anger

Unpacking Your Storyline

My brother Dave always fought my brother Jimmy’s fights for him around town. Dave was three years older and looked out after him.  Jimmy kind of had a mouth and Dave backed him up. He was a big fighter. Once, Jimmy was being picked on by Mike Sweeney who was sort of a neighborhood bully. When Dave heard about it he challenged Sweeney to a fight. They met behind the Etog Bowling Alley. Jimmy was with him but stayed in the car.  Sweeney had a chain and wrapped it around Dave’s head. I remember seeing the blood from Dave’s head spurting everywhere. Dave went nuts. He picked up Sweeney and body-slammed him to the ground and hit him in the face mercilessly until Sweeney was unconscious. Dave kept hitting him. I remember seeing Sweeney’s lifeless body flop after each hit and thinking Sweeney was dead. It was horrifying! 

Two weeks later, as friends, Dave and Sweeney got drunk and drove a 1963 MG into a concrete culvert with speeds in excess of 100MPH! Neither were killed but Dave got his eye gouged out. My mom used religion and got everyone to pray for Dave’s eye.  During surgery, they put his eye back in and he was miraculously able to see out of it again.  

Later I watched my dad, in a rage triggered by Dave coming home drunk, pull a leg off one of our dining room chairs and beat Dave mercilessly on his arms until they bled.  Dave could have killed my dad but he just closed his eyes and took it. 

These life experiences shaped my view about anger, violence, and fighting. I learned that fighting was always for survival and then you fight to the death. It always humiliated other people. I decided to never fight except to escape death. Even as an adult, I have always been unwilling to wrestle with my boys because of what I witnessed during my childhood. 

Everyone has a story to tell. The magic of healing can be found in the stories of our lives that we share. The  uncovered storyline can be the most important link to healing. Housed in every story is truth that can liberate. This is why Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) has been so powerful for so many for so long.  Within the community of alcoholics, there are “shared stories.”  Each unique story is tied together through a shared weakness. 

I learned to change the storyline about fighting and to direct it away from violence and toward healing and justice-making for self and others. Do you know the storyline you tell yourself from experiences in your life?  Is it life-affirming? What storyline did you learn from life experience? Is it life-affirming or do you need to redirect or maybe even give up the storyline altogether?  

Listed are considerations for changing your storyline from destructive to life-affirming:

*No One Passes Through Childhood into Adulthood Unscathed–It is not uncommon to hear someone declare “I grew up in a perfectly happy childhood.” Usually, this signals that someone is minimizing significant hurtful experiences. Regardless, no one is able to go through childhood and avoid disappointment and other hurts. There are major traumas and minor traumas. Both are significant. While horrifying traumas can be obvious, minor trauma is often minimized and overlooked. Many times upon exploration, what is revealed are experiences of neglect and abandonment that have been normalized and marginalized. Frequently, people have learned to practice an unspoken rule in their family to “embrace the improbable and ignore the obvious.” Understanding the impact of these “minor” traumas in average daily living takes focused effort. 

It takes courage to tell our stories and deepen awareness of what is real. We are often afraid to unravel the uneventful, uncomfortable times of our past. We fear that if we do this, preconceived notions of reality will disintegrate. Consequently, we fear that what we have always thought to be true has now crumbled into nothingness. Yet, personal healing demands that we tell our story to uncover the meaningfulness that exists in average everyday living experience.

*Authentic intimate connection happens by telling your story and understanding your storyline–It is scary to be vulnerable. I describe it as becoming emotionally naked. Perhaps people will accept what they experience of you or perhaps not. Being honest with yourself at the deepest level has always been a most difficult task. Yet without this honesty, the depth of meaningfulness in life is blunted. Average experiences in life remain just that—average with no depth of insight. Brilliance is unleashed in the depths of honesty. Yet, there is a great price. To become emotionally naked to oneself is courageous. To open your heart with that same honesty to another person is at best a risky encounter.

