A searchable, downloadable PDF of the original article appears below. Used with permission from the magazine of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois.

Sally hid under her bed, fearing the footsteps in the hallway would stop outside her door. Jim dreaded the holidays and the turmoil they brought to his home. Bill learned to keep friends away from the house after school so his mother’s secret would not be discovered.

No Haven at Home

What do these people have in common? Their parents drank too much, or fought too much, or violated sexual taboos. As a result, their children were emotionally devastated. The kids grew up believing that everything was their fault. Not knowing how to respond to the emotional upheaval in their rollercoaster home lives, they did the only thing they could do. They quit feeling, quit talking, and quit trusting.

These are the adult children of dysfunctional homes. They are known as ACOAs — an acronym for adult children of alcoholics, though the term is applied to a wide variety of dysfunctional home settings.

Charles “Chick” Sell, professor of Christian education at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, is author of a new book, Unfinished Business: Helping Adult Children Resolve Their Past. He is also the founder of a support group on the Trinity campus for students and other adults from the community who had traumatic childhoods like his own. Chick Sell’s father was an alcoholic for most of Chick’s growing-up years, though later he did seek help and treatment.

Lasting Damage

Chick discovered that the scars of those early emotional traumas did not disappear with adulthood. Paul and Dave, two students at Trinity, can also testify to that fact. Though both are intelligent, well-mannered, and spiritually committed adults, they carry with them the pain of growing up in homes where the rules were all wrong.

Their emotional responses to trauma in the home followed a pattern similar to that of most ACOAs when confronted with a domestic situation out of control. They decided to take personal responsibilities for maintaining order and equilibrium in the home. Dave took it upon himself to care for everyone’s needs, even trying to play the role of his missing father.

“I tried to become a dad to my little brother,” he remembers. “I also became a comedian, to keep the family laughing.”

Making Maladjustments

It is not uncommon for children to assume different roles in the family to compensate for severe problems, according to Chick. “It is not adjustments that are made, but maladjustments,” he observes. Some children choose to become the hero of the family in a desperate attempt to salvage the pride and dignity the parent has lost through their behaviour. Others deal with the family problem by becoming the family problem themselves, engaging in irresponsible acts.

Regardless of the reaction, the stress of living in an unstable, unpredictable, and chronically painful home situation teaches children three rules: Don’t talk about the problems, don’t allow yourself to feel hurt, and don’t trust anyone again. Unfortunately these rules are carried into adulthood, and they create tremendous interpersonal struggles for adult children. The primary results of their upbringing seems to be an inability to be intimate with anyone.

Paul puts it this way: “A big issue in my family was conditional acceptance based on performance, based on role playing, as opposed to having the freedom to be myself and express my feelings. That freedom didn’t exist for me as a child.”

Unconditional Acceptance

It was at this point the Trinity support group began to help him recover from the sorrows of his childhood. “To be able to walk into a group of people and be accepted without conditions, to have the freedom to express my emotions — the anger, the hurt, the fears, all those things associated with growing up in an alcoholic family — was very healing for me. Acceptance and understanding by others of the struggles I face is very important.”

Both Dave and Paul admit maintaining close friendships has been a difficult task. Trusting people is a fearful risk for ACOA. They tend to carry their problems alone, a pattern they learned early when there was no one with whom to discuss the ugly family secret. “I think one of the difficulties we have is building significant relationships with other people,” Dave says. “Just this last week we were discussing this issue in our group. One of the people in the group asked, ‘Is this a place where I could find the type of friendships I have been missing?’ ” Indeed, learning to trust is one of the goals of Chick Sell’s group.

Breaking the Code of Silence

ACOAs tend to grow up with low self-esteem. “My feelings and emotions and thoughts were never accepted as being of value, so I became wary of communicating anything intimate about myself for fear of rejection,” Paul remembers. Rather than sharing honestly, ACOAs learn to tell others what they think they want to hear. Pleasing others becomes their first priority. “You become so externally oriented you lose a sense of your own integrity,” Sell adds.

