Why Don’t Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACoA’s) Get the Help They Need?

Being a child in a home where one parent is slowly slipping into addiction means watching that parent we love, the one we have sat at the breakfast lunch and dinner table with all of our lives, climbed into the back seat to do errands with, gone to see Grandma, taken family vacations with…we watch that very parent turn, in the blink of an eye, into someone who terrifies us, someone who shakes us to our core to be around. Addicts get a look of madness in their eyes when they are using, each of our parents did anyway. Their faces become twisted, they say mean, mean things, they move in strange ways, they act like they hate us and in their shame, they shame us. Their attempts at love become hard to believe and hard to receive. Unless you have lived with the rollercoaster of addiction, you will likely not know what I am talking about. You will likely not understand how twisted your emotional experience becomes.