Transcript of our discussion: Raising Teens Live: When does a parent’s drinking start to affect children?
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Daisy
Welcome to our Facebook Live Q&A. This is the third in a series of live discussions for Back on Track about parenting and alcohol. And today, I’m delighted to be joined by mother and daughter, Suzanne and Lola. Thank you so much for coming. And Sue, who is a Family Worker from Back on Track.
So today we’re discussing: when does our drinking start to impact on a child? And I totally would like to come straight to Suzanne and Lola. I mean, thank you so much for coming along today and to share your personal experiences. It’s so important. Can I start with you, Suzanne, and just ask you, what’s your story?
Suzanne
Hi Daisy, thanks for having me on. I am in recovery since 2006 from alcoholism, so Lola would have been five or six and her younger brother was four when I went into recovery. And so they don’t really have any memory of me drinking. It was always very compartmentalised as well because I didn’t tend to drink when they were around, but it did make me emotionally absent because I was always kind of going, oh, will they just – could ever hurry up and go to sleep? Or will their dad ever turn up so I can go out? Or not even go out, just open the bottle, you know. But it was very, kind of, high functioning. However, it probably wouldn’t have, had I continued, because it’s a progressive condition, as we know, and I’ve been sober all this time until lockdown, where I relapsed after 15 years last summer, but as soon as the recovery meetings reopened face-to-face, I got back on track again.
I basically couldn’t make friends with Zoom, and so, you know, and I stupidly thought that I would be OK and I wasn’t. And the thing that made me really hurry up and go back and regain my recovery was that Lola came home one evening as an adult, as she is now – came home, and found me asleep on the sofa. But I was passed out. And that she said the next morning, ‘Oh, you were asleep on the sofa, you never do that’. And I was so shocked and horrified, it was a kind of wake-up call. I went straight into a meeting that day and I’ve been going religiously ever since. And so that’s where we’re at. In terms of my impact on Lola, I think was probably fairly minimal. But I don’t know – over to her.
Lola
It was pretty minimal, to be honest, like you’re… It’s always been something that I’ve grown up with, my mum going to AA meetings, being in recovery. it’s quite normal for me. So when I was younger and I saw adults excessively drinking or being drunk, I found that more abnormal then, like, I had no experience of that, essentially. But yeah, growing up, your alcoholism didn’t affect me in the sense that I saw you drunk or anything like that. It just means I have a really good understanding of what alcoholism is and that it is kind of a disease. And there’s not a choice in it. And I think that’s a great thing for me because I have lots of understanding around it. Because my mum’s always been really open and honest about it. It’s not some secret thing, which I think is so important because you wouldn’t – you wouldn’t talk about cancer in the same way. It’s an open conversation in our house and it always has been. So I think that’s had a really great impact on me. It’s not some hidden thing. I think the only thing was that I was really surprised that you relapsed in the summer.
Suzanne
So was I!
Lola
I was it was just, I had no idea. The night that my mum – I found her on the sofa, I just thought it was an odd evening, mum, you never fall asleep on the sofa. I came home quite late. All the lights were on and I just thought, oh, that’s a little bit weird, but it happens, I guess. But I had no idea that you had relapsed. And it kind of made me realise that you could easily secretly drink without me realising. It was an easy thing for you to do. So maybe it’s made me a bit more mindful. Like I don’t keep any alcohol in the house really anymore because I don’t think that – I don’t want to have the temptation. there for my mum. Like, you wouldn’t leave a steak under a dog’s nose and not expect it to eat it, you know, so, I try to do the same thing because obviously I’m of an age where I drink, so I just don’t want to rub it in your face, essentially, and just kind of keep it out the house, because that’s what it’s always been like here.
Daisy
I love your honestly, guy. It’s so refreshing. And your positive analogies are great It’s something to grab hold of actually and think about, which is really, really, and not – having no shame there, which we were talking about in previous episodes, to not have that because otherwise, how can you move forward with anything? I love to bring you in, Sue, obviously now, to talk about what you do with young people and what your observations are.
