All That Is Bitter and Sweet

by Ashley Judd

  The therapies used at Shades of Hope call for a tremendous amount of written work to make an honest appraisal of one’s difficulties and strengths, including an “auto”—a long, unfiltered autobiography and histories of all one’s addictions. Tuesday of family week is set aside for the client to read his or her written work aloud to the family. My job was simply to witness Sister’s process, to hear what it was like to be her, how being in our family affected her, to hear her courageous admissions of powerlessness over her addictions and the heartbreaking descriptions of the unmanageability of her life, including how she hit bottom and her plan for going forward. We weren’t allowed to write or take notes and were asked sit still and be perfectly present. Nobody could minimize or say, “No, that’s not the way it happened,” or, “You’ve been such a jerk!” Hearing my sister’s story in that setting was one of the greatest experiences of my life. I thought it was rock and roll. It was something I had wanted for her and something I’d been looking for my whole life. It was what I tried to do for other people in my advocacy work—to allow them to be truly witnessed in their context, in their process, in their reality. By the end of the day I was exhausted but exhilarated, and I had loved repeating back to her, even the wildly painful parts, exactly what she had said. It was empowering. Others in the family weren’t as tickled, and that corny stew was starting to bubble.

  Wednesday is devoted to a form of experiential therapy called “the sculpt”—a three-dimensional representation of a family’s dynamics. It is directed and managed with great creativity and skill by the therapists, but it’s scary as hell for the family at first. Sister asked a few of her friends in treatment to represent various people in our family. Then she placed each member of the family in a symbolic position. One member, for instance, was asked to stand on a chair, because they had ruled the family, functioning as ultimate authority. Being up high like that illustrated how they were up on a pedestal, in a position above and separate from others, wielding inappropriate power. And then divorce was represented, addiction, enmeshment, all the different manifestations of the disease. Questions were asked and answered, dynamics explored, memories unpacked, the effect of things on her revealed. When it was time for me to be born and join the family, I was asked to play myself. I sat on the floor, representing the time in my life when I was the baby.

  Tennie asked gently, “What are you doing down there?”

  “Oh, I’m praying,” I said. “I’m constantly looking for some sort of spiritual solution.”

  “But what are you thinking?”

  “Um, well, right now, how ridiculous this is, how [So-and-so] always gets away with this bullshit.” I had been watching all the family stuff I had already been witnessing helplessly for thirty-seven years, and it was crescendoing inside of me.

  Tennie asked me to stand up. “How do you feel?” she persisted.

  “I feel absolute and total rage in the seat of my soul,” I said.

  “Who are you so angry at?”

  I looked around the room, my arm flew up, and I pointed at someone.

  And Tennie said, “Tell them.”

  The first thing I said was, “How do I know you are lying? Your lips are moving.”

  As for the rest, well, the things that are said in treatment are confidential for good reason, and individuals typically discharge hysterical, historical emotions without the family present. This moment was unorthodox. Afterward, the treatment team told me my anger preceded me into a room, that on a scale of one to ten, I was a fifteen. It was something I had heard before, but most people either couldn’t tell me in a way that did not constitute abuse or simply wouldn’t tell me I seemed angry. Either they raged at me about my rage, which prevented me from being able to consider that what they observed might have some basis in truth, or they said things like “You are so intimidating, you seem invincible.” Imperious was another word I heard from time to time. Both approaches, of course, made me angrier, the former entrenching me in how justified I felt in being angry and the latter baffling me when I felt exceedingly vulnerable inside and yearned for that part of me to be acknowledged. Since first thing Monday morning, the staff had been saying, “If you hear something about yourself three times, you may want to take a look at it. There just might be some truth in it.” Well, I heard all the time from certain people that I was angry, and in this setting, it was becoming harder to duck the feedback.

  It was extremely unconventional, to say the least, but the treatment team began as a group to lead me in anger work, a process that moves old, stuck energy out of the body. In a room full of strangers and my family, in front of whom I had not felt safe to express my real feelings for decades, with the staff’s encouragement, a primal roar came out of me. It was shocking for me, and the anger work took on a life of its own. Later, I was told that I seemed to be “doing” my whole family’s anger, which was considered an unacceptable emotion in many ways. That I took on not only my own but other people’s, people who were so enmeshed with others that they could not risk ever expressing anger toward them (because they might alienate the person on whom they were reliant). It was a brand-new idea, and it made perfect sense.

  Eventually, my head of steam—which dated back to … oh, what? Age seven? Eight?—began to dissipate. When I sat next to clients, they quietly celebrated me, congratulated me, held my hand, gave me those empathetic knowing glances again. (By contrast, of course, my family was stupefied and horrified.) At the beginning of sculpt, as everyone was settling in, offering their feelings check, and being given an explanation of what lay ahead, I had been nearly passing out for some inexplicable reason, nearly levitating out of my chair with feelings I did not understand. After the anger work, I could feel something was happening, and it seemed good, as though I had burst out of a too-tight husk, as though I could breathe.

