9th Renewal Convention on
Adult Children, Recovery, & Trauma
Las Vegas , NV � February 23-26, 2005
The Lowdown on Families Who Get High
Patricia O'Gorman, Ph.D. (ACOA25-020-O'Gorman)
OLIVER-DIAZ: What is your ethnic background?
PARTICIPANT: [Inaudible]
OLIVER-DIAZ: Yeah. Latina , I thought so. Sir?
PARTICIPANT: Mexican-American.
OLIVER-DIAZ: Mexican-American. No alcoholism among the Latinos. There is only machismo. No drinking, men. Are you Latina ? You are something.
PARTICIPANT: German.
OLIVER-DIAZ: German? Ah, okay. Ma'am, what are you ethnically?
PARTICIPANT : [Inaudible]
OLIVER-DIAZ : I know, but they came from somewhere.
PARTICIPANT : Russian.
OLIVER-DIAZ : Russian? Okay. So these are different.
PARTICIPANT: [Inaudible].
OLIVER-DIAZ : When you talk about families you cannot ignore�I mean, the Irish, you are Irish? Well no, I missed that totally because that counts. That counts especially when we start talking about children of alcoholism. I had a program called [USORY], which was for children�we found that children of acculturation have got the same issues as children of alcoholics. The same issues, they've got shame issues, they've got all this reversal because they are English dominant. And that CoA's and children of acculturation, there is a lot of children of acculturation, right? And that they are [machismo] kids, right? Because the parent is saying, �Well, you know, you are becoming an American,� and meanwhile the school is saying, �Become an American.� So the best thing to do is to go to a gang. So, you know, we can talk about anything really. We can talk�we'll talk about this because we're supposed to, but we can talk about parenting�
PARTICIPANT: [Inaudible].
OLIVER-DIAZ : Are you a drunk? Were you recovering? I don't know why I guessed it. <Laughing> I'm all right.
PARTICIPANT: [Inaudible].
OLIVER-DIAZ : Well, look at him and then look at yourself. That's an [issue] between the family and the drunk. <Laughing>
PARTICIPANT: [Inaudible].
OLIVER-DIAZ : I'm in AA too, so don't worry. Oh, wait a minute, that's anonymous so I can't say that. Score that off the tape. I'm in a self-help group. I'm in an unnamed self-help group in recovery. Ma'am, where are you from, what do you do and who are your parents?
AUDIENCE : <Laughing>.
OLIVER-DIAZ : What are you ethnically?
PARTICIPANT: [Inaudible].
OLIVER-DIAZ : Are you early Irish or late Irish?
PARTICIPANT: [Inaudible].
OLIVER-DIAZ : Like your folks, when did they come?
PARTICIPANT: [Inaudible].
OLIVER-DIAZ : You know the Irish fought in the Civil War, right off the boats. They ended up fighting in the Civil War on both sides. Now, what does that have to do with parenting? Absolutely nothing, but you should have good, interesting things coming out of that.
O'GORMAN : Well, it has something to do with parenting because part if parenting is our family story, and how addiction fits into that family story is an important part of what parenting is about. So, even though we've been doing a little tongue-in-cheek, how do families teach�
OLIVER-DIAZ : Don't you think you should introduce yourself, just in case they don't know what you do?
O'GORMAN: Oh, okay.
OLIVER-DIAZ : I mean, you don't have to. Do you care what she does for a living?
O'GORMAN: No.
AUDIENCE : Yes.
OLIVER-DIAZ : All right.
O'GORMAN : Okay. Well, why don't you introduce me and I'll introduce you now.
OLIVER-DIAZ : She is a very smart person.
O'GORMAN : I picked him as a friend 25 years ago.
OLIVER-DIAZ : Yes, we've been together for 25 years. That's why we are screwing around like this. But, I met her�me and Roxie are going to have a big fight because I say I started the first children of alcoholics program and she says she did. I started mine in 1979. It was called Project Rainbow. It was free-standing and it was publicly funded. Pat O'Gorman was the youngest ever person to run NIAAA, National [] Prevention Department, and she was�and they thought Pat O'Gorman, when she went out to speak they thought Pat O'Gorman was a fat guy with a red nose coming out to talk about addiction. The women were not�33-year-old women were not even in NIAAA, much less the head of the prevention section of NIAAA, so she had a whole other women's deal going on. I met her because�
O'GORMAN : Gender issues, you would know nothing about that.
OLIVER-DIAZ: Yes, but back then it really meant�and then I met Patty at another conference when I started my program. I'm sitting next to somebody, Ellen Morehouse, who some of you guys might know, and Ellen says to me, �Oh my God, it's Pat O'Gorman,� and I said, �Well, who the hell is she?� and they said, �She's Pat O'Gorman,� and she had done the first research on children of alcoholics. Patty and I have written a couple of books together over the years.
O'GORMAN : Like five.
OLIVER-DIAZ: Yeah, like five. But my wife points out, all my books are written with her and her books are written alone.
O'GORMAN : Well, I have one alone.
OLIVER-DIAZ: And you have one alone, so I've got to do something alone. But Patty is the Chief Clinical Director for Berkshire Farms, which is the largest juvenile justice facility in the state of New York . So she's got lots of kids and lots of data and has a private practice and has been lecturing all over the world � Israel and the [Privlov's] and a lot of places.
O'GORMAN : [Privlov's], yeah, and this is Phil, my best friend. I have to say that. And Phil started the first children of alcoholics group.
OLIVER-DIAZ: You tell Roxie that tomorrow when you see her.
O'GORMAN : Yeah.
OLIVER-DIAZ: That I said it and I started it and tell her to prove it.
O'GORMAN : And Phil then went on in county government and then went to the White House where he worked with papa Bush in the White House Office on Drug Abuse Prevention, which he headed the prevention branch of. And then Phil, through a couple of iterations, then went down to Florida ; and he is now CEO of the largest treatment facility in Northern Florida in Jacksonville called Gateway. And Phil also did his stint in child welfare.
OLIVER-DIAZ : Right.
O'GORMAN : As well as my�
OLIVER-DIAZ: Both of us came out of child welfare.
O'GORMAN : And substance abuse. I'm a psychologist, he's a social worker, and what we are here to talk about today is parenting, but also talking about how the substance-abuse field, the child-welfare field, the mental-health field, we are all serving the same families. And so, how do we begin to work together? And how do we begin to understand some of the pressures and structures that other fields are under? Because I find and I'm sure you find, too, that we do a lot of tripping over each other in communities; and I think some of that, much of that, can actually be avoided. So that's what we are going to be talking about.
Talking about parenting�because we say all the time that alcoholism and drug addiction is a what? Disease. A family disease. Yet, how many of you actually have family programs in your communities? Okay, okay, two of you, three of you. And how many of you, in your family programs, are actually doing something about parenting, specifically about parenting? Okay, two. Okay. Does the parenting program actually deal with addiction and parenting? Yours does? Okay. Because that's very important. One of the things that we know but we don't operationalize is that when people become sober, which is the goal of treatment efforts, right? Sobriety? What does sobriety change in the family? Everything, everything! I've had couples come to me in my private practice because they are no longer sexually active. Why are they no longer sexually active? Because in sobriety what has changed? Everything. Yeah, like how do you do this sober, you know? Right? I mean, we are being very�you know, we are a bunch of professional people, well also parenting changes. How do you parent sober? It's one thing to parent as part of this crazy cycle called drinking and drugging�and then, you know, we're going to be talking about the cycle, where it's not so conscious. How do you do conscious parenting?
Then how do you make amends when you actually get in the program for what you begin to realize you've done? The immense part is very important because what I have seen in my work and what Phil has seen, is that unless that gets dealt with, that's a real trigger for what? Relapse. You know, if I start feeling really bad enough about what I've done with my kids and I can't figure out what else to do, there is something I know that will make me feel better. So these cycles, which we can talk about, are also cycles we need to operationalize what we want to do about in the sense of prevention and treatment. So there I am. You figured out how to do that? I'm impressed Phil.
