[I started to write about how being an addict is like being LGBT. Actually, being an active addict is like being a closeted attacked member of the LGBT community; being in recovery has a lot in common with being out and proud. But before I could explain all that, I got into this digression and I'm going to share it as its own post....]

Addiction seems very complicated. In reality, it’s incredibly simple. Simple like gravity. You drop a ball, it falls to the ground. Sure, you can get all obsessive and detailed – what’s the ball made of? How heavy is it? Are we outside? How far away is the ground? What’s the ground made of? Is there wind? Is the ground level? Am I dropping it, or sort of throwing it a little bit? – but ultimately none of that stuff really matters. The bottom line is still that the ball is going to hit the ground. (And I once took a class called Physics for Liberal Arts Majors, which I thought would be all about the lyrical splendor of the universe and which in fact was basically physics for people who hadn’t yet noticed that things fall when you drop them. So I know what I’m talking about here.)

Here is what happens. People are abused. (“How” and “for how long” matter, but so does “by whom.” Pretend I drew you a little graph here where intense infrequent abuse is high up on the chart, and so is living with people who have ever abused you in any way – and living with people who frequently abuse you intensely is especially crazy-making – and we’ll move on.)

More specifically, children are abused. And, since they are children and developmentally are supposed to think everything is about them, are in fact in a molten crucible of diverse experiences which are constantly creating and re-creating their vision of the world, what they learn from the abuse is that they are not worthy human beings. They learn that they deserve shame, pain, and disrespect; often, the bottom line to them is that they are not worthy of life. That’s the message of abuse, after all; that’s what distinguishes abuse and trauma.

Trauma, like falling out of a tree and breaking your leg, or losing your house to a hurricane, is genuinely random and obviously not about you. The only time that people take messages like “I’m not worthy” from trauma is if they’ve already been set up with those messages by abuse. Abuse, on the other hand, carries those messages whether it’s done on purpose or not – and it’s rarely on purpose. Most adults who abuse children think that they are doing their best, that yelling at their kids, hitting their kids, raping their kids, is an example of their shining love and excellent boundaries. Most adults who abuse children are kind of crazy. (Sidebar: it’s not always adults. Sometimes it’s the classmate or neighbor kid or babysitter, acting out their own abuse. Doesn’t make a huge amount of difference, in terms of its effects.)

So, abused kids melt that down. Their molten worldview hardens around “I am not good enough.” It can be conscious or subconscious, but it is there, rock-hard and deeply embedded.

And they do two things with it: dissociate, in any way they can, and choose more pain, because they think that is what they deserve. Which becomes a vicious cycle: more pain brings with it more need to dissociate, which means choosing more pain in an attempt to feel anything, which means dissociating from the feelings, which means worse choices because we can’t really make good choices if we can’t feel the effects of what we choose, (not to mention if we think that we don’t deserve good things), which means dissociating harder, which….

That cycle is addiction. That’s all that you need to know about addiction. It means doing something to check out of our feelings, or our lives. The popular perception is that it has to be something inherently harmful – but the reality is that checking out like that is the most harmful part. (All right, yes, there are drugs that will kill your body and soul faster than checking out. On the other hand, you could argue that people can’t really choose to keep doing drugs that harmful without checking out in the first place.)

Addiction doesn’t necessarily mean beer, pot, heroin, cigarettes, nice recognizable drugs. Just about every addict (abuse survivor) has a whole lot of options for what lets them check out. That’s why Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, has an implicit rule against “thirteenth-stepping,” hitting on newcomers: because so many people put down the alcohol and switch right over to the sex and love addiction that they don’t even realize is a problem. That’s also why there is so much caffeine and cigarette consumption at a lot of meetings. People quit things in the order that those things are killing them, or at least in the order of most to least immediately painful killers. Not everyone can even stand to use drugs to check out: substance addictions have a genetic switch that gets flipped on by abuse, and lots of people lack that genetic component. But process addictions (codependency, emotional eating, sex addiction, compulsive debting, et cetera) are available to everyone who’s been abused. Isn’t that great? In fact, every addict, every abuse survivor, is a codependent, because codependency is all about trying to control the uncontrollable (like trying to control our emotions and histories) – and what else are these other addictions there for but the illusion of control?

