Spirituality is Something You Are: Forgiving, Loving, Finding Serenity

Thursday, August 19th, 2010 | Best of MeadowLark | No Comments

Note: This article was originally published in the Winter 2007 edition of MeadowLark, the Meadows‘ alumni magazine.

Spirituality is Something You Are: Forgiving, Loving, Finding Serenity

An excerpt from Changing Course: Healing from Loss, Abandonment and Fear

by Claudia Black, PhD, MSW

When you set out on a new course in your life, the course of recovery, you are on a spiritual path. It is a path that leads to forgiving, accepting, loving, and finding serenity within yourself and with others. This spiritual path promises to lead you from aloneness and emptiness to a sense of connection and meaning in your life.

On this new journey, we are often involved in a process of spiritual growth before we recognize the spirituality of it. Looking back, the turning point came when we allowed ourselves to begin letting go of our fears and defenses to hear the truth:

There is another reality than the one I live.

I want it. This insight led us to learn more about the “other reality” and to learn more of the truth. The truth is that we are all human, both unique and ordinary, filled with dark and light. The truth is that all of our life experiences, whether admitted or denied, form the ground we stand on now. And the truth is that – in spite of our imperfections, our past and present pain, and the roles we’ve adapted to survive — we now know that we are free to choose how we live our own lives. Realizing this, the victim’s passive plea, “Why me?,” becomes a new, proactive question instead: “What can I do now?” This shift brings us to another turning point and another awareness:

I am responsible for the choices I make in my life.

When we accept our humanness and exercise our responsibility for making our own choices — for example, choosing what we do when we are angry, lonely, or sad — we are involved in a spiritual process. Our spirituality must be based on a vision that attends to our whole self and honors our whole experience, while at the same time acknowledges that we are accountable in the present for our own feelings, beliefs, and behaviors.

In The Spirituality of Imperfection, Ernest Kurtz writes that we have suffered zerrissenheit, or “torn-to-pieces-hood.” Spirituality, as he describes it, is the healing process of “making whole.” Spirituality helps us first to see and then to understand, and eventually to accept the imperfection that lies at the core of our human be-ing.

Accepting our human limitation brings us inner peace. What a relief it is to put an end to the fight within ourselves. Also, as we find the permission to be the imperfect beings that we are, we become able to let others be who they are.

The experience of inner peace is foreign to those of us from shame-based families because there was so little peace and harmony in our lives. We didn’t have the models that projected unconditional love, acceptance, or gratitude. As a result, we came to believe that if we were anything less than perfect we were inferior and of little value. So, we sought perfection, believing it was our only avenue to acceptance and love.

We were so hurt by the absence of the nurturing we needed to thrive that we have spent a great portion of our lives trying to make that unconditional love happen in the present, hoping somehow to make up for the past. Paradoxically, when we are willing to believe that we cannot change the past, then we become willing to let go of our pain.

Think about the family being a house with many rooms. Our growing up years were lived in our parents’ room, which was connected to their parents’ room, and their siblings’ room, and so on. The present day is the room where we have lived our adult lives. A mixture of experiences has taken place in all of these rooms. Some experiences were good, some caused a lot of pain. We need to realize that all families are imperfect, as all of us are imperfect people. Those of us who don’t understand or want to accept that truth remain actively in denial. As Thomas Moore writes in Care of the Soul, “The sentimental image of family that we present publicly is a defense for the pain of proclaiming the family for what it is — a sometimes comforting, sometimes devastating house of life and memory.”

To deny or disown any part of our experience leaves us dangerously incomplete and especially vulnerable to our shame. The lifeblood of shame is secrecy, fed by the dark fear of being found out. To grow toward wholeness in the context of our family home, we have to open all the doors and windows to let in air and light. Then for us at last, healing will begin.

“You and I are children of mud, earthy and moist,” Jane Smiley writes in A Thousand Acres. “We’re not all fire and light — no matter how much we wish otherwise.” Facing this truth, we reach another turning point:

It is in the acceptance of all that was and is that our spirits become whole.

Bill Moyers described acceptance as wholeness and health in an interview about his book, Healing and the Mind:

“Health is … a state of mind that recognizes the history of life, which includes moments of great delight and moments of deep sorrow. When we see all these parts of our being as connected, we come to terms with where we come from, who we are and where we’re going. Health is a whole.”

In the process of becoming whole, we may say we “have spirituality.” But spirituality isn’t an event or a possession. It’s a way of living and being. Spirituality doesn’t mean we never get hurt again, or that we are always smiling, always happy, never angry, and never scared. In part, spirituality means that when we are hurt or afraid we can respond without making matters worse. Also, as we change course and take steps on this spiritual road, we are able to enjoy the good feelings of being solidly balanced, open and unguarded, peaceful about the past and generally positive about how we are living in the present.

Techniques for Managing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Thursday, August 5th, 2010 | Best of MeadowLark, Uncategorized | No Comments

Note: This article was originally published in the Winter 2007 edition of MeadowLark, the magazine for The Meadows alumni.

Techniques for Managing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

By Lara Rosenberg

This article is based on a workshop that Lara gave February 13 – 14, 2006, in Sri Lanka hosted by the INGO RedR. The workshop is focused on staff working with individuals, families, and communities that have experienced or continue to experience traumatic events. It was an introductory workshop of particular value for staff having community experience, but limited or no psychological training. It was assumed that participants had prior knowledge of stress.

Stress affects us in many ways: cognitively, affectively, physiologically, and behaviorally. “Stress” is a broad term. It’s part of all of our lives; each individual has his own ideas of how to define it. There are many definitions given to stress, but the important underlying factor is that stress results from a change in one’s environment and requires an adjustment. The environmental changes that require us to adapt and adjust are known as “stressors”; they can include anything out of the ordinary. Many think of stress as only negative, but it can be positive and necessary to our healthy development. The ways in which we adapt to our environments leave some stimulated and others with feelings of fear, nervousness, and confusion, which lead us to either solve or avoid a problem. Change always brings extra pressure, as individuals have to adapt to new circumstances.

Humans and animals are born with the capacity to react to threatening situations in adaptive ways; the “fight or flight response” allows individuals to experience resilience in response to danger. Bessel van der Kolk (1994) describes the fight response as hyper-arousal or protest and the flight response as freezing or numbing sensations, which allow individuals to avoid consciously experiencing the event.

Trauma is caused by a stressful occurrence “that is outside the range of usual human experience, and that would be markedly distressing to almost anyone” (Peter Levine, 1997). Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) causes one to experience a prolonged or delayed reaction to an intensely stressful event. According to The DSM-IV Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, PTSD occurs when an individual experiences a threat (actual or perceived) of death or serious injury to self or others with a response of “intense fear, helplessness, or horror.” PTSD can occur in adults and children from all socio-economic backgrounds. Most people who are exposed to a traumatic, stressful event experience some symptoms of PTSD in the days and weeks following exposure. According to the National Center for PTSD, data suggest that approximately 8 percent of men and 20 percent of women exposed to trauma develop PTSD; of that group, 30 percent develop a chronic form that persists throughout their lifetimes.

