identity

Chaos and the Big Sleep

April 5, 2024 by Ken Wells

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

“Everybody is somebody—but on any given day there is somebody who feels like nobody. At the end of the day, the question is “Does anybody care enough to walk alongside the one who feels like nobody long enough to help them feel that they are somebody again.” —KW

You can’t change the way you grew up. Mary Main, a professor at UCal-Berkeley suggests that people learn to engage in a cohesive coherent narrative of their life. What I think this suggests is that if you are an addict it is important to not just look back and identify all the acting out you have ever done. But dig in and look at the relationships with people in your life that connect to why you do what you do and who you are. It’s sort of like making sense of the chaos and learning to connect with yourself in this endeavor.

Chaos makes this hard to do. People who grew up with crazy chaos often carry a little crazy with them their entire lives. Chaos puts to sleep the awareness of living life through healthy alternatives. The way you survived is what you replicate later in life. Your habits for survival are tattooed on your bones.

Therapy teaches you to talk about your chaos. You can learn a lot intellectually about what happened—the abandonment, the disorganized attachment, and all the systemic dynamics about your dysfunctional past. But most of us who grew up in craziness will die with some of it still inside. Sometimes I wonder if this is why I will die an addict.

I, like many addicts, grew up in an environment that was so dysfunctionally complicated that it is exhausting just to talk about it, and I have been talking about it for years. Every abuse headline is connected to subheadings that guaranteed crazy living for mere survival. It’s been said that addicts learn to embrace the improbable and ignore the obvious. Is there any other way for an addict to survive a complicated abusive past? The web of instability is so complex that to endure required that you fall asleep to healthy behavioral options and live in a trance-like state to what is real.

For example, I grew up in a large family. The ubiquitous presence of sexual abuse impacted our family in every dimension. There was sexual abuse perpetrated by pastors and leaders at our church. There was sexual abuse that was pervasive in our family. The church I grew up in was a cult. There was patriarchal domination of men toward women in our home and church. In a cult, church life and home life environment become one. You must develop the capacity to fall asleep to the reality of what surrounds you just to survive. When I shared my sexual abuse by the pastor of our church to responsible leaders, they concluded that my parents who had attended the church for 40 years were troublemakers and shunned them for 3 months. You would have thought that victims treated in this way would sever relationships and find another church to attend. My parents didn’t. They went to sleep about the reality of what happened to their children and to themselves. Once, many years later I asked my mom about the church shunning her and my dad regarding the sexual abuse and she responded that it never happened. Of course, it never happened when you fall asleep to reality.

My parents fell asleep to the injustices that intruded their lives because they were overwhelmed with the history of abuses that took place in their own family of origin. If you don’t face and address injustice, the only way to survive is to fall asleep to the realities of abuse and domination that penetrate you and the people you love.

My parents ignored what was going on in their family by singing gospel songs like “When We All Get to Heaven” or “Victory In Jesus” in order to ignore the hell on earth that had pervaded every aspect of their lives. How is this so different than the way our society ignores the lies and deceit proffered by politicians, religious leaders, and cultural icons about what is real? Rather than sifting, sorting, and researching truth, most of us choose a media service to do our thinking and fall asleep to the incongruence of our own hypocrisy and those who lead us.

For those who choose to no longer ignore the emperor who wears no clothes, waking up takes commitment to truth and honesty. It also takes time. The effort to wake up requires that you stop doing what keeps you asleep. It’s no wonder you are sleepy if you keep taking sleeping pills.

You will need to stop your own crazy thinking like trying to do more to keep from being less. Slowing this locomotive down is no small task.

You will have to address your mistaken beliefs that exist and have created blocks to intimacy with yourself and others. Mistaken beliefs have been tattooed in your heart as a way of surviving the craziness of your childhood. When you do more and have more it is difficult to accept less and think you are more. Material gain is like booze. There’s nothing wrong with either one as long as you respect that both can make you drunk. Driving your life drunk is scary whether you are intoxicated with booze or the disease of more.

The only way to stop the chaos is to wake up from the big sleep. Nothing changes until it is real. When craziness is complex, waking up means to slow life to examine the inconsistencies, face your hypocrisy, and address your incongruence.

