In 12-step circles “working a program” means sticking to a daily program of recovery. For those of you not familiar with “12-step programs,” we are referring to the original 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, upon which almost all other Anonymous groups have been modeled. But before we speak directly to the issue of recovery, we would like to share with you a typical recovery history.
Jack’s Recovery Process
Jack grew up in a middle-class suburban home outside of Denver, Colorado. He is the oldest of three children. He earned a bachelor’s degree in business and management in 1969 and then took a job with a local manufacturing firm. Three years after graduation, he married Betsy, and they started a family immediately.
Seven years into the marriage, Jack started feeling “stale.” One day a friend from work invited him to go jogging. He agreed, hoping it might help pull him out of the doldrums. It did. Within a few months, Jack had worked up to running 10 miles a day, and by the end of his first year, he ran a marathon. His productivity at work had increased ten-fold and he had renewed vigor and enthusiasm for life. Everyone outside of his home saw him as a ball of fire. He was exciting to be around, was a go-getter at work, was generous and charming.
At the same time that all of this was going on away from home, things within the home began to deteriorate. Betsy and Jack had grown distant from each other. She started to complain to Jack a lot about his long absences from the children and her while he was training for marathons. They would fight for a few hours and then remain cold and aloof for several days.
The children picked up very quickly on this covert tension and started “tip-toeing” around the house during the long periods of silence. Jack and Betsy’s sex life all but vanished. Beneath the excitement of his outer life there developed a deep numbness inside of him. Simply sitting down to dinner with Betsy and the kids became a cue for his wanting to escape—to run away from it all. He was bored with the idle chatter that happens at mealtimes. The little day-to-day things that were shared with each other irritated him. He lost interest in his children and his wife.
Roughly two years into this phase of his life, Jack started gambling. At first he just bought a few lottery tickets but the rush of excitement soon overwhelmed him. He escalated to making several trips a year to Reno, where he began losing large sums of money. And towards the end he was taking incredible risks in the stock market.
Betsy thought it was fun at first. She would never have taken the little risks that they were taking all by herself. She even bought a few lottery tickets on her own. But it wasn’t fun for long. She lost count of the sleepless nights she spent worrying when “the big loss” would hit and they would be bankrupt. She was absolutely alone, even when Jack was not out gambling, because he was always preoccupied with it. It became a nightmare for her. She finally became too numb to care. Jack had become numb, too, without even knowing it. His entire life consisted of work, running and gambling. He had become completely isolated from his family, his friends and from himself. His three addictions had a stranglehold on him.
Jack’s recovery did not come easy. The family therapist that Betsy finally went to recommended that she start going to Adult Children of Alcoholics 12-step groups because her father was an alcoholic. The therapist also recommended that Jack enter inpatient treatment for his gambling addiction. Jack refused.
“This is not a big deal,” he proclaimed. “I can deal with it by myself.”
But Betsy did not give in. She told him that he would have to become involved in some kind of group therapy experience or she would ask him to move out.
Jack’s strategy was to shop around town until he could find a therapist who would see things his way. The first two that he saw recommended treatment. The third said that he should join a men’s therapy group, and that he probably wasn’t gambling addicted. So he joined that group.
Jack stayed with the group several months, and nothing really changed. But Betsy was changing.
Four months into her therapy, Betsy attended an intensive short-term treatment program for Adult Child/Co-dependency issues. She did a lot of painful work around her family of origin and abuse and neglect issues. She emerged from that program somewhat “raw” but deeply connected to the Little Child inside of her for the first time in her life.
At last a clear picture of her life was emerging for Betsy. She was not satisfied with being the wife of an unrecovering addict. Two months after her short-term treatment experience, Betsy approached Jack calmly but purposefully.
“Jack, I care about you. We have shared a lot of our lives with each other. Because I love you, I can no longer watch and be a part of your self-destruction. I have made a decision that I will stay in this marriage for now if you go to inpatient treatment for gambling addiction. All I know for sure is that I can’t live this way anymore.” And then she cried honest, unashamed tears.
Jack did go into treatment. It was the most painful thing that he had ever done, because it revealed all of the pain that he had experienced as a child growing up in a dysfunctional family system. He felt renewed and invigorated, though. He had some new hope. He learned quickly that treatment is just the beginning of recovery. He learned that he would always be recovering, rather than recovered. He learned that each day was new; and that each day offered the choice of being in recovery or of acting-out his addiction. He learned that he had work and running addictions, too, and that he would need to deal with those more as time passed and as his spirit healed. He had a few “slips” his first year, when he would buy lottery tickets, but he also kept going to his aftercare therapy group, honestly working his program and he kept attending a Gamblers Anonymous 12-step group. And he kept getting healthier.
