Chapter 2
You Can’t Go Forward Without
Finishing the Past
Healing the Pain of Abandonment, Fear, and Shame
“In this dream I was stationed underground, in the grave. . . . This was my company, my life, my mission—to watch over the bones. And then slowly. . . . I walked away and climbed out of the grave, into the sun and the wide expanse of the world. . . . I turned one last time to say good-bye. The vigil was over.”
—John, adult child of an alcoholic,
Quoted by Stephanie Brown, Safe Passages
“To free yourself from the past you must break the rules of silence and compliance.”
—Claudia Black, It’s Never Too Late to Have a Happy Childhood
WHEN CHILDREN ARE RAISED WITH CHRONIC LOSS, without the psychological or physical protection they need and certainly deserve, it is most natural for them to internalize incredible fear. Not receiving the necessary psychological or physical protection equals abandonment. And, living with repeated abandonment experiences creates shame. Shame arises from the painful message implied in abandonment: “You are not important. You are not of value.” Unresolved pain of the past and pain in the present created by past-driven behaviors fuel our fear of abandonment and shame. This is the pain from which we need to heal.
Pain from the Past
Physical Abandonment
For some children abandonment is primarily physical. Physical abandonment occurs when the physical conditions necessary for thriving have been replaced by:
• lack of appropriate supervision.
• inadequate provision of nutrition and meals. There was a book titled Potato Chips for Breakfast by Cynthia G. Scales, and a talk by educator and lecturer Dan Barmettle called Macaroni at Midnight; these titles poignantly reflect the poor eating habits of children in some families.
• inadequate clothing, housing, heat, or shelter; physical and/or sexual abuse.
As children, we are totally dependent on our caretakers to provide safety in our environment. When they do not, we grow up believing that the world is an unsafe place, that people are not to be trusted, and that we do not deserve positive attention and adequate care.
Emotional Abandonment
Emotional abandonment occurs when parents do not provide the emotional conditions and emotional environment necessary for healthy development.
Because more people experience emotional abandonment than physical abandonment, and because it is a more subtle dynamic, the following experiences may be helpful to understanding emotional abandonment. There are two frameworks for abandonment that can simplify the term.
1. Abandonment is experienced by parental indifference to a child’s needs and wants, or the parents (or other primary caregivers) are emotionally unavailable on an ongoing basis. They do not offer the support and nurturance a child needs. Therefore the child can neither experience nor express his or her feelings appropriately (see the discussion on the Abandonment Line in chapter 1, page 12).
2. Abandonment occurs when a child has to hide a part of who he or she is in order to be accepted (while others do this to avoid rejection), such as when
• it is not proper in your family to make a mistake.
• it is not okay in your family to show feelings, being told the way you feel is not true or okay. “You have nothing to cry about and if you don’t stop crying I will really give you something to cry about.” “That really didn’t hurt.” “You have nothing to be angry about.” When in fact the child is feeling great fear, sadness, pain, or anger. We are not talking about the occasional time a parent becomes frustrated with a child and makes such a comment, but a family situation where there is continual discounting of a child’s emotions.
• it is not okay in your family to have needs. Everyone else’s needs appear to be more important than yours, and the only way you even get attention is by attending to the needs of others.
• it is not okay to have successes. Accomplishments are not acknowledged, are many times discounted, or even used as ammunition to shame a child.
Other acts of abandonment occur when
• children cannot live up to the expectations of their parents. These expectations are often unrealistic and not age-appropriate, such as expecting the eight-year-old to remember her dental appointment or the twelve-year-old to be able to manage his younger siblings for hours at a time.
• children are held responsible for other people’s behavior. They may be consistently blamed for the actions and feelings of their parents.
• disapproval is shown toward children that is aimed at their entire being or identity rather than a particular behavior, such as telling a child he is worthless when he does not do his homework or she is never going to be a good athlete because she missed the final catch of the game. Who the child is, is not separated out from what the child does.
Abandonment and Boundaries
Many times our abandonment issues are fused with distorted, confused, or undefined personal boundaries. We experience abandonment when parents have a distorted sense of boundaries, their boundaries and ours.
When parents do not view us as separate beings with distinct boundaries—we will experience abandonment.
They want us to like what they like, dress like they dress, and feel as they do. This is particularly painful during our teenage years when, as part of discovering our own self, we seek out behaviors different from our parents’. This teenager/parent struggle is common to many. Some parents cannot recognize this as part of the adolescent stage, but see it as a personal affront to their image and their own sense of worth. If we in any way express differences from our parents, or make different choices than they would, we know we run the risk of rejection.
When parents expect us to be extensions of themselves, fulfilling their dreams—we will feel abandoned.
How many of us went to the school of our father’s choosing because he had wanted to attend but had been unable to? How many entered into careers that our parents chose for us? How many of us married who we did or when we did because our parents desired it? I offer a caution in that having done what our parents expected, wanted, or demanded does not mean that it was the wrong thing to do. It just so often means that the decision was never totally ours. It is the process that is more painful or possibly wrong, not necessarily the outcome.
Maddy told how her mother spoke as if it were simply fact that neither of her daughters were to have children due to the possibility of transmitting a terminal genetic disease. “My mom made it clear that it was not an option for me. Because that decision seemed based in her wanting to protect us from pain, and to protect a child from a premature death, it was hard to want to question this dictate. Mom’s motivation was sincere. But I was twenty-nine years old when I realized I had never made my own decision about this. Until then it had been my mother’s dictate. I realized I had to sit down and separate my life choices from my mother’s pain in having a child who died young. I wrestled with the decision for a few years and ultimately made the decision to not have a child. Today, the decision is mine, not my mother’s.”