The World Health Organization (WHO) states that the prevalence of mild and moderate common mental disorders in the general population is 10% and can increase to 20% after a disaster. As stated by Dr. Daya Somasundaram from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka (WHO, 2005), “WHO estimated that 50% may have problems and 5–10% have serious problems needing treatment. One [non-WHO] survey found 40% post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in children,” referring to people in Sri Lanka. Other data suggest that the mental health burden in Sri Lanka is even higher. Dr. Roy Lubit (2006), as well as Pia Mellody, a pioneer on the effects of childhood trauma, stresses that the full impact of trauma may not be experienced until a child reaches adulthood, engages in adult relationships and responsibilities, and develops more sophisticated cognitive capabilities.

The National Center for PTSD states that one of every three disaster survivors experiences some or all of the severe stress symptoms that may lead to lasting PTSD, anxiety disorders, or depression. Severe stress symptoms are extreme attempts to avoid memories and feelings. In order to numb their emotional pain, individuals will stay unusually busy, withdraw, and exhibit addictive behaviors. Violent behaviors often become prevalent.

Individuals can experience severe depression as part of PTSD, suffering a complete loss of hope, self-worth, motivation, and purpose. Some might experience disassociation, feeling outside of oneself as if living in a dream, or may become vacant for periods of time. Intrusive re-experiencing can occur through terrifying memories, nightmares, or flashbacks. For some, hyper-arousal manifests in panic attacks, rage, extreme irritability, or intense agitation. Other manifestations include severe anxiety, paralyzing worry, extreme helplessness, obsessive and compulsive behaviors, and feeling responsible for the event. Children often re-experience traumatic or stressful events through recurrent memories, nightmares, and play. Some children become very aroused, exhibiting nervousness, irritability, anger, disorganization, or agitation. Children also shun thoughts, feelings, or places that evoke memories of the event. Occasionally, they experience a loss of developmental patterns or skills, separation anxiety, bed-wetting, and learning difficulties. An 8-year old boy in Sri Lanka could not see for 10 weeks after enduring the terrifying experience of the tsunami, in which he lost his mother and home. This example of physical impairment demonstrates the freezing response described by Bessel van der Kolk (1996), as well as Peter Levine (1997) in his Somatic Experiencing® work.

Disaster stress may revive memories of prior trauma; pre-existing social, economic, spiritual, psychological, or medical problems can intensify. Individuals at higher risk for severe stress symptoms and lasting PTSD include those who have been exposed to other traumas, such as abuse, assault, or combat. Chronic poverty, homelessness, unemployment, or discrimination will often intensify the traumatic event, as can chronic illness and psychological disorders.

Most likely to develop PTSD are those who experience stress at a greater intensity, with unpredictability, uncontrollability, and real or perceived responsibility. Factors such as genetics, early-onset and longer-lasting childhood trauma, lack of functional social support, and concurrent stressful life events also contribute to the disorder. Those who report a greater perceived threat, suffering, terror, and fear are at risk for developing PTSD, and a social environment that produces shame, guilt, stigmatization, or self-hatred can affect sufferers as well.

Individuals experiencing PTSD face an increased likelihood of co-occurring disorders such as alcohol/drug abuse and dependence, major depressive episodes, conduct disorders, and social phobias. According to the National Center for PTSD, “In a large-scale study, it was found that 88% of men and 79% of women with PTSD met the criteria for another psychiatric disorder.” Some experience difficulty in their psychosocial functioning, with profound problems in their daily lives. Concurrent prevalent physical problems include headaches, dizziness, chest pain, and other aches and pains. Often medical doctors treat only the symptoms, without considering PSTD development.

At the same time, stressful or traumatic experiences can facilitate personal growth. In treating sufferers, it is most important to restore safety in their lives, build coping strategies, and reduce pain. It is necessary to find out how they are coping with the situation and stress. Healthy coping mechanisms should be slowly introduced if behavior patterns reflect unhealthy habits such as smoking, drinking, or staying unusually busy. When dealing with disclosure, it is important that a secure and confidential environment is maintained. Humanitarian aid workers should teach survivors of trauma that they are not alone in order to help reduce a sense of isolation and rebuild trust. The aid worker should acknowledge and validate the person’s feelings and experiences by offering comfort and support.

Aid workers should assume people are doing their best to cope and should empower them to feel as in-control as possible. Victims should not be asked to reveal emotional information, but if they volunteer it, helpers should listen. Access to mental and physical health services should be provided. In addition to reducing anxiety and depression, valued and meaningful goals help individuals regain hope and purpose. Improved access to education and employment opportunities encourages achievement. It is important to restore individual dignity and value, create opportunities for pleasure, and foster connections by maintaining or re-establishing communication with family and the community. Expressing oneself through journaling, reading, or becoming aware of experiences helps to release stress. Eliminating self-blame for what is occurring allows people to grow. Relaxation methods such as walking, breathing, meditation, yoga, prayer, and listening to music also promote healing, as do self-care behaviors such as brushing teeth, showering, and taking care of one’s living environment. Small goals should gradually lead to a focus on the big picture.

The majority of trauma survivors will prove resilient; their feelings of fear and anxiety, along with urges to avoid or relive the experience, will decrease over time. Everyone handles life experiences differently, and it is necessary to allow each individual to heal at his or her own pace. The experience will always be a part of this person’s life; however, the possibility of growing from the experience becomes more attainable when anxiety is reduced.

A Miracle is Just a Shift in Perception

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 | Best of MeadowLark | No Comments

Note: This article originally appeared in the Winter 2007 edition of MeadowLark, the magazine for alumni of The Meadows.

A Miracle is Just a Shift in Perception

By Colleen DeRango

In working with clients to help them heal their trauma, many of us in the Somatic Experiencing® community have come to recognize that one component preceding a shift in perception may not be a thought at all: It may be the body’s “felt sense” of moving from a state of calm to anxiety and then to calm again, or what is called “pendulation.”

Peter Levine’s influence at Mellody House has generated a subtle shift in the way we work with clients; our focus is on supporting clients in establishing a sense of “internal resourcing,” as opposed to concentrating on difficulties or problem areas. Somatic Experiencing reinforces this focus and gives us the necessary tools and language.

Consider an example: A cat attentively and expectantly watches a mole dig a tunnel under the lawn. The cat waits with positive expectancy for the mole to move. This visual image represents the idea of seizing or grabbing hold of the positive. As counselors, we do this by supporting the client in reconnecting with the felt sense of “I can.” Sometimes this “I can” sensation is expressed in a bodily movement. Other times, the client experiences a bodily change, wherein he feels “less tight, less anxious, less painful, less stuck.” Gently encouraging the client to experience his “felt sense” of this less painful state is often the beginning of the miracle of moving from “I can’t” to “I can.” Clients are adept at sensing their own states of non-calm; so we focus on beginning from a place of “safety, calm, centeredness — or when they last felt most like themselves.” We reflect on how they experienced these states and, from this place of resource, we support them in “touching into” the edges of the more difficult sensations of “tightness, strain or constriction.”

Therapists support clients in listening to what their bodies are sensing, and we challenge them to trust it. For example, in a guided meditation or group session, if a client begins to feel “closed-in” or “anxious,” he’s encouraged to do what he wants to do — and to experience it from a “felt sense.” Oftentimes this includes leaving the room while sensing what it is like to be able to get up and leave. When we introduced this strategy, we thought perhaps clients wouldn’t return. Yet they have always returned and quite often shared with the group their sensations of empowerment.

Additionally, we give clients choices; for example, in meditation sessions, they are welcome to follow the guided meditation or to make a choice about how they want to meditate and then do so. Choice, when given to trauma survivors, is powerful; clients often share that they experienced the act of choosing as a felt sense of power, as opposed to the powerlessness many experienced during past traumatic events.

