Taming your turbulent past : a self-help guide for adult children of alcoholics

181 Pages·1987·1.15 MB·English

by  Worden

Introduction

Epigraph

Man is a multiple amphibian who lives in about twenty different worlds at once. If
anything is to be done to improve his enjoyment of life, to improve the way he can
realize his desirable potentialities, to improve his health, to improve the quality of
his relations with other people, to improve his morality, we have to attack on all
fronts at once.

And the greatest, and what may be called the original sin of the human mind is
sloth, it's over-simplification. We want to think that there is only one cause for
every given phenomenon, therefore there is only one cure--there is not! This is the
trouble: no phenomenon on the human level, which is a level of immense
complexity, can ever have a single cause-- we must always take at least a half a
dozen conspiring factors into consideration . . .
-- Aldous Huxley, 1960

The Essence of This Book

Taming Your Turbulent Past is a guidebook for adult children of alcoholics, grown
men and women whose lives have been indelibly marked by parental alcoholism
and co-dependency.

Its purpose is to help you heal the old wounds from your childhood in order to
restore your full capacity for loving and living and enjoying life as an adult.

Many adult children have experienced great anguish. The anguish of indirection
and indecision, the anguish of feeling "lonely and afraid, in a world we never
made." The anguish of feeling like an absurd little child trapped in an ungainly
body and clothed and made up like an adult -- but always wondering, "What will I
be when I really grow up." Or: "Is this all that life offers?"

There are other anxieties and a nameless uneasiness, a vague sense of doom as
palpable as the far-off rumble of thunder before a storm.

Mary, a 33 year-old adult child who works as a loan officer, describes a feeling
known to many other adult children. "It's like I'm always waiting for something
dreadful to happen, that I've done something wrong, that I've made a terrible
mistake and the roof's going to fall in. I feel like I'm on hold, waiting. Waiting for
the school principal to punish me, waiting for the boss to find a mistake in my
work. Waiting, always waiting."

And like countless other adult children, Mary wonders, "Is there a purpose to my
life? Where am I going? What's it all mean? Will I ever find the serenity that other
people talk about?"

What is the meaning of this life? This is the anguish, the agony of the adult child.

This book is for you if you've grappled with these feelings, these questions.

This book is for you if your life often seems futile or utterly meaningless.

This book is for you if your life is a mechanical repetition of loneliness, hurt, guilt,
fear, confusion, and conflict.

My aim is to offer strategies for self-change that can help you, an adult child of an
alcoholic, free yourself from the turbulence of your childhood so that your can
better cope with the challenges of today. By taming your past, you can finally
experience the full joys of adult living and loving and sharing.

Is this a promise for a magic method of finding a permanent state of bliss. A quick
cure for life-long conflict?

Sorry.

No miraculous key to total happiness exists. There is no effortless self-help guide
to inner harmony in thirty days, guaranteed, without tears.

But I do believe the strategies and exercises in this book can help ease the burden
of your anguish by giving you a far more extensive understanding of the
relationship you had with your alcoholic family during your childhood and
adolescence, and how that relationship is still affecting your day-to-day life.

This new understanding, in and of itself, is not enough to help you master the
powerful and complex emotions that may be preventing you from creating an
adult life that is as productive, fulfilling and loving as you desire.

Understanding, awareness and insight are important first steps in the process of
personal growth. But they are just that: First steps.
The key to rediscovering and mastering your personal power is behavior change.
And behavior change takes practice, rehearsal, stick-to-itiveness, and above all --
ACTION.

The exercises and personal accounts in this book will serve as examples of how
techniques of behavior change can be put into effect in your own life, right now,
starting today.

Taming a turbulent past takes persistence and a creative willingness to change. It
may seem like hard work at first. As Carolyn Rogers recalls, "I waited for a long
time for things to change, for my life to get better. It was sort of like waiting for
my Fairy Godmother to come along and plink me on the head with her magic
wand and make my life fall into place. When I realized that it would be my
responsibility to make changes in my life, I can tell you I was scared."

She was scared, but not too scared to begin learning. Carolyn's first step was
getting past the fear of change, the fear of taking risks. Undaunted by her anxiety,
she began the process of discovering and mastering her personal power. And she
succeeded.

