[MUSIC PLAYING]What do these people have in common Former pre.docx

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What do these people have in common? Former president
Ronald Reagan. ex-Dallas Cowboy Hollywood Henderson.
Writer Lorian Hemingway, granddaughter of Ernest
Hemingway. Comedian Louie Anderson. Actress Susan Sullivan
Former hockey star Derek Sanderson. And performer Suzanne
Somers.
Hello. I'm Robin Young, and like everyone I just named, I grew
up in an alcoholic home. Now I know some of you may
remember me as a co-host of Evening Magazine, a former
correspondent for NBC News, but now I also refer to myself as
something called an adult child of an alcoholic.
Now I know that doesn't make sense at first. Adult child. What
does that mean? But please listen, because tonight's program
may make some people's lives make sense, some for the first
time.
We're going to be talking about adults confronting the fact that
the alcoholism they grew up with was not only very painful
when they were children, but has had a profound effect on them
as adults.
And this alcoholism isn't always easy to see. I mean, sure,
there's the violent drunk that you see on television, but we're
also talking about the silent homes where kids grew up in
constant fear that there would be violence, that Mom would fall
asleep drunk with a cigarette or Dad have a car accident driving
home. No one ever talked about it, and these kids always
thought it was their fault.
I know alcoholism wasn't even mentioned in my home until my

dad died from it three years ago. And even then it was hard for
me to talk about, until I heard other people's voices.
He was a really sort of Jekyll/Hyde personality. When he wasn't
drinking he was charming and bright and insightful. And when
he was drinking he was angry.
I believe my father's alcoholic. And I love him dearly and I
can't get him sober. And he thinks he's just a boozer.
My childhood was normal to me. Craziness, violence, hitting,
screaming, crying, staying up all night. All those things were
just our normal life.
Confusion is why I couldn't figure things out. Why can't I figure
out the confusion? So I was confused about the confusion.
I used to think that a bolt of lightning was going to come and
crash down on me if I talked about it.
Once it was easy for people to see me on the outside and think
that things were going OK. The last year things just went
dramatically downhill.
I thought if I was a better kid that maybe he wouldn't drink.
Now I know, because I was one once, that there are some cynics
out there. Someone recently wrote that it feels as if we're about
to have support groups for third cousins of excessive sherry
drinkers. How important is this?
Well, there are 28 million Americans who have at least one
alcoholic parent. That's one out of eight. And most of the
people that we're talking about have worked very hard at
looking really good so no one knows there's a problem until
their lives just fall apart and marriages break up or they're

profoundly depressed and they don't know why.
We get a lot of mixed signals about alcohol in this country, so
this program is also important because it may help you figure
out if some of the problems you're dealing with have to deal
with growing up in an alcoholic home. If so, this program will
tell you that you are not alone. And it will tell you how to get
help if you decide to stop keeping the family secret.
I never saw my father falling down drunk. But I only saw him,
when I was really little, that half hour between him coming
home from work and bedtime. And of course that coincided with
the cocktail hour, so--
Growing up with excessive social drinking is a lot like growing
up in those amusement park house of mirrors. Everything's just
a little distorted and things change and especially as a little kid,
you don't know why.
But there's a broad spectrum of alcoholic homes and at the other
end is the violent one.
When you see Suzanne Somers perform in Las Vegas, it's hard
to believe she's had any problems other than keeping that hat
on. But Suzanne Somers was not always the fun-loving
performer that she appears to be today. She kept up the image of
a ditzy blonde on the hit sitcom Three's Company. People loved
her, and few would know, until she wrote her autobiography,
Keeping Secrets, the dark childhood she had as the youngest
daughter of a violent and verbally abusive father.
It didn't enter my mind that it was a sad childhood. It just
entered my mind that it was something that I shouldn't let other
people know about.
But still, I was shocked at the events in your childhood. Dishes

