No One Cares That You’re Broken-Dean Winchester/Supernatural Meta
Thesis: Dean’s emotional and psychological problems stem primarily from John’s alcohol abuse. Dean exhibits the majority of characteristics of an Adult Child of an Alcoholic and is one of the few characters on television whose mental health issues are clearly shown to have its source from the alcoholism of a parent.
Within the Supernatural canon, oblique references have been made to John Winchester’s alcoholism. That he abused alcohol is clear, as it was mentioned on more than one occasion that he would pass out from drinking and that he stole a beer can wreath (not exactly the decoration that would be of interest to anyone but an alcohol abuser). Bobby also has a serious alcohol dependency, called “the town drunk” in 5.15 and is himself the son of an abusive alcoholic. This being the CW, alcoholism is rarely explicitly discussed, the closest coming in season 7 when Sam addresses Dean’s drinking when they are fighting the Japanese alcohol monster. However, the extent of John’s alcoholism can be inferred from Dean’s own behaviour.
Now, I focused primarily on the effects that John’s alcoholism had on Dean as opposed to Sam, who also bears psychological scars from his childhood and from John’s drinking. However, the main difference I see between the characters and their reactions to John’s alcoholism is that growing up, Dean was a stable parent figure for Sam. Dean, whose own alcoholism didn’t surface until they were adults, was an unwavering caregiver who provided a strong and stable role model for his brother. This provided Sam with something resembling a stable emotional home life, which Dean lacked completely. Additionally, Dean and John worked to shield Sam from the harsh realities of hunting, not telling him until Sam found John’s journals, allowing him to have a more normal childhood, at least for a time. While their nomadic lifestyle and John’s mercurial parenting prevented Sam from ever having a normal childhood, it was considerably more steady and ordinary than anything Dean had ever had the opportunity to enjoy (at no time is it implied or stated that John made any effort to shield Dean from the truth of the existence of the supernatural). While I would never say Sam is the picture of mental health, the protective factors his brother provided him with allowed him to prevail better in the face of John’s drinking and poor parenting.
There are several characteristics that are common to adult children of alcoholics and Dean Winchester shares a number of them, to the point that Dean could be considered to be highly affected by his father’s drinking. According to Janet Geringer Woititz, the thirteen common traits of adult children of alcoholics (ACoAs) are the following:
- Can only guess what normal behavior is
- Have difficulty following a project from beginning to end
- Lie when it would be just as easy to tell the truth
- Judge themselves without mercy
- Have difficulty having fun
- Take themselves very seriously
- Have difficulty with intimate relationships
- Overreact to changes over which they have no control
- Constantly seek approval and affirmation
- Usually feel that they are different from other people
- Are either super responsible or super irresponsible—there’s no middle ground
- Are extremely loyal, even in the face of evidence that the loyalty is undeserved
- Are impulsive. They tend to lock themselves into a course of action without giving serious consideration to alternative behaviors or possible consequences. This impulsively leads to confusion, self-loathing and loss of control over their environment. In addition, they spend an excessive amount of energy cleaning up the mess.
(http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200702/toxic-brew)
The most obvious traits which Dean has are 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13, with some evidence for 1, 3 and 5.
4. Judge themselves without mercy: Yeah, definitely. Dean is his own harshest critic, constantly judging himself for all manner of things, such as breaking in Hell, torturing people and so on, all coming to a head in 7.4, where he is put on trial for his actions. It is Dean’s own guilt that causes this trial and his own guilt that convicts him. His guilt (and likely not solely his guilt over the death of Amy Pond) sentences him to death, without mercy.
6. Take themselves very seriously: Dean’s level of personal responsibility is extreme. In season 7, episode 5, Sam asks what is wrong with Dean, who is wrestling with his guilt after killing Amy Pond. He replies, flippantly, that something is always eating him, that it’s just who he is. “Something happens, I feel responsible, all right? The Lindbergh baby, that’s on me. Unemployment, my bad.” While it is delivered in an off-hand manner, under the layer of bravado and humour, it reveals a lot about Dean. He has been responsible for his brother’s life since the age of four. Even before that, he took it upon himself to consol his mother after his parents fought (5.16). After that, he took care of his father, taking on the role of nurturer in the family. Parentification, taking on the role and responsibility of a parent, is a very common amongst children of alcoholics. Combined, this means that Dean feels responsible for everything, even when it is well outside his control. While he masks his seriousness with humour, he does take himself seriously.
