Walt and I were conducting a mastermind call this past week around yearly planning. One of our members raised her hand and talked about her resistance to setting any kind of goals for the year ahead. She wasn’t sure what was getting in the way. As I listened to her confusion, I immediately spotted the fear beneath it, which essentially boiled down to her inability to trust herself. Why set a goal if you’ll only wind up disappointing yourself again, if you’ll never be able to affect outcome?”
Because of my background, I always equate that sense of helplessness with being the adult child of an alcoholic, whether or not that’s true in this case.
“How’d you break free of that mindset?” Walt asked over dinner. I pointed to my first marathon as the inflection point, but my recovery started earlier than that.
Which got me to thinking about this book.
The year my father went to rehab, my mother made an appointment with a family therapist to deal with the side effects of his alcoholism.
Now that my parents were admitting that my father had a problem, it dawned on my mother that our alcoholic family dynamics may have taken a toll on us all. She wasn’t so much worried about my older brother Tim, who kept his head down and didn’t make waves, but about me, the rebel of the family.
It was Gary, the therapist, who suggestedI read Wayne Kritsberg’s The Adult Children of Alcoholics Syndrome, which had just come out on the market. I’d tucked it dutifully under my arm on the way out of one of those preposterous sessions, and flung it on my dorm room desk. It sat collecting dust for ages, like most books well-meaning adults suggested I read.
Until one day, bored, I flipped it open.
Cue the hunting horns and popping flash bulbs and scales falling from eyes.
This one book—and, Lord, don’t we all want to change things up for our readers like this with our book—shifted my entire outlook.
For the first time in my life, I understood that everything I believed to be wrong with me was quite possibly a symptom of my upbringing. That there was a peculiar way of living, a quality of feeling, a mental attitude that develops when you’ve been raised by wolves, dysfunctional people who play by a set of seriously fucked up rules.
The rule of silence: where you don’t talk about what’s happening in the family. Where silence extends to not only talking to members outside the family, but also includes talking to the members of the family itself. Oh, and you sure don’t talk about it to yourself, because that would be really crazy. You’re banned from talking about your feelings; therefore, you have difficulty expressing yourself. You learn that it’s so not OK to talk about much of anything because that usually pisses people off. Essentially, you don’t talk, unless you’ve put every word through the scrubber so it sounds nice and acceptable. (Can you see why I might have become a writer?)
The rule of denial: What you see with your eyes, hear with your ears, and feel in your heart you are told is not true. Black is white, night is day. Your internal radar system gets all thrown off. You’re told to ignore bad behavior, but you’re also told to pretend nothing is wrong, to pretend to be normal. You continually try to figure out what’s going on and separate what’s real from what’s not. You learn not to trust—yourself or others. When painful events occur, the feelings that naturally accompany those events are denied, because you’re not “supposed” to have those feelings. You don’t feel anger, because anger is against the rules. You never learn how to honestly express emotions. You smile when you’re angry, look blank when you’re hurt, and remain in constant conflict with how you feel on the inside, and what you show on the outside. If you pretend this is not happening, maybe it’ll just go away.
The rule of isolation: The family is a closed system, which resists adding outsiders. You cling emotionally to each other, but never become intimate. You can’t bear scrutiny. You isolate yourself from the community, and the individual members of the family isolate themselves from each other. You continue to isolate from others. Loneliness runs deep. You want intimacy, but you don’t know how to do it. You’re emotionally dependent on an outside source to get feelings of self-esteem; you focus on external stimuli in order not to feel your own pain.You’ve got unclear personal boundaries. If you unplug from the person you’ve decided to attach yourself to, you’ll lose all sense of identity.
I knew I wasn’t normal–I’d even spotted myself in my Abnormal Psych book half a dozen times– but apparently I was. I was a normal adult child of an alcoholic. Because, when I saw the list of common character traits, I realized I could check off nearly every one of them.
There was a reason I didn’t trust anyone, least of all myself. Why I felt afraid all the time. Why I could never tell anyone what I was feeling. Why I couldn’t, with a gun pressed to my head, be honest with anyone, including me. There was a reason I acted out of fear and denial; why I stuck my ostrich head in the sand. There was a reason I felt nothing, not tears, not anger, not even joy. There was a reason my life was a goddamned soap opera. Why I was so manipulative, a rage-fueled passive-aggressive people-pleaser. So all or nothing. Why I had no idea how to get truly close to another person. There was a reason I kept it all bottled up, why I needed maximum control, why I was perpetually scanning the horizon for the slightest hint of danger. Why I clung to relationships like a hobo to a ham sandwich long past the point I should have bailed. Why I feared abandonment above all else.Why I played the martyr, the nice girl. Why I folded like a cheap suit the minute I ran into any form of resistance, or obstacle. Why I had a pathological fear of conflict.
Check, check, check. Checkity check.
My recovery from what Kritsberg dubbed The Adult Children of Alcoholics Syndrome began in that moment with the stunning realization that my life was not progressing in a healthy way. Those were his words, Kritsberg’s. I suddenly saw that being raised in an alcoholic family had greatly influenced my bizarre behavior and stunning lack of feelings. I wasn’t, in fact, a sociopath. For once, I was predictably normal, normal for someone raised in an unsafe, dysfunctional, alcoholic family system.
What Mom suspected, feared, was spot the fuck on.
It would take years to play out the whole recovery process, to let that momentary insight be anything more than justification for my lack of emotional depth. It would take years for me to learn how to think and behave like a functional adult. It probably took years longer than it should have, thanks to marrying my Muslim boyfriend, and moving with him to the Islamic Republic of Iran, having a couple of babies. It took years, and lots more mistakes, and lots more eye-opening books, and therapy, and running, and learning to write before I got better, before I saw how that dynamic had carried over into my parenting, my subsequent love life, and my approach to the world in general.
Along the path, I realized that many of the same behaviors, rules, and traits I’d always associated with my alcoholic upbringing were shared by those raised with other types of dysfunction–parents with personality disorders, mental illness, or other forms of addiction. There were lots of us wolf cubs out here, all trying to make sense of the world, get our needs met in healthier ways.
