The Invisible Children

It's COA Awareness week!

On her latest article published on Huffington Post, Clinical Psychologist Dr. Tian Dayton examines the plight of children of dysfunctional parents as they grow to adulthood. Often their past trauma remains hidden until well after they mature and because it is buried, continues to negatively affect their relationships and how they feel about themselves.

"COAs grow up to be adult children of alcoholics ACoAs. And they carry these unresolved emotional burdens with them into their adult lives and relationships. Their disowned pain emerges, months, years or most commonly decades later in a post traumatic stress reaction as the COA, now the ACoA stands stupefied in front of an inner world that feels confusing and unknowable. It’s scary to look inside when what's inside has been so long in the making.

The addictions field should be giving very special attention to this hidden population if for no other reason, because they are statistically more likely to become addicts themselves (Cutter 1987). ACoAs also evidence higher levels of specific and generalized anxiety and lower levels of differentiation of self than their counterparts who grow up without parental alcoholism. (Maynard 1999) Scratch the paint off an addict and you will more often then not find a COA who is self medicating their unresolved, childhood pain with alcohol, drugs, food, sex, work or a combination of a couple of these.”

Read the article here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-tian-dayton/the-invisible-children-it_b_8970102.html

Check out the Orange County ACA website at: Orange County Adult Children

PTSD, Trauma And Adult Children Becoming Parents

Dr. Tian Dayton is a pioneer in ACOA healing. Her recently published article in the Huffington Post is titled, "When Adult Children of Alcoholics Become Moms“. Although targeted to mothers, this insightful writing applies to all ACOAs and dysfunctional family members.

Highlights:

Kids whose fight or flight response is activated over and over again by the confusing and disturbing dynamics that surround addiction may become traumatized by that experience. That trauma can surface years or even decades later in a post traumatic stress reaction. Adult children of alcoholics (ACoAs) can experience a form of PTSD from growing up with addiction.

ACoA moms can be big worriers. They pass along a certain anxiety and they often have a hard time with boundaries. In addition, there is this loss of self- regulation that is part of the trauma response, so ACoAs may alternate between emotional and behavioral extremes.

As kids we rewrite, repress, "forget" or dissociate from the pain that we can do nothing about. It's the nature of trauma. Kids who are feeling overwhelmed by the chaos around them "check out"--they dissociate and they freeze their feelings because it's the only way they can get any sense of personal control. After all, they are small and dependent on their parents; they are trapped by the vulnerability of their age and size. Besides this, they make sense of their parent's erratic behavior with the developmental equipment they have at that time, and that sense can be very young and magical.

When they grow up and become adults, they just don't have a mature sense of what happened and how it affected them. They are mature and functioning adults with wounded little kids hunched down in silence deep inside of them.

Why don't ACoAs recognize this and try to get help?

Because the pain is unconscious and surfaces unconsciously through triggers and memory primers. The trap is that because ACoAs often have the capacity to understand what happened to them, they mistake understanding for emotional processing; their pain remains untouched and unprocessed. They can refer to it, but not feel it, process it, and let it go or at least transform into another stage. They block it in a thousand clever ways.

Read the entire post here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-tian-dayton/when-adult-children-of-al_b_8061092.html

Check out the Orange County ACA website at: Orange County Adult Children

Can Adult Children Of Alcoholics "Forget" About The Past?

Dr. Tian Dayton describes PTSD as a post traumatic stress reaction in which childhood pain is being lived out in adult relationships without our awareness.

When we experience trauma the prefrontal cortex (responsible for planning and rational thought) shuts down and the traumatic experienced does not get processed. It works the same way in Adult Children Of Alcoholics as in others, although ACOAs may experience more of these Adverse Childhood Experiences than others.

These traumatic memories later get triggered and re-experienced. Unresolved hurts are  "imported from the past and layered onto the present." For example, you may experience a conflict with someone and feel just like you did as a powerless child.

According to the ACA Solution, becoming your own loving parent is key to resolving things.

As ACA becomes a safe place for you, you will find the freedom to express all the hurts and fears you have kept inside and to free yourself from the shame and blame that are carryovers from the past. You will become an adult who is imprisoned no longer by childhood reactions. You will recover the child within you, learning to accept and love yourself.

This can be a challenge for ACAs as many did not have loving, empathetic parents to model and learn from. Becoming your own loving parent might require the help of a safe group, good therapist and/ or healthy, caring friends.

Check out the Orange County ACA website at: Orange County Adult Children

The ACOA Trauma Syndrome

 

Dr. Tian Dayton blogs on The Huffington Post about Adult Children of Alcoholics and her new book, "The ACOA Trauma Syndrome". 

Some highlights of the blog post:

"Adult children of alcoholics (ACoAs) can and often do suffer from some features of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that are the direct result of living with the traumatizing effects of addiction. Years after we leave behind our alcoholic homes, we carry the impact of living with addiction with us. We import past, unresolved pain into present-day relationships, but without much awareness as to how or why."

"If unresolved pain is left unattended, if it stays buried and denied, it develops a sort of psychic half life, it seeps and leaches into our emotional and psychological underground and gives root to new complexes and conditions. If however we're willing to simply face, feel and share it, miraculous things happen. We learn to think about what we feel rather than run from it. And in thinking, we make sense of what was senseless. We become whole again."

From the book: 

"Trauma is actually fairly common; most people grow up with at least four adverse childhood experiences (Anda 2006). It is not necessarily the trauma that creates lasting problematic effects, but how we deal with it (or don't deal with it) when it occurs and afterward. Much can be done to ameliorate the effects of adverse childhood experiences. Supportive people, places to go that feel safe, and moving shock into some form of consciousness so pain does not remain hidden and unspoken can take a situation that could be traumatic and turn it into something that might be less damaging and potentially even character building."

"Recovery from the ACoA trauma syndrome is all about reclaiming the fragmented parts of self that are trapped in another psychological and emotional time and place and bringing them into the here and now. It is translating hidden emotion into words so that feelings can be processed, new insight and meaning can be gained, and experiences can be knitted back together with new understanding into a coherent and present-oriented picture of the functioning self and the self in relation to others. It is learning to live in the present rather than in the past or future." 

See the entire post here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-tian-dayton/adult-children-of-alcohol_b_1835677.html

 Check out the Orange County ACA website at: Orange County Adult Children