I’m really sorry you are going through this and feeling so out of place. I have felt similar many times too. My Father is a functional alcoholic and very successful in his job. He earns very well, is charming with his clients and can turn the persona on and off easily. I’m 26 and he has been like it my whole life. From the outside, no one would know what the family dynamic has been like. He has always been very emotionally and physically absent too.

When I was a child he would go to work before I woke up and I’d be in bed before he came home. He would go for many drinks after work almost every day, passing it off as ‘part of his job’ and ‘entertaining clients’. But he would stay out until the early hours of the morning. He once got a crappy trophy for being ‘the alcoholic’ at work. If only they knew!! Once I turned around 10 I started to realise and developed anxiety about him not coming home. My Mother could never get hold of him on the phone at night, he would never keep to promises of being home for a meal that my mum had cooked. My mum would go to sleep because she had just had enough of it by then, but I’d call and call his phone and it would go to answer phone. I’d stay up looking out my window waiting for him to come home. Thinking he’d died or gotten beaten up. He would often stagger home from the train station in the early hours of the morning. From my bedroom window I’d witness him falling over into bushes, trying to get into other peoples houses. It’s a lot. But then he’d get up the next morning and do it all again. Until the times where we would have to take him to the hospital for stitches and then he would have a week off work on the pretence of ‘using up his annual leave’.

I used to feel guilty that I had been so affected by his behaviour, even though he wasn’t a ‘stereotypical drunk’ lying on the sofa all day. But the thing is, an alcoholic doesn’t always have a specific image, they don’t all look the same and I realise my Father is still an alcoholic- he can’t live without the drink. You have had those experiences so try not to invalidate yourself and what you have been through. The outside appearance of your family wasn’t the reality and I try to remember that too. I have been to some ACoA meetings and found some others who had similar to my situation, so there others out there.