Maria Dolgopolova: Now, about the second type of story I encountered with clients. Here, I have a variety of emotions to share.
Typically, if we take the standard analysis of the first session, it starts with a very vague request. Sometimes, of course, a person comes and says clearly: I want to be happy in love. Or I want my husband to improve. Or something else clear like that. I want my career to be more successful. But then there is a presentation of oneself. On the one hand, it’s about establishing a connection with me as a psychologist, as a person. On the other hand, there isn't a specific request, but from what the person says about their life, I, as a clinician, see many layers and methods of self-destruction that the person practices. This might be through their career, eating disorders, or relationship scenarios. Sometimes it's all three.
Let's be honest, often adult children of alcoholics are people who also tend to practice some form of chemical dependency. And here is a very interesting point, I think, within the professional community, that many people state in their portfolios and presentations that they don't work with addictions. I’ve always been curious how such specialists survive and practice because, again, this abstract, collective client I described from many of my real clients, who had an unclear request in the first meeting…
If I can identify many different small forms of self-destruction in the first session, it usually turns out that the person has some dependency. Either a drug dependency we will mention later or an alcohol dependency mentioned earlier. Since people who come to me are usually, well, not usually, always socially successful to some degree—I’m not a budget psychological help institution—so we're talking about people who are socially successful. This area of their life is intact, they want to pay for psychological work, and so on. Therefore, they generally look normal. They don't look like heroin users, they don't look like people with cocaine or methamphetamine problems, or anything like that. They often don't even look like people who drink or use marijuana daily. But mysteriously, it often becomes apparent in two to three months. And at this point, I'm curious about what my colleagues who say they don't work with addictions do. I mean, do they say, "That's it, this session was the last," or what? Or is this phrase written so that at least someone with these problems doesn't come to them?
One way or another, I even created a separate course for psychologists, and not only for psychologists, about self-destruction. What I noticed is that many forms of self-destruction accompany the story of chemical dependencies and psychoactive substances. These can indeed be seen in the first session. The path of therapy, in my opinion, is partly about building the ability, the impulse for self-protection and self-care from scratch.
Because if our parents didn't create a safe environment for us, either because they used substances or had some mental disorders, we don’t learn to do this for ourselves. We don't develop this safe filter, the idea that what destroys me, I don’t do, and what protects me, I do, or at least doesn’t destroy me. I’ve noticed that people often have to live without this filter. They do both what is beneficial for them and what destroys them, either emotionally or even physically. And this thing takes a long time to build, but it can often be built. At least, I know a sufficient number of positive and good cases where self-destruction decreased during therapy. This is the second type of story I would highlight. These stories are not tied to any specific social problems or specific requests about relationships. And I just wanted to emphasize that this is a topic I find truly important in the context of our discussion.
Olga Zaitseva: Do you mean that people suffer from addictions without recognizing them as self-destructive? That is, they are quite adapted but lack sensitivity to their own needs, which are being covered up by these habits.
You talk about self-destruction, but it’s not perceived as such. For example, they drink, and everything goes away, the inner criticism switches off.
Maria Dolgopolova: No, well, obviously, drinking isn’t seen as self-destruction.
Olga Zaitseva:You mean things like workaholism, shopping addiction, love addiction, overeating…
Maria Dolgopolova: Well, you know, a person works 12 hours a day and doesn’t see it as potentially harmful. It doesn’t occur to them that it might be bad for them.
Olga Zaitseva: That’s an interesting phenomenon because it’s described as one of the characteristics of adult children of alcoholics—they lack this boundary. They want so much to feel significant and needed that this is the only way they can achieve it.
Imagine if both parents drink, or one parent drinks, say, the father drinks and the mother doesn’t but is co-dependent. What happens to the mother then? She’s in contact with the child only when the father is sober and she is relaxed. For example, when I think back to my childhood, my mother was absent. I remember her functionally fulfilling her duties, but every evening she became a "dead" mom, staring endlessly out the window. No matter what you said to her, there was no contact. She was so immersed in her own worries that she didn’t respond to my tears or engage with me at all. Her thoughts were all about whether my father would come home drunk or not. As an adult, I understand this now. When my therapist asked me, "Did your mother love you?" I used to tell myself, "Yes." But then I realized I never felt that love. This basic feeling... We love ourselves as our mother loved us. And how did she love us? Who knows? I convinced myself that my mother loved me because she did so much for me. Often, it's conveyed that she was saving us from the father or something. But I never felt that love. As a result, a person grows up with an inability to feel love for themselves, and they fantasize about this love. I’m great when I’m effective and work a lot... What other outlet is there? I’m great, but at the same time, I don’t feel it at all...
