How do I know if my mum’s alcoholism really affected me?
I’m only 22 and I have a good relationship with my mother who has been sober for over 8 years now, so I really didn’t think much of the fact that I’m an adult child of an alcoholic. She’s mentioned it briefly to me (her dad was also an alcoholic), but I always brushed it off because I never felt it affected me much.
She never abused me or my sisters, and my parents were divorced and my dad is well off so we weren’t neglected. I had some brief counselling in my teen years during and immediately after my mum was in rehab, but I never felt it helped much (I’m autistic and apparently that can affect how effective certain types of talk therapy can be).
Today I was browsing mental health services because I feel like my life is becoming more and more unmanageable. After my autism diagnosis last year, and I suspect I have ADHD too, I’ve just found it really difficult to cope. Anyway I found the ACA website and a lot of it really resonated with me. But it seemed like a lot of the people who talked about their experiences had either suffered quite a lot of abuse or neglect from their parent(s) and/or they lost a parent due to their alcoholism. But I’m not really like that.
So… where do I go from here? How do I know if my problems and mentality come from being an adult child or just from my autism/adhd or any other mental health problems? Can both things be true?