  There were more lessons to be learned that week, effective ways to improve communication and approach one another directly about hurt feelings or disagreements without causing harm. But after that sculpt, everything seemed anticlimactic. I found myself increasingly identifying with the other clients at Shades during our group interactions, and I picked out a couple I particularly liked to sit next to at meetings. Meanwhile, physical symptoms resumed and became more alarming, waves of dizziness and sensations that made me feel as if an electric wire were being touched to my body. Episodes of near hyperventilation and almost passing out increased, apparently in reaction to the painful childhood memories being dredged up and daylighted in group sessions and exacerbated by seeing my parents in the same room, at the same time, and by the idea of my sister finally having her long deserved moment of being heard and validated. All this triggered the first layers of years and years of my own pent-up feelings. They were roiling right under the surface of my skin, quivering in my lungs, coming out any way they could. It was becoming clear to me that all the stuff I had been trying to manage with the same ole same ole coping behaviors could no longer be contained. I was like a papier-mâché sculpture, trying desperately to patch my peeling layers, while something about being in this place spoke to a part of me that was so ready to stop the patching. My emotions were beckoning me to relax in the nascent knowledge that it was okay to come unpeeled, something my conscious brain was not quite ready to believe.

  On Thursday night, Shades invites the whole community to an open all-addictions Twelve Step meeting for friends and family of the clients as well as any former clients. Apparently, folks drive for hours every Thursday to reconnect with what has become hallowed ground, the place where they found their recovery. I had no idea what it was all about, but I was curious, open-minded, and hopeful it would have something valuable for me. As I was dressing in my room, my mind started to drift back to what the next week at home held in store for me. I heard a voice from deep inside of me say, I don’t want to leave. It was so clear and so startling that I froze. It wasn’t an idea or a thought—it was a voice coming not from my head, but from deep inside my chest. I sat on the edg
e of my bed and thought, Would there ever be a place for me in a place like this? All the questionnaires I had filled out on Monday didn’t seem to apply. I didn’t have an eating disorder. I wasn’t a drug addict. I didn’t have a gambling problem, a shopping problem … When I introduced myself at the beginning of each group, I said I was codependent; now “rager” had been added to my claims. But was that enough to earn a bed in a joint like this?

  I walked over to the friends and family meeting in the dining hall and sat in a folding chair next to a client I had befriended. There were about forty people, all seated in a large oval so we could face one another. When it came time for people to volunteer to share their experiences, strength, and hope, someone from my family began talking about me, describing me, sharing stories and facts and traits in a way that felt very wrong, very painful, as if they were taking ownership and credit for the survival skills they thought were so charming, such as my highly inventive fairy world and passion for reading, strategies I had developed to endure and survive their addictions. The tsunami in my body started, and I almost hyperventilated again. Then suddenly I found myself speaking out in front of the whole group, saying, “Please stop! Those are my personal things and it’s inappropriate for you to be talking about me in this way. And by the way, the time frame you are talking about, bragging on me? By the time I was in sixth grade on Del Rio, I was coming home from school and putting a gun to my head on a regular basis, thinking about killing myself.” It was pretty amazing. I had spoken up, shared my reality, debunking powerful single-strand narratives that had dominated the family mythology for decades, and finding the voice—without having to isolate or rage—that I had lost when I was seven years old. Another family member, one who used their voice even less than I and was notable especially for never standing up to anyone, actually spoke up and also asked the person to stop talking about me that way. It seemed a few of us were ready to begin making some big changes.

  On Friday, the last day of family week, we met once again in the group room. We each sat with our loved one and said five things we liked and loved about her. We made collages based on suggestions by the treatment team, topics to do with our relationships with one another. It was such a great, loving experience. The staff gave us suggestions about how to support Sister after she got back home, explaining the basics of ED (eating disorder) recovery: no comments about her body. Stay out of her plate when she eats; it’s none of your business. If she is in recovery, you will know from her behavior.

  Then they started going around the room and making suggestions for each family member, in some cases recommending Twelve Step programs they should seriously consider attending, books they should read, professional help they might consider. I went last, and the woman who was the head of the treatment team looked at me and said, “We’d like to invite you to stay.”

  I was startled. I told them I’d love to come back sometime for the six-day intensive course they offered, but—

  “No, Ashley, we’d like to invite you to stay for forty-two days of inpatient treatment. The Band-Aid was pulled off this week. We’d like to help you heal the wound.”

  Now I was absolutely staggered. Of course, the thought had already occurred to me, but it was a difficult thing to hear in front of my family, some of whom began clucking about how badly I needed help (oh, the pot calling the kettle black!). I was getting more and more infuriated, feeling that overwhelmed, helpless, voiceless torture again. I felt picked on, when others, with obvious multiple addictions, could also use inpatient treatment. (The staff would tell me later that the invitation was also based on how much hope they felt for me—but I had no way of knowing that yet.)

