If there had been an Oscar for “Most Changed by Treatment,” Kali Rose would have won it. She arrived at the retreat house at the beginning of the misery addiction treatment program looking like a war refugee.
And she was—a refugee from her war against herself. She had slept just a few hours a night for weeks. She’d eaten nothing but sugary stuff for the previous three days. Exercise? Forget it. And in the span of two hours prior to arriving, she had smoked a pack of cigarettes.
Remember how her father converted his own stress and anxiety into anger against Kali Rose? In a similar way, Kali Rose converted all of her uncomfortable feelings into anger against her own body.
She was over her stress limit when treatment started—changing jobs, worried about a sick friend. Her feelings of being overwhelmed were converted to self-abuse.
Plus she was entering treatment. And nearly everyone binges on their own brand of drug before walking through those life-changing doors.
Now, after two months in the embrace of a healthy community, Kali Rose looked like a different woman. Not permitted to abuse herself, having her human needs met abundantly, she was alert, present, amusing, delightful, and powerful.
After treatment, she moved in with her mother.
“Kali Rose, I thought you were going to the gym. Aren’t you late?”
“Kali Rose, when are you going to make something of yourself?”
“Kali Rose, don’t sit so close.”
“Don’t take so long in the bathroom.”
“Don’t be so messy.”
“When are you going to the gym? You said you would leave an hour ago?”
“When are you getting your hair cut?”
“Don’t you think it’s time to start covering that gray?”
“Now that you are doing so well, why don’t you go on a diet? Look, for dinner I made a salad and a cold vegetable plate to help you. You know, when you get older, your metabolism decreases. You have to eat less.”
Words like this, spoken at routine intervals, are like slow torture. They send the same message: you are not acceptable.
Would you start feeling irritated if you heard this stuff day in and out? So would anyone. That’s the natural reaction.
Kali Rose’s mother was picking on her. It would be natural to respond with anger.
But Kali Rose couldn’t let herself be angry with her mother, so her self-hatred returned with a vengeance. Within two weeks she was back to staying up too late, bingeing on sugar, skipping medication, and punishing herself.
Kali Rose’s mom discharged her own anxiety by targeting Kali Rose; then Kali Rose targeted herself.
Kali Rose would lay down her life for her mother. In a way, she had. By not allowing herself to voice her anger and by abusing her body, Kali Rose was endangering her life.
Another example of a child being turned against his own body is found in Javier’s life. Perhaps Graciela resented being a sharecropper’s wife. Maybe an exhibitionist unwrapped himself in front of her when she was young. Whatever her reason, she made her son feel dirty.
Javier couldn’t escape Graciela’s incessant comments to his sister about what all men want, how they just had one thing on their minds, and how she should not let men touch her.
He wouldn’t remember her harsh scrubbing when he was diapered, but his implicit memory held the message intact—that women hurt, that the body is a source of pain. He did remember her veiled and embarrassing comments about what he was doing so long in the bathroom and how he had to keep his hands on top of his covers at all times. He remembered the day she refused to wash his sheets and made him do it. He remembered how she wouldn’t touch him and recoiled when he hugged her, whether he was seven or twenty-seven.
Javier became an adult with two problems: he hated his body, and he both hated and wanted ministering from women. He expressed his body hatred by putting himself on endless, strict diets. He looked like a prisoner of war. In a way, he was.
His issues with women were complex, so his cycle with women was complex. He had a way of drawing a woman to him, inviting her to mother him, and then stripping her of her self-esteem with brilliant, undetectable insults. He picked needy women with low self-esteem who would never leave him, and then he left them.
Not all misery addicts hate and target their bodies, but those who do have one thing in common—their mothers rejected them physically and criticized their appearance, movement, or sexuality. In addition, their mothers were not usually physically affectionate. They didn’t cuddle, hug, or hold their children.
Every child is in serious need of a stamp of approval from Mom. She’s the maker after all. If your manufacturer finds you faulty, it’s hard to overcome the stigma. It makes you feel like she regrets putting you together.
Any reasons she might have—such as not wanting to be pregnant or being upset at losing her career—don’t help. By the time you learn this information, you’ve already lived with rejection for at least a couple of decades.
Maternal rejection seeps into our cells. We are filled with a sense of wrongness that isn’t easily overcome.
One lever that will pry it loose is expressing our anger fluently and flowingly. We don’t have to express it to the person with whom we are angry. We just have to say it to someone who cares about us and who will listen heartfully. We may have to pound a pillow or throw ice at a wall outside, but pillows don’t get hurt and ice melts.
It’s important for everyone to express anger and to be willing and able to do so. But most of the misery addicts I’ve worked with have stuck anger, anger that is suppressed and difficult to access. Yet even deeply buried anger finds some way to pollute the ground. It’s either misdirected to an inappropriate target, such as our own body, or expressed indirectly through passive aggression, passive resistance, hurtful teasing, or sabotage.
People who mishandle anger in the opposite direction, through rage or violence, usually aren’t misery addicts, and they’re more likely to harm others than themselves. The emotion they are suppressing is commonly grief or fear. (For these folks I recommend the books The Anger Habit by Carl Semmelroth and Donald Smith and Beyond Anger—A Guide for Men: How to Free Yourself from the Grip of Anger and Get More Out of Your Life by Thomas Harbin.)
In either case, a true feeling is being redirected into a different expression that feels more acceptable. Unfortunately, however, stand-ins never do the trick. If grief is the true feeling, rage won’t diminish it. If anger is the true feeling, no amount of misdirected, indirect anger will abate it.
Only a clear, direct, wholehearted expression of the anger will do the job.