I don’t know where this book gets off saying “A Novel” on the cover. Bookends is chick lit, pure and simple.

What’s the difference? Well, chick lit books are of course novels, in the sense that they’re fiction, but novels aren’t necessarily chick lit. Chick lit is very specific: it has a female protagonist; the purpose of the story is to hook her up with the guy who the author has, early on, chosen as the obvious perfect guy for her; it’s narrated by the protagonist; and the protagonist has almost no personality, only a collection of fun facts you know about her.

I’ll write later about Chick Lit Protagonist Syndrome, but suffice it to say that they’re almost universally wildly codependent, with very little self-knowledge, compulsive emotional eating, no idea whether the guy really likes them even if he comes in with “I Really Like You, Protagonist” tattooed on his forehead, and deep shame about themselves and especially their bodies (which are always telegraphed as very very beautiful despite what the protagonist thinks). Oh, and every man in the book is either gay, married to a friend of the protagonist’s, or a future love interest. There are no other options.

This one also can’t tell a story. Jeeezus. The pacing of this book is rocky; it starts out with several chapters about the characters in their early twenties, then rockets forward to the 31-year-old present with no explanation for the early chapters, then much later on brings back the one character who left the group in those early chapters. It’s obvious that she must be coming back, but only because it would be a terrible book if such a pivotal character were introduced and then totally dropped.

The story gets back on track with her return, only to drift off again toward the end as every plot thread has to get wrapped up, often off-camera. I can’t tell you how many of the characters’ experiences are just summarized for us by the narrator. There are times, in the last few chapters, where days and even weeks of intense character development are retold at a breathless pace. Like, she has the narrator tell us that her friend Si is telling us his friend Eva’s life story, and we hear the whole ENTIRE thing third-hand, and then we get this:

“And she really is [fine],” Si told me, in wonder, in awe, and then he said goodbye and put down the phone, because he had the rest of the night to think about what she’d said.

Come on: how would the narrator even know what he was going to think and do after he hung up? It ends up ringing false because (like any good codependent) the narrator has no boundaries. That is, Green is trying to write the story from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, but puts her in the body of a specific character who couldn’t know all this stuff and isn’t the right vehicle for it.

The problem here is that Jane Green has too many great characters with fascinating stories for one book – the way that she chose to tell it. Si’s story would have made a much better book. Or she could have told different chapters of Bookends from different perspectives, letting the overall story unfold as each character played their own part. That would have made an incredible book. Instead, the story is hamstrung by being forced through one rather passive woman’s perspective.

There are also too many stories happening – the opening of this new bookstore, Bookends, which is co-owned by the protagonist and another main character, and even lends the book its name, takes up a lot of time but barely serves to advance the plot at all. It’s a major undertaking, and a major success, and yet there’s no emotional impact to it: we’re told that it makes the other main character’s life very busy, which puts stress on her marriage, but it causes so few problems for the protagonist that it seems pointless other than as occasional comic relief.

So: chick lit. Because of the boundary problems, the Chick Lit Protagonist Syndrome, and the slapdash writing. I’m not saying that chick lit can’t be well-written, but this particular kind of slapdash fast-paced gallop through a storyline, with little pause for real emotional depth, is characteristic of the genre. I enjoyed Bookends anyway, but I don’t think I would read it again.

[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.

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?

This is a reading/blogging challenge put on by Renay over at Bottle of Shine. Basically, people list ten books they love, and/or go pick out three books to read from other people’s lists, and then review the ones they read.

Like most blog challenges, the benefits are that we get to discover new blogs, meet new people, have our blogs discovered by new people, get some writing inspiration, and in this case, read some awesome new-to-us books.