Knowing that trauma is about disconnection and that healing is about reconnection, the client experiences the sensation of being able to move, versus the trauma of being forced to stay. We wondered if clients would use their ability to choose as an excuse to leave group. Interestingly, the clients who left once rarely left again; they shared that they experienced a “sensation of empowerment” as a “life force” versus “life depletion.” In SE language, we would identify this as the “miracle” of self-regulation, i.e., activation and deactivation. In SE we also learn that the body has the ability to self-regulate and that “trauma disconnect” interrupts this capability.

Somatic Experiencing® meshes well with The Meadows’ model, which is trauma-based. In the powerful Survivors’ Workshop, an experiential exercise encourages the client to “identify with his functional adult caring for his inner child.” He then shares his reality with the people in his life who have been “abusive, neglectful or abandoning.” This involves resourcing prior to touching into the anxiety or pain. The workshop is completed within a community of five or six other clients. As in SE, healing work is meant to be processed with someone, versus by oneself.

At Mellody House, we reinforce the value of community in working toward trauma healing and recovering from addictions and selfdefeating, addictive behavior patterns. In essence, we encourage clients to support themselves and one another from a place of compassion. Following the SE approach of giving counselors permission to make mistakes while training, we encourage our clients to “experiment and make mistakes,” encouraging the “try” without the limitation of the expectation of perfection. The successful part of the try is “pounced on positively,” not only by counselors, but by other clients as well. As the client experiences the “felt sense” of “I can do this,” energy becomes available to “touch into” more pain, anxiety, frustration or “stuckness.” The “I can” part of self-regulation is restored, and the result is a client who senses new empowerment. “I cannot drink” becomes a “felt sense” experience of “I CAN not drink.”

Clients who have achieved “self-empowerment” have an energy about them, a “coherence” that other clients seem to move toward. And somewhere along the way, the shift toward healing gains momentum, stronger than perhaps the “triggers to use.” As a client discovers that “more of me is available to use my strategic thought” to manage the triggers, he develops resiliency.

I realized early on that I could talk at length with clients about their problems and still not know how to restore their resiliency. But if we can “pounce on the positive” and support clients in identifying their “felt senses” within, their human systems move into healing. The “I can” capacity of the human system is amazing.

In considering the recent Somatic Experiencing Conference, where many of us gathered to learn and to share our experiences, I think about the simple enjoyment of connecting with others in this community. My sensation of restored resiliency was reinforced by a wonderful “ventral vagal” connection with so many SE practitioners. What a strong reminder to balance work with fun, connection and growth.

In closing, instead of saying, “A miracle is just a shift in perception,” one might say, “A miracle is the ability to shift and change perception.” Either way, I believe in miracles.

Forgiveness: Let’s Just Call it “Letting Go”

Thursday, July 8th, 2010 | Best of MeadowLark | No Comments

Note: This article was originally published in the Summer 2006 issue of MeadowLark, the magazine for alumni of The Meadows.

Forgiveness: Let’s Just Call it “Letting Go”

By Kingsley Gallup, MA, LISAC

It tugs at the heart, boggles the mind and puts the spirit to the test. It’s called forgiveness. But what exactly is it? While the concept conjures up many decidedly unappealing connotations, could it be that forgiveness is simply letting go?

Forgiveness is at the heart of recovery, and mastering it the essence of renewal. And many of us can’t put it off any longer. Our ill will has become chronic. We have been inviting resentment into our hearts through our unrealistic expectations. And resentment is nothing short of bondage. It drains our life force. Forgiveness can replenish it.

Today we have choices. We can cling to the past, to a childlike ego state and the security of an unforgiving spirit. Or we can let go. These are the choices of the functional adult. After all, are we victims or volunteers?

Perhaps we never felt powerful early in life, and we aren’t about to relinquish that power now, however real or perceived it may be. Perhaps our resentments make us feel one-up and better-than. Perhaps we fear looking others in the eye, as this would mean coming face-to-face with the truth of who we are.

So why forgive? Why risk the pain of exposure? Why give away our perceived power? Because as good as the payoffs of not forgiving may have been, the perks of forgiving are far better! Forgiveness releases healing power. It frees us from the burden of hurt and anger. It calls us to confront humanity and fallibility and, in so doing, allows us to live in peace and change for the better. It liberates all that energy we previously expended on resentment. It opens the door to intimacy. Forgiveness is about remembering and letting go (Claudia Black).

Since we can’t give away what we haven’t experienced, forgiving oneself is step one. We learn to release sorrow and regret. We love ourselves through our misdeeds. We confront our past and work out resentment. We become open to the belief that we can change. The path of self-forgiveness is paved with trust in ourselves, our humanity, and our higher power. It is a spiritual self-healing of the heart that comes by calming self-rejection, quieting our sense of failure, and lightening the burden of guilt (Messina & Messina).

Some of us have bought into the myth that that self-forgiveness is selfish – just some socially acceptable way of letting ourselves off the hook by avoiding responsibility. If so, it’s no wonder we hesitate to forgive others who have wronged us! Why would we ever want to let them off the hook? Truth is, self-forgiveness is an act of integrity. It is how we maintain character. It’s how we live ethically and free from hypocrisy.

Without self-forgiveness, our wounds never heal. We risk unresolved hurt, pain and suffering. We fear making mistakes or having past ones revealed. Our lingering shame fuels self-pity, indifference, stuffed emotions, self-destructive behaviors, hostility, distance from others, and resistance to chance. Forgiving oneself is about letting go of shame – some carried, some our own.

What we believe about ourselves dictates how we interpret our world. Think about the concept of loving our neighbors as ourselves. What exactly are we offering our neighbors? Love and forgiveness? Or hostility and condemnation? Only from a place of authentic self-love can we love our neighbors as we truly wish to do.

Each of us yearns for the freedom of letting go. But we need to do the footwork. It’s time to take a step. After all, “If you want something you’ve never had before, you’ve got to do something you’ve never done before” (Drina Reed). The time is now. Let go.

Fear of Abandonment: Some Lessons from M. Scott Peck and Pia Mellody

Thursday, June 24th, 2010 | Best of MeadowLark | No Comments

Note: This article originally appeared in the Spring 2006 edition of Meadowlark, the magazine for alumni of The Meadows.

Fear of Abandonment: Some Lessons from M. Scott Peck and Pia Mellody
By Lawrence S. Freundlich

In Pia Mellody’s charting of childhood developmental immaturity, one of its primary symptoms (meaning one of the inherent, essential human attributes of the child at birth) is dependency. Each human child is dependent for his survival on his primary caregivers and, as he matures, on his ability to cooperate with others so that he may get what he needs and wants in order to become a functional adult. Thus, the infant is first dependent and, then, as he matures, interdependent. However, this potential to develop the skills necessary for interdependence has a built-in obstacle, one that, like the other primary symptoms, is inherent at birth; this built-in obstacle is the child’s fear of abandonment.

My recent readings in M. Scott Peck’s enormously influential The Road Less Traveled (Simon and Schuster, 1978) have reminded me how much of a creative and/or a destructive force the fear of abandonment can be in the shaping of a child’s psyche. Its power to harm is obvious. On the other hand, its power to become a shaping element in a child’s healthy development of interdependence is less obvious, but just as elemental.

