by John Friel
That evening his parents, brother and sister all had a good laugh over the Littlest Gosling’s “discovery”.
“Why, we’ve been coming back to this pond every spring for as long as I can remember,” spouted Mr. Gander. “And no one has ever been sick a day in his life since we’ve been here,” added Mrs. Goose.
“Alright, alright,” shouted the Littlest Gosling, “enough is enough!”
Over the next few days everyone forgot about the incident, and things pretty much went back to normal.
About two weeks later the Littlest Gosling began to feel sick again, but he’d learned his lesson the first time, so he didn’t even think about telling anyone in the pond about it.
At first he didn‘t know quite what to do. He went back to the small cove and saw some more dead fish and smelled that smell again. Then he took a tour of the rest of the pond and discovered some of the same things going on. A few dead fish here and there, a funny smell and a slight headache and queasy stomach that wouldn’t seem to go away.
By now he was able to fly, and although he was feeling weak, he decided to break the rule that his parents had made for him and his brother and sister, and he flew up and over the edge of the pond and away. After gaining altitude, he noticed a big lake off in the distance with a large population of geese, ducks and loons, and so he headed toward it.
After a few minutes, he landed gracefully on the surface of the lake about 50 yards from a big gaggle of geese who were swimming about, enjoying the late afternoon sun. He was hesitant at first because his parents had told him not to leave his own pond, and because these geese were strangers. But they were very nice, and they invited him to come and join them in their conversation.
Soon after they began to talk, the Littlest Gosling told them what had been happening to him lately. As he talked, the Eldest Gander of the gaggle became very serious. The Littlest Gosling noticed that a frown swept across his face, and then suddenly the Eldest Gander began honking furiously.
“Where exactly do you live, son?” he asked the Littlest Gosling.
“A few minutes from here, as the goose flies,” he answered. “In that pond behind that abandoned farm.” The Eldest Gander honked even louder now.
“You must fly home and warn your family at once! And everyone else who lives there, too. That pond is poison! Believe me. We lived there once, too.” His face grew sad. “I lost two of my goslings because of that pond.”
The Littlest Gosling did not hesitate for an instant. He took to the air and flew directly to where his parents were swimming in the pond.
“Dad! Mom!” he shouted. “I know I’m not supposed to leave the pond, but I just had to get away. I was feeling so sick. And I was so curious. Anyway, I talked to some geese in a lake near here, and the Eldest Gander there said that the water in this pond is poison, and that he lost two goslings because of it. We need to get out of here right away!“ he said excitedly.
Mr. Gander looked sternly at his son and said, “We told you never to leave this pond until we are all ready to fly south for the winter. You have broken our most important rule. We are very disappointed in you. Now go back to the nest and don’t leave there until we tell you to!”
The Littlest Gosling was heartbroken and terrified. He didn’t know what to do. He loved his family, and he wanted to be a good gosling, but he didn’t want his family to die either. He began to return to the nest. When he was almost there, he suddenly turned, looked up into the sky, recalled the words of the Eldest Gander, and then flew off toward the big lake.
He had decided to live rather than to die but he was so deeply sad that he cried for the better part of four days. Members of the gaggle on the big lake would stop by to comfort him, and to tell him that he had made the right decision, but he still felt a deep pain inside. On several occasions, he almost got up and flew back to the pond, thinking that to die with his family would be better than to live with strangers. But each time, something deep inside of him told him to stay put.
And then something happened. Almost three weeks after he had left home, he saw a lone goose, or was it a gosling, winging its way toward the lake. His eyes were riveted on the bird. His heart leaped when he realized that it was his brother. His brother had started to feel sick, too. He had got in a huge fight with Mr. Gander but had finally decided to join the Littlest Gosling. Three days later, his sister joined them and a week after that, so did Mrs. Goose. Finally, one week later Mr. Gander, sick to his stomach and with a headache throbbing in his temples, joined the rest of the family on the big lake.
It took a lot of courage on their part, but once they were settled into their new home, Mr. and Mrs. Gander called a meeting of all the flocks.
As a hush settled over the lake, Mr. Gander put his wing around the Littlest Gosling and said, “This is my Littlest Gosling. For a while I thought he was a Bad Little Gosling. I thought he was a Selfish Little Gosling. I thought he was a Silly Goose. But he wasn’t. We were the Silly Geese. And the Littlest Gosling saved our lives. We are proud of him.”
A tear trickled down the beak of Mrs. Goose. It was a tear of pride and relief and gratitude. The Littlest Gosling’s heart filled with warmth as every duck, loon, goose and gander on the big lake began honking their loudest honks and calling their loudest calls to celebrate his courage, wisdom and strength.
That winter they all flew south together and in the spring they returned to the big lake. They were pleased now to be a part of all the flocks safe in the knowledge that their water was pure, their friends were true and that their goslings would be able to grow up to be healthy and strong.
Part III
What Happens
To Me?
