Bradshaw On, page 21
I don’t wish to impose my experience of the journey to wholeness on anyone else. No one can tell others how to find their own authentic selves. Everyone’s journey may look different from the outside. Many readers may not have any experience with the 12 Steps or any other recovery program. Yet even the most functional persons need to examine and update their childhood, emotionally separate from their family of origin and grieve the all-too-human wounds that come from life’s hurts. Some form of this journey is required if you are to achieve your own solid self-esteem.
For those of you who identify with compulsive/addictive problems, the stages I’m outlining are more in the order of logic. In actual experience, things are not quite so neat and tidy. People may enter different stages at different times and by different doors.
Having said that, there is still some value in offering you ordered stages of recovery. I’ve seen several people jump to Stage III and do higher consciousness work without going through their ego work. I’ve seen people who have purported to have spiritual healings but who have never done any of the painful shame-reduction work I spoke about in this chapter. I have seen them maintain this spirituality for a while, only to go back to their compulsive/addictive lifestyle later on. And I’ve seen them become spiritually addicted.
I believe I went through this spiritual addiction. I was in a monastery at 21 years of age. I meditated every morning. I prayed (sometimes six hours at a time) and fasted. I was celibate for nine and one-half years. My own evaluation of that experience is that I was totally unprepared for the spiritual discipline that such spirituality demands (I hope God chalked up the nine and one-half years of celibacy).
We need strong ego boundaries before we are ready to let go of our boundaries (Stage III work, discussed in chapter 11). Adult children who were abandoned through sexual, physical or emotional violence need to do repair work on their ego boundaries before they are ready to soar into higher consciousness. What I’ve described as Stage I work does not yet repair those ego boundaries. More work needs to be done for that to occur.
The Dark Side of Stage I
One can become addicted to Stage I work. I know people who quit drinking and drugging and became addicted to their guru, a religion, even the 12-Step program itself. This happens because Stage I recovery is a first-order change. A first-order change is a change in behavior within a given way of behaving. In the case of Stage I, people are still dependent on the group. They have not yet achieved a solid sense of self-esteem. They have not yet grieved their childhood wounds. They are dry and abstinent but they are still compulsive. They frequently act out compulsively with something other than alcohol. The 12-Step program of Alcoholics Anonymous calls this kind of acting out a “dry drunk.”
All in all, Stage I brings one a better sense of balance (yin/yang). Life is no longer all or nothing. The peaks are lower and the valleys not as deep.
Let me summarize Stage I using the phrase STAGE I RECOVERY.
Surrender to Pain
Surrender means I give up trying to control my compulsive/addictive behavior. I am willing to let others help me and do it their way. I’m willing to go to any lengths to get well.
Trust Others with Your Secrets
As you seek help, you are willing to label yourself an alcoholic, co-dependent, drug addict, sex addict, etc. You are willing to trust enough to ask for help. The labeling is crucial. You can’t heal what has no name. An old 12-Step program slogan is, “We are as sick as our darkest secrets.”
Affiliation Needs
As you surrender to a recovery group, you come out of isolation. You are willing to let people care for you. You receive new mirroring, warmth and trust. You start believing that you can depend on the group.
Group Support
You now belong to a new family. There are good models here for your journey toward wholeness. You receive education on the nature of addiction and raise your awareness. You pick someone to be your sponsor who can model how to walk the walk for you.
Experience Powerlessness and Unmanageability
You experience this out of your pain. You come to see the powerlessness more and more as you get your “brains out of hock.”
Ist-Order Change
Stage I is a first-order change because you have not done your work on your family system. First-order change is a change of behavior within a given way of behaving. You are no longer acting out, but you are very dependent on the group. You are not yet your own person. You have to be careful that you do not become addicted to recovery. I’ve seen people embrace spiritual programs, make a god out of the religious guru. They stop drinking and drugging, etc., but they become addicted to the guru. One can be dry and abstinent and still be compulsive. In AA this is known as a dry drunk. Recovering people frequently get addicted to recovery because they have not done the second-order change work.
Relativize the Absolute Will
You live one day at a time. You are learning to delay gratification. You accept the things you cannot change and change the things you can, and you are learning the difference. You accept limitations.
Experience Emotions
You are no longer psychically numb. You are starting to experience your emotions. You feel awkward, like a teenager who is having emotions for the first time. You grieve the good times. You feel shame and embarrassment. You grieve over the loss of control and over a past you wish had been different and often seems wasted. Healing demands that you experience these emotions. You can’t heal what you don’t feel.
Collapse of Grandiosity
You have given up your denials about being able to control your compulsive/addictive behavior. You have given up your grand expectations. You are more realistic and have more realistic expectations of yourself and others. You can laugh more at things. They are not so dramatic or serious.
Oneness with Self
You see yourself as acceptable in the eyes of your group. You are starting to accept yourself. You are accepting responsibility for your life and know that your happiness will depend on you. You’re starting to trust your feelings, perceptions and wants.
