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!)

Oh yeah: and that was the Mother’s Day episode of the comic, too. I know they don’t mention it, but I like to think that that is why Elly got to take a bubble bath after her day of a million errands. It’s Mother’s Day – let’s allow her to be “lazy” for once! Maybe in the very last panel!

After I went to bed I remembered another angle on “lazy”: the way it’s used in racism. I’m no ethnic studies major, but what I’ve got here so far is that first the white mainstream abducted and enslaved people from West Africa, and decided to label them “lazy,” clearly applying no logic to anything around them whatsoever.

(And again, there’s a connection to self-care as well:
“When the Europeans colonized Africa, they looked contemptuously upon native work habits. When they saw African farmers hanging around their huts in the middle of the day and drinking beer, the Europeans called them lazy. They said this was a reason Africans didn’t ‘prosper,’ and by extension a sign of racial inferiority. From the African’s point of view, you’d have to be crazy to go out and work in the 100 degree tropical heat. You stored up your energy during the day, and did chores at sundown when temperatures cooled off. From there a phrase was born, ‘mad dogs and Englishmen go out into the midday sun.’” I won’t vouch for the historical accuracy of any of those details, but you get the drift.)

Latinos, especially Mexicans, got similar treatment, in this case being driven into intense poverty and extremely low-paying jobs with terrible conditions, and again getting labeled lazy. (Supposedly for coming from a culture of taking siestas in the afternoon heat – for extra credit, you may write a paper about the north/south divide in specific countries, continents, and around the world, with special attention to cold versus hot climates. No longer than five pages, due in my office by ten!)

Of course, racism is a form of abuse. And this is a variation on the same game that we saw before, that leads people to workaholism: impose impossible pressure or impossible standards on people and deprive them of their needs for not meeting those standards, or just as a side dish to the pressure. On an individual scale, it’s the parents who make their kids work (way above their age level) in the family business, or keep up the house and raise the kids while their parents work, always trying to do tasks that even the adults in their lives aren’t doing well, always trying to do it well enough to earn the attention and approval that are one of their most basic developmental needs. Mainly, I suppose, when paired with the overt emotional abuse of lecturing, yelling at, or shaming them when they inevitably do something wrong. On the bigger scale, it’s the society or government that creates unlivable conditions for people and holds out the imaginary carrot of “We’ll stop abusing you when you do a good enough job to prove that we’re wrong.”

Play with it; I’m sure there are corners I’m missing here.

I’ve wanted for a while to start writing about a different abuse-related myth every Monday. Because they start with the same letter, of course! And there are so many different common, harmful ideas that come from abuse.

Like laziness.

Lazy is one of those words that can mean a lot of different things depending on its connotation. It’s a little like “sinful.” I always see ads for ice cream or chocolate or yogurt that babble mindlessly about how sinful it is (to eat something that tastes good, or has any fat content) and how we no longer need to feel guilty about it if we eat their brand. Often, people use “lazy” the same way: to mean “I feel kind of guilty about doing something that feels good.” “I feel kind of guilty about enjoying myself.” “I feel kind of guilty about doing something that’s just for me.” It’s that Puritan idea that pleasure is a sin.

It all comes back to shame. Specifically, to the message abuse carries that we’re not good enough, not worthy or deserving of basic pleasures like safety. (And see there, how pleasures are also needs?) Guilt is shame. It’s the feeling we get from subconsciously (or, sometimes, consciously) telling ourselves that what we are doing is wrong. That it’s Not Okay. When, really, it’s the abuse that was Not Okay all along. Abuse is really good at teaching upside-down messages like that.

Laziness. Elly in this For Better Or For Worse strip confuses relaxation and peace with being “lazy.” She thinks she has to “earn” those things by working herself to the bone. Just to take a bubble bath! I mean, that’s basic self-care. What does she do if she really gets stuff done – award herself an extra fifteen minutes to brush her teeth?

That’s the “positive” spin people put on “being lazy.” Horrifyingly, there’s still a negative spin. At least Elly thinks it’s good to be lazy. (For a little while. Eventually. As long as she’s done all the grocery shopping, put all the groceries away, baked a pie, done and folded the laundry, vacuumed the house, taken out the garbage, brushed the dog, and cleaned the counters first, of course.) If she hadn’t done that, and had taken the bubble bath, you can bet that she would have been complaining later on that she didn’t get anything done because she was lazy all day. Or, worst of all, that she’s just lazy – as if it’s a permanent, deep-seated and unshakable character trait.

People: there is no such thing as laziness.

You are not lazy if you relax after doing your work. You are not lazy if you never want to do your work. You are not lazy if you promise yourself all week that you are going to write that paper or do those dishes or clean up that cat vomit, every single time. Not if you sleep till three in the afternoon every single day even though you don’t do anything when you’re awake. Not if you lie around “doing nothing” for months at a time when you are “supposed” to be looking for a job. Nope. No dice.

Resistance surely exists. Avoidance exists. So do overworking and underworking, both of which are different ends of workaholism. Depression exists, too, and perfectionism.

All of those can lead to labeling our behavior “lazy”:
Resistance when we are putting off something that scares us, or when we do not have the resources we need to do it, or when we are giving ourselves unreasonable things to do. (Like putting too much on a To Do list. Or avoiding schoolwork because in the past we have avoided it until it is painfully late and so we associate pain with the schoolwork and so we avoid it until there is too little time to do it without pain….)

