The Laundry List and My North Star

A look at the creation of my social self

I lived with my alcoholic father until I was ten. After that, I only saw him a few times until I was in my mid-20s. In the mid-aughts, I spent a fair amount of time with him. However, I haven’t seen him in 16 years, and I haven’t spoken to him since 2010. The reasons why are a story for another time.

Throughout my 20s and 30s, I thought most of my problems came from living with my mother. Her chronic illness, coupled with severe depression and a host of other issues, certainly caused me to develop some unhealthy ways of thinking. I thought I was over my father—the chaos he created, his violent outbursts, his abandonment, and so on. It seemed to be in the past and not something that determined who I was as an adult. After all, he left when I was ten, and my family’s state of crisis didn’t end when he did. Birth to age ten is such a small window of time; it can’t possibly matter all that much in the long-term grand scheme of things, right?

Wrong.

Hanging out with my dad, February 26, 1977.

I don’t remember the first time I heard about The Laundry List, which is the 14 traits of an adult child of an alcoholic (ACOA), but it sure was eye-opening when I did. You can read them below.

1. We became isolated and afraid of people and authority figures.

2. We became approval seekers and lost our identity in the process.

3. We are frightened by angry people and any personal criticism.

4. We either become alcoholics, marry them, or both, or find another compulsive personality, such as a workaholic, to fulfill our sick abandonment needs.

5. We live life from the viewpoint of victims, and we are attracted by that weakness in our love and friendship relationships.

6. We have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, and it is easier for us to be concerned with others rather than ourselves; this enables us not to look too closely at our own faults, etc.

7. We get guilt feelings when we stand up for ourselves instead of giving in to others.

8. We became addicted to excitement.

9. We confuse love and pity and tend to "love" people we can "pity" and "rescue."

10. We have "stuffed" our feelings from our traumatic childhoods and have lost the ability to feel or express our feelings because it hurts so much (Denial).

11. We judge ourselves harshly and have a very low sense of self-esteem.

12. We are dependent personalities who are terrified of abandonment and will do anything to hold on to a relationship in order not to experience painful abandonment feelings, which we received from living with sick people who were never there emotionally for us.

13. Alcoholism is a family disease; and we became para-alcoholics and took on the characteristics of that disease even though we did not pick up the drink.

14. Para-alcoholics are reactors rather than actors.

So when I read that, I thought, “Well, shit.” It’s me. It’s all me.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t walk around proudly proclaiming to be an ACOA and seeking ways to identify as such. But looking back at some of the choices I made, reactions I’ve had to certain people, and other situations, it’s clear to me that I am the product of an alcoholic household.

Since learning about The Laundry List, it’s become easier for me to recognize when I’m playing out one of these in my current life. I could go on for days about the various times and ways these traits show up, even now. Perhaps more importantly, I can identify how my early childhood set me up to respond to future situations in ways that would reinforce those beliefs, regardless of whether they were right or wrong.

I’m currently reading Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live by Martha Beck. I’m only four chapters in, but I find it pretty insightful. The book asserts, at least up to this point, that there is the essential self and the social self. The essential self is who you truly are as a person. The social self is who you are on the outside, developed by societal expectations, your family, peers, media, religion, and others.

As I mentioned, Beck cites school as a major contributor to the social self. She says, “In school, you learned that being smart is the most important thing in the world. This was closely followed by working hard, being quiet, keeping your belongings tidy, and not causing any trouble.”

I saw school this way. I desperately sought the approval of my teachers, even into high school, when I’d rather have died than admitted that. I was afraid of getting in trouble or doing the wrong thing. Yet, I always sought excitement, constantly creating situations where I could get caught doing something wrong and get in trouble. At the same time, I worked very hard to keep my image as a good kid, worried that people would find out what a terrible person I was. It was like living two different lives, both constantly fighting each other.

I knew what kind of person I should be and also believed I could not be that person. I was stuck in a cycle of subconscious self-sabotage, creating ways for the world to prove my beliefs from early childhood—beliefs I didn’t even know I was carrying around—were correct.

This all got me wondering if school would have had this impact on me in the same way if I didn’t already have a foundation built by living with alcoholism. If I didn’t have such fear of authority and doing the wrong thing, would I have been even more reckless? Or would I have rebelled less because of a foundation that would have presumably created higher self-esteem and increased confidence? The world will never know.

But knowing all this, what do I do now?

What I do is I use all this information to find the patterns, the trauma responses, the involuntary reactions to otherwise innocuous situations, and I turn them around.

I remind myself that I was dealt an incredible burden when I was too young to know what to do with it. I developed coping skills with the illogical brain of a child. Those coping skills no longer serve me. I now have a fully developed brain that can objectively look at a situation and determine I don’t need to feel like that anymore.

I don’t use this information to say, “See? You were born to be this way, and you can’t be any other way.” I use it to say, “See? You didn’t do anything wrong, and you can learn to do better.”

Evolution is unavoidable. It’s how you evolve that matters.