I've been intrigued for a long time by the famous Thomas Wolfe line "You can never go home again." Home is that elusive place-in-time (or, in physics, point-in-space/time) that once was, but can never be the same again. It's not just a physical location. Sure, you can go to the place that was once your home; in fact, you may live in the exact same house or at least the same city in which you were born. But 'home', as in that place-in-time where you thought of yourself as 'being at home' was once, but can never be again, the same place. It has changed, just like you have changed. The 'you' who goes there is not the 'you' who once thought of that place, in that time, as home. It can become a complex analysis, breaking each component of the sentence and the concept down into constituent parts.
I was reminded of the sentence this morning when I was talking with an old friend from Albuquerque, where I lived for 29 years of my adult life. I was born into and lived my childhood in a military family, so I have never been 'from' a specific place (we lived in 7 U.S. states and possessions and two foreign countries). There is no 'this is my home' sense, for me, in the same way that people who grow up in a town, from birth until they leave their parent's house. I now live in St. Louis, Missouri and I meet a lot of people who were born here, have lived here their whole life, and fully intend to die here. This is their 'home', and though they have changed, and St. Louis has changed, they have that 'sense of home' in a stronger and more 'stable' way than I can ever manifest. Nevertheless, when I reached 17 years of age, I moved to New Mexico to go to college (because my mother was from there and my parents had residency in the state, hence schooling was less expensive). After a year in Socorro at the School of Mines, I moved to and lived in Albuquerque until 1998, when I moved to St. Louis. So, in the sense of 'a singular place where I spent the majority of my life', Albuquerque is my primary home, with St. Louis my second home.
This Christmas, I sent a gift of a book on the history of the Missouri Botanical Gardens to a number of different friends whom I'd met over the years (most of them in New Mexico). I sent it sort of 'out of the blue' -- no one expected a present from me, and indeed I had never before sent them a Christmas gift. But I did it this year as an 'incentive' for them to remember me and to give serious thought to come and visit me in my second home city; in fact, I stated such, quite directly, in my letter to them. As those friends have called to thank me for the gift, we have had a chance to 'catch up' on the events that have transpired in our mutual lives. And, lo and behold (I say that as a small bit of surprise, given how each of us gets involved in our lives wherever-we-are) 'life happens' to your friends [and the rest of the world] when you're living your own life. My friend in Albuquerque was telling me about how his wife of 30 years has developed ALS and is slowly physically deteriorating from the condition. That put me in a bit of a melancholy mood, and made me sad that I hadn't been there to live through all the years with them as the close friends they had been when I lived in Albuquerque. But, of course, none of us can be in more than one place at a time. We can only live our lives wherever-we-are, and be aware of, somewhat tangentially, the lives of others at a distance.
That got me to thinking about the journeys that immigrants have taken throughout history. I remember reading about how, when Europeans left the 'Old World' for the 'New' (America), they knew they were unlikely to ever see their families again. And how this was true for early settlers of the American West, when they left their families back East. Or what refugees experience when they leave war-torn countries to immigrate to a new country to raise their families in relative peace. There is always the probability they will never again see the families or friends who constituted their 'home'. They are, indeed, moving elsewhere to establish a new 'home', for themselves and their families, to establish a different 'place-in-time' where they can once again create a 'sense of home'.
Nowadays, with computers and the Internet, the ability to keep track of family and old friends is more resilient. You don't even have to wait until someone replies to a letter; you can call them on the phone or write them an email, and 'instantaneously' reconnect. But, of course, it's not quite the same thing as 'being there', nor of having lived in the same town and had the experience of interacting on a regular basis. It's surely better than what immigrants have had for most of human history, no doubt about it. It's a much quicker connection and you can ever write to people at 3 in the morning, when you can't sleep and know that, via email, you can send them a note which they will read at their leisure. And that casual ability to keep connections alive, even while living your busy life elsewhere, is truly a wonderful gift of technology.
