EIGHT

Haunted: The Symptoms
of
Relationship Trauma

All children wake up in a world that is not of their own making, but children of alcoholics and other drug-addicted parents wake up in a world that doesn’t take care of them. No matter what we name their risk factors, they still have to make their own breakfast and find their own way.

—Jeannette Johnson, PhD

ACoAs can feel haunted by a past that they cannot wrap their minds around. They feel confused.

John is a client in recovery from sex addiction. He came home from school every day to a mother who was depressed and locked in her room with booze, cigarettes, and ­prescription meds, a mother who couldn’t help him to manage successfully in school and feel supported at home; she was a mother who did just the opposite. “But she wasn’t a real alcoholic,” John says. “She would get depressed and then just drink enough to feel ­better.” In role-playing himself as a child, he said, “But I loved my mother. I know there must have been good things. I don’t want to hate her. I only wanted her to open the door to her room and come out and talk to me.”

John continued his role-play speaking to his mother. “I need you. I need you to be with me. I hate school; I don’t have any friends; the guys all pick on me. I need you to help me when I come home; the day is so long. I wanted to be home, outside playing. I missed you.”

This combination of prescription medication, liquor, and cigarettes was what occurred “every four weeks” according to John. “I would know it. I could sense it. I would come home from school and it was like this dark cloud was hanging over the house. And she would be in her room. And I just couldn’t screw up the courage to knock on that door; I guess I didn’t want to see what was behind it, it scared me to see her like that.”

This psychodrama I did with John shows clearly how, in a child’s mind, the parent is just the parent. Children just do not understand that drugs and alcohol might be driving their parent’s peculiar behavior. Even when playing the role of his mother, John resisted the idea that she was an alcoholic. In his child mind, she just was depressed and didn’t want to be with him. And it was somehow his fault; he was just not worth attention.

I kept John in role reversal, playing his mother so that by “showing” us what his mother actually looked like and by my questioning him in role, he might come to better accept his mother’s obvious addiction. John, as his mother, sat on the edge of the bed, head hanging down, knees splayed, with a cigarette and a cup of coffee.

John was a lonely little boy who needed his mommy to talk to about his day. When he came home from school, he would stare at a shut door that he could not screw up the courage to knock on. Eventually he would give up and slowly begin his afternoon process of getting his own snack, playing his own games, and going into the basement and making his forts to sit in. And wait. For something. For someone. He spent endless hours by himself in what he now sees as a dissociated state. He was nowhere really, suspended, lost in space. He tried to hold on. “I’ll wait for Dad to come home,” he would say. “And he’ll take me to the diner for a hamburger. But he’s so mad at Mom and I want to help her, to help her feel better. And I need him, but why doesn’t he help her? And I need her, but she isn’t there.”

This is the kind of confusion that the child of an alcoholic/addict (CoA) carries: loving and feeling close to the same parent who is leaving him to manage all by himself. John found his solution with an older boy who took an interest in him. Carlos became his friend. They kept fish together in the basement. Carlos was John’s only friend. He was all that stood between John and his deep longing and loneliness. So when Carlos told John to take his pants down and let Carlos play with him, John couldn’t say no. He felt too scared. But he didn’t like it. It made him shiver inside both with stimulation and fear, and the whole thing make him feel bad. But Carlos was showing more interest in him than his parents were. He longed to tell his mother. But she was behind that door.

This is often the dilemma of adult children of an alcoholic/addict (ACoAs). They long to love their parent, but their parent has transgressed so seriously that the love they long to feel is burdened with ghosts, haunting recollections, unresolved pain and resentment, and a feeling of loss. They feel guilty for their anger and resentment but are unable not to feel it. They feel sad for their parents because they know their parents struggled.

CoAs would do anything to bring a smile to the face they love, even sacrifice themselves. They feel angry because their parent doesn’t see them, or neglects or abuses them. The little CoAs carry all sorts of feelings that they don’t know what do with.

When these COAs grow into ACoAs and arrive at my office, they are often stuck in a state of emotional and psychological frozenness. They need to move through the feelings they never felt and complete actions that they had to hold onto because there was no safe way to cry, kick, scream, and say all that they longed to say but didn’t dare. And not just their angry, hurt, and guilty feelings, but their thwarted feelings of love as well; “I love you, it hurt me to see you suffer, to want to help, and to be able to do nothing to make you happy. I tried but it didn’t work, or I wound up feeling used, which made me feel like I failed you somehow—but didn’t you fail me?”

