The past and present images become conflated and indistinguishable from each other, and we are at risk for making our relationship hold not only the weight of today’s conflict, but the weight of our unresolved history.
We feel overwhelmed by the same feelings of helplessness, rage, and choicelessness that we experienced as a child, and we completely lose track of the fact that we are now adults and can think with the mind of a mature and thoughtful person. That child we once were gets warmed up, and we cry her little tears along with ours; we fight his battles holding up a plastic shield; we feel small and defenseless all over again in the presence of this big love. Or we want to run out of the house feeling hurt and misunderstood and hide under a tree or in a corner. Or we feel outraged and cannot integrate, manage, or own the feeling that is so threatening to the child mind to acknowledge.
So far, we might be describing what happens in any fight between members of a couple. We all have little kids inside of us—we’re supposed to. But when we add the triggered contents of a “dissociated self” to the fight, we now have a potent blast of unconscious emotion, interpretation, and possible behaviors to contend with. Like a tiger suddenly wakened out of a deep sleep, we can become enraged and out of control if we are touched in a way that pushes on an unhealed wound and makes it hurt all over again. We rise up, sword in hand, to fight the unfought battles of our youth, not even noticing where our blade lands and draws blood. In those moments of triggered, blind rage, all we see is a target for our pain and resentment.
If both people have these sore spots (which is the case more often than not), then a regular fight can go from zero to ten in a heartbeat. Because what is out of sight is not necessarily out of mind, and what we don’t know can still hurt us.
We can operate in our relationships, informed by our childhood conceptions and misconceptions of events, well into adulthood. We become glued to our past interpretations of events, defending them as if our lives depended upon it, feeling as if letting go of our point of view is letting go of some piece of ourselves that we will never get back. Our defenses, like the pain that got triggered, become immature and impenetrable. We are stuck in our own story.
Transference: Entering Emotional Quicksand
When we are triggered by something that “reminds” us of a time in our lives when we might have felt helpless, scared, and vulnerable, we become lost in a web of disequilibrating emotions, not knowing how to sort them out or come back from them. We can become pugnacious and ready for battle or silent and withdrawn; we explode or implode. The danger is that ACoAs may feel that the intensity of their emotional response is entirely driven by what is happening in the present moment that triggered them. They may remain unconscious and unaware that yesterday’s wounds are bleeding into today. In an article titled “Control, Attachment Style, and Relationship Satisfaction Among Adult Children of Alcoholics,” published in the Journal of Mental Health Counseling, authors Denise Beesley and Cal D. Stoltenberg discuss “how ACoAs develop coping habits that may include an exaggerated need to control situations and/or people in order to ‘mediate the chaos and unpredictability’ of the alcoholic families in which they grow up that they then ‘transport’ into adult relationships” (2002). Although in the short term these seem adaptive maneuvers, in the long run, when carried into adult relationships, they become maladaptive (Ackerman 1987). Research suggests that “‘ACoAs’ inability to express their needs and feelings are based on ingrained patterns of distrust, secretiveness, and fear of intimacy and abandonment and that the interpersonal difficulties of ACoAs are reflective of the relational patterns in the alcoholic family of origin. Over time these patterns become the foundation for negative expectations about establishing and maintaining secure relationships” (El-Guebaly et al 1993).
When Geneva and Rashid have a fight, they can quickly become enraged. In the blink of an eye, Geneva becomes Rashid’s alcoholic mother and Rashid becomes Geneva’s raging father. Geneva feels threatened by Rashid’s anger way before it turns into rage. Small signs that his anger is escalating, like leaning forward in his chair, waving his arms, redness in his face, or his voice getting tense and louder, send Geneva straight into defensive behaviors. She becomes suddenly critical and insulting of Rashid; underneath she is quaking, but on the surface she is aggressive. Meanwhile, the more critical Geneva gets the more she triggers Rashid’s unconscious memories of his mother’s drunken states when she was critical and nasty. This web of unconscious recollections quickly wraps itself in and around Rashid’s thinking, and he projects the full package onto Geneva. No longer is she the critical spouse reacting to his accelerating anger . . . she becomes, in Rashid’s mind, a drunk mother humiliating him. In the unconsciousness of the moment, the power balance shifts completely as Rashid seamlessly slips into his child self and reacts to the present as if it were his past. He actually feels like a little boy dealing with a huge, drunken mother. But he doesn’t know that. And the further he becomes stuck to this web of unconscious recollections, the more Geneva “sees” him as the reincarnation of her raging father acting through the body of her husband and the more stubborn she becomes. But she doesn’t know it either.
They don’t know because they have not made their unconscious wounds conscious, so they are left to mindlessly project their unresolved pain onto their adult relationships—thus re-creating and reliving the past in the present over and over again. And the more they have this same fight, the more the past actually does become the present. Yesterday’s pain is re-created and lived out today and passed along into tomorrow.