There are more details. (Wind velocity. Density of the ball.) On another level, checking out is a way to try to avoid the emotional pain of the abuse, and of beliefs like “I am not good enough.” The flipside of that is that pain tells the body to check out – it presses the same “oh no, terrible things are happening and I have no other options – dissociate!” button that is installed by abuse. And seeking out pain is also a way to try to control the abuse. That’s why people date people who are like their parents – why they choose jobs and relationships and situations, over and over, that don’t work for them. Our brains, deep down, think “If I can get THIS one to treat me right, that will stop all the pain! It’ll erase all the abuse I ever experienced!” Maybe it’s a lizard-brain thing. It seems fine until we get it out into the open and actually give it some conscious thought.

But once you know all this, it boils down to something deeply simple. Abuse a kid, and they learn to harm themselves in order to check out. Abuse kids, and they become addicts.

Lance Mannion (how awesome is that? that can’t possibly be his real name, right?) wrote recently about the idea that college is a waste of time for people who are happier in non-white-collar jobs. And the recent article in the Atlantic that suggested that those folks are unfit for college, which I think are (as the Simpsons might put it) strong, bewildering words.

I never saw college as something that I needed to get into a particular career; I figured, even at the time, that if I wanted to go to school to get a particular career (at least one outside of academia), I would go to some professional school for whatever it was I was trying to do.

I knew I wanted to be a writer, and I knew I could write well enough and didn’t need a degree to do it, just motivation and time and work. I was going to college because it was expected of me, because I figured it would get me a higher-paying day job in the meantime, but mainly, because I needed to get the hell out of my family home and I couldn’t make it on my own yet.

I needed college as a kind of decompression chamber between childhood and life. And, both while I was an undergrad and later when I worked in the college’s admissions department, I saw a large number of students in the same position. Whether or not they were studying what they wanted to be doing in life, (whether or not, in fact, they even knew what that was), they needed a place to find their own footing.

It became clear to me pretty quickly that many of us were emerging from the depths of dysfunctional, abusive homes – no matter how loving and well-intentioned they might also have been – and that we needed these four or more years to learn about boundaries, and healthier relationships, and our own wants and needs. Often, we needed the time to become willing and able to acknowledge our own abuse. It’s like fish and water: it’s hard to see it when it’s the only thing you’ve ever known. And it’s hard to feel safe acknowledging it when it seems to be the only option.

Some of us seemed to self-destruct in college. I’m sure every college or university has its share of suicidal students, people who get out of the house and plunge straight into drugs/smoking/alcohol (or just farther into drugs/smoking/alcohol), and people whose serious mental health issues are just becoming apparent. It can be ugly – just plain hideous and terrifying to them and those around them – but it’s part of the healing process. Like pus. I hate to bring pus into an argument, but there you have it. Nasty, hot pus clearing out the infected wound. Of abuse.

Moving right along….

We surely had our share, so much so that we often joked about whether there was something in the dorm’s plumbing that was making people go crazy. Over time, though, it became obvious: there were just a lot of students who were, basically, getting the bends on the way back up to reality. Away from their home lives. Some got the help they needed, though generally not from our school’s incredibly weak counseling department. Some are still working through this process… well, really, we all are, just at different paces and with different tools.

Certainly it’s possible to go through the same process without college, but I am so glad I had it to shelter me. I was thrown in with a huge peer group, given a set of basic rules, and against that background I learned a tremendous amount about how my own childhood had affected me, what did and didn’t work for me, and how it was all different from and similar to others’ experiences. I got to see other people go through the process of facing and addressing abuse and its effects before me, and learn about what I liked and loved and needed in life, and try to learn everything that I wanted to before they decided I had enough credits and kicked me out into the workplace.

It was like a great big womb, basically. Not the safest or most nurturing one, because we were young adults and didn’t need the same kind of womb anymore. But a reasonably safe place where we could be suspended between the child and adult worlds for a little while. It gave me a grace period for figuring out my own shit. I had a lot of resentments about my academic career at the time, some regrets, and a tremendous amount of confusion – but to a large extent, that was because I was concerned with what I thought I needed and wasn’t getting instead of what I did need and was.