Certainly, many people do exactly what their parents don’t want them to do. Often this is a part of their attempt to be a separate person. We don’t marry the person our father liked so much. We don’t go to the college our mother aspired to attend. Often we choose to marry the person they would like the least or simply choose to not attend college at all. Again, it is not the outcome that is the issue as much as it is the decision-making process. Instead of choosing freely, we make a reactive decision based in anger.
When parents are not willing to take responsibility for their feelings, thoughts, and behaviors, but expect us to take responsibility for them—we will experience abandonment.
When parents hold children responsible for what should be their responsibility, such as telling the child it is his or her behavior that has caused the breakup of the parents’ marriage, or it is the child’s behavior that creates the stress that results in the parent’s need to drink or use drugs, they are expecting something impossible of a child. In effect, they are telling children that they have more power than they truly have, setting them up to experience futility and inadequacy.
When parents’ self-esteem is derived through our behavior, when their needs override ours—we feel abandoned.
Henri still feels pain when he talks about how his father publicly gloated over Henri’s accomplishments. “Some people told me I should be grateful that my dad even noticed what I was involved in. But there was always something missing about his being proud of me. When I was growing up, I did well in school; I was a very good athlete. I was a student leader and often had my picture in the local paper. My dad came to my events, boasting about me in a way that never seemed real. His boasting was so grand and his need for people to know I was his son was so strong. Yet there was this total lack of interest in me when I was home. When I got home from the ball games, he would already be in bed. He never boasted to me. He never once congratulated me or patted me on the back.”
What is important to note is that Henri did not get the validation he needed to feel special, important, or of value to his father. What he believed was that his value to his father was in how he could make his father look to his father’s peers.
When children are treated as peers with no parent/child distinction—they are abandoned by their parents.
Many times parents develop relationships with their children in which they are their friends, their peers, their equals. In doing so, they share information that is not age-appropriate for a child. Inappropriate information often creates a sense of burden, or even guilt, for children; that is not fair. To tell a ten-year-old daughter that her father has had an affair cannot offer the daughter any security. The mother may need to talk about it, but that needs to be with someone who has the adult resources to be able to offer appropriate support or feedback. To share with an eight-year-old son the fears related to a situation at work only makes the child feel that his parent is too vulnerable to be available as a source of protection.
Abandonment plus distorted boundaries, at a time when children are developing their sense of worth, is the foundation for the belief in their own inadequacy and the central cause of their shame.
When parents are disrespectful of their children’s boundaries and violate them, the message given is that they don’t value the child as a person. That message becomes internalized as “I am not of value. I am not worthy.” When parents don’t acknowledge children’s boundaries, the message they give is “You are here to meet my needs,” “I am more important than you,” and/or “It is not okay to be your own person with individual feelings, desires, or needs.” The message also implies that the children have to give up themselves to be available to another. This internalizes to the belief, “I am bad for having different or separate needs, wants, and feelings.” “I, in my uniqueness, am not of value.” When children experience chronic abandonment with distorted boundaries, they live in fear and doubt about their worth. The greater the clarity a child has around boundaries, understanding who is responsible for what, and the greater a child’s self-esteem, the more likely a child will be able to reject, rather than internalize, shameful behaviors and messages.
The following is an example of a young person, Sandi, who, in spite of the fact that she was raised in an alcoholic family, experienced some stability in her early years. As a result, she developed a sense of autonomy and self-esteem, which helped her ward off shame. “Up until I was about eight, home seemed okay. I felt valued, life was fun. Then as if it was overnight, my dad was always angry. My mom was preoccupied and distant or very sad. It was as if neither of our parents had any time for us. Looking back now I realize that something was happening. I just couldn’t figure it out. No one was talking about what was wrong. Life just became more and more frightening. I tried to not get in the way. I took care of my brother and sister. I tried to do things to make my dad and mom happy. Nothing I did really made a difference.”
One night when she was sixteen and cheerleading at a basketball game, her father showed up so drunk he could hardly walk on his own and created a scene that nearly incited a racial riot. With his arms thrown over her shoulders and her pom-poms tucked under her arms, Sandi was leading her drunk father out of the gym when he began to scream racial slurs at a group of African American teenagers. “He said things I never heard him or anyone else say,” Sandi said. “He said things I never knew he thought. Thank heaven this group of kids couldn’t reach us. It was all I could do to get him out of the gym. Everyone was screaming and jeering. Well, I got him into his friend’s car and off they went. I didn’t know why my dad acted like he did—I was so angry at him.”
Sandi had the ability to be angry because she had not previously internalized shame and therefore could clearly differentiate who was responsible for what. She had healthy boundary distinction. She knew what took place in the gym was about her father, not her. Because she did not take this incident as a statement about her worth or value, she was also able to access other feelings. With shame we lose the ability to identify our feelings and are more likely to reinstate the Don’t Talk rule. Sandi said she was angry, and then became sad. She could talk about her fear. While this scene was certainly an act of abandonment by her father, she nonetheless had an emotional boundary that protected her self-worth and her autonomy. Sandi’s ability to maintain a healthy emotional boundary (“My father’s behavior does not determine who I am”) prevented her from feeling shamed and personally diminished by her father’s behavior.
Linda was born into an already hectic, frightened family. Her first memories were of hiding behind a table in the kitchen, trying not to be noticed, while listening to her parents arguing and thinking to herself, “Just don’t let them see me.” She spent most of her life trying to be invisible. “In my family there was a lot of arguing, unhappiness, and a lot of moving from place to place. I was the youngest of four and an unplanned pregnancy. My mother let me know right away that she was content with three babies, not four. I felt I came out of the chute needing a protective shield, trying to ward off the hurtful words, the painful glares. I was always in their way, yet I worked so hard not to be. My very existence seemed like such a thorn.” When childhood is spent on survival, such as Linda’s was, there is little energy left to develop an autonomous or separate sense of self. Linda was chronically abandoned, subject to emotional boundary abuse; as a result she experienced and internalized shame.