In other words, when we’re triggered we become overcome by the past and unable to function or gather new information in the present, because “emergence of the dissociative capsule into the present moment would destroy its function (intentionality, acquisition of new memory and evolution of the sense of self)” (Scaer 2007). The present moment becomes, in a sense, dysfunctional, consumed by past, unresolved trauma-based recollections that consist of “old emotionally based declarative memories and feelings from the body reflecting the autonomic, emotional and somatic input from traumatic procedural memory” (ibid). Rashid and Geneva were no longer arguing with each other; they were arguing with ghosts from their past. “During this obliteration of the present moment, the person would exist in the past traumatic experience, would respond to its messages as if confronted with the old trauma, and would be unable to form plans of action or store new memories based on current experience” (ibid).
When these disowned parts of ourselves get triggered by some sort of situation or dynamic that pulls them forward or restimulates them, we may still have trouble owning and coming to terms with them. The moment feeling them starts to hurt, we swing into action, ready for fight or flight—but we don’t really know why. We go into our heads, blame others or project so that we can avoid feeling the layers of pain underneath what is being triggered. And we see the culprit as whatever or whomever is triggering us, which, over time, has the effect of distancing us even further from our own inner truths and drivers. We become not only more distant from our partners, but more distant from ourselves. In terms of intimacy, we are making two significant mistakes: first, we’re not owning what’s in us and taking responsibility for whatever unresolved pain from the past we are importing into our relationship and growing from this knowledge of what lies within our unconscious; and second, we’re transferring our past onto our present and mixing our partner up with our parent. Even though our partner may naturally share similar qualities, he or she simply is not that parent.
When couples fight and trigger each other, they may both get caught in this loop. They may both be “living in the past” psychologically and emotionally. They may be getting locked into a transference reaction from the past and completely unable to take in the kind of new information that might allow them to listen to their partner and solve the problem. They lose their ability to be present-oriented and talk about w
hat is really going on for them. They are shadowboxing with someone from the past.
Bringing Our Inner Adult Back Online
Couples need to understand each other’s triggers. They also need to accept that their traumatized child mind is a place from which they will see each other. They may experience themselves as small and their partner as large or they may sink into a collapsed and helpless place seeing their partner as having all the power, and they may have trouble owning how scared, hurt, and angry they are. When two people are triggered at the same time, the animal mind (the limbic, feeling/sensing mind) is in charge, and the thinking mind goes off-line. We’re in our “trauma trap.” We become trapped in our own trauma transference and our interaction is, at least momentarily, held hostage to past relationships. Understanding the forces that form the relational template and the transferences and projections that we carry and constantly re-create, is one of the most liberating things we can do for ourselves or for our relationship. At those moments, we need to remember to not make our partner in the present responsible for all of our feelings from the past.
When couples get into this place, they need to take a break to breathe, breathe, breathe. Taking a moment to separate and breathe is a simple but very effective strategy that allows the nervous system to restore balance and the limbic storm to pass. The triggered ACoAs can then return to the present where they can again think and make choices that might allow them to move through a trigger moment. Their thinking minds can come back onboard as their limbic worlds quiet down. They can then grow from these triggered moments rather than simply get lost in reliving them over and over again.
How to Turn Triggered Moments
into Growth Moments
The Fight: Solution A. We get triggered by the intense feelings accompanying intimacy, so we:
• Blame our partner (or children) for what we are feeling.
• Make our pain about our partner (or child) rather than recognizing that the intensity of our reaction may have historical fuel.
• Feel like a victim, see our partner (or even our children) as the aggressor and ourselves as the disempowered victim.
• Collapse into helplessness and/or become aggressive and intimidate our partner or children.
We become disappointed, see the other person as wrong, or withdraw or rage—or a combination of these. Rage versus cold withdrawal are really two sides of the same coin. Each serves the function of allowing us to maintain our distance. Both rage and cold withdrawal are hurtful to our partner. We grow more distant from our partner and the gulf between us grows.
The Fight: Solution B. We get triggered by the intense feelings accompanying intimacy, so we:
• Blame our partner (or children) for what we are feeling.
• Make our pain about our partner (or child) rather than recognizing that the intensity of our reaction may have historical fuel.
• Feel like a victim; see our partner (or even our children) as the aggressor and ourselves as the disempowered victim.
• Collapse into helplessness and/or become aggressive and intimidate our partner or children.
But then, we back up and, breathe, breathe, breathe. We settle down and pull our focus off of the other person and back toward ourselves. We check in with what’s really going on with us. We take responsibility for what we’re feeling and use it to better understand who we are so that we can grow personally. We try to explain ourselves to our partner, tell him or her what triggered us, and separate the past from the present through understanding how much of our reaction is historical and how much is about real issues of today that need to be addressed. We listen to our partner do the same. We talk things over with a more calm and rational mind/body. We grow as a person and as a couple and feel closer having come into a relational balance together.
