The glass child: Learning to live for you (with Alicia Meneses Maples)
About the episode
What happens to the child who’s always told to “be good” while all the attention goes to their sibling? They grow up invisible. They become the Glass Child.
In the third and final episode of our Parentification Series, I talk with TEDx speaker Alicia Meneses Maples, who coined the term glass child, about what it’s really like to be the sibling who carries the burden quietly.
Guest: Alicia Meneses Maples, TEDx speaker and glass child advocate
Alicia captivates audiences by illuminating the unseen struggles hidden within the Glass Child Sibling experience. Using powerful and inspiring narratives from her own and other adult Glass Children’s lives, Alicia helps adults discover how to influence the trajectory of mental health for their own lives, creating a lasting impact that extends to future generations.
This episode will help you:
Understand whether you were a glass child
Address how being a “good kid” shows up in adulthood
Create space for your own emotions, wants and needs
Episode links
MORE FROM OUR PARENTIFICATION SERIES:
(ep #13) The parentified child: Why they’re often the eldest daughter
(ep #14) The cyclebreaker: Breaking out of family dysfunction
ABOUT ALICIA MENESES MAPLES
https://iseeglasschildren.com/
WATCH ALICIA’S TEDx TALK
Resources
💬 JOIN OUR SIBLING-FOCUSED COMMUNITY
Join our Facebook group, Siblings For Love of Recovery to:
Connect with other siblings
Share your own story in a safe space
Support for navigating the journey
🤳 CONNECT WITH FOR LOVE OF RECOVERY
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/forloveofrecovery
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61561542956095
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Alicia: [00:00:00] Make sure that you are a good girl for your mom and dad."
Alicia: "Your mom and dad have so many things that they're dealing with so many problems that they're carrying.
Alicia: "Be a good girl."
Alicia: "Do the best that you can."
Alicia: "Make your mom and dad happy."
Alicia: I took that to heart. Like that was, that was my job. That's what I was supposed to do.
Dominique: Welcome to FLOR for Love of Recovery, where I'm your host, Dominique Sibling relationships can be so unique, but they can become more complex when there's drug or alcohol use involved. If you find yourself questioning how to help, you're not alone. Every month we bring together stories that empower you to navigate your sibling's addiction and offer a sense of connection.
Dominique: We also provide fresh perspectives on [00:01:00] understanding substance use and how to protect your peace. Join me on this journey in restoring hope and healing.
Dominique: Welcome back to the third episode of our miniseries on Parentification. In our last two episodes, we spoke about the complexities and experiences of being a parentified child, why it's often the eldest daughter, and what it means to be a cycle breaker. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about who the glass child is.
Dominique: I first heard the term glass child a couple of years ago when I was listening to a Ted Talk given by Alicia Maples, where she was talking about her own experiences as a glass child and what that meant for her siblings and her family. I've never heard something so validating, having a sibling, who struggles with substance use disorder, and I'm really excited to have Alicia Maples on the show with us today.
Dominique: So, Alicia, thank you so much for coming onto the show and, [00:02:00] sharing your own story with us and, yourself a chance to be vulnerable.
Alicia: You are welcome. Thank you for inviting me. I know we've been talking about this for quite some time and I'm glad Dominique, we were able to make it happen.
Dominique: So for those who might know, they might actually have come across your TED talk at some point, or they might have heard the term glass child being, you know, tossed around an ether.
Dominique: I've also heard the term cellophane child, which arguably could be used interchangeably. Before we really dive into it, what exactly is a glass child and could you tell us a little bit about what your experience has been?
Alicia: Sure. So a glass child is a child who has a sibling that is high Needs. And high needs can be defined a variety of different ways. It can be defined as a cognitive disability or delay. It can be defined as a behavioral issue. It can be defined as. A chronic or even a terminal [00:03:00] illness, but there is something going on with that sibling where they are consuming the attention of the parents and all of the priority is on that high needs child.
Alicia: And so the glass child doesn't receive the attention, the care, the development, the nurturing, and the things that he or she needs because the high needs sibling is taking it all up. And so we are called glass children, not because we are fragile, the opposite. We are very strong children. We're called glass children because we and our needs and our identities, we are seen through as though we are made of glass.
Dominique: That's such a powerful statement to feel that you're being seen through, that you're not really being seen for who you are. And I'm sure a lot of folks who are listening and have a sibling struggling with addiction have been in that situation and it's very [00:04:00] validating that you're not alone in this process.
Alicia: And you know, Dominique, one of the reasons why I'm so excited to be on this podcast with you is that there is a lot of attention as much as can be focused on glass children in relation to cognitive disabilities or delays and physical disabilities or delays. There are not a lot of conversations happening around glass children and addiction.
Alicia: So I think podcasts that you're, it's very important.
Dominique: Absolutely. There are so many different circumstances where a loved one or a family can have a high needs child or a high needs sibling, but I think that role often gets understated because addiction is not "a real mental illness" to some people .
Dominique: There's so much science to show how substance use disorder is part of being a mental illness. There is real trauma and, experiences, it's not just this person is choosing to struggle with this [00:05:00] addiction.
Dominique: So I love that you're actually highlighting high needs siblings, high needs families, that it's not necessarily a black and white, experience.
Dominique: So I wanna talk a little bit about what your experience has been like in childhood growing up. What kind of family did you come from and when did you notice that you had an atypical experience with your siblings compared to many people in the world?
Alicia: so I grew up in a two parent family, so my mother was Midwestern born and my father was from Colombia, south America. And I am the eldest of three, three children. So my younger brother, middle child, Mario, was born in 1971 with, undiagnosed autism.