Perhaps no one really has a carefree childhood, but ACoAs carry especially heavy burdens. They have all too often been traumatized by the experience of living with the abuse, neglect, and dysfunction that surrounds addiction. John found a solution with his friend Carlos, who was preoccupied with sex and initiated John into a world of “special knowledge” that made him feel powerful and less stupid and alone. This became
John’s solution in life. He knew that he could feel powerful around women with whom he was sexual. As a grown man with two children and married to a woman he truly loved, John conducted the same secret life that he did as a boy. He was a devoted husband and father, but he had a side life that grew into sex addiction. He felt the same sense of power and the same sense of shame. His trigger was being ignored by his wife, who also suffered from depression; when she withdrew into her depression, he became that desperate, hurt, angry little boy again, and he acted out. Eventually the marriage fell apart and John sought treatment. What began as an innocent child’s attempt to stave off loneliness because he was living with parental alcohol, prescription pills, and cigarette addiction was passed along through the generations as a process addiction that caused another generation of havoc and hurt.

Trauma can take many strange paths. With John, childhood trauma led to a sex (process) addiction. Living with neglect was traumatizing for him. He went through his childhood feeling lost and confused and likely somewhat disregulated in his limbic world. As the limbic system governs libido and bonding, John’s disregulated limbic system may have contributed to his becoming hypersexual and seeking to meet his needs for intimacy by using sex to soothe himself and self-medicate his emotional pain. Limbic disregulation can as easily lead to an inability to organize one’s self into meaningful work, workaholism, over- or undereating, or to over- or underspending.

The effects of being traumatized in childhood don’t tend to disappear on their own; they tend to reemerge later in some form of overreaction, compulsive behavior, learning difficulty, intimacy issues, addictions, or process addictions. In this manner, pain from one generation gets passed along into the next. And no one knows quite how it happened. It seems as if each problem stands whole and on its own, but a closer examination reveals otherwise. John’s story is utterly predictable. But it didn’t have to be that way. Today he is a different person. But help came too late to save John and the family he loved from deep pain. So often this is the case—we wait for life to blow up before we address what needs addressing.

Today there is help all around—articles abound on these subjects, 12-step rooms are around the corner, and help is down the hall in many schools and workplaces. But we have to reach out and take hold of the help. And we have to stick with it until we can create meaningful change in our lives.

I see so many ACoAs who hurt inside but aren’t able to seek out healing because the very vehicle that would help them is the one that hurt them—namely, relationships, which makes entering a therapeutic relationship seem frightening. However, blended in with their trauma-related mistrust of people can be a powerful wish to trust and depend on someone, a need that went partially unmet in their childhood. If they are willing to trust themselves and their own gut and intuition and take a leap of faith, they can heal.

Many ACoAs fear the feelings of vulnerability, sadness, and confusion that addressing their pain might bring up, and they want a quick fix. They e-mail me and wonder if I have a book to recommend; or they go to a one-week program, want to have a few appointments, and then be done with it. They want to think their way better, but they shy away from the deep developmental work that they need to do to heal. Their childhood trauma experience has left them feeling somewhat fragmented inside, and they fear falling apart if they let themselves enter too deeply into their early pain. For this reason, a strong network of support is an important part of recovery.

Trauma-related Characteristics

Following is a list of characteristics associated with trauma-related issues that I have complied and work with clinically.

Unresolved Grief

Grief is a process that takes time and includes many different phases and feelings. Stages of mourning that apply to loss of a loved one through death can also apply to the loss of a loved one through relationship rupture. Living with addiction can lead to painful relationship dynamics within the family that feel rupturing, such as the loss of family members to addiction; the loss of family rhythms and rituals; the loss of a comfortable and reliable family unit to grow up in; or the anxiety of wondering if parents are in the position to parent themselves and meeting their changing needs. Stages of loss, according to British psychoanalyst Jonathon Bowlby, are numbness, yearning and searching, disorganization, anger, despair, and reorganization (1969). Others who have experienced loss through parental divorce, parental incarceration, or being removed from the home and put into foster care are also likely to suffer a profound sense of grief. Thus ACoAs often need to mourn not only what happened in their childhoods, but also what never had a chance to happen.