The first two years following Jack’s treatment were rough ones for Jack and Betsy. They had never been truly intimate before so they had a lot of learning to do. They became involved in couples’ therapy after a while to begin to learn how to share feelings with each other, resolve conflicts without hurting each other irreparably, and to learn how to get their needs met in non-addictive, non-controlling ways.
Five years later Jack and Betsy have a marriage that is working. They still have fights, but the fights get resolved. They still slip into personal isolation, but they see it and do something about it before it becomes serious. They still deny their true feelings at times, but they are so well connected in the recovering community that it is much easier to get back to that Little Child inside of them. They have friends with whom they have shared their struggles. They can laugh and cry together without getting enmeshed in each other’s feelings. And they both enjoy immensely the idle chatter that they and their children share at mealtimes.
The Process of Recovering
There are some basic principles of recovering from Adult Child issues that we would like to outline, with the understanding that each person finds recovery in his or her own time and by his or her own means. This does not mean that we can recover alone! People who “recover” alone, by quitting drinking on their own, for example, are not in recovery. Recovery is much more than simply not drinking or not binging and purging food. For many alcoholics, not drinking is relatively easy when compared to the task of living a balanced, healthy life. Recovery is much more about dealing with our underlying co-dependency, guilt, shame and fear-of-abandonment issues. It is about not replacing one symptom with another. It is about not trying to control those around us. It is about having and trusting our feelings and of getting our emotional needs met in healthy ways. It is about feeling like we belong; that we are not better or worse than others. It is about feeling that the world is basically a safe place to be, and that we are okay in the world. Remember these points as you read through the principles of recovery on next page.
1. Recovery is a Process
This is so simple that it borders on being trite; but it is so easy to forget that we must remind ourselves of this principle from time to time. It is easy to feel great when things are going great for us. But when things are not so great, it is crucial to remember that we are on a journey of recovery, which includes ups and downs. Life presents us with stress and tragedy, whether we are bulimics or not. Life is unpredictable whether we are compulsive overeaters or not. Life is hard sometimes whether we are Adult Children or not.
2. Recovery Cannot Be Done Alone
As we have said many times already, trying to do it alone is one of the primary symptoms of our dysfunction. This has a lot to do with the core shame from our childhoods. We don’t want others to know what is going on inside of us because we are afraid that they will be shocked, will reject or abandon us or shame us further. It also has to do with our need to be in control in unhealthy ways. It has to do with the arrogance and moral superiority that is such a strong part of co-dependency.
“She’s the addict,” we spout. “When she starts recovering, my life will be fine.” Translated, this means: “I am better than her.” Unfortunately, this feeling of “better than” also leaves plenty of room for feeling “worse than” others, which leads to social and emotional isolation.
Recovery cannot be done alone because the experience of sharing our inner selves with others in a safe way is what we have been missing all our lives. True, we may have lots of people with whom we share our problems late into the night, but are they people who don’t get enmeshed with us? Are they people who let us have our pain so that we can learn from it and do something about it, or do they enable us, and get secret satisfaction out of feeling that they are better than us? Do they need to be needed, or can they simply be there for us without trying to “fix” us and offer solutions all the time?
We cannot recover alone but we also cannot recover if all of our time is spent with others who are not in recovery either.
3. Recovery is Painful
This is what keeps so many of us away from recovery. “It has to get worse before it gets better” is one of the key principles of therapy. Digging back into an abusive and neglectful childhood is not easy or fun. Letting down our defenses and feeling the deep pain inside of that Little Child locked up in us hurts. Cleaning out an infection with a scalpel hurts more than the infection, but it is often the only way to heal once and for all. We do not advocate a life of constant pain or martyrdom, but we do know that this pain of recovery must happen. And when it does, this pain will eventually subside.
4. Recovery Means Changes In How We Feel,
How We Act And In What We Believe
It is not enough to just “think our way through it.” It is not enough to just “feel our way through it.” It is not enough to just “act our way through it.”