Alicia: From what my parents tell me, he had regressive autism. He developed, normally, he met all the milestones that I met when I was developing, and then at age two [00:06:00] he completely regressed. And then my youngest brother David, was born with a terminal illness. and he was born when I was six years old. So the first memory that I have of something being, I'm gonna use the word weird because to me as a 4-year-old, it was weird, is my brother and I were playing outside in like this little tiny rubber swimming pool thing, and he reached over the side and he was picking up ants.
Alicia: He was putting them in his mouth. And of course today we know there's a term for that, it's called pica. But to me, as a 4-year-old little girl, I was like, oh, that's so gross, Mario. Why are you doing that? Stop that you're not supposed to eat ants. That's disgusting. Um, I didn't have the word disgusting in my vocabulary, but I thought it was really nasty [00:07:00] and he kept on doing it.
Alicia: And I remember I kept trying to stop him and, and he wouldn't stop. and then I also remember he had like Tonka trucks and matchbox cars and different things like that. And, he wasn't playing with them the way other kids on our block played with them. He just was kind of staring at them or he'd turned them upside down.
Alicia: It was like. He didn't really know what to do with those things, and the other neighborhood boys knew exactly what to do or exactly how to play with those toys. So those were two early memories and I was probably at that time, like four, four and a half .
Dominique: It definitely shows you how, like when we're younger, things might not seem odd or they might seem a little odd or not that big of a deal, and it's just like, oh, there's this weird milestone. But as you get older and you actually have a chance to reflect, you can see like. This was a very early sign that something was a little off.
Alicia: Absolutely. Yeah. I think it's part of [00:08:00] the healing journey also to be able to have that distance from those memories and have a little bit more wisdom and clarity, and then being able to see what we experienced for what it was.
Alicia: Eyes of an adult is, shocking. It's, shifting and it's part of the healing process.
Dominique: When you're a kid, your world is so small, it's just, you know, maybe your household, your family, your school, your friends, and like, that's about it, right? And as you get older, your world gets bigger and so does your perspective. And I think that's something that can be a gift because you're looking at your life or through your childhood or your experience growing up through a different lens.
Dominique: Having my brother struggle with addiction and we're 10 years apart. So when I'm 13, 15, 18 things might not seem so big of a deal. And Then as I've gotten older I'm like, that was actually a problem, or this was actually something that either I shouldn't have been doing. [00:09:00] at that point in time.
Dominique: So it's really interesting how perspective plays such a different role you know, once you're older
Alicia: When we're children, it's normalized for us. Like it's, it's not something that we recognize as strange or weird. it's a normalized part of experience growing up with our siblings. And often we don't understand as children or maybe until we get to middle school and we start to experience what other families are going through, or we get into our friends' homes and see that they're not dealing with the things that we're dealing with.
Alicia: And that can also be one of those revelatory moments where we go, wait a minute. Things are really different at my house. Why are things so calm and peaceful and okay here at my friend's house and not at my house?
Dominique: Once you start comparing yourself or comparing your situation and having those experience, you can really tell that something's a [00:10:00] little off.
Dominique: Something that you talked about, in your TED Talk, for those who haven't listed is this need to survive. You said glass children aren't fragile, which you kind of alluded to we're some of the strongest people we have to be to survive.
Dominique: What are some of the strategies or those coping mechanisms that you developed to survive as a kid?
Alicia: I think I wasn't aware when I was a child that these were things I was doing to survive. But you, you made the point about perspective and looking back, I can see what these things were. I think one of them was being as quiet and as small as I possibly could. I didn't wanna take up space. as much as I wanted to be seen, and as much as I needed attention growing up, attention in my house was a negative thing.
Alicia: Books were my best friends. So when I [00:11:00] needed to escape, the public library, which was just a few blocks from where we lived, I remember in the summertime, my mom and I would walk to the public library and I would check out as many books as I possibly could. The first time the librarian looked and said to my mom, Mrs.
Alicia: Manas, do you, you understand that these have to be back in a week? And she said, don't worry about it. And so I carried like, I was so proud to carry this stack of books with me back to the house. And that was one of the ways that I could escape. I could go to other worlds, I could meet other people, I could experience their stories and it would take me out of my own situation.
Alicia: So that was one of my coping mechanisms.
Alicia: I think I was rewarded for taking care of other people. Taking care of them physically and emotionally.
Alicia: I learned that if I wanted to receive [00:12:00] praise, I needed to excel in anything I was doing, particularly at school, but especially doing everything I could to make my family as happy as I could.
Alicia: And that was a great way for me to receive praise and, and positive attention.
Dominique: Yeah, those definitely resonate with me, especially going to library. Something that you had just mentioned is like, it was not just a coping mechanism, it was an escapism. It was really like a place where you could immerse yourself into the stories of the books and kind of disassociate a little bit from what's going on in the world around you or at home.
Dominique: And that's something that I feel like a lot of siblings and families could probably resonate: creating a safe place for themselves outside of the context of being home. When I was growing up with my brother, and we were really in like the thick of his addiction, and there's a lot of chaos between like the arguing, which is totally normal when it comes to substance use. Because I was a little bit older, my escapism became like going to the gym as much as [00:13:00] possible or hanging out with friends, going to work.
Dominique: Like I actually used to enjoy those things because it meant that I didn't have to be home when those things happened.
Dominique: You also had mentioned that unless we're perfect, we're not valuable, and you kind of talked about that right now, how people pleasing and making sure that you know you're on your best behavior is one of those things that you did to, show up as valuable or as perfect.
Dominique: Can you talk a little bit more about how that belief forms and how it ended up showing up later in life for you?
