But in six months, partly because of money pressures, and perhaps feeling smothered by motherhood and seeing her own chances at a career slip away, his mother sent Sandy off to kindergarten and returned to work. Sandy had “lost” two mothers in the space of six months. And his father was slipping further into an alcohol addiction. Sandy returned each day from school to a housekeeper who was preoccupied with cooking and cleaning and had little time for him. His mother returned home most nights for a late dinner, but he spent very little time with her. He did, however, have his brother, Malcolm, seven years his senior, who then became his salvation and his hero. But eighteen months later Malcolm, who he worshipped and tagged around with every afternoon, joined their other brother Freddie at boarding school. No one really prepared Sandy for Malcolm’s departure or helped him find activities to fill his now empty afternoons.
Sandy lost access to his two mommies and Malcolm all in the space of three years. Sadly, the magnitude of these losses didn’t register with any of the adults around him. They didn’t recognize that he had lost anything at all. Acting as though nothing had changed, Sandy was told by his parents to come home from school, do his homework, and wait for them to have dinner. But he couldn’t concentrate on anything; the words swam in front of his eyes. Sandy’s parents tried to keep the trouble that was brewing within their own relationship from showing. When Sandy tried to reach out for some kind of help, he was told that everything was all very fine, that he was the only problem. He needed to study harder, be a better boy, stop worrying. To make life even more isolating, he lived far away from all of his friends and couldn’t solve his loneliness by passing his afternoons at other people’s houses.
So Sandy did what most kids do: he found a childlike way out of his emptiness. “I just dug into cartons of ice cream that I swiped from the kitchen when the housekeeper wasn’t looking. Sometimes I stole candy from other kids or from the corner store. I obliterated my feelings with sweets. When I was supposed to be doing my homework, I just sat there stuffing my face and watching TV in the dark, then I’d race out of the room when I heard my parents come home.” This is when Sandy’s pattern of self-medicating began; treats and TV became his solace, and the gulf between himself and his parents widened. The gulf between himself and his real feelings widened, too.
Sandy and his parents ate dinner together most nights, though it was rather late for Sandy. At the dinner table, which perhaps could have offered a place for reconnection at the end of the day, Sandy just found more isolation. His brothers were gone and his parents were tired and preoccupied, barely paying any attention to him and probably avoiding talking about anything because talking about anything might lead to talking about everything, which could lead to breaking apart the whole lie they were living. Then what would happen? His mother was invested in maintaining appearances and being the center of attention, while his father was invested in not being called on his increasing alcohol use. Sandy sank further into his little hole.
“I remember sitting at the table one night and I was just so excited. I’d hit a game-winning home run against our rival school—and I mean I wasn’t that great at baseball ’cause I was sort of a fat kid. I spent more time on the bench then playing, but the coach gave me a shot at the end of this game and I’d hit this home run. The whole team made a big deal out of it—it was a huge moment for me; I went from outcast to hero. It made me so happy and I was so excited to tell my parents.”
“Were they at the game?” I asked.
“I didn’t even think of that. No, they weren’t. And at dinner, I waited until my mother had told us about her day and then, when she finally asked me about mine, I gushed about it, telling them every detail. My dad tried to say some nice things and my mom just barely heard it. It was like a, ‘Oh good, pass the salt,’ kind of thing. I remember running to my room and being so upset and they didn’t even know why. They were just so not tuned into me; I was just this kid running around their house. I think I just gave up ever trying to connect with them or please them after that.” Like so many CoAs, Sandy thought he was the problem. He had no idea that his parents had problems they were barely managing.
When Sandy turned thirteen, what felt like a minor miracle occurred. “I just went from being this pudgy, short kid to being the height I am now, six feet three inches, and thin, and suddenly good-looking (he blushes). It was so great in some ways. I mean, it was incredible, but in another way it pushed this hurting kid inside of me even further down, you know what I mean?”