OLIVER-DIAZ: Well, yeah, not in the order that we put things in.
O'GORMAN : Yeah, okay.
OLIVER-DIAZ : Do you want me to go to wet/dry's?
O'GORMAN : Well, we were going to talk about the importance of parenting. We did that.
OLIVER-DIAZ: Let's talk about, for a minute, the fact is drunks are narcissistic and adult children of alcoholics are pretty narcissistic too. I mean, we wrote this book in its first iteration, fifteen years ago? Something like that?
O'GORMAN : Yeah.
OLIVER-DIAZ: Nobody bought it or not very many people bought it, because it was about somebody else. Even the ACoA's, you know, so then we wrote a book on self-parenting for adult children, and they bought it. Yeah, because it was about them. You know, what a lot of this book is about is doing the right thing for the wrong reason, I mean, just think how brilliant Bill Wilson and those guys were. They got narcissistic, self-centered people to spend their whole life purpose in helping somebody else, but only for them. Now, for all of you therapists, that's a good reframe, isn't it? And not only that, you got a million people to buy into that. It's just a simple reframe, it's a powerful reframe. You are going to be a person of total service and selflessness in order for you to be totally narcissistic. Right? And it worked.
And so a lot of what we are going to talk about parenting in a narcissistic system, because it is a�the book you really want to read is Prisoners of Childhood. This is about recapturing, you know�children of alcoholics are not victims; they are actually omnipotent. I once had a little girl on a radio show with me and she said, well, you know, they asked her how she was doing in my program, and she said she was doing fine and that she learned she had feelings and stuff Claudia talks about. And all those things she said and she was really good. The next kid they talked to and she said, �Well, I learned that I was an alcoholic, I'm the child of an alcoholic, and I want to marry one.� This was a kid who was supposed to have gone through my program. And so the reporter; and I'm telling the reporter, �Give me the mic�, right? And I said, �Give me the mic. Give me the mic.� And they don't give me the mic and she says, �Why would you want to marry an alcoholic?� And she says, �Because I know with me it would be different.�
And that's really the syndrome, that's the issue, but that's not victimization, that's�she really thinks she's omnipotent. She thinks she can marry one and change him, which she can't do. And that is part of what the problem is here. And Prisoners of Childhood by Alice Miller really talks about that. You recreate the problem in your life that you couldn't accept in the first place in order to master it, that's why people marry multiple drunks. If you've married the same person more than once or if you dated the same person more than once, you are in that problem. If you got the same jerk more than one time, you are choosing. I always say to people, �There are millions of people on the planet, if you got a jerk, you picked him.� It's not like they happen by accident. And you did it for a reason and this is the reason, this dry is the reason. And so we wanted�and ACoA's kept saying, �Well, I never got parented.� Everybody gets parented in some manner. And most people got some good things even from bad situations.
And you know, a lot of these things, the drunk�when the drunk is not drunk could be a very empathetic, loving person until they are not. And the issue for the child of the alcoholic is a lot to do with control of environment, which is the same thing with other groups of people like children of acculturation, who can't control how things�the things in their lives, they can't control those things. And so, we thought we could change the country by changing the way people parented. And that was the whole point of trying to do what we tried to do.
PARTICIPANT : [Inaudible]
OLIVER-DIAZ: No. But it still can. It still can. Because I think if they treat�the treatment field never got it. Remember now, the addiction field is the only field run by the patient. The mental health�I mean, you don't have schizophrenics running mental health, but in the addiction field if you say you are a recovering alcoholic they promote you. I've got people that want to be drunks that I know, they feel they are out of it if they are not a drunk, in order to get promoted. So that's a strange field and the field of addiction has a lot of counter-transference issues. That is, you know, you get a 40- or 50-year-old guy coming in now to be an addictions counselor, who has been an alcoholic parent, do you think he's going to be prone to get the kids? I had a migraine the first year of my program because these kids are so angry and I had 5- to 18-year-olds. And they were so angry and I couldn't understand why I kept getting a migraine, but I was the child of an alcoholic and I hadn't dealt with it. And so that's a part of the problem, you've really got to deal with your countertransference issues in a situation like this.
O'GORMAN : So parenting. Why is parenting important? What does parenting wind up doing in the family? I mean, if we are dealing with a disease that has a physiological basis, it's the future of the country and also, as we will see in a moment, a lot of what happens in families with addiction is learned behavior. Which is one of the problems that unless you change the behavior you actually can pour the booze out of the system and have the same behaviors that really set up the system again for some other crises to be organized around it. Because these are families that tend to be organized around crises. So we will look at the system.
If we think of the family as a system and we think of every family as having rules, how many sets of rules are there in a family with addiction? At least two. And we talk about those being rules on the wet side and rules on the dry side. Which means, right off the bat, that any time you are doing an assessment you've got to figure out from what perspective people are talking to you from because as we will see soon that the coping mechanisms�the rules, the organization, how things are framed�are totally different on one side than on the other side. On the wet side and thinking about the family�and this is a Bowenian Family Model for those of you who are family therapists� what starts a drinking episode? Okay, what is a trigger?
PARTICIPANT : Stress.
O'GORMAN : Stress? Okay. Let's operationalize that. Let's say we have a five-year-old in the family, because in order to really do family work and in order to do parenting, you really have to, I think, see things through the eyes of the children, and five-year-olds are pretty concrete. So, what would a five-year-old see that would tell him or her that this is beginning? What does stress look like to a five year-old? What begins to happen in the family?
PARTICIPANT : Anger.
O'GORMAN : Anger? And how is the anger shown?
PARTICIPANT : Throwing things.
O'GORMAN : Okay, throwing things. Now, I'd notice that if I was five. Okay? So we're going to put things in the following way. We are going to put behaviors on the outside, and inside we are going to begin to put in secondary gains because a very important axiom for family therapy, for doing any systems work, is anytime you have a behavior that is maintained within a system, there is some secondary gain. Somebody is getting something from this or they wouldn't continue to do it. And certainly if you have a behavior that exists within a family over several generations, this is a very powerful behavior and people are getting something from it.
Okay, so throwing things. What else may a child see?
PARTICIPANT : Yelling.
O'GORMAN : Yelling. Okay. Okay, let's take yelling for a moment. How many of you have ever yelled at someone? How many of you have ever had a knock-down, drag-out fight with somebody? Okay, that's only about half the people here. How many of you have ever had a knock-down, drag-out fight which bordered on being really nasty and really mean? Okay, two of us, three of us.
OLIVER-DIAZ: The rest of you are lying.
O'GORMAN : Right. Okay. Some people have fights and they have blackouts. I have a lot of kids I'm currently working with who talk about when they get angry, they black out and these are particularly violent kids. So, if that happens, sometimes people don't remember, but for those of us who remember at least some of time, how do some of these kinds of real nasty arguments begin?
PARTICIPANT : Feelings get hurt.
O'GORMAN : Feelings get hurt over what? Like what?
PARTICIPANT : Jealousy.
O'GORMAN : Jealousy? Okay, give me an example of that. Okay, so you and I go out. We've been hanging out in a bar. Someone smiles at me and I smile back. We go back home, and�does this sound familiar to anybody? We go back home and you may say what to me? Okay, so he's already�he went from a smile to, �If you like him so much, why don't you go back to the bar?� And like, as the penny drops, he and I are into it. Now, when we really get into it, what is our body language like? Very tense? What are we doing? Are we arguing with our backs to each other, or are we spit contact away from each other? Face to face and spit contact usually; I mean, really get close. And when you are in these kinds of intense arguments, what are you also doing a lot of? You are raising your blood pressure. Yes, and our eyes, my guess is our eyes are locked into each other. Locked in. And one of the things in this model I'm showing you comes from actually a research study where they videotaped families�families who were drinking and families who were sober�and they found something very interesting, that on the wet side people had a lot more contact and the eye contact was usually during arguments. Now, why is eye contract important? On a human being on a developmental level, why is eye contact important? You are making a connection; and on this connection of eye contact, lots of things flow. I have twins; and when my twins were babies�they are about to go to college�when they were babies, I would be able to pick up both of them at the same time and hold them and they would yank on my face because each one of them wanted me looking at him. It is a very basic need we have for eye contact, okay? So, in our family�now, what is your name?
