The Strawbreather

The consequences of growing up in toxic stress and alcohol trauma.

I didn’t feel safe. I was afraid most of the time, and for good reason. There’s nothing more terrifying for a child than a unstable, alcohol-addicted parent who we are supposed to rely on for stability. As I reached adulthood, this fear became anxiety. Anxiety that would define me and nearly destroy me.

I knew it couldn’t be good for my health, feeling like I couldn’t breath or calm down most of the time. My heart would beat frantically like I was prey but the abuse had stopped. Even before I had the information, a part of me knew I would get here — how long can our organs function under chronic stress? — and I shouldn’t have been surprised when I heard this:

Wow your blood pressure and pulse are very high.

A doctor made this comment during my visit to a university health clinic in Sonoma County, California about 15 years ago. I was 23. I can’t recall why I was at the clinic but I do remember him saying that after checking my vitals.

At the time, I didn’t acknowledge the significance of this event but now I see how it connects to the diagnosis I received almost a decade later at a Kaiser hospital in San Francisco:

You have complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

Which I believe is linked to the answer I received from my doctor yesterday after asking him why my feet turn blue and purple. He seemed perplexed by the sudden discoloration that painted my toes and lower half of my feet moments after I sat down on the exam room table.

It could be a sign of peripheral artery disease but we’ll need full blood work and an ultrasound to confirm.

My blood pressure and pulse were also high and while I’m approaching 40 (38), I don’t smoke, I don’t use alcohol — I have nearly 2.5 years sans booze — I regularly exercise and I’m not overweight (well my BMI isn’t perfect but I just thought it was “dad bod”!). In other words, I shouldn’t be high risk for artery or heart disease.

But here I was, and there he was typing away on his computer, another unhealthy American with hypertension who will die young of heart disease, and I felt the same surge of shame wash over me that I felt whenever a medical expert couldn’t understand what was happening to me when they checked my vitals. But I knew, so I mentally pushed through the shame and asked —

Could this be related to growing up in a scary, alcoholic home?

I already knew the answer but when he replied “i don’t think so” I internally collapsed. Partially because I yearn for validation of the persistent harm I endured in my youth; as much as I yearn for empathy for the relentless anxiety that debilitated me for so many years during my adulthood. But mostly because he was wrong.

According to ACES Too High, people with an ACE score of 6 or higher are at risk of their lifespan being shortened by 20 years. Heart disease is included among the most prevalent consequences of adults who grew up in an environment of chronic, toxic stress.

That’s essentially what ACEs are: They are ‘adverse childhood experiences’ that indicate chronic, toxic stress. They “harm children’s developing brains and lead to changing how they respond to stress and damaging their immune systems so profoundly that the effects show up decades later.”

Two-thirds of adults in the United States have an ACE score of at least one. Not only are they common but if you experienced one ACE during your childhood, odds are there were more — they love to co-occur — and the higher your score is (from 0 to 10) the higher your risk is of chronic disease and mental illness.

A couple of years ago, I learned My ACE score is a 9. As I delved deeper into what this means, I had a light bulb moment — I finally understood why I felt sick. My default setting was flight-and-fight; the relentless childhood trauma and fear had ravaged my nervous system and left my sympathetic nervous system in control. Now, the damage caused by persistent stress and anxiety, in my adulthood, was starting to catch up to me.

Over time, you will become more sensitive to trauma or stress, developing a hair-trigger response to events that other people shrug off.

Don’t worry, it’s not all doom and gloom. There’s a reason why I refer to this anxiety and stress disorder in the past tense. Nearly two years ago I was about 6 months sober and was contemplating suicide (there’s a silver lining, I promise). I knew I couldn’t go back to using alcohol to subdue the constant stream of panic and stress but I also knew I couldn’t take any more of this and I had to make a choice. I went to my doctor and had a semi-honest, semi-vulnerable conversation.

I can’t do this anymore. It feels like I’m breathing through a straw —

Is what I wanted to say. And I didn’t mean a straw you get for your fountain soda with your fast food order. I meant a stirring straw for your coffee.

