Getting "a little high on being the savior:" Talking codependency and alcoholic parents with Alethia

“The first thing I saw was the 12 steps with the word God all over the place, and I was like, ‘Great, it’s a cult.’”

Emmy Rossum and William H Macy playing daughter and father on “Shameless” (HBO)

Loving someone who is actively addicted to a substance can be a bit like loving the sun. Get too close, and you get burned; run too far, and you can end up isolated in a frigid darkness. Just like planets in our solar system, there’s a Goldilocks zone. A place where you’re not so enmeshed with someone that it becomes agonizing and unsafe, but not so far that you ignore the reality of your own history and needs.

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My interviewee this week, Alethia (name and some details changed), was kind enough to chat with me about being the adult child of a still active alcoholic, recovery, and the ecosystem of addiction.

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Katie: Hi, Alethia, thanks for doing this. Can you tell me a bit about your experience with addiction?

Alethia: I’m the adult child of a still very active alcoholic; I grew up in the midst of that, but didn’t really know what it was. For a long time, my dad’s alcoholism just seemed normal because I didn’t know anything different.

K: How old were you when you figured out something might be wrong?

It was a slow dawning that started in high school, I think. Also in high school and definitely college, his drinking got way worse, and it was just undeniable that it was not normal behavior.

K: Yeah, I think a lot of those realizations happen in high school and college when you’re starting to get more exposure to other families and what does and doesn’t happen regularly. Were there some key moments where you remember having that realization?

A: There were definitely moments in childhood when I wondered. Part of our family comes from a country known for its heavy drinking; he would always kind of nod to his drinking as part of his culture, and I remember thinking...this might be cultural, but it also seems...bad? It wasn’t like he was interested in engaging in any other part of that culture.

It was really high school when my dad’s parents’ health really started to decline. My grandfather was also a problem drinker. At the time, I wouldn’t have known enough to use the word ‘alcoholic,’ but I knew it was a problem. My sister and I were getting ready to leave for college when my mother left my father for many valid reasons. I don’t blame her for leaving, but the way it happened was really shitty. So for my Dad, there was this massive confluence of dynamics that contributed to the pre-existing issue of alcoholism, and everything just exploded.

His drinking and behavior became more and more unmanageable, and my sister eventually dropped out of college to care for him full-time. It was—and still is—a mess.

K: How did you handle that?

A: I wanted to stay far away from the situation. I wasn’t in Al-Anon in college, but I was starting to explore spirituality and mindfulness, and that was helpful to a degree.

Shortly after college, I moved to a new city for a job, and a family friend let me stay with her while I got my footing. I was really struggling and, blessedly, she was like, “You’re going insane because of your father’s drinking, and it’s getting to the point where I need you to go to Al-Anon or you have to find somewhere else to stay.”

K: Oh, wow. So what did that look like, practically speaking?

A: Panic attacks, obsessing over when the next shoe is gonna drop, hypervigilance, and feeling totally consumed by his drinking. My father doesn’t have a formal diagnosis around any of this, but there are also some mental health issues that are part of the situation and aren’t addressed. He was engaging in very manipulative and kind of stalking behavior towards me. Like, he called my employer and tried to get me fired because I didn’t vote for the presidential candidate he liked. Stuff like that.

K: So your sister was still with your dad at this time?

My recollection of the timeline is a little bit hazy, but I know that she was still heavily involved in his care at this time, if not living with him full-time. That’s still the case today. She’s in the process of trying to become his legal conservator. So, sadly, we don’t have much of a relationship because we’ve taken very different approaches to the situation.

K: That’s really hard.

A: It is. And I know it comes from a place of love; she really means [her total involvement in Dad’s life] as an expression of love. It’s just that for me, it reads as a deep codependency, and I just can’t be involved in it.

