After the Tears Quotes

“One of the survival mechanisms of children raised in alcoholic families is an awareness of parental needs and feelings and of changes in parental moods and behavior. The Adult Child often makes a full-time occupation of mind reading with partners, friends, employers, and therapists. As a consequence, they earn a Ph.D. at the age of six in observing the behavior of others and assessing parental needs—but are in elementary school at age thirty, trying to learn to assess, label, or communicate their own needs and feelings.”
― Jane Middelton-Moz, After the Tears: Helping Adult Children of Alcoholics Heal Their Childhood Trauma

“Fatalistic Outlook The powerlessness and helplessness of experiencing cumulative trauma is often experienced as a belief that bad times or even death are right around the corner, that one is living on borrowed time, or that feelings of security and success cannot last.”
― Jane Middelton-Moz, After the Tears: Helping Adult Children of Alcoholics Heal Their Childhood Trauma

“ACOAs often develop an external locus of control, believing that something outside of themselves will decrease the emptiness or the pain they feel inside. Thoughts such as “If the house is clean enough, I will be good enough” or “If I win the big one at the casino, I will be somebody important” are attempts to control blocked pain and fear.”
― Jane Middelton-Moz, After the Tears: Helping Adult Children of Alcoholics Heal Their Childhood Trauma

“These children learn to adapt to life rather than learning how to live their lives.”
― Jane Middelton-Moz, After the Tears: Helping Adult Children of Alcoholics Heal Their Childhood Trauma

“Most Adult Children report that they have always felt that they were a “mess” deep down and have protected themselves and others from the embarrassment of seeing or feeling that “mess.” They have felt alone in a crowd or isolated all their lives. They have taken care of others compulsively, but never let others care for them. They have sought out relationships where needs weren’t possible, or intimacy could never be achieved. Children of Alcoholics tend to have caseloads, not friends, and feel that they have to work harder than anyone else—to be more perfect, tougher, or more independent and in control. They feel they must hide the craziness they feel inside, and they must earn the right to have relationships or merely live in the world like everyone else.”
― Jane Middelton-Moz, After the Tears: Helping Adult Children of Alcoholics Heal Their Childhood Trauma

“Children from healthy families may work out childhood traumas in the playroom, while children of addicted families find themselves working out the painful traumas of the past in real life.”
― Jane Middelton-Moz, After the Tears: Helping Adult Children of Alcoholics Heal Their Childhood Trauma

“They learn to relate by caretaking, pleasing, isolating, or acting out rather than fully relating with their true and authentic selves. As a result, they feel accepted for their roles, not for who they were. Adult Children often have no idea how to have an equal partner relationship with healthy communication and normal conflict. As one ACOA said, “I feel that everyone else got a book at birth on how to live life, have relationships, and parent—and I never got my copy.”
― Jane Middelton-Moz, After the Tears: Helping Adult Children of Alcoholics Heal Their Childhood Trauma

“Children of Alcoholics stop expecting or wanting help because the continual feeling of disappointment is too painful.”
― Jane Middelton-Moz, After the Tears: Helping Adult Children of Alcoholics Heal Their Childhood Trauma

“Third, and this is the goal toward which we can all move, there are those who are willing to re-experience the pain of the original trauma and work it through, finding their voice and gaining emotional freedom from the constraints of the past. Such working through (what we call grief work), is the essence of the healing process. This involves talking about how it was and how one wishes it could have been, and is accomplished with at least one caring person with whom one has worked hard to establish trust.”
― Jane Middelton-Moz, After the Tears: Helping Adult Children of Alcoholics Heal Their Childhood Trauma

“first, the repeated experience of the trauma itself; second, the effects of the trauma on personality development; and third, the need to re-experience the feelings and/or memories of the original trauma in order to integrate it and work it through.”
― Jane Middelton-Moz, After the Tears: Helping Adult Children of Alcoholics Heal Their Childhood Trauma

