This is a low self esteem article that explains how do we carry our parent's emotional pain. Enjoy it!

How we were raised by our parents determined much of who we are today. How they were raised by their parents and what they experienced before we were born determined how they raised us.

This is the gist of the multigenerational transmission of emotional pain and shame I have written about in several articles. Two poignant examples of this process are grandchildren of alcoholics and children of the Holocaust.

Children of the Holocaust are those adult children whose parents survived the Nazi death camps even though their first spouses and children did not. The parents met after the war, often in refugee camps, married, immigrated to the United States, Canada or Israel, and became financially successful. They never spoke about their unimaginably horrible Holocaust experiences to their families. But their children still picked up their deep pain.

Helen Epstein was one such adult child of the Holocaust who wrote about her experiences in her book, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations . Growing up she knew that something terrible had happened to her parents, but she was not sure what it was. She felt she carried within her a bottomless, black pit of depression she could neither identify nor understand.

A journalist by profession, she set out to find answers about her pain by contacting and interviewing other adult children of the Holocaust. She found they felt as she did. They all carried their parents' deep suffering even though it had never been openly revealed.

Another example of how the unresolved problems of the parents affect the children are grandchildren of alcoholics. Their parents do not drink at all, possible because of the negative example their parents had set, yet alcoholism still affects these children through the behavior of Mom and Dad.

The effects of parental alcoholism on children can be significant, painful and lifelong. When a parent is an alcoholic, his drinking consumes so much of the family's time, worry and attention that little energy is left to meet the emotional needs of the children.

Several characteristics of adult children of alcoholics (ACOAs) have been identified in the voluminous literature on this subject. ACOAs typically suffer from low self-esteem, have difficulty trusting others and tend to be controlling because their parent's drinking was so often out of control.

In addition, they are usually emotionally repressed because they carry so much pain and saw how destructive emotions could be if the alcoholic parent acted out in a drunken rage. Not surprisingly, they often become codependent in that they become caretakers to others and neglect their own needs and emotions.

According to Ann Smith in her book, Grandchildren of Alcoholics: Another Generation of Codependency, ACOA parents are determined to be the best parents they can be, to give to their children what they missed growing up.

There is an unintended trap and burden in this for both the ACOA parent and the children, however. A parent who wants to be a perfect parent to heal his own childhood woundedness must have children who are perfect. The kids can't have normal problem for that would reflect on the ACOA parent in negative ways. It is as if the parent says to her offspring, "You must turn out well so I can feel good about myself and prove I can be a good parent even though I was not well parented myself."

But it shouldn't be the function of any child to raise a parents' self-esteem. This is something the parent should and must do herself. This is the major message of this column on the Good Enough Family: the Mental Health of our children depends on our mental health. Their self-esteem is a reflection of our self-esteem. If they appear to be in pain, and are either withdrawing or acting out, we must look to ourselves for their recovery by working on our own recovery.

About The Author / Credits: J. Bailey Molineux, a psychologist with Adult and Child Counseling, has incorporated many of his articles in a book, Loving Isn't Easy, Isbn 1587410419, sold through bookstores everywhere or available directly from Selfhelpbooks.com. Copyright 2002, J. Bailey Molineux and Selfhelpbooks.com", all rights reserved. Web Site: Loving Isn't Easy

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