Mark Phillips' Pages: Workbook: 3/12/05: The apocrypha surrounding adult children of alcoholics.

Jacob Lawrence, "The Lovers," 1946 — Jacob Lawrence, *The Lovers* (1946)

March 12, 2005:

The apocrypha surrounding adult children of alcoholics. Conditioned to seek attention and approval from self-absorbed authority figures who neither understand them nor particularly care, and who will under no circumstances provide approval.

It makes me sick to acknowledge this as our pattern, from the beginning. Was this the substance of our special bond? Communion, we called it. Was our communion only ever the bond between traumatizer and traumatized, abuser and abused, alcoholic and child?