Values Restored
Even amid confusion and painful feelings of shame, you feel a sense of cleanness about yourself. You experienced yourself as split for a long time—living in opposition to your own values. Now you feel good about clarifying and living your values.
Externalizing Shame
You have come out of hiding. You are committed to self-actualization and/or some recovery type of program. You are willing to be vulnerable and ask for help. As you embrace your shame, you see that you are not so bad. You’re starting to grasp that 95 percent of your shame is about what happened to you and is not about you. Shame is now a feeling and not a state of being.
Rigorous Honesty
You are being confronted by your teacher, therapist, sponsor or other group members on your character defects—such as perfectionism, judgment, rage, criticalness, manipulation and power-seeking. You are confronted when you are dishonest. You are becoming aware when you are being dishonest.
Yin/Yang Balance
Your life is becoming balanced. It’s not all or nothing. The peaks and valleys are not as dramatic.
Ten
Road Map for Uncovering Your Lost Self:
Stage II—Breaking the Original Spell
I saw the angel in the marble and I just chiseled til I set him free.
Michelangelo
Growing up means leaving home and becoming a self-supporting adult. I think this is the hardest task any human being has to face. It means breaking the fantasy bond and facing separation and aloneness.
Growing up means leaving home and giving up our family system roles. It means bringing our primary ego defenses into conscious focus so that we can use them more appropriately. These last layers of defense cover the most precious core of our selves. To get at this part of ourselves involves emotional pain. This is the legitimate suffering we fear most.
For those of you recovering from compulsive/addictive behavior, Stage I was a sine qua non for survival. It’s hard to imagine anyone doing Stage II work well without the achievements of Stage I. In Stage I, I found a new family with new models of maturity. I began to trust and share my vulnerable inner self. I experienced acceptance in the eyes of others and began to accept myself. I felt like I truly belonged in my new network of relationships. I worked on my defensive character defects. I started feeling my emotions. I quit trying to control my relationships. I gave up the grand adventure and settled into the “terrible dailiness,” living one day at a time. I lost all conscious desire to drink or use chemicals. I recovered my disabled will and self-respect.
I did this for some 10 years before I became aware of my co-dependency issues. I had behavior-modified my alcoholism. My disease was arrested.
Co-dependence—the Core of Compulsivity
Despite 10 years of recovery, I hadn’t yet dealt with the dis-ease of my disease. Vernon Johnson called it the ism of alcoholism. It’s what I am calling co-dependence—the core and root of any and all compulsive/addictive behavior.
After 10 years of recovery, I found that I was still highly compulsive. Perhaps that’s a good guideline for Stage II work. How compulsive are you still? Can you take a first step on co-dependence and honestly not identify with it?
Stage I allows us to see what Michelangelo called the angel in the marble. Once we’ve accepted that we are an angel, we still have the job of chiseling to set ourselves free. Stage I was a first-order change. We modified our behavior. We stopped using, eating, sexing, obsessing on relationships, buying, gambling, smoking, etc., and joined the human race. We accepted limitations. Two layers of our defensive shell were gone. But we still remained dependent. Many of us transferred our compulsivity to something else. Work addicts quit working and started drinking; smokers quit smoking and started eating; alcoholics quit drinking and started working addictively.
Stage I recovery can become an addiction itself. We can use the program to avoid dealing with the problems of everyday life.
When I worked as counselor-consultant for the Palmer Drug Abuse Program (PDAP) in Houston, person after person came to me who was using the program to avoid real honest responsibilities. Almost all had money problems caused by compulsive spending. In many cases, they were working a frantic program, but refused to go to work.
Dispelling the SPELL
We have to treat our co-dependence if we are to uncover the core problem. This requires uncovering the delusions of the original family trance—the SPELL. Stage II is disenchantment. Children are magical and make gods out of their parents. Disenchantment is a natural process. Many primitive tribes construct situations of disenchantment to mark the entry into adulthood.
The initiation rite for Hopi children is a good example. The rite centers around kachinas, masked gods who visit the village. During the rites of passage, the kachinas tell the children secret stories and dance to entertain them. The kachinas frighten them with ogre masks. As the ceremony reaches its climax, the children are taken to huts to await a kachina dance. As they wait, they can hear the dancing gods calling as they approach the hut. But to the children’s amazement, the kachinas enter without their masks. The initiates learn, for the first time, that the kachinas are their parents impersonating the gods.
The experience of disenchantment is the beginning of mature consciousness. We have to move from the delusions of childhood fantasy to the disenchantment of adult life. I once heard the
psychologist-theologian Sam Keen say, “We have to move from the illusion of certainty to the certainty of illusion.”
