Family Dynamics

Who Shortchanged Me and How Do I Get My Change Back?

March 5, 2024 by Ken Wells

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

My mom died when she was 99. One of the last statements she uttered as she gazed at my sister was “You know I killed my sister!” Over the past nine years of her life, she was decimated by Alzheimer’s. Slowly the lights went out and she did not recognize anyone during her final hours.

When my mom was 9, she played with lit candles in a backyard shed with her little sister Aileen, age 6. The wind caught the candle flame which ignited Aileen’s dress and within an instant, she was engulfed in flames. My mom took Aileen by the hand and ran with her toward the house. Their mother, seeing what was happening from the kitchen window, raced toward them, ripped off a sheet from the clothesline, and rolled her torched little girl to the ground, putting out the flames. Skin fell from her body. She was rushed to the hospital where she spent two weeks. Her mom took her out of the hospital for home care. However, she died at home from gangrene poisoning. Her little body was placed in a casket in the home, a custom observed during that day in time.

The experience was so traumatic that my grandmother insisted that everyone sleep in the backyard. It was her way of pacifying the immense pain she felt from the horrific event. The tragedy occurred in August and they slept in the backyard till mid-November. Grandmother blamed herself for the death because she took the child out of the hospital too soon. She never talked about it for the rest of her life. My mom was convinced it was her fault for playing with the candles. No one ever sat down to process with her as a 9-year-old what happened. From that day forward they both blamed themselves, never discussing their false guilt with the other.

To get the smile of approval from her mother, my mom became a great baseball player, barnstorming throughout the Midwest in a well-known women’s league. This worked until it didn’t. She fell in love with my dad and married him during the middle of a road trip. Their elopement was unapproved by her parents. She fell out of favor with them.

My mom discovered religion and became extremely zealous with her faith for the rest of her life. I always believed that her intense desire to show love for God was in part a make-up for the lack of approval she felt from her parents. This lack of emotional validation was passed down to the next generation. I certainly felt a sense of being one-down from my mom’s folks—my grandparents. Likely, I was carrying my mom’s shame without knowing it.

My dad had his own unfulfilled developmental needs that he brought to the marriage. Both were emotionally shortchanged and throughout their lives never recognized the emotional shortchange that happened to them from their parents. They certainly had no idea how to address the deficit or to effectively get the change back. The emotional deprivation was transferred to the next generation which included me and all my siblings.

At the end of my mother’s life, she was only able to recall the shameful guilt she carried throughout her life. For her, seeking her mother’s approval, and God’s forgiveness, was never enough to rid her of the shame and guilt she carried from the tragic accident that occurred when she was very young.

My mom’s story is not so unique. Most of us do not get through our childhood unscathed. Metaphorically, our early childhood developmentally resembles the holes in a chunk of Swiss cheese when those needs are left unmet. The developmental needs of a child are many. When they are not met an emotional pool of pain is created that must be drained. When it is not drained it builds and eventually splashes out of the pool into destructive behaviors that sabotage relational intimacy.

It becomes an intimacy disability that can take the form of argumentativeness, addictive behavior, narcissism, and much more. Through the stages of development, the child becomes emotionally stymied. Later, when these needs are inadequately addressed, children grow into adults who respond with the mindset of an adolescent or younger in relationship dynamics. In short, responses that worked as a child do not work as an adult.

People tend to try to fill up the inside holes and emotional vacuum with a cocktail of outside pursuits. To be loved and accepted people might seek achievement, popularity, sexual relationships, addictive substances, and countless other experiences in an attempt to fill in what is missing. The attempts become destructive because the unmet needs can only be met within and not from the outside. The many attempts to fill in the holes that exist on the inside through outside validation and experience trigger one to be like a child who cannot get enough sugar. It is necessary to develop the wise mind adult within each person in order to address the neediness that exists because of the unmet developmental need that exists within.

So, the first question about who shortchanged me must be addressed. To answer this question it is necessary to look back to our relationships with our family of origin. Soren Kierkegaard, the philosopher wrote that “life is meant to be lived forward but can only be understood backward”. Examining our relationships in our family of origin is not about looking for someone to blame. Rather, it is about seeking understanding which uncovers ways in which you take responsibility to address the unmet needs in a healthy adult way. When you recognize who shortchanged you emotionally, you can then focus on getting the change back.

