Feeling Nothing, Craving Everything: ACOA (Adult Children Of Alcoholics Syndrome)
Alcoholic Mum, Ex drug-dealer Dad- How growing up in the house of an addict has shaped every aspect of who I am.
When you grow up in the house of an addict, forced to take on the role of adult as you ‘parent the parent’, your childhood is characterised by chaos, unpredictability, and (lack of) control.
When you know that what is happening at home is wrong, that a child should not be in that environment (when your mother herself has told you so, yet continues to do it anyway), somewhere along the way you have to pretend that you don’t care, pushing the emotions away as far down as they will go. Because, as hard as home life is, you’re told that being in care will be harder, ‘and if social services get involved, that’s exactly what will happen…’, as she would remind you every time you’d shout, in between cries, that ‘it’s not fair.’
‘Life’s not fair- the sooner you realise that the better. I’m doing you a favour.’
How to fuck your child up 101.
Having essentially been forced to remain silent for 18 years, left with no choice but to make numbness my default so as not to ‘slip up’, and the years after that forgetting that there was an…
