Claudia Black - It Will Never Happen to Me: Growing Up with Addiction as Youngsters, Adolescents, and Adults

Claudia Black

Third Edition

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1981, 2001, 2020 by Claudia Black.

All rights reserved. First edition 1981.

Second edition 2001.

Third edition 2020.

Printed in the United States of America.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

Publisher: Central Recovery Press

3321 N. Buffalo Drive

Las Vegas, NV 89129

25 24 23 22 21 201 2 3 4 5

ISBN: 978-1-949481-40-2 (paper)

978-1-949481-41-9 (e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020946521

Photo of Claudia Black by Winifred Whitfield. Used with permission.

Every attempt has been made to contact copyright holders. If copyright holders have not been properly acknowledged please contact us. Central Recovery Press will be happy to rectify the omission in future printings of this book.

Publishers Note

This book contains general information about addiction, addiction recovery, recovery, trauma, parental substance abuse, mental health, familial trauma, and related matters. The information is not medical advice. This book is not an alternative to medical advice from your doctor or other professional healthcare provider.

Our books represent the experiences and opinions of their authors only. Every effort has been made to ensure that events, institutions, and statistics presented in our books as facts are accurate and up-to-date. To protect their privacy, the names places, and institutions in this book may have been changed. Except for the poetry and the story Best Little Boy in the World names used in the book are not the true identities of clients. Any identification is from the commonalities of being from an addictive family system. All quotes without names were made by people as young as six years of age.

Cover design and interior by Deb Tremper, Six Penny Graphics.

To Jack, whom I dearly love.

It will never happen to me are words repeated for decades by those impacted by addiction in the family during their growing-up years. Although its been four decades since the first publication of this book it continues to be the primer on the impact of addiction in the family.

The earlier preface shares what drove me to write this book, some of my initial insights, what led me to identify and discuss the roles common to survivorship, and what the dysfunctional rules were within the addicted family. At that time, naming these roles and rules was a validation to peoples experiences and offered a language in which to talk about those experiences. I believe that is still true today.

It Will Never Happen to Me describes the life of the family member disrupted by addiction and speaks to the ways children attempt to cope, describing their experiences of how they bring safety into their life. Yet those very coping mechanisms, while offering survivorship within the storm, create problems later in life. Willpower and intent dont override their internalized self-defeating beliefs. They dont override the unhealthy modeling children are subject to and dont override the traumatic stress that lingers in their body long after a child has left the family environment.

I wrote this book to help people understand that all children raised with addiction are impacted and to challenge the phenomena of their ability to look good, often from an outsiders view appearing to be doing fine. As young adults, they often have a sense of pride in how well they are doing. They have jobs, go to school, have goals. Yet something else is occurring internally. They chronically doubt themselves, sometimes hate themselves. They have secrets, display forms of self-harm, make decisions based in fear, and are afraid much of the time. They are depressed but surprisingly function in spite of it. In many cases they are simply running as fast as they canrunning from any insight or awareness, away from the chaos, the drama, or the void of home. They have chaotic, traumatic family stories but with minimization, denial, and confused loyalty. For most, they dont stop to consider the influence of their growing-up years. Ultimately, many repeat a similar story of their childhood; for others, its a slight variation. They are living a painful legacy that repeats itself as these children live out their traumas.

As much as children have been negatively impacted, there are many factors that can create resiliency and ameliorate some of the traumatic impact. Children need to be supported in their strengths and protective factors created to override the risks. The impact of family trauma does not need to be a life sentence.

It is possible to live their life differently than to repeat the family script. I want children, young and adult, to live life with open arms, not closed in fear or shame. I believe It Will Never Happen to Me will help in that process.

I spent my whole life making sure I didnt end up like my dad. And now, the only difference between my dad and me is that my dad died from his alcoholism, and I dont have to die from mine.

It has been many years since I first heard those words. In that time I have listened to similar stories repeated by men and women of all ages, across the world. Regardless of the drug of choice, the majority of kids raised with addiction in the family have said to themselves, It will never happen to me. They were going to make sure they did not do what their parents had done. As I sit in family groups, I hear the same story from husbands, wives, and partners. They, too, have been raised in addictive families and have repeated those same words. In their wildest dreams, they didnt imagine it could ever happen to them. But they married an addictsome for a second or third timeeven though the words, It will never happen to me, were thought and spoken with all sincerity. They are all surprised to see the cycle of addiction repeating itself. It does not take long before their children are also echoing those same words. Another generation of young children continue the fight for esteem amidst chaos and fear.

My work and personal life are guided by the belief that no one deserves to live with fear and shame. I was raised in a family setting where addiction was a way of life. Aside from my father being alcoholic, we lived in a small town where my parents owned a tavern that was central to our logging community. Chronic drinking among adults was common to most and exposure to this was the norm. Unbeknown to my mother, my fathers drinking was well established prior to their marriage. He was just twenty-two years of age, she was seventeen. Having been raised with alcoholism and compulsive gambling, the earlier stages of my fathers addictive behavior were not concerns for my mother.