Straight Talk: What Recovering Parents Should Tell Their Kids About Drugs and Alcohol

Thursday, May 7th, 2009 | Best of The Cutting Edge | No Comments

Note: This article is an excerpt from Claudia Black’s book “Straight Talk”. It was originally published in the Fall 2003 edition of Cutting Edge, the online newsletter of The Meadows.

Straight Talk from Claudia Black: What Recovering Parents Should Tell Their Kids About Drugs and Alcohol

Whether you sobered up last year or 15 years ago, you may be wondering what to tell your kids about your past addiction. Dr. Black shows readers five very different families and how these parents have talked to their kids about recovery, relapse, and the children’s own vulnerability to using drugs and alcohol in an addictive manner.

Discussion tips and easy-to-understand facts are shared in boxed sections to help parents focus on key issues. Topics include:

• The basic healing messages that young children need to hear if parents who have recently become sober are raising them.

• How to talk to adolescents, teens and grown children about the basic characteristics of addiction, including denial, preoccupation, loss of control, change in tolerance and withdrawal.

• How to discuss genetic and environmental influences that can contribute to becoming chemically dependent, including the latest brain chemistry research.

• How parents in early recovery can begin making amends and building sober relationships with their children, whether the children are young or grown.

• Age-appropriate strategies to reduce a child’s risks for experimenting with drugs and alcohol.

This book is aimed at parents who are recovering from drug and alcohol addiction but is also relevant to non-addicted parents who grew up in addicted families.

The following is an excerpt from chapter one:

On December 31, 1986, the day after I got sober, the last thing I wanted to face was what I had done to my kids. Prior to sobriety, as a father, what I had going for me was the law, the Ten Commandments, and the tradition that adult men protect their kids. So when I became sober, the first thing I wanted to do was quickly reassert their respect for me based upon everything I had going for me. This might have worked when they were small and I had drank only a short period, but, by the time I got sober, nobody could say that I deserved all the respect that the law and the Ten Commandments provided for. I realized I was going to have to get to know the kids and vice versa. For me it meant being friends first. The kids really wanted me to be a parent, and I wanted to regain their respect. Today I have been in recovery for several years and have regained that respect, but not by asserting what I had in the first place but by “letting go” of the outcome of my relationships after I had done all I could to change, trusting that God would then do His thing.

– Wally

It has always been my belief that parents truly love their children and genuinely want what is best for them, yet that message often becomes convoluted, inconsistent and sometimes nearly non-existent when addiction begins to pervade the family system. As much as parents want to correct this, the focus of early recovery is often on recovery practices, the marriage or partnership, and job or career. This is coupled with parents frequently just not knowing what to say to their children, or how best to interact with them. This confusion can be as true for the adult child as for the adolescent or younger child. In many cases it is easy to ignore the issue of what to say or how to interact with your children if someone else, such as an ex-spouse or grandparents, predominantly raises them, or they are adults living on their own. Children can also impede the process by pretending all is just fine between you and them because you are now clean and sober. And, in fact, for many it is better already. Or they distance themselves from you with aloofness or anger.

The inability to be intimate, to share yourself with your children, to be there for them, is one of the most tragic losses in life. Having worked with thousands of addicted parents, I’ve seen their eyes shimmer with tears and glow with love when they talk about their children. As I wrote this book, I interviewed a host of parents, and I was inspired by the depth of love and vulnerability shared as they talked about how addiction impacted children, and the hope their recovery would provide them the positive influence and connection that they would like to have with their children.

What Do You Say To Your Children?

In recovery there is a lot of wreckage of the past that needs to be addressed, and there is a lot of moving forward that will happen as well. What your children want most is to know you love them.They want you to be there for them and with them. That can be hard to recognize if your children are angry or distant. It can be hard to do, given the priority needed to learning how to live clean and sober. Creating new relationships or mending old relationships doesn’t happen overnight. The most important thing you can do for your children is to stay clean and sober. Yet while you are doing that, there are so many little steps you can take with your children to begin to be the parent they need and the parent you want to be. It is my hope this book will help you in this journey. Thomas, a recovering parent, shared this story with me.

My daughter was grown by the time I got sober. More than anything I loved her and wanted her to know that. I wanted her to know that the parent she saw all of her growing up years wasn’t the real me—that there was this whole other me, this place of love that I had for her that I had lost control of due to my drinking and drugging lifestyle. The hardest part was being honest. Then I had to be willing to listen and not argue with her about how she saw me. I know what she saw. She saw the addict. She couldn’t see my place of love; it was too well hidden. So I listened and I didn’t need to argue, I was now in my place of love. But I really wanted her to know that the things I had said or done was not the real me. Yet it could sound like a cop out. I wasn’t trying to cop out. She had her experiences because of how I acted in my disease.

I talked; she listened. She talked; I listened. Together we have healed.

Addiction is a devastating disease. It ravages one’s physical, mental, emotional and spiritual being. The greatest pain is that it impacts those we love the most–our children. In recovery we learn that addiction is a disease, that it is not a matter of will power or self-control. We surrender to our powerlessness over alcohol and other mind-altering chemicals. We put one step in front of the other, often following the direction of other recovering alcoholics and addicts before us. We rejoice and celebrate recovery. For the first time in a long time, we begin to like ourselves. We begin to let go of our insecurities, our fears, and our angers. We begin to look beyond ourselves, and when we do, many of us are confronted with the reality that this disease is not just ours alone. Addiction belongs to the family. Confronted with that stark realization, how do we empower ourselves to make a difference in our children’s lives so that they do not repeat our history?

Most children raised with addiction vow to themselves and often to others, “It will never happen to me. I will not drink like my father, or use drugs like my mother.” They believe they have the will power, the self-control, to do it differently than their parents. After all, they have seen the horrors of addiction, and shouldn’t that be enough to ensure that they don’t become like their parents?If I were to meet with a group of children under the age of nine who were raised with addiction, and ask them if they were going to drink or use drugs when they were older, it is very likely that nearly 100 percent of them would vehemently shake their heads no. If I were to come back six years later when these children are teenagers, half of them would already be drinking, using drugs or both. The majority of others would begin to drink or use within the next few years.

These children will begin drinking or using out of peer pressure, to be a part of a social group, to have a sense of belonging. Kids often start to experiment just to see what it is like, and many simply like the feeling. Some will find that alcohol and drugs are a wonderful way to anesthetize or medicate the pain of life. Alcohol and drugs momentarily allow their fears, angers, and disappointments to disappear. For some it produces a temporary sense of courage, confidence, and maybe even power. Aside from the emotional attraction that alcohol or drugs may provide, the genetic influence may be such that these children’s brain chemistry is triggered within their early drinking or using episodes, and they quickly demonstrate addictive behavior.