Without honesty, there is no authenticity. Without authenticity, average everyday experience fails to have impactful meaning. Living life unchallenged and with boredom eats away at the soulfulness of inner brilliance. Dishonesty becomes a way of embracing the improbable and ignoring what is obvious. It makes average experiences empty of brilliance and drains creative resources.

*Your story can teach you the fundamental basics of self-care in the presence of human struggle if you are willing to examine and change your storyline as needed. A common thread that ties all of us together is the story of struggle. Tragedy, death, loss, emotional and physical pain are common bedfellows regardless of how or where we live. We make up a storyline about our experiences in life. Are they affirming and life-sustaining or flawed and enervating? For example, I am getting old. In my old age, I can tell myself that the joints in my body are just going to hurt, so get used to it.  I can tell myself stories about others whose lower back hurts just like mine and that it is just the way it is for old people. The stories I listen to from others are stories of folks who sit on a couch all day and don’t stretch or exercise. Well, what I know about that is when I do that, my lower back hurts. Yet, when I stretch, run or walk, my back is stronger and hurts less. So, if I want to change my storyline about getting old, I will need to look for stories of older people who have healthier experiences in life. Those who walk long distances and exercise are motivated to doing and being active. It is all about the storyline I choose to believe about my life experiences.

Strength and inspiration come in every-day moments when we change the storyline and share connection with the human spirit of others. There is genuine depth in soothing a broken heart when we learn to steady and stay in the presence of overwhelming discomfort. As we change the storyline of life experience we learn that the human spirit is resilient and has the capacity to transform the convulsion of wretched agony into the presence of poise and healing peace when discomfort and heartache is embraced and shared.

How Does Addiction Affect Families?

You don’t necessarily have to be an addict in order for your drug and alcohol use to annoy members of your family or have a negative impact on your family’s dynamics. However, an addiction often forms around dysfunctional family behavior that can be aggravated by the addictive behavior.

Families in which parents are addicts have their own particular dysfunction. Instances are they will not able to their own children. Because of what they’ve witnessed as models for adult behavior, these children are at an increased chance of becoming addicts. Sometimes, as they mature, children of addicts may attempt to distance themselves from their parents’ compulsion. Only to find later on that they have abuse a different substance. This might happen, for instance, when a parent is an alcoholic. Even though the adult children of this parent don’t drink, they might develop an addiction to sex. Or might run up high debt because they are shopaholics.

How Does Addiction Affect FamiliesFamilies in which children are addicts often have problems distinguishing the difference between helping versus enabling the addict. Addicted family members should be handled with tough love. Don’t give in to the temptation to try to make the situation better for the addict. Only he or she can make the decision to get clean. Families in this situation must first make the addict aware that their behavior is unacceptable and then they must seek to heal from the trauma that addiction has caused in their daily lives. Sometimes the financial devastation of addiction (if family members are stealing money from other family members or opening fraudulent credit in their name) can takes years to set straight. In cases of theft or violence, family members often have to make the tough decision whether to involve law enforcement.

Dealing with Addiction

Usually, these extreme steps might be the final push that an addict needs in order to seek help. Addiction causes damaged on the normal family bonding. An addicted family members cannot be trusted. They usually cannot hold onto a job and may often go missing over night or for multiple days. They inevitably betray people who love them and more prone to violence. Above all, they are not able to attend to small children.

In addition to the emotional impact, the cost of an addict’s attempts at recovery might ruin the family financially. While the cost of buying drugs or alcohol can be a drain on a family’s budget, which may dwindle due to job loss, recovery programs can often be very costly, too. Many families dealing with addiction have to consider whether they might be better off filing bankruptcy, which can lead to the loss of future opportunities, such as the purchase of a home or the ability of your children to attend college. An addiction doesn’t just affect the person suffering from it; it affects everyone around him or her.

It is normal for the dysfunction of addiction to trigger feelings of anger, bitterness, resentment, jealousy, and many others from those who love a person abusing drugs or alcohol. The bottom line is that families should be very careful when dealing with addiction. It can damage relationships for years.