I am codependent. I recognize both the obstacle this poses in my life, and I also see this recognition as part of the pathway to my freedom.
The substance which impacted my family of origin was not alcohol or even externally ingested or administered - to the best of my understanding, it was hormones and other brain chemicals gone awry.
In my past, there was a great deal of screaming. I was over thirty when a therapist who specializes in trauma explained that I had PTSD from my childhood. It didn't make sense to me at first, sure it was bad, but it was survivable. I remember him telling me he was surprised that I was as functional as I was and that I was not an addict. Then I saw 'The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood' on the big screen. The scene where the Ashley Judd character wallops her kids (and is then institutionalized for her brutality) was transformative. I saw for the first time that what had been 'normal' in my early life was not at all normal.
Although it was extremely uncomfortable, there was a new breath of freedom for me in connecting those dots, as if I were learning to really use my lung capacity for the first time. (That metaphor is literal in my case, I very often held my breath as a child, I suppose I was trying to stay under the radar to avoid setting off the inevitable and inescapable cycles of anger which regularly visited our home.)
It was only partly a coincidence that I saw the film almost exactly at the time I started attending an ACOA group (Adult Children of Alcoholics and other family dysfunction). The therapist insisted that I belonged at meetings 4x per week. I no longer had a reason to avoid a women's group one of my best friends had helped to establish several years previously. She wanted to see the film, and we went. My recollection is that I had been to a meeting or two ahead of seeing the movie. I felt sentenced to attending the group and I did not like it. Slow tears streaked my face from open to close on that first day... Inside my head, the words, 'I am broken, I am broken' came from somewhere and kept repeating. I was relieved when the meeting ended and I could flee.
But I kept coming back. I fit into the 'other' category, but my patterns and issues were identical to those of people who did have alcohol in their homes of origin. I learned an enormous amount about myself and I have deep appreciation for the 12-step model as a construct for reaching peace and self-forgiveness. I was there every week for upwards of three years (until a medical accident readjusted my life).
Before that level of recovery (whatever it is or was), there were repeated rounds of physical recovery for me with surgery to address a major health issue. Complications with or alongside the surgeries found me in situations where the medical professionals did not expect I would survive, twice in my twenties and once at the end of my thirties. I remember not wanting to survive at parts of all of those experiences, once begging to be set free because it was utterly unendurable. I remember telling God that if he'd release me, I'd call it even and not resent what I'd been through - I blacked out about then, but apparently, my plea was not sufficiently convincing as I found myself awake again after yet another surgery.
I often felt very alone, both in illness and in recovery. I longed to have someone to hold my hand and know who and what I was in the times when my strength was not sufficient to know that for myself.
I find myself, today, with someone in need of that same assurance and continuity as he walks through his own valley of the shadow of death. There are many differences and many similarities in our experience. What I know for him is that only he will be able to direct his journey to freedom. It is a truly awesome journey fraught with at least as many life-threatening perils as I've found myself met on my own path. The day we met in person, he asked me to help him stop drinking - I really had no idea what I was agreeing to at the time, only that I loved him and that there is deep goodness in him and that I would lend whatever strength I had to assist him on his quest.
I knew nothing then. I do not know much more than that now, but I've seen a very similar paradox in him of amazing strength contrasted by stunning fragility, as I have lived in my own life.
What I first fell in love with about him, long before we met in person, was that his deepest love in life is for his daughters. It is for him, for them, and for the daughter in me who was left by her father, that I have devoted strength and hope I did not know I have within me.
My father was not able to take a look at how I experienced my abandonment. I just wanted to be seen, and my father and stepmother took that as my wanting to make them wrong, somehow. So this part of my life is my taking a different path to help resolve for myself the stumbling blocks I have found no other way to tear down.
So, this part of my journey is very much for myself as well as for the love in my life, and the loves in his.
When my own survival has been on the line, I have learned there is no choice but to look inward to find the light and the voice which brings me through. I did not like surrendering to discomfort and the unknown, but I got better at it through repeated experience.
For him, well, I think he's beginning to learn to trust that another will be and do what she says she is and does. I can't direct his actions by any means, but I have been able to nudge him in healthful directions. I've been there in the moments when he finally noticed that things were 'that' bad that getting to the hospital was a necessity... and then get him there. It's taken a couple years to get him a full set of physicians to assess and address the spectrum of medical situations which have arisen from genetics and from addiction. I've been able to help offset issues from drinking with supplementation which has helped to reverse some early problems... We do not know where he is metabolically at this point - there may already be irreversible organ damage. But where ever he is, perhaps he's ready to actually let it be part of his past and to claim a new future. HIS future.
