This is not my shame

“Dom w butelce” is not a pleasant read, but to many people it will bring... relief?

MAGDALENA KICIŃSKA: It is not pleasant because the experience of being a child at home with an alcohol problem is unpleasant. There is a lot of sadness, loneliness and harm in it. But we hope that our book can also bring comfort, a feeling that you are not alone with this experience. It is my dream that it is available in school libraries, and thus to people who still do not know that alcohol abuse at home is not OK.

AGNIESZKA JUCEWICZ: I would also like our book to make people reflect on their alcohol use – I think it can give them more insight into how their drinking can affect their children. It can give partners and friends of people who come from families with addiction a greater understanding of what they have gone through. It can help those who have sobered up and look at themselves as drinking parents to see what their children were struggling with.

There is a dispute among therapists as to whether an ACA syndrome (adult children of alcoholics) can be distinguished as a set of common problems. The stories your heroes tell are very different.

M.K.: Because drinking is different – mothers and fathers drink, people from the countryside and cities, from poor and prosperous homes, the unemployed and the working. There may or may not be physical violence at home. It is different when there are arguments at home than when a drunk parent goes to bed and is absent when he or she comes home from work. Scenery and actors differ, but there are common points.

A.J.: It is estimated that there are approximately 2.5 million people addicted to alcohol in Poland. They have partners, children. What do they have in common? From conversations and from my own experience, I know that, for example, shame – for what home you come from. And something much more painful – shame for who you are.

M.K.: Children often feel responsible for their parent’s drinking. It happens that children from alcoholic families are very good students, they hope that the parent will notice them, see what a nice child they have, and stop drinking. Another type of responsibility is dealing with the effects of drinking – here comes the shame that someone around you saw your father stagger or knows why he didn’t come to the parent-teacher conference.

A.J.: There are still many stereotypes of an alcoholic in Poland. But also of children of alcoholics. One of them is that it “shows”, because such children are, for example, neglected. But often you can’t see anything. And all the effort a child puts to cover it is very much related to shame. I grew up in a block of flats where only my family “had a problem”. And today I am not even able to recreate the effort I had to put in when taking the lift with my neighbour. Because I knew she knew.

These stories are also linked by the prolonged silence of children, which results from shame. What are its consequences?

M.K.: Loneliness. The feeling that no one can help you, you have to deal with it yourself. And what I discovered recently: confusing strength with endurance. I have heard many times about myself that someone perceives me as strong. And I do not feel like that at all, on the contrary, I feel that I am weak, that I need support, but I am unable to ask for it.

A.J.: This silence sometimes comes from the hope that until you say your parent is an alcoholic, maybe it’s not true?

One of our heroes, Marcin, wrote a diary as a child. He wrote down several notebooks until one day he wrote: “And my mother is an alcoholic”. Today he understands that’s what the diary was for – to write this one sentence. Another hero, Maciek, ran a blog. One day he confessed: “I wanted it to be a different Christmas”, and that sentence actually meant that his mother was an alcoholic. He did it at the age of 30. He hadn’t admitted it for so long.

M.K.: Until recently, I used to say that I am the daughter of an alcoholic. Only recently have I started to say: “My father was an alcoholic”. The sentences are the same, but the latter shifts the responsibility from me to my father. I’m putting this baggage aside, I’m giving it back to the person who brought it home. But it was a long time before I uttered that sentence.

In each of the interviews, the moment someone tells someone else that their parents drink for the first time is very touching.

A.J.: And very important. First of all, when you tell someone, it means you trust them. Second of all, you are confronted with the reaction. Many of our heroes were very afraid of it. They would say: “I thought she would think I was from a pathological family”. It turns out that this is usually taken with great compassion, sensitivity. And when you see this reaction, you feel that you are more than the home you come from.

M.K.: This is why I switched to saying my father was an alcoholic, in order to symbolically break away from thinking about myself that this was my first and most important identity. It was a symbolic separation from the shame.

Could therapy be the next step?

M.K.: I am not a therapist, so I dare not advise that therapy is necessary. However, I can say that it helped and helps me. I went to individual therapy when I was 22, and to group therapy later, because I was reluctant to do it. I went there to deal with something else, but it soon turned out that there was a whole lot of rubble underneath the problem to be moved.

A.J.: One of our heroes went to therapy because something started to go wrong in his relationship. He did not want to go back to the question of the family home, moreover, very often people feel reluctant to it: I do not touch it. It is understandable.

I don’t think therapy is necessary. A lot of people manage somehow. Sometimes it is because on their way they met good people, they had relationships that, in a sense, corrected those experiences. They gained confidence thanks to them. Adult children of alcoholics often find it difficult to surpass the feeling that the only person you can count on is yourself.

