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Our Stories
Tony Giordano
Though I was never addicted to alcohol or drugs, substance abuse has impacted me and my family in profound ways. My father was an alcoholic when I was young and his repeated drunken rages did untold damage to me that didn't show up until years later, when I fell into depression.
When depression first struck at mid-life, I initially thought it was due to my job, where I felt a kind of burn-out compounded by hostile work conditions. That was certainly a factor, but I felt there had to be more. Why weren't the others around me similarly affected? I quickly saw that I was more vulnerable for some reason, and set out to learn why. I looked back at my past including childhood, even though the therapists I saw then didn't encourage this retrospective.
I also began reading a lot about mood disorders and their causes; I had to know why I fell into depression. Was I weak? Was it my own fault? These questions haunted me and the resulting sense of weakness and guilt inhibited my recovery. But as I read book after book I began to learn some crucial lessons - that I was very much like millions of other children of alcoholics, that mood disorders like depression are very often caused by alcoholic parents, and that this kind of severe emotional trauma occurring in childhood can cripple a person emotionally, even decades later.
The thought that had been in the back of my head was now called into focus - was my father's drinking in some way connected to my illness, all these years later? I didn't think much any more about his heavy drinking and the violent rages that followed, which happened many weekends over a period of years. But this was the one thing that stood out as being so extreme and destructive in my otherwise healthy family life that it warranted examination.
Based on the discussions I initiated with therapists and from all the reading I was doing, I became convinced that this was the origin of my depression. The intense fear, confusion and mixed emotions that a parent's alcoholic rages can inflict upon a defenseless child frequently lead the child to go into hiding of sorts. This hiding and emotional numbing is built into their character and that can later lead to any number of disorders such as depression, anxiety, or dissociation.
I had been struggling more than two years trying to recover. Learning about the cause of my condition was the single biggest factor in my recovery as this knowledge relieved me of all the crippling guilt and shame. It wasn't my fault after all. I wasn't weak. I decided to share the lessons I learned by writing a book using my story to spread the word on the connection between trauma in alcoholic families and subsequent disorders, and to dispel a common myth with the title, "It's Not All in Your Head".
We've learned a great deal in the half-century since my childhood. We know that the substance abusers themselves often had underlying mental disorders that lead to that very addiction. This may have been true for my father, who had too much of a proud, old-fashioned masculinity to believe he could be depressed. I don't think he had any idea he was harming his family; he loved us too much to allow that. But people today should know better how these actions can harm others.
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