PARTICIPANT : Tom.
O'GORMAN : Tom? Okay. Tom and I have started yelling. I got real angry that he thinks I'm screwing around. I've picked up a glass; I threw it. Now, what's going to happen next? Okay, he may throw it back or leave, okay. So leaving is one option, but Tom and I are really into this, you know. We kind of like this in a crazy way. He and I are really connecting because even though he thought I was smiling at someone else in the bar, there is nobody in this universe right now but him for me because he and I are in this major argument, major battle. So, what may happen next? I've thrown something at him. He may do what?
PARTICIPANT : Hit you.
O'GORMAN : He might hit me. I'm not recommending it, but what is the secondary gain that comes from being hit? What type of contact?
PARTICIPANT : Physical.
O'GORMAN : Physical contact. Okay? Now if you start looking inside the circle, it's not looking too bad, is it? Eye contact, physical contact, okay? Now, as this evening goes on with our five-year-old child there, Phil, what's going to happen next? He's hit me. What am I probably doing at this point?
PARTICIPANT : Crying.
O'GORMAN : Crying, yes. If I wasn't crying before, I'm sure crying now, but I'm angry. I'm yelling. How is this going to�what's kind of the next move? It's time to make up; and as two adults, how do adults normally make up?
PARTICIPANT : Sex.
O'GORMAN : Sex. Okay. But before this, my guess is there is probably a lot being said between Tom and I. Like what kind of things? Bitch. You know, in my family that would not�in my family that would kind of be almost under the radar screen. Whore? Sleeze? Okay. That's kind of a beginning. What else?
PARTICIPANT : Slut.
O'GORMAN : Slut? It's all about her. What may I say to him? Bastard?
PARTICIPANT : Asshole.
O'GORMAN : Asshole? That's also kind of under the radar screen. Pig? I may say, �You can't get it up. You are not a real man.� Attack, attack, attack, attack. An attack where there is a lot of vulnerability, which is our inner selves, our sex lives, who we are. It is nasty because it gets down to the deepest level, very much creating shame. So we've got little Phil here, and Phil is listening to this and as this goes on, I may say to Tom, �I'm going to kill you,� or he may say to me, �I'm going to kill you.� I may get the frying pan. I heard a cassette a while ago on Eddie Murphy and it was one of these�I hate comedians because they always make me cry�so I'm listening to Eddie Murphy in the car, crying, as he's�and everyone is laughing. You know, it's an Eddie Murphy routine, and he talks about his mother going after his father with an iron. I never thought about an iron being a weapon before, but it's a metal thing with three points. He would go after her, and she would pick up that iron and start going after him.
So, at a certain point it's not that we are shaming each other; we are also threatening each other. And now the room gets quiet. Phil is five, and Phil has heard Mommy and Daddy say things he doesn't quite understand, but he knows they are bad. And he's also heard them talk about hurting each other. So what may Phil do? The room is quiet. He may start crying. He may try to go in there. He may leave the room. What happens if he goes in? Okay, but Tom and I may be, what is that word, in flagrante�we may be involved.
PARTICIPANT : In flagrante delicto.
O'GORMAN : In flagrante, yes. We may be in flagrante, and Phil walks in. And so how may Phil be responded to?
PARTICIPANT : [Inaudible]
O'GORMAN : Phil may throw a tantrum.
PARTICIPANT : [Inaudible].
O'GORMAN : Oh, they may yell at him? Okay, so we may yell at Phil to get out, which is�how does Phil feel about that? He just went to rescue Mommy because Dad said he was going to hurt Mommy; he may feel very rejected. What else?
PARTICIPANT : Shame.
O'GORMAN : Shame. Okay. What else can happen? We could yell at him to get out. We could ignore him, and then he's thinking what's happening? Insignificant? He could get angry. He may get angry and attack Daddy or Mommy�probably Daddy in this scenario as we've set it up. And then what could happen then? He may get hurt? What else can happen? Okay, that's how he may feel, but what else, what else may Tom and I do? I know this is very uncomfortable stuff, but this is the stuff that happens.
PARTICIPANT : [Inaudible].
O'GORMAN : Yeah, he may get pulled into this. This may become a threesome. Oh my God, yes, it happens. You know, when we talk about in the family, when we talk about sexual abuse, sexual abuse is not an isolated act. Sexual abuse is on a continuum. And I'm not saying this is every family, but what may happen in a family such as ours is I've joined Tom in a bar. I'm drinking. He and I are arguing; maybe I have a couple more drinks at home. So, maybe I have a couple more drinks. I'm getting ready for bed. Maybe I have a bathrobe on, maybe I forgot to close it. I don't have a nightgown on, you know? Tom may be really drunk. Phil is in the bathroom because he's up because it's 2:00 in the morning, and Tom may tell him, �Get out of the bathroom� because he's got to pee. So we have these kinds of boundary violations that begin to happen in the family. Because Tom and I are bad parents? No, because Tom and I are operating under a different system, and it's a system we don't want to think about but it's a system because we are so upset, we are so angry, we are so into one another that Phil is really not important.
OLIVER-DIAZ: You know, Patty and I both come from the child-welfare field. Sometimes this stuff gets too polite. You know, we talk about these emotional scars, and you forget what really happens that are not emotional scars. I worked in the child-welfare field most of my life with kids that are addictive, and I was doing a Gestalt group recently with adult males in one of my facilities. All of them were chronic relapsers, every one of whom had been sexually abused and never discussed it. All of them had been in jail, but the abuse happened when they were kids. And it was very�the people are sick. There are a lot of sick people on the planet, and they do sick things; and if you can't name it, you can't deal with it. If the therapist can't name it and be in that situation with the kid, the therapist is useless. I think sometimes what happens to a lot of us is we just get too polite about this and make it all emotional.
O'GORMAN : Yeah.
OLIVER-DIAZ: And they internalize shame. Well, yeah, but one of the other ways you can internalize shaming is by being raped, and all of you know that in the public system is that what happens. It happens a lot in�the very rich and the very poor have a lot in common; the same kind of craziness goes on for different reasons. But you've got to be able to name it, and that's part of what Pat is talking about here is being able to name it. When I worked with kids, you know, they want to know if you can actually tolerate what they are going to tell you about their childhood.
O'GORMAN : You know, speaking�to give you another story and, you know, not about addiction, there was a kid I was working with, and I was encouraging him in a group of kids to tell their stories, and this kid told his story about accidentally killing his best friend. He had a gun, and the gun went off and his best friend died. I looked upset when he said that, and I don't quite know what I did after that, but I remember the kid saying, �Didn't you want me to tell my story?� It's the same thing with the adults we work with. You know, if guilt of parenting, that the people that we are working with in recovery was just that they yelled at their kids, if that was it, that would�you know, we could deal with that. But it's all this other stuff that either they did or they are afraid they did. We have to be able to hear their story.
OLIVER-DIAZ: But adolescent girls, often adolescent girls get traumatized by the fact that when they reach puberty their fathers withdraw. The fathers withdraw because they get sexual feelings from their daughters; and then instead of realizing that's an impulse they don't have to act on, and that just means she's becoming a woman, they withdraw. In these families, sometimes they don't withdraw on either side because the inhibitors are down. And, you know, without saying this happens�obviously, it doesn't happen in every alcoholic family, but you've got to be able to explore and investigate and find out whether this has happened.