I was lucky to find my first group for children of alcoholics at the age of 13, in 1989, in one of the first addiction treatment clinics in Warsaw. This group for children looked more like a clubroom than a therapy session. But it was such a safe place where I found out that there were other people like me. Later, when I was older, I went to individual therapy, and about ten years ago, at 35, for a ten-month group therapy for adult children of alcoholics, which I really didn’t want to go to.

Why?

Because it seemed to me that I already knew everything, that I had already “worked through” everything, how many times can you revisit the past. But my motivation was that I had young children and it felt like something I could do for myself and for them.

And how was it?

I realised that this experience is still deep inside me and has an impact on what kind of a mother, partner, friend I am. But also that I will not get rid of certain things. For example, the deep sense of loneliness that accompanies me and this inherent insecurity. And that I have to live with it somehow. At the same time, during this therapy, I felt an incredible closeness to people. I understood there that when meeting another person, I cannot assume anything, because I do not know anything for sure, and that their suffering is undiscovered for me. My first impression when I went to the group and looked around the room was this: what am I doing here? But I persevered, I started to open up. Listening to the stories of these people and sympathising with them, for the first time I also got in touch with my suffering, which I had not fully recognised before. Meanwhile, they recognised it. When I saw how touched they were when I was talking about some drastic situation from home, I just admitted to myself how terrible it must have been for me, that little girl.

M.K.: My experience is similar. When I was listening to a stranger’s story, I suddenly realised that this was my story too. I felt someone hurt her and started to cry because I saw little Magda, who was also hurt.

Was it similar when writing the book?

M.K.: Yes, it was. We even talked about the fact that this book is such a group in which we meet with interlocutors, but also every reader for a moment joins this group and we hope that at least some particles of such coexistence, compassion will be experienced.

A.J.: For me, writing this book was even more difficult than therapy. Because there you are under the care of therapists, and here we were alone. With each conversation I had, I returned to my family home, I also started dreaming about it. And I already had the feeling that I had managed to leave it behind. On top of that, we feel responsible for our heroes.

Who are they? How did you find them?

M.K.: Their friends recommended them, we placed an announcement on Facebook and a few people came from there. I reached one of the interviewees through contacts in the penitentiary world. Of course, with the number of 2.5 million alcoholics in Poland, it is not possible to show the full spectrum of experiences, but we wanted it to be as wide as possible.

A.J.: Generational differences turned out to be important. Our youngest interviewee was 19 years old, the oldest was 69. And yet you can see that the younger generation has a completely different awareness. Kasia already knew that her parent’s drinking could have consequences for a child, in Włodek’s generation, no one thought about it. Father drinks? Yeah, he does.

The details of these stories are shocking. For example, a boy’s story about how once in his life he received a Lego gift from his grandmother as a child. Drunkenly, his father burned these bricks in the bathtub.

A.J.: This is actually a very drastic picture. But there are also less drastic, but no less painful ones. One of our heroines tells that in order to return home after school, she had to wait for her mother to come to pick her up. But her mum doesn’t come because she drinks and forgets about her. So she was walking around the school – for one, two, three hours. When it’s winter, she freezes. Many people probably pass this little girl without even wondering what she is doing there, why she is walking around like that.

M.K.: And even if someone asked her where her mother was, she would cover for her and say: she’s on her way. Because there are very different survival strategies, just as our interlocutors are different.

A.J.: One of our heroes has only recently realised why at 1 p.m., when he goes to dinner, he gets restless. His mum was a cleaner at school and at 1 p.m. she showed up to start cleaning the classrooms. His self-imposed task was to check in what condition she was. When she was drunk, he led her to an empty room so that the headmistress would not notice.

What, in your opinion, is the worst experience of a child from such a home?

A.J.: The feeling of living on a bomb, in constant tension and fear. Also for your own life, the life of other family members. One of our protagonists says that she will not fall asleep without a light on, even though she is already an adult. I also stay awake when I’m home alone. As a child, I was often left alone at night and I was afraid that a murderer would break in and kill me. To this day, when I am alone, I have a habit of turning on the lights in all rooms.

Children raised in alcoholic homes often say they have two parents – when thinking about the drinker. And if both mum and dad drink – there are four of them. In the drunken version, it can be the executioner and the torturer. In the sober version – someone who apologises, tries to compensate. A bit like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. How do you find your place in it?

Another thing that these so different heroes have in common is their low self-esteem. Do you have it too?

A.J.: Of course. Honestly? I will be glad to find out that there are people who came out of such families unscathed and think well of themselves, but I do not know such people. For me, it was great at the declaration level. I heard from my parents that I was smart, capable, but so what – when I came home, everything told me that those were just words. Meaningless.

M.K.: How can a child feel good about themselves when their parent does not notice them? You think to yourself: if it is more important to drink, it means that I am not very interesting. My father never knew which grade I was in. Building self-esteem in isolation from that defined by the drinking parent is arduous work. I do it all the time, sometimes it’s better, and sometimes I’m back to a place where I don’t think I deserve anything.

