• Remember self-care. While taking care of others is a core feature of parenting, we need to take care of ourselves as a part of that process. Take breaks, have fun, relax, get exercise, and spend time with friends.
• Have fun, relax, and play with your kids. ACoAs can be what is known in the vernacular as “terminally serious.” Play is bonding and tension relieving, and it teaches teamwork in an easy way. All species play; it is an integral way in which both human and animal babies build social skills. And relaxing with our kids builds trust and ease in the family. It sends a positive message to kids that home is where you can be yourself and be loved for who you are.
• Pass along what you love. Children absorb and model what they sense that their parents love. Whatever you love, whether taking walks, cooking, painting, music, sports, or taking a Sunday drive, share it with your kids. Many times these interests build themselves right into the personal or professional futures of our children. And they remember where they learned those interests; it is a way of feeling close to a parent for a child to be initiated into the inner sanctums of their parents’ cherished activities.
• Have a good relationship with your child’s other parent or stepparent. Who we are speaks louder that what we say. We are our children’s models on how to live in an intimate relationship; we demonstrate reasonableness and getting along through our actions. We show what love looks like and how it feels and whether we are with our children’s spouse or not, we owe them a respectful rapport with the parent with whom we chose to bring them into this world.
• Don’t turn your children into little parents by making them confidantes. As ACoAs, we have a lot to get off our chests and a deep need to do so. Having perhaps felt at the disempowered end of a power imbalance with our own parent, we may share too much of our ACoA pain with our children with whom we may feel more empowered and trusting.
• Take time. There is no substitute for time: in this busy world we may forget that it is the time that we spend (or don’t spend) with our children that they will remember. In Antoine de Saint-Exupéry The Little Prince, the title character recognizes that it is the time he “wastes” on his flower, on tending her, listening to her, and making sure that she has the attention she so desires, that makes the flower so special to him. “ . . . in herself alone she is more important than all the hundreds of you other roses: because it is she that I have watered; because it is she that I have put under the glass globe; because it is she that I have sheltered behind the screen; because it is for her that I have killed the caterpillars (except the two or three that we saved to become butterflies); because it is she that I have listened to, when she grumbled, or boasted, or ever sometimes when she said nothing. Because she is my rose.” So it is with children: it is the time that we fritter away together doing this and that, the feeling a child has knowing that his mother is in the next room or that his father’s door is ajar while he plays that gives a deep sense that all is well, that family is good.
The Spiritual Journey of Parenting
There are few if any experiences in life that pull on our insides, warm up forgotten parts of ourselves, and move us to be better people than we ever thought we could be than parenting. We look into the faces of our children and we see little balls of our own DNA staring up at us, telling us by their very presence that life is good, that life goes on. These tiny creatures have the power to reach their little hands into our hearts and literally massage life into them or tug on their unhealed parts, or most often both. We are, through our children, returned to our own childhood states. Therein lies the sacred opportunity to break the pattern of dysfunction and grow spiritually. When the pain comes up, do we process it and try to understand it or do we mindlessly reenact the past and pass down either what we got or its polar opposite? What gets triggered in the course of parenting offers us a window into our unconscious and our unmet developmental issues, gaps, needs, and strengths. The three-year-old we hold in our arms calls to the three-year-old in us, and we are brought toward a forgotten land, a forgotten self. The deep feelings that get triggered tell us where our inner work lies, and we are offered a second chance at living, at healing and restoring our own inner child.
As ACoAs we can use our experiences to become spiritually awakened because we have something called recovery. We see firsthand the importance of not being fake, of not living superficially. If we are willing to look at our own disease pattern and not just at our parents and our past, we can use our experiences to make ourselves humble, tender, and thoughtful parents as well as smart, creative, and independent adults.
SEVENTEEN
Mindfulness and
the Gift of Trauma
Siddhartha looked into the flowing river. Never had a river attracted him as much as this one. Never had the voice and appearance of the flowing water seemed so beautiful. It seemed that the river had something special to tell him, Something which he did not know.
—Siddhartha
There is something in the river, something that draws us, that teaches and enlightens; that allows us to remember how transient all of life really is. A rippling reflection of ourselves and the world around us stares up at us from the water’s flowing surface. For an instant, that transient image might be illumined by a shaft of sunlight or parting clouds, allowing us to glimpse what is normally not visible; to become aware of what was probably always there, but we were somehow not able to see. Something below the surface of our being that we “do not know” becomes known to us. A deeper layer of self becomes visible. And then it passes, dissolves, and becomes part of the rolling waters once again. And we have to keep traveling the river to expose its further secrets. We have to wait for more images to reveal themselves, to learn what we are meant to learn. We have to embark upon our own inner journey.
The gift of trauma is that it deepens us layer by layer. It pushes us to our psychological, emotional, and spiritual limits and teaches us to hold more emotion than we are used to holding, to see more than we are used to seeing, to contain, observe, and look for meaning.