Alicia: Sure.
Alicia: Love this question.. You know, I don't think my parents said " Alicia, you're not valuable unless you're perfect." But the actions and the behaviors and the reinforcement through how they treated me, it was very evident to me as a child.
Alicia: In our home, the quieter that I was, the better I was, [00:14:00] the better I performed, the more rewards I got in terms of attention or even sometimes just being left alone, which as I said before, it's that weird dichotomy, right? Like, is. We want to be seen. We want to be held. But when the environment is so toxic and the only kind of attention or the primary kind of attention that exists is negative, you also don't want that either.
Alicia: Right? But this was also reinforced by community. Well-meaning people said to me, particularly after my youngest brother David was born with this terminal illness, I heard on a regular basis.
Alicia: "Alicia makes sure that you are a good girl for your mom and dad."
Alicia: "Your mom and dad have so many things that they're dealing with so many problems that they're carrying.[00:15:00]
Alicia: "Be a good girl."
Alicia: "Do the best that you can."
Alicia: "Make your mom and dad happy."
Alicia: I took that to heart. Like that was, that was my job. That's what I was supposed to do.
Alicia: You asked what I think is a super important question, which is how did this [being a "good kid"] show up for me in adulthood?
Alicia: So Very typical to the Glass Child experience is this idea that our purpose for existing is to be of service to others.
Alicia: To put our needs as secondary to everybody else, and that our value is correlated to how happy we make other people and how well we solve other problems.
Alicia: They're what we do and what we employ in order to survive.
Alicia: When we believe that our purpose is to serve others [00:16:00] and to fix other, people's problems, we look for relationships or for partners who have problems that need to be fixed.
Alicia: We're supposed to help other people and those people that we are most often attracted to have problems that we can't fix. At best we can't fix them. At worst, they're toxic. They're abusive. We also learn as children that our voices don't matter, and our needs don't matter. We can find ourselves in these relationships and we have no idea how to get out because we don't say this is not okay.
Alicia: Setting boundaries is incredibly difficult. And it's, it's incredibly difficult to identify that anything wrong is happening because we were wronged so much as children, that it's normalized for us.
Alicia: So [00:17:00] that's one example I would say that also carries over into jobs. I was talking to another adult glass child, she talked about her struggle in leaving the job that she was currently in to go to someplace where she would be treated, the way she needs to be treated so it's not just in, um, romantic relationships or marital relationships.
Alicia: It can be even in work relationships.
Dominique: And It's interesting to hear how it can bleed into careers and other areas of our life too, and you might not even be aware of it but again, when you take that step back, you can see a little bit more holistically as to where this is coming from or why this is happening.
Dominique: One of the areas that I wanna dive into is this need to take on responsibilities. We talked a lot about what problem solving looks like. Were there points in your own childhood or with your own family where you felt like you were taking on responsibilities that were either well beyond your years or were more than you were just willing to take on at [00:18:00] that point?
Alicia: Yes. When my brother David was born, I was six years old, but I was also old enough to be aware of the things that were going on around me. And one of David's issues was he would get sick to his stomach quite a bit.
Alicia: My mom and dad had one bedroom, and Mario, David and I were in another bedroom. And honestly, Dominique, I can't tell you how long this went on. I know as an adult it feels like it went on forever. Looking back, I was on vomit duty. I. So David would throw up multiple times in the middle of the night and I would be the one who would hear it.
Alicia: And I would get up and I would go down the hall to my parents' room and I would wake them up and I would say, David is getting sick, David is getting sick. And then mom or dad would come into the bedroom, turn the [00:19:00] lights on, try to clean up David, who was crying. again, I can't tell you how long it went on for, but it felt like it went on for an eternity.
Alicia: and I actually developed PTSD around that and I had no idea why. I remember watching a movie where somebody was getting sick in that way and I was in my twenties, and I got up and I went to our bedroom and into our closet and I just pushed myself as far back into the corner of our closet as I could.
Alicia: And this was my first husband. He freaked out. He came looking for me and he found me that way. And I was just kind of holding myself and rocking back and forth. And he's like, are you okay? And I said, no, I'm not. And he asked me what was going on. I had no idea. It probably took me, I didn't realize the connection, like my mid thirties, that, [00:20:00] oh my gosh, that's right.
Alicia: This happened to me when I was little and I. This is why I can't watch these kinds of scenes in movies.
And by the way, it didn't matter if I had school the next day,
Alicia: if I didn't get enough sleep, I still had to get up and do whatever I needed to do.
Alicia: Another is Mario, his behavior was very unpredictable and nobody knew what autism was in the seventies, or I should say, very few people had an idea or understanding of what autism was. His behavior was super unpredictable. And so we would be in the car driving around in Chicago and Mario and I would be in the backseat, no automatic or childproof locks, and, my job was to make sure that Mario didn't open the car door while we were going down the freeway and jump out.
Dominique: Wow. That is scary.
Alicia: That was my job. So I sit in the backseat [00:21:00] of the car and I would just watch him and he liked to play with the locks, like push it up and down, up and down, up and down.
Alicia: For context, no, like seatbelt laws at that time, or child seat laws. So one of my parents very easily could have sat in the backseat and made sure that Mario didn't jump outta the back of the car.
Alicia: But no was little Alicia that was responsible for doing that.
Dominique: Yeah It's a tough spot to be in to like have to feel this need to protect your siblings. I guess that can, that might feel natural for a lot of kids, but I think when you're doing something like that at a young age, and it's not just like standing up for your sibling, it's like making sure that they don't jump out of a moving car like that is truly frightening.