Sue
So Back on Track, which is a Brighton & Hove agency. It’s a pity it’s not UK-wide, but it’s not,
and I have to say that here in case somebody up in Northumberland [needs help].. So I work with Year 6, so that is transition year from Primary to Secondary, which is a big transition for lots of kids, regardless, up to 18. And my referrals come in from the school, from social services, or self-referral or the other parent who might be not drinking, if the family have parted ways, so our referrals come through…
So, for instance, a school might come through to me because the young person has gone to a teacher that they feel comfortable [with], usually pastoral care, they’ve said something or school has noticed them being upset or their work has gone off kilter, their academic work, or they’re missing days, or they end up crying in the medical room or something like that. And I will come to the school or meet them outside or pick them up from home or go for McDonalds or any of those kinds – depending on the age of the young person – to build up that trust and also relationship between me and the young person because they don’t want to betray their parents at that point. They feel really upset talking about the parent that’s drinking because they love their parents and they feel it’s a sort of sense of betrayal, talking to me about something that their mum or dad is doing. So it’s really about, in the beginning, just building up that relationship with the young person so they start to know that there’s no judgements, no judgements, you know, and a lot of that will be, yeah, now I really understand why mum’s doing that. And, you know, so I – and I do, because we all deal with stress in different ways, and the thing with alcohol is, it’s accessible. You go to the newsagent, you can get alcohol. You go to the supermarket, you can get alcohol. And it’s legal. And what I found is that during lockdown, since lockdown, when children weren’t at school or young people weren’t at school for great swathes of time – I would say about four months of the year, wasn’t it, they were out, or five – they began to notice things at home that maybe they hadn’t noticed before because they were at school or it might have been because the parents or the parent is under a great deal of pressure, particularly with lockdown. They might have been furloughed. They might have lost their job. One of those parents or carers, they might be worried about the mortgage, you know. So all of these things began to be really noticeable to young people that something was different within the household, because it might have been hidden before, you know. And that’s – going back to what you were saying before we actually started the Live, – have you – so I’m presuming you’ve seen an increase in referrals since lockdown? Yes! Because like you were saying, Suzanne, you probably wouldn’t have had that situation had we not had… because Covid has just really affected so many people in different ways and at different times as well, which is quite astounding.
Daisy
And what signs… I know you’re saying you get referred, the children come to get referred to you, Sue. Say you’re a family member and you’re worried about somebody, what are the signs we’re looking for? And can a friend refer to Back on Track?
Sue
Anybody can. But I do need the parent’s consent and part of that is because the other part of Back on Track, not that I work with the parent, but then I can support the parent in working to the other part of Back on Track, which is the Oasis Project, who will work with the adult parent to support them in trying to find a way through this. Now what happens a lot of the time with my current clients is that, you know, we’re different kind families, we’re blended families now. So it might be the ex-husband or the or the ex-wife has referred the child because they can see that their ex partner has got a problem with alcohol, so a lot of my young people don’t want their mum to know, or their father – whoever is the drinking parent, they don’t want them to know. But that’s OK. I can still work with them because the other parent is, you know, knows that she or he is seeing me. It’s kind of, nothing changes unless that drinking parent is aware of the effect of the drinking on the child. That could be anything. That could be – I’ll give you an instance – locking herself away in a room. I’ve got a 13 year-old at the moment. She’s not speaking. I mean, she’s talking, but she’s just isolating within herself. And so for the other partner, they could begin to see that something wasn’t right.
Daisy
Can I just go back to you, Suzanne because that goes back to the parent thing of, how did you get to a point where you knew you needed to get help or when you needed support? I mean, I know we’re going back quite a long time ago now. I’m talking about when Lola was younger, but what was that catalyst for you to be able to go and get the support that you needed and how did you go about that?