flying and people fighting, kids hitting parents, parents hitting
kids, and the yelling. It was dark.
All those nights of hiding in the closet to escape the reality of
hearing the yelling and the craziness and worrying that someone
was going to be killed in the next room, what a terrible thing to
live with. For a child to worry each night that one or the other
members or yourself might get killed in tonight's fight.
There were words that your father used against you that I didn't
even know existed in the '50s and the '60s. These were nasty
things you just don't say.
Big O and nothing. You're nothing. And I would hear that over
and over. You hear you're nothing and worthless and useless,
and then the rest of the language that I can't say here, which is
part of an alcoholic home--
I couldn't believe it. Let's try to trace this. How did your
father's put-downs of you when you were young affect you when
you were older. Did you actually hear his voice telling you
you're nothing, you're no good?
It's not that I heard the voice. It was me. I was nothing. I was
worthless. I became what he said I was. So I didn't have to hear
his voice. I knew that I was useless and worthless. I knew that.
Her siblings had the same low opinion of themselves. Maureen,
Danny, and Michael all became alcoholics. Suzanne was
determined not to drink, but what she didn't know was that she
had taken on other characteristics of an alcoholic. She lied,
even saying her dad was dead.
I didn't want to be the daughter of the drunk anymore. You get a
mixed message of lies. You're taught, on the one hand, my
mother is a good Irish Catholic, church-going woman, teach me

never lie. And yet I'd hear her on the phone saying, Mr.
Mahoney can't come to work today because he's sick. And I'd
look at him and I'd think he's not sick. He's drunk. He's passed
out.
And so I got the message, OK, you're not supposed to lie, but
there are some lies that are OK. So lying became a way for me
to protect the reality of who I thought I was.
One lie led to another. The crisis became worse. She had to
marry at the age of 18, had a baby, and shortly after that she
had an affair that cost her her marriage. Ill-equipped to take
care of her young son, she took whatever modeling job she
could get, even posing nude for this Newsweek cover. And the
lies continued.
The crisis was all I knew. And when I left the house, the
environment, the crazy environment, to go have a normal life, I
didn't know what normal was. So I just created the patterns of
my childhood in my own life. So I created my own crisis. So
therefore I wrote bad checks for a period of time
You were arrested.
I was arrested, yes. Yes. It was part of the crisis, though.
Because what our parents do to us, good or bad, affects who we
will be as adults. And this is how it manifested in me.
Today, as honorary chairperson of the National Association of
Children of Alcoholics, Suzanne Somers speaks with conviction
and hope. She tells of her entire family's recovery. Brothers,
sister, and father, all sober for several years. And her mom is
now in a support group. But it's only recently that Suzanne got
from her father the only thing she ever really wanted.
Nonetheless, he's been sober for 11 years and I've been waiting

for something from him, for him to recognize what his disease
did to me and to make amends. And two days ago I got a letter
from my dad that said that he was sorry, in the most-- It's just a
beautiful letter.
It makes me emotional because it ends it. And I think every
child of an alcoholic would love to have the opportunity to hear
from the parent, I'm sorry. And so many children of alcoholics'
parents die before they have the chance to say that
I think that I first understood that my father was an alcoholic
when he died. What happened was the year before, he had
become ill and the doctor said to me, well, you know he's an
alcoholic. I was furious. I called my sister and I said this doctor
is saying Dad's an alcoholic.
And she said, no kidding, Sherlock. She'd been trying to tell
me. And of course I couldn't hear what I didn't want to hear.
One of my brothers and I, we went to his bedside and we
pleaded with him to please get help.
And the miracle did occur. He decided to go into recovery and
he did become sober, a totally different man. And we were all
adjusting to this change when several months later, his liver just
failed. And on Christmas Eve he died.
And in many ways the worst things had happened. Here I was
convinced that I had saved a parent, which I guess maybe Id'
trying to do all along, but come to find out that of course I
hadn't. And it would be a while before I realized that I had to
try to save myself.
Well, after my dad died I set out in time-honored family
tradition, working hard to avoid dealing with it. I did so many
alcohol-related stories for NBC that a friend said to me, Robin,
I've been elected to tell you, alcoholism is not a beat. I think

since I'd failed in saving my dad, I was going to try to save
everybody else.
And I was also seeking out soulmates, like the brother and sister
that I met here in Boston. The nightmare of every child of an
alcoholic had come true for them. She told me that she was
riding the train and she looked up and there in the seat across
from her was her dad. A bum.
The most incredible thing happened after that story aired. My
mother had been watching it with my sister and she told her that
our grandfather, my father's father, had in fact been a bum on
the streets. Knock me over with a feather. That wonderful old
man who had moved into our home when I was really young had
apparently never recovered from the Depression. And my father
had been forced to take him in.
And suddenly I just was aware of all the pain of seeing this
wonderful old man, but remembering now that I could see his
shame. And also realizing the tension that existed between my
father and his father, the fact that he had to be confronted every
day with that failure. I was overwhelmed by not only
remembering the pain, but realizing that we had never, ever,
talked about it.
Around this time, I noticed a book that had become a publishing
phenomenon, a bestseller by word of mouth. And I did a story
on the author, psychologist Janet Woititz. Today she continues
to lecture on the link between the alcoholic and the child.
You see, the alcoholic, for example, is dependent. The people in
that system who get caught up in that cycle are what we call co-
dependent. As co-dependent, they lose a sense of themselves
and their own value and they devote themselves to trying to fix
the alcoholic. If we're looking at the adult child of the
alcoholic, we look at something that's more complicated,