The pressure was now on through his teenage years. He became much more athletic, a better student, and had many friends, both male and female. “But now, maybe because I finally looked like I was supposed to, my parent’s expectations really kicked in. I tested super-high, so everyone knew I was smart, but I still couldn’t concentrate. I was sort of split—big on the outside but this screaming little kid was still on the inside. And because I was now expected to do so well, I had this constant thing hanging over me, nipping at my heels. I had such high expectations but no one to support me, to teach me how to get there. So I became super anxious about failing. And I had this recurring nightmare that I’d wake up one day and be this freckled-faced, fat kid all over again. I guess that’s when I found pot and alcohol. I just wish I’d had someone—anyone—to talk to. Every time I tried to talk to my mom she just told me I was fine, and my dad tried to understand, but, I don’t know, he just didn’t really stand up for me or for himself or for anyone, really. I just pushed it all further down and thought there was something wrong with me that couldn’t be fixed. I just blamed myself and got high and hid it from my parents—which wasn’t really all that hard.”
Sandy walked around feeling like a wounded little boy submerged in the body of a handsome young man. He was hurting and confused inside with no one to help him with it, so he came up with his own solution, a way to make his anxiety more manageable. Food wasn’t working anymore, so he looked for something stronger; drugs and alcohol did the trick. Not only did they soothe and quiet his fears but they gave him the sense of confidence that he lacked. They made him feel capable of facing his life. They gave him a false sense of feeling full instead of empty, calm instead of anxious, social instead of withdrawn, and happy instead of sad. But when the effects of the substances eventually and inevitably wore off, he’d crash and have to face reality. The painful feelings he had temporarily numbed would re-emerge, only they would be even more confusing and disturbing to him now because of this constant cycling between false confidence and gaiety back to sad and lonely. And physically he felt increasingly lousy after using, which really intensified all of his bad feelings. So the next time he’d need even more alcohol and drugs to make his feelings go away again. Thus began his dance of addiction. His only way to attain emotional comfort was through synthetic means; he had no idea how to get there on his own.
Breaking the Chain: The ACoA Under the Addict
Today Sandy successfully abtains from drugs and alcohol, but the emotions that he used to manage with them are confusing and difficult for him to deal with since he’s had little practice to date. For starters, it’s hard for him to even distinguish one feeling from another: hurt quickly turns into rage, frustration into hopelessness, and excitement into high anxiety or preoccupation. Once these feelings get hold of him, he tends to become easily overwhelmed and frightened by the intensity of his own, somewhat unfamiliar feelings. Drugs and alcohol used to be his emotional brakes; now he doesn’t have them.
Sandy’s situation is typical of addicts during their first year of sobriety. When the initial thrill of abstinence wears off, the realities of life sink in, and old, unfelt ACoA-related emotions reassert themselves. Sandy’s sobriety was well-established. Now began the recovery process from his ACoA/PTSD issues. He began reconnecting with the child—the screaming little, hurt, and vulnerable kid living inside of him.
“I’m so sorry I tried to forget about you
and pushed you back into the depths of my memory, that I tried to pretend you don’t exist. I get now that this is exactly what everyone else did to you all along and must have made you hurt even more and made you feel even more forgotten and alone. I didn’t want to hear your screaming in the dark. I didn’t want to know about how much you hurt inside, but now I want to change that. I want to protect you and help you feel good about yourself, to calm the hurricane of emotion you always felt but could never express. You tried for so long to do this on your own, but it was like building a foundation on quicksand, and you were always sinking back into it. Those days are over: you are not crazy. I am here now, and I’m going to help you find solid ground.”
Don’t worry, Sandy, I think as I sit here, you will be okay. You will know a freedom you have never known before. You will find yourself. And in finding yourself you will find everything else.
Your life is waiting for you. Go get it.