It sounded like a snort; a desperate, imbedded breath that someone might do when they are congested from a respiratory illness. But I wasn’t sick from a virus. My nostrils would implode as I anxiously tried to suck in oxygen. This was my life for so long.

I kept it pretty general when I was describing my symptoms to the doctor but I also didn’t minimize how much I needed help and how nothing else I tried had worked. I wasn’t leaving there without something that makes my sober life live-able.

The doctor prescribed me amitriptyline, brand name Elavil, and my life was never the same.

It’s not that I don’t have anxiety now — I do, but it’s not debilitating and doesn’t make me want to drink or die (which were synonymous with how much my addiction to alcohol had progressed before I stopped). I’m no longer breathing through a stirring straw.

What does all of this have to do with alcohol? Good question.

Alcohol has shaped my life in many, significant ways. Aside from my own alcohol addiction, that I overcame nearly two and half years ago, my childhood was brutalized by booze.

I grew up in the home that no one wanted to visit. It was scary, unstable and I often felt unsafe and unsure about what would transpire when I went to bed and returned home from school.

My mother was heavily addicted to alcohol and so were the friends and men who she served at the dive-establishment she tended bar at who would come over to keep the party going. One of my first memories was a man going into overdose-induced seizures while just he and I were in the living room and I was watching Monday Night Football and eating cereal. My mother was passed out drunk in her bedroom and when I ran in to tell her what was happening, she couldn’t function, so I called 911. I’ll never forget the look the paramedics gave me when they saw my childhood circumstances and the shame it invoked.

Fortunately I did have my older brother but unfortunately it was only until I was about six when alcohol took him too.

Looking back, my brother’s descent was already happening in my earliest memories of him, when he would party with my mom and do crank until I would wake up to go to school. But he played football and seemed confident and strong and I believed he would protect me from the perilous world around us. Then he left during one of his drunken rages with my belligerent mom. It wasn’t long before his drinking led him to the streets for nearly twenty years.

Needless to say, and probably putting it lightly, this was a stressful environment to grow up in. It’s no surprise my brain responded to this perpetual sense of danger and toxic stress with a hair-trigger sensitivity to stress. And tragically, my story is not unique.

In the United States, ten percent of children live with parents who are addicted to alcohol.

For so long I was angry at my mom, brother (and many, many others) for being alcoholics who hurt me. While I still harbor some resentment — because how can we not? — I now choose to direct my anger and blame at the only consistent part of my childhood: alcohol causing harm.

And it does cause harm. “Did you grow up with an alcoholic or problem drinker?” is one of the ACEs measured in the original CDC-Kaiser ACE Study and according to ACEs Connection, 7 of the 10 ACEs can be attributed to growing up in an alcohol addicted home.

So here we are. My c-PTSD symptoms have been largely quelled by a miracle medication — thankfully, I am no longer trapped in stress response — but the chronic trauma of my past is still insisting on its relevance. Instead of showing up as feeling unable to breathe, I’m seeing the consequences of a life of flight-and-fight in my cardiovascular system and life expectancy.

Sometimes it feels like no matter what I do, I can’t escape the past. Not only the memories: the howl of a drunken mother who sounds like a tortured demon in a loud argument with another tortured demon while I lay in bed night after night praying that her boyfriend doesn’t leave because she will get worse — it all will get so much worse — and we will likely join my brother on the streets.

It feels like I also can’t escape the statistics that say I will likely die young.

But that is exactly what ACEs are. They are indicators of hard lives lived and bodies unable to let go of the past and calm the fuck down. I’m so grateful my parasympathetic nervous system has been given a larger role in my life, thanks to amitriptyline.

Now, all that’s left to do is hope it’s not too late and my body and organs can recover and sustain. That, and make sure my family’s cycle of alcohol trauma dies with me and the world’s most harmful drug and industry doesn’t continue continue to get away, unabated, with ruining the lives of children and the anxious adults they become.