There is another level, though, of 'never going home again' for people who are recovering from trauma. The journey of recovery takes one (hopefully, if there is forward movement) far afield from the 'home' where one's trauma occurred. And, indeed, the point of being in recovery is to move quite far away from the original home. In the case of recovery, the hope is that one won't be able to come home again, at least in the sense of the home where the trauma took place. That's a 'home' you want to leave far behind. But, at the same time, like any immigrant, you want to establish a new 'sense of home' in a place where you can find relative peace. And that 'place-in-time' may also be a 'place inside your soul' where one can experience safety in a way that was never possible in the original 'home'.
There were, indeed, many aspects of my life in my military family that I never want to 'go home again' to, just as there were with my life in Albuquerque (or even life here in St. Louis). I'm nostalgic for the good times, the warm loving experiences with my friends, and the intermittent happy times with my family-of-origin, but surely I'd like to move beyond, and never return to, the negative events, the years of deep depression, and the long years of painful struggle involved with recovering from the sexual, physical and emotional trauma.
So, though none of us can 'ever really go home again', on some levels we wouldn't want to, and on other levels we wish we could. It's complex. That 'place-in-time' isn't what it 'used to be'. We're different, it's different, life has moved on, we've gotten older. But if we can create a safe and resilient 'place in our souls' that is, for us, 'home', then we can carry our 'sense of home' around with us wherever we are, forever.
Monday, December 27, 2010
Monday, December 20, 2010
Fear Of Intimacy Is Doubly Difficult for Sexual Abuse Survivors
Everyone I know, everyone I read about, talks about having a 'fear of intimacy'. It's hardly an unusual phenomenon. Getting emotionally close to another human being is difficult, in the best of circumstances. Each person brings to a relationship their own 'emotional baggage' -- familial upbringing, cultural assumptions and expectations, personal hopes and longings, media images of 'what a good relationship looks like', body-type preferences, sexual and financial desires, experiences with past relationships, good or bad, and a whole host of other life challenges. To say that it's difficult, 'in the best of all possible worlds', to find a compatible partner is to put it mildly. Even people with relatively positive life experiences have a struggle finding someone with whom they want to spend time, someone with whom they share 'chemistry', and finding someone to spend a lifetime with -- well, the chances of that happening are statistically quite rare.
But for survivors of sexual (and physical, emotional, or religious) trauma, the fear of intimacy is doubly difficult. They are not simply butting up against run-of-the-mill fears, of 'losing oneself' in an intimate relationship, but of being able to trust another human being not to abuse them in the same [or a similar] way they were abused as children. As children, they were molested and/or raped by 'caregivers' who 'said' they loved them, even as the 'caregivers' violated every shred of the child's trust. After a childhood of being told that love was being 'disciplined' by being beaten senseless ["I wouldn't beat you if I didn't love you"], or that love was submitting to the sexual predation of mentally diseased adults, or that love was being the object of another's violent outbursts or unreasonable religious demands, one's 'sense' of 'love' has been rather corrupted. And it becomes necessary as an adult, through positive mental health intervention, to re-learn what love can be whole-cloth, from the ground up.
And that lack of trust tends to be projected upon an individual who most looks like the child's abuser. If you were a boy child and your father molested you, you tend to distrust most men and be fearful of male supervisors; or if your mother molested you, you tend to distrust women generally and be fearful of female authority figures. The same is true for girls (distrust of men if your father molested you, fear of other women if your mother did the sexual abuse). If both your parents engaged in the sexual abuse or if the parent who abused you took pleasure in gender cross-dressing when they engaged in the sexual molestation, your struggle to trust much of anyone, of either gender, is greatly compromised. It might take a lifetime of searching, going through one relationship after another -- via serial promiscuity or serial monogamy -- before finding someone who is compatible. Even then, with the best of mental health intervention (assuming the survivor has access to such assistance, which especially for boys is rare), finding a compatible partner with whom one has 'positive chemistry' and whom one can trust, is rare. Not impossible, but rare.