O'GORMAN : And also, when you have this kind of sexualizing that I talk about that happens in the family, even if nothing happens, kids may not feel safe. So the girl who is 13 or 11 and has breasts may not feel safe because of all this chaos going on. It may be that nothing has happened, but it's also the safety net is down. Or the boy who is beginning to have, you know, ejaculate at night, wakes up with this screaming and the yelling and the pots, it doesn't feel safe. Does that mean that somebody has sexually violated him? No. But in terms of his sexual development, there is not a lot of safety; and what is he going to do with that? So you have this kind of�this family spinning out of control, sex being seen somehow as adults making up, and what happens, what ends this drinking episode? They make out? Okay. And so this may be that when this happens, it's over. It's quiet, and the next morning, what may Phil say to me? �Mommy?� What may he ask me about? Am I all right? Okay. So Phil may ask that because why?
PARTICIPANT : [Inaudible].
O'GORMAN : Right. And he will ask that until I teach him not to because what�my response to Phil, which is going to be a loving response and this is part of, again, how as a field we get�we trip ourselves up, but my loving response to Phil may be to say something to him like, �Of course I'm all right! Get out of here!� <Yelling>
OLIVER-DIAZ: �What the hell is she�What are you talking about? Nothing happened here.�
O'GORMAN : Right. Now why am I saying Phil? What am I trying to do to Phil?
PARTICIPANT : [Inaudible]
O'GORMAN : Right. Why am I doing that? How is that an act of love, because it is an act of love?
PARTICIPANT : You want to protect him.
O'GORMAN : I want to protect him. And what am I teaching him?
PARTICIPANT : [Inaudible].
O'GORMAN : Why do I teach him to shut it out? The shame is so great? Okay. What else? How do I protect myself?
PARTICIPANT : [Inaudible].
O'GORMAN : Right. So I'm going to teach him to do the same thing. You know, when we say this whole thing to families that are in denial, like it's a conscious decision. We forget the fact that denial is a very nice, you know, protective thing we all do all the time. And so when we get a parent in treatment, instead of saying, �You are in denial,� wouldn't it be nice if you say to the spouse, �You know, you are loving your child and you are teaching your child everything you know.� Now, as a mother, I think I would feel much more comfortable with someone saying that to me than I'm in denial because I am teaching Phil what I know how to do. As parents we can only teach what we know how to do, which is why parenting programs are important because we have to expand the skill range. But I am a loving mom shutting down my son because I keep myself shut down, not because I'm in denial, which is some sort of conscious thing I'm doing to keep my husband drinking and beating me. No, I don't think so.
No, this is what I know how to do, and this is what I'm going to teach. The problem is that Phil, in not being validated, learns to be helpless; and there is a whole literature on learned helplessness, and that's something I invite you all to read. Seligman was the first person who began it, but there are many offshoots to this locus of control. The problem is as a result of this, my Phil will learn to be more externalized as opposed to internalized, even though our whole school system is based on being internalized, which means taking the power within yourself, being able to self-monitor, self-regulate, do assignments. Phil is being taught to kind of check out what the committee is saying because his feelings are not being validated. What does this result in? If this is the wet side, which is full of eye contact and physical contact, and you know what I call this? I call this the intimacy ritual because one thing Tom and I are when this is going on, we are close, we are locked into each other. And on the dry side, what happens?
PARTICIPANT : [Inaudible].
O'GORMAN : Right. A friend of mine coined the phrase �walking on eggshells without breaking any.� There is no contact. Which side is really the most painful? The dry side. Interesting. Just from a behavioral point of view, we are not talking about drinking, we are talking about behavior. On the wet side there is connection; on the dry side there is no connection. The dry side is ultimately more painful for the child and actually the family. Now, who can tolerate this the least? The dry side? The little boy? I think Phil is going to learn how to withdraw. Now, he may withdraw and go out with friends. He may withdraw into himself. My guess is he's going to learn how to deal with it, but who really has trouble with it?
PARTICIPANT : [Inaudible].
O'GORMAN : The addict, and the addict will use and then push the family into the wet cycle. Right, there is no chaos. There is the anticipation of chaos. Now, you are Phil, you are five, you are growing up in this family. Who is the most powerful person in the family? The addict. Who do you want to be like when you grow up? You want to be like the powerful person, the addict. This family system really teaches how to be powerful; it also teaches how to be what? An addict. It teaches how to be intimate, so that I have a daughter who comes along and Phil's story about, �I want to marry an addict because I know it'll be different with me,� a girl growing up in this family may say, �Okay, I can marry somebody like dad because I'm familiar. This is the pain I know.�
In Phil's and my 12-Step book to self-parenting, we talk about the pain. We all invite in the pain that we know to keep away the pain we don't know. Even though this is chaotic, I can master this. I know how do to this. It may be expensive to me, it may cost me something, but I know how to do this. So this is the social learning that happens around addiction. This is why parenting is important because we need to teach people to do it a different way. And unless we teach people to do it a different way, the system is primed so that the family will organize around something else. If they don't organize around addiction, what may they organize around? Let's say Tom gets sober, but nothing changes. We go through these periods of raging at each other, probably because we are not having sex, and then we go through these periods of withdrawal. What's going to fill the vacuum? Okay, who can bring in the chaos now if you and I aren't doing it? The system is primed; it needs chaos.
PARTICIPANT : The child.
O'GORMAN : The child will do it. So Phil may develop an addiction problem. My daughter may get pregnant. There is a need in this system for chaos because otherwise people are not connected, and being connected is a basic human need. So until we can change the system and this is the whole social learning and this is why parenting is important, we have a system�that is just ripe and ready and waiting, like a little Petri dish, for a little piece of bacteria to be thrown in and for it to continue.
OLIVER-DIAZ: Did that make sense? This isn't rocket science. The thing is it's all learned behavior. Back in the old ACoA days, people actually thought like they have like a disease. This is just a�most adult children of alcoholics, by the way, do very well. They are just a little neurotic and they are a little uptight and they go to therapy a lot, but it's not like they've actually�they don't have toxic lives. Maybe they have toxic internal lives, but all this stuff can be corrected. The biggest issue that Pat brought out is that you learn to be outer-directed rather than inner-directed because you can't control your environment.
When I had my program, what we tried to do is teach kids how to live in a hostile environment while maintaining self-esteem. You got it? How do you live in a hostile environment while maintaining self-esteem? It's true, for anybody who, you know, it's true for Latinos who live in, maybe, Texas because it's really true for a lot of people other than CoA's; and that was the problem. A lot of people tried to get into the CoA movement who weren't CoA's because they had been either�the issue is narcissistic parents. It's parents who they do self-referential parenting. All the parenting is about them. �You did wonderful in school. I'm really glad. You did all this. You know, it makes your dad and I feel like all our sacrifices are worthwhile.� There's nothing in that for her. Self-referential. These kids have the job of keeping their parents emotionally ready.
Now, the other problem is the addiction field is the only field run by the patients. So, counter-transference is going to be here. The least likely kid to get help is going to be the child of an addict. Why? Because addicts work in the field; and if they didn't deal with that on their own program of recovery, they are not going to deal with it in treatment, and they don't. I'm going to read to you, and this was a true story of one of our kids, and her name was LeeAnn.
�I couldn't believe it. The alcoholism counselor was working with Dad, called me and Lance into his office and told us we needed to help Dad now that he was trying to get sober. He told us mom and dad were going through a hard time and that we should try not to put unnecessary stress on them. Put unnecessary stress on them? Could you believe that? What do you think they've been doing for the last 15 years? For as long as I can remember, I've been trying to avoid putting stress on them. Who do you think was doing the taking care of Mom every time she fell apart? Who do you think was doing the cooking and the wash and the Christmas shopping and the counseling for everybody? Who do you think raised Lance? And he had the nerve to tell Lance that he was supposed to help Dad and Mom now? Lance was eight at the time, and he's supposed to help mom and dad? I think all adults are nuts. When do we get taken care of? I'm supposed to take care of him when he's sober? And you know what? I left the counselor's office feeling guilty for not wanting to help out any more. Even thinking about it now, I feel like I've never been seen, ever.�
And that's what happens in the addiction field because we get so focused on the addict. First of all, as a recovering addict myself, I know nobody gets anybody sober. People can offer some stuff, and either you eat it or you don't eat it. And the family should be treated at equal servings, too, of the same stuff. And, you know, just because you are a recovering drunk doesn't mean you have family responsibilities you have to face up to at that time. You've got a kid� you've got a kid, and I think a lot of times in the addiction field, you know, we've taken too much care of the addict without allowing the addict to�I've never met a fragile drunk. How do you be a fragile drunk? I once walked two miles in a blizzard to get a six pack. I don't know fragile drunks. I know people who are good con artists who are drunks and can act fragile, but they are not fragile. I mean, this is his responsibility anyway, and this is what these kids are looking for, somebody to say, �Hey, you know, it's about you.� Tough, you know? Now you are sober, and you've got all these headaches? That's right, so stay sober, work your program, get to your sponsor, find out what your cues are, but you've got to work with your kids as a parent.