because these behaviors become a part of what they internalize
as who they are. And so it's more serious.
There's no time for a child's feelings in an alcoholic home, and
support groups like this one, run by Janet, try to make up for
that. Thousands of groups across the country provide a safe
place for old wounds to finally be healed. When I was growing
up I guess I was always waiting for the shoe to fall, because my
father was a late-stage alcoholic when I was young.
And whenever there was a family gathering or whenever there
was a holiday, it was how long is this day going to be OK?
When is the first incident going to happen? How much time do I
have to play?
It's relationship problems that usually bring people for help.
Issues of control, trust, intimacy, these stir up trouble as the
child of an alcoholic tries to get close to another person.
A real specific wall is not being able to have the kind of
relationship that they want and not knowing what it is that goes
wrong. Not knowing why they make the choices that they do,
not knowing why they get stuck in the ways that they do, not
knowing how to fix it when they have an argument, not
knowing-- One of the walls has to do with their own children,
not knowing how to be a parent.
The problem is children never forget the contradictory messages
from their childhood.
You can't do anything right, I need you. You grow up in a
situation where no matter what you do it isn't good enough. So
that's who you seek. So you're very drawn to people who are
warm and loving one day and rejecting the next. Those are the
ones who turn you on.

In other words, while the ACOA is going through their
problems, the people involved with them--
May not have any idea at all what hit them. And those that get
involved are generally looking and begging for space. They end
up saying, I love you but please go away, which is the set up.
And that's how they play out their childhood.
In fact, Janet Woititz says that adult children of alcoholics don't
take lovers, they take hostages. But the real problem is that the
opposite is also true. That same person who will hold on too
tight in a relationship will run as fast they can in the other
direction if their partner actually responds to them. It can make
for a horrible emotional tug of war.
And there are some other characteristics that Janet lists in her
book, so why don't we take a second and see if any of these are
familiar to you. Do you find yourself fiercely loyal to
employers who just don't deserve that loyalty? Do you crave
approval but can't stand compliments? Are you super
responsible or super irresponsible? Do you find yourself
wondering just what is normal, anyway? And are you more
comfortable reading other people's minds than your own?
And sometimes it becomes masked. They use food to
compensate. They might use alcohol or drugs to compensate.
They may become very compulsive in their exercising. They
may be very compulsive in money spending and that may create
a crisis enough for them to say something's going on. But they
don't say, gee, I was raised in an alcoholic home, I need more
help.
Claudia Black is a co-founder of this ACOA movement, so is
Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse. And like many other leaders,
they're also children of alcoholics.

We have a tendency to hold back, to share less. Our whole life
has been, don't talk, don't trust, don't feel.
Don't talk, don't trust, don't feel. That is the battle cry of
children of alcoholics, but some people want to change that.
And in fact, what was an idea of a few years ago has become a
movement. This is the fifth annual National Children of
Alcoholics convention in San Diego.
Hundreds of professionals and adults who grew up in alcoholic
homes have come from all over the United States to try to get
some understanding of the past. What they learn is that many
painful childhood memories begin at this age.
How are kids hurt when there is a mom or a dad who drinks too
much or uses too many drugs? What are some of the problems
that kids have? Yes, Jessica.
You can get really ignored.
Kids get ignored.
What does that mean?
What does that mean? That's a good question. What do we mean
when we say kids get ignored? What do you mean?
They don't get any attention paid to them.
Mom and Dad don't spend enough time with them. What were
you going to say, Connie?
Sometimes they get hurt. The parents could hit them or abuse
them.
Abuse them. Hit them or abuse them in some way.