Depression with Feelings of Despair

Research in animals and in people shows that stress or trauma early in life can sensitize the neurons and receptors throughout the central nervous system so that they become “kindled” or oversensitized; kindling is the biochemical process where nerve cells that help regulate emotions are overfired repeatedly by trauma’s effects and thus we perpetually overrespond to stress of all kinds (van der Kolk 1987). Because the limbic system regulates mood, disregulation can lead to difficulty with managing emotional states throughout life, which may contribute to depression. Depression, in my experience, grows when we cannot express pain and anger; it relates to the emotional constriction or frozenness that is part of unresolved grief. The lack of sharing genuine feeling in the addicted home can also lead to isolation, a common feature of depression.

Avoidance/Tendency to Isolate

People who have been traumatized may avoid feelings that threaten them. Because they fear re-experiencing feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, rejection, or rage, they feel safer avoiding the kinds of honest exchanges that might be part of intimacy with themselves and others. They reason that by avoiding honest and authentic connection they will avoid being hurt, and so they isolate or significantly limit direct honesty. They avoid parts of themselves and parts of relational closeness (van der Kolk, McFarlane, and Weisauth 1996). Unfortunately social connectedness, though natural to our species, still needs to be learned and practiced. The more we isolate, the more out of practice we become at making connections with people, which can further isolate us. Support groups like 12-step programs are a godsend for those who fear direct connection as they do not require a formal “joining” and do not insist that people play a particular role. You are as welcome in the rooms as any other person in them and can participate at whatever level you choose.

Shame

Shame is a natural response to feeling that one is somehow in the wrong. Darwin observed it as a part of all cultures, both primitive and advanced, and one can identify it even in animals. For the person growing up in an addicted environment, shame becomes not so much a feeling that is experienced in relation to an incident or a situation—as is the case with guilt—but rather a basic attitude toward and about the self: “I am bad” as opposed to “I did something bad” (Bradshaw 2005). Shame can also be a condition imposed culturally from without or by living in a family that does not accept who you are as an individual or is ashamed of itself within the larger community. Shame can be experienced as a lack of energy for life, an inability to accept love and caring on a consistent basis, or as a hesitancy to move into self-affirming roles. It may play out as impulsive decision-making or an inability to make decisions at all (T. Dayton 2007).

Loss of Trust and Faith

When our personal world and the relationships within it become very unpredictable or unreliable, we may experience a loss of trust and faith (van der Kolk 1985) in both relationships and in life’s ability to repair and renew itself. This is why the restoration of hope is so important in recovery (Yalom 1980). It is also underscores why having a spiritual belief system, such as that in 12-step programs or faith-based affiliations, can be so helpful in personal healing and in restoring a sense of belonging to a community where one can easily access support and friendship. Having a spiritual belief system can play an important role in personal healing by providing both hope and a sense of security despite any ongoing familial and intrapsychic chaos. It can also help the person in pain to reframe suffering and give it positive meaning, which develops resilience. A spiritual belief system can put pain in perspective and give it meaning and purpose (T. Dayton 2007).

Distorted Reasoning

Watching someone we love slowly become someone we cannot make sense of can shake us to the core. It can be disturbing, humiliating, and frightening. Family members may twist or distort their own reasoning in order to make this destabilizing experience easier to manage or less “real.” Distorted reasoning can become intergenerational as children absorb, model, and live out their parent’s way of thinking about and handling distressing situations, and it can affect the health of relationships. Denial of someone’s behavior—for example, a distortion of the truth—is excessive minimization or rationalization. When we attempt to make distorted behavior seem somehow normal, we have to twist our own thinking to do so. Also, as children we make sense of situations with the developmental equipment we have at any given age; when we’re young, we either borrow the reasoning of the adults around us or make our own childlike meaning.

Survivor’s Guilt

The ACoA who “gets out” of an unhealthy family system while others remain mired within it may experience what is referred to as “survivor’s guilt” (T. Dayton 2000; Lifton 1986). This is a condition wherein a person may see himself as having done something wrong by thriving when others were less able to. Survivor’s guilt can lead to self-sabotage or becoming overly preoccupied with fixing one’s family. ACoAs may seesaw between wanting to cut off their family—because being close makes them feel that they are sliding “backward”—and wishing to reconnect with their family so they do not have to tolerate their painful feelings of separateness and guilt. Over time, ACoAs need to learn what children who grew up in healthy families learned: how to be separate and stay connected in ways that allow them to maintain an autonomous sense of self.