And one of the problems�if you were a cancer patient and you came out of chemo and you got a fresh, clean bill of health, do you think your kids would want to hear and go to a group about cancer? No, they want to distance themselves from the trauma, right? So what happens when somebody goes into recovery and it works? Yeah, I mean, they put a �Honk if you are a friend of Bill's� on the car, and they want the kids to do what? To go to Al-Ateen. Al-Ateen is really good for kids in actively using families, but, you know, kids don't want to go hear about that. They are supposed to get better. You came out of the hospital, you are better, so what is all this about? Who ends up in the house?
PARTICIPANT : Strangers.
OLIVER-DIAZ: But what kind of strangers?
PARTICIPANT : [Inaudible].
OLIVER-DIAZ: Well, they are all narcissistic drunks; it's just that they are not drinking. You just think the same people are there that were there before. They are still narcissistic. And what are they talking about?
PARTICIPANT : [Inaudible].
OLIVER-DIAZ: They are talking about not drinking. The alcoholic system, whether it's drinking or not drinking, it's still alcoholic-centric. It's not centered around the children and the family functioning. Now it's centered�not only that, but it's a cult. AA is a cult. You don't think that? I mean, Dr. Bob? It's like Obi Won Kenobi, right? Bill W. First of all, how many people go in a hospital for cancer or diabetes and come out where nobody has a last name? Right? You come out of this kind of treatment and weird stuff happens. Bill W, Bob, nobody has a last name. All these people come over, and what are they constantly doing? They are breaking down. You know, you know, I always tell, �Don't take children.� I see it all the time. Don't take children to AA meetings. They are going to watch all these adults decompensating or talking about the crap they used to do, and this is called recovery? Or some counselor calls the kids into the room and says, �Kids, listen, your father has got a fatal disease. It's a family disease.� Does that sound better to the seven-year-old?
O'GORMAN : Does it sound like relief?
OLIVER-DIAZ: Yeah, does that sound like any kind of relief for the kids? There is a lot�and the whole field of recovery has language about addiction that is totally inappropriate to talk to a kid about. You know, plus, even to an adolescent, adolescents don't have abstract thinking; they can't think about a higher power. They can, you know, their focus is very concrete, and a lot of these kids just feel like their parents are in a cult. They can, you know, their focus is very concrete. And a lot of these kids just feel like their parents are in a cult and they want to�it's like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, right? Because not only that, there are a lot of people who claim to use the word, they invented co-dependency. We consciously never used it. We tried not to use that word because we thought either you are dependent or you are not dependent in the family system; you are not co-dependant. Everybody in the family is trying to survive, that's what they are trying to do. They are just trying to survive. And the most toxic victims in the family are the kids because they have the least ability to get out, especially little kids because they can't run away and they internalize a lot of this stuff. When I ran a program for little kids, we just taught them very basic things to begin with, which was how to survive physically in an alcoholic home during a fight.
I learned one thing: If any of you ever wanted to work with young kids, you don't say, �Show me what it is like at dinner time� because the first time I did it, the kid was out outside the window on the ledge. They were doing all the things. I mean, they threw the tables over. They showed me what it was like. So now I have�right after that I learned how to put parameters around �show me what it was like', because it could be anything, but one thing treatment is not about is the family and treatment is not about the kids. People who talk to children don't talk in age-appropriate language. Every treatment facility can afford to have one person who knows developmental issues for kids, and we have many. We have a child psychiatrist, we have a lot of different people on our staff who can talk to children in age-appropriate language. You know, these families need family rituals, and we will be talking about that soon, but the biggest issue for kids who encounter treatment is the narcissism of the parents and the field support of the adults' narcissism and not looking at making them responsible for their children. Number two, the disease concept to kids has to be done�like I taught little guys about their father's addiction by asking them to eat one potato chip. It's got to be very concrete, and they have to understand it's not about them. I used to do a lot of puppet play, and the kid would say, �Daddy, do you love me or do you love booze?� There are Latino kids, because it's a love issue at that level, they don't feel shame. They don't name it like that. They just know there is something wrong.
And then one of the problems with recovery is that the parent who was not a drunk all of sudden becomes sick. I understand it's not really good to just be there for others all the time, be over-responsible, but did you ever meet a kid that didn't want an over-responsible mother? You know, �Iron my underwear. Do all of it.� You know, Mom, yeah, she comes back and she says,
�I'm a sick co-dependent.� Well, who the hell�now who has he got to go to? Children need to feel safe and identified by their families and have their needs met. All of sudden everybody is sick, including them. You know, this poor girl who has been getting A's raising the family is now a co-dependent. She is sick because she is overachieving. Never make overachieving a problem. What the hell are you going for? Mediocrity is good? There is nothing wrong with overachieving. The whole thing is having a balanced life like the old medicine wheel. Just a balanced life. And we have made those things into sicknesses. You know, women married to men either who are�I always say marriage is a contract, it's a deal. All marriages are deals, you decide whether you are going to stay in by the price you are paying, and when the price gets too much for either side, you split or you renegotiate the deal, but it's always a deal. I don't know an alcoholic couple that didn't cut a deal, and one of the deals is it's great to be with a drunk because they are so screwed up nobody ever looks at your stuff. I mean, I've seen women who came in married to alcoholic men, put a fifth in front of them and take the top off the bottle and go back to it. Why? The heat is too much on them.
So it's never one thing, and the only ones who have no real interest in all that are the kids. They are the least likely to get served in the drug and alcohol system and still are. Now, we have a women's and children's program we have a lot of children in our residential�living there with their parents, and they are born there too. But I've seen parents carry the kid like this, like a book. You know, they have to be taught from the�some people have to be taught just from the very beginning up. They don't interact with the kids, you know? The good thing about a kid on opiates is they are not bothering you too much, and we've had a lot of crack-addicted kids and a lot of opiate-addicted kids. But it's a terrible thing to watch a child, an infant, detoxing. On the other hand, these outcomes that everybody thought were going to be so bad aren't there. There is definitely ADHD in some of these kids, but there are definitely ADHD in a lot of kids in treatment now too. So ADHD is a whole other issue, but they are not the six-toed�all these things that people predicted would happen with children of addicts hasn't happened, but they do�we know that we can do strength-based things with those kids even as infants around creating for them more resiliency, and we are trying to do that.
If you do anything in your practice or if any of you work in agencies, giving the kids the priority in the system is important. And realize that to everybody else AA is a cult. And, in fact, most of us who are in recovery need to recognize it's one hell of a strange group of people.
O'GORMAN : And also, you know, just pick up on that point for a moment, that when people go into recovery, part of what they are going to do is model what the treatment program is saying. So if the treatment program never speaks about kids, it is sending a message. If the treatment program only speaks about kids in this kind of way that everyone is sick, that is sending a message. If the treatment program is talking about the needs of kids and educating parents who may have been raised in this system and don't know the difference, that is sending a message. And so the issue is what sort of message do you want your treatment program to be sending? End of the slide show, healthy families?
OLIVER-DIAZ: There you go.