Jerry Moe, author and workshop leader, knows that most
children of alcoholics already believe the alcoholism is their
fault.
Children have an incredible sense that it's their fault. Part of it
is just developmentally, young kids see themselves as being the
hub of the universe. Everything revolves around them.
Kids who desperately want their parents to stop drinking will do
anything to make them stop.
I took bottles of vodka, dumped it out, and put tonic water in
there or bubbly water in there.
So is there anything that we can do?
Nothing.
In this exercise a child tries to get Mom to take off the blanket,
which symbolizes her refusal to stop drinking.
Are you in there?
Yes, I'm here.
Will you please come out from under that blanket?
Go leave me alone. Go on.
I'll clean the house or do better in school if you stop.
To me the most devastating consequence of growing up in an
alcoholic home is it robs children of their childhood. I believe
that in order to survive little children of alcoholics sell their
soul, sell that little kid inside, to survive and take on incredible

adult concerns, like is Mommy going to fall asleep in bed
tonight with a lit cigarette. Am I going to take care of my
younger brothers and sisters to make sure that they have a lunch
packed to go to school? And as a result, they don't get to play.
This is what a kid's life should be like, thought Linda
Hollingdale, a counselor on the campus of Saint Michael's
College in Winooski, Vermont. She saw young adults
struggling, but it wasn't until she heard Claudia Black speak
that she understood. These kids were already straining to look
normal so no one would guess their secret.
We hear again of the more physical, blatant forms of
abandonment. But we're talking about what kids don't get to
hear. They don't get to hear the I love you. They don't get to
hear that you are important. They don't get the kind of time that
implies that.
The other thing that happens with these kids, that we refer to as
the walking wounded, that really look pretty good, is they're
often highly perfectionistic.
Using Claudia Black exercises, these students are beginning to
understand the repercussions of growing up in an alcoholic
home.
What these cards represent is basically what they say. Anger
can be any type of anger. Sadness can be loss, grief, any kind of
sadness issues. I'd like you to take cards that represent your
emotional state and the number of cards you take will indicate
the intensity.
Do I take one of each?
Guilt's really taking a beating. Here we go.

Sadness, guilt.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Now let's start off with mine. This is as far back as I can
remember. I just wanted to try to get as far away from how I
feel now. Happiness and fear went hand in hand because I was
always afraid of losing my mother, like at 5 o'clock I'd lose her,
when she started drinking. But I was very guilty because I
thought it was my fault that they couldn't love me after 5
o'clock.
I never remember seeing drinking but I remember distinctly my
mother being two different people. And I was always confused
about why sometimes I was really loved and why sometimes I
felt ignored.
I always, always felt like there just was something that I wasn't
doing right. Mainly I was never doing what I was doing to the
highest level possible, which is what seemed to be what my
parents seemed to want. And I always felt guilty that I was
letting them down, letting myself down.
And I was always fearful that things were never going to change
and that I was always going to feel the same way, and that I'd
never feel happy like I felt everyone was always happy.
You know, as tough as it is to hear that pain, I find myself
envying kids who are aware of their feelings. When I was that
age it seemed like the only option was just to feel nothing. And
the result is I remember very little of that time. It would have
helped to have known that there are distinct roles that children
in an alcoholic family take on.
There's the hero, the over-achiever. They try to do everything
right.

The scapegoat is the one that rebels. They probably do drugs
and they don't do anything right.
Then there's the lost child. They just watch everything quietly
and blend into the woodwork, while the mascot provides the
comic relief. And next we're going to tell you a story about a
man who made that pain his profession.
Why is it that brothers and sisters from the same alcoholic home
react differently? One reason could be they see different
degrees of their parents' alcoholism. For instance, an older child
may leave before it becomes too bad and become successful, but
they may pay later. In fact, some people believe that they may
suffer something similar to post-traumatic stress syndrome, the
same delayed reaction that Vietnam veterans had to leaving
comrades on a battlefield.
The fact is, no matter how successful they become, it seems that
no one gets off scot-free.
Try to get the car. That was a big deal, you know that. Hey,
Dad? I cleaned the garage. I did the lawn. I built that addition.
[LAUGHTER] Can I use the Bonneville? Take the Rambler.
Louie Anderson was the 10th of 11 children of an alcoholic
father. He was terrified as a child and used comedy as his
escape.
And he'd give you those keys. He'd always give you a lecture
with it. Now listen, I'm not giving you this car so you can screw
it up. Well then I don't want it.
Yes. I use my dad. He's a big part of my act. Probably 30 or 40
minutes of my three hours of material is about my dad. So I use
that all the time.