Complicating survival guilt can be families who are still “in their disease” and who may feel threatened by those who are blowing the whistle. These family members may collude in blaming the whistle-blower, seeing that person as problematic or disloyal and even marginalizing or rejecting him or her. In this case, the ACoA benefits from creating strong bonds with other family systems, friends, and 12-step or healing ­communities.

Conflated Inner Imagery/Fused Feelings/
Behavior and Boundary Issues

Traumatic imagery and the feelings associated with them become conflated in our inner minds. Layer upon layer of experience and emotion from a variety of incidents and sources fuse together and become a well of stored, trauma-related experience that can get triggered when we are in range of something that is reminiscent of what hurt us or a relational cue that stimulates those memories. This type of conflated inner material can become sticky, leaky, and hard to “hold.” Our inner boundaries around it can therefore become shaky and tenuous. Fused and conflated imagery and feelings can contribute to the emotional enmeshment that is so common with codependency when we have a hard time distinguishing our inner world from someone else’s (van der Kolk 1987).

Feelings and imagery can get fused together along with behaviors in the mind/body when the emotional heat of trauma has helped to sear them together. For example, closeness can get fused with compliance, caring with control, love with fear, or sex with submission or rage.

Inability to Receive Caring and Support from Others

The numbing and the emotional constriction that are a natural part of the trauma response may influence our ability to take in care and support from others. Taking and giving support requires a level of trust and safety within the family system that trauma erodes. Also, fear sets in. We reason “What if I let support feel good? Then it will hurt all the more if and when it disappears again.” So we push it away. And in dysfunctional families support can feel out of sync, because it is based on another person’s needs rather than our own.

High-Risk Behaviors. Adrenaline is highly addictive to the brain and may act as a powerful mood enhancer. Speeding, sexual acting out, spending, fighting, drugging, working too hard, or other behaviors done in a way that put one at risk are some examples of high-risk behavior. Also, trauma can engender a flattened, emotional world. High-risk behaviors can be seen as an attempt to jump-start a numbed inner world by overstimulating the nervous system and body through excitation (van der Kolk 1987, T. Dayton 2007).

Traumatic Bonding

As the family members’ fear increases, so does their need for protective bonds, because as the victim’s dependency grows through abuse, so does his or her need for perceived protection. The intensity and quality of connectedness in families that contain repeated painful interactive patterns can create the types of bonds that people tend to form during times of crisis, referred to as traumatic bonds (Carnes 1997).

Alliances in dysfunctional families may become very critical to one’s sense of self and even to one’s survival. One parent may co-opt a child and form a bond against the other parent. Additionally, children who are feeling hurt and needy and who lose access to their parents as a source of reliable support may turn to each other to fill in the missing sense of security. This can develop into a traumatic sort of bond among siblings. Traumatic bonds formed in childhood tend to repeat their quality and content over and over again throughout life (T. Dayton 2007).

One can feel subjected by another person in a trauma bond and lose his sense of autonomy and personal choice. The nature of the victim/aggressor relationship can mean that one person consistently bends to the will of another and feels that he must simply go along with what the more aggressive, powerful, or older person expects of him. In this kind of bond, saying no can feel impossible, and setting boundaries can feel somewhat unthinkable. There can also be a feeling that one has to be loyal and protective of the abuser or the “other” no matter what, secrets must be kept, and if there is abuse, it cannot be talked about.

Rigid Psychological Defenses

People who are consistently wounded emotionally and are not able to openly and honestly address or process what’s hurting them may develop rigid psychological defenses to manage or ward off pain. Examples of such defenses include:

• dissociation (remaining physically present but inwardly absent)

• denial (rewriting reality to be more palatable)

• splitting (seeing life and people as alternately all good or all bad)

• repression (pushing feelings down out of consciousness)

• minimization (minimizing the impact of situations or behavior)

• intellectualization (using thinking to rationalize and analyze in order to avoid feeling)

• projection (disowning one’s own pain by projecting it outwardly)

• transference (transferring old pain into new relationships)