Alicia: it's very different. Right. I'm glad you said that because for people who are not from high needs families, some of this just doesn't make sense to them because they haven't experienced it. one of the ways that, that I can explain it is an 8-year-old [00:22:00] child, a neurotypical 8-year-old child, knows that if they grab a pot of boiling water off the top of the stove, that it's gonna burn them.
Alicia: So you don't have to like watch to make sure that they don't do that. That's just something an 8-year-old child doesn't wanna get burned by boiling water or an eight child understands that knives are sharp and they can cut. Okay. But depending on the need of the sibling, that's something that you have to watch out for.
Alicia: That was part of what I had to do. If mom left the kitchen and she was cooking on the stove, I had to stand there and watch the stove to make sure that Mario didn't come and decide that he was gonna take that pot off the top of the stove and do who knows what with it.
Dominique: right.
Alicia: I had to make sure that he couldn't get to the knives because he could hurt himself with it.
Alicia: That's a different level [00:23:00] of vigilance—w hat in non-high needs families, older brothers or sisters do for their younger siblings.
Dominique: like
Dominique: As you're speaking about your experience, I'm thinking about moments in my life where I might have had to look after my brother and while my brother didn't struggle with substance use, he was a little bit older that manifested while I was still living at home with my parents.
Dominique: And for me, like what that looked like is checking on him in the bathroom to make sure he wasn't like dead or overdosing. in the bathroom. And especially if no one was home or making sure that, you know, if he had paraphernalia out that my parents didn't have to come home to it or making sure that my things were secured and safe 'cause I was worried about, You know, what it might look like if he's desperate for drugs and I don't want him going through my things.
Dominique: It shows up in different ways. And even now, like A couple of months ago, my brother was in active use and I try to find for like the pockets of time where I can actually spend a couple of minutes with him.
Dominique: [00:24:00] And there was a moment where I was on the phone with him. He was sober at the time. And I said like, Hey, like, do you wanna grab, like, slice of pizza or whatever it was with me. He's like, yeah, sure. I was like, I'll be there in 10 minutes.
Dominique: I get there, I call him like, no one's answering. No one's answering the doors. Like now I'm freaking out. So I eventually get into, my parents live in a building, get into the building, eventually reach the apartment, and I'm like banging on the door like a lunatic at this point.
Dominique: And he's like, what, what? I'm fine. And I'm like, you're not answering the phone, you're not answering the door. And the fear is that I'm gonna find you dead one day. I guess in this situation, it's not only the fear of like the sibling, it could be the fear of a parent or anyone being in that situation.
Dominique: But that was a fear that I had so deeply. I was gonna come home one day and my brother was not gonna be conscious. Like that was something that always scared me. And I think when parents are in the throes of what's going on with their child addiction, especially if there's more than one child, it's very easy to forget about how that other child might be [00:25:00] perceiving that information, even if you're not asking them to do something.
Dominique: I think having them watch all that happen is, is very scary. And when it's the older child that is often dubbed at the strong one, then it's like, oh, well this person, they can manage it. Like Dominique will be totally fine. Or my mom coming to me because she knows she can confide in me and trust me and know that I'm gonna be able to handle emotionally what's going on for her.
Dominique: So I think even the emotional burden that can come on to siblings when they're the, like you said, neurotypical child or they're the child without any baggage, can be exhausting to say the least.
Alicia: Dominique, can I say two things about that?
Dominique: Absolutely.
Alicia: Actually, three. One is, I'm so sorry.
Dominique: Thank you.
Alicia: That is a trauma that I wish that you had not had to experience. And, I'm thankful that you're doing this podcast because you're allowing other people [00:26:00] to understand that there are others that are like them and you're giving them some help that I know that you wish that you had and I wish that I had when we were growing up. The second thing that I wanna say is to any parents that are listening to this, think about how you as a parent had the fear of coming home or waking up and discovering that your child had overdosed and died. Then think about your other children processing the same events that you're seeing and you're feeling and you're witnessing and you're experiencing every day. But with the coping skills of a child.
Alicia: You are an adult. I'm not saying that you parent, you didn't go through trauma. Maybe you did, maybe you didn't. But as an [00:27:00] adult, you have tools, you have skills. Children don't have those tools and those skills, they make up the tools and the skills, but they're going through everything that you're going through with the coping skills and the mind of a child.
Alicia: When your child is being quiet and good and says they're okay, they're not okay.
Alicia: Just like you are not okay. So don't, don't take that for granted. And then often think of parentification as physical things, like some of the things that I just described, like making sure when David got sick that I went and got my parents or, I speak to a lot of adult glass children who some of their responsibilities as kids were actually giving their siblings medication to them or hooking up oxygen tanks or different things like that.
Alicia: Right? So we think in kind of [00:28:00] this, um, horizontal perspective about parentification as sibling to sibling, what isn't talked about a lot is something that you brought up, which is parentification in a vertical manner, which is child to parent. So you said that one of the things that you had to do was listen to your mother talk about how she felt.
Alicia: It's not uncommon Dominique in high needs households for parents to overshare with their children, with their typical children, their non high needs children. And I'm talking, sharing everything from like, here's my emotional distress. Here's how I'm feeling.
Alicia: I'm so anxious, I'm unhappy. I, I feel hopeless to issues around their marriage. Like, your father and I are fighting. I don't know if we're gonna make [00:29:00] it to finances, to even their sexual relationship. It's unbelievable to me because we as kids seem like we're okay.
Alicia: We become this safe place for our parents to overshare. So all of that to say there's parentification that happens at this horizontal sibling to sibling level, and there's parentification that occurs from a vertical perspective. Us and the parents.