The late John Bradshaw used to say that we have 25,000 hours of parental introjects by the time we become an adult. That is a lot of parental tapes that influence how we behave, how we respond to others, and what we say to ourselves. Your parents are like you, imperfect. Some parents were egregious in their lack of parenting skills. Some were extremely abusive. All parents fail to meet every need in a healthy way. It’s the result of a condition identified as being human. There are no perfect parents.

In order to recognize the shortchange, you will need to take your parents off the pedestal. By necessity, every child puts their parents on a pedestal. To each child, during the magical years of development, essentially the parents are God. For example, Dad could say to Junior at an early age that tomorrow the sun is going to come up from the west and be bright blue and Junior would respond, “OK, if you say so!” Whenever a need goes unmet, impressionable children are vulnerable and conclude it is their fault. At a young impressionable age, it is one thing if they have a problem, but it is really big if God—mom or dad are the cause for the problem. So, as a child grows through the psychological stages of development, it is necessary in early adulthood for them to take the parents off the pedestal so that the adult child can have an adult relationship with mom and dad.

When this takes place, you will not only recognize who shortchanged you but how to get your emotional change back. The way you give the change back to your parents who failed to meet significant needs is that you give back the shame you have carried for them into your adulthood. For example, a child learns that s/he matters when the parent spends significant time with them on their terms and not the parents’ terms. When this does not happen, the child concludes without conversation that they matter less than other things. The need for connection and knowing they are valued is so great at this young impressionable age, that the child will seek ways to get mom and dad’s attention in order to know they matter. The child may try to be a family hero, scapegoat, or achiever in one form or another, all examples of seeking the parent’s attention to know that they are significant and matter to the parent. This is often carried out subconsciously by the child.

So, in the development of a wise-mind adult, you seek to recognize these unmet needs and consciously give back to mom and dad your carried shame. By that you converse with them and share the unmet need from childhood and how you have carried shame for not mattering. You can explain that now you are aware that there have been many things you have done to get their attention only to never be able to do enough to know that you mattered down deep. This dynamic may very well be unintentional on your parent’s part. Yet, by recognizing this and sharing it with them, you can give them back the shame that you have carried of not being good enough to matter. It is the parent’s role to connect with you as a child in meaningful ways by spending sufficient time with you on your terms in order for you to know that you do matter.

If your parents are deceased, or unwilling to have the conversation, then you can have a powerful discussion without them by putting them in an empty chair with someone present who you trust and will give you a fair hearing. With this trust support by your side, you can put your mother or father metaphorically in the empty chair and have a healing conversation. Remember, this conversation is for you to heal not to lay blame at your parents’ feet. You can be direct and respectful with kindness at the same time.

It is possible to stop destructive and damaging behaviors without resolving unmet childhood emotional needs. You can put a cork in the bottle and stop a destructive pattern of addictive drinking or other hurtful behaviors. However, without doing this work, you are unlikely to drain the pool of pain in your life which will continue to sabotage healthy relational connections. It is important to scrub the childhood wounds that result from unmet childhood emotional needs. As you do this work, you will not only recognize who shortchanged you but you will be able to get the emotional change back because you will become the empowered change agent of your own life and destiny.

Your task in identifying the shortchange is to recognize where to roll up your sleeves to do emotional work. It is not to get you to hate your parents and get stuck with blame. However, it is understanding that leads to healing, not blame. If you do hate or are angry with your parents for their abuse or lack of meeting your needs, your recognition is the beginning of the work. Do it to transform negative emotions into healing experiences.

Sitting With Your Own Insides

August 18, 2023 by Ken Wells

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

Someone once said, “Worrying is like a rocking chair, it gives you something to do, but it gets you nowhere!” Human relationships trigger worry. Everyone wants to be liked. You worry that what you might say or do is hurtful to someone you care about. You try to control others so they avoid unnecessary painful experiences. This is true in marital relationships when one partner tries to control what the other does around cooking, driving, or other annoying behavioral patterns.