7. Have difficulty with intimate relationships: Until Lisa, Dean has never had a long-term sexual or romantic relationship in the canon of the show. He is shown to be extremely sexual, however, there is little emotional intimacy between Dean and his sexual partners. This is remarkable, since he is either 31 or 32 (the show seems pegged to real-time, however, a year has passed since the end of season 5, which puts it as occurring a year in the future). His relationship with Lisa is based upon a one-time sexual encounter and then running into her again at a later point. She is his ideal, his literal dream (3.10 “Dream a Little Dream of Me”). After stopping the apocalypse, he goes to her, because he has nowhere else to go, but he admits later in season 6 that he has no idea why she put up with him. It falls apart in the end, because Dean cannot stop being what he is and Lisa can no longer take it. It is questionable as to what Dean actually felt towards her, as well. Jensen Ackles has stated that he felt that Dean was less in love with Lisa and more in love with what she represented (paraphrasing here). Dean has difficulty connecting to another person, which prevents him from entering long-term relationships.
Even beyond that, as intimate relationships are not only restricted to sexual ones, Dean has shown a complete lack of being able to make and retain friends of serious nature. His friendships can be considered more as acquaintances, even fond ones (for example, Garth or Ash), or familial. Those who break the mould (Jo, Bobby, Ellen and Castiel) become family and that is the only reason Dean is able to justify his affection. By transferring them into the designation of family, Dean is able to transcend the feeling that he doesn’t deserve their love and friendship and allows himself to become attached to them, often in somewhat co-dependent and unhealthy ways.
8. Overreact to changes over which they have no control: When Sam dies in 2.21, Dean literally sells his soul to Hell. This constitutes something of an overreaction. This overreaction is in response to growing up in an uncertain environment. Dean grew up not knowing whether his father would return and if he did return, how he would act towards him. John was a strict and mercurial father and his drinking would have likely exacerbated these tendencies. That, in turn, affected Dean and the way he reacts to things. Growing up in an environment like that, the only way Dean could have any mastery over his life was through maintaining very strict control over everything that he possibly could. When that control slips from him, he overreacts massively.
9. Constantly seek approval and affirmation: Dean is defined by his approval-seeking. He needs external validation, since the way he grew up, with a father who drank created the conditions for low self-esteem. Adult children of alcoholics tend to have lower self-esteem than children of non-alcoholics because of several possible factors, including parental neglect, inability to trust, unstable home environment and feelings of being a failure (http://libres.uncg.edu/ir/asu/f/Ballard_Mary_1995_Attributional%20Style.pdf). With Dean’s chronically low self-esteem, he cannot obtain self-affirmation, so he seeks it in other people. His interactions with John are proof of that. He is “Daddy’s little brunt instrument” (3.10, again, what a fantastic episode for getting a real understanding of the mess that is Dean’s psyche), and allows himself to be used to achieve John’s goals, to the extent that he is the one to kill Azazel (2.22), the culmination of over two decades worth of ambition for John. While Dean’s reasoning for hunting and destroying evil creatures is different than John’s (protecting innocent people and creating a safer world as opposed to being motivated by revenge), there is definitely an element of impressing his father, gaining his approval in his continuation of “the family business.” Beyond that, Dean’s interaction with Gordon in 2.3, “Bloodlust,” has an element of wanting to impress the other man. He wants Gordon to be impressed with him, to approve of the work he’s done, because he needs that external validation of his life and actions. With his father gone, Dean seeks out another older male whose approval he can try to gain.
