Withdrawing at School

The Complete ACOA Sourcebook: Adult Children of Alcoholics at Home, at Work, and in Love, also says,

Another problem at school was the inability to concentrate. Quite
often your thoughts were directed to the fantasies you constructed to make life
okay, or to stop worrying. [...]

You had learned to keep your feelings to yourself, perhaps not even acknowledging them to yourself. […]

After a while, you may have misbehaved or stopped going. [...]

If you withdrew, you knew you’d be left alone, because you were quiet and didn’t cause anyone any trouble. And the more you did this, the more alone you would feel and the harder it would be to do anything else.

For me, after elementary school, I started to withdraw. I saw myself as so completely unworthy that I dared not even speak. I believed that everybody else’s family loved and supported one another, like on the Waltons, or Happy Days. I thought my family life so abhorrent that nobody would believe it.

And so many people said that I lied, I figured I was best off not saying anything than saying things and getting into trouble for shaming the family by revealing the truth.

I didn't lie though. Not about what happened in that house. About that, I never lied. Sometimes I would lie in the house, to protect myself, but never about what was going on.

My sisters wound up withdrawing to the point that they withdrew from school completely. Quelle affaire!!

Nowadays, my Dad is different… a kinder, gentler version of the man he used to be. Not perfect, and we don't always get along, but more human, somehow... I still have difficulty relating to him. I have been able to forgive, for the most part, but not to forget.

It is so easy to slip back into the roles we played in my childhood. I don’t know that we will ever have the relationship I would have liked to have had. My fantasy will never materialize, since it only existed in my mind. I don’t even know that it will get any better than the way it is now, but at least I know now that my family was not so different from other people’s. Although I was alone in my isolation, shame, and fear, I was not alone in being alone. That did not help me then, especially since I did not know, but it a tiny bit reassuring now.

Maybe I wasn’t bad.

Maybe it wasn’t all my fault, after all.