People talk about making America great again. Yet, if everybody, who knew somebody who felt like a nobody, was willing to walk alongside to wake them up from the chaos and craziness, maybe that would hold promise to a great future for the first time. Together, we can be somebody once again.

When The Load Seems too Much

April 2, 2024 by Ken Wells

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

Someone remarked that Atlas was not forced to hold up the world, he was convinced that if he did not, the world would fall. This kind of magical thinking is a trademark for children between the ages of 3 and 11. If dad were to wake up and announce to his five-year-old that the sun was going to come up from the west and be bright blue, it is likely that son would say “OK, if you say so, Dad!” He would believe it because at that age he is highly impressionable and vulnerable to illogical conclusions.

During this time it is so important that parents recognize the vulnerability of their children during early susceptible years of childhood development. Often, children make up that they are responsible for adults in ways that are distorted.

Children listen to the interaction between parents. When parents fight unfairly, the kids conclude it is their fault. Parents almost literally are God to young impressionable children. So when they fight, kids conclude that it is one thing for a child to have a problem but if God (mom and dad) have a problem it is untenable. So, they make up that the reason mom or dad are fighting is their fault. Or, they believe that it is their responsibility to fix the problem. Often, one or both parents seek out emotional support from the inadequate child. When parents lament about the other or use the child to be a receiver of everything that is wrong in the world, the child concludes that it is their responsibility to fix their parent. It could be that the parent complains about the other partner in the relationship. It might be that the parent pours out fear and anxiety about finances, health, world economy, politics, religion, dismal results about their favorite sports teams, or whatever. Like a vacuum, young impressionable kids suck it all in and magically conclude that it is their responsibility to fix the problem that mom and dad complain about.

Subtlety, the parent-to-child role begins to shift whether intended by the adult parent or not. Children take on a role that they cannot fulfill. Even though they cannot fix the adult by their behavior, they still try.

When adults get stuck in immature childlike behavior, they are vulnerable to allow the child to fix the problem. They allow the child to attempt to fix the problem by letting them listen to them lament and/or depending upon the child to offer emotional support and love. This dysfunctional behavior cements into the brain of the child that it is their responsibility to be the parent to their adult parent. Children take on this impossible task and adopt a family role to be the fixer or hero in ways that never work. They lose themselves in their role and maintain the role in their adult relationships after they physically grow up.

This patterned behavior contributes to intimacy-disabling behaviors in their adulthood. The lack of early child development of healthy boundaries created by unhealthy parents fuels dysfunctional adult behavior. The child grows up believing that the only way to be OK is that they have to fix everyone around them. They are set up to absorb everyone else’s hurt, disappointment, and difficulties, and that it is their responsibility to fix. They need to be the hero in order to be validated. So children who needed to fix their parents are prone to seek out heroic type jobs as adults. They become medical professionals, entrepreneurs, and CEO’S of companies with an emphasis to prove their worth by fixing problems. Their tendency is to find their identity in how well they can move mountains, fix problems, and conquer conflict because that is what was required of them when they were children. Dysfunctional childhood expectations are usually very subtle and unnoticeably powerful. It is a set up for desperate outside validation. The only way you know that you are worthwhile is that you are able to fix, conquer, or create solutions for problems that other people have. No matter how much money they pay you, if you do not fulfill this role of fixing others you will not be satisfied. Even though you know as an adult that intellectually you cannot solve other people’s problems, you have wired yourself that this is the fixated role you must play. Unnoticed, you become Atlas convinced that if you do not hold up your world it will indeed fall apart.

Here are a few considerations to ponder if you feel stuck being Atlas.

1. There is a distinct difference between sharing someone’s pain and bearing it. Children from dysfunctional families learn to practice carrying mom/dad’s and other’s pain. In doing so, they succumb to overwhelm. They may grow up to be successful in their professional pursuits, but in their relationships they continue to believe it is their job to carry another person’s problems with the accompanying pain. They never learned to walk alongside and witness another person’s struggle without carrying their pain and compulsively needing to fix the problem. It is necessary to allow others to feel and have their own struggle without your interference.

