courage

Wounds That Boomerang and How to Stop the Re-Enactment

June 14, 2024 by Ken Wells

READ IT TO ME: Click play to listen to this post.

“If you bring out what is inside you,

what is inside you will save you.

If you fail to bring out what is inside you,

what is inside you will destroy you.”

The Gnostic Gospels

I have experienced this truth over and again as a therapist treating sex offender behavior. The question has always been why would anyone sexually abuse another, whether adult or child? The answer is always found in a desperate need for control, and re-enactment of being wounded, dominated, and helpless at a vulnerable time in life toward someone else.

A common scenario is that one guy marries a woman who has a young female child. The intimacy-disabledness in his previous relationship was never addressed and worked out. So he brings that forward into this new relationship where he has become a step-parent. He repeats the same intimacy disability in that he feels one down to his partner, cannot connect at a deeper level, can’t please his partner sexually or be pleased himself, avoids conflict and only knows to dominate or be dominated by his partner.

Things don’t work out. But, he does feel a special kinship to the stepdaughter. With her, he feels empowered, helps her with homework, becomes her confidante, and engages her in physical horseplay. To his spouse, this is everything that her previous partner would not do.

So she is devastated when she finds out that her new partner has been molesting her daughter, watching her undress, etc. In shock, she wonders where did this come from?

He is also fearful, wishing he had never gone down this path. Now forced to do therapy he uncovers unresolved neglect/abandonment and no one to meet his needs as a child. He traces the lack of control he experienced as a child to his inability to be empowered in an adult relationship. He acts out his insecurity through attempts to meet his needs with a child through domination and control.

Does everybody compensate for childhood needs in their adult life in this destructive way? Of course not! However, none of us got through our childhood unscathed. If we do not face and address our own childhood pain of being broken we will relive the break in some form of re-enactment later in life!

The various ways of re-enacting are numerous. Whether pain and suffering have a proper place in our lives or whether we become cornered and trapped in the pain and suffering depends on an individual’s efforts to integrate the painful experience into life experience which later becomes a source of wisdom. It has been my experience in treating trauma that what is not integrated is repeated. It is repeated through compulsions (addictions of all types) and all kinds of controlling behaviors that create intimacy disability. Not every person who has been sexually or physically abused sexually offends another. Yet for sure, everyone who has been abused in childhood will re-enact that abuse in some way as they go through the stages of life, if not addressed. There are many ways to act out the hurt and pain in hidden ways that are subconscious to the individual and acceptable to the culture. Behaviors such as workaholism, male machismo, being a social “player” and perfectionism are all examples of facades that hide many types of abuse manifested in early childhood.

Consider the following:

1. Face, feel, and accept: Stopping the cycle of re-enacting painful experiences requires that you access the courage to face what is. Most of us won’t do this until the pain of not facing reality is greater than the pain of embracing truth. You will need to declare a personal jihad face to your own demons. To do so means that you must experience the feelings that have been creating discomfort. Leaning into the feelings is the only way to get through them and accept the reality of what is. Short of that you will tend to seek revenge to avoid facing your own shortcomings. Rather than distract yourself with schemes to get back at others who have hurt you, face your demons and find the acceptance that will create a sense of connection with others.

2. Integrate or disintegrate: When you are not willing to look at your part of a problem in relationship, you re-enact ways that you have been controlled as a child into a use of power to control others in your adult life. You may bully with intimidation, act like a victim, or shut down and sulk. All of these and many other strategies represent ways that you disintegrate trust and connection in adult relationships.

Integration incorporates past experience with present encounters and helps to create a different future. Integration involves recognizing how past abuse impacts present response. It includes redirecting shame carried to the caregiver who gave it to you in the first place and to the hurtful behavior you engaged in the here and now. Once you have stalked the shame to its source and redirected it to behavior, instead of self, you will be better able to integrate the wounding experience with a grounding of self-empowerment. Every time you face your own pain and brokenness you interrupt the need to re-enact old destructive behaviors in the here and now. When you don’t, you repeat the suffering and pass it on to others.