Maria Dolgopolova: For example, why do people work 13 hours a day? There is indeed an obvious secondary benefit that obscures the effect I’m talking about. Because it’s clear that if you work 13 hours a day and achieve impressive results, you might be getting something incredibly valuable in terms of love and self-recognition. So much so that you’re willing to continue in this way for another ten years.
Olga Zaitseva: But I think it’s also about feeling alive. You do something, and through this action, you feel like you’re actually present in life. Before I started therapy, I considered myself like Sleeping Beauty. I lived, but it wasn’t my true life. I couldn’t leave work on time or finish anything. Looking back, I wonder how I had the strength to do all that.
It was all accompanied by a strong sense of guilt, not to feel shame that I’m somehow wrong. This gets filled with something—flavor stimulators, cigarettes—what psychoanalysis calls oral fixation. Everything that provides pleasure through the mouth brings pleasure to dependent people. And co-dependent people too. This finger-twirling, tactile perception... It’s how I connect with my body because in such families there’s either no tactile contact at all or it’s very specific, related to aggression or distance. A distorted way of being that seems abnormal from the outside but is the only way you know how to live. So, you’re talking about psychotherapy that aims to reveal whether such a life truly suits you. Do you genuinely feel like you’re living your authentic life, a good life that brings you joy? Is that what you meant?
Maria Dolgopolova: What you are describing, I can understand... I was talking about something slightly different, but I'll return to what I was saying because you’ve touched on an important detail. I’ve processed it for myself through concepts such as having adult children of alcoholics on one side and, for clarity, let’s take addiction as an example. What happens during addiction, both physiologically and psychologically? Over time, a person begins to lose sensitivity to a certain spectrum of emotions. They become attuned to vivid positive and negative emotions, feeling quite alive in these emotions. However, their brain starts to process less and less effectively, to the point where intermediate emotions, or emotions in the middle range, become unperceivable. The most alarming thing is that in dysfunctional families, and especially in families with substance-abusing parents, children, despite not using substances themselves, experience the same disruption in their emotionality. They start to perceive their intense negative emotions and intense positive emotions, but this middle spectrum becomes inaccessible to them. When it is inaccessible, they truly feel like they are dead in between, unable to feel anything.
So, if we have a person without this experience, either from their parents or from their own substance use, we can experience joy in various small things. We had a normal workday, a warm team, we walked to work, smelled a flower. All of this provides a sense of being alive despite the fact that these are, in general, pale emotions compared to others that could be experienced. A person with this reversed type of perception starts to seek out extreme emotions to confirm that they are indeed alive. Otherwise, they literally feel lost and not alive.
This is similar to addiction recovery, where a person starts to slowly regain the ability to perceive intermediate emotions. Without the ability to perceive these middle emotions, we will revert to the same old scenarios. We might choose a partner who hits us on the head because it’s very vivid, or return to a substance use experience because it’s also very intense. Indeed, what we can attempt to instill, for example, in therapy or other rehabilitation programs, is the gradual development of the ability to experience these dull intermediate emotions.
Olga Zaitseva: That’s true. I have an association, it’s like being on a diet. At first, it seems bland and tasteless, but over time you adapt to it. We even joked in class about how there are 50 shades of buckwheat, some salted, some with butter, and so on.
Because a good life is actually a stable life, right? When you know what comes next. When there aren’t these spikes, like a drunk coming home, a sober one coming home, and how to react to it. For children growing up with alcoholics, life was unpredictable. So they experience nothing or some kind of spike. When the father is in the early stages of drunkenness, he might be sweet and give gifts. Later, if he’s a violent alcoholic, he becomes aggressive. These stimuli are indeed very intense. Love is perceived like in a song by Shnur: “This is hell. I know love by the pain all over my body.” Yes, that’s what love feels like. So, when you say you recognize yourself in this from some time ago, it seems like if love should be love until death, it’s supposed to be overwhelming, making your heart stop pounding. But in reality, happiness seems to be where it is boring. It seemed to me that... it’s truly boring, and actually normal stability is where you understand what tomorrow will bring, and there is no anxiety.