Avoidance is really a kind of resistance. Or we might call it procrastination. Even calling self-care and pleasure “lazy” is a kind of avoidance – this time of things that we don’t think we deserve.

Overworking can be a post or book all its own. It’s that urge to do “just one more thing” that never seems to end, or that insane desire to “justify” our pleasure or our existence.

Underworking usually happens because we’ve overworked, or because we’re avoiding something. People often think that they are lazy when really they are involved in (and avoiding) work or a workplace that is really unhealthy and triggering for them. When we don’t know what else to do about it, we underwork by avoiding things, making too little money, even lying about how much we’ve done to stay out of trouble, and living in fear and deprivation.

Depression is also an effect of abuse; the emotional chaos and pain of many different kinds of abuse has serious neurological and chemical effects which can put our brain’s chemistry out of whack for decades. One symptom that people with depression may experience is the need to sleep much more, for no apparent reason, and serious low energy which can make it very hard to get even the most basic things done.

Perfectionism leads us to that insane idea that we have to “earn” rest, that what we are doing is never good enough and that it has to be good enough – and if it’s not (as it never will be when we are that wrapped up in obsessively pressuring ourselves) then we get to shame ourselves about how lazy we are for not meeting those perfectionist standards. What fun!

Nobody is inherently lazy. It’s just not a thing. If someone seems to be lazy, either their basic needs aren’t getting met so they don’t have the resources they need to do what’s on their plate, or what’s on their plate is really not something they should be doing and they’re subconsciously repelled by it, or they’re fine and they’re being held (by themselves and/or others) to unreasonable standards. Or several/all of the above!

Now how about a nice hot bubble bath….

In Alcoholics Anonymous, they often say that alcoholism is not the problem, it is just a symptom. Many people, especially in early recovery, enthusiastically cast aside drinking for another addictive behavior, and just about everyone in every twelve-step program discovers myriad other self-destructive behaviors they’re engaging in as they take inventory of their lives. These behaviors echo past trauma and abuse. The true problem is that these traumas have taught us that we deserve pain and chaos. We have learned to seek out and recreate our unresolved traumatic experiences even after the original harmful situations have passed. It is immaterial whether we perpetuate it by starving ourselves, berating ourselves, short-circuiting our bodies with harmful substances, underearning, choosing and staying with abusive people, cutting our bodies, or something else entirely.

So what’s the solution?

Well, don’t worry, we have our top psychologists, scientists, and therapists working on that around the clock… oh. We don’t?

Well. Here are a few pieces that might fit.

Every twelve-step program uses the same twelve steps, regardless of the behavior being addressed. And, I believe, part of the reason that this is done and that it works for all our addictive “symptoms” must be that it addresses this core problem. Let’s see what the steps ask us to do that might be vital to recovery from trauma and abuse.

The first step, of course, is to admit that we have a problem. It is a very profound step: it helps us begin to see what we are doing that is harming us. It shows us what is not working, what we want to change. It helps us begin to be honest with ourselves and others, instead of harming ourselves with denial and fear.

Step two gives us the opportunity to explore what we believe about the universe, and what parts of that have and haven’t worked for us. We get to see what has worked for others, too, and see that other people have found relief from these painful problems. In step two, we begin to experience hope that things can be different, which I think is crucial to any kind of recovery.

In step three, we learn to ask for help. We seek a willingness to seek out healing from outside, trustworthy sources – to stop trying to do it all ourselves – to realize that our methods have not been working for us. This is mindblowing for many people, especially for those of us who have learned not to ask for help because we are just a burden. Beginning to understand that that is not actually true, and to see ourselves as worthwhile human beings who deserve support and who deserve to get our needs met, is nothing short of a miracle.

The fourth step brings us back to that honesty. We take a long, hard look at our lives, being as honest as we can about our resentments, fears, and relationships in general. This has tremendous implications: it can lead to much deeper clarity about what things have been like and what is harming us; it can bring us back to the emotions that we’ve numbed for so long; it can teach us where our boundaries really are and what we need to do to take responsibility for them. It is an incredible and far-reaching exercise.

The fifth step is even more terrifying for many people than the fourth. It asks us to share everything we learned in the fourth step with another human being and with a higher power of our own understanding. But when we share this with someone who is trustworthy, we learn amazing things. We learn that we are not alone. We learn that our feelings and actions and experiences are not so horrifying that people will run from us if they find out the truth about them. We even learn that those feelings, actions, and experiences are not who we are. And with all of this this comes a greater ability to trust, and a step toward self-acceptance.

Step six builds on that fourth step work too. We get to look at all of the behaviors that are harming us and start thinking about the possibility of maybe someday not doing them anymore. We get to just be willing for things to change, and to know that for the moment, that is enough.

So with the first six steps, what do people get that helps them recover? The beginnings of honesty; hope; help; reality; feelings; boundaries; trust; the possibility of change; and a door opens toward self-acceptance and compassion. That compassion is not located in any specific step, but undergirds the whole process. It’s the motor that powers all our healing.

What on earth could be left for the last six to provide? Read the rest of this entry »