Facing and cleaning the wounds from the past will integrate your life experience with others and strengthen the bonds between you and the world around you. Ultimately, what you refuse to face inwardly will get acted outwardly into the world around you. It will require courage for you to address your historic pain.

The Unencumbered Being

June 7, 2024 by Ken Wells

READ IT TO ME: Click play to listen to this post.

“So often we make a commitment to change our ways, but stall in the face of old reflexes as new situations arise.” — Mark Nepo

Living in sobriety requires a willingness to make adjustments. We tend to cling to old patterns of living. We are creatures of habit. There is comfort in doing things the same way we have always done them. It’s true for us all. Yet, growth and transition create the need for change. Adaptability is an overlooked quality in recovery. There are common threads that connect all of us in recovery. When we uncover the common threads there is relief and acceptance among those who know addiction. There is safety in routine and predictability that is necessary to create calm from a life of chaos.

Leaving the addictive life behind demands great courage and humility. For many of us, it took many steps forward and backward before we finally turned the page to a new life totally separate from the old ways of addiction. Most of us recall the loneliness, awkwardness, and struggle experienced during the course of making these changes. It took a great deal of effort to leave old digs, watering holes, and other experiences in addictive behavior. Many of us wrestled with euphoric recall and endured painful user dreams about past moments of addiction. The culture of addiction felt like a warm hug, it was so familiar.

Reminiscing the first time you ever stepped across the threshold of a 12-step meeting was so scary and unraveling . . . Who will I see that knows me? What will I have to say? Can’t wait just to get back to the safety of my car after the meeting was over. It took a long time before a 12-step room became a safe place. Even longer to feel like you belonged. There were painful disclosures and humble admission of character flaws. Learning to let go was and is a painful struggle. Over time, the 12-step meeting became a refuge, a place to become emotionally naked with people you once dreaded to face.

In time the recovery culture replaced the neighborhood of addiction. Some old acting-out friends disappeared while other relationships became redefined. Gradually, recovery behavior, relationships, and lifestyle replaced the addictive culture so that today the old life of addiction would be as awkwardly experienced as once was the new life in recovery. Finally, the evolution of recovery had transpired!

Once settled and established, life has a way of underscoring impermanence. Back in the day, Bob Dylan was correct when he wrote and sang “The Times They Are Changin”. In community, relationships change. People move or die. Family configurations require adjustment. An environment that was once predictable experiences the threat of change. Uncertainty is part of the flow of life. The passage of life creates the need for adjustment. We have to practice letting go in new ways about relationship dynamics we mistakenly thought were permanent.

This part of recovery life is difficult. There is resistance to ongoing adjustments and adaptations during life transition. Once you have stretched and strained from the life of an addict and settled in recovery, now considering continual life adjustments can feel overwhelming and too much to ask of yourself. The late M. Scott Peck in his book, The Road Less Traveled, likened life journey to the metaphor of traveling through the desert. Many come to the first oasis in the desert and settle there, deciding to camp for the rest of life and never completing the journey through the desert. The oasis is comfortable, so why continue?

Recovery life beckons to press on toward continued growth with its accompanying need for adjustment and willingness to embrace change. The temptation is to hover around old recovery times and digs that can no longer be sustained because of the impermanence of life. Essentially, nothing remains the same. There is a need to change and move forward. However, change generates fear and anxiety.

Typically, when facing the need for change we want to hold on to what has always been. When there is fear of the unknown, we grip tightly to what we know and have experienced, even if it no longer applies to times we live and might be hurtful. In a parable in the New Testament, Jesus referred to the need for change as being like putting old wine into new wineskins. This metaphor for change emphasizes the idea that the new cloth had not yet shrunk so using a new cloth to patch older clothing would result in a tear as it began to shrink. Similarly, old wineskins had been “stretched to the limit” or become brittle as wine had fermented inside them; using them again therefore risked bursting them. There comes a time for change when what used to be true and applicable needs to be adjusted. When we refuse to adjust we become inflexible and more likely to tear or break. Transitions in life though hard suggest that it is time to move on to new truths, relationships, and understandings about life. Yet we tend to clutch and hold on to what we know when we are fearful ofchanges that usher us into the unknown.