O'GORMAN : Okay. Adult children of alcoholics as parents. If you've come out of this system, you've taken the pledge you are not drinking, which is a good thing. You know, you may be biologically at risk, and behaviorally, your behaviors may potentiate that. What does it look like? Not knowing what normal is, normal becomes what for adults raised in this system? If I don't know what normal is, normal is chaos. Or if I don't want it to be chaotic, what is the antithesis of something chaotic?
PARTICIPANT : [Inaudible].
O'GORMAN : Perfect. So therefore I am going to be very anxious trying to be perfect all the time. In fact, early on in ACoA there was another women, and she and I joined�I won't break her anonymity�but we had what we started because we were both so anxious as parents. We spoke about the bad-mommy's club because we had to normalize parenting for each other, and it was so intense and with all this head knowledge I have�you know, I'm a psychologist, I'm licensed in New York state, I've been a child psychologist my whole life, but all this head knowledge I had to operationalize it. So I had my support group, even though she was in California, and we were in touch all the time about normalizing parenting because it is hard. I've done many difficult things in my life; the hardest thing I've ever done is be a parent.
And, you know, it beats being raised in this family. It's just such a hard thing to be a good parent. So perfectionistic is definitely in there. If you grow up being anxious, how are you going to treat your kids? You are going to be very anxious, and so there is a lot of anxiety that is built into the system because, remember, this system is waiting for the penny to drop. What is going to start it? What is going to start the contact? What is going to end the contact? So anxiety is a special issue. Tom spoke about jealousy. I've seen this with many parents who get angry at their kids because of what? Because Tom�Tom is in recovery now. Tom and I are getting it. Phil is now 18, and Phil wants a new car. We have done such a good job, in a funny way, that Phil feels he deserves a new car. But Tom didn't have a new car at 18. I didn't have a new car at 18. So we start getting angry at Phil like, �Who the hell do you think you are that you deserve a new car?� We are jealous at our own kid. We are like�we get jealous at the good product we've produced. And it's�does it make sense when I describe that? So, we actually get it, but it brings up our own stuff.
OLIVER-DIAZ: One day my daughter�who is a lawyer now, but she was always a lawyer and just didn't have the degree yet�was arguing with her mother and I, both of whom came from somewhat oppressive families. And we said, �How the hell does she get the nerve to do this?� I mean, we wouldn't do this to our families. Well, of course, we wouldn't do this to our parents. They would beat the crap out of us. And then we realized that if you create a self-affirming human being, they are going to affirm themselves. They think you are wrong. Most of us have been so oppressed that we identify that as rebellion rather than healthy because we were so�we didn't answer anybody back, we would just act out. We would just sneak out or something later on, get even another way. And that was healthy, and that's the same thing�you get jealous. I mean, every time I'd go to Disney World, I took my daughter and her husband, who is a Marine Captain, to Disney World because that's all he wanted to do after going to Iraq, which I understood. And they had a great time, we had a great time at Christmas, but at the same time�we never, I mean my parents wouldn't do that. And so you get jealous, you get a headache, you somatize. And I've done work with alcoholics in recovery, and I'll talk about that, who get really physically ill when they start being a good parent.
O'GORMAN : And the trick is to resolve the trauma and not to relive the trauma. I think being a parent is kind of God's way of helping us finish it up because it brings back everything, and so it's an opportunity to work through it as opposed to relive it because reliving it is where you are going to be. That becomes then another trigger, you know, for Tom to start using again, for me to start being a rage-aholic again. But if we can help resolve the trauma, and that means also in our treatment programs giving people this as part of their life script, saying stuff is going to come up and you can resolve it. It's not that you are going to come out and it's all going to be fine, but this is how it's not going to be fine. And give people a pathway for when it's not fine. What should you do? Should you go to more meetings? Should you maybe come back for a booster program? You know, should you call your mental health center? What should you do? You should do something, otherwise you're retraumatized.
OLIVER-DIAZ: That's you, that's me.
O'GORMAN : Yes.
OLIVER-DIAZ: That's because I'm the recovering alcoholic. You guys look serious. You are tired, aren't you? I know. It's a strange place to have a CoA conference, Las Vegas.
O'GORMAN : <Laughing>
OLIVER-DIAZ: It's a, you know, it's very�like the first conference we had for CoA's was at Disney. That made more sense. But this is a strange place. I'm traumatized just by walking downstairs. You know? Because everything is highly sexualized. It's over stimulation. I'm ADD to begin with. Next thing I knew, I'm putting $20 in there. I just don't even know about it, I'm just going like this because like all the activity. And I went back to my room and quieted down, but you have to stay in your room if you want to have peace of mind. You can't go out at all. Having said that, you know, a lot of�you know, we get to amends, and a lot of people get to the fifth step in AA�I don't know if any�all of you in the field, you need to understand Alcoholics Anonymous and steps. I'm not going to do the steps here, but you need to understand them. There's a part where you make amends, but it says whenever�you don't make amends and cop to what you did unless it's going to help somebody�if it's going to help. I've had people retraumatize their kids by telling them things they did to them when they, you know�and Indians, are you a Native-American or�
PARTICIPANT : [Inaudible].
OLIVER-DIAZ: Yes, because I did a lot of work in Indian Country�Northern Cheyenne and in Canada and in Australia�and we could be traumatizing our children because denial is a good thing sometimes. It blocks off trauma until you can handle it. You know, later on in life when you have that memory, it's because your ego is strong enough to handle and deal with the information. So you don't force somebody to learn something too early in the game because they may not be emotionally ready to handle it. First you have to assess, you know, if everybody� Same House, Different Home is a book Ackerman wrote and it says it really well. Not everybody feels the animal in the same way; and this family that Pat did, maybe the older kids were�like the sister took the younger kids upstairs to their room and told them a story while the brother fought the father. Same house, different home. Those little kids, I've had them later in treatment; they don't remember the alcoholism the same way because they were protected by the older siblings.
So first of all, you've got to really assess the damage. You know, a lot of people think all these kids are terribly wounded. There are some emotional scars, but nobody gets through childhood not feeling some scars. I mean, I remember the other big ACoA �Ah-hah!� was when we invited Bruno [Brettleheim] to the conference to tell us how adult children were different than everybody else, and [Brettleheim] said, �A family is a family. You deal with what is in the family.� And it's different, you know, it's very different. If you are more religious your family's life will be more protected from alcoholism because the system itself is going through all these rituals that you need. If you are more ethnic, you know, what does a good Italian husband do with an alcoholic Italian wife if he wants the kids to be raised Italian? What does he do? He moves his mother in to cook and take the kids to church. You see, that's a protected family, so you need to assess it.
Now, the other thing is you need to be a parent. I mean, when people go into AA, they are alcoholics. You know, you are supposed to be an example just in case you hear this. Alcoholics are not supposed to talk about their recovery; they are supposed to be an example of their recovery. You get these guys reading the Big Book like a Bible to the kids. You know, they go to the father for help, and the father says, �Why don't you do first things first?� You know, give them the slogans. They use AA as a defense not to be intimate with the children. The alcoholic should not be talking about AA at all in the house unless the kid wants some information; and, you know, putting all that stuff up on the wall is not helpful to the kid, right? You need to keep recovery personal. I was in therapy about, I don't know, about five or six�I was in therapy for a total of 17 years; 32 years in AA, and this is what you got. I once asked my therapist, �Why do I need so much therapy?� and he said, �Because you really are screwed up,� but he said, �but you came by it honestly.� We all come by it honestly.
But these people are very self-centered; and like my therapist said, you don't change all that much. You really can't change your character structure. You can be maybe less self-centered, but you're never not going to be self-centered, the alcoholic. So it's really to understand�they have to learn how to talk without putting �I/me.� I remember my wife�and we've been married 14 years�it took ten for me not to say �I.� She said, �Can't you talk to me without �I?' Can't you talk to me without you being involved?� and I had no concept of what that meant. It wasn't because I was trying to be mean; I just had no concept of somebody being more important than me. She helped me understand that with behavior modification. So that's a big issue, really working with them and learning even a little thing like to give that compliment where it's not about you. That other compliment would say, �You did wonderful. I appreciate all the work you did, and here is a present for your achievement.� I'm not in there. Do you see the difference from that and the first compliment I gave before where it was all about me? You need to let the parent get the kid fired from the job of keeping them emotionally okay.