Turning the Tide
Admitting to our own transferences, seeing them for what they are, and seeing how they shape and set up our expectations of others are important parts of trauma resolution. When we project what we fear the most onto those close to us again and again, we may unwittingly participate in creating it. Even though another person may well be reminding us of some part of an early, primary relationship dynamic, that person is not the earlier person. But our trauma transference mind doesn’t know this; it relentlessly paints in the rest of the picture in excruciating detail and reacts to that picture as if it were the whole story, and soon all we see, all we expect, and all we allow, is what we got. We cannot move beyond the internal map we have drawn; we’re stuck in our own picture from the past. Like placing the negative from an old photo on top of a new one, the past and the present blur into each other and we are not capable of being in the here and now. We are in our dissociated capsule, seeing only what we saw, feeling only what we felt, and doing only what we did or wished we could do. We scream and rail at a ghost.
SIXTEEN
Grandchildren of Addiction: Breaking the Chain
What was silent in the father speaks in the son, and I have often found in the son the unveiled secret of the father.
—Friedrich Nietzche
Is it addiction that “skips” a generation or does trauma become intergenerational? It has long been speculated that alcoholism “skips” a generation. But when we understand how ACoAs who become parents may import and live out the ACoA trauma syndrome in their parenting, we need to question what exactly is skipping a generation: an “alcoholic gene” or their unresolved CoA pain? Or both?
Our children become who we are, not who we tell them to be; if we want to change our children, we need to change ourselves. We need to take recovery from the ACoA trauma syndrome as seriously as recovery from mood-altering substances.
ACoAs do not need to be self-medicators to pass on pain. ACoAs may play out alcoholic family dynamics whether or not alcohol is present in spite of their best efforts to avoid doing that. As parents, they may overreact or underreact. The ACoA’s style of parenting may reflect the same lack of regulation that is part of the ACoA trauma syndrome; it may seesaw, for example, between enmeshment and disengagement or chaos and rigidity. The same unregulated family dynamics that the ACoA learned while growing up get re-created in the ACoA’s own parenting.
This is why being a grandchild of an alcoholic/addicted family can be as if not more confusing than being a child of an alcoholic/addicted family. Grandchildren experience the residue of their parent’s untreated PTSD issues, but there is no obvious culprit causing it: after all, no one is drunk, right? But ACoAs can be emotionally drunk. If ACoAs do not treat their own PTSD issues, they are at high risk for re-creating many of the types of dynamics that they grew up with in their own partnering and parenting, in one form of another. They likely do this without awareness, truly convinced that they are delivering the kind of care and attention that they never got. The problem is that their caring and loyalty may be fueled by some of their own unconscious and unmet needs and their children sense this and feel guilty and even resentful—but they don’t know why. If they felt underparented, for example, they may overparent; if they felt underprotected, they may overprotect; if they felt kept at a distance, they may even glue themselves to their children, suffocating them with more attention of a certain kind than is healthy. Thus, the grandchild of alcoholics (GCoA) inherits the dynamics that are trauma-related without the obvious trauma; because of this, they may feel guilty over their parents’ tough past but confused about how their parents might be passing pain along to them. In this way, the torch of dysfunction gets transmitted to another generation and may set the GCoA up for wanting to self-medicate. Addiction, in other words, skips a generation (T. Dayton 2007).
Grandchildren of addiction pick up on the unhealed pain of their ACoA parents, and because of that they may carry silent worries. Aware of their parents’ tough childhoods, they can feel guilty and not really know why. They can feel guilty about their nat
ural mixture of positive and negative feelings toward their parents that are part of any close relationship, or disloyal because they want their own lives in which their parents are not a central focus. After all, they are lucky, right? Their poor parents had all this pain and would never treat their children like they were treated. Right? But their ACoA parents may well be passing along a more silent form of pain—the unhealed PTSD of their past. Children absorb their parent’s love, joy, and pleasure in life through the natural phenomenon of limbic resonance. They also absorb sadness, guilt, and anger; whether it is spoken or not, they “carry their parent’s pain.”
And one of the problems is that ACoAs oftentimes do not think they need help. The defenses against feeling and processing pain that they developed early in childhood have become part of their personalities. Their pain is so well hidden, so well intellectualized, that they are caught in their own trap. The trap is that because ACoAs often have the capactity to understand what happened to them, they mistake intellectual understanding for emotional processing; their pain remains unprocessed; they can refer to it but do not feel it, and they block it in a thousand clever ways. ACoAs also may continue to live out their caretaking patterns from childhood in parenting, such as identifying in someone else what needs fixing in them.
Parents with a family history of trauma and/or addiction may tend to:
• Have trouble tolerating their children’s intense feelings because they have trouble tolerating their own.
• Have trouble tolerating their children being rejected by anyone.
• Have problems with their own self-regulation that impact how they deal with their children’s ups and downs.
• May violate their children’s boundaries by being unnecessarily intrusive and overly curious about their children’s affairs.
• Either read too much and overreact to situations that bother their children, or block their overreaction and underreact instead.
The ACOA Trauma Syndrome Page 18