10. Usually feel that they are different from other people: Many ACoAs feel this way, because they are different from other people, other people did not grow up having to take on adult responsibilities as children, they did not have to deal with inconsistent parenting styles, they did not have to deal with emotional and/or physical abuse (though many people who were not raised by alcoholics were in these situations) and it leads to feeling profoundly alienated and alone. In Dean’s case, it is even more severe, since he is one of the few people who has seen what is lurking behind the veil of the normal world, leading to serious isolation and loneliness. In 1.6 “Skin,” Dean says that while Sam is a “freak,” so is he. While the label of “freak” is applied to Sam more than Dean, in the earliest seasons, Dean is the one who is weird and unable to function in normal society, with normal people. In addition, he fully believes that he is incapable of this. In 1.8, “Bugs,” Dean claims that he would “blow his brains out” if he had to live a picket-fence, apple pie existence in suburbia. Dean believes that he is so fundamentally different from other people that he could not live like them or with them, no matter how much he desires it (and he is shown at later points to desire the apple pie life).
11. Are either super responsible or super irresponsible-there is no middle ground: Dean definitely tends towards the super responsible end of the spectrum. He has been responsible for caring for his brother since the moment John thrust him into his arms and sent them out of the burning house in Lawrence. In 1.18 and 3.8, flashbacks have shown that Dean was caring for his brother for days at a time while their father went on hunts, at ages that were far too young for that type of responsibility. Beyond that, Dean was shown comforting his mother as a small child (5.16), cleaning up the emotional wreckage his father had wrought even before the fire (I suspect that John was likely a bit dependent on alcohol prior to the fire and his subsequent alcoholism was greatly exacerbated by the loss of Mary and what he sees after he starts hunting). Dean takes responsibility for everything and everyone. In 7.7, when despite Dean’s best efforts, when Camille is killed by the ghost, Dean blames himself fiercely for this, to the point of being unable to even take pride or contentment in the fact that he was able to help stop the killings and save other people. Dean feels the need to save everyone, but especially his brother. He takes all the bad things that happen to his family and even to strangers and internalizes it, rendering it as guilt which manifests as the need to be responsible for everyone.
12. Are extremely loyal, even in the face of evidence that the loyalty is undeserved: Dean is the epitome of providing undeserved and unwavering loyalty. He was loyal to his father, sticking with him and by his side when Sam left for university. He remained so loyal that he followed his father’s tiniest and most oblique and obscure orders (for example, dropping everything to follow what he couldn’t have been certain were his father’s text messages) in the first season. His character, the vessel of Michael, is reflected by the extreme loyalty of Michael to God, who will smite the brother he loves simply because it is what he believes his father wants him to do. Because it is righteous. This actually reflects back to when John asked Dean to stop his brother from becoming a monster, by any means necessary. Dean never follows through on this, partially because he is not as dogmatic as Michael (his loyalty is human, not divine, and thus flawed), but also because his loyalty extends to Sam.
He is loyal to a fault with Sam. That’s not to say that he doesn’t call Sam out when the loyalty and trust is broken. Dean, despite his own protestations to the contrary, is not stupid, so he sees the awfulness of his brother’s actions and is wounded by his brother’s own disloyalty, especially when he has given everything (including his own soul) for Sam. That being said, he trusts Sam far too long in season four. It may have been interesting to see Dean’s faith in Sam irrevocably shattered and have him come to terms with what his overly dependent nature have wrought in season five, but Dean’s jaunt into the future in “The End” shows a world that has literally been destroyed by Dean’s lack of loyalty on Sam. When Dean stops being loyal to his brother, Sam says yes to Lucifer and the world delves into an apocalyptic wasteland. When Dean gets back to 2009, he is forced to be loyal and trusting with his brother, to forgive and forget because if he doesn’t, the world will end bloody. He lapses back into his pattern of trust and loyalty (even if it is occasionally more fractious than previously) for the rest of the season, to the point of going along with Sam’s plan to trap Lucifer and his faith in Sam being able to wrench control back at Stull Cemetery in 5.22. This loyalty, despite the fact that it is not really earned back by Sam in season five, but is more rewarded by Dean as the alternative world seen in “The End” is too dire for any other option.
