Relationship Dynamics Within the Addicted/Traumatized Family System

Situations that turn our sense of "normal" on its head, put us regularly on emotional overload, and cause us unusual fear and stress can be traumatizing. Living with addiction, let's face it, falls into this category. For starters, it's disturbing to our sense of an orderly and predictable life. Normal routines get thrown off, feelings get hurt, doors get slammed, hearts get broken and families get torn apart. Family members are all too often left staring, dazed and disillusioned, as they witness the lives of those they love, in spite of their best efforts to avert catastrophe, fall apart at the seams. Mistrust grows, "normal" feels out of reach and the fabric of faith in an orderly and predictable world becomes frayed and worn.

The Cost of "No Talk" Rules
Because alcoholic family systems are often steeped in defenses such as denial and minimization, they may actively resist talking about the fear and anxiety they are experiencing. Instead intense emotions explode into the container of the family and get acted out rather than talked out. Though acting out brings temporary relief, it does not lead to any real resolution or understanding, so nothing really gets fixed, mended or amended. Walls go up and battle lines get drawn as family members silently collude to keep their ever widening well of pain from surfacing, blaming it on anything but what's really going on. They avoid talking about their worries, thinking that if they don't get discussed, they aren't really all that bad or might just disappear on their own. Perhaps they worry that talking is a tacit "call to action" that they don't feel ready to take.

Because these families are not finding healthy ways of staying on emotional middle ground, they tend to achieve balance by swinging from one end of the pendulum to the other. Their emotions and behaviors seesaw back and forth from 0-10 and 10-0 with no speed bumps in between. They have trouble staying balanced and living within a range of 4,5 and 6.

The Trauma Extremes: High Intensity vs. Shutting Down
How does the dynamic of seesawing between emotional and behavioral extremes get set up?
Here is one explanation that grows out of trauma theory.

The intense emotions of fear and high states of stress, that so often accompany living with addiction, ignite our natural fight, flight trauma response. They flood the body with adrenaline so that we can prepare to flee for safety or stand and fight. When we can do neither, when fighting seems exhausting and pointless or when children or spouses feel that they are trapped and cannot really get away, which is often the case in pain filled families, we may simply shut down or freeze so that we don't have to feel our intense, negative emotions. Shutting is our body/mind system trying to preserve itself from overheating, in this case, with too much emotion. Watch any frightened cat, dog or salamander freeze (read: shut down) because it senses danger and you are seeing a natural trauma response.

When these swings from feeling flooded with feeling to shutting down, happen over and over again, they can become central to the way we process emotion.

Following are some ways in which this see sawing from one emotional extreme to the other, may manifest or creep into in the thinking, feeling and behavior of the family:

Impulsivity vs. Rigidity

Impulsive behavior can lead to chaos, wherein a pain filled inner world is surfacing in action. Painful feelings that are too hard to sit with, explode into the container of the family and get acted out. Blame, anger, rage, emotional, physical or sexual abuse, over or under spending and sexual acting out, are some ways of acting out emotional and psychological pain in dysfunctional ways that engender chaos.

Rigidity is an attempt to control or shut down that chaos both inwardly and outwardly. Adults in an addictive/traumatizing family system may tighten up on rules and routines in an attempt to ward off the feeling of falling apart. Or family members may contract in their personal styles becoming both controlled and controlling.

Recovery Option: Self regulation is a basic developmental accomplishment that allows the growing child and eventually the adult to regulate their thinking, feeling and behavior so that it is within an appropriate range for the situation they are engaged in.