If you’re reading this, chances are something in the title already landed somewhere. Maybe it was the word “alcoholic”. Maybe it was “adult child”, a phrase that sounds like a contradiction until you’ve lived it. Either way, you’re probably here because some part of your life doesn’t quite add up, and you have a hunch it goes back further than your current job or your current relationship.
I’m Françoise. I’m an ICF accredited coach, and I grew up as the child of an alcoholic. Those two facts are connected, and this article is about why.
The patterns nobody warned you about
Growing up around addiction doesn’t always look dramatic from the outside. Sometimes it’s a parent who’s unpredictable rather than absent, loving in the mornings and unreachable by evening. Sometimes it’s the specific exhaustion of never quite knowing which version of them you’ll get. Whatever the shape of it, children in that environment learn fast. You learn to read a room before you can read a book. You learn that your needs come second, or third, or nowhere at all, because there’s a louder need in the house that always takes priority.
Nobody sits a child down and explains any of this. You just adapt. And the adaptations that kept you safe at seven or eleven don’t switch off when you turn eighteen. They come with you into your first job, your first serious relationship, every room where someone senior walks in.
This is where I see it most in the people I coach. The client who over-delivers on every project because some part of them still believes being useful is what keeps them safe. The client who can’t relax around a difficult boss, because their nervous system learned long ago to read tone and body language for danger before words even land. The client who finds it almost impossible to ask for help, because as a child, asking rarely got them anywhere.
None of this is a character flaw. It’s intelligent adaptation to an environment that demanded it. The work isn’t about fixing something broken. It’s about updating a system that’s still running old rules in a life that no longer needs them.
Why this often stays invisible for years
A lot of adult children of alcoholics build genuinely successful lives. That’s part of what makes this so easy to miss, in yourself and in others. From the outside, over-functioning looks like ambition. People-pleasing looks like being easy to work with. Constant vigilance looks like being switched on and reliable.
It’s often only in coaching that people start to notice the cost underneath the competence. The exhaustion of never quite trusting a good week to hold. The discomfort that creeps in when things are calm, because calm used to be the quiet before something happened. The difficulty celebrating a win, because some part of you is already bracing for what comes next.
If any of that is landing, I want to be clear about something. You’re not imagining it, and you’re not being dramatic. These are well-documented patterns among adults who grew up around addiction, and they respond well to the right kind of support.
What ACOA coaching actually involves
My coaching draws on Neuro Linguistic Programming, cognitive behavioural coaching, and a trauma-informed, ACE-aware lens, alongside my own lived experience of growing up in this exact situation. That last part matters more than people expect. You don’t have to spend your first few sessions explaining what it was like to grow up with unpredictability at the centre of your home. I already understand the shape of it.
Sessions are grounded in coaching ethics and boundaries. This isn’t therapy, and I won’t pretend it is. What it is: a space to work at the pace your nervous system can actually handle, with someone who understands both the professional frameworks and the lived reality, working towards goals that are genuinely yours rather than generic ones borrowed from a coaching template.
I developed my programme after years of navigating people-pleasing, staying in situations I wasn’t happy in, and self-sabotaging relationships and opportunities, all traits I can trace directly back to being a child of an alcoholic. It’s the programme I wish I’d had access to when I was doing this work on myself.
If this is you
You don’t need to have hit rock bottom to benefit from this kind of coaching. Some of the people I work with are thriving by every outward measure and still feel like they’re running on a kind of fear that never fully switches off. Others are earlier in noticing the pattern and want support making sense of it. Both are the right starting point.
If you’d like to talk about whether this is a fit, get in touch.