  My head was spinning, and I quietly inventoried my life. I had rock-solid commitments, including a ten-day trip to Central America for PSI. But I knew that trying to tell this bunch, “Oh, but I have this three-country tour with appointments with heads of state, and the military is providing security,” was not an adequate reason, in their eyes, for me to defer going into inpatient treatment. I had already seen the staff convince mothers who were breast-feeding newborns that the best thing they could do for their child was to get clean and sober.

  So I knew not to argue or bargain. I sat quietly in the midst of the chaos of my family and looked to my left, and there was Tennie. She looked at me, not saying anything. I kept looking at her, because somehow, in spite of how she seemed to know things about me that I didn’t yet know about myself, things that seemed shameful to admit, she had become my safe person in that room. As I kept looking, something was being communicated to me through her gaze. She had something I wanted. I had no idea what it was, but she had it. It radiated out of her, easily, effortlessly, a sense of recovery, emotional sobriety, and most of all serenity. I kept looking at her, feeling something wordless pass between us. I nodded my head slightly. That was my surrender. I agreed to stay on the spot because of the way she looked at me. Just as I knew I was a Lost Child because “Pets are very important.” That little, but that much.

  I returned my attention to the head of the treatment team, who had witnessed my nod. And then Tennie said the most remarkable thing: “Nobody ever thinks to do an intervention on the Lost Child.”

  I wanted to bawl as I had never bawled in all my born days, but after showing my family the pain of my anger, I’d be damned before I would show them how much a remark like that cracked me open, especially when I had suddenly, unexpectedly, become the new “identified patient” in the room. As I choked back my enormous swell of emotion, though, I knew in that moment that these people understood something about me that even I didn’t understand. And with very little information, but emerging trust, I made my decision. And as it turns out, there would be plenty of time for deep crying—and the gifts that come with constructive catharsis—ahead.

  Chapter 15

  THE LOST CHILD FOUND

  When I received my honorary doctor of humane letters degree, another miracle, conceived in my family week, was born: Both my mother and father attended. I have waited a long, long time for moments like this one.

  We think each family which has been relieved owes something to those who have not, and when occasion requires, each member of it should be only too willing to bring former mistakes, no matter how grievous, out of their hiding places. Showing others who suffer how we were given help is the very thing which makes life seem so worthwhile to us now. Cling to the thought that, in God’s hands, the dark past is the greatest possession you have, the key to life and happiness.

  —The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous

  hey do not mess around at Shades of Hope. My nod was received as a firm “yes,” and I was dispatched from the group room immediately to retrieve my things at the B&B and check into treatment at the front office.

  I admit to walking rather slowly to that B&B, breathing in what I misconstrued as my last taste of “freedom” as long as I could. I noticed the painted scenes on the curbside Dumpsters again, the ones that had irritated me earlier in the week. Why they bothered me so much dawned on me: They could be a metaphor for my life. Painted up on the outside, looking good from a distance, and full of heaping piles of rotting stuff on the inside.

  Once in the B&B, I wrestled again with the old rotary phone and how to place a long-distance call with a calling card without buttons to push, to share such strange news with my husband. It was both simple and difficult to explain. “I am staying for inpatient treatment.” There was not much else to say, because I didn’t know anything else. His questions were smart and concerned: “What does this look like? For how long? Do I see you? Talk to you?” I had no answers. Wait. I did have an answer.

  Trust the process. Don’t quit before your miracle.

  I think he was in shock, understandably. Dario being Dario, in spite of how it affected him, was supportive of me. Not only is that his nature, he had a powerful incentive. He would soon become the first and biggest beneficiary of my wonderful new way of life. In the meantime, he was on the fi
rst plane home to Scotland, literally that night, where he spent my time in treatment with his family, reading my letters and writing me back. (I did not have visitors on Sundays and Wednesdays like my friends, but I did receive a lot of mail.)

  When we hung up, I felt deep fear and a chilling uncertainty. Not seeing my husband for that long suddenly seemed too dramatic, too drastic, and the bargaining bloomed in my head: I can go home, this is all overstated. Ted is one of the greatest clinicians in the country. I can create a plan with him to tackle the things that have been revealed this week. I’ll sustain my good start and take it seriously. This inpatient business is over the top.

  I rang Ted, pretty much to tell him this. I did not get past “The treatment team just did, what do you call it? An intervention? On me, for adult child of dysfunctional family issues. They’ve invited me to stay for six weeks. I initially agreed but I have changed my mind and am coming home, and boy, Ted, we have work to do!”

  Ted, the great communicator, the gentlest of souls, floored me with his response: “Ashley, I have wanted this for you since the first time I met you.”

  I stood stock-still, speechless, and my bargaining, so convincing mere moments ago, vaporized.