All people get hurt; pain is part of being alive and in a body. In the same way that we will have body bruises and broken bones, we will have emotional wounds and broken hearts. But we have a choice as to what we do with what happens to us. The art of life, as the saying goes, “is to play the hand we’re dealt” as well as we can.
Our thinking mind is one of human beings’ most dazzling gifts. With it, we can make sense of our own experience. It is through our thinking mind that we can imagine something as abstract as a sense of self and reflect on ourselves in relationship to our world. This is how man made fire, airplanes, music, art, the computer, and how we structure something as conceptual as a consciousness of past and future.
But even with all of this evolutionary distinction, our intellect is still only an instrument in our living hands, because our direct experience of life happens in the present moment, not in our heads.
Relationship of the Thinking Mind to the Body/Mind
If we watch our own hand pick up a spoon and bring it to our mouth, we see what a seamless and amazing machine the body/mind is as it executes this incredibly complicated task. Our senses guide us as the spoon moves and finds its placement through space. If we think at all, it may be just to watch the picture of our arm as it passes before our eyes, or to wonder about how our food will taste.
But usually, we are nowhere near this experience. Usually we are a million miles away as we mindlessly bring the spoon up to our mouth again and again and eat without tasting. We are somewhere else. Our intellect is not doing this lovely job of being still and observing, maybe having a thought or two about what is going on in the here and now to enhance our feeling of being present. Rather our intellect is leaping around, taking us far away from the moment, probably somewhere in the future or in the past. Most of us spend the bulk of our time just like this. Somewhere else.
<
br /> Returning to the Present. Trauma essentially takes us out of our present moment. When something is happening that is overwhelming us, the moment gets too painful to stay in. So we become defensive; we find some way to remove ourselves from the present. We build large, defensive structures, essentially designed to ward off what is happening that we can’t handle. Though emotionally fleeing from the moment can provide a temporary safe haven, it can have long-term effects that undermine our ability to be present to our own inner and outer worlds.
Healing trauma is a process of returning to the here and now, of unpacking our defenses so that we can feel what went unfelt, understand the significance of what we’re feeling in terms of our self structure, and reintegrate what have been heretofore disintegrated, unprocessed pieces of experience. We need to own all of who we are so that we can feel whole. Resolving the frozenness of trauma allows us to feel more alive in the present.
Pain Templates
We template our early experiences, and those templates become a baseline from which we operate. What we do when our templates from the past get triggered defines a critical moment. Do we use what is getting triggered as fodder for personal growth, or do we just pass on pain? Do we project our pain outward, disowning it in ourselves, thus throwing an old template onto a new experience? Or do we recognize that a pain template from the past is getting triggered in the present and is being layered upon and mixed in with the situation we’re in right now—that we’re about to re-create an old pattern in a new circumstance?
Self-Sabotaging. Psychologist Peter Levine speaks about triggers in terms of energy and the ability of a threat to literally overwhelm the activating systems of the brain. When we are traumatized, for example, if the energy from the threat that is occurring is not discharged successfully at the actual moment that the threat is happening, along with its accompanying feelings and behaviors, the traumatic moment becomes imprinted in the brain. Then, each time this moment of threat is triggered by some cue in the present that is reminiscent of the original hurt, the body goes into its “defensive position.” Each time we respond to a perceived threat, first biochemically and then behaviorally with actions designed to minimize this threat, a “blueprint” of attempted survival strategies is re-created and stored in both the body and the brain and we, in a sense, retraumatize ourselves (Levine 2004).
Emotional Whiplash. Someone who is rear-ended in a car is taken by surprise. In a millisecond the body reaches out to defend itself; often throwing out an arm and the head goes suddenly forward and back in movements that are outside of its normal range of motion. In whiplash, the neck muscles can freeze in that position in a thwarted action of self-defense. The large muscles are stretched beyond capacity and weakened, and the small ones go into trauma trying to support what the large ones can no longer support. And each time there is the threat of further harm, those now-kindled and sensitive nerve endings react all over again as if the threat were as real as it was the first time. The muscles are caught in a cycle in which they retraumatize themselves. Healing whiplash requires those muscles to release that thwarted movement and complete it with awareness and/or to be “taught” how to regain their more normal patterns of movement, in order to rebuild their strength and resilience.
There is such a thing as emotional whiplash—when our emotional muscles get overstretched and our sustaining core is weakened. Then we try to use defenses like denial, minimization, repression, or intellectualization, to shore ourselves up, because our core emotional muscles are traumatized. And they get oversensitized, so that every time there is a signal that we may be hurt, we throw out a new blueprint of the old relationship dynamic and re-create and deepen that pattern—in a sense, retraumatizing ourselves.