Frozen Feelings: Fear and Trauma
It can be difficult to access trauma “memories” through reflective talking alone (van der Kolk 2004). For this reason I find psychodrama, which allows memory to emerge through action and role-play, an ideal form of therapy for trauma resolution if done simply and with no “script” or agenda coming from the therapist. Role play accesses the limbic world, the world of powerful emotions and imagery that is pressing to come forward. We cannot describe what we cannot feel.
When someone who has walled off his feelings is asked to “tell his trauma story,” he might stare blankly, he might try to come up with a story, or even worse, might adopt a therapist’s story as his own. He might be put into the embarrassing position of freezing all over again. He is at risk for telling a story that is not grounded in his own feeling and relevant, personal meaning. A story that therefore never gets experienced and processed remains intellectual and repetitive. He gets stuck in his own story but the exit door alludes him. Role play does not put someone in that bind; it simply says, “say what you’d like to say to so and so,” the story pours forward, and words are found along with relevant emotion as meaning becomes clear. The limbic system operates with split-second speed; we’re designed to feel first and think second. Role play works with this natural flow and allows for the feeling and sensory story—the limbic story—to emerge first and then be translated into language; thus feeling, thought, and sense impressions integrate easily. Role play immerses the being in his own experience, and while being in it, he finds his own way out of it, and the brain as well as the body forms new neural wiring, their own path out of pain, that frees him from the repetitive, recycling encapsulated trauma mind trap.
This is how it works for allowing historical pain to emerge. In normal day-to-day living, we also experience feelings faster than thoughts. But once we’re aware of what we’re feeling, our thinking mind becomes our best friend. Through awareness, we can gain balance and insight and make choices based on our understanding of needs, wishes, goals, and our self.
Sandy’s emotion came up much more naturally talking to an empty chair representing a part of him than trying to find adult words to describe frozen child feelings. Though he is amazingly articulate, there is more immediate emotion that emerges in a role-play talking “to” himself than if he were talking “about” himself. It is more immediate and direct and has the added benefit of beginning and strengthening an inner dialogue between his adult self and his child self. Then, when I invited Sandy to reverse roles and momentarily become his child self, he had greater access to the words because he was, in fact, sitting in the feelings and the role of his inner child. As Sandy allows the child feelings to emerge, his adult mind looks on or “witnesses” and he is able to look at himself with new, more compassionate and mature eyes. He is able to take his child self by the hand to walk slowly with him toward maturity. He takes this innocent, lively, and creative part of himself with him instead of leaving him behind, frozen and mute.
Progress Toward Emotional Sobriety
Sandy’s first year of sobriety can only be described as tumultuous. He arrived each Monday at group alternately feeling elated or desperate and confused; all of the emotions that he had been medicating for years were crowding in on him and he felt overwhelmed and burdened by them—but he had hope and he had commitment.
Many evenings, Sandy was filled with rage and recrimination for his parents, for his siblings, and for himself. It was amazing to observe him try to hold onto himself while he experienced what he called “the hurricane,” the swirl of intense emotions that used to feel so overwhelming that he ate, drank, and drugged them away. He literally held onto his chair and winced as those foreign feelings pushed their way toward the surface of his mind. He had been so used to silencing them that feeling them represented a strange, new world.
What is happening from the trauma point of view is that the body and mind are caught in an interplay that make us feel that we’re spinning into a black hole. The disturbing and sometimes painful body sensations (heart pounding or tightness, sweating, shortness of breath, dry throat, and so on) that accompany anxiety and fear trigger feelings and fragments of trauma-related imagery—scary scenes. Then the scary mental pictures that are racing through your mind trigger more disturbing body sensations and emotions. This becomes an internal combustion that can become explosive. It’s why learning the skills of deep breathing, relaxing, and slowing down are so important. Guided imagery and meditating can be very helpful here, along with sane forms of exercise. Sandy took up meditation, painting, walking, and racquetball. In his second year of sobriety, he bought a dog and fell in love with her.
