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.
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