As a recovering parent or spouse/partner, what can you do to stop the chain of addiction? What do you say to your children about your addiction? What you say and do depends on your own story.

About the author

Claudia Black, Clinical Consultant for The Meadows, is a world-renowned lecturer, author and trainer internationally recognized for both her pioneering and contemporary work with family systems and addictive disorders. She is also past Chairperson of the National Association for Children of Alcoholics and presently serves on its Advisory Board. Dr. Black has been featured in numerous publications, appeared on many national television shows, and written several well-known books, including It Will Never Happen to Me, Depression Strategies: Practical Tools for Professionals Treating Depression and her latest book, Straight Talk.

Child Abuse in the Name of Religion

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 | Best of The Cutting Edge | No Comments

Note: This article was originally published in the Fall 2004 edition of The Cutting Edge, the online newsletter of The Meadows.

Child Abuse in the Name of Religion
By Robert Fulton, MA, LISAC, Administrator, The Meadows

The father, like an Old Testament prophet, roars out the moral law at the child he cannot control. If the parent does not see or hear what the child’s sinful deeds or thoughts are, certainly God does, and nothing gets past God. If the child does not learn to behave according to the holy law – to abide by its prohibitions against impure sexual thoughts and deeds, against drunkenness and dancing and sloth, to be neat and finish one’s food – the child is damned. Obey God; obey your parents. And if punishment is not enough to change the child, God’s damnation will be forthcoming as certainly as the sun rises.

The Bible-thumping parent, like the Old Testament God of wrath, lays down the law to his child.
He teaches that right and wrong are external concepts, sanctioned by a relentless God, and that disobedience is the measure of personal failure and evidence of flawed humanity. This substitution of power and control for nurture and love is the setting for traumatic abuse in the name of religion – a denial of the inherent worth of the child and the perfect imperfection of his developmental energies and appetites. Often there is a sexual element at the heart of the parent’s own developmental immaturity.

Religiously abusive parents instill in their children a fear of an ogre in the sky with a great big chalkboard, writing down everything these children do – and that if these deeds are not erased, they will be damned. These parents have no idea how to maturely educate and guide their children, usually because they were never taught by their own parents. They make God into a Marine drill sergeant whose bellowed orders cover up their own feelings of parental inadequacy. Their denial of their anxiety and fear and the repression of their sexual energies infect the air like an undiagnosed epidemic, and it is the child who becomes diseased.

Let us say that a religiously abusive parent discovers his child’s masturbation. He says to the child, “I know what you are doing, and although I may not see you doing it, God knows and sees what you are doing. If you continue to masturbate, you are going to be damned.” The parent, because of his own psychosexual immaturity, cannot walk the child through a natural sexual evolution in a functional way, and rather projects onto the child his own primitive fear of sexuality. In angry self-righteousness, the parent invokes external authority to maintain control and to go one-up so that he can, like the Wizard of Oz, hide behind his role on the family throne. Most often, these “God-fearing” parents think they are frightening the wits out of their child for the child’s own good. The child will now feel defective around a normal developmental stage, which the parents do not celebrate or honor. Instead, they demonize normal sexuality and shamelessly terrorize the child in the name of “holiness.”

Parents who revert to the authoritarian threat of Biblical punishment are fear-based. They need an external control system because they don’t have an internal control system. The child will carry the poisonous inheritance of his parents’ shameful immaturity as he grows into adulthood, ruining his own attempts at intimacy in posttraumatic throwbacks to his original shaming.

Having been tyrannized into the same emotional and intellectual box with his parents, that child, should he ever become reflective and seek freedom from parental coercion, will rebel and develop the core issue delusion of taking his value from one being. But it is a sad truth that the budding desire to gain freedom will be shame-based and will eventually take a dark side, as the adult wounded child seeks relief from his shame. And as we see so often at The Meadows, this search for lessened shame will take on a medicative state, even if it is addiction in the name of a delusional freedom, a delusional selfdefinition and the delusional authenticity of rebellion.

Since the child’s gratification will be shamed-based, resentment and remorse enter his adult relationships whenever he seeks gratification. All of his emotions are knotted up in the tentacles of carried shame, so when he steps outside the template of his parents’ shamelessness, he takes their shame with him; he re-experiences the notion that he is defective, even in the midst of gratification. He feels the childhood shame of his parents’ debasement of normal human developmental emotions, even in the rebellion through which he seeks his freedom from tyranny.

When he experiences the ecstacy of being outside the box, the wounded adult child has his wires crossed and must go outside the norm in order to find this ecstacy. Perhaps this adult wounded child will look to a prostitute in order to get subconsciously in touch with the shame, fear and intensity his posttraumatic stress require. The adult wounded child will demand shame, fear and intensity from the experience, because these emotions were present at the ego age of his original wounding. To be himself, he will search for the familiar, even though it is painful and degrading. He has become hardwired by posttraumatic stress.

These kinds of shame-based actings out will involve the adult wounded child in the blame game, in which he blames his partner for the remorse, guilt, inadequacy and anger he experiences when he has sex or when he seeks relational gratification. Daddy gets the blame, the partner gets the blame, and religion gets the blame. Everything but himself is at fault.

He does not have the tools to be self-empowering and accountable. Not having the power to defend himself, he will characteristically react as a victim – of everything bad that happens in his life. The adult wounded child goes into a victim stance as a way of coping with his lack of personal skills. He feels himself a victim to the spouse, to the parent… he is even a victim of God: “Dear God, how can You have abandoned me?”

Some stay in the “poor-me” victim stance, while others flip into the aggressive offensiveness of “screw you.” Not able to ask what their role was in all of this, or what they need to do in order take care of themselves, they attack from the victim position. These victim attacks take them from one-down to one-up. Addiction, always a one-up posture, is often concomitant with the victim stance.

Abuse and the Parish
When I was involved in parish life, a corps of volunteers kept the parish running. The pastoral team would always falsely empower these people by lavishly praising them. These volunteers needed self-esteem – people who did not have self-care, people who wanted a daddy or a mommy because they didn’t have one when they were growing up to tell them how wonderful they were.

In parish life, so many people get their esteem externally. The healthy goal is to give from a place of fullness, to give of the fullness of yourself freely, without manipulation. If I give myself away so that you will tell me I am wonderful and I can feel good about myself, I have given myself away, and this is codependence. It is not self-esteem; it is other-esteem.

The good of the institutionalized church is not more important than the good of the individual. The persons who suffer in this paradigm of other-esteem are the children of parents who, while serving the church, are not at home parenting. They are at church buying their esteem. The church, by being a failed parent to its own priests and parishioners, recruits failed parents who willingly accept the church’s abuse of authority and labor for the greater glory of the church, inc.

What this says to the children of these needy parents is that both parent and child have no value; they are less-than. It perpetuates a vicious shame cycle in which the parents get their esteem on the outside, and are abandoning their children in order to do it. The church requires failed parents to buy into its own failure of parental responsibility, and it applauds the failure by calling these abused parishioners “the faithful.”