Dominique: Particularly with my mom, and I always felt like I was like her therapist and it started from like a really young age and I always dismissed it 'cause I just thought we were close, right? I was like, my mom and I are close, we're having girl time. This is what we do. We're going to shopping and we talk about A, B, and C.
Dominique: It wasn't until I got a little bit older, really in the last couple years where I started reflecting on that. And I'm like, did I really need to know about this situation? Did I really need to know about that relationship or how she perceived this person? [00:30:00] Because a lot of those things actually informed my own experiences and she might have had, you know, additional background on someone and I maybe didn't perceive them that way.
Dominique: And maybe it ended up showing up in my relationship with them in another way. And I think now it's gotten to the point where like I'm just listening to her and I've told her this. I was like, mom, sometimes I just uhhuh you to death because you don't ask me about me. If you want me to just be an ear to listen to, like I'll be an ear to listen to, but then don't like haphazardly ask me how I'm doing.
Dominique: It felt unique to me. But the more I started having these conversations with people, particularly with siblings, I see that I am not alone. My parents were not being malicious in this. They were just doing the best they can with what they had.
Dominique: Me being this quote "mature" kid, it felt very natural for my mom to wanna do that. and It didn't bother me so much at the time, but it's really now that I'm learning how much it's showed up in other areas of my life.
Alicia: Dominique, what you're [00:31:00] describing, it's real. It's part of the reason I believe that so many adult glass children decide to go low contact or no contact with their families because it's one of those things that once you see it, you can't unsee it.
Dominique: Mm-hmm.
Alicia: You recognize it for what it was.
Alicia: and what happens then is you start to see it today, like you recognize what happened when you were a child and you see it still playing out today. And our parents, some are able to make changes and to listen to what we're saying to them and listen to the boundaries, and some are just not willing to do that.
Alicia: My mom and dad are great examples, like my dad and I had, so much healing in our relationship towards the end of his life, and it's something that I'm so thankful for, and grateful for. And he became a protector for me, which is what I [00:32:00] longed for as a child and was thankful to have as an adult.
Alicia: My mom is 92 and because of her own trauma and because of what she lived through with my brothers, she is very much stuck in a, a pattern of behavior, and a pattern of communicating that isn't good for me. And we have difficult conversations a lot about it.
Alicia: I know she doesn't understand. I know she wants to have a relationship with me, and so I'm navigating how to have that and still be okay. So sometimes you can have healing in your relationship with your parents, and sometimes they're just not gonna change. So it's up to us to set the boundaries and figure out how to live with whatever they choose to do in terms of treatment and [00:33:00] communication.
Dominique: Yeah, absolutely. I think acceptance is such a big topic and, we talked a little bit about that in our last episode around cycle breaking. It's like sometimes you wanna accept the things you can't change because it gives you some peace. That way you can heal and move forward. But it's really hard to do that.
Dominique: There's a level of grief when you're realizing that this person won't change or the situation won't change. And I think that's where we have to allow ourselves to feel those emotions and then decide how we wanna move forward,, and prioritize our own wellbeing and our own mental health.
Dominique: So. I love that you shared that.
Dominique: I'd love to talk a little bit about your experience with your brothers. You talked a little bit about the, responsibilities that you had, but what was your personal relationship like with them?
Alicia: We will talk about, David first. I loved, I loved him so much. My parents told me he was sick, but I didn't know that meant that he was gonna die. I just loved [00:34:00] him. He was adorable.
Alicia: And of course I was six when he was born, so, I loved being a big sister and helping him. And he was just cute and precocious and he loved to sing. So I had a lot of love for David and for Mario. I loved him and he was a source of so much difficulty for me.
Alicia: But he also was going through the same things that I was when it came to David. You know, he was seeing David get sick. He, without the benefit of being able to verbalize anything. He just had his behaviors to express what he was going through and what he was feeling. So Mario and I, in a lot of ways we're just kind of allies [00:35:00] together.
Alicia: There's this really precious moment that I'll never forget, I was crying, and Mario came over and brought me a towel. It made me cry harder and I could see his reaction kind of in his face, like, did I do something wrong?
Alicia: And no, I, I just said, thank you, Mario. And, and he did what we we did for him, which is like pat him on the back. He just kind of uncomfortably patted me and that's always been a, a precious memory for
Dominique: I love that. That's, that's adorable.
Alicia: yeah, to describe our, our relationship, I loved both of them very much. The relationship with Mario was just tougher to navigate because I didn't know how to be close to him. there was a lot of, physicality in the relationship that I was afraid of.
Alicia: He punched, he bit, he did things like that, and so having a relationship with him it was challenging.
Dominique: [00:36:00] Yeah. I love that you bring that up because, one of the things we talk a lot about on the podcast, and I usually ask speakers, is like, what does it mean to be a sibling? And I think in the context of your relationship with Mario, at least you use the word ally. And I think that's really interesting because when we talk about sibling relationships, it's usually about in the context of like, like how, kind of how you described David is, you know, you had this smile on your face, you were bright, you know, you're enjoying that process.
Dominique: And then you shifted when you were talking about Mario and you were talking about him being an ally, but there was this intimate moment that you guys shared this very emotional moment where he was able to connect with you and it was almost like we're in this together. Kind of feeling. And I think that's something that's really interesting with siblings where things might not always be rainbows and sunshine, but I think siblings can connect with each other in a way that nobody else can because they are in it.
Dominique: It actually reminded me of when you said that he brought you the towel, to wipe your tears, a couple of months ago my brother, survived, his third overdose [00:37:00] and he didn't wanna talk about, what had happened and what his experience was like.