• reenactment patterns (continually re-creating dysfunctional patterns of relating whether or not they prove successful or healthy)

Repetition Compulsion/Cycles of Reenactment

Repetition compulsion is a psychological phenomenon in which we repeat the emotional, psychological, or behavioral aspects of a traumatic event over and over again without awareness, re-creating pain from yesterday in relationships and circumstances of today (Freud 1922). Partnering and parenting are particularly common ways of passing on this type of pain, as those relationships so closely mirror the family dynamics in which we may have modeled behaviors. Cycles of reenactment can take the form of repeatedly re-creating or reenacting the painful, warded off, or feared contents of the traumatic relationship dynamics, or putting oneself in situations where the
dysfunctional dynamics or similar events are likely to happen again. For example, a man whose mother was an alcoholic may continually project onto his wife the disappointment and mistrust that he “warded off” experiencing toward his mother, being suspicious of her and expecting her to disappoint him.

The characteristics of relationship trauma we have discussed in the last chapters are those that CoAs learn by modeling ­family behavior and internalizing as their own. When they become ACoAs, these characteristics influence how they create and settle into their own adult lives and relationships. Luckily this story is not one-sided, as ACoAs also learn powerful skills of resilience and can be very ingenious and purposeful people as a way of mending and making sense of their past. Breaking out the kinds of characteristics that may have negative impact will helpfully help ACoAs become aware of potential pitfalls of growing up with addiction and/or family abuse and avoid playing them out blindly. “Awareness is prevention“ (A. Dayton 2012).

The Codependency Connection:
Neurobiological and Trauma-Related Factors
that Contribute to Codependency

Codependency can be seen as the predictable set of qualities directly arising from how the brain/body processes fear and trauma.

Children’s powerful need to attach is a primary piece of the codependency puzzle. Attachment is key to our survival, and we need it for our sense of well-being, so pathologizing attachment behaviors can be a slippery slope. But attachments that become traumatized can give rise to what we often call codependent tendencies. Codependent behaviors are more or less natural and attuned behaviors that have been stretched out of shape. The following neurological findings create a picture of the forces that may drive codependent behavior.

Fear-based relating. The prefrontal cortex is where we make decisions and long-range plans; it is where we form the mental templates that predict the future, tell us what to expect next, or how to lay out a task. It is also where we predict the behavior of those around us. When we freeze in fear, our ability to make these sorts of mental projections and leaps is affected. Trauma can cause us to overread or underread social or relational signals and lose our relational footing.

We look at other people’s expressions to come up with ideas on what to think, feel, and do. Our frozen thinking combined with our hypervigilant or heightened ability to scan the environment can affect our ability to make clear and autonomous decisions.

Sense of Self. It is a gift of the prefrontal cortex that we can do something as abstract as imagine a sense of self. Our sense of self is under constant construction. We are always editing and adapting our self-concept—our “self-picture.” For CoAs who are regularly in a mild to intense state of fear, the shutting down of this picturing and organizing aspect of the brain can significantly impact their ability to sustain their own concept of “self” and “self in relation”; thinking may feel frozen or confused, and emotions may feel enmeshed and indistinct.

Individuation can be tough for those who lack a clear sense of self. They may feel that if they pull away from their attachment figures they will disappear or will not have enough “self” to sustain them. Or they may fear that if they don’t placate and “take care of” other people, no one will like them.

Hypervigilance. Because of the way the brain processes trauma, cumulative trauma can make us hypervigilant (van der Kolk 1987); we become hyperresponsive to stimuli that might make us anxious that we will be hurt, rejected, or disappointed, and we constantly scan our environment for signs of some form of relational threat.

For CoAs, this can mean becoming hyperfocused on other people’s expressions, expectations, needs, and possible next moves so that we can steer clear of trouble. This little fact is codependency in the making. We start to base our behavior on what we believe will fit best into the situation that we fear.

Chronic Stress. Because it causes the constant release of the stress hormone cortisol, chronic stress can get us stuck in our fight/flight/freeze response. Too much cortisol can cause stressful relating to morph into codependent relating by undermining the cortex’s ability to regulate fear signals coming from the amygdala. Too much cortisol also partially shuts down the hippocampus, the part of the brain that helps us to accurately perceive and read our environment. The hippocampus’s job is to provide context, to tell us what is scaring us and just how scared we need to be, and to ground us in our present-oriented environment. When this part of the brain is not functioning correctly, we can feel lost in space, and we feel like our anxiety, along with our need to control and fix, gets bigger.

