But ACoAs also need to find their inner adult. Too often we talk to the world from our wounded inner child and then we’re disappointed when no one hears us clearly. If we cannot hold our own inner child because we find our anxiety and pain overwhelming, why do we think someone else should be able to? We blurt out our unedited pain and anger, then we feel hurt, misunderstood, and disappointed all over again when the other person does not want to hear it.
The first person who needs to hold and listen to our inner child is us. Our inner child needs to open up to our inner adult, and our adult self needs to hold our hurting self as we would hold a crying child—with caring and compassion. We need to simply breathe with, love, and hold the child within us; we need to care. Then our adult self needs to translate what our child is trying to say into adult language that can be effectively communicated to someone else.
When we allow our inner child to blurt out each and every reaction before the adult in us makes any attempt to understand, hold, and translate feelings into words so they can be lifted into conscious and intelligent thought, we sabotage ourselves and our relationships. We don’t communicate in a way that others can understand, and we don’t take that other person into consideration. What we do when we are triggered will have much to do with whether or not we re-create past pain in the present.
The Dark Kaleidoscope of Trauma
Along with the capacity to imagine a future and make plans for it, to invent and imagine, our thinking mind can create endless, dark scenarios that make us want to retreat from life. Years of repressing and denying our pain and giving into the will of others can make us feel we should ignore nothing, that we have to dissect every random thought or feeling that we have and stand up for ourselves so strongly that we become stubborn and inflexible.
But that’s not normal. Though long-term relationships need constant work, care, and maintenance, they need not be in the emergency room all the time, and we needn’t be there either. Remember, the same medicine we need in a crisis or to cure infection can become poison in healthy conditions or in too high a dose. The body may need heroics to deal with a disease or set a bone, but then it needs time to heal and rehab. And eventually, it will just need healthy care and maintenance.
So it is with the mind. Resolving old feelings may require us to delve and dissect, but living day to day may call for additional skill sets. We need to learn when to pay attention and when to let go, when to act and when to just breathe. Sometimes all we need to do is tolerate our painful feelings and comfort ourselves so we don’t behave in such a way as to make everything worse than it is.
Sometimes talking is enough. The spoken word is an action. It is the end result of a complex process of feeling, owning, and translating emotions and thoughts into language. And it’s the beginning of communication through words. It is first intrapersonal and then interpersonal.
Therapy and pop psychology might erroneously give the impression that there is an ultimate goal, a place to arrive where we will finally be whole, intact, and cured; that there is some sort of “there” to get to, that there is such a thing as being healed once and for all. But the self is a flexible and fluid construction in a perpetual cycle of renewal and repair. We are constantly dealing with and healing from the slings and arrows of life. What we want to achieve is the ability to operate within a healthy range, where the self can be repeatedly injured and heal from injury, just like the body. This is why we build physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual resilience, so we can stay fit for life.
But we are always a self in motion, a self in an evolving sense of relationship. A self constantly experimenting with and developing a new relationship with its own core values and the values of the world it experiences. Our self is always evolving in relationship to others and in how we interact, listen, share, and co-create a relational space. A healthy sense of self can adapt, ever modifying itself, establishing and reestablishing its own equilibrium within the inevitable and perpetual fluctuations of life.
Hurt Isn’t Broken: Reframing
To watch someone you love lose themselves a little more each day and become someone you hardly recognize is an unforgettable experience. To witness as they become someone who they hate themselves for being but cannot stop being and you hate what they have become but still love them is life altering. Living with the disease of addiction changes everyone. It affects us in both good and not so good ways. And then we have a choice. Do we pass on the pain we experienced to future generations, or do we do the best we can to break the chain of pain in our generation? Do we become bitter about life and relationships, or do we find a way to hold this experience and allow it to make us deeper and wiser?
One of our great capacities as evolving humans is turning weaknesses into strengths. If, for example, you learned as an ACoA that you could not depend on anyone, you also learned that you don’t wait around and hope that others will hand you a life—you go out and create one for yourself. Or if you had to assume managerial roles in your family that deprived you of some of your youth, the upside is that you developed management skills at a time in your life when you simply had to use what was at hand and get things to work—before adult fears set in and told you that what you were doing was something you shouldn’t even think of trying. If there was little food in the house to cook dinner with, you learned to be creative and ingenious with what you had. If age-appropriate toys were lacking, you made up your own games. ACoAs learn to be creative and to take risks because we have to, and that creativity and risk- taking can and often does serve us well as adults.
