Before picking out a book for this assignment, I tried to determine what in my own

personal life it is I needed to read up on. Being a recovering alcoholic and also being an

adult child of an alcoholic, there were many subject matters that came to mind that I

needed to look into.

Being an adult child of alcoholic parents, I decided to learn more on this subject. The

book I chose to read for this critique was, “Adult Children of Alcoholics”. Reading

this book brought back many memories of how it was living in such a chaotic

environment.

I feel that this is a good book for many children of alcoholics to read. This book gave me insight on many questions that I had regarding my up bringing. At one point, I thought that alcoholism only affected those who are considered lower class families (families who live in the projects), since that is where I was raised.

According to this book, there are certain generalizations that recur in one form or another

with adult children of alcoholic, I fully agree with this fact. One of them being, adult children of alcoholics usually have to guess at what normal behavior is, because growing up nothing was probably normal in their lives. That is a statement that I can relate to. Growing up, I had to act as if everything was great in my home, when in reality, everything was not fine. My mother was always at work and I had to fill the mother role 1

shoes by taking care of my siblings and my dad, well he was a joke, was always passed out on the couch or on the floor. I may not be a rocket scientist, but I know that was not normal. Growing up into adulthood, it was very difficult for me to determine what was considered the norm and what was not the norm.

In chapter 2 in the book “What is happening to you now?” It discusses children growing up into adults. What now? We, adult children of alcoholics, grew up and because of how we were raised, we have no clue on what or how are lives are suppose to be like. This book makes a lot of sense to me, I relate to a lot of what the author writes.

In my own experience, when I became a parent I had no clue on how to be a mother, I did the same thing my own mother did. I married an alcoholic and to escape from the madness that was going on in my home, I did what I had seen in my childhood, I put in many hours working. As for my child (I only had one at that time) he stayed with my mother.

Now that we are all grown up, it is up to us to get our own lives back on track. As the book states, maybe not all adult children of alcoholics have the same chaotic characteristics, but the majority of us do.

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One characteristic that is mentioned is, “Adult children of alcoholics judge themselves without mercy”, boy is the author right! I for myself, am one of those persons. Because of my upbringing I am my worse critic. Growing up in an alcoholic environment, anything I did was never good enough to my parents. If I brought home an “A” on my report card, my parents would say “That’s pretty good, but an “A+” would have been better. If that was not bad enough, my father would go on for hours on how my step-sister would bring home better grades than me. God only knows how much I hated my father at that time. Anyways, to this day, I try my best at everything I do because of that.

Other characteristics that are mentioned are, “Adult children of alcoholics have difficult having fun” and “Adult children of alcoholics take themselves very seriously“, those are very true statements. Growing up in an alcoholic family, there was no time for play for many children, so as adults we feel silly acting like kids. I for one still have a problem of letting my guard down and acting silly with my children. I never learned how to play as a child, I had to grow up way to soon before my time. This is an issue that I need to work on, not only for my sake, but for the sake of my children. I feel so bad when my children try to horseplay with me and I refuse to play in that way with them. My twelve year old daughter gets pretty upset with my, she calls be boring. When my daughter makes these kinds of statements, I feel guilty because I do not know how to have fun.

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After reading this book, I decided to get myself and my children into counseling. This book made me think of all the unresolved issues that I have in my life, due to alcohol abuse by my parents and by myself. I now know that it is never too late to get help for an addiction problem, whether or not a person is still currently using.

Sometimes I feet that maybe it is to late for me to change, but my mind is quickly changed everyday when I wake up to the faces of my children. I am a recovering alcoholic, and I know that it is going to take many years of continuous counseling for me to get myself “right”, as for my children, well that is a different story. I got control of my addiction before it got way out of hand, so my children were not exposed to many years of chaos, maybe they will not need years of counseling as myself.

Now that I got to read this book, maybe I will pick up other books that deal with the same subject matter and hopefully they will be as insightful as this one .