Latest / Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour / Children Living in The Shadow of Addiction. Caught Between Love And Fear. Episode 2.

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Children Living in The Shadow of Addiction. Caught Between Love And Fear. Episode 2. · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: This is episode two Broken Childhoods Living with Parental Addiction.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: This series explores what it's like to grow up in the shadow of addiction, not from the perspective of the adult, but from the perspective of the child who is powerless and must live alongside it.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: I try to make things easier at home.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: If mum's tired I make my own dinner.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: And if dad looks angry, I keep my little sister in our room.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I think if I'm good enough then everything might be okay.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: Teachers say I'm very mature for my age, but really I'm just trying to stop things from getting worse.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Children are biologically organized to depend upon adults for safety, protection, and emotional regulation.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: But when addiction disrupts the stability of a parent, something unusual often begins to occur, and the direction of care slowly reverses.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: Instead of the adult regulating the emotional life of the child, the child begins to regulate the emotional life of the adult.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: And this phenomenon is often referred to as parentification.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: The child becomes the responsible one.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: The one who helps keep the household functioning, who notices when the adult is becoming distressed, who attempts to stabilize the emotional climate of the home.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: And children don't describe these roles in a dramatic language.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: They simply say they are helping.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: But what is occurring psychologically is far more complex because the child is adapting in order to preserve attachment.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: And while this adaptation may seem to help the family survive, although it rarely does, it also asks the child to sacrifice something important: the freedom to be dependent, carefree, or to just simply be a child.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: The ambivalent bond between child and addicted parent is a term which describes this very well.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Because when we think about children living with parental addiction, it's easy to imagine that the child might simply become angry with the parent or reject them.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: But clinical experience suggests something far more complex.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: Children rarely stop loving their parents, even when those parents are deeply unreliable, even when those parents behave in ways that are frightening or confusing.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, the attachment bond between child and parent is one of the most powerful, powerful psychological forces we know.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: From the perspective of attachment theory, children are biologically organized to seek safety, protection, and emotional regulation from their caregivers.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: But when the caregiver is also the source of instability, something deeply confusing occurs.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: The person the child turns to for safety is also the person who creates the sense of danger.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: This creates what attachment theorists sometimes refer to as a conflicted or disorganized attachment pattern in the child.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: The child is being pulled simultaneously in two directions, towards the parent and away from them.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Psychodynamically, this creates a powerful form of emotional ambivalence.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: The child may feel love and fear towards the same person, longing and anger, hope and disappointment.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: And because children depend so completely upon their caregivers, they often resolve this conflict in a very particular way.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: They protect the parent internally.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: Rather than recognizing the parent as unreliable, the child may begin to believe that the problem lies with themselves.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: If I were better behaved, if I were quieter, if I tried harder, then perhaps the parent would be different.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: This is a good example of uncommon sense, that which the child is forced to use.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: This process has been described in psychoanalytic literature as a form of defensive idealization.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: The child preserves the image of the parent as good even when the lived experience contradicts that belief.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Because acknowledging the parent's unreliability to directly would feel psychologically overwhelming.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: Object relations theorists, such as Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott, describe how children internalize their early relational experiences in the form of internal representations, what Melanie Klein referred to as internal objects.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: In families affected by addiction, the internal representation of the parent may become deeply conflicted.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Part of the child holds on to the loving, attentive parent who appears during moments of sobriety.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: Another part of the child holds the frightening or emotionally unavailable parent who appears during periods of intoxication.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: And these two internal experiences may never fully reconcile.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, they have to coexist, often uneasily and very often painfully.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: And this internal conflict can continue long after childhood is ended.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: Adults who grew up in families shaped by addiction sometimes describe a persistent emotional tension when they think about their parents.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: They may feel deep love and deep resentment, compassion and anger, loyalty and grief all at the same time.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: And what they're experiencing in those moments isn't confusion, it's the psychological legacy of a child in which love and instability existed side by side.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Now understanding this ambivalence is extremely important because without recognizing it, we might expect children or adults who were once those children to feel only anger towards the addicted parent.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: But the reality is far more complex.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: The bond between child and parent does not disappear simply because the relationship was damaging.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, the child carries that relationship internally, and it continues to shape how they experience love, trust, and safety in relationships throughout their lives.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: Many patients I've worked with grieve the loss of the childhood they never had, or the parent they never had, still holding on to the idealized image of the parent who frequently was available.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I see children who are continually let down by a parent, those whose addictions prevent them from being consistent, can prevent them from being reliable, and yet somehow the child still wants the parent.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's extremely hard to see a child in that state, and it's harder to have them learn that the parents' difficulties and the parents' behavior are not because of the child.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Simply saying those words actually doesn't make that much difference because it doesn't speak to the part of the child who is desperately wanting the parent to be in their lives as a parent.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: When children become responsible for managing the emotional lives of the adults around them, childhood becomes something different, something quieter, something more cautious, watchful, and painful.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: In the next episode, we will explore another powerful feature of families affected by addiction and the silence that often surrounds it, and the secrets that children learn to carry, because when addiction enters a family, it rarely affects only one person who struggles with it.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: Its shadow falls across the lives of the children who grow up inside it.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.