Over the past few months, I’ve not been posting. Part of it, as I said in “An Open letter on the Holiday season” is that holidays are hard for me. Yes, they bring memories of many past holidays to the surface, but that’s not the most basic problem. I’ve always been a person who has needed to grieve over the fact that things aren’t as they should be. Others are happy at Christmas, and I’m a depressed, nervous wreck. Life is an opportunity, and I often find it a burden. These differences between reality and the ideal are mere intellectual curiosities when it’s sunny out and my time’s my own. But when it’s raining, cold, and the middle of the work week, the gap between me and the ideal moves inside me and festers.
So I’ve needed to go back to basics. [bxA] And since dysfunction can color even my relationship with my higher power, “basics” for me isn’t faith—“basics” will always be my status as an Adult Child. I find faith’s ideals—forgiveness particularly— hard: so as I go through my life, I listen when poets say “Forgiveness is giving up all hope for a better past.” I listen when Rabbis talk about the importance of “Forgiving God, even as God forgives us” even though my inner theologian takes issue with a need to forgive the creator. My difficulty with faith is nothing more than a symptom of the problem we adult children share. As many intellectual curiosities as I nurture, I can get distracted: I have to come back to step one.
For “adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families” step one says: I admitted I was powerless over the effects of my dysfunctional upbringing. But if I’m to do a full job, I need to go deeper than that. I’m powerless over resentment, powerless to please people, powerless to control others' behavior. I’m powerless over whatever, in each moment, is compromising my serenity—even if “effort to name what I’m powerless over” is what’s temporarily preoccupying me.
Powerlessness is the foundation of emotional sobriety. To grow emotional sobriety, I have to cultivate the witness—a stance of simply observing, as opposed to trying to manipulate. I’ve known all of that for a while. But in the last few months, something else has become clear. I have to question the qualityof that witness. If anyone’s parents ever communicated displeasure by silently glaring, if anyone’s parents ever gave each other the silent treatment, you get it. How we look affects how we see the problem. How we see the problem affects what steps we take, and how, to solve it.
I’ve spoken about this before. In the slightly rambling post “The Original Child, my first and Greatest Teacher,” I identified the child inside me who looks on the world with utter fascination and excitement. My original child doesn’t talk much. He’s pretty stoked just to lay there and be excited. As many layers of dysfunctional psychobabble as were laid over top this presence, it took me 37 years to see that he was there in the first place. The point here is, if the original child doesn’t do the seeing, if the healthy adult doesn’t do the thinking and the acting, everything—my home life, my recovery, and my faith—will get derailed by my own dysfunction.
The Big Book (page 451 of the 3rd edition) says “I can [do the work of shifting my focus] with an AA meeting. The more I focus on its defects…the worse the meeting becomes. But when I try to see what I can add to the meeting…the meeting keeps getting better and better.” What I’ve realized is that, (in a way that, thankfully, hasn’t hardened into disassociating completely,) I have a group of recovering people inside me. My inner, wounded child looks on situations with paralysis, hyper-vigilance and fear, my unhealthy adult with rage. A balance between limits and compassion with those voices is important, and it’s prior to impartially witnessing. In one sense, my healthy adult has to affirm the voices in the room so that spiritual bypassing, or ignoring uncomfortable emotion in the name of piety, doesn’t occur. When all the voices are heard and affirmed, my focus is real, genuine openness. If they’re not, I’m usually impaired in my ability to accept things as they are
If I don’t go to that group meeting, the ones I attend with other adult children are useless. At those meetings, it’s the ‘healthy adult’s’ job to moderate, to validate all the voices so they can be united in seeing my situation in the first place. So when the wounded child brings his inarticulate mix of panic, the healthy adult needs to listen first, then provide the kind of nurture that allows the wounded child to relax. When the wounded adult wants to rage and indulge addictive behaviors, the healthy adult needs to listen first, then remind the wounded adult that it doesn’t need to rage to be heard. This is all part of allowing the Healthy adult and the Original Child to unite the group in doing the same thing: seeing my life healthily.
This is a lot. I need to remind myself that there are times when being the healthy adult suffices to do the Healthy Adult’s needed work. When simply being the Original Child is possible, seeing the world with fascination and excitement happens on its own. The post “Trust God: New thoughts on Steps 1-3 of ACA” is one of a series that attempts to troubleshoot why my higher power was throwing up roadblocks to my “working the program": why no one would pick up the 1000 pound phone when I dailed it, for instance. Now I know that those roadblocks were happening because I wasn’t attending the group meeting that I needed to: the one inside me with the cranky fuckers who make up my psyche. Finding the right group is an integral part of the solution. But codependents like me need to be careful not to expect the group to compensate for work we’re neglecting.
And examining family’s contribution to the problem—whether my family of origin or my life with my Jackie— is part of the solution, but not all of it. For one thing, the Big Book says “don’t seek to understand the reasons why you drink.” For codependents, “drinking” is an analogue for “avoiding insecurity through manipulation”. The point, for us, is that “understanding” is a last ditch effort at manipulation; it’s just clothed in sage’s garb.
It’s too easy to say “I see the problem” and mean “I’m hung up on where it started.” Blaming your family of origin, then, for their very real bullshit: this can masquerade as wisdom. But blame remains a bad move, however enticing. It’s too easy to say “I see the problem” and mean “I’m hung up on what grates on me when I’m not doing my own recovery work.” Resenting my Jackie for her responses to life—she likes to get vocally angry with inanimate objects in her way, for instance, and my inner child is afraid of angry people—this can masquerade as constructive. But the only way to troubleshoot what makes my problem worse is to address the wounded voices inside me that make me sensitive in the first place.
The big book says “The hardest place to work this program has been my own home…with my wife.” It suggests working the steps specifically around home life, then says “‘the courage to change’ in the serenity prayer meant, not that I should change my marriage, but that I should change myself and accept my spouse as she was.” That extends, I’d argue, to the group of voices I hear at the group meeting inside myself. They are what they are. Hearing them, and choosing to be my original child: this is important if I’m to lay hold of any serenity. Validating them, and allowing my inner adult to focus me on seeing my life healthily: I’ve got to do it if I’m going to see things as they are.
The acronym is KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Keeping it simple, for AA, has always been, “Don’t drink, and go to meetings.” For me this means “Don’t use substances, behaviors, or your home life as a solution to your problem, attend to the different voices that contribute to your ego, and allow the best of them to determine your perspective and behavior.” Honestly, that’s still more complicated than I’d prefer. But seeing it in the first place means doing it is easier than I think. I begin the new year, not with resolutions—i can’t afford the force they involve—but with the Original Child’s fascination to witness what comes.