Growth in recovery requires that you let go of preconceptions and expectations that have accumulated from past relationships and experiences. Recovery is a life of continual recreating yourself in spirit. Some have said that life in recovery is about becoming an unencumbered being. It demands that you release and let die the mentality of the past. Do you know the mentality that you need to let die within you? Is it the drive that you have always lived for? Is it your need to control things, people, possessions, power, position, environments, or money? Sobriety brings us to spaces in our lives where we need to change our entire way of life. Dropping the way we have done life will mean that you do this one drop at a time. The drastic changes that occur at the inception of recovery underscore the way we are to live our lives moving forward… whether beginner or old-timer. Soren Kierkegaard wrote that “life is meant to be lived forward but can only be understood backward”. Living forward and looking backward are both difficult. Understanding can be sleuthed through past reflection but will require rigorous openness and honesty. Fear can be an obstacle to living forward. Letting go of what we know and embracing the unknown is a faith proposition that scares the hell out of most of us. Yet, for those who press forward, what emerges is the peace of becoming an unencumbered being.

Footprints That Connect Spirituality

May 31, 2024 by Ken Wells

READ IT TO ME: Click play to listen to this post.

“What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The human body is magnificent. The more we learn about the intricacies of our bodies, the more clear it is that there is an amazing life force that creates and connects all of life on this planet and beyond. Some people believe that as phenomenal and amazing as the physical body is most of who we are is spiritual, not physical.

Volumes have been written about the spiritual world but it remains a mystery. Many who decry religion reject the concept altogether. Those who believe and talk about the intangible nature of spirituality accept that discussion about its properties can be like trying to nail jelly to a tree.

Religious practice helps many to chart a course toward the meaning of the spirit world. From a macro view of the world, the influence of spirituality is undeniable…

Today, I would like to suggest a less macro and more micro understanding of spirituality in the common experiences of everyday living.

1. Spirituality is found in the connection of you to the world around you. Addicts live disconnected. They pull the plug on connection to people and the world around them. Their addiction becomes the organizing principle in life. The affair that is created with addictive behavior has been described as a warm blanket more than once. However, spirituality is about the opposite. It is a connection to all facets of living both organic and nonorganic. Meditation is a recovery discipline that connects one to the world around you in the present moment. Being able to connect to the world around you—the birds, trees, plants, animals, rocks and human energy has been described by some recovering addicts as an explosion of meaningfulness where there was once emptiness. I like to think metaphorically that your feelings are the Voice of God.

When listened to, feelings will tell you essential needs that need to be met in a healthy way. The tendency for an addict is to disconnect from feelings of discomfort. Yet, if you sit with uncomfortableness it will tell you what needs to be addressed in your life. You will need to marshal mature actions by utilizing your wise mind to meet those needs in healthy self-fulfilling ways. This requires mentorship and endless practice. It is not magical. So you might say spirituality is about mature adult living and you don’t have to even use the word spirituality to capture this life experience. For example, you may find yourself angry. Rather than emotionally throw up in someone’s lap or stuff the experience and pretend it doesn’t exist, take time to listen to what anger is trying to say to you. Feelings are experienced in clusters. Withanger it is often tied with fear, sadness, loneliness, shame, or other feelings. If you take time to sift and sort each attached feeling they will clarify what you are experiencing and when connected to your wise mind you can better address your needs. This is why I suggest that your feelings are the voice of God! Listen to them and they will serve you well. This is a spiritual experience.

2. Spirituality is found in the experience of vulnerability. Vulnerability is the process of being exposed to possible harm. It is about embracing the fear of rejection, of being taken advantage of, and of embracing your human limits. It is not taught, it is practiced. If you do not practice it, you will not learn it. It is about becoming emotionally naked to another. It is risking rejection. It engages a willingness to remove yourself from the center of your universe for the purpose of sharing another’s energy and making space for someone else knowing that they may flatly reject your efforts.