His loyalty is turned against him in season six. Despite his concerns over Soulless Sam’s conduct, he still trusts him enough to have his back, until he realizes that something is truly wrong with Sam, after Sam allows him to be turned by a vampire in 6.5. His faith in Sam, a version of Sam which is clearly wrong and broken to the viewer (dubbed “RoboSam” by watchers before he was revealed to be lacking in a soul). Dean’s loyalty is so strong and blinding that he got turned into a vampire because he can’t fully comprehend how wrong Sam is (and his broken plead of “Sammy” immediately after being fed vampire blood speaks to how much Dean still has faith in his brother, when the viewers had long lost that faith).
Following that, still in season six, Dean was loyal to Castiel, even when the evidence against Cas was mounting. Bobby and Sam voiced their concerns about Castiel’s behaviour, but Dean could not bring himself to believe it. Furthermore, Castiel’s actions were out-of-character for him, which means that Dean did not learn his lesson from Soulless!Sam. Cas had earned Dean’s trust (“He has gone to the mat cut and bleeding for us so many freakin’ times,” 6.20, “The Man Who Would Be King”). For ACoAs, frequently, once trust has been awarded or earned, it cannot be revoked, not until it is beyond painful. Cas even comments on Dean’s inability to lose faith in him (“And the worst part was Dean, trying so hard to be loyal, with every instinct telling him otherwise,” 6.20). Because they trust so completely, true betrayal stings deep and the remainder of the season and season seven shows how badly Castiel’s betrayal has broken Dean. He remarks that what Cas did was one of the first things he couldn’t shake off, “You know, I used to be able to just shake this stuff off. You know, whatever it was. It might take me some time, but… I always could. What Cas did… I just can’t – I don’t know why” (7.17). What I suspect stings the most about Castiel’s betrayal is that he acted against not only Dean (which I don’t doubt he would be able to forgive, as he forgives everyone else he loves for their betrayals of him, because of his his low self-esteem, he doesn’t feel like he has the right to hold a grudge for the long-term), but against Sam. It tears his loyalties in two and Cas acts against the person who Dean has spent his life protecting. This harkens back to Dean’s overly developed sense of responsibility, so Castiel’s duplicity and attack on Sam break Dean more than it would have normally.
13. Are impulsive. They tend to lock themselves into a course of action without giving serious consideration to alternative behaviors or possible consequences. This impulsively leads to confusion, self-loathing and loss of control over their environment. In addition, they spend an excessive amount of energy cleaning up the mess: Season three. Oh, season three. An impulsive, poorly thought-out plan after being crushed by grief to sell his soul in exchange for Sam’s life led to a full year of this for Dean. Dean resigns himself to his situation, allowing the loss of control to take over his life and given his turning point in “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” definitely led to self-loathing (he shoots a demonized version of himself in his dream, which only comes back to taunt him. This constitutes an extremely literal demonstration of his self-loathing). After Dean finally admits that he doesn’t want to die and go to Hell, Sam and he spend the rest of the season trying to find a way out of his deal; it could be considered having to spend a lot of energy cleaning up his mess.
So after this analysis, I hope that it is clear that Dean was profoundly affected by his father and his adopted father’s drinking. Beyond those, the most common characteristics of ACoAs, there are several interesting things that show how deeply Dean was scarred by being raised by an alcoholic.
The title of this essay, “No one cares that you’re broken,” a line delivered by Dean to Cas in 7.22, demanding that the angel , “Clean up [his] mess.” However, I felt that it was a great way to describe Dean and how he expects people feel about him. No one has ever cared that he is broken. His father didn’t, even though Dean lost his mother as a four year old child. Instead of allowing him to grieve appropriately, Dean was conscripted into the roles of guardian to Sam and warrior against the supernatural from an early age. Bobby tried to care for him and to provide some normal childhood activities (Bobby’s memory of playing catch with Dean in “Death’s Door”), however, a few attempts to provide some normalcy is not sufficient. Bobby actually may have exacerbated the problem, considering his own rampant alcoholism, and wavering expectations of Dean. When Dean was staying with him, clearly sometimes he was expected to be a normal child and he was likely expected to be an adult and a hunter at other times. Shifting and inconsistent expectations lead to several of the issues listed above.