And this anxiety, which constantly accompanies us who grew up in alcoholic families, that something will happen, something will happen, you don’t recognize it, but it creates some vividness and emotions. Ah, I exhaled, everything is calm.
As you said, I don’t work with addictions, but over time, as a therapist, we begin to restore their ability to function in favorable conditions. In conditions of peace, not war. It’s like adapting to a peaceful life after trauma. Probably, that’s how it is. And it really won’t be possible to immediately feel that buckwheat is also tasty and that you can get proper nourishment from it. It doesn’t necessarily have to be like that.
Maria Dolgopolova: About the buckwheat, yes. Initially, I was talking about this idea of self-destruction. It's clear when there's a secondary gain involved. I don’t know, you work 13 hours a day, everyone adores you, or you’re a star, or something else. But what I wanted to talk about were even more basic things that don’t provide a secondary gain. For instance, let’s use food as an example because it’s so common. Even if it doesn’t lead to formal eating disorders, I’ve noticed that people who are grown-up children of alcoholics or from dysfunctional families often eat poorly not because they attack junk food in a particular way, but because they lack the internal function to protect and care for themselves.
Olga Zaitseva: The sense of hunger is not there, or rather, hunger is hidden behind other things. The markers are all mixed up.
Maria Dolgopolova:Yes, and when I asked people about their eating habits, my clients who belong to this circle, I always wanted to cry when they talked about these things. They share these things without realizing that they’re eating poorly or not taking care of themselves in that area. But for a person who has this function in place, it’s really painful and disturbing to see or hear about such things. In the case of a therapist, it’s about hearing because we don’t see how our clients eat. And, of course, it’s just a visible example, but the issue is not just that they have a symptom of eating problems; it’s that this lack of self-care permeates every area of their lives. It accumulates everywhere in small amounts. The person, not noticing themselves, exhausts and leaves themselves resource-less. And it’s not because they’re malicious, but because this function seems to be turned off and maybe has not developed in their adult self.
And it’s a long journey. If the experience of safety wasn’t constructed in the family, there really isn’t that reference point when we try to maintain ourselves in some order, in a good basic sense.
Olga Zaitseva: Yes, and for that, one needed to experience good caregiving from an adequate adult who is present, who notices you, who understands. This initial feeding, in time, when the mother is not distracted by the drinking father but is focused on her child, understands that the child is hungry, understands other needs, doesn’t mix things up. You cry, go get a candy, and it will pass. The emotional reactions of the mother lay a lot of the future lifestyle patterns. It depends a lot. It might seem like, well, it’s nothing. Everything was fine, yes, like I heard in a movie once, “I learned to cook well thanks to my mom. I learned to cook. But it wasn’t because my mom taught me, it was because she didn’t cook at all. So, I started cooking.”
It’s actually a sad story because children who mature very early, children of parents who create such a couple, where one is destructive or does something destructive, and the other saves, and there’s this back-and-forth, it’s a very strange couple, and the child seems to live on their own. On the one hand, they start going to the store alone early, but in adult life, they experience significant regression. They begin to expect that someone will come into their life and care for them in that way: “Did you put on your hat? Did you eat?” Because they themselves haven’t developed this attentiveness to themselves. And yes, it’s not even about a secondary gain, but rather an unrecognized helplessness when facing adult life.
Matured early, but it’s a false adulthood, because in reality, “I was always imitating.” Those children who, for example, lived with a mother who drank and became the mother for the mother or the wife for the father, who watches to make sure the father doesn’t get drunk when the mother isn’t around. They play the role of an adult woman, and then they only think about rules, but don’t actually feel in terms of “I’m hungry” or “I need to go to the bathroom.” They might even endure and not go to the bathroom. And only through psychosomatic issues does the ability to feel their body begins. A certain insensitivity to the body.