Dominique: So I had headed over to my parents' house to come see him. And when I asked him about it, he's like, you know, honestly, I don't really wanna talk about it.
Dominique: and I respected that, that was fine with me. But he grabbed my hand in that moment. And my brother is very affectionate, but he'll definitely catch you off guard. He grabbed my hand and I looked at him kind of puzzled 'cause I wasn't expecting it. And he's like, yes, Dominique, I am holding your hand. And he gave it like a gentle squeeze. And like, For me in that moment, like it was enough. And I think it was, again, it reminded me of like being his ally where we were just in this together and like, I was gonna be there for him, even if it didn't mean saying anything verbally. So that really resonated.
Alicia: that's precious.
Dominique: Yeah, it, it definitely was.
Dominique: one thing I wanna ask you about your sense of identity. I feel like often our identity gets wrapped up in who we are in the context of our siblings or how we show up for our parents. I feel like when people ask me about [00:38:00] like, who I am as a person, I'll talk about my brother a lot or I'll talk about my parents. I'm a caretaker. I love helping other people. Those things are true. But I feel like they don't always highlight who I am as a person. And I feel like I have a hard time highlighting my attributes. is that normal and like, have you experienced anything like that before?
Alicia: I think, a normal outcome of being an adult glass child. There are not a lot of studies, there's not a lot of research that's being done around glass children and the after effects. So I, I would just wanna preface that by saying, when I say normal, I'm talking about anecdotally, the stories, the, the hundreds of contacts that I've had in the.
Alicia: With people. even the topics that come up in the subreddit that is for glass children, a lot of it is about identity. So that's why I'm [00:39:00] saying yes, it's normal, not because I can point to a particular study and say, this study highlights this. So it it's just more lived experience and shared experiences.
Alicia: Yeah. I mean, we walk into a room as kids and the attention goes to our parents and to our siblings often. And I, I was known as Mario's sister. that's who I was. Or Mario and David's sister. because of how we are conditioned, trained, and programmed that life is not about us, it's about everybody else.
Alicia: We don't develop. a healthy sense of identity, which by the way, that's one of our parents' jobs. They're supposed to nurture us and help us discover who we are and what we're good at and what we like and what we don't like, and how to develop those attributes and our place in the world. In [00:40:00] Western society, part of our parents' role is to help us develop into a healthy individual, and we miss out on that when we're glass children.
Dominique: Yeah. And I feel like that's something a lot of the times that the glass child gets to miss out on is those little opportunities of self-discovery. My parents afforded my brother and I the same opportunities we grew up in the same households. We went to the same schools more or less, and I feel like he was robbed of a lot of his, his own experiences because of his addiction.
Dominique: And that was something that I'm very aware of today. And I also think about how his self-discovery might be manifesting today. And as Having been a glass child, I also think about how I'm using my opportunities now in my thirties to figure out what it means to be Dominique.
Dominique: Trying out different things that I didn't get to do as a kid because I didn't really have the chance to [00:41:00] do it. Like I remember one time I was in, elementary school and I really wanted to take piano classes. I don't know why I got this in my head, but I think there was like a piano class I was being offered and my parents just couldn't put me in the class, whether it was logistical or financial and whatever.
Dominique: I didn't really think much of it, but as I got older, when I was in college, I felt this need to learn how to play the piano and. It was just like this self-fulfilling thing that I feel like I needed to do. So I ended up taking piano classes in college and I, I pursued that a little bit outside of it and I eventually stopped, but it was like an itch that I needed to scratch because I never had the chance to do that as a kid.
Dominique: When I talked to my therapist now and we have these really heavy, serious conversations, sometimes she's just like, you need to go out and play. Like you need to just go have more fun. And I feel like I didn't do that enough as a kid. I had fun and I did things I enjoyed. I wasn't like robbed of like play.
Dominique: My boyfriend asks me, what kind of games did you play? What kind of things did you do? And I was like, I didn't really do that. Like I [00:42:00] didn't realize that it wasn't normal not to do those things.
Dominique: yeah, like I liked shopping with my mom and I liked doing these things, and. It's interesting how like you have these conversations now and it's always in hindsight that they come up.
Alicia: Also, part of the conversation that we have with ourselves. Sometimes it's subconscious. But then as we start going through our healing journey, it becomes more conscious. is,
Alicia: Is it okay for me to do things for myself? Is it okay for me to have an identity that is separate from my family?
Alicia: I love that you gave yourself permission, Dominique, to take piano lessons. I love that. That's, that's huge. And again, some, some people who are listening are like, I don't get it. We have to give ourselves permission to explore and to try things [00:43:00] just for us and. We have to wrangle this overwhelming guilt. We have no problems doing things for other people 'cause that that's how we lived. Is it okay for me to do that? It's not benefiting the world. It's just something that I wanna do.
Alicia: Is that okay? And Then if we decide, yes, it's okay, or screw it all, I'm gonna do it anyway, then this guilt can start to manifest. Like, mm, You know, you did the thing just for you. And how, how did that help? It didn't really help anybody. So now what do we do with that? Does that sound familiar?
Dominique: Absolutely.
Dominique: Especially when you said guilt, like all the time. And I think that guilt was something that came up a lot when it came to like setting boundaries with my family because I was learning how to prioritize myself, like I felt guilty, like if I said no to my mom doing whatever thing it was because I needed to do something else for [00:44:00] me, whether it was.
Dominique: Personal, whether it was work, whether it was just fun and I had these plans, let's say, or these limitations and these boundaries I was creating, I felt guilty about that.
