First Year Issues when Leaving a Home with an Alcoholic Parent
College is a time for self-discovery, making friends, and career exploration. Coming from a home with an alcoholic parent can increase vulnerability if there is a lack of support or home life was somewhat unstable.
Here are some of the Issues to expect and suggestions for handling them:
- Acknowledge the stressful feelings related to coming to college. Validate your strength in wanting to do something good for yourself.
- You may feel guilt about leaving siblings behind, especially if you were one of the older siblings. Wondering who will take care or protect them if needed. Develop a plan for another adult to look in on them, maybe an aunt, uncle, neighbor.
- Understand the increased risk about your own decisions in regard to the use of substances and make healthy decisions for yourself.
- Guilt about leaving the alcoholic or substance using parent and worrying about who will protect them. Remember sometimes the user has to experience more consequences to make the decision to get better.
- Anxiety or apprehension in talking about your family with new peers. Set up a support system with campus agencies, whether it is the counseling center or campus ministry.
- You may feel extremely vulnerable leaving family and friends behind. Get involved with intramural sports, clubs or other organizations.
- Be prepared for setbacks of increased anxiety when returning home for the holidays. This is normal. Prepare yourself by thinking of different scenarios that may occur and how you will handle them before you leave. Make sure you have a good support system such as a friend or relative when you get home so you have someone to talk to.
Use campus support systems such as the University Counseling Center, The Office of Alcohol and Drug Education or Campus Ministry.
Having a parent or sibling or other relative with an alcohol or other drug problem is a warning sign to be cautious with your own decisions. Having more close relatives with chemical dependencies indicates greater severity of personal risk. Recent research on brain chemistry supports that alcoholism can be genetic and tolerance to alcohol can be 90% inherited. Research supports that children of alcoholics tend to not notice the intoxication effects of alcohol like most individuals do. They seem to already be set up with tolerance, thus not experiencing this drug like many of their peers. Brain chemistry may already be altered on the genetic level, making a child of an alcoholic more susceptible to addiction.