The spiritual demise of the church occurred because the church has opted for power, greed and secrecy over connection, empowerment and intimacy. The invitation of St. Francis of Assisi was to rebuild the church – not in terms of bricks, mortar and coffers – but in terms of being present and spiritually connected: to give a voice to the voiceless and to empower the powerless. The church needs to accept that invitation, so, like a parent to a child, it can nurture and love and be loved by God in return.

History & Addiction

Thursday, April 9th, 2009 | Best of The Cutting Edge | No Comments

Note: This article was originally published in the Spring 2006 edition of Cutting Edge, the online newsletter of The Meadows.

History & Addiction
by Claudia Black, PhD, MSW

Like every aspect of mankind, addiction has its own history. Long before anyone understood the core problems of addiction, people became hooked on substances. The following is adapted from Claudia’s videos The History of Addiction and The Legacy of Addiction.

Chemical dependency has plagued humankind since man first crushed grapes. Each millennium has treated the problems that addiction brings with a methodology unique to the times. Historically, society, as a way of treating those addicted, has imprisoned them, banished them, put them in mental institutions, religiously converted them and, in today’s world, treated them.

What has not changed is the impact of chemical dependency, particularly on those addicted and their families. Herein lies the story.

The roots of addiction are deep and ancient, and the methods used to deal with addicted persons are historically bizarre. The Egyptians used to flog drunkards; the Romans created Bacchus, a God of wine and revelry; and the Turks “cured” drunkenness by pouring molten lead down the throat of the inebriate, perhaps the first example of aversion conditioning — crude, but effective. The Greeks believed that the use of amethysts, beautiful deep purple stones, would ward off drunkenness. They festooned their cups with amethysts, wore them when drinking, and even ground them up and put them in the wine they drank.

An example of an early addict we might recognize is Alexander the Great, king of Macedonia in 350 B.C. By the age of 31, he had conquered the world and, during all his mighty triumphs, had abstained from intoxicating beverages. However, after his great triumphs, in a short span of two years, Alexander became an alcoholic and ended his career in a series of insane escapades.

He burned cities at the request of a courtesan and killed his best friend, and his demise came in a contest of wine drinking. Alexander the Great was 33 years old when he drank himself to death.

Wine making and its export became the economic basis of the Roman Empire. With the collapse of the empire, religious institutions, particularly the monasteries, became the source of brewing and wine making techniques. It was not until the 19th century that the production of beer, wine and distilled beverages became efficient and cheap enough to supply inexpensive alcohol to the masses.

Throughout the 19th century and into the early 1900s, alcohol and various drugs – notably morphine, cocaine and chloral hydrate – were used in various combinations as medicines. These “patent” medicines were highly addictive; alcohol content was as high as 95 percent. By the mid-1800s, the problem of addiction was major and growing. A physician from Battle Creek, Michigan, traveled extensively and used charts to show the effects of alcohol, drugs and nicotine on the body. Today, you would most likely recognize him as the founder of Corn Flakes. His name was Dr. John Harvey Kellogg.

In the 1840s, the first large temperance group, The Washingtonians, was born. The origin of this movement was a drinking club that met nightly at Chase Tavern in Baltimore, Maryland. One night, 20 chronic drinkers, in a spirit of jest, sent two of the younger members to a temperance lecture. Upon their return, the two men presented a favorable report of the lecture, and an argument concerning abstinence began. This argument would last four days and ended when six of the members announced their decision to support an abstinence society. This became a huge movement, with a membership of almost five million Americans by 1845 –notable because it probably marks the beginning of modern-day addiction recovery.

Like Alcoholics Anonymous, the Washingtonians believed in the substitution of personal experiences for lectures, and they viewed the drunk as a sick person. Perhaps most significant, they also professed a singleness of purpose: to help the drunk. But politics became an issue and would cause the movement’s demise.

America’s most recognizable temperance leader may be Carrie Nation. In 1888, she began a campaign wherein she and her female followers destroyed kegs of liquor and sometimes entire saloons, using stones and trusty hatchets.

In the late 1880s and early 1900s, some bizarre forms of addiction treatment were practiced. The Keeley Cure began in 1880. Using bichloride of gold, the treatment involved withdrawing the alcohol or narcotic drug and restoring the nerve cells to their original unpoisoned condition, thus removing the craving for liquor. Enemas and laxatives then stimulated the elimination of the accumulated poisonous products. (Incidentally, Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was subject to this treatment in 1934.) In 1918, it was stated that more than 400,000 people had been treated by this system at various Keeley Institutes. (NOTE: Bichloride of gold did not exist.)

While not concerned primarily with addiction, the Oxford Group, a popular religious movement in the 1930s, was to play an important role in the future treatment of the disease.

But perhaps the most successful treatment for alcoholism has been Alcoholics Anonymous. Dr. Bob Smith and Bill Wilson founded AA in 1935 in Akron, Ohio. Wilson was a drunk who, after being called on by an old friend and member of the Oxford Group, was admitted for his alcoholism to Towns Hospital in New York City in 1934. He remained sober, and his work took him to Akron, where he felt the need to talk to another alcoholic. He was introduced to Dr. Bob Smith, a prominent and persistent drunk. From this meeting emerged the basic premise of Alcoholics Anonymous: one alcoholic helping another alcoholic. The original meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous were held as adjuncts to the Oxford Group on Wednesday nights at Dr. Bob’s house.

Alcoholics Anonymous is a spiritually based program, and its primer is The Big Book. Proposed names for the book were One Hundred Men, Moral Philosophy, The Empty Glass, The Dry Way, and Dry Frontiers. In 1939, 5000 copies were published. Today there are four editions of The Big Book – and millions and millions of copies. Alcoholics Anonymous exists in most countries, with meetings in just about every city in the world.

In 1950, Lois Wilson, wife of Bill Wilson, founded Al-Anon, the 12-Step program for families and friends of alcoholics. Alateen was started in 1957.

In 1951, the “Minnesota Model” was developed. The foundation for treatment from the 1970s to the present, this abstinence model is based on the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. It has become the primary protocol for residential and outpatient treatment programs in the United States and in many parts of the world.

In 1952, the American Medical Association defined alcoholism, but it would not be until 1967 that it passed a resolution identifying alcoholism as a complex disease and recognizing that the diagnosis and treatment of alcoholism are medicine’s responsibility.

While abstinence-based programs would become widespread throughout the United States, treatment in the late 1970s would focus on all chemicals, not just alcohol. The word “alcoholism” was gradually replaced by “chemical dependency.” There would be a resurgence of interest in attending to the family, spouses, partners and children of addicted persons. There also would be heightened interest in both young and adult children of alcoholics.

