All That Is Bitter and Sweet

by Ashley Judd

  I haltingly read my first big chunk of written work one evening in a reading group. In such groups, held a few times a week, those ready with written assignments would read them to peers and staff, who would reflect back what they had heard, as well as offer observations on the text and how to go further with the work. I tried to read in a clear, confident voice, hoping my presentation would make sense of the insensible, this baffling, cunning, and powerful disease of codependency and the behaviors it spawned. I had difficulty with the questions, from section headings such as “noetic disorders” and “otheration,” and I took a tentative stab at providing responses. There was one paragraph I wrote that came to me in a burst of hyperlucidity. For the first time, I intuitively captured and described how whenever I called a certain person in my life, my voice mails followed a pattern: friendly, warm greeting (make you like me, make you glad to hear from me, make you want to listen more). Description of my day (make it upbeat, interesting; engage them: seem attractive, independent, someone to admire). Emotional content (glimpses of how I really felt, truth coming out, hint at that hole in my soul). Download my thoughts about them and how much I love them, what they should be doing (present in a “good way,” but goal is to make them do what I need and want them to do; address my deeply hurt feelings. The “If only you would … I would feel better” section). Summarize all of the above, condense into a nice little paragraph nugget that would be very clear (Goal: make them think this all makes perfect sense, do not think I am crazy). Inquire about their day (be interested in them, altruism, back to upbeat woman at top of message. Goal: Hook them into calling me back). Repeat, day after day.

  My peers that first week included a sixty-three-pound anorexic who couldn’t be in a top bunk lest she break a brittle leg descending from it, a crystal meth addict who had been forced into prostitution, and others with serious chemical and process addictions. Yet when I finished this work, as well as the uncertain beginnings of my exploration of childhood depression, they were dead silent. They looked at me a long time before anyone spoke up. Finally, someone spoke.

  “I am so glad you are here” was her feedback.

  I was stunned and agitated. They were addicts, alcoholics, and the like, but what was wrong with me? I was nuts, by their reactions.

  Well, I was nuts, I have learned to say, but with a huge grin on my face, because today, I am glad of it. Because of Tennie and the others who intervened on my behalf, I was beginning to receive the best treatment in the world, but for codependency and depression, perhaps our society’s most underdiagnosed and untreated emotional problems. Without their keen observance of my emotional pain, who knows how many more voice mail messages like that—and worse—I would have left in my lifetime.

  But it would be a while before I could shuck off my disease and laugh at my former insanity. That night, my new friends, taken into my confidence, helped me begin to see and reconcile how abusive my childhood was. In particular, I began to learn about the effects of neglect and abandonment on a child, how different a day in the life of a child is from a day in the life of an adult. How although it may not have been a caregiver’s intentions, the effects of their actions registered deeply as abuse and trauma. I was taught that the modern definition of abuse is “anything less than nurturing,” and I began to grieve for the small, precious girl I was, needy and vulnerable, exactly how God intends children to be, and the many, many less than nurturing experiences I had. I was told that slapping a child in the face is a uniquely humiliating experience for her. The Karpman drama triangle was explained to me, a pattern of individuals triangulating, jumping from prosecutor, victim/martyr, and rescuer roles, and boy, could I easily see it at work in many of my family’s relationships. It was an extraordinary relief, finally, to have something to call the tortured dynamics with which I had been raised: abuse. I began to recognize the behaviors I had developed in my adult life as attempts to restore within me the many losses of my childhood. Having been taught from an early age that who I was was not okay, I had used people, places, and things as a basic source of my identity.

  I was taught about the shame core that develops in abused kids when their abusers, for whatever reason, are shameless and thus teach the child to be ashamed. They began to teach me about the insidious effects of witnessing others being abused. And they explained I had a long road ahead, because sadly, in a way, healing from these types of trauma can be harder. There is a lack there, a nothingness, a void with which to work. Clinicians even say that sometimes severe physical abuse is at least an interaction between perpetrator and victim, an indication of some kind of interest in the child. But with neglect and abandonment, the message can be that the child isn’t even worth the bother of beating. It can be hard to find a way into the damage done, to begin to undo it. With abuse to one’s actual body, there are powerful modalities that trigger those memories, stored in the very cells of the body, and move out the abuse, memory, and emotional energy. But when it didn’t happen to one’s body all that often, but was played out before one’s eyes … well, one of the consequences is you draw your brain in art group when asked, “What part of your body troubles you?”

  After that first night in group when I read for the first time, I was disturbed by the feedback I received. It was a watershed moment in treatment when the dam really burst and the floodgates opened. I did not sleep a wink and had one of the worst nights of my life. The real work was beginning, both identifying what had been eating me alive and applying a simple plan of action to address it.