Suzanne
Well, the thing is that there’s a huge amount of misconception around alcoholism. So people think that you need to be on a park bench or that you need to have burnt your house down or you kids need to have been taken to social services, and the thing is, that does happen, people do have their children taken off them. I know many, many parents in recovery who’ve lost their children but got them back. But in my case, it was just a question, it was kind of the cliche of, I got sick and tired of being sick and tired And so I woke up one morning, nothing particularly awful had happened, but it was just – I woke up another morning and was unable to get my children to nursery or kindergarten or whatever, and I had to ask somebody else to do it, my sister, and. I just thought, I can’t keep doing this, this is awful, this is just awful and, you know, it was isolation, it was like I had drank myself into a corner.
I still had a roof over my head. I was still working. I’m self-employed. So, you know, I couldn’t fire myself. and, having lost millions of jobs in the past because I was so unreliable, I drank for 24 years, and when I was 38, I found, that that day, I just – it was a day in January, I just woke up, thought, I can’t do this anymore. This is horrendous. And I kind of got desperate enough to reach out for help. So I went through the phone book and I found a therapist. I wasn’t ready for AA – I mean I’d heard of it, or I’d heard of 12-step recovery – I went to a therapist and that day she gave me an emergency appointment. And luckily I picked the right one and she took one look at me and she said, you need to get yourself to a meeting. So I went to a meeting the next day, which was in the same church. hall where Lola did ballet. So that was horrific! So there were little girls floating next door doing ballet and I was like a shaking in the – but people were very nice and it was very friendly. And I was desperate enough that I would have done anything that was suggested. And I never looked back until lockdown where the relapse rate was 33 percent. So people are using – drugs and – the drug addicts had a much worse time because the alcoholics at least could go to the shop when they were relapsing, but the poor drug addicts were criminalised and they had a really bad time. So, you know, in terms of – in terms of suffering, my lockdown relapse was pretty mild compared with the hell that, you know, the children that Sue would see people locked up with their using or drinking parents. It’s just awful. The whole, you know, it had a really awful affect. So anyway, I found recovery and got on with it really well. And I’m back in it again now. And that’s – there’s nothing – you can’t do it on your own. I have tried all the other things before, aromatherapy, psychotherapy, all the therapies, and it didn’t work. I need to be within a group of other alcoholics or other addicts because you can go to a therapist until your head falls off. And unless they’re an alcoholic themselves, they’re not going to completely – they can know it from a book. But to be around other drinkers then or the problem drinkers, the identification is the relief, you know?
Daisy
Lola, going back to when you were younger, did you know at all what was going on when your mum was drinking for all those years? Or you were just too young to…?
Lola
I think because it wasn’t like I would come into the house and mum was passed out on the floor, it wasn’t that kind of drinking. It was more, kind of, once we’d gone to bed or if we were at someone else’s, or something like that/ it was more like – it was different, wasn’t it? I don’t really remember any time that I can remember you drinking, I can’t imagine you with a drink in your hand. I don’t even remember you smoking. So she stopped smoking when she stopped drinking. So those kind of things is not what I associate with that part of my childhood at all. I just don’t remember it. I was lucky enough that it didn’t have an impact on me.
Suzanne
I think I was emotionally absent rather than – the caregiving was fine, but I was emotionally absent, for sure, for their earlier years.
Lola
Well we had nannies, then we had other the people look after us. I remember that and remember you would work a lot. But I guess that’s the only aspect of mum’s drinking that would have impacted me, I guess, that you maybe were working more or we had nannies looking after us.