So, after much thought I came up with ten books that I LOVE that are in some way connected to this blog’s theme: abuse, addiction, and recovery. I think this list reflects how that theme plays out in real life: they’re about learning how we work inside, how the abuse in the world and in most of our families affects us on a very practical and everyday level, and how to make our lives freaking AWESOME. That last part, pretty much, is the core, the essence, and the damn point. In fact, I guess if I thought there was a question about “why we are all here anyway,” that would be my answer: to understand and love ourselves and each other (but especially ourselves) in order to make our lives freaking AWESOME, heLLO.

I highly, highly recommend reading each of these anyway. Obviously, if you have I would love to hear about it, and if you have reviewed them somewhere (including in one disgruntled or excited sentence in your blog) I will be thrilled to link thereforunto.

1. Repressed Memories: A Journey To Recovery From Sexual Abuse, by Renee Fredrickson
I’ve written about this book before, and I will probably write about it again. The very nature of repressed memories means that we can’t just assume we don’t have any. Everyone should learn about what they are, how they work, why people repress things, what indicates that someone has repressed memories, how to distinguish between memories and fears, and (my favorite part, maybe) how dysfunctional families work and how people’s roles in them affect the rest of their lives. It’s just an incredibly well-informed and information-packed book for something that looks so tiny!

2. Sensual Living, by Claire Lloyd
Not about abuse, but a great help to me in my recovery. Sensual Living is about the tactile, beautiful, sensual delights of the objects around us, with a specific aim of showing readers how to make their surroundings more enjoyable to each of the five physical senses. It’s very calming and nurturing to read, and even more so to live. From a survivor standpoint, it’s a wonderful tool to use in overturning the deprivation we often bring to our living environments without realizing it.

3. Wishcraft: How To Get What You REALLY Want, by Barbara Sher and Annie Gottlieb
This book is fucking brilliant. It’s divided into two portions: the first part helps the reader explore what they always wanted to do, what their passions are, and especially what interests and talents they have smothered because of, basically, abuse, or for any reason at all. It explains very clearly that (and how) we are each born geniuses, and how that potential gets smooshed away inside many of us. The second and I think part is about getting what we want. She is incredibly creative in this. My favorite angle is that we often don’t have to wait to become rich or famous or work for years to become actors or pilots or whatever our dreams are; we can figure out what we actually want from that goal (to travel, to be admired, to perform, etc.) and see what ways there are of getting that sooner. And then she outlines how to do even that. She’s just merciless in breaking down exactly how to do it every step of the way, which is my favorite kind of writing.

4. Facing Codependency, by Pia Mellody, Andrea Wells Miller, and J. Keith Miller
I admit it: I haven’t read much of this. I’m familiar with it, though, and I love it from afar. I love, especially, the way that they explain very clearly how abuse causes codependency, and its relation to other addictions, and what it is. These are really important points that should be taught in the most basic psychology classes, which instead many therapists and other mental health professionals are absolutely clueless about. And I love books like this that break down a complicated subject into a series of often mind-blowing yet simple links.

5. At The Speed of Life: A New Approach to Personal Change Through Body-Centered Therapy, by Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks
This book changed my life. How often do I get to say that? Well, every time I mention this book, anyway, so I guess as often as I want! It’s written by a husband-and-wife team of somatic therapists, aimed at other therapists but with plenty of tools and stories for lay readers – and I have to admit that I love learning about how professionals in any profession think and what they know that we aren’t supposed to. The basic subject matter here is how to recognize when memories and emotions are trapped in our bodies, and how to (safely) “get them out.” To that end, they’ve filled the book with fantastic breathing techniques, ways to explore the feelings in our bodies, detailed explanations of verbal and physical “flags” that signal repressed feelings and memories… it’s just crammed with helpful stuff that everyone can use.

6. Double Vision: A Travelogue of Recovery from Ritual Abuse, by Anna Richardson
I sort of think this should go at the very top, “no particular order” or not. This book is gorgeously written, magnificently clear and full of hope and beauty and recovery rising from the chaotic wreckage of addiction and ritual abuse. Abuse writing is one of those genres where books sometimes seem to get published more because there’s a need for books about abuse than because there’s a need for that particular book; Double Vision, I think uniquely, could fit on any list of well-crafted, luminous writing in or outside of its genre. It’s about humanity and pain and joy and growth, in a way that transcends any concern of whether a particular reader will identify with the specific subject matter.