It's a tricky thing because that stuff is subtle. There is a lot to it, and there's a lot of stuff, like Pat said, around learned helplessness. Teaching optimism in these families is important because these families are very pessimistic. You know the father; the mother says to the daughter, �There is nothing we can do about your dad's alcoholism. We have to live with it.� That's teaching helplessness instead of saying, �There is a lot you can do about the way you react to your father. You don't have to be here. You can go to Al-Ateen. You can find friends.� That's an empowering statement. See? Same with alcoholism. So a lot about this is how it is framed, and we need to deal with impulses. I've known guys in recovery�we used to have our group, our adolescent group, every Wednesday. This one adolescent called me up; they wanted an AA vacation. Do you know what an AA, Al-Anon vacation is? Three couples take all their kids. They go down to a place like Virginia, and what do they do?
PARTICIPANT : They go to meetings.
OLIVER-DIAZ: They go to meetings, right. So the kid calls me up, she's nuts, �They are making me crazy. They wake us up every morning with the 24-hour book. You know, they talk about their meetings at night. They are making us nuts.� But she said, �My dad really humiliated me.� I said, �What did he do?� I knew the dad. He was an AA Captain, he wasn't a General yet. And he had a lot of sponsee's. He was a good guy, and he knew now not to do his negative impulses. But he saw his 16-year-old daughter in front of him, and he had one of those AA �Ah-hahs!� �Oh yeah, I'm with my family, I'm sober, I feel loved,� and he hugged her in public. You don't hug a 16 year-old pubescent female, if you are the dad, in public like that, and she felt humiliated because he's like cuddling, �Oh, my baby.� Plus, he doesn't look appropriate that way and he humiliated her. They have to learn to screen impulses, even if they are good impulses. And again, it's putting yourself�how is this going to be received on the other end? Again, that's the self-centeredness and the narcissism of the addict saying, �I love you. It must be good. I'm going to show you my way.�
I had a little seven-year-old that had the same problem with his recovering alcoholic father who he kept trying to hug him because the father did not like the fact that this kid did not like it�you know, why was the father hugging him? He was hugging him for his own insecurities, not for the kid. The kid didn't like people touching him. He didn't like anybody; he didn't like me touching him. He told me he was mad at me, too. He said, �You people just don't leave me alone,� and what he was really saying is the adults were too needy. We needed that kid's validation. If he wouldn't let us hug him, then we didn't feel that we were all right. Seven-year-old. And finally, they learn how to become child-centered, and that is a teaching process for both sides of this. They are both narcissistic; and you really have to teach them, literally, how to think in terms of the children, and that almost never happens at a treatment center. No. It'll happen at a children's program, like something that Jerry Moe might do, but it's not happening generally at a treatment center.
O'GORMAN : What we are talking about is really expanding the concept of empathy to include your children, to have them and be able to see things from their point of view, but really is all the work that has been done on teaching empathy. This is really what we are talking about.
OLIVER-DIAZ: I know we are running late�can I just tell one short story?
O'GORMAN : Yeah, and we've got to do healthy families.
OLIVER-DIAZ: Yeah. One short story just to show how this is. I was doing couple's therapy. Well, actually I had the daughter; she ended up doing couple's therapy. In a family session, I had the daughter, a seven-year-old, say to her recovering parents, �What do you want for Thanksgiving?� She said, �I'd like to have a six-foot turkey.� Now, a six-foot turkey drawing on her wall is easy. You just get big paper and color it. The old man said�it was a young guy�he said, �That's bullshit. I'm not going to that.� He got really hostile. So I asked the daughter to leave us. �What's going on with you?� I said. He said, �I'm not going to do that shit. My father didn't do that kind of stuff.� And it turned out his father was a sadist, so his father didn't do any of that kind of stuff. He did real cruel stuff to this kid. So he says, �That's bullshit. I'm not going to do it,� and I said, �How do you feel about your father?� And he said, �I hate him. I want to kill him.� And I said, �Well, how do you want your kid to feel about you?� So the guy tried it then. What happened was, though, he started getting really bad earaches. As we progressed and then we went into family weekends, it went on and on and he started getting sicker, physically sicker. People will somatize this stuff. That's all I wanted to say�people will put it in their body because what they are doing is they are blocking the pain of their own childhood.
You know, you sort of have to do a parallel process here where you are treating him as it comes up for his issues, but at the same time, developmentally the kid needs what they need when they need it. And they have a right to get it when they need it, not when the old man gets better. So you've got to do parallel therapy there, you know? You've got to work with him, and he was having real severe somatizing. We were worried he was going to get into a relapse at the same time. The deal is, you know, the deal is the deal. The kid is there. If you can't handle the kid, then we're going to have to put the kid with another family member and you've got to make that assessment. We do that a lot. But in our state, if you don't get your act together and you are a recovering person, especially a mother, you lose your kids for good. TPR. Terminated�nationwide, that's the federal law. In some states it's two years and in some states it's six months. If you do not show your recovery within that period of time, they terminate your parental rights for good. So that has made�that is what is at stake now in getting parents more intact.
O'GORMAN : Yes, that's the Adoption and Safe Family Federal Act. Yes, risk assessments�
PARTICIPANT : [Inaudible].
OLIVER-DIAZ: No, but you know what happens is, especially in my state because we are really involved; the case workers have that one year. They start planning TPR in the process because they don't understand addiction. And you are right, if you get a good judge or a good case worker, you can extend that while they are trying to get better. And Florida is a mess. They are so ready to�they want to fill the case plan, they want to get it out of the way; and a year is not a long time to start thinking about sobriety for somebody who has been a chronic alcoholic.
O'GORMAN : Okay. Healthy families. A word about that.
OLIVER-DIAZ: There is an overhead right there.
O'GORMAN : Okay. Maybe we will go to the overhead.
OLIVER-DIAZ: We believe that the destruction of families is not a biological issue; it's the family rituals. If they get disrupted, the addiction really impacts the family. So it really is protecting the family rituals. A lot of this is Steve [Wahlman]'s work.
O'GORMAN : And also Al-Anon.
OLIVER-DIAZ: Yeah, and also Al-Anon. This is that basic Al-Anon. They say that families are healthy on three levels: Family celebrations, family traditions, and pattern of routines. The celebrations are things that happen in the general population. For instance, you can see fireworks on the Fourth of July if you are in an alcoholic family, but it might not be�[].
PARTICIPANT : Yeah, right.
OLIVER-DIAZ: Right? Or Thanksgiving could be in a Chinese restaurant. Right? Depending on what happens in the family that night, those things are not predictable. Predictability is what we are talking about, and you can still be married to an alcoholic and make a predictable home life or Al-Anon wouldn't work. And it does work. The same thing, the family traditions are more localized, birthdays, anniversaries, you know, you don't give the drunk the money to get the cake and expect it to come back. That kind of stuff. This needs to be predictable. And finally, patterned routine. You know, when I'm drunk, �Stay up.� When I'm sober, �What the hell are they doing up?� And it is all that that really invades the system, and it doesn't have to be the nuclear family. In one of Steve's cases it had to do with the grandmother. They never had a protected holiday because this grandmother would always come over drunk. None of the ACoA's drank, so what they did one time in their therapy process is they told the mother she couldn't come unless she decided not to drink. And what did she do? She didn't come. And then they found out that each year they had disruptive family Christmases because the mother was there at all these events, and she would always get drunk and it would always be an issue. Then they realized what it looked like, what it was supposed to be when it was protected, so they were protecting it now. They wouldn't let her come to these things anymore, and that's what Al-Anon would have said.
But the big thing is to teach them how to protect the ritual and all those things can be done even when you are living with a very toxic human being. You simply don't organize around that person and you don't expect their participation. If they can, they can; and if they can't, it doesn't matter.