I thought if I was a better kid that maybe he wouldn't drink. He
was the kind of father who was an alcoholic so his love affair
was not with his children or his wife, it was with alcoholism.
Well, he was never really physically abusive with me. He was
emotionally abusive with me. Some of my older brothers and
sisters say he was physically abusive with them. And I know
that he used to hit my mom. I remember that.
Louie hated the way his father treated the family, but he also
adored him. In many ways he was a great guy. That combination
of love and anger can be crippling to adult children of
alcoholics. They have to bury the. Feelings And like many,
Louie did that with food.
My dad would say when are you going to lose some weight,
those kinds of things. And those kinds of things are the things
that really are problems when you're a kid. It wasn't said for a
response, it was said as a judgment. And then when you would
come into the room and the father would look up at you and go,
eh. Those things stay with you a long time. The eating comes
from wanting to fill that emptiness that you feel and also to
calm and soothe everything, kind of a medication. So instead of
alcoholism, because you are so repulsed by that idea, your
compulsion becomes drugs, it becomes food, those kinds of
things.
In fact, Louie first went to therapy for help with his weight,
only to find out there was a strong connection between that and
his father's alcoholism. He began to explore his feelings by
writing. Eventually these notes became Dear Dad, a book of
letters to his late father.
Well, originally the book was not meant to be a book, first of
all. It was a therapeutic tool for myself to get through these

feelings.
Dear Dad, It's been about a month since my last letter.
Louie first read excerpts of his book to an understanding
audience, the National Association of Children of Alcoholics
convention.
Parents influence their kids, pass on all their behavior in their
children. I look at us and I see it as clear as I see you rolling
those Bull Durhams in your big easy chair. I tried to roll my
own Bull Durham one day. You weren't home. I loved to sit in
that chair and act like you. I'd pretend order people around.
Hey, cat, get over there. No slinking around the house.
At the end of the book I was able to leave a lot of the
resentment behind.
Signed, Feeling the Loss. Thanks a lot.
No question about it, there are more eating disorders, more
learning disabilities, there's more violence and more sexual
abuse in homes where alcohol is abused. Women stand a greater
chance of marrying an alcoholic and men stand a greater chance
of becoming one if their raised in that environment. But the
child that's dealt the worst blow is the one whose mother drinks
during the pregnancy.
Push. Good job. Again. Bear down--
This is a normal healthy birth.
It's a her. You were right.
Children born to mothers who are alcoholics and drink
throughout their pregnancy begin life with many strikes already

against them.
For a child to be diagnosed as having fetal alcohol syndrome,
they have signs in each of three areas. They are growth
retarded. Both at birth and as they grow, they stay small. They
have central nervous system abnormalities. In the most severe
cases, the face is more characteristic and you really can see the
differences. In the less severe cases the face will look more
normal.
But both parents affect a child's genetic makeup. And in fact,
just recently scientists isolated a gene that confirms what many
already suspected. Alcoholism can be inherited.
So when you put the genetics together and then you put being
raised in a dysfunctional family together, we're increasing the
probabilities. And so children of alcoholics are four times more
likely to develop alcoholism. We know that that's statistically,
empirically proved.
I believe my father's alcoholic. And I love him dearly. And I
can't get him sober. And he thinks he's just a boozer. And I
would love for him to taste sobriety.
I talk to my dad all the time about it. I tell him, I got a bed for
you, Harold. Yeah, but I'm just a boozer. Nah, I'm okay. Dad,
get sober. You'd enjoy life so much at your age. Nah. And he
tries. He sees it. But it's the most natural thing in the world for
a drunk to drink. And he justifies it and rationalizes its use. I
don't think he'd appreciate me talking about it.
When I went to rehab they wanted me to say I hated my parents,
that my parents are responsible for me being alcoholic. I have
tremendous difficulty with that. I chose to pick up, nobody put a
gun to my head and said become a drunk.