When we are abandoned by our caretakers we do not perceive that they were bad people or what they did to us was bad. As children we cannot reject parents, because they are so desperately needed. Instead, we take the burden of being wrong or bad onto ourselves. In doing this, we purge the caretakers of being wrong or hurtful, which reinforces a sense of security. In essence, outer safety is purchased at the price of inner security.
Abandonment, plus distorted or undefined boundaries as you are developing your worth and identity, creates shame and fear.
This truth bears repeating because it defines the root of our pain. What we must understand now is that our abandonment experiences and boundary violations were in no way indictments of our innate goodness and value. Instead, they revealed the flawed thinking, false beliefs, and impaired behaviors of those who hurt us. Still, the wounds were struck deep in our young hearts and minds, and the very real pain can still be felt today. The causes of our emotional injury need to be understood and accepted so we can heal. Until we do, the pain will stay with us, becoming a driving force in our adult lives.
Describe the ways you experienced physical and/or emotional abandonment in your growing up years.
Past-Driven Present Pain
In recovery we seek to change the course in our present lives by healing the pain of our past. As a result of our experiences,
• we adopted false beliefs; that is, “I can’t make a mistake or I will be worthless” or “I have to produce to be of value.”
• we learned defense skills; that is, to blame others before they blame us.
• we developed cognitive defense mechanisms; that is, to deny, minimize, or rationalize. We developed mechanisms to distract us from our pain; that is, excessive behaviors such as overeating, drinking, or drug use. All of these are strategies for the preservation of ourselves when our self is threatened.
Jan said, “I knew my parents loved me. They provided for me. They came to my school events. They told me they loved me. They would hug me. Yet, they would blatantly reject me if I showed feelings of sadness or anger. There was clearly a Don’t Talk rule around being emotional unless the feelings were positive. My shame was for having feelings. So while I knew I was valued in one way, I felt very rejected and abandoned in other ways. There was a lot of loss in my family. My dad lost his job and did not find one for four years. My mother had to be hospitalized for unknown reasons twice when I was between nine and eleven. My sister went to live with my grandmother during those times. And we weren’t to talk about any of this. I was angry. I was very frightened. I was sad. I wanted to scream so I could be heard, and yet knew I would not be heard and only banished further.”
Jan did what most of us do when feeling abandonment and fear—she did her best to be “lovable” so her family would be there for her. Being lovable would be defined by others. For Jan, it meant discounting her own feelings and needs and putting those of others ahead of hers, which in turn meant disconnecting from her own feelings and needs. Jan learned these defenses and skills as a young girl; now these are the only defenses and skills she knows for protecting herself and relating to others. Paradoxically, in adulthood, Jan’s beliefs and behaviors no longer protect her, but actually cause her more pain. Unfortunately, this pattern will continue throughout her adult life until the painful weight of chronically discounting her needs and feelings is so great that she is no longer able to continue as she has. Then she will seek new, often harmful protectors, such as alcohol, prescription pills, or food. These present-day defenses will only perpetuate, and probably escalate, her pain until she turns from the course of protection to the path of healing.
Most people develop protective strategies when they are young, carrying them into adulthood, often generalizing the impact into other areas of life. For example, as a child you may have used food to medicate your pain, and continue to use food this way as an adult, but now you have also added alcohol as a medication. Or, as a child, if you used people-pleasing behaviors to get attention from parents, you may also employ this strategy to get attention in the workplace; it may also fuel an addictive relationship pattern.
The mechanisms we develop to reduce our anxiety and fears are defensive protectors. In no way should we ever be critical of what we needed to do to protect ourselves while growing up. Today, we need to recognize when these defenses and protectors are intrusive in our lives or when they create harm and pain. The purpose or theme of these strategies has been to lessen the pain of abandonment; also to compartmentalize or distance ourselves from the incredible fear and sense of powerlessness. The basis for all these attempts is to control or compensate for the pain.
The burden of pain we presently carry and try so hard to control is the combination of unresolved pain from the past plus pain from the present. As we know, events and family conditions that caused our past pain cannot be changed. Our response to pain is a choice we are making in the present. How we choose to respond can change the course of our lives. In the next few pages, we’ll discuss how people respond to pain so we will be able to understand the choices we can make.
Attempts to Control Our Pain
Whether or not we understood the source of our pain in our early lives, we felt it. We were anxious, fearful, saddened, or angry. To live with a high degree of emotional pain was so unbearable for most of us that we sought ways to control the pain to defend against it. Ironically and unfortunately, as we have now seen, those ways of compensating created their own pain.
As adults still trying to control our pain, we have sought ways to create a sense of control or power to compensate for the overwhelming experience of powerlessness. We have attempted to control the pain and/or to control the sources of pain. We have tried to be in control to protect ourselves from further exposure so that our vulnerability would not be visible. We have tried to be in control so that no one would ever shame us again and so that we would not have to feel our pain.
We feel our pain. We medicate our pain. We rationalize our pain. These are all responses to the pain we have felt for so long. We first respond to pain on an emotional level, most commonly in terms of victimization, rage, and depression. Then, in an attempt to control the pain, we may respond with behaviors that try to medicate it such as alcohol, food and drug abuse, or compulsive behaviors related to sex, money, or relationships. Last, we may respond on a rational level, thinking we can avoid the pain if we don’t do anything to cause it. Perfectionism and procrastination are two cognitive attempts to control pain by avoiding it.