I believe that you, as an adult child, can also discover and master your personal
power. In the coming chapters we will explore methods that can help you . . .

Uncover and examine some of your most cherished and protected beliefs about
the causes of your unhappiness.
Relinquish your hidden resentments and heal your emotional hurts.
Forgive your parents and accept them exactly as they are.
Accept yourself as an imperfect being with complex and ambivalent emotions
living in a complex and ambivalent world.
Stop blaming things outside yourself for your problems and accept the
responsibility for your own happiness, health, and well-being.
Change your behavior as well as your thoughts and feelings.
Is Change Really Possible After All These Years?

Yes, you can tame your turburlent past, you can put meaning into your life, if . . .

. . . if you are willing to give up as much as you gain.

But wait a minute, you protest. I've given up too much of my life already. I can't
give up more. I just can't! I owe myself something!

Right. You do owe yourself something. You owe it to yourself to become unstuck
from the crazy glue of the past. You owe it to yourself to learn how to be more
fully alive in the present, to gain meaning and purpose in your life.
You owe it to yourself to make real, concrete and lasting behavioral changes
instead of bouncing from one illusory panacea to the next.

Lasting change means you must give up a lot.

You must give up your resentment and bitterness and petty annoyance about the
way your parents treated you.

You must discard your desire to punish and blame.

You must abandon your need to always win and to always be right.

You must cast away your defenses and the emotional armor of contempt and hate.

You must lay aside your compulsion to control your world by feeling responsible
for everybody else's happiness or by making other people "act right."

Positive Self-Change Takes Effort

Why bother, you might ask. I'm an adult now, I don't want to rehash all that old
garbage, and I won't forgive my parents until they change.

This book isn't for your parents, but for you.

Your well-being, your health, your relationships, your day- to-day happiness.
Your life. That's what is at stake here.

Adult children of alcoholics are, after all, adults.

And adults take responsibility for their own lives.

Isn't it about time you started living your life instead of sloshing around helplessly
in the backwash of your parent's turbulence, expectantly waiting and hoping for
someone to toss you the magic lifeline of happiness?

Aren't you tired of waiting?

Let's begin now. Let's take a look at how a new understanding, a new perspective
and a willingness to practice new behaviors can become your lifeline to a more
satisfying life.
The Pursuit of Happiness

The trouble is not that we are never happy -- it is that our happiness is so
episodical.
--Ruth Benedict

"I vividly remember a time in my childhood when I would lie in bed at night
yearning silently for happiness. I knew happiness was my basic unalienable
right." Carmen, a 32-year-old mother of two, smiled nervously, self-consciously as
she sifted through her memories and keyed on her happiness-hunger.

"I knew it absolutely because beginning in kindergarten I dressed up like a
Pilgrim in November, and pretended to chop down cherry trees in February, and
exploded firecrackers in July, all of this in celebration of our brave Founding
Fathers who gave their all to guarantee us 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.'

"I mean, my God, being unhappy was positively un-American. I not only had a
right to be happy, but a duty as well. Wasn't this country founded on the very idea
that personal happiness was the highest and loftiest goal we could seek in this
life?

"Shouldn't that be my goal, too?

"But there I was, odd-kid out, unhappy and ashamed to admit it. It seemed
everybody else in the world was happy and laughing and having a good time
except for me, the forlorn little girl hiding her fear and pain and loneliness behind
a shy smile."

Carmen was six years old and already a failure . . . but not a total failure. Even at
the age of six she could envision a sense of hope, a tiny, timid glimmering that
maybe, just maybe, happiness would happen to her the same way it seemed to
happen to others.

Her memories continued to unfold. "I believed that as I grew-up and got out on
my own, away from family turmoil, away from the demands of teachers and
parents and siblings, that I would achieve an emotional pinnacle of permanent
peace and happiness where my problems would melt away and my life would run
smoothly, without conflict or fear."

Carmen had a familiar yearning, a longing for a magical state of well-being which,
once found, she would never lose.
She believed happiness was a concrete thing, something she could search for and
find like a lost toy.

She also believed, as most children do, that the responsibility for her happiness
and health and satisfaction rested outside of herself. If she was angry, it was
because someone made her that way. If she was lonely, it was because someone
neglected her. If she felt alienated, it was because someone had hurt her, lied to
her, disappointed her, and failed to meet her most basic needs to be nurtured and
encouraged and loved. This is the way she felt: "They made me unhappy. Me. Me!
ME! How could they do this to sweet, precious me?"