As an infant, totally dependent on his parents for the fulfillment of his needs, the child’s expectation is that the world exists to satisfy his own desires. This instinctual expectation of immediate satisfaction is unreasoning, uncivilized and innocently selfish. In the first few months of an infant’s life, a child does not take care of himself. He is taken care of. Not only does he lack the skills to self-care, but also he has no conception that the environment has anything else on its mind than to care for him. He demands everything, with no inkling that it might be refused or unavailable. If it is refused or unavailable, he will presume that he is being abandoned. He will view any denial of his wishes as a mortal threat, and anyone who has heard a baby scream for solace knows how nature has shaped his voice to indicate the imminence of a mortal threat – even if the threat is only a wet diaper, a desire for an ounce of milk or the need for a nap.

If very young children are to emotionally survive these reality-based inklings of abandonment, they must learn, in Peck’s terminology, “delayed gratification.” Peck equates delayed gratification with discipline – the discipline forced on every child when he recognizes that he is part of a social system and not “God the Baby.” The challenge of delayed gratification brings the child face-to-face with the reality of being only one human being among others, competing for survival in interdependent groups.

Self-care – or the ability to recognize that you will get what you want only if you do some of the job yourself – is learned in the face of the child’s elemental desire to be cared for totally: “I want what I want, and I want it now.” The parental challenge is to teach the child discipline without implying abandonment. In other words, in order for a child to grow up, he has to learn that delayed gratification is not equivalent to abandonment. The child’s ability to survive will depend on how well he learns to cooperate. This is when the sublimation of abandonment fear becomes the engine for healthy development. Peck says:

Most parents, even when they are otherwise relatively ignorant or callous, are instinctively sensitive to their children’s fear of abandonment and will therefore, day in and day out, hundreds and thousands of times, offer their children needed reassurance: “You know Mommy and Daddy aren’t going to leave you behind”; “Of course Mommy and Daddy will come back to get you”; “Mommy and Daddy aren’t going to forget about you!” If these words are matched by deeds, month in and month out, year in and year out, by the time of adolescence, the child will have lost the fear of abandonment and in its stead will have a deep inner feeling that the world is a safe place in which to be, and protection will be there when it is needed. With this internal sense of the consistent safety of the world, such a child is free to delay gratification of one kind or another, secure in the knowledge that the opportunity for gratification, like home and parents, is always there, available when needed….

But many are not so fortunate. A substantial number of children actually are abandoned by their parents during childhood, by death, by desertion, by sheer negligence…. Others, while not abandoned in fact, fail to receive from their parents the reassurance that they will not be abandoned. There are some parents, for instance, who, in their desire to force discipline as easily and quickly as possible, will actually use the threat of abandonment, overtly or subtly, to achieve this end. The message they give to their children is: If you don’t do exactly what I want you to do, I won’t love you anymore, and you can figure out for yourself what that might mean.” It means, of course, abandonment and death…. So it is that these children, abandoned either psychologically or in actuality, enter adulthood lacking any deep sense that the world is a safe and protective place. To the contrary, they perceive the world as dangerous and frightening, and they are not about to forsake gratification or security in the present for the promise of later gratification or security in the future, since for them the future seems dubious indeed.

Considering the shaping power of the fear of abandonment, we can see that being taught to self-care may appear to the child as the withdrawal of his parents’ support. How then does one introduce the discipline of self-care without exciting the fear of abandonment? Peck says that self-care is impossible unless the child feels that he is valuable. “The statement ‘I am a valuable person’ is essential to mental health and is a cornerstone of self-discipline [delayed gratification].” Peck and Pia Mellody are in agreement on this point of being valuable. Without a feeling of value, the child will not self-care.

For Mellody, self-esteem is the first core issue. In discussing the internal connections of the core issues, Mellody speaks of psychic balance being achieved when value, power and self-care are properly functioning. She observes that, when we believe we are valuable, we do not have to depend on the opinions of others to verify our value (our internal boundary is working). We are in touch with our inherent worth. Our actions are congruent with our belief in our own value. Then, because we value ourselves, caring for ourselves becomes an act of self-esteem. Self-care then is a function of self-esteem, because it is natural to care for someone we like. The good feeling we have about ourselves is projected out into our environment. We learn to care for ourselves because we believe we are worth caring for in a world abundant in possibilities of caring for us.

It is impossible to teach self-care to a child who is unwilling to delay gratification because he is terrified of abandonment. Self-esteem, on the other hand, makes the child confident that abandonment does not lie waiting in the shadows of delayed gratification. The abandonment-haunted child will not allow himself to be vulnerable enough to experiment with the techniques required for interdependence. If he takes a chance, he thinks he will be injured. Instead of venturesome vulnerability, he will hide himself behind various kinds of lies (adaptations) so that no one can touch him. He becomes, in Mellody’s terms, “the adapted wounded child.” Peck writes,

…For children to develop the capacity to delay gratification, it is necessary for them to have self-disciplined role models, a sense of self-worth, and a degree of trust in the safety of their existence.These “possessions” are ideally acquired through the self-discipline and consistent, genuine caring of their parents; they are the most precious gifts of themselves that mothers and fathers can bequeath. When these gifts have not been proffered by one’s parents, it is possible to acquire them from other sources, but in that case, the process of their acquisition is invariably an uphill struggle, often of lifelong duration and often unsuccessful.

That uphill, lifelong struggle takes place in the arena of our relationships and their failed intimacy. As Mellody pointed out in her book, Love Addiction and Love Avoidance, the only proper use of the word “abandonment” is in the context of childhood. The child who is without the ability to self-care can, indeed, be abandoned — left with no resources. Adults, who have presumably learned to care for themselves, cannot be abandoned; adults have resources even when they are rejected or disappointed in relationships. Adults are responsible for their own self-care.

Living Lives of Quiet Desperation

Thursday, June 10th, 2010 | Best of MeadowLark | No Comments

Note: This article originally appeared in the Spring 2004 edition of MeadowLark, the magazine for alumni of The Meadows.

Living Lives of Quiet Desperation
By Ben Barrentine Jr., MA, CAS

I was scared. I was lonely. I was a little boy. My father was a college professor. My mother was college educated. I have two younger brothers and a younger sister. We had plenty of food and clothes. We got birthday presents. Santa Claus came to see us. We were a very distant family, like ships passing in the night. We rarely hugged. We rarely expressed emotion. We rarely talked about what was going with us as individuals or as a family. I was scared. I was lonely.

I remember that, when I reached puberty, a neighbor boy showed me masturbation. I masturbated a lot. Now I wasn’t so scared, and I wasn’t so lonely. I found a magazine. It was just an ordinary magazine with a picture of a woman in a bikini. It became my first pornography. I wasn’t so scared, and I wasn’t so lonely. When I was a sophomore in high school, I started drinking and, from the beginning, I drank alcoholically. I wasn’t so scared. I wasn’t so lonely.

I masturbated a lot, and I found Playboy, Penthouse, and other porn magazines and books. I drank a lot. I started dating. I got into relationships. I wanted the women to make me happy. I looked at the women the way I looked at the women in the porn — as objects. I would fantasize and lust about the women I was dating in the same way I did the women in the porn magazines and books. After awhile. I could run the porn images in my head. and I no longer had to have the porn magazines and books. I drank a lot. I was scared. I was lonely.

I went to treatment for my alcoholism. When the staff discovered that I did cocaine and marijuana, they said I was a drug addict. I stopped drinking alcohol, but for the next two years, I continued to use cocaine and marijuana. I liked doing cocaine and marijuana with sex. It wasn’t until many years later that I realized that it was my sex addiction that kept me in my drug addiction for another two years. I was scared. I was lonely.