Emotional Responses to Pain
Victimization as a Response to Pain
Chronic victimization is the result of when we accept and operate on the shameful messages that we internalized as a result of the abandonment. It is a combination of not believing in our own worth and not developing the skills that go with a belief in our worthiness. Setting limits is one such skill. When we have internalized beliefs, such as “I am not worthy,” “I am not of value,” “Other people are more important than me,” or “Other people are more worthy,” then it is difficult to set limits. We don’t believe we have the right to set limits. We do not know how to say no. Those of us who are victims struggle with appropriate boundaries. We are most apt not to have boundaries or to have boundaries that are easily permeable.
Victims have learned not to trust their own perceptions, believing that another person’s perception is more accurate than their own. They always give others the benefit of the doubt and are willing to respond to the structure others set. Victims are not apt to question. In addition to the family rules Don’t Talk, Don’t Feel, Don’t Trust, they have learned the rules Don’t Question and Don’t Think.
Not believing in their own worth, victims often fail to realize they even have needs and, as a result, do not take care of themselves. They operate from a position of fear, unable to access any anger or indignation that comes with being hurt, disappointed, or even abused. When asked what they need or want, victims often literally do not know.
While the development of the victim response is the result of the belief in personal powerlessness, it is clearly a response to the intense emotional pain in one’s life. It not only is an outcome of helplessness, it is also a kind of defense in that victims believe they may not have as much pain if they give in and relinquish their autonomy to someone else.
Victims have developed a high tolerance for pain and for inappropriate behavior. They have become emotionally separated from themselves by becoming highly skilled at rationalizing, minimizing, and often flatly denying the events and emotions in their lives. They are not as readily able to identify others’ behavior that has hurt them because that would, in their perception, create a greater feeling of helplessness or invite more trouble.
Some victims stay in isolation. Those who choose to stay more visible often play a victim/martyr situation: “Look at how I am victimized. Aren’t they terrible for doing this to me! I will just have to endure.” Being the victim becomes part of a cycle. Victims already feel bad about themselves as a result of being abandoned and/or used and abused. They don’t act in a way that provides safety and security for themselves, leading to greater abandonment or abuse.
Typically, the greater a person’s shame, the more likely he or she will invite someone else with shame into their lives. Very often, for the victim, this other person is someone who appears to have the ability to take charge, make things happen, someone who feels strengthened by association with the victim’s vulnerability. Depending on the specific history of the two people involved, that attraction often leads to the dominant one battering the victim, either emotionally or physically.
Almost inevitably, victims have great difficulty protecting themselves in the context of intimate relationships. For example, a woman may have such a desperate longing for nurturance and care that it makes it difficult for her to establish safe and appropriate boundaries with others. Her tendency to denigrate herself and to idealize those to whom she becomes attached further clouds her judgment. Typically, her empathic attunement to the wishes of others and her automatic, often unconscious habits of obedience also tend to make her vulnerable to anyone in a position of power or authority. Her defensive style makes it difficult for her to form conscious and accurate assessments of danger.
For all of the reasons noted above, whether male or female, the shameful person is at great risk of repeated victimization.
Rage as Response to Pain
Rage is the holding tank for accumulated fears, angers, humiliations, and shame. It is for many a response of no longer wanting to endure the pain. Emotionally, rage is an attempt to be heard, seen, and valued when people are most desperate and lacking in other resources. For some people rage becomes an integral part of their lifestyle. Growing up, they found anger to be the one safe feeling for them to express, so all their other vulnerabilities were masked with anger. Many people who are rageful don’t show any sign of emotions; they keep a tight lid on all of their feelings until something triggers an eruption. There may not be signs of any feeling, and suddenly their rage is in someone else’s face. Perhaps it is a scathing memo at work or an outburst of criticism toward a waiter or gas station attendant. It could be a lack of tolerance for any disagreement in a discussion, followed by a theatrical exit, or it may take the form of physical or verbal abuse.
People with chronic rage do exist but they are not tolerated in most neighborhoods or communities. They usually live in isolation, often with someone who is the chronic victim of their rage; or they move around a lot, wearing out their welcome after relatively short periods of time in one place. While we may view others’ rage as being out of control, those who are ragers feel very much in control and powerful. In their rage they no longer feel inadequate and defective.
Rage is intended to protect against further experiences of pain. Rage is a way of actively compensating for powerlessness and feelings of shame by offering a false but attractive (to the rager) sense of power. When rage is the only way people know to protect against their emptiness, powerlessness, and pain, their choice is a quick one. Rageful behavior also offers protection by keeping people at a distance. As a result, other people cannot see into the raging person’s inner self that he or she believes to be so ugly.
Rage as a defense also offers protection by transferring the shame to others. The outwardly rageful person chooses a victim-like person who, consciously or not, is willing to take the abuse and take on or assume the shame.
Rage can be accumulated anger that has never seemed safe to expose. When anger is held back, it becomes internalized. With time it grows, festering into chronic bitterness or, even more likely, chronic depression. When there has been no outlet for rage, it is more apt to explode suddenly as a significant single hostile act such as physical abuse or even murder. Such an act is the consequence of the accumulation of feelings combined with the inability to tolerate painful feelings, to resolve conflict, or to perceive options and choices.
Depression as a Response to Pain
Unfortunately, a depressed person is typically pictured as one who sleeps excessively, is unable to eat, and is suicidal. While that picture represents the severe end of the depression continuum, many depressed adults are able to function daily and meet most of their responsibilities. After all, that has been their survival mode. In my book It Will Never Happen To Me, “looking good” children are described as those raised in a troubled family who maintain the outward appearance of “doing just fine while dying on the inside.” They present a false self to the world that may not have the look of depression, but their true self, their emotional and spiritual self, is experiencing great despair. When this is practiced day in and out, week after week, month after month, and year after year, it can easily translate to being “closeted depressed.”
