A STUDY OF THE INTERACTIVE ELEMENTS OF PERSONALITY STRUCTURE AND EARLY TRAUMATIZING EVENTS IN ALCOHOL-RELATED SUPPORT GROUP MEMBERS

This study was undertaken in order to better understand two groups who experts in the field of substance dependency suggest have experienced chronic trauma-self-identified Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACAs) an d Codependents Anonymous (Codas) (Cermak, 1986a; Brown, 1988). It was hypothesized that current personality traits would be consistent with patterns of those who have experienced repeated exposure to a traumati c situation. Since both groups were founded to support adults who have shared a common history of chemical dependency in their family of ori gin, it was further hypothesized that ACA and Coda members would respo nd similarly. The 16PF(Cattell, Eber, & Tatsuoka, 1985) and a 15-item Likert-type list of early, potentially traumatizing events and their i mpact were administered to 24 males and 70 females. Overall, strong co rrelations were found between the impact of certain events, especially abuse by parents, siblings or others, and certain anxiety and ego-dev elopment personality factors. However, the two samples appeared to con tribute differentially to these relationships. ACAs, on the whole, rep orted more extreme personality factor scores and were more extreme in their perceptions about the impact of early events. Codas responded mo re often in the midrange on both sets of information. ACAs reported su bstantially fewer significant correlations between events and between events and personality characteristics than Codas. These findings sugg est distinct points of intervention for clients who are diagnosed as s uffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and self-identify as eith er ACA or Coda.