7. Workaholics Anonymous Book of Recovery
This might be my favorite book-to-do-with-twelve-step-stuff. It has lots of personal stories, different experiences with and tools for working the steps around work issues (and just in general) and a TON of other helpful tools. Every time I open it I learn something new about having fun, about balancing work and the rest of life, about how work issues can play out in any area of my life, or just about myself personally. Do I have to point out that work issues are basically perfectionism, codependence, and shame, that those three things are basically the same anyway, and that that all comes from abuse? So information like this is vital. And who can resist an approach to it that often boils down to “recovery is about joy and fun”?

8. When Society Becomes an Addict, by Anne Wilson Schaef
Even though, as I’ve said, I think Schaef missed the crucial question of WHY addiction is the way it is (that is, that the signs of addiction are also the effects of abuse), she wrote some intense and explosive stuff about it twenty-plus years ago. If you want a dead-on look at how addicts (abuse survivors) behave, how that looks when it isn’t about drugs or alcohol, and how it looks when it’s on the huge group or governmental level, check this out. If you want a dead-on look at how abuse affects people’s lives and why it doesn’t really help in the long term to get to “it doesn’t bother me anymore that I was abused” and then sell yourself short by taking off (as many therapists suggest their clients should do), likewise, check this out. (Or, more felicitously: if you want to get a good idea of what the effects are that we all get to deal with and see a little bit of how great and unimaginably different life is without them, read this book.)

9. To Be Healed By The Earth, by Warren Grossman
I really like books on alternative healing – really far-out (for us now anyway), wacky, hippie-sounding, energy-work alternative healing – written by people with serious medical degrees and decades of mainstream medical practice. Not only is it refreshing, but it often means the information is studied more carefully because they’re used to thinking analytically and applying hardcore principles of science and logic to what they do. At least, that’s the case with this book. It’s extremely practical, it doesn’t expect the reader to believe a word of it unless it works for them, and it is super-clear at every point about where it is coming from and what to do to see if it works for you. The basic premise is that spending time with nature helps us heal and feel more grounded and energized; I suppose that doesn’t sound very radical, but having a simple system of meditations and ways of lying or sitting or standing with trees and the ground, and talking about how this brought him back from death’s door, is both radical and wildly helpful to anyone recovering from anything, whether it’s physical or psychological – and of course, almost everything is both.

10. One Day My Soul Just Opened Up: 40 Days and 40 Nights Toward Spiritual Strength and Personal Growth, by Iyanla Vanzant
Spirituality is a huge component of recovery from abuse. Particularly when we are little, our abusers often seem like the mainstream image of “God”: they’re these huge creatures who seem to end up around where the sky is, from whence all food and shelter and safety and love come – and anger and judgment and abandonment and tragedy. Maybe the most important part of recovery is learning to separate our abusers from a loving source of guidance, whether we think of that as a God or Goddess or our intuition or the universe or love or some other wild thing. Because until then, our decisions are all informed at least partly by the burden of shame from the abuse, the crazy voices in our heads telling us that we don’t know what we are doing or that we need to be perfect or that we always fuck up or that something terrible will happen if we get another job/relationship/whatever.

To Be Healed By The Earth is one way to explore that spiritual area; twelve-step programs offer another space in which people often explore how all this plays out for them; One Day My Soul Just Opened Up is a third option. It is laid out as a series of daily readings, meditations, and writing exercises that explore issues just like this and many more. It’s basically a deep exploration of our relationships with spirituality and ourselves and others, done in about 20-30 minutes a day for a couple of months. (Plus, afterwards you have all this writing and highlighting and wild inspired or angry scribbling to look back at and see how far you have come!)