2. It is necessary to look backward and undo your dependency to your parents or caregivers around the dysfunctional roles you learned to play as a child. You will not be able to detach from your unhealthy role through simple recognition of what is happening dysfunctionally with your partner, friend, or professional endeavor. Recognition is a necessary beginning. Yet, to transform your behavior you will need to address the past parental/caregiver enmeshment. Grieving is necessary regarding the role reversal in relationship that mom or dad unintentionally did with you. Shame is the dynamic that keeps the old role in place. Empty chair work often is helpful. Sitting your parent down in an empty chair without them being actually present, and describing the impact of their past behavior is always helpful toward creating resolve. With this exercise, you can practice saying it straight without edit and move the energy of all your feelings from the parent/caregiver to the issue of injustice (you being their for them in an adult responsibility rather than they being their for you) and then further to your own personal empowerment to initiate healthy boundaries and self-actualized care. It is powerful to do this with your parents/caregivers in person as long as you are not expecting anything from them in their response or lack of response.

3. Check to see whose baggage you are carrying. When you are traveling and check in bags at the airport you are given identification tags so that you are sure to pick up the right luggage at the end of your destination. More than once someone has mistakenly left with the wrong luggage. In relationships, you need to be sure that you are not carrying other people’s baggage. Sorting out what is truly yours and what is not is never-ending work. Some people don’t feel at peace until the emotions of everyone around them are managed and tended. If this is you, then you are walking out of the airport with someone else’s luggage. Bring it back to them. They cannot go home without it. Though confusing, you cannot be responsible for other people’s emotional response. Until you realize this you will continue to go home with someone else’s baggage, wondering how do you fit into their life expectations, solve their problems or essentially live their life. It is like opening the luggage once home and trying to fit into someone else’s clothing. It just doesn’t work!

Rather than continuing to mimic Atlas in your life, discover the amazing freedom of letting down, letting go, and allowing the world to carry you.

The Enmeshment Dilemma: Where I Stop and You Begin

December 1, 2023 by Ken Wells

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

Addicts in recovery get better… they aren’t cured. There is a spectrum of what constitutes better. Many addicts in recovery stop acting out with their drug of choice as a result of working a diligent program that involves peer support, therapy, and family reconstruction. However, it’s not 100%. Some never stop using and at best learn to reduce the harm of their addictive behavior. There are national coalitions that help develop strategies for overdose prevention and harm reduction education that are helpful in all forms of addictive behavior.

Even when an alcoholic puts the cork in the bottle, many migrate to other more acceptable destructive behaviors like obsessive work, rage, or pleasing others. Addicts become obsessive in their attempts to craft a cocktail of addictive behaviors to fill in the hole that exists in their soul.

Enmeshment is a common underlying issue in the treatment of addictive behavior. It is a result of boundary violations in relationships. It is the absence of differentiation and autonomy. Children in dysfunctional families become enmeshed in the pathology and are unable to individuate. Enmeshment becomes the bond that holds the family together. It is the personalization of another’s reality, problems, feelings, beliefs, and so on. Enmeshment grows from storied belief systems, family rules, and premises that provide protection and loyalty through denial and sometimes threats in a family system. It is the result of poor role modeling, abandonment, and neglect as well as other forms of abuse that exist in a family. Addicts repeat symptoms of enmeshment as an underlying attempt to resolve childhood dilemmas. It is repeated throughout life without conscious awareness. It becomes a significant obstacle in recovery that stymies an addict’s journey toward establishing self-esteem and intimacy.

Enmeshment is intergenerational. In other words, the family problems that existed in your family of origin are most likely to appear in your nuclear family and relationships. You may do the opposite from some problematic behaviors but essentially the dysfunctional behaviors are passed from one generation to another through denial and minimization. Here is an example, my grandfather (on dad’s side) died from alcoholism. He was a raging, mean alcoholic. My dad got religion and was a teetotaler. My brother David, died from alcoholism and cocaine abuse secretive to members of his family of origin. It was fueled by the denial of his nuclear family. Through denial, it is likely that the dysfunctional strategy of embracing the improbable and denying the obvious will be passed onto future generations. The thread that keeps the dysfunction alive is enmeshment. It is the primary basis for codependency, isolation, spiritual bankruptcy, and addictive behavior.