“Some say that we are different people at different periods of our lives, changing not through effort of will, which is a brave affair, but in the easy course of nature every ten years or so . . . I think one remains the same person throughout, merely passing as it were in these lapses of time from one room to another, but all in the same house. If we unlock the rooms of the far past we can peer in and see ourselves, busily occupied in beginning to become you and me.”and me.”
J. M. Barrie, from the Dedication
to his first edition of Peter Pan
10
The Denial
“I don’t need any help. I can overcome this myself.”
“Marital problems? We don’t have any marital problems. George has just been so tired lately from too much stress.”
“But I’m not a . . . ”
“We didn’t have any alcoholism in our family. Well, Grandma liked her brandy now and then, but . . .”
Martin Short, one of the creative stars of NBC’s Saturday Night Live, portrayed the epitome of defensiveness and denial in one of the characters that he developed for that show.
Recovering alcoholics have uproarious laughs when one of their fellows recalls acting seriously the way that Short acted in jest.
“I know that. Everybody knows that. It’s so silly that you would think that I didn’t know that. I’m not getting defensive. It’s you who ’re getting defensive. I’m not defensive!”
Denial is one of the ways that we protect ourselves from a reality that is too painful for us to let into our conscious minds. It serves a healthy purpose as well as an unhealthy one, depending upon how we use it. When we suffer a catastrophic loss, it is appropriate for us to go into a state of denial for a while. It’s as if a protective shield goes up, which we can later let down little by little as our egos are able to make sense out of the tragedy. This is what we do when someone close to us dies, when we lose a job, when our house burns to the ground or when we are informed that we have a terminal illness. As our psychic wounds begin to heal, we let more and more of the reality become real, until one day we are ready to go on with the rest of our lives.
In dysfunctional systems the catastrophe that hits us is a continuous one and denial becomes a way of life, rather than a protective measure to be used only in extreme circums
tances. The pain of living in a dysfunctional system is akin to slow torture as opposed to dying an instantaneous death. Day-by-day, year-by-year, decade-by-decade, we crawl deeper and deeper into a shell of denial, defensiveness, isolation and emptiness that is fueled by our shame and embarrassment at the thought of anyone ever finding out what is really going on inside of us. That is the nature of dysfunctional systems—they are closed and implosive, ever more self-destructive. In that sense, they are just like malignant tumors in the body.
Denial is very tricky to spot sometimes, too. We know many people who have actually quit drinking or using cocaine entirely, and yet who are still in almost complete denial about their disease. We know of others who can clearly state that they are work addicted or drug addicted or relationship addicted, and yet continue to fuel and practice their addiction.
They say, “I’m not in denial. I know I’m an alcoholic. How can I be in denial?”
Well, take a look around you! Open your eyes! Look at the trail of destruction you continue to leave in your path. Look at the empty, desperate relationships. Look at the spouses and children and friends who are struggling painfully with the way that you treat them. They love you but they hate you. They want to be with you but they are terrified of you. They are becoming addicts of one sort or another themselves.
We Are All In Denial
We can buy a new house, have another child, move to a new city, switch from whiskey to beer or try any number of other pointless, useless tricks to “make things right,” but until we admit that things are not the way we fantasize them, nothing gets better. And all of us in the addictive system do it, not just the one at whom we are all pointing our fingers.
Mom may be the “Identified Addict” who is hooked on Valium; but if you’ve been in the system for any length of time, you’re some kind of an addict as well. Addiction breeds addiction. We make excuses for the self-destructive addictions of our loved ones because underneath it all, we are struggling with the same problems. It’s simply a lot safer to point our fingers at someone else.
What’s more, we learned our denial way back in childhood and brought it with us into adulthood, which is why we wound up with a cocaine addict or a sex addict or a TV junkie in the first place.
Part of the denial is that when we finally realize what has happened, we can’t figure out how it happened. Look at a truly healthy woman, someone from that top 5% of the normal curve who really does have it all together. She dates a guy who seems to be on the ball. Because they’re dating, he’s on his good behavior. He has a cocaine problem, but she’s one fine catch and so he doesn’t use much around her. In fact, he probably uses less around her than anyone else. And we all know, though, cocaine addiction is about much more than using too much cocaine. It goes much deeper. It means that all kinds of other things are missing in our developmental picture. It means our cups are not very full. Think about it. Don’t you think a truly healthy woman is going to spot something else wrong? Of course, she will.
It’s elementary, my dear Watson. After a few dates she’ll get a funny feeling when she’s around him. She may not even be able to label it in words, but that won’t matter. Being healthy, she will have learned long ago to trust her gut feelings about people. She’ll notice that he may get uncomfortable in certain types of intimate conversations, or that his moods fluctuate a little more than she would like, or that there are certain parts of his life that he seems to have blocked out, or any number of other subtle cues that aren’t so subtle to her.
If she’s truly healthy, she probably won’t back away from him right away, but she will keep the brakes on the relationship enough until her gut feeling tells her to go forward, because she’s learned from her own past experiences. When she was younger, she may have rushed headlong into a relationship like this one and eventually been burned. She probably did it when she was still a teenager or in her early twenties. Being healthy, and having a pretty full emotional cup, she was able to get out because she wasn’t desperate for love. Sure, it hurt for a while, but it wasn’t the end of the world. And best of all, because she wasn’t in a constant state of denial, she learned from her experiences. That’s the saddest part of denial. It keeps us from ever learning from our mistakes.