I would like to find a book like ours 15 years ago. First, to feel that it’s not my fault. Second, to feel that there are others who have the experience. Third, to know that something can be done about this experience.

The book does not promise any sudden recovery, some wonderful happy ending.

M.K.: Because there is no sudden recovery. When you experienced something during the most important years when a person forms, one cannot promise you that everything can be easily changed, quickly repaired.

A.J.: Such an experience is like a limb. You can’t chop it off and move on. But I think it is worth making an effort to understand what happened, just so that you do not stay in it all the time, but start living your life, which can be… better.

Sometimes you ask your interlocutors if there was anything good about their experience. And they say: no, nothing.

A.J.: That there was nothing good when their parents drunk. But they go back to those moments when their parents were sober. They keep these memories in some golden chambers of their memory when, for example, their mother didn’t drink for a year because she was sick.

M.K.: The belief that the parent will get a grip is in the child until the death of the parent. And sometimes, even after death, a person thinks: maybe I didn’t know something, maybe he/she loved me very much, but he/she went through something difficult? I think the need to love your parent is a primal thing.

A.J.: In the case of children from alcoholic families, love is closely related to loyalty. In my group therapy, we started out with 12 people, and only 6 of them made it to the end. Most people leave because they feel they are betraying their parents.

M.K.: One of the interviewees, after all the violence he suffered and still experiences from his father – physical and emotional – told me that his parents are getting older and he cannot go abroad, where he would like to continue living, because he has to take care of them. This sense of attachment is unimaginable.

A.J.: What is difficult in most cases is that these parents aren’t just bad after all. Many of them are interesting, warm people, they are fun to chat with. They are both. And it is difficult to contain – the parent who hurts you and the one who gives you some signs of love. Simultaneously.

M.K.: In addition, there is a sense of longing that I also feel. It is a longing for those moments which were good or which I imagined. Sometimes I get a pang of jealousy when I hear that a friend is going to see her parents for advice. It is amazing for me that you can go to your parents for support. Sometimes it turns into a longing for a childhood that I didn’t have. And I must mourn it.

A.J.: In one of our interlocutors, this sense of mourning, grief for childhood appears when her children are born. It is close to me. For me, it was a very painful confrontation to see what a child is, what he or she needs and what can be given to him or her, and that I didn’t get it. Maybe my kids will read it someday and forgive me for not enjoying playing with them when they were little, but I don’t know how to do it.

Is forgiveness possible?

I don’t like that word because I don’t like to talk about this experience in terms of guilt. What kind of forgiveness might come into play when there was physical or sexual abuse? When someone put your life at risk? On the other hand, some process of reconciling with the parent is sometimes possible, only it looks different for everyone.

I can tell what it was like for me. I had a conversation with my mother about the fact that the book was coming out. I said that I would have to mention in it that I, too, grew up at home with alcohol. “What do you think?”, I asked. She said it was okay. Mum hasn’t been drinking for 25 years. Then I said: “Mum, but you know we’re okay now?”. And she said: “Are we? Because I’m not so sure”. We tried to fix our relationship for a very long time, and this repair was mainly done by her. I had a lot of regret, anger, resentment inside. This is not in me any more, so instead of talking about forgiveness, I prefer to talk about gratitude. Well, but I was lucky that my parent sobered up effectively. My mother is an example for me that you can get out of the biggest swamp.

There’s one more thing that connects your heroes. In childhood their feelings were frozen.

A.J.: Imagine a child who is awake all night because there is a row at home and he or she has to get up for school in the morning. If he or she were to allow all these emotions, he or she would fall to pieces. He or she also often cannot show anger, for example, because he or she risks being hit.

M.K.: In an alcoholic home, there is no room for a child’s emotions or needs. I myself had to learn to answer the question about what I feel for a long time. My standard answer was: I don’t know. Learning this, listening to your body – because the body says something too, you can’t sleep or you feel like sleeping all the time – is an important process.

In almost every interview, the hero begins to cry. Thawing begins.

A.J.: It is worth crying over your childhood and seeing this harm – it is a path to recovery. But I guess it would be good if this grief did not dominate, so as not to get stuck in it. And when I say “recovery”, I mean life can just be better.

M.K.: Or easier. I’m not saying that it is suddenly easy and wonderful. But you feel a little less bad. You have a backpack with various things that you are carrying, but some of them can already be taken out of the backpack.

A.J.: One of our heroes also uses the backpack metaphor. When he was little, he packed all the books, notebooks, paints and PE uniform to the backpack, because he wanted to be always prepared for changes in the class schedule. He carried a heavy backpack every day. Now he is in another therapy and learns that you do not have to be prepared for every situation. You can only take what you need and move on.

Author: Paulina Reiter

Illustration: Marta Frej

The text was published in „Wysokie Obcasy” a magazine of „Gazeta Wyborcza” on 25 September 2021