To keep depression hidden, those of us who are depressed avoid getting close enough or spending enough time around others who may recognize our true feelings and the pervasive emptiness our depression is masking. We don’t develop close friendships where others are invested enough to “pull our covers.” We appear very capable and seem to put out an impenetrable force field that says, “Don’t ask me about myself. Don’t push me.” It is difficult enough being depressed. It is even more difficult when we have shame around it—shame as one cause of depression and added shame because we are depressed.
There are many different theories about the cause of depression. Some clinicians and researchers believe it to be a biochemical imbalance, a disordered neurochemistry, best treated with antidepressants. It is commonly accepted among professionals that depression tends to run in families, suggesting there may be a physiological predisposition toward depression. Other theories support the belief that depression is a consequence of a habitually pessimistic and disordered way of viewing the world. It can also be a consequence of loss and the inability to do the grief work necessary to bring completion to the feelings of sorrow. (Note: A qualified physician needs to assess all depression.)
There is tremendous loss associated with being raised in a shame-based family. With the family being denial-centered, as it often is, and it not being okay to talk honestly, the sense of loss is amplified because there is no way to work through the pain. The hurt, the disappointment, the fears, and the angers associated with life events, as well as with abandonment experiences, are all swirled together and internalized. When you add to this a personal belief that says you are at fault, it is easy to see why you came to believe in your unworthiness, and so try to hide your real self from others. Eventually, whether you are thirty-five or fifty-five, you suddenly hit a wall. The burden of hiding eventually becomes too heavy and all of those protecting, controlling mechanisms that kept you going for so long just stop working. Depression sets in.
Most people who experience depression related to loss are extremely frightened of their feelings. And they have so much to feel about. When it is not safe to speak these feelings, they become directed inward against the self. This becomes another means of perpetuating shame, which then further protracts the depressive mood.
As discussed in chapter 1, there are necessary and unnecessary losses in life. Because it was not safe to acknowledge them, we didn’t learn coping skills for the losses that would occur in our adult years. So, when a loss occurs and/or accumulates in adulthood, we resort to the same defenses we learned in childhood to deny what we are feeling.
When we have had chronic loss in our lives, many of us develop thought processes wherein we catastrophize and exaggerate fear to such a point that we feel hopeless and in despair. For example, when your husband is twenty minutes late for an important appointment, you think he must have been in a terrible car accident. When your boss forgot to say hello, you feel certain that she is angry with you and is going to let you go. Armed with some small bit of knowledge, we presume the worst will happen.
Over the years, given our experiences, we have developed a committee of internal voices that have become our Inner Critic, telling ourselves we are stupid, not wanted, ugly, and unimportant; this is in response to any slight or perceived loss, or when we feel slighted by someone we value.
Most adults from troubled families experience a combination of both unresolved loss and a pessimistic view of life. When we feel our powerlessness, our despair, and our fear, we send ourselves into a downhill spiral so quickly anybody’s head would be spinning.
Acute Episodes of Depression
Many adults make their way through life cut off from their internal pain, until they experience a significant present-day loss—the last child leaving home, a significant health problem, the death of a close friend or family member, the loss of job or career opportunity. As great numbers of women enter peri-menopausal and menopausal stages, the combination of physical changes and the symbolism around such changes can create an incredible sense of loss. For men and women both, one significant present-day loss can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. In other words, the new loss can trigger the beginning of a downward emotional spiral in which the adult becomes overwhelmed in despair, shame, powerlessness, and depression.
Carmella, who was raised in a physically abusive family, was a department manager in an engineering firm. She had tucked away the pain of her childhood history into a corner of her heart and put a lock on it. She was involved in raising her own family, and kept a distant relationship with her sister and parents. All aspects of her life were compartmentalized. Then one day, she lost her oldest daughter in an accident. Six months after that, her father died. Three weeks later, Carmella made her first suicide attempt. To lose a child is one of life’s greatest tragedies for anybody. Further, Carmella had no skills, no internal supports to deal with the intense pain when her daughter died. While she did not feel close to her father, his death unleashed all of the childhood pain she had so neatly and quietly tucked away. When present-day loss occurs, we may not be aware of remembering our growing up years, but we are certainly feeling the accumulated pain.
Tom, who was raised in an extremely critical home and felt his loss through chronic rejection, quickly separated from his parents and all his siblings after high school. Then, at the age of twenty-eight when his fiancée broke up with him, his exaggerated and catastrophic thinking led into incredible despair. He had talked himself into seeing himself as totally unworthy. He envisioned that his fiancée would marry someone much more financially stable than he was and certainly a lot more fun and exciting. She would have children with someone else. He would be alone all of his life. He was convinced he would never find happiness and he would never be able to offer anything to anyone else. On and on and on Tom’s incredibly painful thinking continued. Soon, he was sleeping twelve to fourteen hours a day, missing days at work, and no longer exercising or eating properly.
Losing a relationship, particularly in young adulthood, happens to many of us. However, because of chronic losses in his childhood, Tom had not learned the skills needed to grieve through the loss of his fiancée. He was not able to understand the experience in any way except as further evidence of his inadequacy and worthlessness. This loss was simply one more that added fuel to his already existing fire of shame.
Like victimization, depression is a consequence of the inability to defend and protect ourselves against the pain of loss.
Suicide: The Most Severe Response to Pain
“I am hopeless. I am unworthy and I don’t deserve to live. Life won’t get any better and I can’t stand this pain.” Suicidal thoughts, attempts, and completions speak of many issues. They are often a reflection of anger, rage turned inward, and depression. For some people, the act of suicide seems to grant power that compensates for the powerlessness in their life. For others, death is perceived to be a better option than living with certain memories and shame. The pain is too overwhelming and, out of despair and hopelessness, people become their own victims. Thoughts of taking our own lives are much more prevalent than people realize. While pain creates such thoughts, we also experience shame for having the thoughts. My message to you is, Please don’t feel ashamed. But, please do speak up and let someone know how frightened, angry, or hopeless you are feeling.
