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02-01-2009, 01:29 PM

# 4 (permalink)

dothi

Member

Join Date: Sep 2008

Location: Anywhere but the mainstream.

Posts: 402

When I was twenty I already felt like I had lived my life. I'm the oldest of three children, with an alcoholic father and codependent mother. I am the family hero; my AF has ever commented that he can't be doing *that bad* of a job if I turned out so well. I'm the successful academic who is never allowed to need help. My younger sister is the lost child, and I have watched her persevere through blatant neglect, struggling under the label of "family failure". My youngest brother is the family clown and favorite. An athletic success, he is the current sparkle in my dad's eye. You can tell by the coffee table loaded with portraits of him from sports events. He's also the favorite because my AF obviously relives his teenage years through drinking with my brother and his friends.

Since I was a child I have been mediating between the AF and my mom. They've always had an angry marriage, fueled by my AF's drunken absences punctuated by fighting. I tried to mediate because I wanted to provide the sense of stable security that was missing from my environment. I didn't know how to have fun. How can you, when you don't know if you're celebrating christmas this year, or if it's cancelled because mom and dad are angry again (and AF is gone drinking). As a result, I grew up to be a controlling person, trying to anticipate and correct problems that had not happened yet. This has been a toxic trait for me in relationships.

I never understood why exactly I was such a wound up person; I just knew that I was, and that it was becoming a problem. I heard someone refer to family roles one day, and decided to google it. I was very ashamed to read about the kind of family I have right here on the internet, then in more detail in books. But I wasn't able to begin healing until I finally understood exactly where the pressure was coming from (not just the alcohol, but the alcoholic's behavior). Then I could finally change how I was reacting to and dealing with that pressure.

Climbing out of bad habits has been hard. My family escalated their behavior, just like the books describe, to convince me that I should maintain my role in the family. I recognize now that my AF plays a victim role, which brings out the control freak in me, which brings back the bad habits. I still feel terrible guilt when I have to tell him "NO" and fail to meet his expectations. But I would never go back. The rewards of this change have been beyond what I could have envisioned while still growing up with my family. When I was still enmeshed in my family, I definitely saw things in black and white. Now a whole world of grey possibilities are open to me, and there is no one right choice (or wrong choice, for that matter).

Please feel free to add to this thread. I would really like to see how strong these patterns hold in people who visit the ACoA forum.