So that’s what the family friend was referring to, which she told me to go to Al-Anon. I was careening towards a mental health collapse myself under the stress and the weight of it. I didn’t understand how codependency functioned; I didn’t understand that what was modeled for me was the idea that obsessiveness is love. That martyring and sacrificing your own wellness for another is an expression of affection. The family friend I was staying with had a good friend in AA, who told her I needed to go to Al-Anon.

K: How’d you feel about that?

A: Well, I didn’t want to be homeless. That was a pretty big incentive, especially being a recent college grad and working for peanuts. But I really didn’t understand what Al-Anon was. I basically thought I was going to an AA meeting, which was confusing. I was like, “Uh, so I can better understand what my Dad should be doing?” But as I said, I didn’t have much of an option, so I went.

K: How was it?

A: The first thing I saw was the 12 steps with the word God all over the place, and I was like, ‘Great, it’s a cult.’

Immediately, I was like, “I hate this, but I have to be here so I don’t become homeless.” But then I started listening to people share and realized they weren’t talking about being alcoholics, they were related to alcoholics, or married to alcoholics, I know that’s not the right medical term or whatever—

K: Don’t worry about it.

A: But from that first Al-Anon meeting, I’ve never really looked back.

When I say I haven’t looked back, though, that doesn’t mean my recovery hasn’t waxed and waned. It’s just to say that I’m so grateful for that family friend telling me I had to go to Al-Anon because I was really losing it. I was losing my sense of self, my mental and emotional health, my self-worth, all of it.

Al-Anon gave me a system that allowed me to go from being chronically overwhelmed to chronically overwhelmed with glimmers of serenity to now, for the most part, feeling relatively serene with periods of overwhelm.

K: That’s wonderful.

A: Don’t get me wrong, my life isn’t perfect. I’m currently very pregnant, I’m losing my housing in six months for complicated reasons—there’s plenty of stress in my life. But the way I handle it and the way I feel about things generally is so different, and that’s what the program offered me. When I was deeply codependent, I didn’t even think it was ethical to have self-respect or self-integrity. It gave me a relationship with a “higher power,” which to me just means trusting in something bigger than myself and my own smarts.

K: I imagine there’s a lot of freedom and autonomy in not having your emotional state completely tied to another person’s behavior.

A: Absolutely. Eventually, I joined CoDA (Codependents Anonymous) as a complement to Al-Anon. Al-Anon helped me become less and less enmeshed with active alcohol users. But my codependent tendencies still show up in other types of relationships.

CoDA has given me both more specific and broader ways to address my own codependent tendencies that don’t necessarily involve alcohol addiction. But I definitely needed Al-Anon first—that’s what allowed me to navigate the high intensity of worrying about someone else’s addiction and losing myself in the process.

K: With your dad, have there been bouts of sobriety? Have there been either false or sustained starts in that direction? I ask because I know it can complicate the question of whether it feels safe to get emotionally involved.

A: Unfortunately, it’s just been a pretty linear downward trend. If there’s a dip upward, it’s a blip. He’s never acknowledged his alcohol use as problematic, much less tried to get help. I don’t say this as a way to put myself on a pedestal compared to my other relatives, but as far as I know, I’m the only person in my family who has pursued any kind of recovery—either for their own use or to deal with someone else’s. I think that just creates conditions for the addict not to have to look at the problem that’s plainly obvious. I don’t mean this as a commentary on the intention or how well-meaning the actions are, but rather how, as they say in AA, “cunning, baffling, and powerful” alcohol is.

To me, the notion that this disease is sequestered to an individual is so obviously and plainly wrong. I think if more of my family were in a program or working on these issues, my Dad wouldn’t be able to deny his reality as much. Like, these delusions are working in tandem.

A program like Al-Anon is really helpful in identifying those patterns. It offers profound compassion to both the alcoholic and the loved one, but also invites us to look deeply at how we are contributing to the problem. Which doesn’t mean that we cause or control any of it. It just means looking at your own behavior and realizing, “Oh, sometimes I can get a little high on being the savior here.” How do I acknowledge that? Because the addict doesn’t deserve to be the mechanism through which I feel better about myself.

