I AM MARRIED to a woman I love very much. I really can’t see my life without her; at the same time, I can’t see my life with her anymore. She comes from a family where her father was an alcoholic and divorced her mom when she was nine. My wife is a social drinker; her older sister is addicted to alcohol and prescription drugs.

Here’s the rub. My wife displays the classic characteristics of an the adult child of an alcoholic (ACoA). We fight all the time because she won’t let me into her life. She keeps me at arm’s length, and will not display the love, trust, affection, appreciation, and admiration that I need and deserve in this marriage. I never thought it could be tied to her being an ACoA, until just recently.

It’s starting to make sense. The more I read, the more I am starting to think it affects our relationship. We have gone through endless marriage counselling. In her mind, I am always wrong and the complete source of problems in our marriage. Don’t get me wrong: I am no angel, but it takes two to tango.

I think we have a pretty good life together, because I make a very good living, am very attentive to her needs, and help out around the house all the time. Every time I think I am doing something to make her happy and get her to the point where she will start loving me, she doesn’t.

I can’t find anything that will help me understand, cope, or help her break through this.

Laurence

Laurence,

We want to believe if we are good, we will be rewarded. We want to believe an attentive, helpful, loving husband will receive, in return, the love he shows his wife. We want to believe the world is just.

Unfortunately, all of these things are only beliefs. None of them is necessarily true. If you want a visual representation of what happened to your wife, look up foot-binding and view pictures of the painfully deformed feet inflicted for centuries upon hundreds of millions of girls in China.

What your wife endured was the psychological equivalent of foot-binding. Often, there is little physical or emotional abuse in alcoholic homes. Instead, there is complete emotional neglect. Researchers are finally coming to understand the effects of neglect are often more severe than the effects of physical, emotional, or sexual abuse. Kids enduring emotional neglect may simply never bounce back.

ACoAs frequently don’t understand the link between their problems with a partner and the alcoholic home they were raised in. Your wife built defenses as a way of handling life in her parents’ alcoholic home. The problem is: Now that those defenses are no longer needed, she cannot let them go.

Only she can admit that, and begin the work of recovery. The problem for ACoAs is that the field of alcoholism
is controlled by people whose interest is in curing alcoholics. They typically ignore or deny the worst effect of alcoholism: Child abuse. For people in this field, even the best-intentioned, the alcoholic is the centre of the universe. The children have meaning only in reference to the alcoholic.

As a result, little real progress has been made in helping children of alcoholics. The term ACoA is a circumlocution. What this is about is child abuse, pure and simple. That’s why we find that the books most helpful for children of alcoholics are those dealing with recovery from child abuse, especially recovery from sexual abuse. In intensity of effects, sexual abuse is what being an ACoA most resembles.

The only cure for your wife is recounting her experiences, and feelings again and again until they have lost their emotional charge and become mere facts. That may not happen until after all the love you have for her is gone.

Wayne & Tamara