Latest / Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour / Children living in the shadows of addiction. Episode 3. Guardians Of The Family Secret

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Children living in the shadows of addiction. Episode 3. Guardians Of The Family Secret · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and welcome back.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: This is Kim Lee, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist, with episode three of Growing Up with Addiction.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: The child's emotional world.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: People at school don't know what it's like at home and I don't tell them.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes my friends talk about their parents picking them up or helping them with homework.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: I just say mine are busy.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: You learn quite quickly not to talk about it.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because if people knew what it was really like, I think they see your family differently.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: One of the most powerful forces operating within families affected by addiction is silence.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Children quickly learn that certain aspects of family life aren't discussed outside the home.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes this silence is spoken because a parent might say, Don't talk to anyone about this.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's communicated through warning looks, sudden changes of a subject or attention that enters the room when certain topics are mentioned.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes the silence is never explicitly stated at all.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's just simply understood.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: But the effect is the same.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: The child becomes the guardian of the family secret.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: And carrying a secret of this magnitude is a heavy psychological burden for a developing mind.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Children depend upon adults not only for safety and care, but also for helping them make sense of emotional experiences.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: But when those adults are themselves overwhelmed, particularly by addiction, the child is left to manage experiences that are confusing, frightening, and often deeply contradictory.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: On the one hand, the child knows that something is wrong because they see the unpredictability, the broken promises, the arguments, and the strange changes in mood or behavior.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yet, at the same time, the child remains emotionally attached to the very person whose behavior is causing the instability.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: And this, as we said in the previous episode, creates a powerful internal conflict because the child must both acknowledge and deny the reality they are living in.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: In psychodynamic and psychoanalytic terms, this can create what Wilfred Beyond described as an absence of containment.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Normally, a parent helps a child process feelings by receiving them, thinking about them, and then returning them in a form that the child can tolerate.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: But when addiction disrupts this process, the child's emotional experiences often remain unprocessed and unspoken, but it doesn't mean they disappear.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: So the silence doesn't just remain external, it becomes internalized.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: And over time that internal silence begins to shape the child's behavior.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Some children become extraordinarily careful, they monitor their own behaviors closely, determined not to create additional stress within an already fragile household.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes teachers may describe them as mature beyond their years.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: They may seem responsible and they are quiet, but beneath this apparent maturity often lies a child who has learned that their own needs must remain secondary.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: Other children manifest the silence differently.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: They may appear restless, distracted, or oppositional.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Not because they're deliberately disruptive, but because the emotional tension they carry has nowhere else to go.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: The unspoken experiences of home life leak into school behavior.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes this may appear through somatic symptoms, headaches, stomach aches, frequent visits to the school nurse.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: And the body often speaks what the mind cannot safely articulate, and sometimes the silence appears through emotional withdrawal.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: The child may appear distant from peers, reluctant to invite friends home, uncertain how to explain the inconsistencies in their family life, and gradually the gap between their private world and the world of other children grows wider.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott once described how children in difficult environments may develop what he called a false self, a way of presenting themselves to the outside world that conceals their internal reality.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: For many children, living with addiction in the family, this false self becomes a protective strategy.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: They learn to appear normal, functional, and untroubled, even when their inner world is anything but.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: And because the family's secret cannot be spoken, the child often begins to feel that the reality of their life must remain hidden from everyone teachers, friends, extended family, neighbors, even professionals.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: To understand what this silence can look like in the life of a child, it may just help to step for a moment into the consulting room.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: I once worked with a boy called Christopher.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: He was eleven years old when he was referred to me, and his teachers described him as polite and well behaved.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: But they were concerned because he seemed increasingly withdrawn.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: He rarely joined in playground games, and he'd begun complaining of stomach aches almost every morning before school.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: When Christopher first came into the consulting room, he spoke very little.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: He answered questions politely but briefly.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: There was nothing overtly troubling in what he said yet.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: There was certainly a noticeable caution in the way he spoke, as though every sentence had been carefully checked before leaving his mouth.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: After several sessions, Christopher, which is the name I've given the child, began bringing a small Lego figure into the room.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: And this was followed by more small Lego figures, which he would line up along the edge of the table in the room.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: One day he placed a figure on its side and said quietly, he's asleep.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: A few months later he added sometimes he sleeps all day.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: Gradually through the play, a picture began to emerge.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: Christopher's father had developed a serious alcohol dependency, and some days he would remain in bed until late afternoon.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: Other days he would be irritable and unpredictable.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: Christopher had learned to keep the house quiet when his father was sleeping.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: He had also learned something else, never to talk about it outside the home.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: When I asked him gently whether anyone at school knew what things were like at home and that dad slept so much, he shook his head.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then he said something that stayed with me.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: He said if people knew they would think my dad was a bad person, and that single sentence captured the conflict he was carrying.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: Christopher was protecting his father.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: He was protecting his family and protecting the secret.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: But in so doing, he was also protecting the silence that prevented him from receiving help.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: The stomach aches that brought him into therapy were in many ways the body's attempt to speak what he could not yet say.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Children like Christopher often live within this tension for years.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: They become experts in emotional containment and concealment.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: They learn what must not be said.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: They learn what must not be seen.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: But the cost of maintaining this silence is profound.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: Being the child who emotionally contains the adult but conceals them at the same time is a profoundly complex dichotomy.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: When children cannot speak about their experiences, they struggle to make sense of them.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: And when experiences remain unspoken for long enough, the child may begin to assume that their reality is somehow unique, that other families don't live like this, that other children wouldn't understand.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: The silence deepens the sense of isolation.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: And isolation in turn makes it even harder for the child to reach out.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: Christopher's story is not unusual.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: When children are asked directly or indirectly to protect the secrecy surrounding addiction, they will become emotionally isolated.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: They carry experiences that can't be easily spoken, and in so doing, they may begin to feel that their world is fundamentally different to the world of other children.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: Helping such children, creating a space for them to be themselves and do something which I call uttering the unutterable, is a privileged position for a grown-up to have with a child.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: And as the child begins to communicate the uncertainty, communicate the dichotomy, the awful conflict that they conceal, they can then start to experience relief.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: We think very carefully about addiction as being a mental health illness.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: And we also think about the risks that it poses to children and other family members.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: When addiction enters a family, it really affects the person who struggles with it alone.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: Its shadow falls across the lives of the children who grew up inside it and who carry it into their futures.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for this.