As I work with Sandy, I have the sensation that I am watching a child grow up and discover the world as he experiences both the joy and terror of growth. And as I witness the transformation, I ask myself, How did we get here? How did this young man turn from brooding and self-destructive (albeit always with his intelligence and humor intact) to this amazingly sweet, balanced, and engaging guy? Then I remind myself that the magic isn’t in any one moment or any one insight, but in a symphony of small moments, of small insights that weave themselves together into a new picture, a new, integrated body/mind story, and thus a new body to live in.
It is dazzling, really, and very moving to be a part of someone’s awakening into his own being and his shaping a new version of himself. Over the second year of Sandy’s sobriety, I have found it remarkable and inspiring to watch him take hold of his inner world and reshape it. He has prioritized his physical and emotional sobriety and adopted the necessary life changes to make it real. While Sandy used to fidget in his chair, tap his hands and feet, and shift position constantly, now he sits at ease, limbs long and fluid. While his legs and feet used to turn in with tension and fear, now they stretch out in ease and comfort. His limbic system is healing before my eyes, and his body tells of a different man living inside of it. Sandy used to have a somewhat brooding, dark expression cast across his handsome young face. Now he is open and cheerful. He has a ready laugh; his humor often penetrates to the quick and is always welcome with group members, who he regularly sends into gales of laughter. His insights are unusually perspicacious for a man his age. He is able to wrap his mind around complex personal and interpersonal issues and translate them into words in a way that is worthy of a mature and deep person. He is developing the ability to marshal his excellent mind and bring his powers of observation within his control. Because of his hard work in recovery and his willingness to make significant and healthy lifestyle changes, Sandy has greatly accelerated his personal growth. He has changed in time so that he can alter the course of his life.
ELEVEN
Process Addictions:
The Many Other Faces
of Self-Medication
If you can’t get what you want, you end up doing something else, just to get some relief. Just to keep
from going crazy. Because when you’re sad enough, you look for way
s to fill you up.
—Laura Pritchett, Sky Bridge
Everyone has some version of occasional self-medication. Richie has a beer to wind down after facing bumper-to-bumper traffic on the commute home. Tina misses her mother who lives in a city far away, so she eats a big bowl of macaroni and cheese because it reminds her of home. Lauren goes shopping to cheer herself up after a breakup with the guy she’s been dating. But when does self-medicating turn from a harmless, occasional pick-me-up into a long-term problem with physical, emotional, and financial consequences?
Self-medicating takes hold when we compulsively use a substance or behavior to manage and control moods and mental states that we cannot cope with on our own. It happens like this: We have a desire to feel better, and we discover that a certain action leads to the satisfaction of that desire. The more consistently that particular action leads to the state we want to achieve, the more we want to do it. Alcohol and drugs are common mood managers. They are reliable. We learn how many drinks or which drugs work best to achieve the result we want. We prescribe our own dose so to speak—we self-medicate.
When we don’t understand how certain substances and behaviors play with our body chemistry and set us up for addiction, we’re at risk for perpetuating lifestyles that slip into self-medication. We get stuck in hidden addictions.
Compulsive behaviors take hold in the brain because they are highly rewarded; they work with our own brain chemistry to make us feel good, but when we overuse these feel-good chemicals we can head straight into process addictions.
Dopamine, for example, is made in the brain and associated with feeling happy and chatty. It makes us feel calm and connected, smoothing out the rough edges. Food and certain behaviors like sex can also work to alter brain chemistry because they can have an analgesic effect similar to drugs or alcohol. According to Bart Hoebel, a psychologist at Princeton University, “Highly palatable foods and highly potent sexual stimuli are the only stimuli capable of activating the dopamine system (reward circuitry of the brain) with anywhere near the potency of addictive drugs” (Hoebel 2008). But then the crash comes. When dopamine levels drop after a food binge or orgasm, depression sets in and then we
The ACOA Trauma Syndrome Page 11