Vulnerability is accepting this possibility and courageously exposing your heart anyway. It doesn’t make sense to always/only be vulnerable. But when it does it is pursued against all odds no matter what the price. It is a shift from intellectual reason and protection to opening your heart and sharing raw feelings that expose hypocrisy, incongruence andfailed behavior in hopes of finding connection and acceptance. This requires courage but when manifested multiplies meaningful life experiences. Vulnerability is spirituality and counterintuitively creates connection.

3. Spirituality is about the experience of uncertainty. No religion can prove that it is the one true way. Outside of religious experience, no philosophy or experience can prove its methodology of living as the one correct approach. There are many opinions and beliefs. Likely, they are all correct in different ways! You will need to sort out what you choose to think and believe. Ignoring this reality is a choice in itself. For sure, spirituality is a belief plunge into uncertainty. None of us like the experience of free falling. When I was young I would take junior high kids to a cliff at a lake in Wyoming to jump in for a swim. The cliffs were between 50 and 60 feet high! It was far enough to consciously experience the free fall. When free falling you experience total helplessness. There is literally nothing you can do to counter gravity but to fall. This is what it is like to plunge into the uncertainty of spiritual belief. It is having the confidence that in free-falling into your belief, your confidence is not that you will control the outcome but that your spiritual belief will bring you back up. This means that with bravery you are willing to live with the uncertainty that surrounds you every day because of your belief in the basic goodness of who you are and/or the power you choose to trust in your daily free fall.

4. Spirituality is about velvet steel. I call my blog Velvet Steel because of my deep conviction of this spiritual principle. Spirituality is about connection which engages the principle of velvet steel. This concept embraces the word “consideration” which can describe a parent who practices when to apply the strict letter of the law to a misbehaving child and when to back off and go easy. There is no formula. It’s all about cultivating sensitivity to the spirit of another. Sometimes you need to be willing to walk to hell and back to stand for conviction and principle and other times not. It’s about being velvet steel.

In recovery meetings, there is usually at least one person who sees themselves as the hammer—the steel—and gives feedback from that standpoint. It is common for others to consistently be velvet, being easy toward others hoping they too will be easy with them. It is rare that you experience velvet steel blended in feedback. This is because it is difficult. Often it takes a certain degree of steel to be velvet as well as it is important to share a certain amount of steel while being velvet in feedback. That said, spirituality is not all about rules and regs (steel) but it also includes knowing the rules well enough to know how and when to break them (velvet). Velvet steel is a dynamic applied in many different ways and requires integrity and honesty to the practice for it to be a spiritual practice that heals and transforms behavior. Spiritual practice must include a mature application of velvet steel. In truth when applied with sensitivity it reflects an art form.

There are footprints of spirituality in common everyday places that are mostly overlooked by those who are in a hurry or a frenzy of everyday living. Take time to notice the footprints of spirituality that will help right-size your everyday walk with meaningfulness and connection.

How Does Believing in Who You Are Differ From Believing You Can Do Great Things?

May 14, 2024 by Ken Wells

READ IT TO ME: Click play to listen to this post.

“None of us are defined by our worst actions that we have done.” — Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“Nor are we defined by the worst things that have happened to us.” —KW

I have been privileged to work with individuals who have demonstrated extreme self-confidence and belief in being able to achieve great accomplishments in their personal and professional lives. Some have accessed confidence and belief to create massive financial success while others have become elite in their professional sport, ability to entertain, or experiences of political power. They have engaged in visualization skills and affirmation to fulfill their goals. They were masterful in their achievements.

However, there is a remarkable number of those who have achieved world-renowned feats who admittedly state they have less belief in who they are separate from what they do. Some have even disclosed that they would be lost separate from what they do. In other words, their professional craft and achievements define who they are.

How bout you? Do you know who you are separate from what you do? Do your achievements define you? If so, then you have created a hamster wheel affect for your life. You will need to do more to keep from being less.

There will never be a time when enough achievements will create fulfillment. You will never experience a sense of completion or enduring satisfaction because you will need to keep running for more and more. It’s the nature of the hamster wheel driven by your identification that who you are is what you do. Or, you will only know to identify yourself by what you did in the past or what you are planning to do tomorrow.