Dominique: I think What helped me too is communicating that to her or whoever it was that I was building this boundary with. It was like, I need to do A, B, and C so that way I can be a better daughter so I can show up for you. And I feel like when I started telling people like why I was doing things, not that I need to explain things, it gave me power to like vocalize what the benefit was for me.
Dominique: It's kinda like when you name that thing, it gave me more power.
Dominique: We talked a lot about this need for, self-discovery and for validation. I wanna talk about like, recognizing our own emotional needs. I think that gets something that can get, swept under the rug or not even pulled up off the rug because we don't even know what our emotional needs are.
Dominique: And I think that's part of the self-discovery process.
Dominique: Is it normal for people to like, not know what their emotional [00:45:00] needs are if they're a glass child or maybe they don't know where to start?
Alicia: Absolutely. Yeah, there's a, a term that you may have heard of which is called alexithymia. and very prevalent among adult glass children. Alexithymia is not an absence of emotion. It's an inability to describe the emotion, and an inability to understand where the emotion is coming from. And that's super common amongst adult glass children.
Alicia: I was taught that I needed to suppress my emotions. I could be joyful, I could be positive, I could be encouraging, comforting, like those would be on the list of emotions that received positive reinforcement. What was absolutely not [00:46:00] allowed in my home growing up was sadness to the extreme that when we got the phone call that David had died, he was gone. I was 11. My dad hung up the phone and he looked at me and he said, Alicia, David's gone. He's with Jesus. I started crying and immediately dad said to me, stop crying.
Alicia: I had just found out my brother died and I was not allowed to cry. If I had a dollar for the number of times I heard, stop crying in my home as a child, who knows how big the stack would be. It'd be big.
Dominique: Wow.
Alicia: Difficult Emotions were absolutely not allowed for me when I was growing up. And that's not an uncommon experience for glass [00:47:00] children. For me, what that caused was an inability to recognize my own feelings. I mean, When you spend 13 years of your life not expressing emotion, I mean you just kind of turn off that recognition because it's not helpful.
Alicia: I don't like to label emotions as good or bad or positive or negative. It's one of the things that I've done a lot of work around in therapy is they're important. They tell us things. We need to pay attention to them. And so a lot of my work currently is recognizing that I'm feeling something.
Alicia: So for example. My first marriage was really just tragic and I was going through some, horrible times, and I remember Dominique, that I made like a double batch of chocolate chip cookie dough. I was by myself and I [00:48:00] sat down on the sofa and I just started eating raw cookie dough. I ate almost the entire thing.
Alicia: I remember thinking, you know, Alicia, your friends will talk about how when they're upset they'll have a pint of ice cream, but none of your friends talk about gorging on cookie dough.
Alicia: This is like not really normal. Why are you doing this? These, these were my thoughts. And then maybe about two weeks later I would go, oh, I wonder if I was doing that because I was upset about something. Two weeks later, I would be able to identify it as what it was that was upsetting me and making me angry.
Alicia: That is how disconnected I was from my own emotions. And the danger, the danger of [00:49:00] that is I could not see how terrible my marriage was, I could not see how destructive the behaviors were that were happening around me because I was so disconnected from my emotions. I couldn't see my emotions. I couldn't see the danger of my situation.
Alicia: It is important for parents to understand that your kids are allowed to have bad days. It doesn't make you a bad parent. If your typical child is having a bad day. It means your child is normal. And if you don't have the bandwidth to help your children regulate their emotions, get them some freaking help. Like that doesn't mean that you're a failure either. Getting your child a therapist is an [00:50:00] amazing way to be a good parent because you're recognizing that they have issues that you can't help them with, but they need help, and that's your job.
Dominique: I always joke that I think everybody, once they're able to speak, should be in therapy. Because there's so much that goes on in our lives, and especially in the context of your kids' life, that you can't see everything. And I think there are a lot of things that go on in a kid's life that they might wanna talk about that maybe they just don't know how.
Dominique: I know I would've benefited from having a therapist at a young age because as an adult, I can spot out all the things where, there should have been some kind of a change or there would've been an opportunity for me to talk about things that maybe, rubbed me the wrong way.
Dominique: As a parent shouldn't have to fall on you to be your kid's therapist either. Your kid, I think, should be able to come to you and confide in you and trust you if there's a healthy relationship between you two. But I think it's okay if a kid doesn't wanna come to their parent for every little thing, but I think having a healthy relationship with another adult that [00:51:00] can help them identify those experiences and emotions is so important.
Dominique: Is there any advice you would give to siblings in particular who were trying to step out of maybe a caretaker role or trying to rediscover what it's like to just be a sibling to their brother or sister?
Alicia: Yes, I'm hesitating because this is probably not gonna be a popular answer.
Dominique: That's okay.
Alicia: Move as far away as you can. It's really important for siblings to have a chance to live life as their own person and discover who they are and in most. High needs families. That doesn't occur unless the glass child moves far [00:52:00] away.
Dominique: I don't think it's an unpopular opinion. A lot of people can probably resonate with that. When I was contemplating moving out, I was waiting for things to quote, get really bad at home before he decided to make a conscious effort and decision to move.
Dominique: I only think about like what that actually ended up costing me in the long run and what that might've looked like if I would've moved out sooner or further away.
Dominique: I live about 20 minutes from my parents and something that I talk about with my therapist is like, it's like far enough where I don't see them every day, or I don't always see them every week, but it's close enough where I can just like hop over if I need to, right?
Dominique: If there's an emergency or if there's something that needs to happen. Like I can just head there. And I think there's something about having distance between family and not because you know you're sick of them or you're tired of them, but it's forces you to prioritize what's truly important to you and understanding what is an emergency.