The role of the private sector in treatment has lessened, with community-based programs taking on more responsibility. Today’s recovery programs treat addictive disorders, recognizing crossaddictions and the need to abstain from all mind-changing chemicals. In many cases, clients are treated for multiple addictive disorders, such as gambling, chemical dependency, eating and sexual disorders, and dual diagnoses, most commonly PTSD and affective disorders.

Addiction is a complex disease, a devastating disease and a terminal disease – yet today it is a treatable disease. History has left us a long and painful legacy of addiction. Today we are beginning a new legacy: that of the reality of recovery.

We Are All Neighbors

Thursday, March 26th, 2009 | Best of The Cutting Edge | No Comments

Note: This article was originally published in the Summer 2004 edition of Cutting Edge, the online newsletter of The Meadows.

We Are All Neighbors
By Peter A. Levine, PhD.

What has happened to our world? Why this large-scale killing, maiming and torture as human populations increase in number and complexity – and as their access to ethernet information grows each year, seemingly in inverse proportion to their compassion? Even when competing for their most basic resources – food and territory – animals typically do not kill members of their own species. Why do we?

While there are many theories of war, post-traumatic stress is one root cause not widely acknowledged, even though it is the single most important instigator of the perverse cruelty of modern warfare. Mankind’s history of war, xenophobia and genocide has generated a legacy of trauma-induced dysfunction fundamentally no different from that experienced by individuals, except in its scale. There remains, however, an enormously important question: Can recovery from trauma be replicated on a larger, societal scale, with similar healing effects? At The Meadows, this has become our living promise.

Let us review what happens when a person is traumatized. First, his internal system remains aroused; he is always on edge, unable to relax or tune down. He is constantly aware of a pervading sense of danger, suspicious of everything and everyone. Not knowing why he feels threatened, this fear and reactivity escalate. This, in turn, amplifies the need to identify the source of the threat. Propelled by a tremendous terror and rage lurking just beneath the surface, he is unconsciously driven into re-enactments to help regulate the ongoing escalation of arousal.

Imagine now an entire population of people with a similar post-traumatic history. In fact, imagine two such populations located in the same geographical region, perhaps with different languages, religions and traditions. What will happen? Croatian civilians are sawed in half by Serbian soldiers. Atrocities are committed, in turn, by Croatian troops. Dozens of truces are called, and each time the result is the same: The urge to kill and destroy takes over, and insanity once again prevails. The Serbs and Croats have been repeating their violent patterns as virtual instant replays of World Wars I and II. Middle Eastern nations can readily trace their wars to Biblical times. Even when wars do not repeat with the kind of ferocity and brutality seen regularly around the globe, suffering in the form of societal dislocation, child abuse and other forms of hatred will. There is no avoiding the traumatic aftermath of war; it reaches into every segment of society.

Transforming Cultural Trauma

Trauma is an inherent part of the primitive biology that brought us here, biology which cannot be changed without completely redesigning us, down to our very cells. To release ourselves from reenacting our traumatic legacy, both individually and as a society, we must transform it. We can do so only by addressing the problem at its roots: in our physiology.

Several years ago, Dr. James Prescott, then at the National Institute of Mental Health, engaged in some important anthropological research on the effects of infant and child rearing practices on the prevalence (and absence) of violence in aboriginal societies. He found that the societies in which child rearing was characterized by close physical bonding and stimulation through rhythmical movement had low incidences of violence. Conversely, the societies with diminished or punitive physical contact with their children showed clear tendencies toward violence in the forms of war, rape and torture.

As we know from the studies of Dr. Prescott and others, the time around birth and infancy is a critical period. It is then that the infant associates the states of its parents with basic security and ability to regulate arousal. When parents are traumatized, they have difficulty imprinting their young with this sense of basic trust and resource. And without this sense of trust, children are more vulnerable to later trauma. One solution to breaking the cycle of cultural trauma is to involve infants and their mothers in an experience that generates trust and bonding before the child has completely assimilated the parents’ anxious state.

In Scandinavia, I am involved in some exciting work inspired by my Norwegian colleagues. This project uses what we know about this critical period around infancy to allow not just one individual, but an entire group of people, to begin transforming the trauma of their past encounters. This method of bringing people together requires a room, a few simple musical instruments and some blankets strong enough to hold a baby’s weight.

The process works as follows: A group of mothers and infants from opposing factions are brought together at a home or community center. The encounter begins with this heterogeneous group of mothers and infants taking turns teaching one another simple folk songs of their respective cultures. Holding their babies, the mothers dance while they sing the songs to their children. A facilitator uses simple instruments to enhance the rhythm in the songs. The movement, rhythm and use of voice in song strengthen the neurological patterns that produce peaceful alertness and receptivity. As a result, the stuckness and fixation produced by generations of strife begin to soften.

At first, the children are perplexed by the events, but they soon become interested and involved. They are enthusiastic about the rattles, drums and tambourines the facilitator passes to them. When not provided with rhythmic stimulation, children of this age do little more than try to fit such objects into their mouths. In this situation, however, the children join in generating the rhythm, with great delight, squealing and cooing.

Because these infants are not blank slates, but highly developed organisms even at birth, they send signals that activate their mothers’ deepest senses of serenity, responsiveness and biological competence.
In this healthy exchange, the mothers and their young engage in an exchange of mutually gratifying physiological responses that, in turn, generate feelings of security and pleasure. It is here that the cycle of traumatic damage begins to unravel.

The transformation continues as the mothers place their babies on the floor and allow them to explore. Like luminous magnets, the babies gleefully move toward each other, overcoming barriers of shyness as the mothers quietly support their exploration from a circle around them. The joy and mutual connection generated by their small adventure is difficult to describe or imagine – it must be witnessed.

The group then continues, with smaller groups of a mother and infant from each culture working together. Two mothers swing their infants gently in a blanket. These babies aren’t just happy; they are completely blissful. They generate a roomful of love so contagious that soon the mothers are smiling and bonding with members of a community they earlier feared and distrusted. The mothers leave with renewed hearts and spirits they are eager to share with others. The process is almost self-replicating.

Once a group of people has participated in the experience, the group can easily be trained to replicate it. The impact of this experience is so powerful that participants want to spread it throughout their communities, and many of them do so. The beauty of this approach to community healing lies in its simplicity and effectiveness. An outside facilitator begins the process by leading the first group.

The experience offers a gentle alternative to the destructive cycle of trauma, suffering and violence by allowing the biological imperative for natural bonding and love to assert itself. Resistance to stress and trauma, the development of basic trust, and the capacity for enduring personal and peaceful relationships are forged during a critical period of life.

Developing physiological and neurological patterns give us the instinct of the animal and the intelligence of the human being. Lacking either, we are doomed to act out our hostilities. With the two working together, we can advance on our evolutionary path, utilize all our human capacities and bring our children into a world that is safe.

