How Adults’ Relationship with Alcohol Affects Children
No one should drink alcohol. Ever.
(If you’ve received this article by email, please click on the heading, which will send you to the most up-to-date version of the article. I often edit and correct typos after the first upload to Substack)
The law stops people from driving with relatively low levels of alcohol in the blood. Why? Because even in very small quantities, without being anywhere near drunk, alcohol impairs the prefrontal cortex (PFC), our executive brain. Once the PFC is impaired, we cannot think clearly, we can’t make sensible or ethical decisions, we lose our self-awareness, and we lose the capacity to take responsibly for our actions and their impact on others. Driving a vehicle without the capacity to be responsible can be, and often is, deadly hence the strict laws.
No human being in their right mind should ever want to lose access to their PFC, but drinking, any drinking, does precisely that. The PFC is all we have to enable us to live a full, meaningful life in relationship with other people — to be fully human, and not be savages to one another. It is also what we need in order to guide children to full humanness.
Alcohol does not relax people, it just makes them temporarily unaware
When people drink, they think they’re more ‘relaxed’, or ‘feel better’. Many people have told me they drink after a hard day as a ‘treat’ they feel they deserve, something they ‘enjoy’, a kind of a ‘reward’ they they’ve ‘earned’ for all the hard work they do. People think that in small quantities alcohol is benign, that there is nothing wrong with having a wee drink with friends, or a glass of wine after work. Our society agrees and normalises it.
But people’s belief that alcohol helps them relax, is an incredible illusion. What really happens is that they temporarily lose the part of their brain that gives them awareness of their feelings. Anyone who has ever witnessed an intoxicated person can see clearly that the drinking person is practically ‘spilling’ their feelings all over the place. Far from relaxing or ‘feeling better’, people feel more not less.
Once people consume even a small amount of alcohol, any feelings that they normally try to suppress, avoid or keep hidden, will rise to the surface with real and full intensity. Alcohol does not generate new feelings. It disables the mechanism in the front of the brain that enables us to regulate our feelings and our behaviour. Without the PFC fully awake and in charge, feelings and behaviours become disregulated.
Sadness, depression, happiness, anger, or lust, the feelings will be out for everyone to see and absorb. The drinking person is temporarily unaware of his or her feelings, and for a short period of time they live with the illusion that they are more ‘relaxed’…
Our ongoing fight against self-awareness
Why and how we became self-aware so late in our evolution, and why no other primate is like us is still a mystery. It does not fit with the evolutionary timetable and no one, except religion, has any kind of explanation for it.
Whatever caused us to become self-aware, from that moment on we have been troubled. Being self-aware means that we can see ourselves. Suffering is always hard, but it is particularly hard for humans, because we know that we suffer. Instead of just feeling whatever it is we feel, as all mammals do, we know when we feel things, and we know when these feelings are not comfortable. We also know we will one day die, and it scares the hell out of our limbic brain. So many clients tell me at the start of therapy how much they hate their feelings… It is only possible to hate our feelings, when we are aware we have them.
I have always seen the story of Adam and Eve as an attempt to capture what it was like for our species when we became self-aware. It is described as sudden, because from the point of view of evolution it happened in a blink of an eye. It is also not surprising that in the Bible, the suffering that self-awareness brought with it is seen as a punishment. One minute we were innocent creatures living in harmony with our surroundings, foraging for our food, mating, and giving birth without pain. Then something happened, and we changed forever. Once we changed, angels with flaming swords closed the gates to the Garden of Eden behind us, and there was no going back.
Things got complicated for us. Birth became painful because the human brain became so large, that the baby’s head no longer fitted comfortably in the mother’s birth canal. We could no longer continue our innocent existence in harmony with nature, and we developed shame about our bodies.
The story of our species becoming self-aware is not a happy one. In the Bible it is a story of disobedience and ‘sin’, and the implications of self-awareness are described as a punishment. I know that we didn’t change because an Adam and an Eve ate a fruit, and I don’t think we did this to ourselves. But this is how our pre-technology, pre-science ancestors tried to describe and explain our dramatic and disturbing transformation from unaware advanced primates, to the messy creature we are now. Somewhere in the deepest recesses of our collective memory there must be some echo of a recognition of our ‘before’ and ‘after’…
I am not surprised gaining self-awareness was described as such a sorry saga. Awareness is a terrible burden, and I think we’ve never stopped resenting it and fighting against it. Ever since we got a PFC, our species has been trying to make it go to sleep, and ’shut it up’. The PFC shows us ourselves and our situation, and we often don’t like what it makes us see. We routinely try to ‘kill the messenger’, instead of pay attention to what it is trying to show us about ourselves and our reality.
When people drink, it is as if they are trying to revisit the Garden of Eden. Perhaps they yearn to recapture that innocent time in our past when we didn’t know when we suffered, because we were unaware of ourselves and our feelings. Alcohol has always been a reliable short-term PFC sedative, but the relief from self-awareness that it provides is short-lived and dangerous.
In therapy we need a working PFC and the ability to make good neurological connections between the PFC and the limbic brain. Our entire species is deficient in this. We are not born with good connections between the two brains, which is why people and the world are in such a mess. For therapy to work, my clients need a functional PFC and good neuroplasticity (the ability of the brain to change its connectivity and neural ‘architecture’). Without those, there is no change in our psychology, and no hope of ever recovering from past hurts and traumas. That’s why I tell my clients that if they want to see me for therapy, the condition is that they don’t drink.