The sexual abuse survivor fears, with good reason, that they might 'go to their grave' never finding a partner who cares about them personally. One of the 'trauma messages' that is learned by many survivors is that their only value is in being sexual, primarily being 'sexually available' for the pleasure of someone else, or for being able to 'sexually service' their abuser. [For some sexual trauma survivors, not being in a sexual relationship, as an adult, for an extended period of time sets the stage for suicidal thoughts -- precisely because they believe their only value in the world is in 'servicing the sexual needs of others'. Not having that opportunity for a long time essentially means, by way of this dysfunctional logic, that they no longer have 'human value' in this world.] That the other person could, possibly, be concerned with the survivor's sexual pleasure or emotional care is so far from consideration as to be viewed as 'fantasyland' -- maybe desired, but utterly and completely unexpected.
Many survivors, at least until they learn better mating techniques [and the underlying emotional dynamics], tend to be attracted to people who are 'similar' to their abusers (even if they say to themselves that they are looking for someone quite different from their abuser), simply because that 'kind of person' is familiar to them. It's not that people want to be abused again (for most victims, the last thing they consciously want is a reenactment of their trauma), rather that they tend to be attracted to people who have characteristics that reenforce their underlying trauma dynamics. As a therapist noted to me one time: "If a survivor is in a room with 100 people and 99 of them have relatively healthy behaviors, but there is one person in the room who exhibits the underlying inappropriate behaviors that a survivor is 'familiar with', that is the person with whom the survivor will try to connect."
This pattern will continue for years until and unless the survivor has the opportunity and resources to obtain constructive mental health intervention and a provider who can lay out the underlying dynamics. Only by showing the survivor how he is reenacting the trauma and point out a more effective approach to finding a healthy relationship will anything begin to change. As was pointed out to me in the course of my own recovery "the best way to find a suitable partner is to be the kind of person you are seeking." It was only by engaging in a lifetime of really difficult mental health recovery that I finally gained sufficient mental health to be able to 'attract' a relatively healthy intimate partner/friend into my life. And, indeed, I have found someone with whom I now have a long-term relationship, but it took 38 years of 'dating'. [This is not to fail to acknowledge some delightful short-term relationships -- and some resultant long-term friendships -- with women in the interim, but to note that this is the first time anyone has been willing to 'invest' in a mutual long-term emotionally caring and sexually pleasurable interaction with this survivor.]
For so very long, it was as though there was an infinitely strong plexiglas wall between myself and other people. I could 'see' other people engaging in what appeared to be emotionally and sexually caring relationships, but my access to those kinds of interactions was impossible. It was as though that was available to other people, but surely not to me. When I would discuss such a possibility with female partners, their behavioral reaction (if not their actual words) was "That's a really funny joke; do you have any more humor like that?" It was extraordinarily painful to be rejected for a long-term invested relationship time-after-time, even when I felt deeply loving toward the women. Finally, a couple of years ago, I met someone who, due to their own trauma recovery and positive relational intervention, was seeking someone like me.
It has taken a 'a lifetime' [I'm now 59] to find someone with whom I'm compatible, but I know now, personally, that it is possible. And I extend that 'acknowledgement of possibility' to other survivors of profound sexual trauma. I'm not talking about perfection (what would that even look or be like?) nor am I saying there are any guarantees of it's longevity; I'm talking about hard relationship work that has the chance to lead to a positive relationship outcome. At least now I have an 'envelope' in which to generate such a mutually caring - and trusting - relationship. I'm finally on the other side of that plexiglas wall.
