Overview of Alcoholism: ACA (book critique)
Uploaded by corinna on Nov 12, 2003
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
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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...