With no awareness of my sexual addiction, I got into recovery for my drug addiction. I was still using sex-porn, lusting, looking at women as objects, masturbating lustfully. I was scared. I was lonely.

When I went to treatment for my sexual addiction, I began to get into recovery. I began to learn something about intimacy with myself and other people, not just women — men and women. I began to like myself and to discover who I was — my values, my interests. I began to connect with people on a more intimate level. I wasn’t so scared. I wasn’t so lonely.

As the facilitator of the “Men’s Sexual Compulsivity Recovery Workshop,” I have firsthand knowledge of recovery. I first developed this workshop some 10 years ago, before Patrick Carnes joined The Meadows. The workshop builds on the groundbreaking work of Patrick Carnes and Pia Mellody in the areas of sexual addiction and codependence, respectively.

Sexually compulsive people are caught up in sexual addiction: thoughts and behaviors, pornography, lusting, leering, fantasizing, anonymous sex, one-night stands, prostitution, affairs, simultaneous relationships, adult bookstores, etc. They are scared. They are lonely. They are in pain. They feel guilt. They feel shame. They are living lives of quiet desperation — empty on the inside, while on the outside, they may have all the trappings of success.

The “Men’s Sexual Compulsivity Recovery Workshop” is an educational and experiential workshop. With a limit of six participants, the workshop is designed to promote changes in the lives of those suffering from sexually obsessive thinking and compulsive behaviors.
The workshop explores the cycles of addiction, recovery and relapse.

Individuals have an opportunity to explore their arousal templates — to discover and examine the events and experiences that caused them to act out sexually. They learn how to lead different lives, how to empower themselves in healthy ways. They learn to experience intimacy with the other men in the workshop. They develop a written recovery plan. They are not so scared. They are not so lonely.

Until You Can Love Yourself

Thursday, May 27th, 2010 | Best of MeadowLark | No Comments

Note: This article was originally published in the Spring 2004 issue of MeadowLark, the magazine for alumni of The Meadows.

Until You Can Love Yourself
By Lawrence S. Freunclich

At our first AA meeting, many of us were so sick and hungover that the most we could hope for was to sit still for an hour without crying or throwing up. That last culminating drunk had wiped us out. We needed help, but we were as frightened of asking for it as we were of another drink. We huddled in against ourselves and tried to disappear. The friendly gestures and words of welcome sounded false to us, and we thought we were among naïve dogooders, or perhaps religious fanatics who had lost contact with reality. We felt we were special; and we were humiliated to be associated with a group of losers, who, unlike us, were just a bunch of common drunks. We felt we would never be able to make them understand what made our own stories so special. We didn’t know where to rest our eyes or what to do with our hands. Each time someone shared, we took it personally, as if each remark were aimed directly at us. We wanted to interrupt to show how much we knew, of how different we were. We wanted everyone to understand how we had been wronged. Most of us, however, were too frail to speak.

During our first 30 days of meetings, if someone said how grateful she was for the peace and hope that sobriety had given her, we thought that only a person with a shallow understanding of life could be so easily sedated by the homilies of AA. If someone expressed his rage, we grew frightened, feeling as if his energy were somehow a direct personal threat to us. If someone told us how they got drunk at the business meeting, we belittled his exploits because we had done so much worse. If someone shared that she hated people who shared petty annoyances, we thought she was talking about us. If someone expressed her gratitude for having gone from bankruptcy to wealth, not only did we think her a braggart, but we felt the hot humiliation of our own awful financial desperation and how we had failed our loved ones. Some of us attended meetings and never raised our hand. Others of us, when we finally talked, couldn’t shut up, as if we had to tell the world our whole story in one breath. No matter what we said, we felt that we had made fools of ourselves or, worse, that no one in the group could possibly understand us.

Yet we always felt like phonies. In this early stage of our AA solitary confinement, we were in the soul-mangling grip of what AA calls “self-centered fear.” When we learned more about self-centered fear, we would hear ourselves described as “arrogant doormats” or “that piece of garbage around which the entire universe revolved.” We felt that all eyes were on us, that we were in a play with a large cast – but the spotlight was on us only, and that the characters we were portraying were worthless and had to deny it. We were obsessed with people we despised, and those people were ourselves. As the weeks went by and somehow “we kept coming back” “one day at a time,” because we had “smart feet” and went to meetings “even if our ass fell off,” we recognized that not only did we have self-centered fear, but that every other addict in the room did as well.

Something startling – and for many of us, unprecedented — had been taking place. For the first time in many years, or perhaps for the first time in our entire lives, we had been learning to listen — learning to listen to something other than the voices in our own heads. We didn’t know it, but our world was beginning to get a little larger. No cross talk! What a challenge. With listening came identification. With identification came emotional bonding; we came to see that the other addicts in the room had gone through the same kind of hell we had. They had gotten just as sick, lost just as much money, offended their loved ones, crashed cars, told embarrassingly bad lies and cursed God.

These commonalities began to fascinate us, and our attention was diverted from ourselves to others. We were becoming less selfcentered. As the reality and similarity of our colleagues sunk into our hearts and minds, we began to see that our stories were not unique and that other people could understand what we had been through. Even when a share made us angry or contemptuous, we sat still and let the person have his say. It was all right for them to show their imperfections; after all, they were only human. And if they were only human, it was easier to admit that we were only human. This was a spiritual breakthrough for us. Surrendering to the truth of our own humanity was a key spiritual gift. For us alcoholics, our imperfection had always been experienced as shame; it had made us allergic to our own humanity and forced us into emotional adaptations aimed at denying our imperfection.

Until that breakthrough moment in AA, we had never believed that anyone could love us if they knew the truth of who we were. “Hide that truth at any cost,” our alcoholic brains screamed out to us. Drown it in booze and lies. Some of us mocked the homilies of AA that were tacked up on the walls of the meeting room, sayings like, “Stinkin’ Thinkin,’” “Put a Plug in the Jug,” “Let Go and Let God,” and “We row; God steers.” But even we mockers found our eyes continually drawn back to one motto, which never seemed to go stale. It was the sign that said, “We Will Love You Until You Can Love Yourself.”

When we celebrated our 90 days, we felt blessed by what AA had so far done for us. We felt as if we had rejoined the community of man, and now we thought we understood what the old-timers were talking about when they said that AA “was a we program.” We had a fledgling faith — or if it wasn’t yet faith, we dared hope that the love of our fellow AAs could give us the self-esteem that our addiction had destroyed. If we kept coming to meetings, we would experience the loving that we were not yet capable of believing we deserved.

And, for many of us, the support of our AA colleagues kept us sober for years. We saw our lives improve. We saw that, if we stayed sober and practiced the principles of AA in all of our affairs, our relationships matured and we found the strength to survive the rough patches of life: things like losing our jobs, divorce and the refusal of the children we had abused to forgive us. We found the patience to deal with people at the job who annoyed us.

During our years in AA, many of our friends had gone back to drinking. Some died; some we never heard of again. Some came back into the room and reported that the hell in store for the recidivist was there for the taking. They added, “The misery is optional.” Many of us believed what we had heard about the misery being optional. Despite the fact that we continued to go to meetings, we could feel, after 5, 10, 15 years, the alcoholic demons beginning to rise up within us again. We felt that the AA program had done us good, and we were grateful for it. But there were parts of us that remained in pain and refused to be medicated by the traditions, steps and people of AA. For us, the inevitable occurred. We joined the ranks of the slippers. And, sure enough, we discovered the misery we had been told awaited us.