Daisy
I think that’s the crucial point as well that you’re making is it’s so nuanced, it’s so different for different people’s set-ups, as you said, Suzanne, the assumption that someone’s lying on a park bench passed out when actually someone can be an alcoholic for years and no one will know about it. You know, so it’s… A functioning alcoholic. we were talking before on one of the other Facebook Lives about labels because I think that it gets really confusing. I’ve talked to other parents and they’re talking about units, getting confused about how many units you can have, and at what point are you a functioning alcoholic? And we got to a point where we’re like, these things aren’t really very helpful at all. It’s got to be, as you said, Suzanne, it’s got to come from the person to be able to say, I’m going to make a difference. I’ve got to change this up and make something positive happen. And I think that, , as you know, because your expertise, Sue, is about the child, it’s knowing what the signs are for the for the child, I guess, because the child must open up to someone of trust to be referred.
Sue
They’ll say… and they notice – because most – obviously you get people coming through our service whose children are under social services because that is the kind of drinking that is seen and out there. I mean, I’ve got one young person whose mother had a horrendous car accident when she was drinking with the children in the car. So what happens there is that obviously social services get involved. But a lot of my kids that I see, it’s all very functional… It’s not functional – it was seen as functional drinking on behalf of the parent. They still went to work. They still… so I go through with the young person: What is it that… How was it in the house? What did you first notice about mum or dad? And they would say things like, she would forget to cook, she’d be asleep or he would get really loud and laughing really loud and put the music on in the house really loud.
I’ve got a young person who went round to see her dad because they were a blended family. They’d split. And I asked her, and she said I knew something wasn’t right because as I was walking up to the front door, the music was blaring out really loud. OK, so that wasn’t usual. And when I went in, dad didn’t seem… It made me feel uncomfortable because he wasn’t like he usually was. You know, that kind of thing.
So when children get to a certain age, they’re beginning to notice behaviours. So it might not be, you know, like Shameless. A parent might not be on the couch surrounded by beer bottles. It most probably isn’t like that. It’s just little nuances of changes of behaviour that as the child is getting older, they are beginning to notice things are slightly different. Like they might spend a sleepover at a friend’s house and then come home and think, hmm, my mum doesn’t do that, yeah? Or they’re sometimes due to be picked up from school, forget to pick up from school. I mean they’re usually coming home on their own at that age. But little nuances of behaviours begin to tell that young person, I mean, obviously, if they’re 17 or 16, it’s different, but when they’re young, 10, 11, 12, it’s something in their gut they don’t feel comfortable with and it’s not right and it’s not, what’s wrong with mummy, what’s wrong with daddy? Children are so intuitive, they really are. And they might be in school, and they might go to the medical room lots of times and then the pastoral care teacher or whoever it is safeguarding might come and see them and ask them what’s wrong, because she might think it’s bullying. She might think, yeah. And then they will begin to say something. Or, I have got some young people who actually look things up and phone to ask what they… some. But it usually comes through the school, comes through the other parent, comes through – unfortunately if social services is involved, like the example I gave you – come through them.
Daisy
Can I ask you, Suzanne, what advice would you give to other parents who may be struggling?
Suzanne
I mean, it’s a very, very subtle and yet powerful condition. So it will reassure you a million times in your own voice that it’s OK, there’s nothing to worry about. You deserve it, you’ve worked hard or you’re tired or you’re happy or you’re sad or it’s Tuesday or whatever. Everyone else is doing it. It’s normal, there’s nothing wrong with yours, it’s completely by the book.
And then you may go through the cycle of, oh my God, I’ve done it again. I feel awful. I hate myself. And then you go, Oh, but then that passes and it’s the endless hamster wheel. And if you feel that you’re on that hamster wheel, there’s a good chance – if you have to think about your drinking and think about trying to control your drinking, then there’s a problem. Because people who drink normally don’t think like that. They don’t have obsessive thoughts about it. They don’t feel that they’re on a hamster wheel. They don’t have a constant cycle of regret and obsession. And so if you are identifying with what I’ve just described, I would say reach out to somebody. I mean, a lot of people don’t go towards 12-step recovery because they have preconceptions about it being a religious thing or about being a cult or about being whatever. None of those things are true.
