I'm like Ceridwen in that I am not an ACOA. My father is now passed away but I strongly believe that he was an ACOA. Just today I was going through the family tree, up to the great grandparents on his side and all the offspring. Looking at the aunts and uncles, my first cousins, my second cousins. I was shocked at the amount of alcoholics, bitter divorces, people never marrying, a born again christian - my thoughts are that for somebody to find God when they aren't born into a religion is that they have gone through hell and back. I think they are all signs that we all had poor role models. My father taught me black and white thinking, perfectionism, if you aren't good at it then don't try. I turned into a high achiever but then imploded in graduate school and have curbed back my ambition. Another consequence of my upbringing is that I am married to an alcoholic.
I suspect my father was the clown. I never saw him with his parents because they died when I was very young but he always pretented to be more stupid than what he was. The wording of that is poor because he was not stupid at all. But he was always trying to fill a silence with a joke.