Some of us are great at reading and thinking about recovery and so we tend to get stuck here. Others are great at expressing certain feelings, and this is where we get stuck. Still others of us are very adept at changing our behavior to fit what others expect of us. Recovery means making changes in all three areas, and in achieving a healthy measure of congruence among all three. That is, what we do is consistent with how we feel, which is consistent with what we believe about ourselves and the world.
5. Recovery Means Getting Out Of Our Roles
In Chapter 6 we discussed some of the dysfunctional roles that we get caught up in as we are growing up in our families. We noted that these roles are distorted mutations of truly healthy needs that we have. Recovery means giving up the role of mascot, hero, princess, enabler, and so on, and getting those same needs met in healthy ways.
The family caretaker, for example, will feel tremendous guilt at first when he chooses to no longer take care of Mom’s feelings or Dad’s alcoholism.
But the more a caretaker is able to give up this role, the more he or she will be able to have healthy mutuality in all relationships. Likewise, we must give up the roles of offender, victim and rescuer, breaking the vicious cycle that happens with these three roles.
6. In Recovery, We Recover Our Choices
This is so hard for us to grasp at first. Time and again our clients will state that they have no choices. This is experienced as the powerful feeling of being stuck, which is a key symptom of co-dependency. In our co- dependency traps, we become reactors to people and events around us, never realizing that we can choose and take action. Because of our dysfunctional belief systems, we paint ourselves into a corner where we are miserable but see no way out. This is one reason that we believe that family-of-origin therapy is essential to recovery, because it is those distorted childhood beliefs that keep us painted in that corner.
“If I tell him that I feel he has a cocaine addiction, he’ll just leave me. If he leaves me, I will be alone. If I am left alone, I will not be able to survive. If I cannot survive, I will die. Furthermore, a good wife always stays with her husband no matter what. That’s what our marriage vows say. If I confront his cocaine addiction, I am being a bad wife because I will be causing the end of our marriage.” This is the kind of logic that we use to keep ourselves stuck.
At some point in the recovery process we will be able to say, “I have recovered my choices.”
7. Recovery Requires Transcending Paradoxes
A paradox is something that appears to be contradictory but in fact is true. It is essential in recovery that we let go of black-and-white thinking, which is at the root of these paradoxes in which we get trapped.
For example, can someone be “good” and “bad”? Can we love and hate the same person? Can we become powerful by “giving in”? The answer to all of these questions is “yes.” Yet, before recovery, we struggle very hard with these questions. We want to label him “good” and her “safe,” when in fact it is humanly impossible for anyone to be “good” all the time or always “safe” to be with. Likewise, love and hate are not opposites, in our opinion. The opposite of love is indifference.
As Confucius wrote many centuries ago, “Only the truly kind man knows how to love and how to hate.”
In Summary
The basic elements of any recovery program will include one and usually more of the following:
1. Regular participation in an ongoing 12-step, self-help group is a must. We always require this. (See the Appendix for a list of 12-step groups.)
2. Individual psychotherapy.
3. Group psychotherapy.
4. Family therapy.
5. Inpatient or outpatient treatment.
If the dysfunction that we experienced in our childhoods was mild, participation in a 12-step group may be sufficient. The bottom line will always be the quality of life that we are experiencing (we do not mean the financial quality of life, by the way).
Oftentimes people will expend a lot of time and energy in therapy during the first two years of recovery. They will then reach a point of new-found stability and then just maintain their recovery with a self-help support group. Then as life progresses and becomes richer, there may be a need to delve even deeper into issues that have not yet been addressed.
A large precentage of women who attend inpatient treatment for chemical dependency are survivors of incest or sexual abuse, for example. The first two years of recovery may be just about the chemical addiction—quitting the use of chemicals, changing friendship patterns to others who are also in recovery, and so on. Later on, it will be necessary to address the sexual abuse issues in therapy but only when one is ready to do so.
We have summarized the recovery process in the following flow chart. (See Figure 18.1.)
Recovery is lifelong, and it becomes less and less painful as we progress. Stresses that five years ago would have thrown us into a deep depression are now handled directly with strength and wisdom. Stresses that put us on the verge of acting out our symptoms now, will not do so five years from now. It is not life that changes. It is we who change.
Recovery is a relearning process in which, step by step, we come to see and feel and know the Little Child inside of us.
Recovery is allowing ourselves to experience the truth. At first, this is terribly painful. In the end, it lets us make that Child inside of us feel safe, warm, lovable, whole, proud, honest, peaceful and real.
Figure 18.1. Recovery Process Flow Chart