This is my prayer. My life is my ardent prayer.
The substance which impacted my family of origin was not alcohol or even externally ingested or administered - to the best of my understanding, it was hormones and other brain chemicals gone awry.
In my past, there was a great deal of screaming. I was over thirty when a therapist who specializes in trauma explained that I had PTSD from my childhood. It didn't make sense to me at first, sure it was bad, but it was survivable. I remember him telling me he was surprised that I was as functional as I was and that I was not an addict. Then I saw 'The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood' on the big screen. The scene where the Ashley Judd character wallops her kids (and is then institutionalized for her brutality) was transformative. I saw for the first time that what had been 'normal' in my early life was not at all normal.
Although it was extremely uncomfortable, there was a new breath of freedom for me in connecting those dots, as if I were learning to really use my lung capacity for the first time. (That metaphor is literal in my case, I very often held my breath as a child, I suppose I was trying to stay under the radar to avoid setting off the inevitable and inescapable cycles of anger which regularly visited our home.)
It was only partly a coincidence that I saw the film almost exactly at the time I started attending an ACOA group (Adult Children of Alcoholics and other family dysfunction). The therapist insisted that I belonged at meetings 4x per week. I no longer had a reason to avoid a women's group one of my best friends had helped to establish several years previously. She wanted to see the film, and we went. My recollection is that I had been to a meeting or two ahead of seeing the movie. I felt sentenced to attending the group and I did not like it. Slow tears streaked my face from open to close on that first day... Inside my head, the words, 'I am broken, I am broken' came from somewhere and kept repeating. I was relieved when the meeting ended and I could flee.
But I kept coming back. I fit into the 'other' category, but my patterns and issues were identical to those of people who did have alcohol in their homes of origin. I learned an enormous amount about myself and I have deep appreciation for the 12-step model as a construct for reaching peace and self-forgiveness. I was there every week for upwards of three years (until a medical accident readjusted my life).
Before that level of recovery (whatever it is or was), there were repeated rounds of physical recovery for me with surgery to address a major health issue. Complications with or alongside the surgeries found me in situations where the medical professionals did not expect I would survive, twice in my twenties and once at the end of my thirties. I remember not wanting to survive at parts of all of those experiences, once begging to be set free because it was utterly unendurable. I remember telling God that if he'd release me, I'd call it even and not resent what I'd been through - I blacked out about then, but apparently, my plea was not sufficiently convincing as I found myself awake again after yet another surgery.
I often felt very alone, both in illness and in recovery. I longed to have someone to hold my hand and know who and what I was in the times when my strength was not sufficient to know that for myself.
I find myself, today, with someone in need of that same assurance and continuity as he walks through his own valley of the shadow of death. There are many differences and many similarities in our experience. What I know for him is that only he will be able to direct his journey to freedom. It is a truly awesome journey fraught with at least as many life-threatening perils as I've found myself met on my own path. The day we met in person, he asked me to help him stop drinking - I really had no idea what I was agreeing to at the time, only that I loved him and that there is deep goodness in him and that I would lend whatever strength I had to assist him on his quest.
I knew nothing then. I do not know much more than that now, but I've seen a very similar paradox in him of amazing strength contrasted by stunning fragility, as I have lived in my own life.
What I first fell in love with about him, long before we met in person, was that his deepest love in life is for his daughters. It is for him, for them, and for the daughter in me who was left by her father, that I have devoted strength and hope I did not know I have within me.
My father was not able to take a look at how I experienced my abandonment. I just wanted to be seen, and my father and stepmother took that as my wanting to make them wrong, somehow. So this part of my life is my taking a different path to help resolve for myself the stumbling blocks I have found no other way to tear down.
So, this part of my journey is very much for myself as well as for the love in my life, and the loves in his.
When my own survival has been on the line, I have learned there is no choice but to look inward to find the light and the voice which brings me through. I did not like surrendering to discomfort and the unknown, but I got better at it through repeated experience.
For him, well, I think he's beginning to learn to trust that another will be and do what she says she is and does. I can't direct his actions by any means, but I have been able to nudge him in healthful directions. I've been there in the moments when he finally noticed that things were 'that' bad that getting to the hospital was a necessity... and then get him there. It's taken a couple years to get him a full set of physicians to assess and address the spectrum of medical situations which have arisen from genetics and from addiction. I've been able to help offset issues from drinking with supplementation which has helped to reverse some early problems... We do not know where he is metabolically at this point - there may already be irreversible organ damage. But where ever he is, perhaps he's ready to actually let it be part of his past and to claim a new future. HIS future.
This is my prayer. My life is my ardent prayer.
Comment