by Lisa Frederiksen
I’ve written several posts lately dealing with the impact of a loved one’s alcohol abuse or alcoholism on their children. On Saturday, I ran across this article by Dr. Tian Dayton, Clinical Psychologist and author, “Diane Schuler: The Heartbreak of Denial,” published August 15 on The Huffington Post.
Here is the opening to her article, and I encourage you to read it in its entirely. Dr. Dayton covers so many excellent points we all need to keep in mind as we work to address the fall out of a loved one’s alcohol abuse and/or alcoholism on the family — especially the children. And, the way to help the children is to help the non-drinking parent understand the disease and to understand that alcohol abuse produces the same horrific drinking behaviors as alcoholism.
Quoting the opening paragraphs of Dr Dayton’s article:
“An August 13th, New York Post article Blood is not Thicker than Alcohol reports that, “William Hance, was enraged not just that his sister, Diane Schuler, had guzzled vodka and smoked pot while driving his kids — but that her husband, Daniel, concocted bizarre medical excuses to try to explain away his wife’s condition and denied that she had a drinking problem, said a lawyer familiar with the situation.”
This is the kind of heartbreak that alcohol and drug abuse engender.
Families who hide parental alcohol and drug abuse put children at risk. The case with Diane Schuler is the horrific extreme of how children can be affected by, in this case, a drunk driver.
But there are other ways of “driving drunk”. There is the mother who simply ‘forgets’ to pick her children up on time, or to get them to school functions, friends or doctor’s appointments. There’s the Dad who doesn’t come home at night because his relationship with a bottle takes precedence over his relationship with his family.
Then there are the silent sufferers, the kids who become little adults too soon. The ones who stand guard at the gate of the family ready to swing into action to get younger siblings up, dressed and fed when mom or dad are “out of it”, to act in loco parentis not for physically absent parents but for parents who are absent because they have disappeared temporarily into a bottle or a drug.
The long term effects of this kind of constant preoccupation with whether or not the adults who are supposed to be in charge of our lives are on or off duty are what we have been discussing in previous blogs on codependency and will continue to discuss in that series….” Click here to finish the article.