The family SPELL is powerful. My friend Howard Trush compares it to instinct in animals. He writes:
It is learned outside of one’s awareness, it becomes just as much second nature to us as the spoken language.1
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1 Howard Trush, Close Encounters of the Intimate Kind; or How to Stay a Couple by Really Trying (New York: Vantage Press, 1985).
Stage II involves breaking this SPELL. This is a second-order change. First-order change involves the change of one behavior to another within a given way of behaving. Second-order change involves a change from one way of behaving to another. In second-order change, we give up our compulsivity. That certainly does not mean that we can go back to using chemicals at this stage. The ingestive addictions have their own inherent addictive properties. Current research suggests that once you have passed over a certain line of tolerance, you cannot return to using in a normal way.
Stage II is the process of going back and uncovering the original pain that occurred as a result of our abandonment. We have to make the feelings about our abandonment real. This means giving up the primary process ego defenses. These include the denial and delusion about our parents and family.
Externalized Shame
By embracing this deep internalized shame, we can begin to externalize it. We began the externalization process in Stage I. It is a long process (it will probably go on until death for some of us). The externalization process is a process by which we (a) transform the shame back into a feeling (internalization made our shame into a state of being); (b) reduce the shame; (c) give the shame back to those “shameless” source figures who interpersonally transferred it to us; (d) transform the energy of the shame into positive action.
Giving the shame back to “shameless” caretakers involves dealing with our carried shame. This was the shame our source figures dumped on us through their control, perfectionism, critical judgment, power trips, contempt and rage. This was the shame we carried whenever our caretakers acted “shameless” and played God. This was the shame resulting from the poisonous pedagogy.
Induced shame doesn’t mean that it isn’t our feeling of shame. It is our feeling of shame. But much of it resulted from our caretakers covering up their shame with one of their defense strategies against shame.
For example, Mom feels shame over the state of her life, her children’s suffering and her alcoholic, nonintimate marriage. When the pain is too intense, she yells at the kids to clean up their rooms or do the dishes. In her verbal shoulds, oughts and condemnation, she shames her children. She shames her children as a way of defending against her shame. The children carry the shame. The transactional theorists call this “passing the hot potato.”
Externalizing the shame is the process of owning the shame and then uncovering the sources from whence it came. Much internalized shame does not belong to the person who carries it. Therefore, it must be reduced and given back. Realizing how we were abandoned and expressing our feelings about it are the beginnings of Stage II. Alice Miller writes:
The greatest of all narcissistic wounds—not to have been loved just as one truly was—cannot heal without the work of mourning.2
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2 Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child, 85.
Mourning is the ultimate work of the externalization process. Mourning is the only way to heal our unmet developmental dependency needs. Since we cannot go back in time and be children and get our needs met from our very own parents, we must grieve the loss of our childhood self and our childhood dependency needs. Grief is a complex process that involves a range of human emotions.
Grief work begins with shock and denial. It proceeds to a kind of bargaining, then to hurt, sadness, anger, guilt, remorse and finally, acceptance. In truth, many of us have been stuck in the grief process all our lives. We have been stuck at the levels of shock and denial.
Stage II work builds on the work begun in Stage I. It was there you began to feel again. You can’t do the grief work if you can’t feel. You can’t feel if you are psychically numb.
The grief work is sometimes called the “original pain work.” Alice Miller writes:
The achievement of freedom . . . is hardly possible without the felt mourning. This ability to mourn, i.e., to give up the illusion of a happy childhood, can restore vitality and creativity. . . . if a person is able to experience that he was never loved as a child for what he was, but for his achievements, success and good qualities . . . and that he sacrificed his childhood for this love, this will shake him very deeply.3
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3 Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child, 56-57.
This work is painful and that’s why we hold onto our denials and delusions. Why go back to the past? Why go through all that pain again? The fact is, we really never went through the pain. We developed a fantasy bond and used our primary ego defenses to avoid the anger, hurt and pain of our abandonment. Then we avoided our avoidance with our rigid roles and characterological defenses. We missed expressing the feelings at the crucial time.
We missed it because our caretakers would not allow us to be angry or sad. They justified this with the poisonous pedagogy. We also missed it because it was so painful. Your emotions can only be your emotions by expressing them. Denying our emotions is a way that causes us to lose control over them. Once repressed and denied, you no longer have your emotions—they have you.
The repressed emotions form a frozen energy core that unconsciously runs your life. Compulsive/addictive behavior is by definition outside our control. Emotional energy has to go somewhere. You either repress emotions (act them in); project them onto others (say others look needy when you feel shame over your own neediness); or “act them out.”
My addiction was an acting-out of my shame. My drunken episodes, which started as a way to feel better and overcome shame, escalated into shameful behaviors. Hanging over the commode after a drinking bout (a fitting place to celebrate toxic shame), I felt deep shame and remorse. What started as a way to cover up shame ended with more shame. This vicious cycle is referred to as a squirrel cage. Alice Miller calls this cycle “the logic of absurdity.”