It is not uncommon for those who find their identity in what they do, to feel a great sense of emptiness and despair immediately after performing a great feat. I have heard several share that their deepest darkness happens when they are off stage and alone after performing. Some have even shared that it has been a huge trigger to act out with their drug of choice while others have indicated vulnerability to suicidal ideation.

Identifying who you are other than the results of what you do or will do requires that you have a sense of presence in the here and now with an emphasis upon “being”. This requires that you be able to sit with what is and make meaningfulness from it.

It suggests that you are able to separate what you do from who you are. It can be scary. You learn to focus on meaningfulness by simply being you separate from what you do.

When you are all about the results of what you do then the idea of coming home to yourself and sitting with your feelings, thoughts and presence is frustrating and likely confusing.

Yet, it is necessary to detach from the results of what you do. Even, when success bombards your world and seems to flow freely. Eventually, you get to a point of realization that you cannot control the end result. It is beyond you!

But, the alternative to the detachment of results is to embrace uncertainty and all of its unwanted feelings and thoughts. Not a very attractive alternative. However, when you practice this free fall in life experience you encounter unparalleled freedom. You learn that uncertainty and freedom go together. Eventually, you discover that unwanted feelings subside or become transformed into the magic of gratitude and other feelings of peace. You experience the unconditional confidence of going down with all the feelings of discomfort knowing that you will rise again with the awareness of freedom to be who you are.

This is no small feat. When this is practiced both praise and criticism received for the things you do is recognized as an imposter to the real you.

Here are considerations to anchor your identity to who you are rather than what you do.

1. Know the values of your heart and don’t betray them. Be more concerned about being true to those values and less concerned about successful results.

2. Affirm that you are an unrepeatable miracle of the universe. For many this sound like too much fluff. Many would want their result to speak for who they are. The paradox is that when you know who you are before an endeavor, the results do not determine their essence. You will not let an outcome define you. You will embrace all of yourself- the good, the bad, and the ugly. You will understand that life is a tapestry that weaves the sweet with bitterness and triumph with tragedy. No victory will add to this reality and no defeat will take away from it. This reality must be etched in stone that exists within your heart.

3. Create a list of affirmations about your being, not what you are good at doing. Religiously bathe yourself in them every day as mental hygiene in the same way you take care of your physical hygiene. This is often overlooked. Endless practice prevents most people from realizing their destiny. To know who you are you must feed yourself with the clarity that separates being from doing. Give yourself permission to be a mistake-making person, the only kind that lives on this earth. Be the one who takes something meaningful from every mistake into your future. This is an endless practice.

4. You won’t understand your sense of self from a distance. You will need to be willing to embrace going deep within to know your being. For most this is scary. Socrates stated that “the unexamined life is not worth living”. You must be willing to do the uncomfortable. it requires intentionality. Sitting with challenging emotions and understanding their message to you about who you are requires persistence and tenacity which many prefer to avoid.

5. You will need to be courageous as you embrace your being. You will need to make a decision to be true to yourself when everyone around you is pressuring you to be different. You must be brave, anchoring your identity in your being. You will be tempted to lose yourself in what you do. There will be failure but you must bring yourself back to center. As Maya Angelou wrote in her poem Still I Rise, “You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise.”

When you learn to believe in who you are as a stand alone belief, what you do or how much you do will pale in comparison to the uncovered brilliance that you are an unrepeatable miracle of the universe. This truth about being is a stand-alone truth that will stand the test of the ages.

Collective Resilience

May 26, 2023 by Ken Wells

“The human capacity for burden is like bamboo—far more flexible than you’d ever believe at first glance” – Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper

Resilience is the capacity that a person has to adapt and readily recover from adversity. It is evidenced in the picture that contrasts the mighty oak that fought the wind and was broken and the willow which bent with the wind and survived. Recovery from addiction requires resilience. There are many up-and-down experiences. Addicts must develop the capacity to adapt in order to do recovery on life’s terms. As life unfolds, plans are foiled and people disappoint. Flexibility is necessary in order to maintain long-term sobriety. Chaos gives way to calm in recovery when an addict practices resilience.