Sometimes people get stuck with obsessional control. This is common with dysfunctional family relationships. Family members become enmeshed and attempt to control what another family member thinks or does by trying to live inside their skin. It is very intrusive and destructive. Sometimes families control what children do for play, making friends, and creating pressure about career choices. Families strongly influence the choice of a life partner. Cultural, religious, and economic status are family factors that play a critical influence on an individual’s decisions about life. To the extreme, family members lose sight of where they stop and another family member starts because of intense enmeshment.

Addicts lose themselves in their addiction. They take up too much space. If addiction is a big balloon in a small room, the addict takes up all the space and smashes everyone against the wall to get what they want when they want it. They don’t know where they stop and other people start.

The first order of business in recovery is to get the runaway train going down the track (the addiction) stopped. The second order of business is to establish boundaries with friends, family, and work. Addicts act like my old Craftsman lawn mower; without a governor, it revs up faster and faster until the engine finally explodes. Addicts need a governor. That’s what learning boundaries are all about. They are essential for addicts to recover.

Addicts go to a treatment facility to stop the train from running out of control down the tracks. Most treatment facilities are very good at helping an addict recognize that he/she is out of control. By the time 30-60 days of treatment is complete, an addict can see and think straight for the first time in years. They feel better physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

The test is when they return home, the dysfunctional dynamics are the same. An addict is expected to come home and fit right in. “Treatment was for you. You need to know how to fit in with your family. We are your people who love you!” Comments like this greet a recovering addict upon home arrival. Family members walk around the dead dog in the living room. The family game of ignoring the obvious and embracing the improbable is in full operation. The unhealthy roles family members play are solidly enforced. The family is in denial of its dysfunction. Members project that the addict is the identified patient. Hurtful enmeshment is denied. If the addict confronts hurtful, dysfunctional behavior, he is met with comments that he/she is being dishonest and is delusional. “That’s the reason you went away for treatment” it’s concluded. All too often the family remains the enabling system that fuels the addictive behavior. Dysfunctional families cannot see the forest for trees. Essentially, nothing changes in the home environment that the addict returns to.

Friends also are impactful. Most addicts must create an entirely new set of friendships. This is difficult. Addicts who follow through and do this or at least try, wrestle with not belonging, loneliness, and feel ostracized. It takes courage to overcome despair, eliminate delusion, denial, and dishonesty and minimize defensiveness while recovering from addictive behavior.

Learning to sit with what you feel inside is hard to do. It requires training to sit with an uncomfortable experience and not numb out with an addictive choice. It is common for addicts to become busy with recovery and avoid sitting in discomfort. You can become busy with doing recovery tasks, attending recovery meetings, completing 12 steps, and participating in recovery social gatherings which adds to the busyness of doing life with all of its demands and never learn to sit with your own insides. Here are a few things to consider:

1. Learn to stay in your own lane. This is what boundaries are all about. Much has been written about boundaries and recovery. Successful recovery requires that you create internal boundaries that help you to separate from trying to please others when you need to care for yourself. You will need to create strong external boundaries that do not let others treat you with disrespect. You cannot make a person respect you but boundaries with consequences will take care of you when others treat you with scorn and disrespect. Work with a therapist, sponsor, and recovery friend to fine-tune your boundaries in order to improve your capacity to sit with your own insides.

2. Train in detachment. Learn to separate from high-risk scenarios, family settings, and friendship situations that you know are destructive to your recovery. Addicts are intensely fearful of being abandoned. It started with their family of origin. Detaching from hurtful situations is a way of growing yourself up into the powerful adult that your destiny requires of you. It’s scary. Yet, it is an important way to teach others to respect you and treat you with dignity. Detachment will never occur without the voice of assertion. Other people will learn to appreciate your values when you assertively detach from unhealthy behaviors. Sometimes when you step back, family members will take note and offer a new respectful appreciation for your boundaries. Other times family members might misunderstand, feel hurt, and distance themselves from you. Either way, you will need to practice internal and external boundaries that promote self-care. Your willingness to sit with this discomfort will be a critical proving ground for building a solid foundation for recovery.