Another lesson: you can lose the people you love. The upside is that we don’t take love for granted, and we know that good relationships can be ruined if we don’t take care of them. We learned that the people we loved, both good and kind, could fall apart. And so can we. So we turn that one around and get good at self-care, and we become willing to honestly confront issues that may undermine personal and interpersonal health and happiness, because we know that in the long run it will be better. And we learn to appreciate life and people while we have them; we know that nothing, good or bad, lasts forever.
It’s important to look around us: people go through horrible things, much worse things than we can imagine or have probably gone through ourselves. If we’re going to “compare and despair,” we should also compare and be grateful, because we have recovery when so many others don’t. There is something soothing, purifying, and humbling in processing pain that allows us to emerge more free and whole and alive. Something that puts us in touch with a side of life that we normally skate over; something that grows soul and expands our capacity to be spiritually alive and present to the mystery and moment of life.
One of the gifts of trauma for many ACoAs like me is that it brings 12-step programs into our lives. I will always have these words from the Alanon greeting burned into my heart: “You may not love all of us, but you will come to love us in a very special way, the same way that we already love you. Talk with each other, reason things out but let there be no gossip . . . let the understanding and peace of the program grow in you a day at a time.” These words held me when I needed holding. There was more spiritual sunlight and emotional and psychological fresh air in those dusty back rooms and basements than I can explain. Initially, I was simply glad to share what I really felt and not clear the room out. To say what was in my heart and have nothing around me explode. In fact, nothing happened at all. People said things like, “Thanks for sharing” or “me, too.” It changed my life.
“You will not regret nor wish to close the door on the past.” Another promise of the program that came true. Alanon gave me a wonderful sense of being connected to a reliable, easily accessible community, one that was based on “principles not personalities.” Now when I look back, I find love, strength, beauty, and pictures in my mind of people doing their best. I feel I had a great beginning, that I was just where I was meant to b
e.
In early recovery we need to create a strong enough support system to help to hold our outpouring of pain, which can include 12-step programs, group therapy, and one-to-one therapy. We need a strong enough container of care to hold us during the mysterious and deepening experience of getting to know ourselves on the inside.
Then comes the long-term maintenance, the self-care, and self-repair. Our relationships are a sustaining part of our lives that need constant maintenance, and families are always going through new stages of life that come with their own challenges.
Coming Home: The Gift of Integration
We cannot heal what we don’t feel. When in the course of resolving trauma we “reenter” our bodies and actually feel the emotions that we split off in a moment of fear, imagery follows. Colors, shapes, and moments of forgotten time come into view as pieces of the puzzle of us; fall together, sometimes gently and sometimes not so gently. And we have a curious sense of déjà vu, of having lived them before; as if someone we have known well and forgotten is being remembered.
That someone is ourselves. We’re integrating what was fragmented, mending what was torn, and increasing our capacity to feel whole, alive, and present.
Our physician lies within. Good therapy helps us to get in touch with, educate, and strengthen our own internal healer. It allows us to learn to depend in healthy ways so that we become capable of close relationships. It strengthens our autonomy. Recovery is a journey of personal and interpersonal expansion that we are in charge of, one that can and often does include a spiritual awakening. In developing the awareness to mine our own depths and bring our shadow selves into the light of awareness, we actually deepen our capacity for being in the moment.
People in my groups who have been in long-term recovery report something curious: though they continue to have problems in life, they no longer experience those problems as traumatic in the way that they did before they had awareness and tools and strategies for coping. They do not expect life to be problem-free, and they have equipped themselves for processing the pain they are in while they are actually in it. They aren’t freezing up and storing it in the body or splitting it off and throwing it out of consciousness. They are living in the present. They stop asking “When will I finally get there?” because they realize that there is no “there.” That life is simply appreciating the moment, the now, that the whole idea is to strengthen their inner being enough so they can enjoy the ride, so they can live this thing called life.
Invariably, when groups do psychodrama, pain comes up and out as they boldly “take the stage” or inhabit their own personal role. What they did not get to say as a helpless child is said, what they did not get to do is done, and what they did not feel is felt. The silent scream is no longer silent. And then the joy of self-discovery somehow takes over and they are in touch with their inner being. They see the whole situation in a new and more personally meaningful light, they decathect from a moment in time that had them ensnared in its unconscious grip. And they smile, they laugh, and their body and face move more freely. They have expanded their range of emotional motion.
As Sandy put it one evening when he was going through the closure of his good-byes and moving on from group: “I saw you do your psychodrama tonight. I saw you struggle to let yourself feel, to let yourself say what you wanted to say. I saw you start to feel. It was like a door inside you opened up. I remembered that moment when I started group and had that feeling. When it came to me . . . when that door . . . I mean, I had been waiting so long for something to happen . . . when that door inside me opened and I finally realized . . . I saw . . . that the person who was holding it closed all along, was me.”
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