Resilience is a recovery quality that increases when exercised and practiced. The following suggestions will help you strengthen the practice of resilience in your recovery.

Stay positively connected to at least one other person in recovery. Resilience tends to wilt in isolation. Recovery requires connection to others. When a sense of community wanes, addicts withdraw and close their heart where they need to be open. Twelve-step meetings are designed to accelerate connection and openness. However, large meetings make it difficult to be open. They trigger isolation for some in recovery. Building resilience in a large meeting requires the same commitment to connecting with others that is necessary in a small meeting. Go out of your way to have coffee and conversation with at least one person. It will greatly increase your capacity for resilience.

Make meaning from mangled moments. These are moments in life where nothing goes right. Thank God this doesn’t happen all the time! Yet, when they do occur, it seems like they always occur. During these times you can get caught up in moaning and groaning. Long-term complaining will snap serenity and threaten sobriety. Take a deep breath and then let go. It’s just one of those days! Step back and learn from these mangled moments. There are priceless lessons you can gain when things go wrong. Practicing gratitude will help you open your heart and make meaning out of mangled moments.

Help someone else when you are in the midst of your own trials and trauma. I learned this from my mom. There were always trials for her in raising 12 kids. There would be one crisis after another. What kept my mother sane was that she always had her eye on others whose struggles were greater than hers. In our community, there was the Fryman family who had 22 children. My mom was forever gathering clothing and food for this family whose trials were greater than hers. There was a poor woman in our community known as Sister Harris. My mom would have her iron our clothes for 50 cents a basket because she needed the money. When the clothing came back with a musty smell my mom made us put up with it because Sister Harris needed the money. My mom seemed to gain inspiration for her own trials by helping someone else. Try this in your recovery. It will inspire you while you increase your resilience.

Imagine a positive future. My mom used to imagine what it would be like to take a vacation to St. Louis, only 2 hours away from where we lived in East Central Illinois. I sat with her at the picnic table in our backyard listening to her daydream about a trip to this favorite city. I developed deep satisfaction saving money from my paper route and mowing yards to make this trip possible for my mom. It was a future vision that propelled me through my childhood trials and tribulations. Creating a vision for the future will help you stay the course in your recovery life of sobriety. When times get tough, maintaining an unspeakable imagination for the future will sustain you and create a way through the agony of craving. Keep your eye on the prize of a positive future. It will strengthen resilience in your recovery.

Simply forgive! In the aftermath of addiction carnage, resilience increases when you simply forgive. Forgiveness means to let go and not hold against. You must first forgive yourself before you will effectively forgive others. You forgive yourself for doing the same thing in principle as that which was done to you. Though you didn’t commit the same behavior in like kind, you did so in principle when you consider times when you did what you wanted, when you wanted it, regardless of its impact on others. This is a universal principle of offending that all humanity has engaged in at some time in their existence. When you forgive yourself, you create the necessary resilience to forgive someone else. This is the secret to getting out of your own emotional prison from a hurt perpetrated by another. Forgiveness requires that you believe in your capacity to forgive. The word “believe” is an Anglo-Saxon word that means to live in accordance with. Therefore, you must live out forgiveness of self and others daily. Seldom is forgiveness a one-and-done experience. Most often, it requires a daily practice of letting go and not holding a grudge against yourself or others. This practice increases resilience.

A 12-step community is a place to practice collective resilience. Every person within the community struggles with the same issues of craving and need for sobriety. The power of resilience can deepen in a collective way. Collective resilience encourages collective courage. In a 12-step community, everyone is invited to deepen the practice of resilience while facing the adversities that are inevitable in the recovery journey.

Stuck and Stargazed

April 18, 2023 by Ken Wells

When I graduated from seminary in 1977 I committed to an intern position at a large church with 24 full-time pastors on staff. I worked 85+ hours a week without compensation for three years. I would work from 7 am till 10 pm each weekday and then help the janitorial staff clean the church from 10 pm to 2 am. Many nights, Eileen and I would sleep in the parlor of the church. We lived off Eileen’s salary which was $9k per year. Why did I do that? At the time, some said because I loved God and the church. But underneath, in my desire to be the best I could be, there was a desperate need to gain the smile of approval from the senior pastor. You might say I was stuck in stargaze.