I never, for example, thought of myself as someone who self-harms, even though adult children of alcoholics might have tendencies toward self-harm or borderline dynamics. I never thought of myself that way until I realized that I wanted to get tattoos. And the main thing is, when you get a tattoo, you don’t feel pain. It’s like it doesn’t hurt. Everything can be endured. This tolerance for pain, as my children say: “endurers.” And there’s something to it. We learn to endure. But the more I started to recover, Maria, the more my ability to feel returned. And when I recently had my tattoo redone, I decided to correct it. It was excruciatingly painful. I thought: “What a nightmare!” The first time I got it done, it was like, it doesn’t hurt, and I thought it was a distorted return to life. To do something to yourself to finally feel your presence in this life, but somehow through pain. As paradoxical as it is, it’s like pain is the entry into life.
Maria Dolgopolova: Yes. I really liked how Janet Woititz described that in an ideal scenario, parents help the child process their experiences. This is a classic description of one of the roles of parents: besides providing basic needs like food, shelter, and functionality, they also help the child process their experiences. But if, for some reason, parents are going through their own intense stress, such as being in a codependent relationship with someone with a chemical dependency, or dealing with severe depression or personality disorders, they cannot fulfill this role for the child. So, what happens is that as a child, the person becomes unusually mature, meaning they learn to cook all conceivable and inconceivable dishes, go to grocery, establish contacts with strangers to get help of any kind, earlier than other children. But as adults, these individuals often feel much younger than their actual age. This is because they start to experience “safe childhood” little by little only in adulthood, being self-teachers for themselves. They find themselves being pulled back into their childhood, noticing that their peers have accomplished incredible things, like starting businesses, having children, or taking on significant responsibilities. They feel like they’re being sucked into a different world and can’t even initially explain why they seem to be “lagging” in areas where others do not. They wonder why they encounter so many doubts during ordinary life tasks.
Woititz's formulation was that this is essentially “undeveloped development” in adulthood, which consumes all their energy. Therefore, there’s a certain objective sluggishness, and I remember from my clients that many described feeling like they were not truly adults, with a kind of awkwardness and shame at being exposed in this way.
Olga Zaitseva: Yes, I agree with you, it resonates strongly. It’s so important! If you haven’t gone through certain life stages to truly mature—what we call psychological maturity—you’ll have to re-experience all of that in the therapist’s office because you still need that adult presence beside you. That’s why it doesn’t work just with friends or self-help books. There needs to be the presence of an adult person with whom you reprocess some experience. You’ll have to relive all the crises, the three-year-old, seven-year-old, and adolescent stages. It’s very awkward and shameful to admit and vocalize, as if you’re somehow infantile or underdeveloped.
Maria Dolgopolova: Besides therapy, some people manage to "adopt" someone older from the next generation in adulthood and build an alternative family system. This doesn’t happen often, but I know more than one case where...
Olga Zaitseva: That’s wonderful. I mean, if it’s a healthy relationship.
Maria Dolgopolova: Yes, I mean healthy. Not when you make tremendous sacrifices just to gain that experience. When, for instance, you manage to make a boss somewhat of a father figure or something like that.
Olga Zaitseva: Yes, through new experiences with an adequate adult person. Yes, it’s great if that happens.
Maria Dolgopolova: Yes, it certainly does happen.
Well, I suggest asking listeners one more time if they have any questions for us, as we’ll be wrapping up soon if there’s nothing else you’re interested in.
Listener: Since no one else is asking, I’ll ask one more question. Could you please tell me how much your sessions cost?
Olga Zaitseva: Maria, you can start. I would probably say that it's not exactly sessions, although I understand that it’s easier to refer to them that way. I call them meetings, not even consultations, because before we move on to therapy, this format is the one I find most interesting, and I probably don’t consult. I’m not sure how to answer this question. It feels awkward to speak aloud about how much I charge for therapy.
Maria Dolgopolova: Can people find this information online, or is it private?
Olga Zaitseva: No, no. I don’t have any websites; I don’t maintain any. People just come to me... For some reason, it feels awkward to talk about the cost. Maybe because I want to raise my therapy rates now. I’d be more comfortable answering if you write to me. It’s really uncomfortable to say this out loud here. But I can respond in a message if that suits you. Maria, how about you? Can you answer?