And so she waits and watches. Sooner or later her friend’s underlying dependency will be exposed. He will want to “catch” her. He will want to possess her. He will want to capture her now and for all time, to fill in that terrible void in himself that he has been filling up with cocaine. He will want to get married. He will want to spend more and more time with her. Or in punishment for her not giving him all that he wants when he wants it, he will pull away for no reason for periods of time. He will become “gamey,” and the relationship for him will become like a chess match instead of a healthy, respectful interaction.
Eventually, he will make a big mistake. He’ll pout or explode in a rage, or he’ll go on a binge when he least expected it and she’ll find out about it. With her gut feelings confirmed, she’ll honestly and tactfully pull back. As she pulls back his symptoms of severe dependency will escalate. She’ll pull back some more in healthy self-protection. Then it will be over. She’ll breathe a sigh of relief. He’ll mutter that she’s a “bitch.” She will have had her reality confirmed. He will return to his denial.
“At least I can use when I want to now,” he’ll say to himself. “She wasn’t such a fine catch after all.”
And the continuing darkness of denial will again envelope him. “The last time I talked to her, she said she thought I had a cocaine problem and that I should get some help for it. Humph! I’ve got a problem? She must be kidding. Everybody knows I don’t have a problem. She’s the one who has the problem. It’s so funny that she should say I have a problem when it’s so obvious to everybody that she’s got the problem.”
Martin Short, eat your heart out. Someone’s trying to outdo you again, and he’s doing a darned good job of it.
Many psychotherapists have a saying, “It’s going to have to feel a lot worse before it feels better.” Denial keeps us from ever feeling truly better.
It’s like a friend of ours who had a mild infection under her fingernail. The tip of her finger began to swell up until it was pretty painful. She finally consulted her physician, who immediately became concerned, injected her finger with novacaine, and proceeded to rip off her fingernail and dig out the underlying infection. Did that ever hurt! Strangely enough, a few days later, the pain went away. Within a few weeks, her finger was as good as new.
Denial is just like that. It’s like the tissue encasing a boil, protecting the rest of the body from the infection. And just like with boils, we sometimes can’t heal ourselves.
In the case of the denial surrounding our addictions, this is almost universally true. The casing of psychological “tissue” gets thicker and thicker, the boil gets bigger and bigger and we experience more pain. The more pain we feel, the thicker the denial gets. We repeat the same mistakes over and over. The boil gets bigger and bigger. Without help, it finally bursts, and then we have a real mess on our hands. With addictions, this mess isn’t just a little blood and pus. It’s divorce, abuse, depression or death. Long-term denial simply doesn’t do anybody any good. Ever.
11
The Feelings
All Of Our Symptoms Are Feeling Diseases.
If you remember nothing else from reading this book, please remember that. Our symptoms are unhealthy mechanisms that we use to keep from feeling our feelings. They smother, hide, distort and mix up our feelings. They turn fear and sadness into rage. They create depression from anger, fear from loneliness. In many cases, they cause a unique distortion in which the rich, full range of normal human emotions is channeled into one or two overpowering feelings. In this way, loneliness, sadness, fear, shame and rejection all get thrown into the pot together and get expressed as anger.
The anger is then manifested as bitterness, unhappiness with one’s life or with the people in one’s life
. It takes the form of constant criticism, constant dissatisfaction, perfectionism, belligerence, argumentativeness, combativeness and other types of emotional abuse.
In this same way, feelings of tenderness, softness, warmth, safety, closeness and sensuality all get thrown into one pot and get expressed as lust, which is why the spouses of all kinds of addicts say that their sex is great sometimes, but that they feel lonely and empty in the relationship nonetheless. There is nothing wrong per se with anger or lust.
What we are stating is that when these are the only feelings that we feel, then there is something wrong. Human beings feel more than just these two.
As many physicians already know too well, the toll of this emotional blunting and distortion is more than just troubled relationships. A constantly hurried and angry style of life leads to increased risk of heart disease and heart attack. A stressful, other-focused lifestyle leads to any number of stress-related disorders from hypertension and headache to gastric problems, fatigue and chronic depression. These are all “feelings” problems in one way or another. And the reason that these problems persist and are so pervasive is that to admit our real feelings is, for many of us, a terrifying thing to do.
By the time we have developed some of the more serious consequences of feelings diseases, we are in such a state of denial that it is next to impossible to get us to admit that we even have a problem.
“Things will get better in my marriage when we move away from our relatives. Then I’ll have time to devote to my family.”
“I just need this Valium to help me through the holidays. Then I’ll stop using it so often.”
“I know my husband needs to go to sexual addiction treatment, but it’s just not the right time to have all that turmoil in our lives. Things are going okay and he’s not going out every night. We’ll do it this summer when we have the time and energy.”