However you find your recovery, whatever way suits you. But do not try to do it by yourself because it is the most soul-destroying thing. Some people can pack it in, and it’s called white knuckling, but then you get clean, but you need to be serene as well. There’s no point in being clean if you’re just like a caged rat all the time. That’s no fun for anybody. I tried that before, before I went into recovery. I tried giving up by myself. I lasted about a year and people were begging me to drink again because I was awful because at least when I had to drink I’d relax. So the recovery thing shows you how to… shows you that the drinking is just a symptom of other stuff that’s going on in your life, in your head or your patterns or your thinking. And then the drinking is just a kind of a thing to ameliorate all of that.
So I would say the second you hear that voice of truth inside yourself, your inner voice going, you’ve got a bit of a problem here, haven’t you? You’re doing this against your will. This isn’t fun anymore. Listen to that voice with both your ears and get yourself connected with people who know what they’re talking about. And I mean other alcoholics. I don’t necessarily mean go find a psychiatrist. I mean, you can go and sit with somebody who’s – just go to a meeting or a group or something, you know?
Daisy
That’s amazing advice Suzanne, I can’t thank you enough. I’m sure there are loads of parents out there that… I love your analogies. I love the hamster wheel, it makes sense and it’s a positive analogy. So it’s great.
And I just wanted to ask you, Lola, what advice would you give to a child or a teenager that might be worried about their parents?
Lola
I think it’s difficult because obviously each situation is different. If I’m ever worried about my mum, I go and talk to her. I say, what’s wrong? What’s going on? And I think that discussion is really important. And I think for people who aren’t alcoholics, who maybe don’t understand what it’s like, to just have understanding and just be there and be loving because they are going through something that I won’t understand and you won’t understand unless you’re an alcoholic yourself. It’s just about being understanding and working with them and trying to let them know that you are there essentially, I think if any child is worried about their parent, maybe it is time to have a conversation about it, to tell your parent that you’re worried about them, and that’s a really grown up thing to do, especially if you’re a young child, it’s a really grown-up thing to do and it can be really scary.
So I think it’s just about taking it slow and then also talking to other adults as well if the child is worried about that parent because they are like your provider of everything. And if you see your parent in that new role of being vulnerable and being at risk, is a is a scary thing to grow up into. So I think that if you talk to your parent and also talk to other adults around you about how you’re feeling, I think that’s probably the best way around it.
Daisy
That’s amazing advice, thank you. And I don’t know, Sue, if you want to say anything else, because I was going to wrap up with all of the amazing helplines.
Sue
Well, I just want to say that the young people I work with, it’s a privilege an absolute privilege to work with them and it’s so fulfilling. And also to see the growth, you know, the growth that they have as they’re learning. The emotional growth that they have as they’re learning. And that they’re not alone.
Daisy
That’s amazing. And that’s such a positive thing to know that they can go to you and go to get involved with Back on Track and get that help. I know that NACOA has a confidential helpline and message board and online chat. So there’s confidential ways to get help.
Sue
Yeah, absolutely. And also the therapy, as you say, from Oasis Project can help people. And that’s just brilliant.
Suzanne
May I also say, sorry, there are other support groups, around 12-step recovery that look after teens, there’s an organisation called Al-Ateen and there’s also Al-Anon. So they’re for people who are connected with alcoholics but aren’t alcoholics themselves or maybe that are – you can get free instant support within the 12-step umbrella, if kids need it. But, you know, probably better to go to Sue first.
Daisy
I mean, I just also have to say that you’ve all got amazing hair, so it’s been great to talk to you. And I know we’re going to clip that up and try and put it everywhere, because your advice is so important, especially right now. So thank you so much to Lola, Suzanne and Sue. We’ve got a brilliant conversation.
Next week we’re going to be discussing conflict and language around discussing alcohol. And if anybody’s got any suggestions that they want us to cover, please get in touch. And all of our help and advice will be on our pages, on our website makegoodtrouble.co.uk. So, thank you so much.