ABSTRACT
Biddy Youell’s chapter comes from the perspective of an NHS child psychotherapist, experienced not just in treating children and assessing for treatment, but also in conducting assessments to advise family courts about the safety of the child.
Youell focuses on the emotional and psychological impact on the child of having a parent with an addiction. She provides a graphic account of an infant with an addicted mother, a baby in whom the urge to make an attachment seems to have been almost extinguished and replaced by a passive hopelessness. Youell also describes teenagers who have little chance to attend to their own development as they struggle to support and rescue their addicted parents. In her words, what children of addicts have in common is that “The parent is preoccupied, most if not all of the time, with something other than the child”. As she vividly conveys, this represents not just an absence of a functioning parent, but the replacement of a potentially containing, attentive parent by someone who behaves more like a child, needing to be cared for, and even berating the adolescent for being a puritan when attempting 34 to be responsible and set limits. The adolescent is then not just a “parental child” with respect to providing care for the parent, but becomes a quasi-parent having to bear the hostility of his or her (actual) parent, which presumably derives from and belongs with the parent’s own introjected parental figures or internal objects.
Youell describes the plight of these young people, burdened by a sense of guilt and responsibility towards their parent(s) and wary of dependency themselves. In some cases, the need to protect an idealized image of the parental figure makes it impossible for them to separate, and they remain in thrall to the family culture and extremely difficult to reach through psychotherapy or other interventions. In unfortunate cases, the parent sees the young person’s psychic pain and offers the only solution they know—ingestion of substances—and so the cycle of addiction can become transmitted through the generations.
Youell’s chapter is not just of interest to those working with children, but is an invaluable reminder, for those working with adults who are the children of addicts, of the psychological deprivation, conflicts, and assaults that these people may have experienced in childhood and adolescence as their own development is eclipsed by the need to preserve the life or sanity of their parent.
