what are the effects on adults when you have a parent that has an addiction
to drugs or alcohol this question was recently posted by one of our viewers
and i thought it was a great topic which is why we're going to explore that in this video
for those of you who are new here i'm Amber Hollingsworth and you are watching put the
shovel down the YouTube channel designed to help you understand the science and psychology
of addiction so you can get your life and your family back on track get back to living the life
that you want to live you know there's actually a lot of literature out there
about the effects of grown adults when they grew up in a household with an addicted parent and most
of that surrounds it's called adult children of alcoholics sometimes it's abbreviated by ACOA
and they're actually support groups in person in real life in a lot of cities and even online
but essentially the thing that you really need to understand this that if you grew up in an addicted
household it no doubt has lasting repercussions and effects on you and believe it or not some of
those effects don't even show up or you don't even recognize them as issues or problem areas until
you're an adult now of course as you can imagine this can show up in any kind of way you can have
a number of issues but in this video i'm going to explore five of the most common types of issues
that you might expect to see if you grew up in an addicted household the first thing on that list
is if you are an adult child of an alcoholic or addicted home you may have great difficulty with
change now of course no one likes change but if you're an adult child of an alcoholic you may have
more difficulty with this than other people like let's say the plans change at the last minute
or something that you're really looking forward to falls through and the reason for this increased
difficulty dealing with that is when you grow up in an addicted household you never know
what's going to happen you're living in like a constant state of fear and anxiety because
sometimes you come home and everything's all good and other times the stuff can hit the fan
at any moment when you grow up in a situation like this you really crave consistency and stability
so in adulthood when you get these curveballs thrown at you it's actually re-triggering some
of your childhood trauma now this isn't a symptom that everyone who grew up in an addicted household
has in fact i grew up in an addicted household and i think that i'm i probably have an even
better ability to sort of deal with curveballs than others but what you're going to see as with
the rest of these symptoms that we're going to go through it's it's interesting because you're
going to have these symptoms but you probably fall on one extreme or the other just hang in
there because i'll explain what i mean by that the second symptom that you might notice as an adult
child coming from an addicted home is that you might have an over sensitivity to other people's
needs because as you could imagine growing up in a child in a chaotic or dysfunctional home
one of the ways that you learn to survive is to read the room and understand what's going on with
other people that's kind of how you manage all of those curveballs it gets thrown your way children
that grow up in homes like this they're actually so in tune with the people around them they can
pick up on the smallest change in vibrations because it truly becomes a survival coping
skill now you can also see this in the opposite form which is where you might be overly sensitive
to your own needs because as a child you may have been neglected your needs weren't met people were
inconsiderate of you and because of that you had to learn that you are the only one that could look
out for your own needs so as a way of learning to protect yourself you become overly focused on
making sure that you get your needs met now the way you'll see this triggered in adulthood is you
can be highly offended and even become very angry when you perceive someone around you as being
thoughtless or inconsiderate or oblivious when you see things like that happen it triggers that
childhood experience you have and you can be very very sensitive to those sorts of things so watch
out for that one you may have difficulty opening up and really truly showing yourself to another
people because on a deep level from your childhood you don't really feel like other people can
meet your needs or that you can really trust other people in that kind of way to take your shield all
the way down and on the other extreme of that you may have difficulties with being overly vulnerable
and you may see this show up in your life if you have a tendency to share too much too quickly or
trust too quickly or build relationships too fast this is an over vulnerability and it's
an adaptation of a coping skill that you likely developed in childhood as a way to survive you see
connection with other human beings is absolutely imperative and necessary for our survival and if
you grow up in a home where your parent or parents just didn't have the capacity to connect to you an
adaptive mechanism might be to start figuring out how to connect quickly to other people however in
adulthood as you can imagine this can definitely lead to some problems which leads me to the next
thing on our list which is difficulties with attachment you see vulnerability and attachment
those are two things that kind of go hand in hand and so you may find that you either have a
very difficult time forming and sustaining long-term relationships with people or you may
find that you have a difficult time because you attach too quickly or you're overly anxious about
your relationships the psychology of attachment is actually super fascinating and there is a lot to
learn here in fact i have a few videos on this i'm going to link one of them right up here for you in
case you're interested in learning more about that and the last thing on our list for adult children
of addict or alcoholic homes would be you may have difficulty with issues around responsibility now
pretty often what you're going to see is that an adult child of an alcoholic can tend to be
overly responsible for the other people around them because somewhere in their childhood they
became almost like a "parentified" role because a lot of times if the parent can't function as the
responsible one one of the kids in the household will step up to that plate and assume that sort of
care taking type of role and that continues over into adulthood thing about over responsibility is
it looks on the surface like it's a good trait and you're going to receive
a lot of validation and recognition for this trait but it can ultimately lead you to a very unhealthy
place your relationships can be lopsided and you end up feeling very resentful and frustrated when
you overtake responsibility for the people around you and conversely if you grow up in an addicted
household you may have difficulty accepting responsibility so you can definitely find
yourself on the other extreme of this especially if your role in your family as a child was
being the scapegoat because a lot of times the scapegoat role the person that's in that role
is very angry and upset about what's going on in the house they're not getting their needs met well
and it's kind of an acting out to call attention to the real problem which is the addiction that's
going on in the family the acting out can result in you know not being responsible for your grades
as a child or not being able to hold a job or making all kinds of other reckless or impulsive
decisions now i'm definitely wondering if you can connect to any of these signs and
symptoms that were listed here today are there some that you might add to this list you see
most of all these symptoms show up to us as the person it's perceived as depression anxiety stress
so we see that problem area but sometimes it's hard for us to really narrow down and pinpoint
what exactly it is that's causing those symptoms and a lot of times you can go back to this
checklist and you can say okay that is the trigger here that's what's hitting my button that's what's
taking me back to this old childhood place and really stirring up my emotions now if you find
that you're really struggling with some of these patterns and you're ready to break free of them
once and for all you might want to consider getting yourself a counselor if you don't
already have one because these are issues that your counselor or coach can help you work through
dig through your past history some things that happened in your childhood so that you can best
identify specifically what your triggers are if you're interested and you're ready to get
started working through some of those adult child and alcoholic issues the links in the
description now up next for you i have those videos on attachment because i think that is
a great next step for you in understanding how your childhood experience affects you as an adult