Non-traumatized humans prefer to live in harmony. Yet traumatic residue creates beliefs that we are unable to surmount our hostility and that misunderstandings will always keep us apart. It is imperative that we make every effort to discover and teach treatment modalities like the Scandinavian model I described previously. We must be passionate in our search for effective avenues of resolution. Not just peace, but survival, depends on it.

Nature cannot be fooled. Evolution happens as a result of forces that threaten to destroy the species. Trauma is one such force.

CuttingEdge Editorial Board comments in response to this article:
The theory of childhood development and immaturity developed by Pia Mellody and its application to the patients at The Meadows is a most encouraging demonstration of how post-traumatic stress can be treated and individual destinies turned to the path of self-knowledge and relational peace. And while The Meadows applies its processes of analysis and recovery to individuals, at its center lies a template that we must apply on a broader societal scale.

The Psychological Impact of Traumatic Life Experiences

Thursday, March 12th, 2009 | Best of The Cutting Edge | No Comments

Note: This article was originally published in the January 2008 edition of Cutting Edge, the online newsletter of The Meadows.

The Psychological Impact of Traumatic Life Experiences
By Bessel A. van der Kolk, MD

Studying the psychological impact of traumatic life experiences helps to clarify many issues of human suffering. The legacy of traumatic experiences, particularly in childhood, is expressed in bodily reactions such as chronic physical discomfort and illness, unmodulated emotions, and failure to fully, physically and mentally, engage in the present. In order to gain a sense of control over one’s physical reactions, it is necessary to mobilize the body. We must physically come to terms with the remnants of fear and defensiveness lodged in our physical reality; otherwise, the imprints of the past may permanently determine whether we feel at home in our bodies and whether we can be open to and learn from experience.

Mainstream therapy helps us by providing insight into the origins of our misery, often in the context of an understanding and supportive relationship. This understanding and support can give people the courage to face previously intolerable realities and give voice to what had felt unspeakable. Working with bodily states is relatively new to Western psychology. In contrast, many cultures around the world have ancient traditions, such as yoga and tai chi, that emphasize working with bodily states in order to affect the mind. These body-oriented methods hold in common the notion that, in order to change, people need to have physical experiences that directly contradict past feelings of helplessness, frustration and terror.

Neuroscientific research shows little connection between the various brain centers involved in understanding, planning and emotion; we simply are not capable of understanding our way out of our feelings. In fact, our logical selves tend to run behind our emotional urges, and function primarily to rationalize our loves and hates. Psychological conflicts, while often having origins in the past, become rooted in our internal sensations, which have become blunted, exaggerated or “stuck.”

Hence, the process of psychological change involves regaining a healthy relationship with our internal feeling states. In contrast to understanding, paying close attention to one’s internal life – the flow of physical sensations, feelings, internal images and patterns of thought – can make an enormous difference in how we feel and act.

Areas in the conscious mind that convey the sense of being in touch with oneself and one’s bodily states (the medial prefrontal cortex and insula) are linked to the brain’s emotional center (the amygdala) and arousal centers and, finally, to the hormonal and muscular output centers. In this way, working with deep sensations and feeling has the potential to achieve a sense of internal equilibrium and balance. Only after being able to quiet and master one’s inner physical experiences does one regain the capacity to use speech and language to convey, in detail, feelings and memories.

About the Author
Bessel A. van der Kolk, Clinical Consultant for The Meadows and Mellody House, is one of the world’s foremost authorities in the area of posttraumatic stress and related phenomena. His research work has ranged from the psychobiology of trauma to traumatic memory, and from the effectiveness of EMDR to the effects of trauma on human development. He is a professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine and medical director of the Trauma Center in Boston, a Community Practice site of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network. The Trauma Center is one of the preeminent training sites in the country for psychologists and psychiatrists specializing in the treatment of traumatized children and adults.

Understanding Sexual Recovery

Thursday, February 26th, 2009 | Best of The Cutting Edge | No Comments

Note: This article was originally published in the Spring 2007 edition of Cutting Edge, the online newsletter of The Meadows.

Understanding Sexual Recovery
By Maureen Canning, MA, LMFT

Sexuality is yoked with one’s being – the body, mind and spirit. It is connected with one’s identity, or essence. But as a culture, we have conditioned ourselves to experience and express our sexuality with a laser focus on physical gratification, the seeking of pleasure and release.

This is only a small part of what our sexual selves encompass. The totality of sexual expression is experienced through one’s passion, creativity and life force energy. When we hear a moving  piece of music; create art; connect with nature; lust after our favorite food, engrossed in its  consumption; grow passionate about learning a new language or dance step, this is the expression of our sexuality.

This energy taps into the core of who we are. That’s what makes sex addiction so powerful –
and what sets it apart from other addictions. Our sexuality comes from the depths of our being, as does recovery. Examining and integrating healthy sexuality from this perspective becomes much more than just “mind-blowing sex.” It becomes a spectrum of possibilities, a transformation of the whole self.

For several years, Anna has been working on her recovery from alcohol and sex addiction. Like most addicts, Anna had given up her most treasured hobby; it had been sidelined by the tumultuous life of her addiction. Anna had given up riding horses. Once an avid polo player, she had dropped out of the game and sold her animals. After several years of recovery, she was able to reconnect with her passion. Anna recently bought a new horse and is training several others. She rides almost every day.

“Maureen,” Anna says in a somber tone, “I was riding my horse the other day, and I think I had a spiritual moment.”

“What happened?” I ask.

“I had been rushing around yesterday morning, and, by the time I got to the stable, I was in a bad mood. When I got on my horse, she fought me, wouldn’t do anything. She threw her head up and tried to buck me off. A friend watching me suggested that I stand up in the saddle and get myself centered, take a few breaths and feel her rhythm. I did what he suggested, let go of my stress and got in tune with her. When I sat down, she became calm. I rode in that ring and felt so connected to her. It was amazing.”

What Anna is creating is connection, first with herself and then with life at large. She has come a long way in her recovery, and she is now reaping its rewards. Of course, it has taken time and a concentrated effort. For sex addicts, recovery can be a long and arduous but rewarding process.

Treatment planning for sexual addiction needs to realistically address the healing of one’s personhood. In early treatment, the goals are focused and concrete: breaking through denial, surrendering to the addiction, acknowledging losses, making disclosures to loved ones, working the 12 Steps, getting a sponsor, going to meetings, etc. In this phase of treatment, the client is typically in crisis, emotionally overwhelmed, disoriented and experiencing withdrawal. Inpatient treatment is an intense process that can leave the client feeling inundated and emotionally fragile upon discharge. Patients often feel splintered, their ego state disoriented, their affect-management tenuous and their communication skills poor. The stress of re-entering life is, at best, a challenge and, more realistically, a trigger for relapse.