It still took me a while to hit bottom, to come face to face with my experiences of abuse and their effects on my adult life. Part of that was denial, part of it was a lack of information about those effects and the resources available to me. I didn’t know this stuff, the therapists I went to didn’t know this stuff, the doctors I saw didn’t know this stuff, my friends didn’t know this stuff – we have a lot of work to do in making it common knowledge so that people can start healing sooner. But college helped a lot in closing the gap between what I knew and what I needed to know, outside of the classroom.

One of the big points that Barbara Sher makes in Wishcraft is that you are a genius. That each of us is a genius when we are born, full of curiosity and passion and talents and all the other things we associate with genius.

She offers exercises which are similar to the one Penelope Trunk suggests that I wrote about a few days ago. I’ve found it incredibly useful to look at the things that overjoyed and fascinated me as a child through Wishcraft, and now to look at how my childhood memories can teach me about what I need in my adult life and work.

Tonight, all of this came together in my head and I suddenly understood why I am so awesome.

You see, babies are awesome. Little kids are totally awesome. I personally think this is a universal truth. It was obvious to me with my own kid, but I figured I was biased. But it’s also obvious in every other child I encounter, and especially with my girlfriend’s nieces. Meeting a kid is just like being whacked with the awesome stick. They don’t even know how awesome they are. It’s like fishes and water. They can’t see it because they don’t know any other way to be. (Or, with the sad exceptions, they don’t know they’re awesome because they’ve already learned from their parents that they’re not – even though that’s not even remotely reasonable.)

Proof?:

 

(Sadly, I could not find my favorite baby picture, but I think these add a little something too! How cute am I with those little chocolate eggs?)

Well, a huge part of recovery for me was first learning how awesome I was… slowly becoming aware of the great things about me, my strengths and beauty and character, and slowly becoming willing to accept those things. Learning that the negatives I brought to my life were old coping mechanisms, old responses to abuse, and that I didn’t need them anymore. And, eventually, becoming willing and able to SAY that I was awesome – in front of other people and everything! – without immediately having to shame myself, hedge it around with conditions, trying to keep them from thinking I thought I was TOO great.

I’ve come to see myself, more and more, as (on one level) a spark of universe-stuff. A little bit of what everything else is made out of, connected to everything, with all this stuff that makes me a separate person important because it’s part of my experience now, but not all that relevant to who I am deep down. And that’s how babies and very young kids look to me too – just big SPARKS.

Tonight I saw that I’m awesome for the same reasons, in the same ways, that babies are awesome. You are, too. We are all born with all this great joy and energy and potential. We are born worthy and loving and lovable. Wonderful and good and loved. We are born perfect just the way we are.

We are all incredible, awesome, exciting people. We struggle, a lot of the time, with past traumas and with the crazy messages and old painful coping skills we’ve learned from them. And sometimes we act out, like cranky tired children, because of all that stuff. But that stuff is all layered on later. It’s learned and it can be unlearned.

One reviewer wrote, “Most books on life planning have, to my mind, two fatal flaws: they assume that your ’strengths’ are an infallible guide to what you ’should’ be doing with your life; and they then attempt to map this to a ‘career.’ Barbara Sher starts with the basics: what is most important to YOU? Given that, how are you to get it? (And this doesn’t necessarily translate into ‘career’!)” It’s true: often the things we think of as our “strengths” are the ways we’ve learned to cope. We’re proud of coping, of surviving, sometimes at a cost. Sometimes we don’t notice that we’re choosing painful situations over and over again, things we’ll need to cope with, because we’re so focused on those strengths at the expense of ease and joy.

The weary battle with negative coping mechanisms – aka the effects of abuse – can eclipse the truth: The stuff that’s actually part of us, at our core, at our birth, is pure AWESOME. That’s the stuff we really get to own, and live with, and enjoy, forever.

I recently discovered Penelope Trunk’s blog, Brazen Careerist. It has a fantastic name, doesn’t it? She does, too. Well, I have a not-so-secret love of personal finance and business writing, which is slooowly leading me toward becoming a successful entrepreneur… which overlaps a lot with recovery. I mean, how many people do you know who do something brilliantly – crafts or writing or coding or cooking – who you just know could make tons of money doing it if they only believed in themselves? How many skills do you have, honestly, that you could turn into a career if you paid for it with the time and energy and self-worth that that takes?

