Breaking the curse

There is a particular kind of grief that does not have a clean name because it is not bereavement, because the person is still here. It is not estrangement, because you have not left. It lives somewhere in the space between loving someone and watching them be slowly consumed by something you cannot reach into and remove. Families with alcoholism in them know this space well and most of us learn to furnish it just to make it liveable, without ever quite acknowledging that we are doing so.

I have been thinking about inter-generational patterns lately over the past year since Lyra is nearly 18 months old with a particulat focus on how certain things move through families because they are learned behaviour. Alcoholism is one of these. Not in a simple genetic sense, though the research does suggest a heritable component. More in the sense that children who grow up in homes shaped by alcohol learn a particular relationship with it, with stress, with coping, with what you reach for when the weight gets too heavy. They learn what normal looks like. And sometimes what they learn is not what they would have chosen.

The curse isn’t the alcohol, it is the template it leaves behind quietly shaping what feels familiar and what feels safe.

Watching someone you love struggle with alcohol is its own specific kind of exhausting. It is the low-level vigilance of knowing and noticing version of the person you love that exists underneath the thing that has hold of them, visible in glimpses, heartbreakingly present one moment and unreachable the next.

And underneath all of it, for those of us who carry the family history, is a quieter question. One that does not always announce itself but sits there regardless. What did I absorb from this? What did I learn, without knowing I was learning it, about what stress feels like and what relief looks like? Where does that live in me?

I do not write this from the other side of the thing. My family’s relationship with alcohol is ongoing, complicated, and not resolved. There is no tidy before and after. What there is, is intention. A deliberate decision to understand the pattern well enough that it stops being unconscious. To build different responses to difficulty, ones that do not follow the grooves worn deep by what came before. To be someone who reached for help when the weight got heavy, rather than something else.

That is what breaking an inter-generational curse actually looks like, most of the time. A thousand small decisions, made in the ordinary circumstances of an ordinary life, that accumulate into something different from what you inherited.

It is also, it needs to be said, an act of compassion rather than condemnation. Understanding that alcoholism is shaped by pain, by history, and by things that happened long before the person who carries it had any choice in the matter, and this does not mean excusing the harm it causes. It means understanding it well enough to respond differently.

You can grieve the parent you needed while still loving the one you have.

If you are reading this and recognising it, I want to say something directly. The weight you are carrying, whether you are watching someone you love or navigating your own relationship with what you inherited, is real and it is heavy. Getting support for it is not a betrayal of your family. It is the most serious thing you can do about it. Therapy, Alcoholics Anonymous, honest conversation with someone who understands. The pattern does not break by willpower alone.

And if you are in the middle of it, as I am, not through it, not resolved, just still here and still trying, staying present without losing yourself counts. Maintaining the relationship without losing your own ground counts. Choosing, again and again, to respond differently than the template suggests, that counts too.

The curse is not inevitable. It can be broken.