As we've heard, genetics can be a loaded gun if you don't
understand the connection. As a child of an alcoholic, Derek
was at birth already four times more likely to become one
himself. But he didn't think about that when he was the heavy
drinking star of the Bruins. No one did.
So I would drink until 3:00, 4:00 in the morning, play a 1
o'clock game the next day. I figured because I passed out for a
few hours and had a shower I was fine. I didn't realize that I
was playing drunk.
But eventually the drinks and the drugs began to show, even in
a televised interview.
Here's the key. Meet me in the room.
Derek's downward spiral was swift and hard. He had it all, he
lost it all.
And you think that's normal behavior. Athletes, everybody goes
for a few beers. I was sleeping under bridges in Central Park,
totally broke and still didn't realize alcohol was my problem. I
thought the world was against me.
I was carrying a gun. I was in blackouts a lot. If I held anybody
up, I don't remember. But I was in blackouts at the end
sometimes up to a week. Functioning, but still blacked out,
which is dangerous. And I know I had a weapon. And I know it
was empty sometimes and I had to reload it, but I don't know
where I shot it.
Eventually his teammate and friend Bobby Orr intervened and
took Derek to the first of 13 detox centers.
He's getting himself caught. He's taking chances.

Derek's been sober now for eight years. He does play-by-play
for hockey games and he talks to kids about the effects of
drinking on his life. One thing he doesn't talk about is his own
dad's drinking.
I can personally dispel a lot of ACOA theories. I was never hit.
I was never abused. I was loved, cared for, and it was a very
concerned, giving, loving family organism. It was something
that was just perfect.
This may be a good time to stop and point out that this is not
about blame, sitting around and listing all the things that your
parents did to you. This is about trying to understand their
drinking so that you can take responsibility for your own
behavior. But it's true. The family member that stands up and is
the first one to say, there's something wrong here, can feel very
disloyal.
Lorian Hemingway-- Yes, she's the granddaughter of the famous
American writer Ernest Hemingway-- lives a quiet life here in
Seattle, Washington. She comes from generations of destructive
alcoholic behavior that masqueraded as eccentric family fun. In
fact, it had become so acceptable that when Lorian decided to
halt the cycle and declare her alcoholism to her 17 year old
daughter, she was met with disbelief.
When I told her I was alcoholic, she said, I don't believe you. I
explained the sort of drinker I was. It was easy for people to see
me on the outside and think that things were going OK. The last
year things just went dramatically downhill.
The thing that is ironic about having that sort of history is
seeing your own mother go through it, and say to yourself, I
will never, ever do that with my life. And then ending up, when
you're 35 years old, worse than she was at that age, near the
point of death. And seeing that you did indeed do that. That's a

little frightening.
The drinking history of Lorian Hemingway's family is really
quite staggering. Her grandfather, Ernest Hemingway, one of
America's finest writers, was also one of its most famous
drinkers. Several of his children would become alcoholics.
Lorian's father, his son, and Lorian's mother were both
alcoholics, so was her famous cousin Margaux Hemingway.
Drinking was a family sport.
1980 is when it started kicking off in-- I don't want to use the
word earnest-- in full force. That was not as bad as years down
the road, no. That was when my family was still having fun.
Lorian can drink anybody under the table. Why don't we have
her participate in the contest? It was well known fact that I
drank a lot. And a lot of people said, you drink because you're a
Hemingway.
Lorian wanted to follow in her grandfather's footsteps. Like
him, she became a writer, in fact writing many articles about
him. And like him, she took up fishing. And again like him, she
took up heavy drinking.
That sort of passion and that connection to him grew at a
particular point in my life, probably during my mid-20s, when I
tried to be the female personification of my grandfather. Sheer
idiocy, looking back on it now, but I think it was probably
something that I had to go through.
Lorian got help, got sober, and in August of 1989 wrote an
article for Washington Magazine. In it, she describes coming
face to face with her own alcoholism, how her mother ended up
in an institution because of the disease, it's devastating effect
on the rest of her family, and her pain at having survived.
It saddens me that my grandfather ended up a suicide and that

my uncle ended up a suicide, that my mother is where she is.
It's a gift that I wish I could give them, this knowledge that you
can survive past it. And that there is hope. But there is nothing I
can do about that.
Hollywood Henderson, once a powerful linebacker for the
Dallas Cowboys, was brought to his knees by drinks and drugs.
It was only after his career dreams were totally shattered that he
began to look for the roots of his drinking.
I don't know. My mother or father, being regular drinkers,
probably gave me a sip of beer at an age before I knew what it
was.
Like a sip of Coca-Cola?
Yeah. Alcoholics do that to their children, you know. They give
them a sip. They do.
For his new sober lifestyle he's taken back his old name,
Thomas. He's also reaching into the past for painful memories
of traumatic events that were the result of his parents drinking.
But at 12 years old I witnessed, on the front porch of my house,
my mother shooting my father. He was my stepdad. And he had
physically abused her earlier that evening.
Thomas Henderson will tell you now that his memories help him
to understand his parents, not to blame them. But that wasn't
true when he first began to write about them in his book called
Out of Control.
When I first started to write the book it was going to be a tell-
all on everybody but me. And then something happened to me in
my recovery.