Dominique: I think a lot of the times, especially with being a glass child, having a high need sibling, everything feels like an emergency all of the [00:53:00] time. Especially there's addiction and you're thinking about losing a life, like, that's so scary. But I think not everything is an emergency.
Dominique: Asking yourself is there a better adult who can handle the situation? Am I the best person to handle the situation? Can I support this person from afar without physically being there? All these types of questions should be asked when creating some kind of physical distance between yourself or the glass child and a family.
Alicia: I agree with you. For parents who are really, codependent with their kids, moving away forces them to start developing new relationships and new resources, and that can be important.
Alicia: It may feel like I'm not answering your question about how to develop a relationship with your sibling, but figure out who you are, who are you, and then you can start showing up in [00:54:00] better, healthier, more productive ways for your relationship with your, with your sibling.
Alicia: If you're trapped in that cycle, then you're not necessarily showing up in the best way for that relationship. So that's why I answered your question as, move as far away as you possibly can.
Dominique: Yeah, I absolutely love that. Like I think once I moved out and I was able to create that distance, I could think about. How do I wanna show up for my parents? How do I wanna show up for my brother? And more importantly, what kind of relationship do I want to have with them, if at all? Now my brother is in the very early stages of recovery
Alicia: Yeah.
Dominique: we're able to think about like what our relationship could look like, like how I can support him. And just like Having normal conversations. I think has been helpful in understanding what do I want our sibling relationship to look like?.
Alicia: That's beautiful. Treasure those moments every time that you have a chance to have, [00:55:00] have them, dominique,
Dominique: Absolutely. Well I wanna begin to close out with asking you two, very important questions. The first one being in your TED Talk, you suggested that parents , show their kids that they're validating their experiences just by saying, I love you. And by affirming that they're valued simply for existing.
Dominique: What would that have meant to you as a child to hear those words from your parents?
Alicia: I saw something the other day that made me cry, and it was a parent writing a note to their son saying almost those exact words. I love you just because you exist. I love you because you're my son. I love you because you're beautiful. I love you because you're you. And it brought tears to my eyes to read that because I thought how fortunate for that boy [00:56:00] to hear that message and how sad for little Alicia that I didn't get to hear that message.
Alicia: My parents didn't know that they needed to say it. I, I don't think that they were being malicious. I think they were just in survival.
Alicia: Regardless of how I perform or I don't perform, regardless of whether I cry or I'm happy that I'm valuable because I'm Alicia, it would've made all the difference in the world to me.
Dominique: Oh, I love that.
Alicia: I would not be struggling as an adult to believe that I'm valuable because I am.
Dominique: A lot of the important topics that we talked about today come from learning how to self-love too. And I think if you're not told that as a kid from the people that arguably mattered the most at that time, your [00:57:00] parents, I think that can really stunt how we see ourselves and how we show up for ourselves and love ourselves.
Dominique: The last question I wanna ask you, is there anything that you feel that a glass child should hear that we haven't already covered? Or is there any, piece of advice that you'd wanna give a glass child that's looking to, start their own healing journey?
Alicia: First would be find a therapist, find a trauma informed therapist, a therapist who has done work and understands the issues around childhood trauma. You've experienced childhood trauma, emotional neglect, potentially even abuse witnessed or vicarious trauma as a child.
Alicia: Many adult glass children talk about going on this circuitous journey of trying to find therapists. And, and so I would say that that is step one.
Alicia: The other thing that I would say is be [00:58:00] self-compassionate and work on self-compassion because as you go through the healing journey, there's a lot that's gonna come up for you.
Alicia: And then the third thing I would say is as you're beginning your healing journey, you want to surround yourself with people who understand and who can be supportive of you and not dismissive of you. And I really wanna caution you, with this next thing that I'm saying, I'm not trying to cause division between siblings and their parents.
Alicia: I would not talk about what you're discovering in therapy with your parents until you know they're ready to hear it. I've heard far too many stories where adult glass children have these epiphanies about what they went through and the things that they [00:59:00] endured, and they are anxious to talk to their parents about it.
Alicia: And what ends up happening is they go to their parents and their parents aren't, they're not ready to hear it. They're not ready to listen. They're not ready even to see it. And so the glass child just gets re-traumatized all over again. So be cautious about approaching your parents with the things that you're learning.
Alicia: I get wanting to do that, but I also want you to be careful and not be re-traumatized by your parents not seeing you all over again.
Dominique: Yeah, I absolutely love that and I can actually admit that I've been guilty of that. I can speak from personal experience. It doesn't work out in your favor most of the time. Not even because they intentionally want to invalidate your experience, but really just because they don't remember it that way.
Dominique: Or they might just be feeling attacked. And I think it's a normal human response. Going to therapy is for you to [01:00:00] process those experiences and decide how you wanna show up, how you wanna move forward, and then if and when your parents are doing their own work and they're ready to have those conversations, then feel free to go ahead and have the conversations in a way that your parents might be able to receive that information.
Dominique: With that being said, I wanna thank you so much, Alicia, for coming onto the show today. Sharing your own personal experience, your professional experience, and for all the work that you're doing, advocating for glass children all over the world.
Alicia: Dominique, thank you for having this podcast. Thank you for shining a light on this one aspect of the Glass Child experience, which is addiction. It's so important and I'm thrilled and honored that you asked me to be here. Thank you.
Dominique: Thanks for listening to this episode of For Love of [01:01:00] Recovery. If you enjoyed this episode or know somebody who might, please leave a comment and share it. You can also join our Facebook group, siblings for Love of Recovery. If you're looking to have deeper conversations around your siblings drug or alcohol addiction, and remember whether there's hope, there's healing.