But for survivors of sexual (and physical, emotional, or religious) trauma, the fear of intimacy is doubly difficult. They are not simply butting up against run-of-the-mill fears, of 'losing oneself' in an intimate relationship, but of being able to trust another human being not to abuse them in the same [or a similar] way they were abused as children. As children, they were molested and/or raped by 'caregivers' who 'said' they loved them, even as the 'caregivers' violated every shred of the child's trust. After a childhood of being told that love was being 'disciplined' by being beaten senseless ["I wouldn't beat you if I didn't love you"], or that love was submitting to the sexual predation of mentally diseased adults, or that love was being the object of another's violent outbursts or unreasonable religious demands, one's 'sense' of 'love' has been rather corrupted. And it becomes necessary as an adult, through positive mental health intervention, to re-learn what love can be whole-cloth, from the ground up.
And that lack of trust tends to be projected upon an individual who most looks like the child's abuser. If you were a boy child and your father molested you, you tend to distrust most men and be fearful of male supervisors; or if your mother molested you, you tend to distrust women generally and be fearful of female authority figures. The same is true for girls (distrust of men if your father molested you, fear of other women if your mother did the sexual abuse). If both your parents engaged in the sexual abuse or if the parent who abused you took pleasure in gender cross-dressing when they engaged in the sexual molestation, your struggle to trust much of anyone, of either gender, is greatly compromised. It might take a lifetime of searching, going through one relationship after another -- via serial promiscuity or serial monogamy -- before finding someone who is compatible. Even then, with the best of mental health intervention (assuming the survivor has access to such assistance, which especially for boys is rare), finding a compatible partner with whom one has 'positive chemistry' and whom one can trust, is rare. Not impossible, but rare.
The sexual abuse survivor fears, with good reason, that they might 'go to their grave' never finding a partner who cares about them personally. One of the 'trauma messages' that is learned by many survivors is that their only value is in being sexual, primarily being 'sexually available' for the pleasure of someone else, or for being able to 'sexually service' their abuser. [For some sexual trauma survivors, not being in a sexual relationship, as an adult, for an extended period of time sets the stage for suicidal thoughts -- precisely because they believe their only value in the world is in 'servicing the sexual needs of others'. Not having that opportunity for a long time essentially means, by way of this dysfunctional logic, that they no longer have 'human value' in this world.] That the other person could, possibly, be concerned with the survivor's sexual pleasure or emotional care is so far from consideration as to be viewed as 'fantasyland' -- maybe desired, but utterly and completely unexpected.
Many survivors, at least until they learn better mating techniques [and the underlying emotional dynamics], tend to be attracted to people who are 'similar' to their abusers (even if they say to themselves that they are looking for someone quite different from their abuser), simply because that 'kind of person' is familiar to them. It's not that people want to be abused again (for most victims, the last thing they consciously want is a reenactment of their trauma), rather that they tend to be attracted to people who have characteristics that reenforce their underlying trauma dynamics. As a therapist noted to me one time: "If a survivor is in a room with 100 people and 99 of them have relatively healthy behaviors, but there is one person in the room who exhibits the underlying inappropriate behaviors that a survivor is 'familiar with', that is the person with whom the survivor will try to connect."
This pattern will continue for years until and unless the survivor has the opportunity and resources to obtain constructive mental health intervention and a provider who can lay out the underlying dynamics. Only by showing the survivor how he is reenacting the trauma and point out a more effective approach to finding a healthy relationship will anything begin to change. As was pointed out to me in the course of my own recovery "the best way to find a suitable partner is to be the kind of person you are seeking." It was only by engaging in a lifetime of really difficult mental health recovery that I finally gained sufficient mental health to be able to 'attract' a relatively healthy intimate partner/friend into my life. And, indeed, I have found someone with whom I now have a long-term relationship, but it took 38 years of 'dating'. [This is not to fail to acknowledge some delightful short-term relationships -- and some resultant long-term friendships -- with women in the interim, but to note that this is the first time anyone has been willing to 'invest' in a mutual long-term emotionally caring and sexually pleasurable interaction with this survivor.]