(There are plenty of successful entrepreneurs, and successful everything elses, who don’t have a strong sense of self-worth. I’m thinking of people like Stephen Fry, Ellen Degeneres, and Douglas Adams, people who create amazing things and are modest and self-effacingly doubtful about it to the point of ridiculousness. The trade-off, I think, may be that with less self-esteem it takes more time and energy to make it, and it’s a lot harder to enjoy.)

Well, damnit, that’s not the post I am trying to write today, although it cries out to be written and will certainly be coming soon. My point today is that despite my struggles with self-promotion, I am pulled to read things like Brazen Careerist, and in that particular blog I have found a great treasure trove of smart, clear writing not only about business matters but about life. And I really knew I had found something good when I read Why you already know what you should be doing next.

This piece reminds me a lot of Wishcraft, one of the books I’m recommending for the cat-herding challenge and one which I will be including in the “tools” section of Facing Abuse when it comes out. In Wishcraft, one of Barbara Sher’s great points is that we can go back to our childhood interests and passions and memories in general to find out what it is we want to be doing. And it may not be as simple as “I loved to fingerpaint or collect twigs so I should become… a famous fingerpainting twig-collector,” of course. We can look at what we loved about those things, what pushed us to do them and what we got out of them.

And we can do the same in adulthood; we may have lifelong dreams of becoming an opera singer and find that what we wanted to get out of it is satisfied tremendously by joining a local choir, or by working behind the scenes for an opera, or something else we had never considered. Or, of course, that nothing but becoming an opera singer will satisfy that itch, and that that passion is enough to power years of voice training and drama classes.

Trunk shares a similar story. She suggests that all we have to do is pick a memory and pull it apart:

“Close your eyes and think of a great memory of childhood… Do you have it? In my own, haphazard studies of this test, you can always learn something from the moment you pick. The first time I did this exercise, I thought of playing in my grandparents’ huge front yard. Of course, I was telling all my younger cousins what to do. Probably telling them why croquet was a great idea and I was going first. Something like that. But the bigger thing I learn from the story is that I am connected to space and nature and running around. All still true for me now, but it took me years of living in big cities before I could figure that out.” (bolding is mine)

The first childhood memory that came up for me was from, I think, first grade. We did this art project where we drew a colorful picture in crayons, and then (confusingly) painted over it with black paint. When the paint dried, we got to scratch it off, making a new picture in the black paint, and the old bright crayon colors showed through wherever we scratched.

I remember a butterfly; I’m not sure whether we HAD to scratch a butterfly drawing (you know how rigid teachers can be with art projects), whether I did one, or whether both the Rachels in the class did. I think it was one of those where we each had to do a butterfly, I guess on the reasoning that butterflies are colorful. I was pretty pissed off about having to paint over my original drawing, not to mention having to then “draw” whatever the teacher told me to.

But I know that the Rachels did because I remember that their pictures both said Rachel and they were both of butterflies. And this bothered me tremendously. I was like, how are they going to be able to tell their pictures apart?! So I tried to help by scratching one of the Rachel’s names on the front of her drawing.

Man, you have never seen such a fuss. I am sure that it was huge and sprawling and defaced the whole picture, and as an adult I know that it was probably unnecessary – that they probably each could recognize their own butterfly. And maybe it didn’t matter if they couldn’t. But I remember the Rachel whose name I scratched being really upset, and the teacher calling my parents in (whether for a special meeting or just when they picked me up from school I don’t know) and them all very seriously and with great concern asking me why I did it, and trying to guess whether I was mad at Rachel about something or what.

And I tried to explain, and I don’t know if I had the language skills back then to do it. It’s hard for little kids to consciously reason these things out and get all the way to
being able to explain them in terms adults will understand. Adults just aren’t that smart. They don’t remember, often, what it was like to be a kid and not have all these concepts of what upsets other people and how they feel about their artwork and that they might have different feelings than you do. Actually, I guess it’s more that they often don’t have the concepts themselves that other people might feel differently, in a way. I mean, it was really hard for them to grasp that I might not think about it like an attack like they did, that I might actually have thought I was helping and be telling the truth when I said that. Adults, I remember, are weird.