Neither of Dean’s parental figures ever took it upon themselves to recognize the pain and psychological problems Dean has endured throughout his life. Not until season seven does Bobby even suggest that Dean talk about his pain, breaking from his tradition of encouraging Dean to deal with his pain through repression and alcohol abuse. By then it is far too late, Dean fully believes that he no one cares that he is broken and that he doesn’t deserve to be cared about.
Beyond his father and his adopted father, Dean learns this lesson from Castiel. After “99 Problems,” Dean’s depression reaches a breaking point and he intends to say yes to Michael. This is tantamount to suicide. Instead of talking him down, dealing with the issue of Dean’s suicidal intentions, they lock him the panic room and after he escapes, Cas tracks him down and beats him to within an inch of his life. It’s about Castiel’s anger and disappointment (albeit justified anger and disappointment), but it does nothing for Dean. When Cas takes him to Van Nuys to retrieve Adam, his rash and desperate action leads Dean to step up to the plate, deny Michael once more and kill Zachariah. Dean owes Cas and his overwhelming sense of responsibility and guilt means that he cannot take the selfish route and give up. Interestingly, this is one of the only times Dean puts himself before his family and friends, and he is denied his chance to be selfish by Cas, once again showing that no one cares how broken he is.
Sam is a far more selfish character than Dean (and I do love Sam, but he is). While Dean defined himself by his willingness to sacrifice everything for his family and for others, conditioned from the age of four to be such, Sam was conditioned to accept the love and sacrifices that his brother made for him. He was taught, by example and by experience, that Dean would give up everything to make sure that his brother was happy. The times when Dean did not (flashback in the episode 1.18 “Something Wicked”), he was punished immensely. The implication is that Sam was not as punished for his transgressions (though he certainly felt he was punished within the family) as was Dean (for instance, when Sam ran away for a time to live on his own, it was viewed as a happy memory, while Dean implied that John was extremely angry and punishing for his failure to stop his brother from leaving). Sam loves his brother, make no mistake, however, he does not understand why his brother is so broken, because he was not in the same situation as his brother. As a result, though he tries to connect with his brother at various times over the years and get him to talk about his issues and deal with them, he fails due to a fundamental lack of understanding of his brother and what his brother lived through. Even though Sam does care, truly, about his brother, Dean cannot see that, and because of his outsized feelings of responsibility, cannot accept that.
Another symptom of John’s alcoholism is in Dean’s own relationship with alcohol. The way in which Jensen Ackles has subtly changed Dean’s alcohol use over the years (it was extremely noticeable to me, but that’s mostly because I marathoned seven season over three months, but it’s more subtle when it’s stretched over seven years). By season seven, Dean is an alcoholic. Definitely. Sam comments on Dean’s inability to get drunk, calling it akin to “drinking a vitamin,” in “Party on, Garth.” The amount of alcohol Dean needs to get drunk is considerable and he seems to enjoy drinking for the first time in years (maybe since season two’s “Tall Tales”). When he drinks, by season seven, it’s because he needs it to function. In season one and two, Dean’s use of alcohol is overindulgent, verging on abusive, but not a necessity. By season four, he drinks heavily when he cannot cope with things emotionally, as in “On the Head of a Pin,” when he is torturing Allistair. In “Sam, Interrupted,” he admits to drinking 50-60 drinks a week, if only to get to sleep (and as he confesses this to a hallucination of his own mind, we can presume this to be accurate as opposed to bluster). He is heavily dependent on alcohol in the break between season five and six, admitting he drank too much to cope with Sam being trapped in Hell, but by season seven, this has moved to full-fledged addiction. Part of why I think he confesses that he can’t shrug off Castiel’s betrayal and destruction of Sam’s mental wall in “The Born-Again Identity” is that alcohol is no longer helping him cope (not only because I believe him to be in love with Cas and the betrayal to be particularly painful for that reason). He needs it to be level, but it doesn’t provide him to with mental escape and emotional coping mechanism it once did because he is so heavily addicted to it.
