The Christian Adult Child

This is a community for those healing from the effects of being raised around alcohol. We are learning to be a child and are learning to receive love.

  • You belong.

    You are worth being seen. You are worth being heard. You are not a burden. You are valuable and irreplaceable. You have the right to dream. You have the right to make mistakes. You have the right to have joy and change your mind, then change it again. You deserve to embrace your identity in Christ and release the identity formed through alcoholic dysfunction. Who you became in that process is different than who you are called to be.

Hello, I’m an Adult Child of an Alcoholic and a Child of God.

Being an Adult Child is characterized by isolation and as the Big Red Book calls it, terminal uniqueness. It’s that feeling of always being on the outside, looking in. That deep-seated “truth” that you won’t belong with anyone. Perhaps you even feel you are watching your own life. Trauma causes deep disassociation, as a protection mechanism.

Engaging with life, reality and truth for the first time can be totally overwhelming. As children, we had to buy into, and believe the distorted lies that were the Alcoholics truth and reality. We didn’t have another choice. 

Yet, in Christ, we are called to belong and to approach Him as a child. Christian Adult Children face unique challenges in their recovery and faith.

  • How do I approach God as a child, if our childhood was stolen by the disease of alcoholism?
  • How do we pray for our needs, when we don’t feel we have the right to have any?
  • How do we ask for help, if we are wired to be hyper-independent?
  • How do we trust God, ourselves, and others – when trust has been linked with pain?
  • How do we heal, when we don’t see another way of life?
  • How do we relax and have fun, when our physical body has developed in high-stress, cortisol-baked environments?
  • How can I trust God, if He allowed my painful childhood happen to me?
  • How do I dream, if I am stuck in survival mode?

Perhaps you have tried to share your struggles and you have been told to “trust God” or “have faith” or “let go”. I realize now that people who love me don’t want to see me in pain, they offer advice that may work for them. However, in this deep healing journey, I was looking for someone who could both understand my struggle and walk with me a little bit as I struggle to overcome the lies I believe about God, myself, the world, what I deserve and life. It is about the reconciliation about what you know to be true in your mind about Jesus and His promises, and the fact that your heart has been deeply conditioned through dysfunction to the core symptoms of dysfunctional families: don’t talk, don’t trust and don’t feel.

We can’t get our childhoods back, but we can learn to become a child for the first time, as a Child of God, today.

“God sets the lonely in families, he leads out the prisoners with singing…”

Psalm 68:6 KJV