As we began the arduous and humiliating process of “coming back” (and some of us would do it several times), some of us were overtaken by a sense of alcoholic doom. We became convinced that, even with AA’s constant offer of forgiveness, understanding and guidance, that a part of us was too damaged to heal. Even if we couldn’t be precise about it, the promise that “We will love you until you learn to love yourself” was for us a nice thought, but a beneficent fantasy.

What we did not know was that the abuse our caregivers had inflicted on us in childhood had so damaged our awareness of our inherent worth that any promise of love stirred up posttraumatic associations. The promise that our colleagues in AA would love us until we learned to love ourselves was offered in tenderness and compassion, but we were hard-wired to reject it. It sounded to us just like our parents. People like us would slip and slide until they wound up where AA had predicted: in jail, dead or in a mental institution.

The only kind of love that was going to work for people like us needed to come from caregivers who were trained to discover the etiology of our abusive childhoods — and who, when our trauma histories were clear to us, could teach us the practice of boundaries so we could protect ourselves from the posttraumatic stress that triggered our alcoholism and relational dysfunction.

Our caregivers had to be healthy themselves. We would not be cured if they came at us from a position of superiority. That would plunge us back into childhood. To the extent that their own trauma histories escaped the containment of healthy boundaries, our caregivers would infect us with their own dysfunctions.

When people like us came to The Meadows, most of us desperate and without a clue that we had at last come home, we had no idea how lucky we were. We were finally at a place where we could love ourselves, and because we could, we also could love others. For those of us who still loved and valued AA, because we, at long last, had a spiritual awakening, we felt the personal responsibility to carry this message to the suffering alcoholic.

Spirituality in Everyday Life

Thursday, May 13th, 2010 | Best of MeadowLark | No Comments

Note: This article first appeared in the Spring 2004 issue of MeadowLark, the alumni magazine of The Meadows.

Spirituality in Everyday Life
By John Bradshaw, MA

Recovery is about an awakening. We are literally awakened from a restless sleep that has numbed our feelings and left us emotionally and spiritually groggy and exhausted. This awakening begins with the eye-opening experience and recognition of our powerlessness — with recognition of our limitations and our need for help – and with the hard work of transforming our toxic shame into healthy shame. It is this healthy shame that is the source of our spirituality.

For many of you, this awakening began in earnest in a treatment center or program. The important work you have done involves freeing yourself from the bondage of the past. This bondage literally drags us out of the present. It distorts our perceptions. It blocks our feelings and keeps us constantly in fear of exposure. All of this serves to prevent us from recognizing one of our most important human limitations, which is simply that we exist only in the now, from moment to moment.

In the mystified and trance like state in which we lived before recovery, we could not be present in the moment, for each “now” was full of “then.” Whether we were listening, observing, talking, or in any way experiencing life, we simply were not there. And so the quality of our life was diminished.

I look at old photos of family outings and realize that, much of the time, I was not there. I cannot ever get these moments back. They are gone. I missed them, and I am sad and angry about that. I don’t want to miss any more of my life.

It frequently seems that our lives are made up of a series of events. Taken individually, these events appear insignificant. In the grandiosity of toxic shame, we discount and dismiss them without realizing that, no matter what success or failure occurs, these events will continue to be the core of our existence.

Gandhi said, “Almost everything we do is insignificant, but it is very important that we do it.”

To be awake and fully conscious is to recognize that everything, from washing dishes to locking up the house at night, is important and demands attention. The move from toxic shame to healthy shame enlarges our opportunities for recognizing the significance of the insignificant.

In my view, spirituality is a lifestyle rooted in moment-to-moment awareness and appreciation of all events in life; it must, of necessity, be an everyday affair.

Some of us have difficulty accepting ourselves unless we are praying or are in church. We associate spirituality only with religion and its happenings. This ideal hinders our acceptance of ourselves as spiritual, but it is only part of the problem.

Toxic shame, like a brooding omnipresence in our souls, is always there to remind us that we are unworthy, and that spirituality is a state far too lofty for us to achieve. With its customary deceit, shame urges us to deny our humanness by denying its spiritual quality. To be human is to be spiritual, and to accept this is a part of healthy shame.

We need to recognize that spirituality is not at odds with “terrible dailiness,” and it need not be grandiose in its ceremonials. The soul benefits most when its spiritual life is performed in the context of ordinary life. It grows and blossoms in the mundane and is found and nurtured in the smallest of daily activities.

Spirituality is living each moment of life more abundantly. It is honouring our values in our simplest acts. Spirituality is being present in our feelings. It is being more conscious of our connections to others and to all things. Spirituality enables us to turn an ugly loneliness into peaceful solitude.

None of these remarks is intended to discount prayer or our relationship with our higher power as principal sources of spirituality. Turning to this higher power on a daily basis is a bottomless well of spiritual sustenance. Other techniques, such as meditation and service, deepen and enrich us by giving us a way to pass on spiritual awakening to others.

I have the image of a group of sleeping children about to embark on a holiday. One of them awakens and, with excitement and energy, rushes to the others, urging them to “wake up — it’s time to go!” All of us need to bring the light to others with the same joy and enthusiasm.

A brief word of caution: Certain qualities are antagonistic and destructive to our efforts to achieve a soulful spirituality. Rigidity, moralism and authoritarianism are some of these. They are to be avoided like the plague, for they are harsh and arrogantly insist on absolute standards and perfection. They destroy the gentleness and serenity out of which spirituality flows.

If I were to make a list of the promises of recovery, a deepening spirituality would rank high. It is the fruit of our labor. Recovery takes great courage and involves great risk if it is to be successful. To come out of hiding and embrace our shame is no easy thing to do. Those of you who went through a program know well the pain and agony of this experience. The payoff for such tremendous acts of courage should be great. I believe it is.

Self-Esteem: An Inside Job

Thursday, April 29th, 2010 | Best of MeadowLark | No Comments

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

Self-Esteem: An Inside Job
By Kingsley Gallup, MA, LISAC

The concept may be nebulous, but it’s by no means inconsequential. Our very lives are a testimony to our self-esteem, the condition of which is the distinguishing difference between surviving and thriving. Consider the following questions:

• Do you live by the credo, “If I can’t do it perfectly, then why do it at all”?
• Are you carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders?
• Do you bend over backwards to please others?
• Is it hard for you to forgive yourself?
• Is self-care selfish?
• Do you “shape shift” to fit your particular setting?
• Do you go one up or one down?
• Are compliments hard to handle?
• When someone says “I love you” do you silently wonder, “What’s wrong with them?”; maybe even, “I’m not sure I want to be with the kind of person who would want me.”

And so, what’s the state of your self-esteem? How miserable are you making yourself? For each of us, there comes a time when we are faced with our own human frailty. It is in these moments we are confronted with the state of our self-esteem. We discover how we really think and feel about ourselves. We may find that we have simply been operating in survival mode, having mastered an array of techniques for disguising our self-loathing. The good news is to make a change we need not look far. The answers lie within.

Pia Mellody has defined self-esteem as the internal experience of one’s own preciousness in the face of one’s human frailty. It is a total reality experience, and it comes from embracing the concept of inherent self-worth and applying it to self.