For so very long, it was as though there was an infinitely strong plexiglas wall between myself and other people. I could 'see' other people engaging in what appeared to be emotionally and sexually caring relationships, but my access to those kinds of interactions was impossible. It was as though that was available to other people, but surely not to me. When I would discuss such a possibility with female partners, their behavioral reaction (if not their actual words) was "That's a really funny joke; do you have any more humor like that?" It was extraordinarily painful to be rejected for a long-term invested relationship time-after-time, even when I felt deeply loving toward the women. Finally, a couple of years ago, I met someone who, due to their own trauma recovery and positive relational intervention, was seeking someone like me.
It has taken a 'a lifetime' [I'm now 59] to find someone with whom I'm compatible, but I know now, personally, that it is possible. And I extend that 'acknowledgement of possibility' to other survivors of profound sexual trauma. I'm not talking about perfection (what would that even look or be like?) nor am I saying there are any guarantees of it's longevity; I'm talking about hard relationship work that has the chance to lead to a positive relationship outcome. At least now I have an 'envelope' in which to generate such a mutually caring - and trusting - relationship. I'm finally on the other side of that plexiglas wall.
Monday, December 13, 2010
Physical Manifestations That Result From Sexual Trauma
To say that an individual is 'sensitized' by their sexual abuse trauma is to put it mildly. The very nature of a trauma event pushes ones nerves to the breaking point, forcing the person who is being molested to both shut down emotionally and want to flee the event as quickly as possible -- though flight is often not possible, especially if the assailant is bigger and/or stronger or is using a weapon to force, via coercion, submission from their victim. That 'fight or flight' desire is almost always present, and depending on the level and frequency of the abuse, it can eventually become an inculcated defense in the abused individual's life. Even when abuse is not actually occurring, the abused individual is constantly 'on guard' in defense against a possible set-up, attack, or abandonment. And they tend to 'read abuse into' situations which might objectively be nonthreatening to a non-abused person, simply because they expect abuse to occur without the slightest provocation.
The adrenal glands, which produce the chemicals that allow the body to be ready for flight, are continually taxed and depleted. And there is plenty of, at least anecdotal, evidence that this depletion leads the individual to become hypersensitive to the world around them. I give my own situation as an example of this syndrome. Between profound physical abuse, incest, the resultant attempt to 'stuff' the emotional pain with substance abuse, and various disease maladies over the years, my own body has become more and more hypersensitive (not less) as I have aged. Medications which I had been able to tolerate when I was younger (and at an earlier stage in my mental health recovery -- indeed, when I was more 'shut down' emotionally) have now become intolerable as I have gained a greater 'sense' of my somatic body, as I have 'spent more time', consciously, in my body. [One definite result of profound trauma is that abused people spend a good deal of their waking hours being mentally and emotionally 'outside of their own skin', because it was -- and continues to be -- not safe to consciously inhabit the body that was so severely abused.]
Medical practitioners always assume that since I'm a tall man [6'8"] who weighs over 200 pounds that I can easily tolerate fairly strong levels of medication; in fact, quite the opposite is true. I often can only tolerate children's doses (and even then, I can 'feel' the medication cursing through my body in a way that most people find rather curious, since they don't feel much of anything on a normal adult dose). Several of my therapists have speculated over the years that this is, at least in part, due to the over-depletion of the adrenal glands. It is very difficult for me to completely relax in any given situation because I'm continually 'on guard' for a possible attack. Which is, of course, as an adult somewhat paradoxical, since now I'm tall enough and big enough to probably fend off most non-weapon related physical attacks -- but it is difficult for me to 'know' that that's an objective reality.