Extended-care treatment involves giving patients time to identify and integrate ego states, stabilize their emotions, grieve losses, begin trauma resolution, and implement treatment tools for relational development with self and others.

The profound shame that patients feel, and the slow but constant erosion of their personhoods, are the results of sexual addiction. The trauma and subsequent addiction result from a lifetime of ritualized behaviors and deeply embedded coping mechanisms. Patients run from their shame, using anger to act out and destroy any semblance of an authentic self. The recovery of the authentic self and the ability to live in one’s truth must be extracted from the wreckage of the addiction.

About the Author
Maureen Canning, MA, LMFT, Clinical Director of Dakota and Clinical Consultant for Sexual Disorder Services at The Meadows, has extensive experience working with sexual disorders. She is a past board member of the Society for the Advancement of Sexual Health, as well as past president of the Arizona Council on Sexual Addiction.

Somatic Experiencing: Resilience, Regulation, and Self

Thursday, February 12th, 2009 | Best of The Cutting Edge | No Comments

Note: This article was originally published in the Summer 2005 edition of Cutting Edge, the online newsletter of The Meadows.

Somatic Experiencing: Resilience, Regulation, and Self
By Peter A. Levine, Ph.D., Clinical Consultant for The Meadows and Mellody House

My life’s work, encompassing nearly four decades as a stress researcher and trauma therapist, has taught me how vulnerable we humans are to the effects of stress and trauma. An apparent contradiction to this fragility surfaced during a study I conducted at NASA with Apollo astronauts. In monitoring their physiological responses transmitted to Earth, I was surprised to observe an extraordinary capacity to successfully withstand extreme levels of stress.

However, the most exciting discovery of my career was the recognition that “ordinary” trauma sufferers had the same innate, though latent, ability to rebound from stress. I was both humbled and amazed to witness their ability to learn the very skills that I believe facilitated the astronauts’ spontaneous resilience.

In the 1960s, as a student in the fledgling field of mind/body psychology, I learned how to “read” people’s postures and assess the patterns of tension held in their bodies (in the vernacular, many were “uptight,” “twisted” in angst, “scared-stiff,” or helplessly “collapsed” and without energy). I was experimenting with using body awareness to help these individuals learn to normalize their excessive tension patterns. However, a deeper truth emerged from those shared efforts. I discovered that “long-forgotten” events, which had originally been perceived as significantly threatening or highly stressful, had left deep, organismic imprints on my clients. These stress patterns played out in the theaters of their bodies as habitual postures, recurring symptoms, stereotyped movements and repetitive behaviors.

As I continued to explore these body narratives, it became clear that, given the appropriate support and guidance, most individuals could unlock the somatic “stress memories” trapped in their bodies. In so doing, they experienced a rebound (albeit delayed) similar to what the astronauts exhibited as a spontaneous response to the stress of liftoff and space flight. With their self-possession restored, former trauma victims were relieved of their constrained postures, freed in their movements and behaviors, and liberated from many of their symptoms. I began to recognize that effective treatment was not a matter of remembering or erasing painful memories, but of establishing a resilient nervous system, similar to those possessed by the naturally endowed astronauts.

With the resilience of their nervous systems restored, my clients and I sometimes saw remarkable patterns of behavioral and psychological change. Rather than the repetitive and self-reinforcing patterns of symptoms, new adaptations emerged. Often, without the client even noticing, lifelong symptoms of pain, anxiety and sleep disturbances were replaced with engagement and interest in life.

Thirty years ago, Jody’s life was shattered. While walking in the woods near her boyfriend’s house, a hunter approached her and began an “innocent” conversation. It was mid-September. There was a crisp New England chill in the air. Her boyfriend and others thought nothing when they saw someone, behind the bushes, apparently chopping wood. A madman, however, was smashing Jody’s head again and again with his rifle. The police found Jody unconscious. Chips from the butt of the rifle were nearby, where they had broken off in the violent attack.

The only recollection Jody had of the event was scant and confused. She vaguely remembered meeting the man and then waking up in the hospital some days later. As she tried to recollect the event, she went blank in panic. Jody had been suffering from anxiety, migraines, concentration and memory problems, depression, chronic fatigue, and chronic pain in her head, back and neck (diagnosed as fibromyalgia). She had been treated by numerous physical therapists, chiropractors and physicians. Jody, like so many traumatized individuals, grasped desperately and obsessively in an attempt to retrieve memories of her trauma. However, her body revealed a clearer “snapshot” of the event. The upper half of her body, particularly her neck, back and shoulders, were extremely stiff. Her shoulders were high, with the right one practically touching her ear. Her upper body moved almost as one unit, stiff and jerky. Jody’s head seemed like it was retracted into her trunk, like a turtle that had been startled. Her movements were tentative, even furtive; she seemed to be always glancing to the right. It was as though she was on guard, waiting to be struck.

When I suggested to Jody that it was possible to experience healing without having to remember the event, I saw a flicker of hope and a momentary look of relief pass across her face. We talked for a while, reviewing her history and her day-by-day struggle to function. Focusing on bodily sensations, Jody slowly became aware of various tension patterns in her head and neck. With this focus, she began to notice a particular urge to turn to the right and retract her neck. In following this urge, in slow, gradual “micro movements,” she experienced momentary fear, followed by a strong tingling sensation. Through “tracking” these sensations and movements, Jody began a journey that her mind could not understand. In learning to move between flexible control and surrender, she began to experience shaking and trembling, which gradually spread throughout her body. Thus began, ever so gently, the discharging of her trauma — and the recharging of her life with its lost vitality.

In later sessions, Jody experienced other spontaneous movements, as well as sounds and impulses to run, bare her teeth and claw like a cornered animal. By gradually carrying out and experiencing these biologically established protective responses, Jody was able to sense how her body had prepared to react in that fraction of a second when the hunter raised the rifle to strike her. By allowing these incomplete movements and sounds to be mindfully expressed, Jody began a deep, organic experience of her body’s innate capacity to defend and protect itself. Through “owning” the life-preserving actions that her body activated at the time of her attack, she released that bound energy and realized — from deep within — that she in fact could, and did, act to defend herself. Gradually, as more of these “defensive” and “orienting” responses reinstated, her panic and anxiety decreased, as did her physical symptoms.

As Jody came to appreciate the return of her animal instincts, I came to appreciate how animals, while preyed upon in the wild, respond to constant, life-or-death threats without breaking down. If animals did not possess a natural “immunity” to stress, the survival of the individual, as well as the species, would be tenuous at best. This innate “hardiness” was in line with my observations of the astronauts’ stress responses, and it sharply contrasted with the symptomatic people I was beginning to treat with my body/mind techniques. This was the final piece of the trauma puzzle.

