I sit there in my heavy winter jacket, sweating. My brain feels like it has too many tabs open. I'm replaying how I replied to a colleague — was it too demanding? Am I being a good daughter? A good sister? A good partner?
I'm training for a marathon in freezing weather. I'm in a new relationship. I'm thinking about starting a business. Moving apartments. I need to figure out my visa. I've just started analytic training. I need to attend to my community garden. My patients. The world feels like it's on the brink of war. People are dying.
And my brother has just left rehab, and we don't know where he is.
My therapist says, "You have a lot going on."
I say, "Yeah, I guess."
Rationally, I know it's a lot. All at once. But I feel fine. All my problems feel like privileged problems. Everyone I love is still alive.
The chaos, the adrenaline — it feels familiar. Almost comforting.
And that's when it occurs to me: something is not fine. This is what growing up in an addicted household trained me for. The ability to function in chaos. To blunt my internal warning systems. To keep going.
I know I'm not alone. According to the Children of Alcoholics Foundation, more than 26 million people in the United States grew up in an alcoholic household. Many of us are now adults carrying the imprint of that environment — often referred to as adult children of alcoholics (ACOAs).
Some of us don't drink. Some of us do. But even without the substance, the patterns linger: hyper-vigilance, guilt, over-responsibility, fear of abandonment, perfectionism.
Growing up, it often felt like my job was to keep my mom happy. To read the room before I entered it — and adjust myself accordingly.
Developmentally, children are not equipped to understand addiction. Early childhood is marked by egocentric thinking — not selfishness, but the belief that events happen because of you. When a parent is unpredictable, emotionally unavailable, or consumed by substances, children often fill in the gaps with self-blame.
If Mom is struggling, it must be my fault. If she's distant, I'm not enough. If she's angry, I did something wrong.
Psychoanalytic writer Stephen Brady describes how children in addicted households often experience the substance itself as a kind of rival — "a mysterious potion which their alcoholic parent prefers to them." Alongside this confusion comes another quiet task: trying to repair the parent, to protect them from further strain.
As a child, you depend on your parents to survive. When the person you would turn to for comfort is also the source of fear, something has to give. You learn early to worry. You learn early to anticipate needs and adapt. And you learn not to feel too much — because feelings might upset them. Or worse, there's simply no one available to notice them.
So you smile. You calm the room. You become easy. And something in you goes quiet. You learn to manage what no child should have to manage.
From 12 years old I would text my mother from school and study her replies for clues. Were they shorter than usual? Less warm? Did her sentences make sense? Did I feel that familiar tightening in my chest — the sense that something was off?
When I got home, I'd watch her closely. The way her mouth moved. The way she held herself.
Is she okay? Has she been drinking?
I knew instantly.
Then I would start searching — under her bed, in the bathroom cabinet, in closets — looking for bottles. When I found them, I'd tell my dad: Mom's not okay.
Chaos would follow.
What I didn't know how to name then was how much of myself I was giving up in the process. And the next morning, I'd be back at school at 6 a.m. for cross-country, then assembly, maths, religious studies — smiling, focused, functional. As if nothing had happened.
Worrying inside. Carrying it alone.
I notice this in myself, and I see it in others who grew up like this — a kind of dreamlike forward motion, a way of staying functional without fully registering what's happening inside.
It's adaptive. It's protective. It works.
Until one day you realize you've built a life around staying ahead of danger that no longer exists, and in the rare moments of stillness, everything feels strangely empty.
I can tolerate a lot. I can juggle competing demands. I can show up for everyone. I can stay functional in crisis. I can even excel.
But I'm not sure that's the same thing as being at ease.
My brother is eighteen months older than me. We grew up in the same house, with the same parents, under the same roof.
And yet our lives look very different.
I live in New York. I have close friendships. I completed graduate school. I'm a therapist in a psychoanalytic training program. By most external measures, I'm doing well.
My brother has been in and out of rehab. Addiction has taken hold of his life. I worry constantly about where he is, whether he's safe, whether he's alive.
And with that worry comes guilt.
Why me? Why this life? What made me so lucky?
Was it temperament? Chance? Was it being born six weeks premature, spending my first weeks in the NICU — literally incubated, separated from the chaos at home? Was it gender, the way girls are often socialized into caretaking, learning early to attune, to manage, to smooth over what feels unbearable?
I don't know and will never be 100% sure.
However, family systems theory offers one way of understanding this split. In families affected by addiction, children often take on unconscious roles to help the system survive. Often the oldest child may become the identified patient — the one whose struggles visibly carry the family's distress. While the middle or eldest daughter may become the caretaker or manager, working tirelessly to stabilize the emotional environment.
I don't think these roles are chosen. They seem to emerge.
Living with addiction doesn't end when you leave the house. It lodges itself in your nervous system. You get used to fear, to uncertainty — and you learn to keep moving. And sometimes, you mistake that movement for freedom.
In therapy and in twelve-step rooms, I'm beginning to understand how this early role shaped my adult relationships. When you grow up organizing yourself around someone else's instability, you learn to look outward for the source of discomfort. If you could just fix the other person, you believe, you would finally feel okay.
Letting go of that belief is slow work.
This beginning doesn't have to determine the rest of your life. When old wounds appear in the present, it doesn't mean you're broken — it means something is asking to be understood. In twelve-step programs like Al-Anon, CoDA, and ACOA, people sit together who don't need the backstory. They understand because they've been there. There's no hierarchy, no transaction, just recognition. And in that shared understanding, something loosens. For many, it's the first place life begins to feel lighter.
I have built a life I'm proud of — but I'm learning to ask harder questions.
What would it feel like to get on the right train — and let myself arrive where I actually am?
Growing up in an addicted household gave me resilience, sensitivity, endurance. It also gave me a nervous system that confuses chaos with safety, responsibility with love.
I'm still learning how to put some of that down. Still learning that I don't have to earn love by holding everything and everyone together.