An Expense of Spirit and a Waste of Shame

Thursday, February 18th, 2010 | Best of MeadowLark | No Comments

Note: This article was originally published in the Summer 2005 issue of MeadowLark, the magazine for alumni of The Meadows.

An Expense of Spirit and a Waste of Shame

By Lawrence S. Freundlich

There is so much about her that I admire. Her knowledge of Western culture is vast; she is one of the best-read individuals I have met — including at the highest levels of academia — and she seems to remember it all. But her book learning hasn’t isolated her from the world. She has a rich social life. She attends premier art openings and theater and music events. Her circle of friends includes the business, cultural, and social movers and shakers in America and Europe. Many of them have been her lovers.

But all of these virtues are awash in alcohol. She has partied all over the globe and left a trail of real and metaphorical broken glass and stained gowns. She is famous or infamous (depending on whether she is your friend or your foe) for her scurrilous mockery of pomposity among the rich and powerful. She is afraid of no one. She is welcome in as many circles for her sanitizing iconoclasm as she is unwelcome in others for her preposterous rudeness. For some she is a culture hero — for others a dreadful boor. She has not spared her several husbands or children the spectacle of her shaming grandiosity.

When I was drinking, this woman and I were often in one another’s company, bonded by alcoholic gaiety and amused by one another’s provocative hostility. Neither of us would have recognized a boundary violation if we were hit over the head by it.

When I sobered up, after I had worked hard at making what I learned at The Meadows a part of my life, I came to see my friend for the adult wounded child she was, and my heart went out to her. I was particularly touched by her admiration for my own recovery. Because she often expressed how much of a better person I had become, I thought that I could lead her down the path of recovery.

I wanted very much to change her — to make her want what I had. I encouraged her to tell me about her upbringing, and she did. It was a very painful tale in which the false empowerment of privilege and the disempowerment of abandonment left their morbid residue of grandiosity, shame, and worthlessness over all her relationships and trapped her in alcoholic denial of her own immaturity.

During a recent vacation retreat at her home in France, at which several of us were her guests for a few days, we were the recipients of her usual hectic generosity. Then the liquor began to do its work: slurred speech, repeated anecdotes, insults, confused lectures. She was always on stage, leaving hardly any air for me to breathe. Once again, I was the little child in the presence of his shaming parents — too frightened to speak the truth for fear of being abandoned. I should have left, but I did not. Instead, I sulked silently, and my carried shame began to grow like a tumor. My authentic self shriveled. I masked my worthlessness in a constant interior monologue of contempt for her bad behavior, when it was my own shame, fear and powerlessness that were torturing me. Before the week was over, I alternated between wanting to scream in her face or hide in my room with my head under a pillow.

In the months since that sad event, I have reflected on how ill-advised it is for us recovering people to think we can save friends and partners from their addictions. Since so many recovering people have had childhoods in which their wounding involved not being heard, they are vulnerable to post-traumatic stress when their active friends and partners mock their advice by continued dysfunction. When they inevitably fail to understand us, our own shame wounds are opened, and it is we who put our recovery in danger.

The model upon which our recovery is based will often leave us feeling on the outside.  This loneliness is not a personal failure. Accepting it is the difficult but healthful gift of having become a mature adult. The wound of “not being heard” creates an abnormal need to hear things discussed intelligently and straightforwardly. I say “abnormal” because such boundaried and conscious behavior in relationship is abnormal for the species. We may be forced to accept our need for and insistence on boundaried and conscious relationship as an idiosyncrasy spawned by our own trauma histories. To fall into self-pity because we harbor a delusional notion of recovery according to our standards is an expense of spirit and a waste of shame.

The First Step is for the addict to take — we cannot take it for him. No one took it for us. If modeling sober behavior for our addicted friends does not lead them in the right direction, perhaps the only other thing we can do is to pray for them. Prayer, after all, doesn’t require their understanding or willingness.

Healthy Sexuality One Step at a Time

Thursday, February 4th, 2010 | Best of MeadowLark | No Comments

Note: This article was originally published in the Summer 2005 issue of MeadowLark, the magazine for alumni of The Meadows.

Healthy Sexuality One Step at a Time
By Maureen Canning

There is a saying in AA that reminds newcomers “to fake it until you make it.” The belief behind this advice is that you can act your way into good feelings – that proper behavior nurtures healthy emotions.