3. Learn to grieve. Addicts need to grieve the loss of addictive behavior. It involves embracing the entire gamut of feelings. When you don’t grieve your losses you will tend to live outside of yourself. This creates distance from what’s truly going on inside. Grieving embraces the resentment for no longer having your “friend” of addiction choice in your life. That resentment needs to be felt and expressed directly. You will need to cry for yourself. Many men learn to cry for others but have been told they cannot cry for themselves. There are many things to grieve in recovery. Loss of childhood, loss of honesty and integrity, loss of childhood dependency needs not being met, loss of curiosity, adventure, and loss of choices are only a few issues that need to be grieved.

4. Practice affirmations. It takes courage to sit with your own insides. When you do, clarity will appear. It’s not magic but it is assured. To do this task you must engage in affirming yourself. The practice of self-affirmation is an age-old recovery skill set that is most often overlooked. Yet, it is helpful to affirm your feelings. Learn to practice self-affirmation about your sense of being. Make it a part of your daily experience in the same way you do physical hygiene. You will find it transformational. This skill practice is nothing new but revolutionizing.

Addicts in recovery have learned to sit with their own insides. They deepen their own self-awareness with keen intuition. They learn to navigate dysfunctional systems by staying in their own lane, detaching from what hurts, and grieving the inevitable losses that come in life. In the end, addicts who practice affirming themselves assert the transformational power of recovery.

Walking Away From Crazy

June 9, 2023 by Ken Wells

“We come from fallible parents who were kids once, who decided to have kids and who had to learn how to be parents. Faults are made and damage is done, whether it’s conscious or not. Everyone’s got their own ‘stuff,’ their own issues, and their own anger at Mom and Dad. That is what family is. Family is almost naturally dysfunctional.”

—Chris Pine

Family is a powerful dynamic. It’s the place we come home to every day. It’s a place where the fundamental supplies to do life are provided in order to function and thrive. Family is where the emotional, physical and spiritual needs are furnished and developed. Most families do not provide enough for these needs to be met. Essentially, bonding is a critical need that when left unmet without sufficient amounts of mirroring, engagement and attunement to children increases the likelihood of addiction Addiction most likely occurs when an individual cannot find meaningfulness in everyday experience. This is not addressed by providing more things for the child to do, but rather by participating with the child’s activities with sufficient amounts of time. Connection is critical and ofttimes missing. Without connection the possibility of addiction increases. For certain it contributes to the creation of crazy-making life experience.

I tell people we had 12 kids in our family. In reality, there were 9, 4 girls and 5 boys, and I was the youngest boy. I say 12 because my parents raised my oldest sister’s 3 kids from school age to teenage. My sister’s kids were dropped off at our front porch and abandoned by their parents, who were unwilling to raise them. I often think about how crazy-making this experience was for them. Including them into our family would be a bare minimum expression of care.

My dad was a World War II vet, a foot soldier for two years. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge. I learned after his death that he was a decorated soldier with 2 Bronze Stars, 2 Oak Leaf Clusters, and a Purple Heart. He took his World War II combat PTSD out on the boys in our family. Once one of my older brothers, Jimmy, thought he was big enough to take on my dad. He had disobeyed and smarted off to my mom. My dad told him he couldn’t talk to his mom that way and to apologize. Jimmy told him that he would not apologize and wanted to settle the matter, mano a mano with my dad. My dad gave him a beat down. It was awful. He never stopped until my mom begged him to stop. It became pretty clear to me that any kid who received a beat down like my dad gave Jimmy would have a ton of rage inside. This was the type of crazy-making I grew up with.

Then there was church which doesn’t have to be dysfunctional. Yet, in my experience, it reflected the reality of the home I grew up in—crazy-making. We all had to go to church twice on Sundays, to a midweek prayer meeting, and all the revival meetings which took place twice a year for two weeks straight every night.