Thomas Henderson got help at Sierra Tucson, a treatment center
in Arizona.
When you're sober for five and a half years, sometimes you
think you got it all together. But if you haven't dealt with the
family of origin issues or being an adult child of alcoholics,
then a lot of things are still not clear and you still may act out
in certain areas.
So I went in to Sierra Tucson and what happened was I was
crying for three and a half days, and did some work on my
mother and my father. Let go of some shame and some guilt.
I was so angry. There's no way that I could come from a family
like I did and have the tools that it takes to raise children.
[? Kathy ?] [? Higby ?] was as devastated as Thomas Henderson
but for a different reason. She thought she'd done everything
right, that she had outsmarted her past, that she, and therefore
her children, had escaped the horribly disappointing alcoholism
that [? Kathy ?] grew up with.
Both my parents are alcoholics. My father died at age 49. I don't
really remember seeing my father drunk, but later I realized I
never saw my father sober. Never. And my mother, when she
drank, the effects were much more apparent physically with her.
She was the one that was supposed to be OK, and when she
started drinking that was real hard on me.
Rigid control would become her escape route, and the whole
family felt the pressure to be perfect. She was unconsciously
trying to do as an adult what she couldn't do as a child: fix her
parents.
Me as a child decided that I better get in control of things
because nobody else was going to do it for me.

She became a social worker in Warwick, Rhode Island, married
a family practitioner, had three beautiful daughters and a lovely
home. But one day her tightly controlled world collapsed. A
son, born prematurely, died.
And that made me stop and say I can't do this anymore. I no
longer had control.
It was that experience that made Kathy seek help from Sharon
Wegscheider-Cruse.
But there's no room for the good things to happen when there is
a reservoir of toxic anger inside. Anger has to come out. Shame
has to come out. Guilt has to come out. Hopelessness has to
come out and leave that person feeling void of all of those pent
up years of feelings. That's when the positive healing feelings
can begin to be generated.
How are you feeling right now?
A little nervous.
A little scared?
That's normal.
Now Kathy and her husband Ray lead workshops together for
children of alcoholics. Using something called Family
Sculptures, therapy group members play the roles of people in
the individual's alcoholic family.
Say, you are an alcoholic, because he is now your father.
You are an alcoholic. You are very abusive, mentally and
physically.

You. I don't know where your sense is at all. I should beat some
in you, for God's sake what's the matter with you?
What are you feeling?
I feel like did then.
What is that?
I'm feeling worthless, like I'm no good. And feeling alone.
The next step is to try to release all that hurt and anger that's
been kept inside.
No more.
You never listen. Never listen.
No more.
You've got to listen. Why don't you listen to me? You know I
know more than you do.
No.
You know I know more than you.
No.
I'm a better person than you.
Now comes the hard part. As tough as it is to admit that a parent
is an alcoholic, it's devastating for the child to realize they have
to change. I guess the old saying is true: the devil you know is
better than the devil you don't know. And it's scary to express

emotions like anger. That can be very dangerous if you were
growing up in an alcoholic home.
Someone just said to me recently, how are you going to do this
show? Don't you still get angry? Don't you just lose it? Of
course I do. And I have found a safe and appropriate place to
put those feelings. Next we'll talk about getting support.
I remember the first time I ever went to a support group. You
see, every day thousands of people who have been affected by
other people's drinking get together in rooms across the country
to talk. I went to my first meeting, I remember I literally looked
at my watch and said, oh, I have about an hour, let's just get this
thing fixed, shall we? How hard could it be? I didn't have a
drinking problem. I didn't have a problem with drugs. I was just
going to fix this thing. And I figured one, maybe two meetings
at best.
Three years later I am still attending meetings. I've been
astonished at how hard it is to change negative thoughts about
yourself. I'm convinced that it's as hard for a child of an
alcoholic to do that as it must be for a heroin addict to kick
their habit. There are now 4,000 groups across the country
which are just for adult children of alcoholics. You'd be amazed
at who you'd find there.
I wanted to somehow make it better. I wanted to make him feel
better. I wanted to make the relationship between my mom and
dad better. I wanted to make it OK. And I thought, well, if I
clean the kitchen or cook dinner or I'm very quiet--
You may know Susan Sullivan for her starring role on Falcon
Crest for seven years. But Susan never trusted that success.
What seemed like modesty was actually a grim resignation. She
believed anything good was going to vanish.