One common way that this passing down of pain from past to present can occur in our relationships is through a dynamic that psychoanalysts call projective identification, in which we project qualities—good or bad—on another person that match up with what we already have experienced, and we behave in such a way as to elicit responses in that other person that match up with our existing templates or blueprints. In other words we draw out of them the very behavior we fear most. Our minds tend to perceive selectively; we give less attention to qualities that do not match up with our templates and more to those that do. We look for qualities of rejection or subterfuge that match up with what we may have known, and we expect or even elicit them from the people we’re relating to, convinced that what we see is all there is. Or we can assume that people will feel positively toward us. In other words, we elicit what we assume is there. In either case, we behave according to our template.
The Gift of Awareness and Self-Reflection
When we are triggered, which is inevitable, we need to learn new strategies for feeling management Expecting life to have bumps and having tools to deal with them can actually help us use moments of being triggered to grow from rather than retraumatize ourselves. When we’re triggered, simply breathing through pain, allowing our perceptions of threat to ease and doing something different from the old pattern can work wonders. A small change in our knee-jerk reaction can interrupt the template and open the door for change and growth. We can quiet our minds and our reactions so that we can observe and understand where something that is happening on the outside might be sending us on the inside. When we do this, we can use moments of being triggered as moments of healing; because what triggers us most is often what has hurt us most; it sends a signal up from where our deep, unconscious pain lies. If there was not unresolved pain there, we would not feel so vulnerable; our reactions would be less intense.
Life is a constant process of injury and repair. Recovery allows us to rework moments from the past that have us stuck in our present so we can release ourselves from an endless and self-perpetuating cycle of stubbornly reenacting and re-creating old templates of experience—so we can become more relaxed, porous, and open to new experience.
The Gift of Presence in the Present
Self-awareness and self-reflection are what allow us to live life consciously, to see ourselves in action, witness the workings of our own inner being, and observe and understand others. In order to calmly self-reflect, we need to be able to be in a state of mind that is not distracted. Following the breath as it moves in and out of us is an age-old method of connecting our mind and body, calming down our nervous system, and reducing racing thoughts.
Thich Nhat Hanh, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and author of The Miracle of Mindfulness, says:
Simply breathe in mindfully and bring your mind home to your body, and when your breath is home in the body you are in the here and now, in the present. Follow your breath with awareness from beginning to end . . . By doing this we cultivate concentration . . . and through concentration, we cultivate insight . . . and insight is a miracle, we just breathe in, and we touch the miracle of being alive. Breathing in we become aware of our body . . . we may notice tension and pain we have allowed to accumulate. We have not treated our body tenderly; we can always allow tension to be released by breathing in mindfully, by breathing out mindfully.
Nhat Hanh tells us that through these simple practices we can learn how to recognize a feeling of joy and generate a feeling of happiness within ourselves: “In order to generate joy, you come home to your body and you come home to the here and now and you recognize that there are so many conditions of happiness that are only available in the here and now.”
Only You Really Know
Only we know where it hurts and how much. No therapist, however talented, can know exactly where or how much we’re feeling pain; we barely know it ourselves. No system can rescue us if we don’t allow ourselves to be helped. No diagnostician can help us if we don’t talk about what is going on inside of us. We know the intricacies of our inner world, where we love and care the most, where our pain is sharp, dull, or like emotional pinpricks. Where we have no feeling at all.
/> In the same way that we need to take charge of our physical health, we need to stay on top of our mental health. We need to develop a language and a context for healing. Part of healing is finding good help, and the other parts are developing a self-help Rolodex and building skills of emotional processing. We need to know where to go to get help when we need it and how to manage and process our feelings and thoughts as they are occurring. Once we learn to read our own symptoms and triggers and understand the basics of transference, projection, and reenactment dynamics, we’re in a position to be our own first line of defense. And we have a better sense of when to seek help and what kind of help to seek. Our personal prescription may be just a day off or a spa day; it might be time with a friend, a hobby, a family member, or nature; or we might need to seek out a 12-step program, a therapist, or treatment. The more we learn, the more our adult self is in a position to make good decisions and choices.
Strengthening the Compassionate Inner Adult
There is a stage in recovery where we really just want to let our child speak with absolutely no thought of what another person might feel like at hearing it. One might say that this is, in a way, a correction for all of the times we fell silent or felt erased. Part of finding that frozen self is giving our inner child full rein to feel and speak. That’s the part of recovery from ACoA issues that is serious family-of-origin work. When we first unthaw our frozen inner child, adolescent, or young adult, the floodgates open, and all the withheld emotion comes pouring forward. And that is right for that time. But eventually, as with any child, inner or outer, we need to grow up, we need to learn the skills of effective communication, and we need to realize that no matter how strongly we feel, other’s feelings need to be taken into account as well. ACoAs and codependents have often put the feelings of others before their own, at great personal expense. In recovery, the child within finds a voice, and so does the inner adolescent, young adult, and so on—the silenced selves come forward.
The ACOA Trauma Syndrome Page 20