Boundary practice, which is the practice of sober behavior,  relies on this insight. As Pia Mellody has said, ”Boundary practice re-creates the conditions under which truth and respect are possible.” During the “re-creation” stage, sober behavior is consciously practiced and may seem unnatural, since we still are feeling the uncomfortable emotions associated with our disease. But despite our discomfort, we notice that the results of our acting sober are all positive. Positive builds upon positive and, at last, boundary practice yields a satisfactory (healthy) portion of inner peace.

In therapy, recovering sex addicts discover that what they think of as sexual pleasure is, in fact, the reduction of anxiety they feel when they use manipulative sex to obliterate or ameliorate the fear, shame and powerlessness wired into them by childhood sexual abuse. Disconnection from the authentic self has caused them to make a monumental mistranslation in which danger, intensity, fear, shame and powerlessness have come to mean “sexual pleasure.” Undoing this perversion of emotional truth and recovering for addicts their Authentic Selves are the aims of recovery. When in recovery, we reconnect to our Authentic Selves, we feel the safety that we lacked as children. In this feeling of safety, we begin to build what I call “congruent” selves, in which, on all levels of our being, we move toward living in the truth and taking the first steps toward healthy intimacy in relationships.

One Step at a Time
Sex addicts had to disconnect with their feelings as children, because to acknowledge the betrayal of their parents’ role of caregivers would have been overwhelmingly threatening. So they adapted, stuffed their feelings, and lost contact with the care and nurturing they genuinely wanted and needed. Since sexual urge is the energy source of our selfhood, sexual abuse caused them to lose contact with their creative identity. In order to get back in touch with their healthy needs and wants, they have to rediscover what it feels like to be authentic – free of traumatic intimidation – and vulnerable. This reconnection will be a careful and specific process of reflection and practical exercise. It is a step-by-step process. The goal is to rediscover, in the everyday events of our lives, the healthy bond between pleasure and sexuality. Only then will it be possible to see how spiritual truths and sexual energies are connected at the highest level of our being.

For example, music is one thing that can provoke the awareness of such positive bonds between bodily sensation and pleasure. When you connect with music that seems to speak to you, that is the kind of restorative reconnecting between pleasure and self-esteem that I speak of. The music and who we really are seem to be congruent; we fit together as part of a force greater than ourselves.

Another example of an activity, which, like music, reconnects us and makes us feel whole, is sensuous dining. You go into your favorite restaurant and order your favourite food, and, in that moment, you are so present and connected with the experience of taste, smell, texture and comfort that you feel complete. You feel that pleasure is what you deserve. Pleasure loses its connection to danger.

People damaged in this way must be coached in the techniques of self-care and pleasure if they are to recover from sexual addiction. I coach recovering sex addicts to identify the everyday things that give them pleasure. It might be burning incense, the sound of a fountain they listen to as they sleep, or bedroom walls, newly painted in a color that is soothing. As they act practically and habitually to cater to their sense of pleasure, they reawaken their sensitivity to pleasure and learn that it does not have to come with fear, intensity, powerlessness and shame. They learn that pleasure is not the reward of manipulation and control; it is something they deserve, in and of itself, and only because they are precious. They learn that the experience of pleasure exposes them to no danger. But it can be terrifying for sexually addicted persons to open up to such restorative activities. Their original fusion of pleasure with abuse makes the opening of oneself to pleasures as innocent as music, eating or decorating the house in favourite colors, a traumatic pathway back to pain and shame.

This is where the maxim “to fake it until you make it” is put to work. Overcoming the reluctance to listen to our favorite music, to linger over our favorite foods, to decorate our rooms in our favorite colors, soon bears fruit. We learn that pleasure does not need to plunge us back into memories of abuse. We may feel anxiety when we pleasure ourselves in these healthy ways. But we do it anyway, with a little help from our recovering, healthy, like-minded friends – friends with whom we can share our fears and our reluctance to let go and become vulnerable.

The goal of sexual recovery is not to make music, food or interior decorating healthfully available to the recovering addict. The goal is to liberate the sexual energy at the core of our being. When I talk about sexuality, I am not just talking about genital contact. I believe that sexual energy is the core of who we are; it is our life force, our passion and our creativity. From this sexual core of our being resonates our unique selfhood.