A number of years ago, when I was first setting up the Mariposa Men's Wellness Institute, I speculated that 'most men' walked around in a constant 'defense mode', continually 'on guard' for physical [or, in business, emotional] attack from, especially, other men. My therapist at the time noted that he didn't see that kind of defense exhibited by most men at all, and that I might want to consider that that was my personal experience which I was then generalizing to all males. That came as a real 'ah ha' moment for me; I simply assumed that my experience was the experience that was common to most other men (especially given the 'one-up-man-ship that many men exhibit toward one another). Indeed, it may be the experience of some other males, and is very probably the experience of other males who, like myself, had been profoundly abused as children (or who had experienced torture, war-related trauma, or physical attack as an adult), but it was not, as my therapist pointed out, the 'common experience' of most males in their daily lives.
Even now, after many years of recovery work, I find myself having to consciously overcome panicky 'fight or flight' feelings in two particular situations: when I walk past another man who is sitting on a park bench and when a crowed room becomes very quiet for more than a minute. In the first situation, I have a powerful fear that I will be attacked and raped by the man on the bench when my back is turned away. In the second situation, I have an overt sensation that it's a 'quiet before the storm' moment, that any moment I will be physically assaulted. Now, I have clear memories about the second of the two situations: in my family-of-origin, the 'discipline' [i.e. physical violence] was often meted out after a period of silence. It was far 'safer' when there was a lot of noise, when other people in the family [especially my father] were otherwise occupied. But the first situation is more defuse in my memory. I'm well aware of what the fear is, and I have to consciously regulate my breathing to feel any sense of safety (and continue walking -- after about 50 feet of distance, the fear subsides considerably). But the event that causes the fear is rather unclear to me (though I assume it is related to an actual event in my childhood). But in both situations, I have to make a hyperconscious effort to overcome my 'fight or flight' fears, and know in my heart that I can, as an adult, take care of myself.
Abuse survivors often face a lifetime of these fears and phobias, and require continual therapeutic [and/or personal] intervention to feel any sense of safety in situations that non-abused persons would not particularly notice. It requires a focus on desensitizing oneself to these kinds of triggers, differentiating between real and imagined threats.
Monday, December 6, 2010
Filling the Bottomless Pit of 'Not Enough'
For many years, I've studied and have been involved in various 12-step groups around the issue of addiction. Back in the mid-1980's, I served on the New Mexico Governor's Task Force on Alcoholism [after it was no longer an issue in my own life]. As a younger adult, I had my own issues with substance abuse addiction, as I tried -- albeit quite ineffectively -- to 'kill the emotional pain' resulting from the sexual and physical abuse I experienced as a child. I was in profound anguish about that terror and doing everything I could think of to try to forget and move on. It took many years of hard slogging psychotherapy before I realized that it was only by diving into the middle and going through the pain in a sober state of mind that I could ever hope to come out of it.
This is a common problem faced by people who have serious PTSD [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder] issues. As a first sort of pre-mental health education step, they just want to stuff the outrageous pain that is in their souls resulting from all the terror that was visited upon them (from physical, sexual and emotional abuse and/or warfare). But the addiction to those mind-altering substances simply doesn't help, at all. Their intent is spot-on, but the effectiveness of that methodology is simply nonexistent. If anything, their lives tend to spiral out-of-control [even the minimal 'control' that they can exercise in this rather random existence] and worsen as they need more and more 'doses' of alcohol and illicit substances to suppress their inner emotional turmoil. In many cases, they have to finally 'hit the wall' or 'bottom out' before they can have the willingness to take more appropriate and effective steps out of their angst. It takes that willingness, some basic knowledge about more healthy alternative paths, and often intervention by outside agencies [mental health, social service, or judicial] to move to 'the next step' of their recovery. Many volumes have been written about how to move forward and what steps are necessary to gain self-empowering mental health; it's not my intent to cover that here. My focus this week is to talk about a few of the precursor feelings that cause the addictions to surface in the first place.