  Shades of Hope teaches it is abusive to point out a problem without highlighting a solution. Wow, was that a radical idea! In my family, relationships and communication seemed to be all about the problem, particularly as it was observed in one another. I have piles of scathing letters and faxes written to me from my relatives inventorying everything they thought was wrong with me, detailing my failures and shortcomings as a daughter, sister, and woman; vitriolic essays (and voice mails left overnight) about my not doing the right things on holidays; sweepingly negative statements about my personality and soul. If I had a beautiful party, I was a snob. If I burped, I was crude and rude. In their eyes, I couldn’t get life right, at least not for any sustained period of time. Often, other people are dragged into the letters, outsiders used to bolster the damning case built against me. And to be clear, my own disease did complicate and burden my relationships. In doing my work, I began to identify and take responsibility for my symptoms, such as denial, poor boundaries, low self-esteem, toleration of abuse, compliance, and dominance, and the way they affected others. I was learning how typical these antics are in alcoholic and dysfunctional family systems, where the rules are constantly changing and no one can ever be, or do, good enough. In these situations, there are no solutions. That Shades would teach me solutions that led to serenity, solutions I could apply to all these situations, was revolutionary.

  So that night, after reading my work for the first time, I began to apply the solutions suggested. Lying in bed with the old, familiar crushing pain and loneliness, I realized that the principles I had heard in Granny P’s lectures could be applied to my feelings. I reached for the strange new words. Wheels turning, I thought, I am very powerless right now. I am powerless over this old pain, what others have done and left undone. I am powerless over the fact that the only way out of this old grief is through, and that only I can take this journey. No one can do it for me. And yes, right now, my life is indeed unmanageable by me! And I remembered what I had heard emphasized: Being powerless is an act of surrender, but it does not mean helplessness. I had choices. So I chose to move on, to open my mind to the idea of a Power greater than myself, who could do for me what I clearly could not do for myself: restore me to wholeness, sound thinking, sanity. For had I not been strangely insane? I contemplated my God concept: loving, nurturing, gracious, and accepting, a whole, perfect, infallible, eternal parent. Next, I found myself at the turning point. What was it going to be? Keep doing what I had been
doing, keep getting what I had gotten? Or try something different? Was I finally in enough pain that the risk of changing, using these strange new tools, hurt less than the pain of staying the same?

  And then I made the decision. I decided to abandon myself to the care and protection of this Power, as I understood it that nanosecond. I turned my will (my thoughts) and my life (my actions) over to the care of my Higher Power.

  To my astonishment and eternal gratitude, relief was instantaneous. The anxiety vanished. The pain lifted. I could breathe, but I almost held it in this strange new space of calm and placidity. I felt like looking around in the dark, to see what had changed. But the peace seemed secure. It lasted a minute, then another, and another after that. I became comfortable in bed. I relaxed. And blessedly, I dozed.

  About twenty minutes later, the big feelings began to creep back in, the emotional disturbance returned. I remembered that honesty, open-mindedness, and willingness was all that was asked of me, so I repeated the three steps I had taken earlier. Amazingly, it worked again. And it kept working: that night, and every day since.

  I continued to work on my autobiography and inventories, and as I wrote out each year of my life, I relived the emptiness of my past. I thought once more about leaving treatment when that periodic pain in my physical heart recurred while writing about that pivotal seventh year when the childhood depression began. But by the grace of God, I stuck with it. It wasn’t easy, though. Even the pastor with whom I did one-on-one spiritual counseling once a week asked if I needed to be on meds (I did treatment medication-free). That hurt. Everything hurt.

  Being put on “no talk” hurt, too. On Thursdays after lunch, we clients queued nervously as we were admitted, one by one, into the treatment team staff room, where they had collaborated on our new round of assignments. One week, mine was “no talk.” I have never been more ashamed in my life. I was sure I was being told not to speak because, just as the kindergarten teacher had said, I “talked too much.” I was sure they needed me to shut up because my needs and wants were just too much, because I was a burden … all the things I had felt growing up. Although I was told the assignment was to help a person go deep within, feel all the feelings—sometimes for the first time—in this safe place where one could do that, I didn’t hear that. I heard the old messages from long, long ago. But I persevered, and I did good work. I was miserable, but I took the action, and I found myself benefiting from it. I had to let go on a very, very deep level, and I began to see how much conversation is unnecessary, how much it can be used to chat feelings away, sidestep uncomfortable emotions, attempt to control, avoid focusing on oneself, and so on.

  After “no talk” ended, I was partnered with a three-hundred-plus-pound compulsive overeater, and she was designated as the leader of our duo. I walked out of the staff room impressed by their insight. I grasped they were giving me a vital chance to truly break my denial (which stands for “don’t even know I am lying”), to accept eating disorders as a lethal disease when untreated, and to make some major facts about my family and the legacy of addiction crystal-clear. Oh yeah, and I also got, loud and clear, that they were still working with me on my tendency to lead and asking me to experience what it felt like to step back, not be in charge, not use the old will to survive and hang on for dear life.

  I became known for giving excellent feedback during those portions of our groups. I listened keenly and watched transfixed by all that happened. I reached to see connections, patterns that I could apply both to others and myself. I liked waiting until the end, hearing everyone else’s remarks first, then working on assimilating, synthesizing.