Enmeshment runs deep and is unlikely to be curable. My father learned to deal with his fear of abandonment from his father by protecting his mother. My grandfather would get drunk, come home, and try to kill my grandmother. My dad would try to protect his mother but was inevitably helpless. When his father finally left the household my dad quit school in the 8th grade to work to provide for his mother and siblings. All of my lifetime my dad had two to three jobs. He lived his life with the scarcity of never having enough. This became the intergenerational connection to my own workaholism.

My mother tragically was involved in an accident at age 9. While playing with candles with her little sister who was 6, wind blew the flames onto the dress her sister was wearing and before help could be found her sister was badly burned and later died from her injuries. My mother believed she killed her sister. She became a very good baseball player in an attempt to seek her parent’s approval. Later she gave her life for service to the poor in an attempt to seek the approval of God. Both behaviors were pursued with extreme intensity. It’s the serious magnitude of pursuit that marks enmeshment. She needed to be more to keep from being less. She never learned where she stopped and others began. Though impacted by dementia in her dying days, one of her last statements of confusion related to being on time for a baseball game and a reference to having killed her sister. My mother’s compulsive care toward others became a root trigger of my own codependent behavior as a partner, parent, and professional. These roots are deep and most likely will take a lifetime to address.

Enmeshment is manageable. While I seriously doubt that the depths of enmeshment will be cured, I do experience dramatic improvement toward

self-management. I think the management of enmeshment is a proper focus and not a cure. I have been able to stop sexually acting out and curb my workaholism. I have not cured my enmeshment that is expressed through codependent behavior. I have been influenced by over one hundred years of codependent behavior from parents and my own practice. It is unlikely that I will have a “born again” experience around enmeshment. That said, I do not give license to allowing enmeshment to run hopelessly amok. Here are some considerations that have been helpful in my recovery.

1. Practice setting internal boundaries around issues and areas of life where you are prone to lose yourself. In consultation clarify the achilles heel life experiences that trigger enmeshment. It could be your partner’s behavior, your kids’ safety, other people’s problems, etc. Internal boundaries focus on your recognition of limits. Verbalize those limits and your defined boundaries to others so they can hold you accountable as you manage your tendency to enmeshment. You will need their support to remain clear and remind you when you have crossed an internal boundary. Visualizing internal boundaries is like adjusting the focus on binoculars. You must pay attention to the pull of enmeshment or you will quickly lose focus. Recovery from enmeshment is a practice not a peak for perfection.

2. Make Step 3 an everyday lifestyle practice. In the Big Book, Step 3 is “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.” Whether you identify with God or another energy source, managing enmeshment requires surrendering what you cannot control. It is a struggle simply to recognize your enmeshed behavior. You might be convinced that you are compassionately caring or standing for principle. However, upon reflection, you realize that you have got out of your lane and need to surrender your care or your insistence of being right because it is not about you. This will not be a one and done humbling experience. Some days it happens with multiple issues. It can be discouraging but it does require “turning it over” and getting back in your lane.

3. Practice humility. When your kids tell you they experience you as disconnected and absent when you spent your time worrying about money, profession, and the like—believe them! Don’t get defensive and try to help them understand. Just accept your shortcomings. You don’t want to hurt your kids but you did. It’s not always black or white. It doesn’t mean you are a schmuck even if you didn’t prioritize them when you were enmeshed with your work, seeking approval, or trying to fix something. I have learned that the best response to children’s experience is to validate and ask “How can I be supportive now.” Validation is not a brush over. It involves a genuine honest acceptance of your son or daughter’s experience of you.

4. Accept that you are not perfect while being accountable. Mentally you can accept that you are not perfect in your recovery. However, translating this reality to your heart is no small chore. Recovery is about the journey and not about arriving. Your enmeshment behavior will teach you to embrace your real self if you will allow yourself to be accountable and coachable.

