Children of Alcoholism: The Struggle for Self and Intimacy in Adult Life

CHAPTER 7. When the Family Hero Turns Pro: The Adult Child in the Helping Professions

7 WHEN THE FAMILY HERO TURNS PRO: THE ADULT CHILD IN THE HELPING PROFESSIONS MANY CHILDREN from alcoholic homes sacrifice a substantial portion of their selfhood in order to minister to the physical and psychic needs of their parents, or parentsurrogates . They are moved to this sacrifice by love and compassion for their parents, by their fear of losing their parents, and by their longing for a satisfying, sustaining self-selfobject relation (see chapter 4). They also greatly prefer the role of a strong helper to that of a dependent, fearful child. Vulnerable aspects of the self are therefore split off, and most of the time are unavailable to conscious awareness. Some of these children, when they are grown, extend their largess to the wider community by entering the helping professions. A sizable number of these instinctive helpers choose to specialize in the treatment of chemically dependent individuals and families. They often bring to their work an extraordinary capacity for empathy, and their will to restore the suffering alcoholics and their codependents can become the basis for the very qualities of hope, courage , and dogged perseverance that are indispensable to success When the Family Hero Turns Pro 145 in this field. However, in the adult child whose heroic role armor has not been pierced by self-analysis, supervision, or psychotherapy , this will to restore usually operates as a compulsive, destructive force. Fueled, in large measure, by fear and flagging self-esteem, it may actually interfere with the process of recovery. The Heroic Therapist's Will to Restore: Clinical Ramifications The hero, once again, is the unfailingly Hgood" child in the alcoholic family, who, like Jack, accepts the standard of responsibility when it falls from the hands of the drinking parent and the enabling spouse. As the disease of alcoholism progresses, and the family situation deteriorates, the hero's burden of responsibility and fear increases, and the unconscious longing for a healthful, supportive self-selfobject relation intensifies. Eventually the hero's possibilities for transcending the narrowly defined familial role ofselflesshelperare seriouslyeroded.Thischild often becomes as compulsively devoted to the restoration of the family as the alcoholic is devoted to the pursuit and use of alcohol. If the will to restore is an important guiding principle in the life of the hero, it will doubtless emerge as crucial to the attitudes and approaches that the heroic therapist brings to his professional functions. It is likely to be repeatedly evoked in those situations in which the therapist's work requires daily confrontations with the disease of alcoholism, and it should be especially powerful where the therapist's own life as a hero remains essentially unexamined and the need to restore is unrecognized, and thus beyond conscious control. The clinical phenomenon most commonly associated with the will to restore is an impatient Hrush to recovery" by the therapist. The therapist whose self-esteem and sense of emotional safety depends on the pa- 146 Children ofAlcoholism tient's restoration to wholeness is often intolerant of the lengthy and inevitable periods of withdrawal, fragmentation, and regression that precede recovery, and will often attempt to abbreviate or evade these painful phases. Heroic therapists are particularly apt to block patients' expressions of hopelessness, panic, and rage, since they associate such feelings with the possibility of loss or agonizing conflict with the object. They know, from experience with their own parents, that these intense affects usually signal real trouble in that they may lead to physical abusiveness, relapse, or other destructive behaviors. It is most important to understand that, in the heroic therapist's family of origin, emotionality and conflict never came to a good end. When these therapists move to prevent an explosion of feeling in a psychotherapy session, they are recapitulating a scene from childhood in which an understandable attempt was made to fulfill role expectations, to avoid loss and feelings of intense fear and failure, and to curtail parental destructiveness. While the abridgement ofemotionality was an adaptive maneuver in childhood , however, it is likely to hinder rather than facilitate recovery when it is practiced by a therapist. It should, in fact, be regarded as a member of the broad class of enabling behaviors. It may be helpful to consider some clinical vignettes that illustrate the unconscious suppression of explosive affect by a clinician and its deleterious effects on the course of therapy with chemically dependent and codependent clients. The first vignette describes my own...