Our preacher’s name was Gravitt. My dad liked to call him “Doc” Gravitt. He was no doctor I would ever choose to visit. He was a rough rogue. He would call people out by name during the worship service and accuse them of not paying their tithe. He was known to stop preaching, walk down from the platform, and spank a kid for misbehaving in church. He would challenge men who he thought were malcontents to meet him in the parking lot outdoors for a fight. He was unpredictable and very abusive. My parents always thought he was God’s anointed and that you had to tolerate the negative in order to get the positive. They would cite some of the antics of characters in the Bible that God used and were satisfied that Gravitt was like one of those. They would say that it took a character like Gravitt to drive out the riffraff so that the church could grow. All my brothers and I thought that Gravitt was the riffraff. We all used to love it when my one of my older brothers, Dave, would mix it up with Gravitt when he would try to get in Dave’s face and tell him how he should live his life. Dave would not tolerate Gravitt’s bullshit! He would challenge Gravitt to meet him in the parking lot for a fisticuff. We all looked forward to these encounters. We thought they were entertaining. In truth it was crazy-making!

My parents had little time to spend with their kids. Geez, if they were paid full time to only raise kids, there still wouldn’t be enough time to spend with each kid. As it was, my dad worked 2-3 jobs at a time and my mom was a domestic worker. In our home, everything was rationed. Baths, the amount of milk for breakfast, food, and electricity were all rationed in order to cover the expenses of 14 people. There wasn’t any personal time for affection, attunement of spirit, and emotional support from parents.

Martin Luther King once said that “violence is the language of the unheard”. In the family I grew up in there was little experience of being heard. My parents tacitly agreed to not fight about disagreements they had. The anger that was avoided between them was played out between my siblings and me. I was the youngest boy so I had experienced a shitload of hell from my older brothers. To say the least, it was crazy-making.

The lack of touch, attachment and bonding that my parents missed in their childhood was passed along to me and my siblings. It became a mainspring to the years of intimacy disabled-ness, struggle, and addiction that would later develop and come to fruition in my life and that of some of my family members. There was little touch and affection and nurture was scarce. It was crazy-making.

How do you walk away from crazy-making? Addicts experience dysfunctional dynamics within their families of origin to one extent or another. There are many effective suggestions for addressing the crazy-making. Here are a few to consider.

Tell your story. Make your rags into a tapestry. It is a worn-out metaphor, yet many addicts continue to want to walk around the elephant in the living room. Our families of origin have taught us well how to compartmentalize dysfunctional pain and pretend it does not exist. We embrace the impossible and ignore the obvious. Shame is passed from one generation to the next and the conduit is secrecy. We create secrecy by hiding what we don’t want others or self to see and thus avoiding what is painful. Addicts are great with knowing how to compartmentalize.

Show your family rags in 12-step groups. Let this sharing be a stepping stone to open your heart and share with your family, your partner, and your kids. They will truly benefit. Through your sharing, your kids will be able to stand on your shoulders and make a better way for their future. It is an excellent beginning in unraveling the crazy-making from your family of origin. It is a way of making a tapestry from the rags of dysfunction.

Scrub the wound. So much in recovery is counterintuitive. When hurt we want to roar with anger, whereas healing requires us to embrace our anger, fear and sadness with vulnerability. Overcoming the crazy-making that exists in our family of origin insists that we lean into our fear, fragility, and frozen emotional experiences.

Like scrubbing a laceration on your knee, the last thing you want to do is what is demanded. Scrubbing emotional wounds is painful. It is automatic that you would want to shy away and procrastinate scrubbing the wound. When we don’t, the infection spreads throughout our relational lives and appears every time anxiety and threat surface in our lives. Crazy-making family dysfunction must be scrubbed. You must drain the pool of pain that exists through identification of hurt, grieving the losses, and validating your experience.

Anchor to your true self. Tolerating the crazy-making in your family of origin required you to create a false sense of self. Survival in your dysfunctional family called for people-pleasing, caretaking and approval-seeking behaviors. Often your inherent value was not nurtured and was forced into hiding in your family of origin. You may have learned to seek identity and validation through the services you rendered to others. This can set you up to do more to keep from being less. As an addict, this is a common place where you lose your sense of self. This becomes a perfect place to escape emotional pain with your drug of choice. Ending the crazy-making handed to you from your family of origin requires that you anchor to your true self. Crazy-making experiences in life come to an end when you anchor to your own sense of worthiness. It demands that you embrace your own feelings whatever they are. Rather than being dominated by what others feel about you, your true self will give birth to authentic congruence. Your feelings begin to line up with your values which are expressed by what you say and how you live. It’s being anchored to your true self that separates you from the crazy-making in dysfunctional family living.

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