The fact that Dean is using alcohol to cope is, in part, because he has never been taught appropriate coping mechanisms. He does not understand his own emotions, so he seeks to suppress them. He’s makes comments about disliking speaking about his emotions and his hatred of “chick flick moments” (“Pilot”). In “Sam, Interrupted,” he references that the way he deals with emotions and what he considers to be normal is to repress them and to use alcohol to do so. The reason why is because he doesn’t know how to deal with his feelings properly. He doesn’t have the tools to cope with his emotions, so he patterns his actions on those he saw in his father and adopted father, to drink and suppress his emotions. This is unsurprising, since alcoholism is both genetic and environmental. As a result, adult children of alcoholics are four times more likely to become alcoholics than children of non-alcoholics (http://www.nacoa.net/impfacts.htm). Dean is likely to be genetically susceptible to alcoholism and addiction and then without any idea how to cope with emotions and inhabiting a world where high levels of alcohol consumption is normalized behaviour, it is not surprising that he fell into alcohol addiction. By the time season seven rolls around, he is too broken to fight off full-blown alcoholism, Cas’ betrayal being the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Additionally, we can infer that John’s alcoholism was far more severe than what is demonstrated in canon. John comes off as remarkably functional as a hunter, however, this is not uncommon, with his rampant alcoholism shown as subtext and only addressed directly upon occasion (for instance, when Sam explains to Amy Pond that his father has a temper when he drinks). Bobby is also a brilliant and competent hunter, remarkably dependable and capable as well. He is explicitly called an alcoholic and his alcohol consumption is shown to be excessive. From Psychology Today’s article, “Characteristics of High-Functioning Alcoholics” (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-high-functioning-alcoholic/200901/characteristics-high-functioning-alcoholics), both Bobby and John can be considered to be high functioning alcoholics. While they do not appear to be functional humans to most people, they are considered to be paragons of competence within the hunting community. John is viewed as skilled and successful as a hunter. Bobby is the “go-to guy” for many hunters, providing a resource hub with the ability to back the credentials of many hunters in various guises. He speaks several languages and is an expert on demons, ghosts, monsters and lore from every corner of the world. These men, within their society, are highly functional and high-achieving.
From the above article: “HFAs have the same disease as the stereotypical “skid-row” alcoholic, but it manifests or progresses differently. Many are not viewed by society as being alcoholic, because they have functioned, succeeded and/or over-achieved throughout their lifetimes. These achievements often lead to an increase in personal denial as well as denial from colleagues and loved ones. HFAs are less apt to feel that they need treatment or help for their alcoholism and often slide through the cracks of the health care system, both medically and psychologically, because they are not diagnosed.” John and Bobby seem no worse in their alcohol consumption than the rest of hunting society, because they not only can still do their jobs, they can do them well. However, because they are high-functioning alcoholics, the disease is probably worse than even the viewers would realize. As such, the impact on Dean is serious. Because his father figures are highly functional, even with rampant alcoholism, it leads to Dean believing that abusing alcohol is normal and acceptable. If his father and Bobby can drink as much as they do and still work the job as well as they did, he believes that he can too.
When taken as whole, Dean Winchester represents one of the best (and only) portrayals on television of what happens to a child who is raised by an alcoholic. While there are certainly other characters on television who were raised by alcoholics or by abusive parents, they are often portrayed as relatively healthy and perhaps rendered somewhat abrasive or occasionally melancholic at worst. For many ACoAs, there is a level of serious brokenness and consistent psychological pain associated with it. ACoAs are not healthy, especially not ones who had few protective factors, however, this is largely glazed over in characterizations because it is easier to simply add this as an aspect of a personality as opposed to a driving force. Supernatural confronts the psychological pain of ACoAs without flinching or sugar-coating it. It’s unique and fascinating in this aspect and hopefully, at some point, will continue the exploration of Dean’s relationship with alcohol along with his struggle to cope with his mental scars as an ACoA. While it is painful to watch Dean falling into alcoholism, it is one of the most compelling, well-acted, subtle and honest portrayals of an ACoA and of a man falling into alcoholism for complex and tragic reasons.
