Fife support group helps adults with childhood trauma

Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families Fife Group (ACA) with the aim to guide and help one another overcome their traumatic pasts.

An adult child is someone who engages in life with learned survival techniques carried with them from a traumatic childhood and without awareness, direction or support can unknowingly live their lives with ineffective thoughts and judgements that can be detrimental to them, and their relationships with others.

Other dysfunctional family types that can produce adult children include homes with parental mental illness, ritualistic beliefs and homes with sexual abuse.

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The Fife group was founded four years ago when two friends, Sandra and Karen, recognised a need for support .

Sandra, who suffers from overeating as a way to cope with her traumatic past said: “Anyone can walk through our doors. They could be a doctor or a lawyer – we don’t care what their career or profession is. They are here because they need help.

“We want to help anyone who has been raised in a dysfunctional family – that could be religion, or you may have been raised by drug addicts, or been abandoned. It’s trauma from childhood that adult children carry with them.

“All these people who become alcoholics, drug addicts, gamblers or compulsive spenders, you can bet that 90 per cent of them were raised in a dysfunctional family.

“I didn’t just wake up one day and I was an overeater, it is what I saw in my childhood that caused my overeating as a way of coping.”

Karen, who has a history of drink and drug abuse as a result of being raised in a dysfunctional family said: “There was a lot of violence– that’s the picture of my childhood.

“I was raised to be powerless.

“I have found many solutions to my feelings of powerlessness, my feelings of how do I get out of here, how do I stop this and is this what life is?

“I found nicotine, I found food, I found alcohol and I found drugs, and for years I used them as the solution to stop myself being frightened and to stop myself worrying.

“I am an alcoholic, I’m a compulsive eater and I am a drug addict.

“When I start drinking I can’t stop, when I start taking drugs I can’t stop. I had to tackle my addictions in the order that they were killing me.

“Alcohol was knocking the life out of me, so I went to Alcoholics Anonymous and I learned why I couldn’t stop drinking, AA has kept me sober for 10 years.

“I stopped drinking and taking drugs, but I switched my addiction to food and I went to Overeaters Anonymous to get help with my food addiction, but I still had this feeling of resentment from my family of origin that I wasn’t coping with.

“This is when the Fife ACA group was started and I have been there ever since,

“I have been there doing the work that I need to do that helps me to look at the trauma of my childhood and to look at why my behaviour as an adult I turn to my addictions when I am confronted with episodes that are similar to those I experienced in my childhood.

“What ACA does for me is to find other more mature ways of dealing with old situations rather than turn to my addictions.”

Sandra adds that adult children have to re-parent themselves.

She said: “Because we grew up in dysfunctional families with a lack of normal parenting we need to re-parent ourselves.

“We get a lot of people coming from other fellowships like Alcoholics Anonymous or Overeaters Anonymous who have put the substance down and they are left with all the feelings that made them turn to drink or drugs.

“They have exhausted talking about the substance abuse, they have put down the bottle or the drugs and they are left with a hollowness, this is their childhood growing up in a dysfunctional home.”

The group meets every Wednesday at the Queen Margaret Hospital in Dunfermline from 7.15-8.45 pm.

For further information visit aca-fife.org.uk or call 07951 463588.