In recovery, you can speak about those issues that have created the pain. You can say no to your shame. You can learn to find ways to express your anger without hurting yourself. You can develop new beliefs and behaviors that support you in the way you deserve to be supported. You can learn how to access the power within you that does exist. You deserve to be able to live without pain. But when you are considering suicide as a way out of your pain, you must reach out and get assistance from a helping professional.
Behavioral Responses to Pain
“Medicating” Pain
Whether our emotional response to pain is one of victimization, rage, or depression, we may also try different behaviors to control our pain, hoping to lessen the hurt. Unfortunately, our efforts to control the pain don’t remove the cause or source of our feeling. One way people try to control and regulate their pain is by “medicating” it through addiction to substances or compulsive behaviors.
Substance Addictions
Types of addictions may include dependency on food, caffeine, nicotine, sugar, alcohol, and other drugs. Many of the substances people become addicted to are socially sanctioned and supported, making it very difficult for the abuser to see how they are using them in unhealthy ways.
In addition to temporarily controlling our pain, the substances we use and abuse very often provide something for us we do not know how to seek naturally. As an example, alcohol may give a sense of power to someone who has only known powerlessness. It may give access to a sense of courage and confidence to someone who feels lacking. This is certainly drug-induced, temporary and false, but for many people, false is better than none. For someone who is isolated and feels alienated from others, alcohol makes it easier to reach out to people. “Give me a little bit to drink and I become alive. I pull myself away from the wall and I find myself talking, laughing, listening. I see people responding to me and I like it.” This kind of thinking doesn’t mean that a person is addicted, but it does mean he or she is thirsty for connection with others. In this case alcohol becomes the reinforcement in order to feel whole and complete.
For people who have never taken time for play or laughter because life has been so serious and “I have to get things done,” alcohol gives them the opportunity to relax. Alice identified, “My entire life has been spent taking care of other people. I am always busy. I make these lists daily, thinking the world will stop if I don’t get the job done. I don’t think about missing out on fun—it has never been a part of my life.
“I was a teetotaler. I never drank until I was twenty-six. I don’t even know why I started. But those first few times I remember thinking that I was being silly, hearing myself laugh with other people. It actually scared me. Yet at the same time there was this attraction. It was as if there was this whole other part of me I didn’t know and maybe was okay to know.
“The attraction to relaxing with alcohol kept getting stronger. I can actually remember thinking, ‘I don’t have to make this decision tonight,’ or ‘I don’t have to do this by myself.’ Pretty soon it was, ‘I don’t have to do this at all.’ I was having fun. I was relaxing.” Alice’s new ways of letting go and becoming less rigid were not harmful, but because she did not know how to relax without alcohol she ultimately became dependent on it. Alice, like so many others, was seeking wholeness. But the only glimpse she had of it was “under the influence.”
Variations of this scenario fit for other addictions. Our relationship to certain foods or the intake, lack of intake, and/or purging of food may be about an internal struggle with power and control. We may be attempting to access power that we don’t have the skills or confidence to access more naturally. Starving ourselves, purging, and compulsive overeating may be anger turned toward ourselves. Possibly we are punishing ourselves for being bad. The anorexic may be literally starving herself to become invisible in response to shame; the anorexic and bulimic may be seeking perfection—which is based in shame.
When we come from a pain-based family, it is common to go outside of ourselves for a quick answer to relieve our suffering. It doesn’t seem possible that we have any way to help ourselves. Yet, ultimately, we can keep our pain under control only so long before it starts to leak out. Frightened, we feel out of control and we seek a medicator. Sometimes that medicator is a person or possibly an activity; many times it is a substance. Often it is a combination of compulsions and addictions.
Compulsions
To experience shame and powerlessness is to be in unbearable pain. While physical pain is horrible, there are moments of relief. There is hope of being cured. However, when we believe we are defective, there is no cure. Shame is a defeated state. We have no relationship with ourselves or anyone else; we are totally alone. Relief from this intolerable pain must come, one way or another. We need someone or something to take away our profound loneliness and fear, and so we seek a mood-altering experience. We need an escape. Everyone has certain behaviors used as a way to “escape,” but it is when we come to depend on them to relieve our unworthiness that these become compulsive in nature. And when we grow up in an environment of shaming, where the cause of pain is external, we develop the belief that the solutions to problems exist only externally through substances or behaviors that are medicators.
There are many different types of addictions and compulsions ranging from compulsively repeated activities to preoccupying thoughts to relationship dependencies. We may use some form of keeping busy to distance or to distract ourselves, to get our minds off our pain, our fear, or our anger. We keep busy to stay in control of our feelings and therefore to avoid feeling bad. Many behavioral compulsions would be otherwise harmless activities if they weren’t exaggerated, destroying the balance in our lives. For example, exercise is a healthy activity until done so excessively that we actually injure our bodies.
Relationship addiction is the dependence on being in a relationship to validate our worth. That means we use other people to lessen our shame and to avoid truly facing our selves.
Sex addiction is the use of sexual stimulation to act as a detractor or medicator of pain; or it may be a false way of accessing power to overcome our sense of powerlessness. Compulsive sex experiences can temporarily offer us warmth and an appearance of love. Or we can act out sex as an expression of anger. These sex experiences may temporarily affirm that we are lovable and worthy, all the while compounding our belief in our defectiveness. Sex addicts vary in their focus, from obsessive masturbating, the use of pornographic materials, exhibitionism, obscene phone calls, voyeurism, to multiple affairs, use of prostitutes, and so on. For sex addicts, certain behaviors take on sexual meaning. They view objects and people through their sexual preoccupation.