The major one that I'm only too aware of (that I continue to suffer from, in spades, even after many years of a clear and forward-moving path of recovery) is the very primal sense of not being enough, what I call 'not-enough-ness'. Children often gain this sense when their 'caregivers' either fail to instill the sense in their children that they are 'enough' just the way they are, or have unduly high expectations of their children (expectation levels that no one could possibly meet), or actively terrorize their children with profound physical, sexual, emotional and/or religious abuse. The children grow up with the clear sense that no matter what they achieve in the world, it is never enough to gain their parents' unconditional love. In many situations, the parents think of themselves as 'not being enough' and therefore pass this self-deprecation on to their children [in a whole host of ways]. Or, due to their own negative feelings and/or the abuse they experienced as children, they fail to have any clear idea how to express honest love toward their children, even if they have the sincere desire to do so.
Though I've managed to move beyond the more physically and emotionally destructive addictions, like many people who have those experiences as children I'm still very much ruled by not-enough-ness addictions. Nowadays, that expresses itself in avid 'collecting', surrounding myself with academic degrees, stuff in my house [art, books, music, etc.], industrial quantities of ushering at music, dance and theater venues, and service on community boards. While one could say that these addictions are less destructive to my 'being', and indeed do, in many ways, serve a positive purpose for other people in the community (due to the high levels of volunteerism), the 'reason' I do much of it is that primal fear that failure to engage in all of this will expose me to my feelings of 'not being enough'. Hence, even though much of it may indeed serve a positive social outcome, the motivation [often, though hardly always] is less commendable. And rather abusive of the care of my inner child's better needs.
I'm reminded of the advice I gave a woman, years ago, with whom I had an intimate relationship. No matter how much love I laid upon her, she simply couldn't 'feel' the love and was always yearning for more. I noted to her that life is 'like a Pilsner glass', wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. You can pour gallons upon gallons of love in from the top -- from outside of the Self -- and the glass would never fill up [like a bottomless sink hole], but if you squeezed one drop in from the bottom -- from your inner Self, from your love of yourself -- the glass would fill up immediately. If we can't feel love for ourselves, it is difficult to feel love from others. She never quite 'got it'; I finally gave up the relationship when I realized that 'the sky was the limit' on her need for love, or in other words, there was no limit. When I came to that realization, I moved on, to protect my own rather weak emotional heart.
The other image I often perceived in my relationships with many of the women I met was that it was like they were laying on the ground with their mouths wide open, waiting to be 'fed' with emotion that they couldn't supply, not to themselves or to me. I had my own host of PTSD issues; looking back upon such situations, I realize that I likely was attracted to women who were themselves sexual abuse survivors, simply because that 'viewpoint' was familiar to me (surely not healthy, but what I was used to). It has only been in recent years, as my mental health has increased and my recovery become stable and resonant, that I have begun to attract women into my life who, while they may or may not have had their own trauma issues [as Lord Byron noted, none of us leave this world without some pain in our lives], at least were actively working on their own recovery and therefore had 'emotional space and energy available' to offer honest love instead of simply demanding its unilateral receipt.
This is not to say that it doesn't 'take two to tango'; indeed, all intimate relationships, with one's Self [one's inner voices] and with others, takes active involvement and responsibility by all parties. I am noting that I [along with other PTSD survivors of profound abuse] had -- and have -- my own angst around not-enough-ness and that that 'lacking' has and does influence my ability to manifest and maintain loving friendships. All survivors of profound abuse struggle with those issues.
This is a common problem faced by people who have serious PTSD [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder] issues. As a first sort of pre-mental health education step, they just want to stuff the outrageous pain that is in their souls resulting from all the terror that was visited upon them (from physical, sexual and emotional abuse and/or warfare). But the addiction to those mind-altering substances simply doesn't help, at all. Their intent is spot-on, but the effectiveness of that methodology is simply nonexistent. If anything, their lives tend to spiral out-of-control [even the minimal 'control' that they can exercise in this rather random existence] and worsen as they need more and more 'doses' of alcohol and illicit substances to suppress their inner emotional turmoil. In many cases, they have to finally 'hit the wall' or 'bottom out' before they can have the willingness to take more appropriate and effective steps out of their angst. It takes that willingness, some basic knowledge about more healthy alternative paths, and often intervention by outside agencies [mental health, social service, or judicial] to move to 'the next step' of their recovery. Many volumes have been written about how to move forward and what steps are necessary to gain self-empowering mental health; it's not my intent to cover that here. My focus this week is to talk about a few of the precursor feelings that cause the addictions to surface in the first place.