Consider what self-esteem is not–keeping in mind that the absence of self-love can be masterfully disguised. Genuine self-esteem is not about adaptations. It is not about measurement and comparison, nor is it about “should-ing” and shaming ourselves. Self-esteem is neither other esteem (the esteem others have for us) nor reality-based esteem (esteem that comes from comparing our reality to another person’s reality to determine how we measure up). Self-esteem neither goes one up nor one down. And it cannot be acquired externally.

The kicker is, external esteem seekers tend to gravitate toward those from whom acceptance and love cannot easily be found. We flee from those who want us and pursue the rejecters. Perhaps we learned external esteem seeking early on. Perhaps it was how we learned to garner worth and value. It failed us then. And it fails us today. Genuine self-esteem, on the other hand, cuts beneath externals to inherent worth and value. It is constant, rather than situational; enduring, rather than fleeting. It is a mature and unconditional love. And yes, it truly is an inside job.

Breaking the shackles of our histories and reclaiming our preciousness hinges on the internal work of shame reduction. Much like faith and fear, so too are shame and self-esteem contrasting forces: more of one, the less of the other. It’s the carried shame, that toxic carryover from our histories, that cripples. Letting go of this shame is an act of self-love. It is motivated out of an awareness of the truth of who we are–inherently precious, worthy and valuable.

Building self-esteem hinges on exposing our harsh inner critic–you know, that critic who without our awareness shames us…blames us when things go wrong…and calls it simple “luck” when things go well. That inner critic is dishonest. It exaggerates our failures; it calls us names; it records all past mistakes and transgressions. Sadly, this critical voice may be so familiar we hardly notice its destructiveness.

Recovery is about coming to our own assistance. In doing so, we match our healing action steps to our unique histories, giving ourselves today what we didn’t get then. If we were falsely empowered as children, says Pia Mellody, we need first and foremost to base our sense of self-esteem on the concept of inherent worth. We stop controlling, manipulating and caretaking others, focusing instead on self-care and interdependence. Self-care is not selfish. It’s not a character flaw to ask for help! We learn to love ourselves in the face of our humanity – as human beings rather than doings.

If we were disempowered early on, we need also to develop self-esteem from the concept of inherent worth. We learn to use boundaries accompanied by an attitude of moderation, so as to start living in action rather than reaction. We take responsibility for our own issues of self-care.

All of this involves stepping out of our comfort zone. It entails not only thinking our way into feeling and behaving but also behaving our way into thinking and feeling. It’s the “act as if” principle. We say goodbye to our adaptations – to the coping mechanisms that perhaps helped us survive less than nurturing histories. We find gratitude for our insights and in so doing, become liberated from resentment. We learn to change the one person we can change. After all, if we want something we’ve never had before, we’ve got to do something we’ve never done before!” (Drina Reed) In this spirit, here are some thoughts for developing self-esteem:

• Do an accurate self-assessment, listing positive and negative traits. Then, clean up the negative statements by making the statements factual, not judgmental. Remember, self-esteem is based on an accurate self-assessment.
• List important positive traits. Repeat them frequently with feeling.
• Accept the things you cannot change. Don’t confuse an unchangeable cause with an unchangeable trait.
• Become a change agent, a self-helper. Attend to your wants and needs, identifying and respecting what fulfills you. Your number one responsibility is yourself.
• Identify the internal critic inside you. Write about it. What messages bring you mental misery?
• Use affirmations to challenge negative cognitions. Tailor them to counteract individual self-defeating cognitions. Confront the internal critic.
• Eliminate shame-based self-talk. It drains and discourages. It distracts us from identifying and fulfilling our needs, abilities, interests and goals.
• Watch out for victim language. People and events do not cause feelings. They simply trigger mental habits.
• Adopt responsibility language. Instead of “I can’t,” “I should” or “I’ll try,” use “I can,” I will” or “I choose to.” As Henry Ford once said, “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.”
• Set achievable goals and seek out situations in which the probability of success is high, places where you will stretch, but not overwhelm.
• Be proud of who you are. Don’t try to be someone else. Rely on your opinion of you for that’s the one that matters.
• Be patient. Our self-concept reflects years of experience and self-evaluation. Seeds were planted in our subconscious long before we had a say. Debunking the internal critic is a daily practice.

Today, we have choice. We can drape ourselves in the cloak of self-love. We can let go of the old to grab onto the new, remembering that recovery isn’t changing who we are but rather letting go of who we are not! (Claudia Black) We can choose no longer to accept the lies we learned about who we were, embracing instead the beauty of who we are—perhaps for the first time.

No man is rich enough to buy back his past. As such, the best redemption is recovery. We can embrace the pain of the past and burn it as fuel for our journey. We may not have had choice early on, but today we do.

This is mind, body and spirit work, the fruits of which are nothing short of freedom, authenticity and acceptance of self and others. How liberating for those of us who have long played to an audience, denying the truth of who we were to come to love ourselves – not in spite of our humanity, but because of it!

This self-esteem journey is a homecoming of sorts. It’s a coming home to self—to a place we have always known and to a place that we’ve never known. It’s both liberating and daunting, familiar and foreign. It is the essence of authenticity and the ultimate soul work. And pretty soon, our hearts become strangely warmed. We have arrived home at last.

Tags: self-esteem

The Co-Addicted Tango: Pia Mellody’s Theory of Love Addiction and Love Avoidance

Thursday, April 15th, 2010 | Best of MeadowLark | No Comments

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

The Co-Addicted Tango: Pia Mellody’s Theory of Love Addiction and Love Avoidance

By Lawrence S. Freundlich

When Ms. “Crazy for Love” meets Mr. “Give Me Some Room to Breathe,” the stage is set for what Pia Mellody calls “The Co-Addicted Tango.” Ms. “Crazy for Love” is in Mellody’s clinical terms, “The Love Addict,” and Mr. “Give Me Some Room to Breathe,” is “The Love Avoidant.” They will each find something attractive about one another and inevitably something that will detract from one another, making their dysfunctional relationship as painful as it is frenetic and a back-and-forth “Co-Addictive Tango.”

The Love Addict, to whom I have just referred to as ‘Crazy for Love,” I identify as a woman, and the Love Avoidant, to whom I have just referred to as “Give me Some Room to Breathe,” I identify as a man. Is this gender typing accurate? After all, men can be Love Addicts and women can be Love Avoidants? In fact there are powerful forces at work in American culture that distribute Love Addiction to women with significantly greater frequency than to men, and Love Avoidance to men with significantly greater frequency than to women. The most powerful generator of this disproportion is revealed when we understand the psychological concepts of “disempowerment” and “false empowerment.”

Trauma results from either disempowering abuse or “falsely empowering” abuse, which, because of its falseness, disempowers as well. Abusive parents either shame the children into silence as a way of diminishing their own external stress, thereby disempowering the children, or assigning the children roles for which the parents should be responsible, thereby falsely empowering the children.

In our culture, young girls are trained to believe that men are the source of value, power and abundance; it is the female whose prevailing dysfunction is the outcome of “disempowering abuse.” Her need to be taken care of by a man greater than herself is consistent with Love Addiction. The main conscious fear in relationships from which Love Addicts suffer is fear of neglect and abandonment. In childhood their parents have shamed them into thinking of themselves as unworthy. Without the help of an outside agency, like a husband, for example, they do not feel they have what it takes to be whole.