Oh, and then I felt really guilty and weird around whichever Rachel it was for ages after that, because it had been borne upon me that she was totally shattered (SHATTERED!) about her ruined picture.

So what does this say about me?

Well, it illustrates some patterns that continue in my life, that I know are related to the abuse. Like: the adults in my life loved to shame me to try to get me to act the way they wanted, which is not uncommon. And I learned from them that I should feel bad and guilty – shame myself – if other people might not like what I did. Not just if I accidentally hurt them, but if they didn’t like the work I produced or the way I expressed myself. It’s like how, if you are faced with an angry gorilla, you are supposed to attack yourself first so it will feel bad for you and try to soothe you instead. It’s codependence, really: worrying about how other people will feel and trying to guess and fix it to protect ourselves, even when there’s no need to. (And really, there’s never any need to.)

I hadn’t thought, before, about how that codependence/shame ties in with the work I do. I am not sure I know any writers (personally, I mean) who actually believe in their work. I know a lot of writers who know that they love writing, and are pretty sure their work is pretty good, but who live through a lot of fear about any particular piece: nobody will want to publish it, it will never be perfect enough, it will piss people off, it’s not good enough. It’s never good enough. And I know that I have these problems too, and that it’s codependence and shame and fear, and that those three things are all the same. But I didn’t notice how much I was shamed for my work, as a child.

Of course that’s not the only example; my parents were both college professors, were perfectionists, and had crazy-making mottos like “It doesn’t matter what grades you get as long as you do your best and we know your best is an A so you had better get A’s.” It took me years to realize that my work honestly was not only good but above average; it’s still confusing to me sometimes.

And, you know, this story also shows me what I was like before that shame and fear was drummed into me. I was very clear about what I wanted to do. I know that I had already learned some codependent stuff; I mean, the whole thing started because I was trying to help someone who didn’t need my help and hadn’t asked for it, which is classically codependent. But I do love my single-minded fiery determination to do things the way I thought they should be done. I was perfectly clear that the assignment was confusing and stupid and the teacher was crazy, crazy to have us paint over a perfectly good picture and crazy to let people with the same first name go around not putting their initials or anything. So I just fixed it!

I also know that I loved making art. I loved color, and I hated painting black all over and only having a tiny bit of color show through. I wanted to make as much color and as much art as possible. And I didn’t like (okay, I loathed) being told HOW to make a picture. I didn’t want to be told that I had to make a butterfly. I wanted her to say “Okay, just put a bunch of colors all over here however you want because then we’re going to paint over it and scratch a picture into the paint so some color shows through.” I wanted to be given clear information about what was happening so I could do something awesome with it!

Trunk reflects that

“It’s nearly impossible to eradicate our life of SHOULDS, because we all want to make the right decisions. But I think I could have figured out right decisions for me a lot faster if I had realized how much we reveal about our true selves when we’re young.”

I like this because it’s a little different than the Wishcraft technique. It’s not that my story will tell me what career to follow, but it tells me a lot about what kind of decisions I should make. It gives me guidelines. Like, if I look at just this story:

1. I need to reject people and situations where I’m told how to do things. I need to choose to do things my own way, because I have a very strong sense of what information I need in order to succeed and, frankly, when people try to hem me in so that they can make everything I do turn out a certain way, all hell breaks loose. (And I could tell you stories about my last office job that would illustrate this beautifully!)
2. I need to give myself lots of opportunities to make awesome art and do it in whatever way works for me. In fact, I need to just color all over the page. The kind of art I like to make is invariably about filling a space with color anyway.
3. I need to recognize that all the art I make is awesome. That it’s not about doing it according to some specific guidelines and judging its success based on some adult set of rules. That, apparently, scribbling all over the page works a whole lot better. It’s a crucial part of the process.
4. I need to reject the shame that tells me that what I create is not good enough, that I need to justify myself to others, that I need to fix other people’s work and ideas and ways of doing things, that what hyper-critical adults (including myself) have to say about or to me has ever had any merit for me.
5. I need to respect my inner fire and let it carry me through whatever I am facing. And, now, guide it with what I know about healthy safe boundaries.

Anything else? Maybe more will occur to me.

What do your stories tell you about yourself?