Adult children: the secrets of dysfunctional families

can take this first step.

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Working A Program
In 12-step circles "working a program" means sticking to a daily
program of recovery. For those of you not familiar with "12-step
programs", we are referring to the original 12 steps of Alcoholics
Anonymous, upon which almost all other Anonymous groups have
been modeled. But before we speak directly to the issue of
recovery, we would like to share with you a typical recovery
history.
Jack's Recovery Process
Jack grew up in a middle-class suburban home outside of Denver,
Colorado. He is the oldest of three children. He earned a bachelor's
degree in business and management in 1969 and then took a job
with a local manufacturing firm. Three years after graduation, he
married Betsy, and they started a family immediately.
Seven years into the marriage, Jack started feeling "stale". One day
a friend from work invited him to go jogging. He agreed, hoping it
might help pull him out of the doldrums. It did. Within a few
months, Jack had worked up to running 10 miles a day, and by the
end of his first year, he ran a marathon. His productivity at work
had increased ten-fold and he had renewed vigor and enthusiasm
for life. Everyone outside of his home saw him as a ball of fire. He
was exciting to be around, was a go-getter at work, was generous
and charming.

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At the same time that all of this was going on away from home,
things within the home began to deteriorate. Betsy and Jack had
grown distant from each other. She started to complain to Jack a lot
about his long absences from the children and her while he was
training for marathons. They would fight for a few hours and then
remain cold and aloof for several days.
The children picked up very quickly on this covert tension and
started "tip-toeing" around the house during the long periods of
silence. Jack and Betsy's sex life all but vanished. Beneath the
excitement of his outer life there developed a deep numbness inside
of him. Simply sitting down to dinner with Betsy and the kids
became a cue for his wanting to escape to run away from it all. He
was bored with the idle chatter that happens at mealtimes. The little
day-to-day things that were shared with each other irritated him.
He lost interest in his children and his wife.
Roughly two years into this phase of his life, Jack started
gambling. At first he just bought a few lottery tickets but the rush
of excitement soon overwhelmed him. He escalated to making
several trips a year to Reno, where he began losing large sums of
money. And towards the end he was taking incredible risks in the
stock market.
Betsy thought it was fun at first. She would never have taken the
little risks that they were taking all by herself. She even bought a
few lottery tickets on her own. But it wasn't fun for long. She lost
count of the sleepless nights she spent worrying when "the big
loss" would hit and they would be bankrupt. She was absolutely
alone, even when Jack was not out gambling because he was
always preoccupied with it. It became a nightmare for her. She

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finally became too numb to care. Jack had become numb, too,
without even knowing it. His entire life consisted of work, running
and gambling. He had become completely isolated from his family,
his friends and from himself. His three addictions had a
stranglehold on him.
Jack's recovery did not come easy. The family therapist that Betsy
finally went to recommended that she start going to Adult Children
of Alcoholics 12-step groups because her father was an alcoholic.
The therapist also recommended that Jack enter inpatient treatment
for his gambling addiction. Jack refused.
"This is not a big deal," he proclaimed. "I can deal with it by
myself."
But Betsy did not give in. She told him that he would have to

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become involved in some kind of group therapy experience or she
would ask him to move out.
Jack's strategy was to shop around town until he could find a
therapist who would see things his way. The first two that he saw
recommended treatment. The third said that he should join a men's
therapy group, and that he probably wasn't gambling addicted. So
he joined that group.
Jack stayed with the group several months, and nothing really
changed. But Betsy was changing.
Four months into her therapy, Betsy attended an intensive short-
term treatment program for Adult Child/Co-dependency issues. She
did a lot of painful work around her family of origin and abuse and
neglect issues. She emerged from that program somewhat "raw"
but deeply connected to the Little Child inside of her for the first
time in her life.
At last a clear picture of her life was emerging for Betsy. She was
not satisfied with being the wife of an unrecovering addict. Two
months after her short-term treatment experience, Betsy
approached Jack calmly but purposefully.
"Jack, I care about you. We have shared a lot of our lives with each
other. Because I love you, I can no longer watch and be a part of
your self-destruction. I have made a decision that I will stay in this
marriage for now if you go to inpatient treatment for gambling
addiction. All I know for sure is that I can't live this way anymore."
And then she cried honest, unashamed tears.
Jack did go into treatment. It was the most painful thing that he had

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ever done, because it revealed all of the pain that he had
experienced as a child growing up in a dysfunctional family
system. He felt renewed and invigorated, though. He had some new
hope. He learned quickly that treatment is just the beginning of
recovery. He learned that he would always be recovering, rather
than recovered. He learned that each day was new; and that each
day offered the choice of being in recovery or of acting-out his
addiction. He learned that he had work and running addictions, too,
and that he would need to deal with those more as time passed and
as his spirit healed. He had a few "slips" his first year, when he
would buy lottery tickets, but he also kept going to his aftercare
therapy group, honestly working his program and he kept attending
a Gamblers Anonymous 12-step group. And he kept getting
healthier.
The first two years following Jack's treatment were rough ones for
Jack and Betsy. They had never been truly intimate before so they

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had a lot of learning to do. They became involved in couples'
therapy after a while to begin to learn how to share feelings with
each other, resolve conflicts without hurting each other irreparably,
and to learn how to get their needs met in non-addictive, non-
controlling ways.
Five years later Jack and Betsy have a marriage that is working.
They still have fights, but the fights get resolved. They still slip
into personal isolation, but they see it and do something about it
before it becomes serious. They still deny their true feelings at
times, but they are so well connected in the recovering community
that it is much easier to get back to that Little Child inside of them.
They have friends with whom they have shared their struggles.
They can laugh and cry together without getting enmeshed in each
other's feelings. And they both enjoy immensely the idle chatter
that they and their children share at mealtimes.
The Process of Recovering
There are some basic principles of recovering from Adult Child
issues that we would like to outline, with the understanding that
each person finds recovery in his or her own time and by his or her
own means. This does not mean that we can recover alone! People
who "recover" alone, by quitting drinking on their own, for
example, are not in recovery. Recovery is much more than simply
not drinking or not binging and purging food. For many alcoholics,
not drinking is relatively easy when compared to the task of living
a balanced, healthy life. Recovery is much more about dealing with
our underlying co-dependency, guilt, shame and fear of
abandonment issues. It is about not replacing one symptom with
another. It is about not trying to control those around us. It is about

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having and trusting our feelings and of getting our emotional needs
met in healthy ways. It is about feeling like we belong; that we are
not better or worse than others. It is about feeling that the world is
basically a safe place to be, and that we are okay in the world.
Remember these points as you read through the principles of
recovery below.