Even though compulsive behaviors distract and alter feelings, feelings themselves can become compulsive in nature. We become dependent on certain feelings to mask and avoid experiencing what we are really feeling. We may become a rage-aholic, using rage as a release for all feelings. Fear can overwhelm us, where phobias, hyper-vigilance, and/or anxieties can control our lives.
While some compulsions are certainly more harmful to ourselves and our family, others may be considered only nuisances. Substances and behaviors can detract from our pain and, therefore, represent attempts to control whether or not we feel such pain. Yet any time we use a substance or become involved in a process or behavior that interferes with our honesty, our ability to be present with ourselves, it deserves our attention.
Rational or Cognitive Responses to Pain
While some people focus on controlling the pain itself, others attempt to control the source of the pain. Control is the key word here. These people hope to control the cause of the pain, as opposed to removing, releasing, or healing it. As with the emotional and behavioral responses discussed earlier, these cognitive or rational responses try to prevent potential abandonment and prevent the possibility of exposing a shameful self.
Perfectionism
A common rational or cognitive response to pain is perfectionism. Perfectionism is driven by the belief that if a person’s behavior is perfect there will be no reason to be criticized and therefore no more cause for pain. However, perfectionism is a shame-based phenomenon because children learn that “no matter what they do, it’s never good enough.” As a result, in their struggle to feel good about themselves and relieve the source of pain, they constantly push to excel, to be the best.
Highly perfectionistic people are usually people who have been raised in a rigid family environment. The rigidity may be in the form of unrealistic expectations that parents have for their children and/or for themselves. In these situations, the children internalize the parents’ expectations. Also, rigidity may be expressed as children feel the need to do things “right” in order to gain approval from their parent and to lessen fears of rejection. For most children, being “right” is perceived to mean there is no room for mistakes.
Let’s look at the example of Teri, nineteen years old, in a therapy group and talking about being a perfectionist. “When I was in junior high school, in order to be able to visit with friends on Saturday afternoon I had to complete certain household tasks. So, every Saturday morning I would approach my father to get a list of what I needed to accomplish to be able to go out later in the day. I’d pick up his typewritten list and go on about my duties. When the list was completed, I’d return it to my father, but then he just gave me a second list. When I was done with that list, I was inevitably given a third list. Many times there was a fourth and fifth list.”
As you can guess, Teri didn’t spend a lot of Saturday afternoons with her friends. When Teri told this story, tears streamed down her cheeks. Then she paused and reflectively commented, “But we all come from some pretty crazy families. It could have been worse. Besides, I learned a few things. If you want something done, ask me. I know how to be quick.” Then haltingly she added, “What I really learned, though, was that no matter what I do, it’s never good enough.”
That was the lesson for Teri. No matter what she did, it wasn’t good enough. Nothing was good enough because it wasn’t humanly possible to please her father. This Saturday ritual was not about Teri. It was about her father and his need to control, his need for power. Whether or not Terri was permitted to spend time with her friends was not about how well or how quick she was in her work. For her own well-being, Teri would need to acknowledge that. In doing so, she would be able to establish an emotional boundary, separating her worth from her father’s severe criticism. In doing this she would be saying no to the shame she had internalized that told her she wasn’t good enough. She can then start to counter the shame-based message by acknowledging her worth.
Unfortunately, most perfectionists have no internal sense of limits. With shame and fear nipping at their heels the entire time, they always perceive their performance as related to a standard or judgment outside themselves. As children, they were taught to strive onward. There was never a time or place to rest or to have inner joy and satisfaction.
Perfection as a performance criteria means you never measure up. Then, not measuring up is translated into a comparison with others of good versus bad, better versus worse. Inevitably you end up feeling the lesser for the comparison. Comparison with others is one of the primary ways that people continue to create more shame for themselves. You continue to do to yourself on the inside what was done to you from the outside. Since your efforts were never experienced as sufficient, adequate, or good enough, you did not develop an internal sense of how much is good enough.
As adults, we need to identify those areas where we once strived so hard for recognition, attention, and approval. Then we need to come to the understanding that not only did we do our best, but we truly were good enough. The lack of acceptance we have felt is not about us or our worth, but a residue left from those who judged us and who sought power by threatening to reject us. While we were not able to understand that as children, we can come to terms with that today.
Procrastination and Ambivalence
Procrastination, such as starting but not completing a project, or considering a project but never initiating it, is often an attempt to defend against further shame. Perfectionism and procrastination are closely linked. It is easy to picture Teri, in the example given, never finishing her first list, realizing that she could not please her father. Teri, though, believed in herself a bit more strongly than most people who procrastinate. Often, the procrastinator has little confidence and more fear. The perfectionist is more apt to follow through because there is the possibility of the reinforcement of some sense of accomplishment. The procrastinator will not even see that possibility.
Some children received so little attention that they were not encouraged to initiate projects, let alone complete them. Too many times when these children did something, drew a picture or wrote a story and gleefully showed their parents, the parents barely looked at it and then set it aside, or maybe even lost it. When there is no positive reinforcement to complete school projects or homework, children perform with ambivalence. They believe that “No one else cares” and develop the attitude, “Why should I care?” The result is procrastination and ambivalence.
It was just as painful for children when their parents did pay attention, but were constantly critical, maybe making a joke of the children’s work, possibly humiliating them in front of others. Sue, who was an average student in school, became very excited about a history project during her sophomore year of high school. “I worked hard on it all quarter, which was unusual for me, but I found this real interesting and the teacher liked me. For the first time in a long time I really wanted to do something well. One night I was at the dining room table putting all of the pages of my report in a notebook to be turned in the next day in class. I wasn’t expecting my parents to come home for a few hours yet, so I was shocked when my mother and stepfather came in, both laughing loudly, both drunk. Mom asked what I was doing and then picked up my paper which was titled ‘Did America Need To Be In World War II?’ Suddenly, she was in a rage and calling me a communist, saying I wasn’t patriotic.
