt that he was now reasonably satisfied, altho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Growing up with parents with drinking problems and establishing an adult life: Four Illustrations
• 2. What was already known: A review of previous research
• 3. Doing research on the subject: The design of the present study
• 4. Recollections of growing up with parents with drinking problems—results I
• 5. The children of problem drinking parents as young adults—results II
• 6. Explanations for differences in adulthood adjustment—results III
• 7. How has our understanding advanced?: summary and integration
• 8. Implications for intervention, service development and prevention
• References
• Appendix Recalled childhood symptoms by offspring vs comparison and sex
• Subject Index
• Author Index