5. Poise and perspective is the result of recovery practice. There is a tendency to look to wise old sages in recovery rooms with the perception that they have arrived. Yet, perspective that cultivates poise is gifted to the addict who understands that recovery from enmeshment is a journey, not a place to arrive. Recovery creates your own identity separate from what you do for others. The antidote for enmeshment is identity. Recovery is a journey of recognizing that you are an unrepeatable miracle of God as you separate your being from healthy and unhealthy behaviors. The more you identify being separate from your behaviors the less you will be stuck in the muck and mire of enmeshment.

Nostalgic Blues

June 27, 2023 by Ken Wells

Snowfields blanket the landscape for miles and miles
Quiet Solitude tugs at memories burned deep within
Spring seeds planted
fruit ripens in the blink of an eye
Heads shake with disbelief how things used to be
Protests spontaneous-
Unrest and violence with no relief
A rich man’s war drew rebellion
Returned soldiers chided and booed
The Establishment triggered revolution
We gave it the finger
Took over buildings
Smoked dope and got high
Dylan crooned “times are a changin’-
They did until they didn’t
greed came back like an old familiar friend
We took back the finger
Stuff became God again
Blues and rock
Jazz and Motown
Country and disco, too
Soothed the pain of reality
History made, booked, and shelved
Did it matter?
Kennedy, Malcom, and Martin
Heroes wasted?
Religion tried to steal reality
With end times prophecy
And a promise of prosperity
But greed took over the dance floor
halves had more and have-nots less
Hell, not heaven became actuality
Promised “could’a-beens” thumbed through the Rolodex of time-
So close, yet so far away!
Where was I? Where were you?
So it goes with nostalgic blues.
-KW-

As you can tell I grew up in the ’60’s. Many of you read about what some of us lived. Long hair, commune living, a lot of pot and acid, Volkswagen buses tattooed with bumper stickers, and hitchhiking to nowhere highlighted an era of time that triggers nostalgia for those who lived through this epic era time. Oh yeah, don’t forget Steppenwolf, the Who, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, the Stones, and Judas Priest. Reminiscing the 60’s would be incomplete without including these hard rock bands.

Most living Americans have not experienced the cultural 60’s. The majority of those who have are now dead. Those among the living who have are often triggered by nostalgic memories. How could you not? It was such an intense time in America.

That said, every other era in American history has been equally intense, too. The speed of change in today’s era is unprecedented. There were far fewer genres of music in the 60’s than there are now in 2020’s. Television has dramatically changed. The list of change is endless. It’s easy to get caught in a time capsule.
People say kids today are not what they used to be. Of course, they are not because today’s kids were not born back then. Some say they would hate to have to raise kids in today’s world. They said that about kids back when I was growing up!

Nostalgia triggers reflection and yearning for what used to be but no longer is. It can be fun! Throwback experiences bring back yesterday once more.
Nostalgia is a universal experience. Some people get stuck in yesterday, seeking an illusive security that really never existed. Others attempt to seal tight the past and never explore its meaningfulness out of a fear of further pain. Kierkegaard, the existentialist wrote that “life is meant to be lived forward but can only be understood backwards”. He, no doubt, was nostalgic. The question is how to look back, gain necessary insight and move forward without getting stuck in yesterday. Here are a few considerations:

1. Shape your identity with inside values separate from outside influence. Everyone is influenced by outside social behaviors. Entrepreneurs are experts with understanding modernity and social trends that impact what we buy, where we go, and why we behave in certain ways. That said, personal values require introspection about a compendium of life experience. Within this individual anthology, each person is responsible to create heartfelt beliefs fueled with conviction to guide and shape what matters to you in the world around you. It’s easy to connect to what charismatic friends think and do. Hashtag jingoes and witticisms are energetic and influence how you choose to engage the world. Motivated by emotional response, it is tempting to embrace and declare resolute truth without digging deep within your own brilliance to clarify symbol and substance to navigate through social pressure. Groupthink often blunts personal creativity and hampers individual responsibility. It has always been easier to go along to get along for addicts. Dysfunctional families subtly adopt the mentality of ignoring the dead dog in the middle of the room. Dysfunction in families emasculates and indirectly shapes family members to embrace the improbable and ignore the obvious. Individuation is necessary to the formation of identity. It is common to adopt other people’s dogma for living without going deep within in order to know what it means to be true to your own heart. We learn to do this through others role-modeling this process, thus the value of a mentor, sponsor, and parent. Nostalgia beckons that we go back to how things used to be. Sometimes this is good. Other times nostalgia proves shallow and ineffective to current times. Ultimately you are the leader you are looking for. There are no gurus. You are it for you!