A colleague told me a few years ago, “You can’t tell your clients not to drink”… When I asked why, she said that as therapists ‘it wasn’t our place’... I reminded her that we have a duty of care to our clients. If we see a client do something that harms them, it is most definitely our duty to bring that to their attention.
But I do take it a step further in my practice. I work ethically. I am not interested in just taking money from clients. If I know they’re doing something that prevents them from getting the therapeutic results they are paying for I tell them. Anyone who doesn’t like my rules… well, I am clearly not the right therapist for them.
Can people lie to me? Sure they can. Therapists can only go by what clients tell them. But my clients are good, honest people. If they do have something to hide, it doesn’t take long before they admit it. Either way, if people do drink, I will eventually find out… People cannot hide it forever, nor do they want to.
Just in case you are wondering, I have been teetotal since 1999. I’ve never been a heavy drinker, but what little I did drink, I stopped completely back then. I also don’t smoke or drink caffeine, and have never taken any drugs.
I am not a saint, and this is not a moral position. It is a logical one. I choose not to interfere with my brain. I would like to keep it in good shape, so I can continue to grow and develop for the rest of my life. I prefer to face life and myself without masking or medicating anything.
Any amount of adult drinking is a betrayal of children
Growing up with an alcoholic parent is likely to cause children to develop trauma. Alcoholic, or otherwise addicted parents are not fit to raise children. There are always good reasons why people drink heavily, or do drugs. But when it comes to children, frankly, I don’t care what these reasons are. There is no excuse for harming children. Parents’ Alcoholism is child abuse.
In my booklet on relationships, I refer to the use of alcohol as a ‘crime against relationships’. Alcoholics and addicts in general are unavailable for a real relationship with other human beings. Their most important and most intimate relationship is with the substance they are addicted to. In the life of an addict, other people including children are much lower in the order of priorities. The more committed the person is to their addiction, the less available they are. It doesn’t matter what people say, it’s what they do that matters. An alcoholic parent can tell their children they love them, but they don’t act loving when they drink. I think this is pretty obvious, and everyone knows this.
When I talk about the impact of adults’ relationship with alcohol on children, I am not talking about alcoholics or heavy drinking. Any amount of alcohol in a parent’s or adult’s blood is harmful to children. Children need to be parented as much as possible from their parents’ executive brain/PFC. It is the executive brain that enables us to make other people ‘feel felt’, as Dr Dan Siegel says. It is the part of our neurological ‘equipment’ that enables us to form safe and and meaningful relationships that can facilitate growth and development.
When the PFC is asleep, because the adult has even a small amount of alcohol in their system, it’s as if no one’s home. You look into their eyes, and there is no one there. This is terrifying for babies, children and young people, and growing up with fear is a recipe for trauma.
No child should ever be exposed to an adult whose PFC is not fully awake. It is the part of our brain that makes us appear present to others, that lets them know that we see them, that we feel them, that we are able to care about them, and empathise with them, and that we understand our responsibility towards them. Without this we are just ‘not there’.
We all know that ‘the eyes are the window to the soul’. But what exactly does that mean? What is it that we see, when we look into someone’s eyes? What is the soul? This is not properly understood, in fact, not even remotely understood by science. What happens with our PFC, our sense of presence, the flow between people, is a huge mystery that goes into the heart of consciousness studies and spirituality. Whatever the soul is, it needs our PFC to show itself through our eyes to others. When the PFC is disabled, the soul is hidden from others.
The fictional ‘zombie’ is an animated human body without a soul. When someone’s PFC is not there, or is disabled even by a small amount of alcohol, they are temporarily zombie-like. Why are zombies so terrifying? Why is the absence of what we call a soul so scary?
Whatever the soul is, it is essential to our relationships with others. Where there is a soul, there is a chance of connection, of seeing each other. But if we cannot see the soul in someone else’s eyes, we are alone and we might as well be trying to speak to a zombie.
Nothing is more terrifying to a child than being in the presence of an adult they expect to trust, and feeling that the adult is ‘not there’. And yes, this will happen even with a small amount of alcohol in the blood — the amount that the law says makes us unfit to drive a vehicle.
If you want to read something really good and clear about the PFC and the role it plays in our ‘soul’ and our presence, I can recommend the chapter, ‘A broken brain, a lost soul. The triangle of wellbeing’ in Dan Siegel’s Mindsight.
There is another aspect of drinking that is bad for children. When parents turn to any substance, even in small quantities, to help them ‘cope’ with feelings, they do not teach their children anything useful about feelings. Children learn that when you feel bad, you medicate your feelings with something. If people are in the habit of dealing with life’s stresses with a glass of wine, a beer (or anything for that matter), it tells me that they do not have good emotional skills. Drinking is not just about the drinking. It’s about people’s relationship with their feelings. People cannot teach children good emotional skills if they don’t have any.
Alcohol is not a ‘sensitive’ issue, and neither should it be a taboo topic. We need to talk about it openly and unapologetically. The same rationale behind the laws that stop us from driving with very low alcohol levels, should also apply to relationships with children. Drivers expose themselves to heavy penalties if they drive with more than the legally allowed level of blood alcohol. In relationships with children, it is always the children that suffer and pay the heavy penalty, sometime for life. This is unacceptable.
Another excellent, challenging and thought-provoking article. Well done Avigail. No one can say they weren’t warned👍☘️
Whilst I don’t drink that often it has certainly made me consider giving up alcohol completely!