  Although I worked hard and participated fully, I was hardly a model patient. I tried, as all patients do at different times and in different ways, to control my experience and defy the rules I didn’t like. I came to despise Irma, now one of my favorite people at Shades, whom I greet so joyfully each time I return to visit (which I do at least twice a year). She was the tech who mostly did the night room inspections, and I blamed her mightily for my chronic sleep disruption. I resented the excessively early mornings and approached them with a hard-done-by attitude. I wrote Irma up repeatedly for talking too loudly, hollering from one room to the next, which I found rude and disruptive. While allegedly working on a resentment-forgiveness meditation practice, I more than once snuck in forbidden naps. There was also the high-stakes “Affair of the Teabag.” Each meal, clients are provided one hot beverage, either decaf coffee or herbal tea. I had selected coffee, but when Trey, that hard-nosed tech at Shades and unfortunately (I thought) the spouse of my case manager, happened to look away just as I passed the teabags, my hand reached out, grabbed one, and stuffed it in my pocket. I sat down with a smirk on my face, ate my meal, drank my decaf coffee, and returned my dishes to the kitchen. I walked away, a lift in my step. I didn’t have a mug. I didn’t have access to hot water. But by God, I had a teabag.

  I continued to think about my precious contraband. And before I knew it, during a long quiet spell during a Twelve Step meeting I attended but did not qualify for, and thus at which I did not share, I said I had something on my mind and asked if I might share. The group conscience voted yes, and I proceeded to tell my teabag story.

  The most wonderful, remarkable thing happened. Hearing it out loud, I was struck by the absurdity of my actions and rationalizing, and I began to laugh. Others laughed, too—with me, not at me—and before I knew it, I was crying, I was laughing so hard. It was the first time I had laughed in treatment, the first time I’d had fun. Something inside me was beginning to change. My peers told me they could see it!

  I had another breakthrough: After photocopying my work for my case manager, I snuck in a fax to my housekeeper, asking her to send me more Varsity fountain pens, for I was almost out and mailing a note would take too long, because, dang it, I want what I want, when I want it. I finished my fax with a postscript: “Do not fax me back. I am not supposed to be using this machine.” I did not know the fax was set to provide a miniature copy as confirmation of a successful transmission until Kristen, my case manager, simply handed me the paper trail.

  It was a turning point in my time at Shades, for I began to see what they were doing and how they worked. I was so afraid I was going to be in superscary trouble, maybe secret double probation, when Kristen showed it to me, but all she did was lay it on the table where I worked on the porch and walk away. I began to realize she was simply reflecting my actions back to me. I realized she had been so simple, so direct; she had not shamed me. Thus began a rapid evaluation with a new perspective: No one had ever shamed me at Shades. When I had felt shame, it was the core shame that had been inside of me when I walked in the door. I began to accept that I had been so ashamed of my shame, I could never name “shame” as what I felt during a feelings check. I also saw that the treatment team was both encouraging and leaving me to a process, a journey, that only I could undertake, in a place where it was finally safe to do so. It made perfect sense to me when Tennie later said, “Ashley, you know what we are really treating at Shades, don’t you? The big ‘C.’ ” I was about to guess, “Codependency?” when she said, “Control.” Shades of Hope took everything out of my control: what time I went to sleep, when I woke up, what I ate and how much (including slices of lemon and the temperature of my water), my access to the phone, and when, who, and how many calls I made. There was no computer, no music, and no TV, and my self-soothing routines and practices, both nurturing and harmful, were taken away. I sat there, literally, for forty-two days, everything out of my control, so I could feel the emotions I had worked so very, very hard all my life to avoid and, if that wasn’t possible, control. It was the greatest gift anyone ever gave me, and in spite of the considerable agony I was in for much of it, I would do it again in a heartbeat. The rewards are worth it. I used to say that the way I now sleep like a baby every night of my life, made it worth the price of admission. But the gifts and promises of recovery are so rich in my life, the abundanc
e and joy so great, that wonderful sleep is but a minor chord in a great symphony of healing and joy.

  In the months before I ended up at Shades of Hope, my thinking about my service work was alarming. Each morning as I woke up, a single anguished thought would rush into my awareness: 28,000 children will starve to death today. I forced myself to trace the trajectory of their deaths, from hunger to malnutrition to stunted growth to the body cannibalizing itself to wasting of flesh and organs to expiring, knowing it is a long, slow, painful deterioration. I would think about a mother, if she were still alive, witnessing the decay of her child, helpless to stop it. Times 28,000. I would think about the Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph, “The Vulture,” of a hunkered child, teetering mere breaths before she will topple over and die, a vulture patiently waiting for her carcass. I would think about how the photographer, haunted, would later commit suicide. I would panic. I would think: I have to sell the farm. I have to move to a refugee camp. I have to give up my whole life as I have known it to be useful to any degree, to take responsibility for the lives of those 28,000 children. They died yesterday. More will die tomorrow. This was all before my feet had hit the floor. Ultimately, I mobilized myself with excoriating thoughts about my own pointless ineffectuality. I would rage at myself to create some kick-start in my brain chemistry that would allow me to get out of bed and drag myself through another morning. I was hitting bottom, and I had no idea. I just thought I cared a lot about the world.