O'GORMAN : And if this family stops organizing around the addict, you begin to have a different family.
OLIVER-DIAZ: Yeah.
O'GORMAN : And a family which is more fluid, less rigid, a family which is more complicated, if you will, more messy, but a family which has the depth and a richness to it, and that is what Al-Anon teaches. Al-Anon does teach different ways of doing that. That's what the work on family systems does is really look out how do you really view this, so that the family has a rhythm. Kids need a structure. Kids need a structure. In all the research. All the research [Sis] has been doing as Executive Director of MCoA, children need a pattern. They need a structure; and if they don't have that, they will go out and find it.
OLIVER-DIAZ: And sobriety is not a good enough goal.
O'GORMAN : Yeah.
OLIVER-DIAZ: I mean, you know, if you said to a diabetic, �Okay, hey you got your sugar under control. That's great. We don't care if this family is in chaos.� You wouldn't make that statement. So the same thing, just because somebody is sober does not mean that they don't have responsibility for all the rest of this. It isn't easy to stay high and it isn't easy to stay sober. Somebody once said to me, �If you spent half as much time fixing the problems you created as you did in getting high in the first place, you'll never have a problem making a goal� because it takes a lot of energy to be an addict. So the same thing is here. This is just a function of energy and focus, but people have to be taught to do this. Our system does not do this normally.
O'GORMAN : [Five more minutes]?
OLIVER-DIAZ: Let me say one thing. We wrote this; it's called �Egocentronic�. We wrote this in the language of people in recovery for a reason. You have to cross over and make things easy for people to understand, and you've got to use the language they use. In our case, we used program language. That's right, we're going to go through 12 steps. What we did is we took the 12 steps of AA, which people could focus on and deal with, and moved it over to say how would that apply to parenting? And that's what you've got to do when you are working in this field with addicts. You've got to make it in a language they understand, you know? I'm going through that right now because in my agency we are trying to put in a real 12-step model, not what we had before, and the therapists are going nuts. You are going back to a paraprofessional, you are anti-intellectual, and the AA people are saying, �These people don't know anything about recovery.� You know? And the other ones say, �What about treatment?� They all have the same goal, love of the client, but it's simply a function of language. We are developing a cross-over language, and this is a function of language. You talk to people in AA and Al-Anon in their language, not yours. So that's why we did this.
O'GORMAN : Okay. Do you want to read the first step?
OLIVER-DIAZ: We were powerless�we admitted we were powerless over alcohol and that our lives had become unmanageable and then we said admit powerlessness over your ability to protect your child from pain and become willing to surrender to your love and not your control. You know, how many of you have got kids? Okay. You know what that is? The choice between joy and terror, right? Nothing gives you that much joy; nothing gives you that much fear. You know? The moment they can move, right? You are in trouble because you don't know what's going to happen. And you can't tolerate their pain; that's when you become a control freak.
O'GORMAN : Okay. Found hope in the belief that recovery is possible through faith and a willingness to work on yourself.
OLIVER-DIAZ: And you know the whole addiction movement is only about hope. That's what you are really selling. You are selling hope. You are not selling anything else. Reach out for help and acknowledge that you are not alone. These families are always isolated.
O'GORMAN : Take stock in yourself as a parent. Basically, understanding what you are doing as a parent.
OLIVER-DIAZ: And there's positive and negative in all these. It's not just negative. Learn to share your parenting issues with others without self-recrimination. You know, victimization is still narcissism. If you spend all your time looking at how lousy you are, you are still a narcissist. You are just a negative narcissist. You are a double narcissist. It doesn't go anywhere, but it's still narcissism. So without recrimination means I'm willing to change something now; let me take stock.
O'GORMAN : And became ready to change by giving up the demand to be perfect because change is a messy process. There is no way that change can be easy, elegant, strategic, because it invites in the unexpected. So, when we teach our parents to give up the need to be perfect, we can then help them on the road to doing it differently.
OLIVER-DIAZ: Oh, I've got�there's 12 right? You only heard six.
O'GORMAN : Yes, seven. Right, seven.
OLIVER-DIAZ: Oh, there you go. She has it up there.
O'GORMAN : Yeah, how about that?
OLIVER-DIAZ: Make conscious changes in your parenting by identifying specific strategies for healthy parenting. You know, it's easy to take responsibility and blame, but you know somebody is serious when they can give you a specific. That's why when you go to the client, you ask them for a very specific thing and you ask a therapist if they are doing something with the client. Be specific. I'll ask my therapist, �What are you trying to accomplish here?� �Well, we want them to have better social skills.� What the hell does that mean? You know, if a plumber came in and said, �I'm trying to get an overall feeling for your plumbing,� you wouldn't pay him.
AUDIENCE : <Laughing>.
OLIVER-DIAZ: I said, �Give me something specific you are doing with these people so that I can judge whether or not you did it.� The same thing here: specific parenting strategies. They see these as �yes' people. They will tell you yes, and they still don't know what to do.
O'GORMAN : Take responsibility for the effect your parenting has had on your children and learn self-forgiveness.
OLIVER-DIAZ: That's for every parent. Make amends to your children through healthy parenting without overcompensating. That's the biggest�you know, the blackmail. You were a drunk, you know?
O'GORMAN : Model being honest with yourself and your children and create acceptance in your family for imperfection.
OLIVER-DIAZ: That's got to be one of the biggest issues you see especially with ACoA's, is their demand for behavior doesn't help anything. They smother people. Learn to accept limits in your life and find your true spiritual path while allowing your children theirs, and that can be tricky, you know, because kids have odd ways of finding God sometimes. �Oh, this group�� My kid is�our kids are�I don't know if you've got kids that are older, in their 20s, you probably don't, some of you do. They are very�my kids are very religious, you know? They made a point of telling me once, �You people from the 60s really screwed things up.� Those kids are very religious. They are very moral. You know, my daughter told me here, she is not like a Bible-belt kind of person, but she told me, �If you go and gamble, then you are having faith in luck and not in God.� Last night. So I said, �You are right, dear. I understand what you are saying.� Then I went and lost $20, so she was actually right.
O'GORMAN : And by the way, what is the fastest-growing religion among teenagers right now? And the answer may upset some of you. Wicca, yeah. Wow is right. Wicca.
OLIVER-DIAZ: Witchcraft.
O'GORMAN : Twelfth step. Reach out to other parents in the spirit of giving and community, which means take the message and spread it, which means having it in your programs, which means encouraging Al-Anon in your Al-Anon groups or AA groups that parenting be a topic. You know, that we reach out to others about this, that we just don't keep this to ourselves. I was healed by a woman from California, and she and I just�we just were our support group back and forth for all the stuff that we were doing and it helped us both. You know, reach out and touch someone and then you can keep what you got.
OLIVER-DIAZ: The other thing is, over all the years, it hasn't gotten any better. That is, the children of alcoholics issue has gotten better; the parenting thing hasn't gotten any better. And Al-Anon, at least in the communities that I've been in, has gotten weaker. AA is still very, very strong, and I think if anything we need to support more and more Al-Anon and Al-Ateen. Al-Ateen is even harder to support because it calls for a commitment. You know, I want to see some of the people in recovery actually get a car and take all these kids to Al-Ateen meetings, then you can show some amends because that's what it takes. If you don't support it, if we don't advocate for Al-Anon and support it, it's not going to have the strength it needs. And without Al-Anon, you can't do a lot of this � and the alcoholism field has to stop with its own chauvinism around being alcoholics in the field and deal with letting child developmental specialists come into the field and do what child developmental specialists do. It's funny how when you are an alcoholic, you've got the whole thing�my brother was doing family therapy sessions. My brother never had any education in family therapy. I don't do family therapy. I'm a MSW because I don't have any education in it. Because he was an alcohol counselor, he was told, �You run the family group. You'll run the regular sessions, and you'll do the psycho-educational for DUI's.� Well, that's not responsible. So part of it is all of us being advocates. Thanks.
O'GORMAN : Thank you.
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