2. Nostalgia signals a need for further grief work. Life is a constant flux. In the 70’s Karen Carpenter sang ‘Lookin’ back on how it was in years gone by and the good times that I had, makes today seem rather sad—so much has changed”. There is a certain elusive quality with nostalgic memories. It never really was what you make up yesterday used to be. There are fond memories of days when things were more simple. Electronic technology has eclipsed former times that relied upon manual operations. Do you really want to go back to those days when you balance the pros and cons with the here and now? Even if you do, you can’t! While you can sing about yesterday once more— it’s over, never to be repeated again. Nostalgia signals the need for grief work. Letting go of what used to be is unappealing. Nostalgia is a feeling experience that reminds us that we must let go of what we cannot control, the passing of yesterday. Grieving is a life-long experience that most dread and avoid. However, when you lean into nostalgia, embrace its purpose to grieve the loss of what used to be, it opens the door to wonders that exist in the here and now! It does not eliminate the pain that comes with the loss, but, it does ignite the hope of current possibility.

3. Make it a practice to give up the storyline. Nostalgic memories carry a storyline. Trauma fuels nostalgic memories that house mistaken beliefs about self and the world around you. I have listened to many people share nostalgic experiences that unfold hurtful messages. I hear talk about being on the outside of the bubble looking in! Some lament that they never measured up! Other nostalgic experiences trigger thoughts that if you know what I know about me, you would reject me too! They are all inaccurate speculations. When you believe you are on the outside of the bubble looking in, just create a new bubble with you in the center! If others get to know your heart as you do they would be drawn closer to you, not further away. Create your own measure stick that begins with you being enough! Addressing nostalgia means that you will need to let go of the storyline that emasculates and minimizes your sense of self. Enjoy past memories that trigger awareness of fun experiences with people you enjoyed. Allow sadness or painful awareness to be present about hard times experienced. Then let go of the experience, good or bad and create a new storyline that champions personal empowerment and belief that you are an unrepeatable miracle of the universe destined to transcend yesterday into something much more in the here and now.

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.

Taming Your Critical Voice

April 25, 2023 by Ken Wells

“The older you get, the more you understand how your conscience works. The biggest and only critic lives in your perception of people’s perception of you rather than people’s perception of you.” ― Criss Jami, Killosophy

A man and his son were once going with their donkey to market. As they were walking along self-consciously the man began to wonder that others might think “You fools, what is a donkey for but to ride upon?” So the man stopped and put the boy on the donkey, and they went on their way.

Later they passed a group of men, and the man began to worry that these guys might be thinking that “See that lazy youngster, he lets his father walk while he rides. So sheepishly the man responded to his inner conflict by ordering his boy to get off, and he got on himself. But they hadn’t gone far when they passed two women. Now he feared that one would say to the other “Shame on that lazy lout to let his poor little son trudge along.”

Well, the man was perplexed with frustration and did not know what to do. Finally, he took his boy up before him on the donkey. By this time they had come to the town, and he was convinced people were staring at them as they rode their little donkey. He became overwhelmed with shame wondering if the men were thinking “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for overloading that poor donkey of yours — you and your hulking son?”

So the man and boy got off the donkey. To address his shameful thoughts he decided to cut down a pole, tied the donkey’s feet to it, and raised the pole and the donkey to their shoulders. While they walked along with their donkey tied in this position, the man was convinced that others were scoffing and laughing at him. When they came to a bridge, the donkey getting one of his feet loose, kicked out and caused the boy to drop his end of the pole. In the struggle, the donkey fell over the bridge, and his forefeet being tied together, he was drowned.

When you worry so much about what others think you can tie yourself in knots with your own critical voice which pulls you away from doing logical and next right steps. Addicts struggle with their own critical voice all the time. This struggle is likely the greatest hindrance that sabotages long-term sobriety.