“Under those conditions, chronic stress becomes so common that it seems normal. Individuals use denial and repression to protect the ego from disintegration. Living with both the constant unpredictability of the alcoholic parent and the detachment and/or anxiety of the codependent parent is difficult enough for an adult who has a fully developed defense system. For a child, surviving the regular assault of trauma requires massive amounts of energy. This puts the normal developmental process on hold; there is no energy left to invest in development. While other children are learning to play, to trust, to self-soothe, and to make decisions, children in addicted families are learning to survive. The end result is a child who often feels thirty years old at five and five years old at thirty.”
― Jane Middelton-Moz, After the Tears: Helping Adult Children of Alcoholics Heal Their Childhood Trauma

“Providing a cognitive life raft is a way of transporting that small child, so locked in the prison of the ideal self, to the place were feelings of fear, anger, joy, sadness and normal anxiety are understood—first intellectually and then, with work, emotionally— not as dangerous, bad, or crazy, but rather as part of what it means to be human.”
― Jane Middleton-Moz, After the Tears

“Wounded, narcissistic parents may need a grateful child. A father who was unpopular or clumsy as a child may need an athlete. A parent afraid of his or her own anger may need an acting-out child. The real child, the child who was meant to grow and develop into a self in his or her own right, is often never seen. Even if Joan’s interest had been in science or math, her mother needed a dancer—and children will make every effort to be what is expected of them.”
― Jane Middelton-Moz, After the Tears: Helping Adult Children of Alcoholics Heal Their Childhood Trauma

“The survival adaptation developed by these children is similar to that of any trauma survivor, with attendant psychic numbing, restricted affect, hypervigilance, and recurrent intrusive dreams and flashbacks of earlier traumatic experiences. The home environments of these children are what psychiatrist Frederic Flach calls “depressogenic” (156). These homes lack ego support, prevent the development of healthy self-reliance, create hostility and block its release, promote feelings of guilt, and cause the child to feel lonely and rejected. Such an environment engenders a chronic, pervasive sense of loss that tends to be outside of the child’s conscious awareness. It predisposes children raised in these homes to problems with depression in adolescence and adulthood.”
― Jane Middelton-Moz, After the Tears: Helping Adult Children of Alcoholics Heal Their Childhood Trauma

“Children internalize the words, actions, feelings, and behaviors of their adult caregivers. A child who is repeatedly greeted in the morning by the loving and welcoming arms of a parent will internalize self-love. A child who is hurting and sees love, compassion, and empathy mirrored in his or her parents’ eyes will develop compassion and empathy for self and others. It is from early adult caregivers that children develop a set of beliefs about themselves and others, and learn to trust or not to trust in themselves and in others.”
― Jane Middelton-Moz, After the Tears: Helping Adult Children of Alcoholics Heal Their Childhood Trauma

“Overwhelming evidence in resiliency research indicates that a child’s ability to endure and rise above painful childhood adversity depends on the presence of at least one caring, nurturing adult”
― Jane Middelton-Moz, After the Tears: Helping Adult Children of Alcoholics Heal Their Childhood Trauma

“There is often the fear of “making waves” or “not being good” and enormous guilt for doing or saying the wrong thing or making a mistake. Family members rarely see or learn normal conflict resolution, and any sign of conflict triggers fear of either violence or abandonment.”
― Jane Middelton-Moz, After the Tears: Helping Adult Children of Alcoholics Heal Their Childhood Trauma

“When the time capsule from the past bursts open, flooding her with feelings, she will confuse her traumatic memory from the past with her experience in the present. Painful experiences from the past, if not understood, validated, processed, and integrated with a compassionate and trusted other, will continue to intrude on our present and form our beliefs and expectations of others and life experiences.”
― Jane Middelton-Moz, After the Tears: Helping Adult Children of Alcoholics Heal Their Childhood Trauma

“Unfortunately, many children of alcoholics have not been given a secure base from which to venture into the adult world. The focus on addiction in their families, rather than on the developing needs of children, often causes children of alcoholics to feel shameful and anxious rather than confident and secure. These children learn to adapt to life rather than learning how to live their lives. Without”
― Jane Middelton-Moz, After the Tears: Helping Adult Children of Alcoholics Heal Their Childhood Trauma