The code of silence is a common trait of dysfunctional homes. The unspoken rule is that no one should mention the awful behaviour of one or both parents. Chick Sell recalls never discussing his father’s drinking problem with anyone in his family.

Only when his dad was seriously ill in a hospital years later did the topic of his father’s alcoholism come up. Though he expressed remorse over his drinking, it proved to be an awkward moment. Says Chick, “I was unable to say anything more than, ‘That’s all right.’ ”

Just last year Chick learned from a brother that they both reacted as children to their father’s drinking bouts in a similar fashion. When their mother retreated to the attic, often to cry, Chick would follow her up the steps to offer comfort. His brother had done exactly the same thing. Now, after many years, the code of silence was breaking down.

Ultimately the question must be asked; How can ACOAs get better? How can they reconstruct their lives to be normal, healthy, and emotionally and spiritually satisfying?

No Quick and Easy Answers

That is the aim of Chick Sell’s Trinity support group ministry. He is committed to helping men and women find wholeness in Jesus Christ. Unlike therapy groups in our society that vaguely refer members to a “higher power,” or some other fuzzy spiritual concept, Sell believes that Jesus Christ is the final solution to the pain and heartache of their pasts.

Healing and recovery from the damaging impact of growing up in a dysfunctional family takes time. There are no quick and easy shortcuts. The patterns of emotional response learned as a child are still playing, like a tape recording that repeats the same message over and over.

As children, ACOAs needed a defense system to block the pain of their home lives. Turning off feelings and refusing to trust people helped them survive the nightmarish struggles of their childhoods. But now those patterns are no longer appropriate. They hinder the joy, freedom, and intimacy adults should enjoy with their spouses, children, and friends.

Chick believes the truth of Christ’s love for us is a tremendous aid in the healing process. In the mind of a child from a dysfunctional home, there is often disparity between how God sees them and how their parents taught them to see themselves. The truth of Scripture challenges the wrong messages ACOAs sadly came to believe. ACOAs feel they must earn the acceptance and forgiveness of God, but the Bible teaches it comes by grace through faith.

Chick stresses the need to forgive the offending parents. ACOAs can only be free of their pasts as they release their bitterness and anger. The power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ offers this hope.

The Trinity support group is seeing results. For Paul, healing has come through reversing the process that was set in motion early in life. “As a boy I had learned not to trust my father. The next step was not talk to him. Since I could not trust him with my feelings, soon I began not to feel them. They just stayed repressed.”

Paul remained in that difficult emotional bind for several years until he came to Trinity. “I began to go back and look at what happened. I began to get in touch with my feelings of anger and hurt. I began to talk about them in my support group. I’m still in the process of learning to trust others with things about myself, but that’s coming along as well.”

Dave has also experienced the unconditional love of the heavenly Father though other believers. “The biblical truth that we are okay and acceptable as individuals created by God was mediated to me through the group experience of understanding and acceptance. I really feel it for the first time in my life.”

Dave sees several benefits in his own life as a result of this ministry. “You have to build trust in the group. You are sharing things which require a high confidence level. It gives you the freedom to talk and to feel and to trust. You are growing in all the areas you had previously shut down.”

Learning to Trust Again

Even for ACOAs who profess Christ as Saviour, a sense of intimacy with God is often missing until they receive help. According to Paul, “I became a Christian in 1970, but I did

not have a good, consistent relationship with God for many of those years. Looking back, I think I can say it had its roots in not being able to trust in general. That became evident in my relationship with God.” That too is changing. “During my last three years here I have had a better relationship with God than in all the rest of my entire life. I feel more able to trust him.”

Chick Sell feels called to develop a ministry to those who carry great hurt from their pasts. He has taken seriously the injunction of Scripture to “bind up the wounded and heal the brokenhearted.” Through God’s Word, intercessory prayer, and the caring fellowship of believers, many ACOAs are finding new spiritual and emotional health. As members of the group resolve their painful pasts, their unfinished business can be finished at last.