Taming the inner critical voice is a challenge for everyone, addict and non-addict alike. Long-term sobriety requires it. Many try to eliminate the critical voice. Realistically, at best we learn to manage the voice and not dispose of it. To do so we have to come to terms with its voice and give it direction so that it does not dominate our behaviors.

Your critical voice is always delivered with the toxicity of shame. You did or said it wrong. You are never enough. Others do it right but you don’t. You just blew up proving that you will never get it right! When will you ever get it, stupid? These and an endless collection of other judgments and criticisms can be levied at you in rapid machine gun fire within your mind. Often this can occur without anyone saying anything to you. Most people have certain life experiences of failure that make them vulnerable to experiencing the wrath of their own shameful critical voice. For me, it’s when I commit to doing something like meeting for coffee someplace with a friend or colleague and I totally space it out, not just being a few minutes late but as in I don’t think of it until the next day. My mind can go nuts inside. My critical voice has been known to scream and yell at me until it becomes hoarse! It is all motivated by shame. Most people have these failures in life that trigger terrific lectures from your critical voice. How do you address your critical voice when it goes on a nonstop rant?

Here are some suggestions for thought.

1. In the midst of a critical voice rant, take attention away from the thought. You can do this by directing your thoughts toward your body and focusing your attention on feeling the energy in your hands. You can take a walk and concentrate for a few minutes on the conversation of birds chirping and singing in the trees. There are a number of possibilities for distraction. When you take a deep breath, your critical voice will slow down when it no longer has your entire attention. For this to occur you will need to concentrate on establishing an anchor for being present that you return to when the negative rumination runs rampant in your head.

2. Identify that there is negative self-talk going on in your head—that it is not who you are: There may be experiences of negative onslaught that barrage your thoughts and drag you along whereby you conclude that you are your thoughts. It is necessary to distinguish that you are not your thoughts. You must be able to separate and observe that you have negative thoughts that come crashing in so that you don’t conclude that the negative criticism is who you are. Some people fuse their negative narrative with their identity. They conclude that their addiction is who they are and therefore they must act out. They create a storyline of victimization that underscores victimhood as an identity and defend their right to be a victim. If challenged about their negative narrative they will utilize their anger with “How dare you question my identity with all that has happened to me”. Sometimes when people complain enough they get the attention they never got when they remained quiet. So they discover that their negative narrative has a payoff that is worthwhile. Negative attention is better than no attention at all. So they continue to act out with addiction to support their negative belief that will provide the attention that had previously been missing. Being an identified patient is better than being invisible. However, you never learn to give up the storyline of negative self-talk as long as you see the negative narrative as who you are.

3. Understand the source of where the negative self-talk comes from: Once you identify the negative message it is important to recognize the voice of negativity. Usually, that voice comes from your family of origin or significant caretaker. It could come from another significant mentor. It is important to then give back the message and its power over you and take back your own self-empowerment. You may simply declare that they are not welcome to the conversation and that you will ignore the negative message.

4. Practice being present in the moment of discomfort: Being present in the moment is difficult when everything feels shitty. Yet it is important to bring yourself to inner alignment with the present moment you experience. It is about accepting where you are right now, not forever. It is important to learn to lean into the present moment. Everything can be going wrong. You might be sore with remorse, financial reversal, extreme loneliness, or other intense emotional or physical pain. As hard as it seems you must come to terms with the immediate moment you are in. It’s not going to change instantly. However, you can change gradually. You must learn to practice total acceptance about where you are and what you are facing. You do this by practicing thanksgiving. In the midst of painful experience, you learn to challenge and change your negative narrative by leaning into what is and making something meaningful rather than waiting for the next big break in life.

5. Rely upon your affirmations: The secret power of affirmative thought can never be overemphasized. Addicts with long-term sobriety and transformation have long since learned the value of practicing the power of affirmation. There is no lobotomy that works. There is no substitute. Regularly bathing yourself with an affirmative belief that you have hammered into your awareness requires ongoing conditioning and training. It becomes a galvanized shield against the criticism of others and tempers your own self-judgment. It is what I have found to be the secret to taming your critical voice.

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