Maria Dolgopolova: I can answer that. All the information is available online. I offer individual sessions both in short-term and long-term formats, and the cost of a session is currently 6,000 rubles. In recent years, I have also been actively running groups. I currently have an evening group on Wednesdays, which has just started, and you can still join. There will also be a group on Friday mornings. The groups are cheaper. The prices for the groups are listed on the channel you joined for this broadcast, and you can also ask me directly about them. One of the groups doesn't have a specific focus and meets on Friday mornings. People come with their own issues, and we process them in a dynamic format. The Wednesday evening group is called "New World. Settling In." It is for those who feel they are experiencing a new phase in their life, either literally or symbolically and spiritually.
Olga Zaitseva: Is this online therapy, Maria? Online groups, right?
Maria Dolgopolova: Yes, everything is online at the moment because I am physically located in Tashkent, so my work is conducted online.
Olga Zaitseva:Maybe we should summarize? We started with the question of whether the symptoms of adult children of alcoholics differ from those of children with adverse childhood experiences because they seem to overlap but also have differences. I find there aren't many differences, but perhaps we can name and formulate them so listeners can recognize and validate their own experiences, understand why they feel the way they do, and consider how to approach therapy or other ways of helping themselves. Understanding what you are dealing with can make life easier. At the very least, it helps to view oneself as a person present in life. Or maybe we don't need to do that now, I want to discuss with you...
Maria Dolgopolova: If you have a summarizing phrase or message for our listeners and future listeners, let's go for it.
Olga Zaitseva: I would like to say that often, and this is something I've observed in myself, there's a strong desire to find someone who will save you. Someone who will love you in the way you weren't loved, right? Initially, I was in search of that kind of love, but as I grew older and formulated what I learned from my relationship with my parents as an adult child of an alcoholic, and then found confirmation in books, I realized that this is about tolerance to dependency and various traits such as hyper-responsibility, hyper-vigilance, and high sensitivity because you are constantly controlling reality. Whether something will happen or not.
Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the strong, unconscious anxiety that people experience. They might say, "I don't understand why I'm always anxious. My life seems fine, but when I go outside, I can't be around people, I put on headphones and walk faster, sweating and not understanding why." When we start talking, we often discover that their childhood experience involved living with a parent who had issues, such as substance abuse. This symptomatology—this hyper-control that turns into anxiety—can make people feel the need to control everyone around them because people are unsafe. The first figures in their lives were unsafe, and being around others feels threatening.
Entering therapy can be incredibly difficult because it involves another person. I might think everything is fine, and I’m handling social interactions well because I’ve trained myself to do so. But in reality, there is always this underlying discomfort. This heightened anxiety might be a consequence of having lived in a family where one or both parents were addicted.
Consider the consequences of your experiences and whether you might benefit from therapy or other forms of support, understanding how you feel about people, and how to manage your interactions. For example, I used to think I was very demonstrative and enjoyed public speaking, but over time I realized this was a form of hyper-compensation. I was doing it automatically rather than because it was a genuine need.
Self-awareness and understanding your true needs are important. Reflecting on who you are because you had to play a role throughout your childhood can help you reconnect with yourself. And again, it's important to note that this is not exclusive to adult children of alcoholics, as children from dysfunctional families exhibit similar traits.
Maria Dolgopolova: The symptomatology of any difficult childhood, in general. I think this is a great summary. We’ll start wrapping up now. Thank you so much to everyone who has listened and will listen to the recording. Thank you, Olya, for coming and for sharing your personal experiences so openly. It’s a great treasure when someone can share such important details.
Olga Zaitseva: Thank you, Maria. I think we complemented each other very well. You provide very precise scientific formulations, which are crucial and supported by theory. That’s a real value. Sometimes, when I am emotional, I struggle to find the right words, and I think we balanced each other well today.
Maria Dolgopolova: The scholars at the university left their mark on me, so…
Olga Zaitseva: I’m grateful to you for giving me the opportunity to meet with you today and to discuss a topic that is important to me. Thank you.
Maria Dolgopolova: Thank you to everyone who joined us. We’ll see you in future broadcasts, maybe even in another session with Olya. Have a great day, evening, and weekend. Stay in touch. Goodbye!
Olga Zaitseva: All the best!