While humans and animals share the part of the nervous system designed to respond to threat, many of us have somehow lost the capacity to “shake off” our encounters with danger; instead we become paralyzed — physically, emotionally and mentally — as trauma victims. As I worked with more and more people, I became increasingly convinced that freeing that bound “survival energy” — and finding access to our innate restorative capacity — is what allows us to return fully to life. This became the central therapeutic goal. The story of how we have “forgotten” the capacity for self-regulation, and how we can regain it, is at the core of what I describe in my writings. It is what we teach in our Somatic Experiencing® (SE) professional trainings.

Dealing With One’s Inner Sensations to Move Beyond Trauma

Thursday, January 29th, 2009 | Best of The Cutting Edge | No Comments

Note: This article was originally published in the Spring 2005 edition of Cutting Edge, the online newsletter of The Meadows.

Dealing With One’s Inner Sensations to Move Beyond Trauma
by Bessel van der Kolk

Studying the psychological impacts of traumatic life experiences helps to clarify many issues of human suffering. Understanding how the brain fails to integrate traumatic memories (Chapter VIII: Trauma and Memory. In van der Kolk BA, McFarlane AC & Meisaeth L: Traumatic Stress: the Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body and Society. NY Guilford Press, 1996.) helps explain the nightmares and flashbacks in com bat veterans and rape victims or why a woman who was sexually molested might experience sexual contact as if she were raped, even when she loves her partner.

As trauma became better under stood it provided a way to make sense of why many people with deep-seated problems were chronically anxious and afraid, aggressive or manipulative. Many of them had childhood histories of trauma. They are vulnerable to continue to behave as if their lives are in danger and expect to be hurt at the least provocation, including by the very people who care for them. The legacy of having been physically trapped and unable to protect oneself is expressed in bodily reactions such as chronic physical discomfort and illness; unmodulated emotions; and failure to fully, physically and mentally, engage in the present.

Unfortunately, friends, family and even therapists may fall into the trap of giving advice to those who were traumatized. This advice, of course, rarely works; because frozen bodies cannot generate their own action patterns, nor can they follow the suggestions of others. “Helpful” interventions all too often end up in “irrational” explosions of frustrated advisees or “guiding lights.”

In order to gain a sense of control over one’s physical reactions, it is necessary to mobilize the body. Unless we physically come to terms with the remnants of fear and defensiveness lodged in our physical reality, the imprints of the past may permanently alter whether we feel at home in our bodies or are paralyzed in our capacity to be open to and learn from new experiences.

Mainstream therapy helps people by providing insight into the origins of our misery, often in the context of an understanding and supportive relationship. When done correctly, such understanding and support can give people the courage to face previously intolerable realities and help give voice to what was felt to be unspeakable.

Working with bodily states is relatively recent in western psychology. In contrast, most cultures around the world have ancient traditions, such as yoga and tai ch’i, that emphasize working with bodily states to affect the mind. What unites these various body-oriented methods is the common no tion that in order to change, people need to have physical experiences that directly contradict past feelings of helplessness, frustration and terror.

Neuroscience research shows that there is little connection between the various brain centers involved in understanding, planning and emotion–we simply are not capable of understanding our way out of our feelings–whether they are feelings of love, fear, deprivation or hate. In fact, our logical selves tend to run behind our emotional urges and may primarily function to rationalize our loves and hates. Our minds are much like talk show hosts on television who are trying to explain the day’s events at day’s end.

Psychological conflicts, while often having origins in the past, are now rooted in our self-relationships and to our internal sensations that have become blunted, exaggerated or “stuck.” Hence, the process of psycho logical change fundamentally concerns regaining a healthy relationship with our internal feeling states. In contrast to understanding, paying close attention to one’s internal life and the flow of physical sensations, feelings, internal images and patterns of thought (in short, working with the “felt sense” –the ebb and flow of inner experiences) can make an enormous difference in the ways we feel and act.

The pathway in the brain from the conscious self to the emotions (i.e., they only way that people can effectively influence how they feel) links areas in the conscious mind that convey the sense of being in touch with oneself and one’s bodily states (the medial prefrontal cortex and insula), to the emotional centers of the brain (centering on the amygdale), to the arousal centers and, finally, to the hormonal and muscular output centers. What this means is that working with deep sensations and feelings has the potential of attaining a sense of internal equilibrium and balance.

Only after being able to quiet down and master one’s inner physical experiences do people regain the capacity to use speech and language to convey to others in detail what they feel and “remember”. Some choose to then tell the story of what has happened, while others just go on with their lives.

About the Author
Bessel A. van der Kolk, MC Clinical Consultant for The Meadows and Mellody House, is on of the world’s foremost authorities in the area of post-traumatic stress and related phenomena. His research work has ranged from the psychobiology of trauma, and from the effectiveness of EMDR to to the effects of trauma on human development.

Denial Is Not a River in Egypt

Thursday, January 15th, 2009 | Best of The Cutting Edge | No Comments

Note: This article was originally published in the Summer 2004 edition of Cutting Edge, the online newsletter of The Meadows.

Denial is not a River in Egypt
By Robert Fulton, MA, LISAC, Administrator, The Meadows

One of the wittiest adages we hear in 12-Step recovery is “Denial is not a river in Egypt.” It is so witty, in fact, that many recovering people repeat it without asking themselves the absolutely important question, “If denial isn’t a river in Egypt, what is it?”

The answer seems too obvious for further inspection. Denial is about denying that I had a psychological problem. Most often, I denied that I was an alcoholic or an anorexic or that I was a sex addict. But now that I have admitted to myself and to another person that I am any one of those things, I am no longer in denial. I am back in control.

Sadly, intellectual admission often leaves the deeper denial in place – intact and poisonous. The alcoholic awakens every morning swearing not to have another drink and, by 5 p.m., heads to the bar. The anorexic, who has planned three healthy meals, looks at herself in the mirror, sees a fat woman, and decides not to eat. The sex addict at the SA 12-Step program shares the agony of his addiction and, after the meeting, hits on the attractive newcomer.

In recovery, behavior cannot be the driving force. Intellect and affect are the driving forces that determine my behavior. As an addict, I behaviorally shut off my affect and distort my intellect, so that I maintain the behavior that protects me from the awful confrontation with my childhood shame.

Denial of affect involves disassociating from those feelings that our primary caregivers taught us to regard as shameful. Our caregivers taught us to dishonor our feelings, because to honor them and to communicate was to be punished and to be shamed. We learned to separate self from the emotions generated by the truth of what we witnessed. In order to avoid the worth destroying poison of carried shame, we were forced to deny the feelings we had when we witnessed an emotional event in the family.

In order to medicate the pain of having abandoned our authentic self, we find ways to medicate the dissonance – we deny the truth of what we think; we submerge and camouflage the truth of what we feel. The self that emerges from the pain of denial becomes, in most adults, the only kind of “maturity” to which they have access.