I came into my adulthood with a hole in my soul. My dad worked hard at three different jobs to meet the needs of our family of 12 kids. I believed that if I worked really hard then I would get the attention and acclaim that I missed from my dad because of his absence. I wanted this pastor to notice my hard work. Looking back I was stuck in desperation for approval. Yet, I could never get enough. After many years of workaholic ministry, the pastor promised that I would become his replacement. However, I later learned that he made the same promise to five other guys. I felt like a fool.

In recovery, I was challenged to examine my tendency to reach out to destructive people and believe in their false promises. While demonstrating relationship savvy in most friendship connections, I had a pattern of unwarranted loyalty and allegiance to authority figures in my life. Repeated and unresolved childhood trauma created a pattern of trauma repetition that undermined my emotional health and had to be addressed.

Do you ever wonder why you tend to bond with people who hurt you in your life? Addicts have the propensity to bond with people who are emotionally unavailable. Blindly, they lose themselves in unhealthy relationships that trigger desires to meet their unmet needs. They lose themselves in the intensity of the relationship in hopes that this one special connection will replace what has been missing. It can be a strong affiliation with a person of power at work, an intense alliance with an organization leader, or becoming hooked on a romantic relationship. Individuals frequently marry with a deep-seated desire to work out with their marital partner what was unaddressed in their family of origin. It can be an inward repressed longing that must be recognized before authentic contact can occur in an intimate relationship.

Trauma occurs during vulnerable and early developmental stages in life and is often unrecognized and invalidated. People become fastened to this nexus of early trauma. There is a tendency to repeat the trauma in later years of life.

Every child has developmental needs to be addressed. Touch, mirroring value, predictability, knowing that you matter, etc. are just a few developmental needs that must be met in a healthy way. When these needs are satisfactorily met safe attachment is formed. There is an embodied sense of security and acceptance. There is an ability to self-regulate with the capacity to form close connections as well as have separation from those with whom you are most personal.

However, when these needs are not met then developmentally you resemble a chunk of Swiss cheese with holes. There is an intense desire to fill the needs (holes) from the outside by achieving power, position, and control with accomplishment and relational approval. This need is overwhelmingly intense but can only be addressed with healthy attachment on the inside. In the attempt to fill these needs from the outside, you can become like a child who cannot get enough sugar. There is never enough achievement or approval from others.

As an adult, the process of addressing this destructive dilemma is to grieve the losses of deficits suffered way back in childhood. Embracing sadness, anger, resentment, shame, hate, and other feelings associated with loss is both unpopular and uncomfortable. Recognizing these painful feelings as energy streams is important. Moving the energy of unwanted feelings from the original source person to the issue (lack of attachment) and then creating what you want in your life through boundaries and personal empowerment requires accessing the maturity of adult self-parenting. Most times, people need therapy to develop this skill set.

Fritz Perls, who is credited as the father of Gestalt therapy, once said that “nothing ever changes until it is real”. You must come to a place where you recognize that the relationship with a toxic person is an attempt to fulfill a psychological need that was never addressed as a child or grieved as an adult. This is the reason that you never get enough of what you really don’t want in a relationship with a toxic abusive person. The crazy-making experience is that you keep creating the same toxic relationships with people who are emotionally unavailable and abusive.

When these hurtful trauma-bonding experiences are not addressed, people become stuck in their own stargazing experience whether it be name-dropping, preferential treatment toward those perceived as important, or pedestalizing a partner subconsciously hoping they will meet a need within.

Addicts struggle with looking outside to others to find answers for approval that can only be discovered within. There are no gurus to lead you. The late activist Grace Lee Boggs was right when she declared that “We are the leaders we are looking for”. Trauma bonding is a way of repeating an abusive relationship hoping for safety. Those who are willing to take the courageous steps toward addressing the pain of past trauma

Connect To The Conversation

Are you making the most of your recovery?

Take our short quiz and find out.