27/12/2025
A thought provoking read..
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/17fdYH6uBG/?mibextid=wwXIfr
I was thirty-two when someone casually mentioned that children of alcoholics learn to read a room the way other people read books. That we develop this hypervigilance, this ability to detect the slightest shift in mood, to predict danger before it arrives, to manage other people's emotions so expertly we forget we're allowed to have our own. And I stopped breathing for a second because nobody had ever named it before. This thing I'd been doing my entire life. This exhausting performance of perfect. This constant monitoring of everyone else's emotional temperature while my own feelings stayed locked in a basement I'd learned never to visit.
My father didn't drink anymore by the time I was born, but the house still felt like it was built around his absence, around the ghost of who he'd been, around my mother's hypervigilance that became mine. I grew up thinking my anxiety was just my personality. That my inability to relax was a character flaw. That my need to control everything was just being responsible. That my terror of conflict and my reflexive people-pleasing were simply who I was. Nobody told me these were survival skills I'd learned before I could talk. That I'd been adapting to chaos disguised as normal, training myself to be whatever other people needed so I could stay safe in a house where safety was never guaranteed.
Janet Geringer Woititz's "Adult Children of Alcoholics" is the book that finally connected the dots I didn't know needed connecting. She wrote it in 1983, and it's been quietly destroying and rebuilding people ever since. Not with dramatic revelations or therapeutic jargon, but with simple, devastating observations about what happens to children who grow up in homes where addiction—active or historical—shaped the emotional architecture. Where unpredictability was the only constant. Where you learned to be responsible when you should have been cared for. Where you became the parent to your own parents while still being a child who desperately needed parenting.
1. You don't know what normal is, so you perform what you think it should be. Woititz explains how children of alcoholics grow up without a baseline for healthy relationships, emotional regulation, or functional family dynamics. So you watch other people and mimic what looks right. You become whoever the situation requires. You're a chameleon of acceptability, terrified someone will discover you're making it all up because you never learned what "normal" actually feels like from the inside.
2. You're either hyper-responsible or completely irresponsible, with no middle ground.
Either you became the one holding everything together—the caretaker, the fixer, the one everyone depends on—or you collapsed into the opposite, unable to handle basic adult responsibilities. Woititz shows how both extremes are responses to the same wound: never learning what healthy responsibility looks like because you were either forced into it too young or protected from it entirely.
3. You're addicted to chaos because calm feels dangerous.
When things are peaceful, you wait for the other shoe to drop. When relationships are stable, you sabotage them or find people who bring drama. Not because you're broken, but because your nervous system was wired in unpredictability. Chaos is your baseline. Calm registers as the eerie quiet before the storm, not as safety. So you create problems when there aren't any because at least then you know where the danger is.
4. You're terrified of anger, yours and everyone else's.
Woititz describes how children of alcoholics often become adults who can't access anger without shame or who explode disproportionately over small things. Because anger in your house meant danger. So you learned to suppress it, to apologize for it, to make yourself smaller so you wouldn't provoke it in others. Or you learned anger was the only emotion allowed, so it became your default for everything you actually felt but couldn't name.
5. You confuse love with caretaking, and intimacy terrifies you.
You're drawn to people who need fixing because that's the only kind of love you understand. Real intimacy—where someone sees you without you performing, where you're allowed to need things, where vulnerability doesn't equal danger—feels unbearable. Woititz explains how you learned that love means managing someone else's dysfunction, and being loved means being useful. The idea that you could just be yourself and still be wanted feels like a language you were never taught.
6. You carry shame that isn't yours.
Children absorb the emotional debris of their families. You internalized your parent's addiction as evidence of your inadequacy. If you'd been better, smarter, quieter, more helpful, maybe they wouldn't have drunk. Woititz gently, persistently reminds you: it was never about you. Their drinking wasn't caused by your existence. The chaos wasn't your fault. The shame you carry belongs to a disease, not to the child who survived it.
You deserved better than what you got. And you deserve better than what you're still doing to yourself because of what you got. This book won't fix it all. But it might finally help you see that what you thought was you was actually just what you had to become to survive. And now, finally, you can start learning who you actually are underneath all that armor.
BOOK: https://amzn.to/4phcAJH
