Growing Up in an Alcoholic Family

What if the unspoken rules of your childhood are still shaping your adult life? In this episode of With You in the Weeds, hosts Lynn and Shay Roush share a deeply personal conversation in their Dealing With Your Addictions series. Shay opens up about his upbringing in an alcoholic family, revealing how it impacted his trust, emotions, and relationships. 

Here are the sobering statistics: 1 in 6 U.S. children live with an alcoholic parent (1 in 4 with substance abuse); alcoholism drives nearly 50% of divorces; it causes 12,000 annual drunk-driving deaths and 232 million missed workdays; and heavy use shortens life by 2–24 years. 

Shay’s story highlights that behind every statistic, there is a person and family deeply impacted by alcohol. In addition to lost jobs, DWI’s, and stints in rehab facilities, Shay’s dad created financial fears that ultimately led to his parent’s divorce. Despite periods of sobriety, Shay’s father eventually died from alcohol, leaving Shay with a legacy of alcoholism that he didn’t want to repeat. 

This episode unpacks the 5 spoken rules of alcoholic families that perpetuate the cycle:

• Don’t Trust
• Don’t Talk
• Don’t Feel
• Play a Role
• Deny the Impact

As a child grows up in this environment, these rules foster Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOAs) leading to fear of abandonment, difficulty trusting others, people-pleasing, emotional numbness, perfectionism, and addiction tendencies.

Shay’s journey demonstrates how God’s transformative power helped him learn healthier patterns of relating, and break the cycle of addiction in his family, allowing him to be emotionally present for his family despite early temptations. We believe that future generations can be impacted when you name and break the unspoken rules of your alcoholic family and allow God to heal the broken parts of your heart.

We recommend the book It Will Never Happen to Me by Claudia Black, for further explanation on the rules of an alcoholic family. 

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