On the other hand, young males in our culture are raised to believe that it is their job to control and dominate—to be the source of value, power and abundance. They are trained to care “for the little woman,” because she can’t care for herself. It is the male whose prevailing dysfunction is the outcome of falsely empowering abuse. His need to caretake the needy female is consistent with Love Avoidance. The primary conscious fear of the Love Avoidant is fear of being drained, suffocated and overwhelmed. In their childhoods, the parents of Love Avoidants have forced on the child the role of caring for the needs of the parents. In this role reversal, the parent is being taken care of by the child. Giving the child the adult role is a form of enmeshment, which causes the love avoidant to think of intimacy as a job. They learn to resent this job as the neediness of the Love Addict becomes overwhelming.

The Love Addict enters into the relationship feeling an unbearable sense of inadequacy. Her relationship with the Love Avoidant is as doomed as it is inevitable. Having been neglected and abandoned by her own parents, she has learned that all attempts at intimacy will be painfully unsuccessful. When she seeks a love mate she will, therefore, find someone familiarly not intimate, but someone who will be good at mimicking intimacy. She deludes herself into believing that the mimicry is the real thing by creating her lover in accordance to a fantasy of her own making. The Love Avoidant becomes her knight in shining armor—”armor” being the operative psychological irony—shiny, but impervious to intimate contact.

The Love Avoidant, on the other hand, enters the relationship not because he is seeking confirmation of his own worth but out of a sense of duty. In his childhood, his parents taught him that it is his job to care for people who cannot care for themselves. As an adult, the Love Avoidant, while feeling superior or pity for the neediness of his Love Addicted partner, thrives on the power it gives him over her. Eventually, he grows resentful of all the work it takes to be a caretaker. He begins to feel suffocated and lifeless.

The suffocating Love Avoidant begins to distance himself from the Love Addict, who after several bouts of hysterically trying to get him back, eventually becomes exhausted with the pursuit of the Love Avoidant and turns to someone else with whom to be helplessly Love Addicted or to some other addiction to cover her pain of inadequacy. The substitute addiction could be food, alcohol, sex, work, spending or exercise—any addictive activity.

At this point in the Co-Addicted Tango, the Love Avoidant, who is no longer the object of the Love Addict’s desire, feels the pain of no longer being needed. Without someone whose weakness cries out for his strength, his sense of superiority wavers. What value does he have if he cannot care for the needy? This triggers deep, underlying abandonment fears—sardonically the same kind of abandonment fears that lie at the heart of the Love Addict’s emotional dysfunction. Love Addicts, never having been unconditionally loved by their neglectful and/or abandoning parents, look for a knight in shining armor to provide them with the self-esteem with which they never had mirrored for them by their own parents. Love Avoidants, on the other hand, almost never got a chance to feel their inherent worth, because in childhood they were empowered to care for their own parents. While not having received love from the parents, their caretaking gives them a sense of grandiosity, while masking the haunting truth that they have never been intimately loved. This false empowerment very effectively hides the crucial truth that they, like the Love Addict, were starved of intimacy. The contempt they feel for the neediness of the Love Addict, is the masked contempt they feel for themselves at not having been worthy of their parents’ love. Contempt is shame turned outward on anyone whose weaknesses reminds us of the intolerable shame of our inadequacy.

Deprived of the caretaking role by the withdrawal of the Love Addict, the Love Avoidant finally feels the jolt of the carried shame of abandonment; and the Love Avoidant, who once feared being smothered by the Love Addict, now turns around to get close to the Love Addict again, using all of his powers of seduction to get back into control of the relationship.

One is running and the other is chasing all the time. When the one who is chasing finally gets close to the one running away, they both erupt into intensity, either a romantic interlude or a terrific fight. As the lyrics to the classic song say, “You Always Hurt the One You Love.” This behavior is what most people call “normal”; and if it isn’t “normal,” it certainly is “familiar.”

Familiarity

This attraction to what is familiar, says Pia Mellody, starts in our family of origin. “Familiarity” is the central engine of child hood character formation. In the case of Love Addicts and Love Avoidants, each person is first attracted to the other specifically because of the “familiar” traits that the other exhibits. These traits, although painful, are familiar from childhood and appear a safe way to keep the family system stable.

Both the Love Addict and Love Avoidant are traumatized children who originally adapted in order to survive within the abusive family system. They believed that only by adapting to their parents’ expectations of them would they remain protected. Maintaining the status quo, even if it was a dysfunctional status quo, was for these children better than being abandoned or losing their identity (role) within the family.

The abandonment pain felt by Love Addicts in their families of origin teaches them as children to be quiet, alone, needless and wantless so as not to bother the parents. Later, they are unconsciously attracted to people who do not aggressively seek attachment to them. They unconsciously seek to replicate their childhood relationships. A part of self-esteem was wounded in the childhoods of Love Addicts. Abandonment and neglect send the message that they were not worth being with. A large part of their attraction toward Love Avoidants is that Love Addicts find in people who walk away from them an opportunity to heal the wound to their childhood self-esteem. If they can make an adult who withholds intimacy connect and fall in love with them, they can prove that they have inherent worth. Only a child can be abandoned; adults cannot. Healthy, mature adults have it within their capacities to deal satisfactorily with the vagaries of relationships without calling their inherent worth into question.

Love Avoidants are accustomed to needy, dependent, helpless people whom they can rescue, which gives them control and a 7 feeling of safety and power. When they pick up the right signal, Love Avoidants move in seductively and powerfully. People who think for themselves, say directly what they mean, solve their own problems and care adequately for themselves are not interesting to Love Avoidants.

Shame Reduction

The conscious fear of Love Avoidants is the fear of being drained and used. The unconscious fear of Love Avoidants is the conscious fear of Love Addicts, and that is the fear of abandonment. Abandonment is the core issue for both, but getting at the abandonment issue through shame reduction therapy is much more difficult with Love Avoidants than it is with Love Addicts. Disempowering abuse keeps Love Addicts close to their shame core all the time. Love Avoidants are walled off from their shame core by the grandiosity of their childhood false empowerment.

Pia Mellody’s elegant charting of the dance of avoidance and pursuit between the Love Addict and the Love Avoidant is a fascinating anthropology of failed relationality, which deserves the name “Co-Addicted Tango.” But understanding the various stages through which Love Avoidant/Love Addicted relationships travel is not enough to effect healing from the traumatic wounds that set these relationships in motion. For that healing to hap pen, as with all childhood relational trauma, shame reduction must take place.

The therapeutic contribution of presenting Pia Mellody’s modus operandi of the Co-Addicted Tango to the patients is that the compelling accuracy of her models reduces the patients’ shame by exposing their delusions to reason. As they come to see the delusions of Addiction and Avoidance in their own emotional lives, they see that they are not alone in the world of relational dysfunction. More importantly, they come to see that the emotions that seize them during relational trauma are not their fault, that they are not worthless. Undoing the automatic descent into shame and worthless ness during relational stress takes more than intellectual understanding.

Love Addicts and Love Avoidants must revisit the scenes of their childhood wounding by going back in time with the help of a therapist to confront their childhood abusers with their honest testimony of how their parents’ abuse caused shame, pain and bewilderment. There comes a moment in this process of shame reduction when patients are able to rid themselves of carried shame. This emotional “detoxification” is at the center of recovery. The traumatic inheritance of abandonment has poisoned both Love Addict and Love Avoidant with shame of being who they are—better than or less when, disempowered or falsely empowered—it hardly makes a difference. Shame will run and ruin their relation ships unless they heal.