That was a long-winded way of saying my father’s trend has been perpetually downward, and at some point it just becomes a self-perpetuating cycle of the more your brain gets damaged, the less you have the capacity to process what’s happening.

K: How do you handle triggering situations or relationships?

A: I mean, I personally don’t drink because I’m uninterested in contributing to that industry. But when it comes to other people drinking—again, I really credit Al-Anon here—I’ve gotten so much better at reminding myself that what they’re doing is literally not my business. If it starts to bother me, that’s a signal for me about me—it has nothing to do with them. If that signal is discomfort, then I can pay attention to that and leave or do whatever I need to do, but it’s not anyone else’s problem but mine.

I can’t do anything about another person’s drinking, but I can discern some important information about myself when those kinds of feelings come up. And it helps to have a higher power or belief in something bigger than yourself.

K: Why do you think that’s important?

A: I believe that much of addiction has to do with how connected we feel to something bigger than ourselves. That’s not me trying to advocate for a particular religious dogma or whatever, but I do think we live in a culture where we almost worship individualism and human intelligence as though it’s a God. We’re more interested in getting to the top of a hierarchy than in existing collectively with others, and I think that really fosters addiction.

For example, my dad and his siblings were raised Catholic and, for very justifiable reasons, left the Church. They were rightly disgusted by the abuses that were taking place. But there was nothing to replace that sense of connection, which I believe turned into feelings of unmooredness and alienation. Of not having a sense of belonging.

I think people not feeling like they belong is a massive contributing factor to why addiction has taken such deep root in our society. Because, let’s be honest: substance use can in some ways make you feel like you have a ticket straight to heaven, right? But it comes at a high cost.

That’s why 12-step programs are spiritual programs. If we can reestablish a sense of existential belonging—whatever that ends up looking like for us —it doesn’t have to be religious, then the thing that addiction granted us, whether it’s codependency or addiction, is just paltry in comparison.

In other words, I think what we’re seeing culturally with our relationship to substances and addiction is our best version of trying to be connected to something bigger than ourselves. But so many of us haven’t been raised to know how to do that in a healthy way.

I think it’s important to figure out what we’re trying to harness with our substance use or codependency or whatever it is. When I was deeply codependent, trying to be a savior to my dad, I was both trying to take on this role of a God, but I was also hungering for a sense of belonging. It’s not just a medical event where you sequester to the individual, but about the broader ecosystem the person resides within.

K: I completely agree, and it’s not discussed enough. Societally, I don’t think we’re great at understanding that two things can be true. With addiction, yes, there’s this individual medical process happening, but there’s also a societal process happening, and (for many people) a spiritual one. It’s complex.

A: At one point, I was in a psychiatric ward because of severe suicidality. I had a few years in Al-Anon, so I’d developed a relationship with a higher power, and I really, really, really leaned into that during this time. And it’s just like you’re saying: I was in a medical emergency; I needed to go to a medical setting in order to be stabilized and put on medication and all of that. But I also had this spiritual practice, and the doctors actually commented on how much they thought it was helping my progress and recovery. So it’s exactly like you’re saying; it’s never one at the expense of the other, it’s both.

K: Thank you so much, Alethia. Is there anything else you want to say?

A: I’ll just close by sharing that I’m having a baby in a few weeks, which is something I never thought I’d do. What I witnessed growing up seemed so unmanageable, and I knew I didn’t want that. But recovery and therapy have actually helped me to land in a place in my life where not only does that feel safe, it’s exciting to take that leap with someone I deeply trust. If someone had told me at the start of my recovery that I’d be having a baby, I straight up wouldn’t have believed it. To feel safe enough to do this is pretty wild, given how I grew up.

K: I’m so happy for you. Thank you again for doing the interview!

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