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A friend at work gave it to me, and I said, "Oh, isn't that interesting, but I'm not really a child of an alcoholic" and tried to give it back. She just looked at me, and suggested I go ahead and read it anyway. It hit me like a rock between the eyes at that point that my stepfather had been a terrifying, belligerent, violent drunk for the years I'd lived with him - and my mother had been totally whacked out on prescription meds all that time, so whacked out that she did things like set her nightgown afire making tea, walk into a floor fan and need 20 stitches, things like that. Yet my reflexive response had been denial that there'd been a problem. That denial gets so engrained as a habit that it's difficult to even SEE the elephant in the living room after awhile.
The really unsettling thing for me was reading a particular passage on how ACOAs have often learned to divorce themselves from normal emotional responses (you're told so often that what you see and feel isn't valid - "your stepfather is not a drunk!" "you are not being abused, it's all in your head!" - that you learn to discount what you feel and become very detached. Now, something about that passage struck me as significant enough that I felt the need to read it aloud to my then-boyfriend. While I was reading it, I burst into tears (VERY atypical for me at the time, VERY) and cried and shook almost nonstop for about three days. The really creepy thing about that is the whole time I was having that breakdown, I FELT NOTHING.
Gee, I wonder why a passage about becoming detached from normal emotional response struck me as significant? :eyes:
Anyway, the book is by no means a panacea or a "cure" for anything, but it is often helpful to know that you are responding in a predictable manner to your childhood experiences, and it can help you understand WHY you're reacting as you are, and how to begin to alter your thinking. For me, it was such a relief to discover that I wasn't going psycho - I was working out the problems of my extraordinarily-fucked-up childhood and there was a light at the end of the tunnel. For years, I'd feared that I was crazy and going crazier. I went through some bad times working through that shit - it isn't fun to relive childhood trauma - but sometimes you have to rebreak a leg to set it properly. I'm actually reasonably stable these days, but it took a couple of decades.
I wish you luck and healing in your journey.
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