The major one that I'm only too aware of (that I continue to suffer from, in spades, even after many years of a clear and forward-moving path of recovery) is the very primal sense of not being enough, what I call 'not-enough-ness'. Children often gain this sense when their 'caregivers' either fail to instill the sense in their children that they are 'enough' just the way they are, or have unduly high expectations of their children (expectation levels that no one could possibly meet), or actively terrorize their children with profound physical, sexual, emotional and/or religious abuse. The children grow up with the clear sense that no matter what they achieve in the world, it is never enough to gain their parents' unconditional love. In many situations, the parents think of themselves as 'not being enough' and therefore pass this self-deprecation on to their children [in a whole host of ways]. Or, due to their own negative feelings and/or the abuse they experienced as children, they fail to have any clear idea how to express honest love toward their children, even if they have the sincere desire to do so.
Though I've managed to move beyond the more physically and emotionally destructive addictions, like many people who have those experiences as children I'm still very much ruled by not-enough-ness addictions. Nowadays, that expresses itself in avid 'collecting', surrounding myself with academic degrees, stuff in my house [art, books, music, etc.], industrial quantities of ushering at music, dance and theater venues, and service on community boards. While one could say that these addictions are less destructive to my 'being', and indeed do, in many ways, serve a positive purpose for other people in the community (due to the high levels of volunteerism), the 'reason' I do much of it is that primal fear that failure to engage in all of this will expose me to my feelings of 'not being enough'. Hence, even though much of it may indeed serve a positive social outcome, the motivation [often, though hardly always] is less commendable. And rather abusive of the care of my inner child's better needs.
I'm reminded of the advice I gave a woman, years ago, with whom I had an intimate relationship. No matter how much love I laid upon her, she simply couldn't 'feel' the love and was always yearning for more. I noted to her that life is 'like a Pilsner glass', wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. You can pour gallons upon gallons of love in from the top -- from outside of the Self -- and the glass would never fill up [like a bottomless sink hole], but if you squeezed one drop in from the bottom -- from your inner Self, from your love of yourself -- the glass would fill up immediately. If we can't feel love for ourselves, it is difficult to feel love from others. She never quite 'got it'; I finally gave up the relationship when I realized that 'the sky was the limit' on her need for love, or in other words, there was no limit. When I came to that realization, I moved on, to protect my own rather weak emotional heart.
The other image I often perceived in my relationships with many of the women I met was that it was like they were laying on the ground with their mouths wide open, waiting to be 'fed' with emotion that they couldn't supply, not to themselves or to me. I had my own host of PTSD issues; looking back upon such situations, I realize that I likely was attracted to women who were themselves sexual abuse survivors, simply because that 'viewpoint' was familiar to me (surely not healthy, but what I was used to). It has only been in recent years, as my mental health has increased and my recovery become stable and resonant, that I have begun to attract women into my life who, while they may or may not have had their own trauma issues [as Lord Byron noted, none of us leave this world without some pain in our lives], at least were actively working on their own recovery and therefore had 'emotional space and energy available' to offer honest love instead of simply demanding its unilateral receipt.
This is not to say that it doesn't 'take two to tango'; indeed, all intimate relationships, with one's Self [one's inner voices] and with others, takes active involvement and responsibility by all parties. I am noting that I [along with other PTSD survivors of profound abuse] had -- and have -- my own angst around not-enough-ness and that that 'lacking' has and does influence my ability to manifest and maintain loving friendships. All survivors of profound abuse struggle with those issues.
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