page 4 - Out in the Mountains

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For the holidays

by Walter l. Zciclincr

As the holidays approach I have some
thoughts and feelings I'd like to share with
you.

Usually, when I think of this time of
year, I think of depression, loneliness, feeling
isolated. I think of what it's like to be
single in what can seem like a world of
couples, and I feel the loss of warm, safe
family feelings. Somehow all these things
are accentuated by being gay in a straight
society.

I also remember how, in my past, at this
time of year I would increase my use of
"recreational drugs." I drank more, smoked
more dope, cigarettes, anything to distract
me from my painful feelings and feel like a
"party."

At this point in riiy life my only drug is
chocolate, which I indulge in frequently. I
feel sad when I think of how I used to liitrt
myself with drugs, and I feel sad
remembering how lonely it was for me to be
doing that. I feel sad often when I'm around
people who seem to be doing the same thing.
I want to tell them "You deserve more love
and care than you're getting._You deserve to
treat yourself with more love and care for
who you are, no matter what awful things
have happened in your life, no matter how
hard it is with the approaching holidays."

As a gay/lesbian community, and as part
of the whole human community, we deserve
to feel with our hearts how wonderful we
are. These holidays were originally intended
for participation in and celebration of the
return of the sun and light into our lives.

I feel sad remembering how hard this
time has been for me, and knowing how
hard it can be for others. I feel sad
remembering how I compounded my own
hurts, and watching others do that to
themselves. I personally want to celebrate the
passing of the darkest, coldest time of the
year with a feeling of warmth, belonging
and community, knowing that even in the
dark times, love and connection are possible
and available. I invite you to do the same.
Shalom.

 

  
  

” Dom we now our gag apparel fa lq ..."

G/L Adult Children of Alcoholics

Recent estimates indicate that there are
between 28 and 34 million children of
alcoholics, over half of them adults. If we
apply our favorite statistic to that
population we come up with at least 3
million gay/lesbian adult children of
alcoholics. I attended a conference in
Boston sponsored by the Exodus Center and
of the I28 participants who spent the day
dealing with gay/lesbian issues, over half
attended the session for ACOAs.

First, a brief explanation of what it is
like to grow up in a home where alcohol
abuse is a central issue._ Most often, family
life is inconsistent, unpredictable, arbitrary,
and chaotic. Children growing up in an
alcoholic family learn not to talk about the
drinking that they see every day, they learn
not to trust the adult role models they have,
and they learn not to deal with their
feelings. What a parent says one minute is
changed the next. Parents who promise to
show up for school events never show, or
worse, they show up drunk. \Ve learn to
deny feelings because to deal with them
causes more pain than we can bear. We
often feel inadequate, tense, and upset, with
feelings of confusion, guilt, anger, shame, or
fear. While these are normal responses to an
abnormal family situation, because of the
cardinal rule of not talking about the issue,
no one tells us that this is crazy behavior so
we accept the abnormal as normal. Denial
is part of the disease of alcoholism and
denial is a big part of the life of the child
of an alcoholic. The world says that parents
are good, caring, consistent, loving, stable,
reliable and a source of support and
protection but the person raised in an
alcoholic home doesn't see that image and
thus may deny the problem and create a
family in his/her own mind that fits fantasy
and not reality.

Now, go back and reread the above
paragraph ad see if there are some
uncomfortable similarities to what we all go
through at various stages of dealing with
being gay/lesbian. The guilt, the confusion.
the inconsistency of feeling one attraction

    

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but being told by the worldtaround us that
another attraction is the way things "should"
be. How many of us talked to anyone else
in our family about our gay/lesbian fcclings
during those initial stagesof development?
Whom could we trust - we had no positive
role models to help us deal with our
gay/lesbian identity but we were victims of
the media portrayal of negative role models.
How many of us expended great amounts of
energy denying our gay/lesbian feelings
before we finally accepted ourselves?

A double bind if we are gay/lesbian and
an adult child of an alcoholic. The
behavior patterns developed to survive as an
ACOA carry over into our adult lives and
many of the strategies we learned in
surviving in a homophobic society are the
same. Combining the two only serves to
strengthen coping skills which protected us
early on but which can be destructive and
self-defeating as adults. If we don't learn
to break the cycle of "don't talk, don‘t trust.
don‘t feel," we can destroy relationships.
Between 50 - 70 % of children of alcoholics
may become alcoholics themselves or get
involved with alcoholic relationships and
many experts believe ACOAs are about twice
as likely to attempt suicide.

Solutions are never easy. Find a
support system. Talk to friends, read some
of the excellent literature on the subject of
ACOAS. Take positive steps to deal with
your emotions around this issue. Sometiiiics
the hardest step is just saying the words, I
am the child of an alcoholic. Understand
that their alcoholism is not your fault. If
you had been a better child, a better
student, if you were non-gay or non—lesbian
it wouldn‘t have made any difference. They
own their alcoholism — you don't.

Developing a positive gay/lesbian
identity is often times hard enough, but to
develop that while surviving an alcoholic
home can be incredibly difficult - not
impossible, but difficult. Dealing with the
alcoholic or the alcoholic family will be the
subject of another article. For now, just
understand that you can survive and can
break the cycle but first you need to
recognize the issue and accept the fact that
you cannot not be affected if you were
raised in an alcoholic family....

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