19

A Word about Healing
and Spirituality

All Adult Children and Co-dependents are victims of abuse and neglect. The core inside of us has been damaged. We have called this core inside of us our Little Child. What needs to heal are the guilt, shame and fear of abandonment experienced in our Little Child. Ultimately, our healing must take place from the inside out.

In Chapter 3 we talked about our symptoms as being about feelings and about intimacy. Put another way, our symptoms block relationship. They block our relationship with ourself; they block our relationship with others; they block our relationship with the world at large and they block our relationship with our own spirituality. The only way to truly heal, then, is to restore our ability to be in relationship. This is why recovery never happens alone. It is a contradiction in terms.

“Spirituality” itself is cause for much controversy and inner battling for so many of us. The idea of a Higher Power, which is an essential part of 12-step recovery programs, keeps many people away from Anonymous groups for a long time.

“I don’t want any of that ‘God stuff,’” we proclaim loudly. “I’ve had it up to here with that.”

The authors believe this is true because spirituality is misunderstood. We believe that many of us confuse spirituality with formal religion. Part of it gets confused because somewhere along the line we were presented with a lot of black-and-white thinking—you must either be a Catholic, a Protestant, a Jew, a Buddhist, a Moslem, or you are nothing at all. This puts our Little Child in a double bind which makes us want to avoid the issue altogether. So we want to make it very clear that we are talking about spirituality, not religion. The religion you choose or don’t choose is your own business, not ours.

As we view it, spirituality is one’s relationship with the unexplainable, ineffable, the vastness and power of the universe. Some of us call this entity God; others do not. Our spirituality is what allows us to let go of things over which we have no true control, such as other people, other people’s feelings and love or lack of it, accidents, tragedies or death itself. Our spirituality allows us to trust that our lives will make sense and that there is a purpose to life, which we will discover, paradoxically, if we stop fighting so hard to find it.

If you have ever stood on the top of a mountain or at the edge of the sea and experienced a tremendous feeling of power and connectedness with the universe, while at the same time, experiencing a feeling of incredible smallness and personal insignificance, then you have had a taste of spirituality. It is frightening and incredibly energizing at the same time.

But spirituality is more than just these momentary feelings that we have when we commune with nature. It is a feeling of connectedness with the entire human race—with all those who have gone before us and all those who will come after us. From there, it is the ultimate relationship with all of creation that becomes our highest form of spirituality.

Imagine what happens to one’s relationship with something more powerful or unexplainable than oneself, when he or she is the victim of abuse and neglect. The first “higher power” (metaphorically speaking) that we experience in life are those who raise us from infancy—usually our parents. If those parents abuse us and neglect us, they will be teaching us not to trust entities more powerful than ourselves. We will always be fearful of people in authority. We will constantly defend against the unexplainable. We will seek comfort by trying to control everything around us so that we don’t get hurt again. And we will be destined to fail, because we are not gods, and we can never control everything around us.

In our fear and in our damage, we will try nevertheless. In other words, we will try to become our own gods. This is why so many of us turn to chemical addictions—because chemicals give us the illusion that we are in control of it all and because they let us feel connected to the universe for a while, at least until the drug wears off. It is our spirituality that is perhaps the last part of us that is reclaimed after we get into recovery. And it, too, comes back in steps and stages.

Recovery of our spirituality begins when we are truly able to say that we are powerless over our addictions, symptoms or our family systems. The paradox here is that at the very moment that we surrender, we gain back some of our true power. Rather than being left more vulnerable and defenseless by this surrender, we actually become less vulnerable, because now we are not operating according to a self-defeating, destructive logic that depletes all of our energies trying to control things over which we have no control. We are also less vulnerable because we are living in truth and reality instead of in denial and defensiveness. Without the denial, we can use that energy to make positive decisions about our life in areas in which we do have a choice.

After this surrender, we are then able to trust others just a little bit, which begins to restore our relationship with other human beings. For many people, their “higher power” is initially the members of their recovery group.

As we experience sharing our Little Child with others in a safe setting, we realize that guilt, shame and fear of abandonment do not necessarily have to happen. We see others doing the same thing without being criticized or abused. As we experience this gift of total acceptance, we feel a power in the room the likes of which we have never felt before. It is a power greater than ourselves. Many people in 12-step groups simply accept this kind of power as their Higher Power for years.

For many more people, this ability to be in relationship with a group of other human beings eventually opens the door to trusting that it is okay to be in relationship with something even more powerful than the group. Many people call this entity God. But the words and labels don’t really matter. It is the relationship that matters, which is why it is God as we understand God, not as someone else understands God.

The spiritual healing that takes place during recovery brings us full circle back to the first stage of life: trust versus mistrust. With the ability to trust that life is okay, that it will work out in the end even if it isn’t pleasant right now, we have wisdom. We have a sense of belonging. We have purpose and meaning. We have choices.

And so as we heal deeper and deeper inside of ourselves, our lives become bigger and bigger and more connected with the lives of others outside of ourselves. Recovery is thus about the expansion of the self out into the universe, while at the same time, remaining humble and grateful that we are sharing in creation.