What kind of a man was he and what kind of a drinker was he.
He was a really sort of Jekyll/Hyde personality. When he wasn't
drinking he was charming and bright and insightful. And when
he was drinking he was angry. He was just so angry and he was
very verbally abusive. I could tell by the way he walked which
dad was coming home and whether I could run out and greet
him or whether I should hang back a little.
My father was very critical. I always felt that I was never quite
enough and that what I was doing was not enough.
What would he say?
Oh, I remember when he would talk about what I was doing as
an actress. It was always, well, yes, you're doing that and that's
OK. But I remember when I saw Katharine Cornell. So the
unspoken, or not so unspoken, was well, you're doing all right
but you're not Katharine Cornell.
That's a very cruel--
He said, well, because I thought you needed to have that kind of
encouragement. I thought that's what you needed in order so
that you wouldn't glide across the top. And I have felt and
struggle with to this day that I glide across the top. And the real
challenge for me now is to be able to go in deeply into
anything, into a relationship, into my work, into new work and
new ventures, without feeling this terrible sense that I'm not
going to be enough.
Children of alcoholics do judge themselves without mercy, turn
criticism in on themselves, often sabotage their own success,
whether or not they're celebrities.
Sometimes I will feel this sort of free floating ennui, this sort of

depression, and it's real hard, because my mom will say things
like, oh, honey, why are you depressed? Look, you have a
beautiful house, you have a wonderful man, you have money in
the bank, why are you depressed? And then you feel, why am I
depressed? How dare I be depressed. But you are.
My struggle now has been to learn how to grieve, to learn how
to grieve for the things that were not and that will never be, and
then basically to take care of myself.
Susan realized that her late father's acceptance was not only
impossible to get, it wasn't even the biggest problem anymore.
She joined a support group to begin accepting herself.
That part of myself that's a little more frightened and suffers
from not being in control and maybe being stupid and all of that
stuff, that part I don't like to let her out. I try to take her out
more and I try to dress her properly. She gets out she has a hole
in her sock, her shoe is worn down, she is just impossible. But
it's OK. She was the other day without any underpants on in the
car with me. I looked over, I said, little Sue, I'm going to take
you-- No, it's all right.
So the way I understand, you haven't just sort of suddenly split
into dual personalities here. This is your image of you as a
child, little Sue. And the one that's still with you, even though
you look just great and you're big Sue now.
I'm big Sue. And I have my pants on.
You see, we do have a sense of humor and we need it. Asking
for help is one of the toughest things that an adult child of an
alcoholic will ever do. But Janet Woititz advises that you not
try to go alone.
You see, the recovery begins when you get it outside of

yourself, when you put it out there. And you put it out there by
saying it to a therapist, putting it down on paper, talking to
another person whom you select very carefully. It should not be
your boss. It should not be somebody on the first date. It might
be somebody that you meet at a meeting. If you own up to this
and you make the decision to go into recovery, on the one hand
it will be wonderful. On the other hand it has some implied
threats, because you're going to be an outsider in terms of your
family.
A warning: there are now so many books on this subject it's
hard to know where to begin. But begin by trusting your
instincts. Find the one that feels right for you.
Adult children have a wound inside and I refer to it as an
emotional abscess. And it's just like a physical abscess. And we
need to go in, drain it. And we drain it by talking about it,
crying the tears that have to be cried, releasing the anger that
has to be released, so that some of the new feelings, like
serenity and gratitude and hope and joy can begin to happen.
And as that happens and the compulsions are eliminated,
obviously relationships begin to work out in a whole different
way.
Very, very treatable. Does not have to go on forever.
My younger brother Jimmy once told me that he'd watched a
television show much like this one. He began by thinking, this
is sort of interesting. Halfway through he literally got up,
crossed the room, and sat down in another chair, thinking, this
is me.
Well, there's a chance that someone tonight has had that same
kind of light bulb go off. And if you have, we have some
thoughts for you.

First of all, it's never too late. One of the professionals we met
tonight told me she has an 86 year old client who is just now
figuring out that she grew up in an alcoholic home. And what's
more, she plans on doing something about it.
It's also never your fault if a parent drinks.
And finally, you are never alone.
I'm Robin Young. Good night.

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