So when the amygdala is firing too many fear signals and the hippocampus and cortex aren’t working properly, we become simultaneously stressed out and unable to regulate our overwhelming stress. We can get stuck in the stress inside of us and unable to put what’s us triggering into context in order to manage it. We overread or overreact to signals like mood shifts, change in vocal tones, or even another person’s momentary insecurity. So we rush in to help, fix, control, or manage the person who is making us anxious. We mood manage them instead of ourselves in the mistaken perception that if we can just get them to change, we will feel calmer and less anxious.

Intimacy can get stuck right here. When partners, for example, are simultaneously in this state, no new information can get in and the “stuck place” that they’re in can’t get processed and put into context. Everything they feel is “about” someone else and they do not reflect on their own behavior, nor do they “hold” the couple dynamic in their minds very well.

Projecting Our Disowned Feelings onto Others. ­Codepen­dency is not the same as selflessness. Selflessness is a choice. Parents are often called on to be selfless, putting their children’s needs before their own, recognizing that their child’s state of development requires this. But codependency is not a putting aside or postponing of personal need; it is a projection of personal need that we do not recognize within ourselves onto another person. It is a reaction to and a projection of the state we enter when we’re anxious and hypervigilant. There is an old joke that goes, “A codependent is someone who puts a sweater on someone else . . . when they feel cold.” In other words, codependents identify their own feelings in other people rather than within themselves and then they set about taking care of in another person what they truly need/want taken care of within themselves. In a sense, it’s easier to focus on another person’s ­feelings than their own. Codependents may have trouble identifying and owning their own feelings because they have had little practice or encouragement in doing so. Needless to say, this habit of identifying our own feelings in someone else while disowning them in ourselves complicates intimacy and parenting.

Boundaries: The Urge to Merge

It’s difficult to have good boundaries when we’re more aware of another person than we are of ourselves, or when we project our pain rather than own and process it. When we are more focused on scanning another person’s emotional state than our own, we do several things: we may misread their emotions because our fear mind is the mind doing the reading. We may also have trouble distinguishing them from us; we feel not “for” them but “as” them. We tune in so much to the other that we lose ourselves in that person’s feelings. We get confused, and when CoAs get confused, we don’t like it and we want to fix it, fast! Unfortunately, this rarely works because as long as we’re hypervigilant in our “reading” of another person, we are not clearly seeing them or ourselves.

Setting boundaries in an alcoholic/addicted home is not easy. After all, at least one parent is violating one of the most basic boundaries of parenting by being unfit and bringing no end of pain and fear into the household. Addicts violate the safety of the home and everyone in it, and that, along with all of the denial and deception that surround addiction, are fundamental boundary violations.

Women: Wired for Connection

Women are wired for connection from birth, and, in terms of codependency, this can be a liability. Nature has designed the female of the species to pick up on the subtle signals from ­others so that we can be sensitive caretakers of our young (Brazendine 2006). Robert Ackerman, author of Perfect Daughters, conducted a study in 1989; he found that “daughters of alcoholics reported a significantly higher need for control, over-reaction to change, and feelings of overresponsibility for others. They also rated themselves higher in difficulty with intimacy, approval and affirmation, and judging themselves harshly as compared to daughters of nonalcoholics. In an open-ended, follow-up survey, 33 percent of the adult daughters of alcoholics (versus 9 percent of the adult children of nonalcoholics) reported the greatest parenting issue for them as parents was their “need for control” (Ackerman 1988). They reported taking on too many responsibilities for their children by overprotecting them, had extremely high expectations of their children, and “felt responsible for making sure everything in the family was under control”(ibid).

Simply being aware of women’s qualities of connection can allow women to manage this extra sensitivity; it is, after all, a gift of nature. Women’s ability to pick up on subtle signals and read moods are beautiful qualities when understood. Our world has relied on that ability for centuries to bring tenderness and sensitivity into the home and toward children, and now, thankfully, that ability is finding its way into the workplace and the political arena.

Healing trauma is healing codependency. As historical pain is processed rather than projected and the self becomes more distinct and present oriented, codependent behaviors begin to clear up naturally.