We deny on an intellectual level, and we deny on an affective level. We deny intellectually by telling ourselves that two plus two is five. We were empowered to do that, or conditioned to do that, when we were growing up – and two plus two never added up to four in Mommy and Daddy’s household. Our father was a falling-down alcoholic. We said to Mommy, “Daddy’s drunk out on the lawn. He’s passed out. He looks like he’s dead. I’m scared.” And she said to us, “Don’t worry about it; he’s fine.”

The kid knows that the fear of his father’s drunken abandonment is real, but to have that truth, that reality, denied by his mother is to have his reality denied. The child then wonders what’s wrong with himself. Mind you, he doesn’t ask what’s wrong with his father or his mother. They are the ones acting shamefully, yet it is he who feels ashamed – he is carrying their shame. Because the kid’s real fear of the father’s death is being made illegitimate by the lies of the mother, the child himself is now experiencing a death of self – of his own emotional reality and his access to it. He is not allowed to feel the fear of losing his father.

This is the most damaging kind of shame-based denial, because it attacks the child’s very authenticity. He has learned that to have the terrifying emotions attendant upon Daddy’s drunkenness is not all right. Disassociation from self becomes habitual. Denial of self is honored in the dysfunctional family system.

When the child is older and he witnesses a shameful act, the kind of disassociation he experiences will be covered up with a more sophisticated form of social camouflage than when he was 5. For example, he may think that his father’s shameful drunkenness will disgrace the family in the eyes of the neighbors. The primary lie that Daddy is not drunk is justified by the need to remain socially acceptable. The young adult now needs a defense system that not only deflects his father’s shame, but protects his own social self as well. Such denial is often called loyalty and is praised as being politic. He is often told that his cover-up makes him a good citizen.

The child who has viewed his father’s shameful drunkenness may fear that his father will stop loving him should the father became aware that his son sees him as a failed father. In Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco The Drunkenness of Noah, Noah’s two sons come into the tent and see him drunk, and they experience intense shame. They identify with their father’s unexpressed shame at having abandoned his children and given up power in regard to his sons. The intended Biblical lesson is that to see someone in his nakedness is to obtain power over them. Rarely has the Bible been so psychologically deluded. It is not the children who have power over the parent; it is the shameless parent who holds power over the children through the mechanism of carried shame, setting off a career of adapted wounded-child codependence.

So denial, better than alcohol, is the best dysfunctional medication for shame. However, denial cannot salve one against that sense of hopelessness and despair that is engendered when one loses connection to self. It is then that we feel the need to buddy up to an addictive process that will give a false sense of power, that  will eliminate the fear in a moment, that yields that one-up posturing of denial and grandiosity.

When dealing with these disconnects, one is driven back not only to the newborn-to-age 5 feelings of shame but to the adapted state of ages 5 to 17 as well. The early shame sets the stage for the acting out, through which each individual learns to dramatize brilliantly his dysfunctional avoidance of emotional truth. It is an artistic way of keeping from connecting to oneself and avoiding the agony of re-experiencing the death of our truth.

There is a Catch-22 in this artistic denial, no matter what relief it seems to give us. Even when we manage to get in touch with our honest feelings, if we do not have the tools to survive the encounter, we cycle right back into the wound of abandonment or of shame.

Feelings then seem to us a trigger to an unhealable vulnerability. They become something that we need to stay away from, which is why one of the first things a good clinician does (once a patient is reasonably stable) is to urge the patient to drop into his honest feelings, and to let him know that it is okay, that he is okay. He needs the security to feel that accessing his affect will not kill him.

This is actually what happens in the Survivors Workshop. People begin to express their affective authenticity, and they are not shamed – they are honored. And they begin to honor themselves. I often remember what I always said in group: that we have to learn to honor our feelings, which is to hold them – and ourselves – in high regard. Our feelings are our windows of insight into the depth of who we are. But all of that is for naught under the guise of affective denial when, in a defended posture, we compulsively seek to offset the initial wound of being defective, of being unworthy.

In reactivity to the carried shame of abusive childhoods, there are those who acquiesced and expressed their shame, pain, fear and anger in neurotic, seditious ways. Then there are those who rebelliously fought for some kind of voice, but who lacked the tools for connection. In either case, the trauma disconnects one from oneself.

The aim of treatment is to allow me to reconnect to me for the first time as the beneficent parent, the loving parent who needs to be nurtured for who and what I am. At the same time, I learn to present my authenticity and accept the vulnerability that my truth may meet within the world, even if the world shuns me. You may be sad, but you will have the joy and power and value of not disconnecting from the self. You do not rise above and go one-up; acceptance of one’s imperfect perfection is a soaring disengagement from that which is destructive.

People taking the first steps to deal with the trauma of carried shame will choose submission rather than surrender. This submission is often an intellectual admission that there is a problem. But unless the submission is also a surrender to the will, this apparent surrender of dignity will leave a bad taste; it will feel dissonant. It will be sensed as a false admission, one made to keep the depth of the real problem at a distance. The feeling of true surrender is internal peace. Only I will know. But I know I have surrendered when I feel that peace.

The concept of denial and surrender being in that same crucible is vitally important, because denial is a form of false security through control. If, by admitting we are addicted, we seek clarity for the sake of control, it is only to give ourselves the illusion of safety. We remain terrified of letting go of control, because if we let go of this charade, we are going to be left in the abysmal pit of carried shame. So our whole life has been to orchestrate this nonsense. We know it to be nonsense, but we don’t know anything other, so we medicate the nonsense.

In recovery, however, I am now invited to go to a place of powerlessness, and that is a miraculous paradox, because it is only there that I can be empowered. The first thing that has to happen is for you to acknowledge that change is impossible without help. When I surrender, I learn to trust another to give me that help, to help me get on the path to recovery. The recovering individual, once the path becomes a reality, takes the path and continues to go forward.

When somebody gets into recovery, and they begin to date again, it is like being back at 14 or 15, even though she is 40 or 50, because it is a whole new experience. There is the similar excitement and fear and passion – it is a whole new way of relating. It is not a state of authenticity and acceptance of self within memory. Because it is new, it is innocent. In recovery, we experience “innocence.”

And so the healthy lineage allows for the delight, the life, the joy, the possibility and the joy-pain – ever new, ever going forward. Healthy, functional shame, not the sickness of carried shame, is what fuels the joy and the richness, because it reminds me of my authentic self; it puts me back on the path, back on line. As you move in a new venture, it is all new and, therefore, a delight.

And you may find that you have overstepped and then feel ashamed of a behavior because it was all new, but it is now functional shame that allows you to become more intimate, to feel more deeply. I am imperfect, and I make mistakes. My mistakes may cause me pain, and they will. But they don’t make me bad. They only make me human. And that, I don’t have to deny.