“It was unreal. Within minutes, they were both screaming at me, calling me all kinds of names. They took my report and, in their words, threw the ‘trash’ into the fireplace. Well, there was no way I could tell the teacher what had happened. I just took a failing grade. It was pretty horrifying, but I should have known not to put that much effort into anything. Most things never worked out for me too much.”
Sue’s sense of defeat was a culmination of similar experiences. Whenever she put forth effort to achieve, she somehow always felt diminished. It was several years before she could put into perspective the report incident and all the smaller incidents that led her to believe even if she wanted to work at something, it probably wasn’t worth the effort. As a result, Sue quit trying to achieve at a very young age.
When children are humiliated for their efforts, made to feel inadequate or stupid, they find ways to protect themselves so they cease involvement in any action that would prove they really are a failure.
In addition, children become discouraged when they are constantly compared to someone who “did it better” or might have done it better. Tom says he was always compared to his two older brothers. “My two older brothers were articulate. They were quick and did well in school. It took me longer to grasp things. I wasn’t as interested in math and sciences as they were. I was more interested in my friends. So, with school being more of a struggle and having no real help from my parents, only the push that ‘you should be like your brothers,’ I just gave up. I wasn’t like them and didn’t want to be.”
Also mixed into procrastination can be anger, expressed as an attitude of “I’ll show you—I won’t finish this,” or “I’ll only do it part way. I won’t give my best.” Inherent in this attitude is a challenge that insists, “Like me for who I am, not for what I do.” In a family where rigidity is the rule, where it is not okay to make mistakes, not okay to take risks or be different, not okay to draw attention to yourself, you learn not to initiate, or not to finish what you started. For those of us raised this way, it is amazing that we get anything done.
Our pain, our choice of responses, and the consequences of our choices are summarized on the chart, “From a Past of Chronic Loss to the Turning Point: The Experience of Pain from an Adult’s Point of View.”
Understanding Your Defenses Against Pain
Rage, depression, victimization, addictions, compulsions, perfectionism, and procrastination—these are some of the responses to having lived with fear and pain. Such responses often become protectors. They offer ways to control the pain itself and/or control the source of the pain. Other protectors begin as common, everyday acts, but taken to extremes create negative outcomes in the long run. Some of these are intellectualization, physical isolation, humor, magical thinking, lying, silence, and withdrawal.
What are the defenses you employ? Make a list of defenses you developed to defend against the pain. Are those still behaviors you use today? After you make your list, then ask yourself the following questions:
• What did it [the protective behavior] do for you in the past?
• What is it doing for you now?
• Would you like to let go of it?
• What do you need to do to let it go?
• What is interfering with your ability to let go of it?
Letting Go of the Past, Healing the Pain
Every one of us would like to rid ourselves of pain. The answer lies in being willing to admit and show your pain. That means facing the feelings. It means being willing to own the sadness, the hurt and the fears, embarrassments and anger about how you have had to live your life. It means being willing to be specific about all the ways you fought for emotional survivorship, how you attempted to compensate for powerlessness, and how you tried to gain control to overcome the incredible sense of shame and fear that has been so significant in your life.
Ultimately, you will need to identify the loss events, conditions, and shaming messages in your adult life, as well as those in your growing up years, in order to be able to become separate from them. An adult loss graph, like the loss graph of your early years, is a very useful way to begin to identify the difference between who you are and what has happened to you. See Appendix C for a Loss Graph form, with instructions, for you to record the losses in your adult years.
We Can’t Go Forward Without Finishing the Past
To go forward, we must finish and let go of the past. Jill Johnston, author of Mother Bound, writes that as we let go of the past, “we alter the way we see ourselves in the present and the way we cast ourselves into the future. . . . The notion of who has rights, whose voice can be heard, whose individuality is worthy, comes under revision . . . and the shame of difference will evaporate.”
To let go of our pain, we must also acknowledge what we have been doing in the present to control our pain. Facing our own painful reality, both past and present, empowers us by giving us choice.
One option is that we can remain role players, acting out old family roles, directed by negative judgments and false beliefs about ourselves. Choosing this option, of course, we are not really attempting to finish the past. Also, we are consigning ourselves to a future weighted down by the need to manage our shame and pain.
The other option we have is to become free agents, choosing to set our own course and act according to our own freely chosen beliefs, rather than the dictates of external standards. On this course we are able to finish the past because we are no longer being controlled by it.
Finishing the past does not mean that it disappears from our memories. Instead, it simply takes its rightful place as one significant dimension of our personal history.
Letting go of our pain doesn’t mean that we will, or should, forget our suffering. That would be another kind of denial. In time we can learn to honor our past pain much as we would honor a soldier returning from war. We can also honor our experience as a significant part of our life’s struggle to grow and survive.
Freeing ourselves from pain is what recovery is all about. Releasing ourselves from the past and freeing ourselves from the painful limitations of our past-driven present life is the process we go through as we turn to the new reality we want. Remember that recovery takes time. But it can be done. It can happen to you, to me, to all of us.
The awarenesses we now have bring us to another turning point to recovery:
>> The pain we feel is not only from the past, but also from the past-driven present.
>> We were powerless in the past, but we are not powerless in the present.
Another turning point comes with another awareness:
>> We are not our pain.
We are much, much more than mere embodiments of pain. Realizing that truth allows us to separate our selves from our emotional responses. Further, our own response is something we can affect, something we can make a choice about. As Steven Covey writes, “Responsibility is response-ability.”
Together, these awarenesses lead us to the turning point that can put us on the path of freedom:
>> Our pain is our responsibility.
>> What we do about our pain is a choice we make.