And who was responsible for making Carmen so miserable and unhappy and
depressed?

"Well, of course. That's easy," Carmen says. "It was my parents."

She says it easily. There's no bitterness in her voice, no tremulous quaver of thinly
concealed sarcasm or hostility. Carmen has moved beyond the blame game,
moved beyond the victim stance. And as she learned more about her happiness
hunger, she also learned about the universal experience of childhood.

The Universal Experience

When you were a young child, the responsibility for your safety and health and
well-being rested with your parents. You were totally dependent on them for your
survival, both physical and emotional.

You couldn't feed yourself, clothe yourself, keep yourself warm. Without the help
of others, you would have died.

So you were totally dependent.

But not totally helpless.

You learned quickly how to behave in order to get other people to do what you
couldn't do for yourself.

How did you do this? How did a small baby control other people? How did you
get big people to meet your needs?
You cried.

When you were wet, when you were hungry, when your were frightened, when
you were cold, you cried.

And then, in response to your cries, a big person cleaned you and fed you and
comforted you and kept you warm.

Maybe.

Sometimes.

Not always.

As you grew older, you learned to control your environment -- and the big people
in it -- in ways other than crying.

You learned to smile and act cute when you wanted approval and attention. You
learned to sulk when you felt upset and to act stubborn when you didn't get your
own way. You discovered when tears worked and when they didn't, when anger
was safe and when it was dangerous. You learned to express your feelings and to
hide them, to be honest and to lie, to love and to hate, to accept and reject.

This learning process is normal and natural. It is the universal experience of
childhood, and each of us carries inside the emotional memories of that childhood
dependence.

If you grew up in a family conflicted by parental alcoholism and co-dependency,
you are undoubtedly carrying with you emotional memories of powerlessness and
pain, fear and rage, confusion and the desire to control your unpredictable
parents. These feelings are not odd or unique or mysterious. They are the normal
reactions of a normal child in a dysfunctional family.

Unhappiness in reaction to discomfort, conflict, and uncertainty is the universal
experience of all humankind.

This is part of what Carmen experienced. Why should you or I be different?

These unhappy emotional memories may be buried, half- forgotten,
unconsciously repressed, or consciously suppressed through an agonizing act of
self-will.

But they exist.
Countless men and women continue to suffer emotional and physical problems --
career, financial, health, relationship, and family problems -- in their day to day
lives because they are re- enacting the unresolved conflicts of their earliest years
in an alcoholic family.

The same difficulties we had as children in our families seem always to re-emerge
to damage our adult relationships.

In effect, we re-create the personal hell of our childhood unhappiness.

The Inevitability of Unhappiness

Personal problems and unhappiness are inevitable because human beings are
born with a nervous system that makes us sensitive to physical and emotional
pain.

Emerson wrote: "He has seen but half the universe who never has been shown the
house of Pain."

We inhabit the house of Pain-- or perhaps more accurately, Pain is one of the
rooms in our house. For some of us it is a small room, a closet or a crawlspace.
For others it is the living-room, a space we enter daily.

We learn from pain. We learn not to stick our hands in the fire and we learn not to
call a big guy with a bad temper a dirty name, at least not so as he can hear us. (Or
as singer Jim Croce put it: We don't step on Superman's cape, don't spit into the
wind ... .)

In other words, the ability to feel pain is adaptive. It helps us survive in a world
that can be dangerous and demanding and full of threats. It helps us adjust to the
reality that fire burns and people retaliate.

But many adult children of alcoholics have become over-sensitized to the threat of
pain -- that is, because of our childhood memories we have a tendency to over-
estimate the likelihood and intensity of a threat to our present well-being.

We've been hurt in the past and we expect to be hurt again.
After breaking up with his girlfriend, Carlos said, "No more. I can't handle this
stuff-- this tearing away at my insides. Never again."

Never again what? "I'm never going to let myself get in a position to be hurt. I
don't like the feeling of being so vulnerable."

And how do we avoid being vulnerable? By armoring ourselves, by taking
elaborate precautions, by defensiveness. We not only guard against vulnerability,
we protect and overprotect.

We erect walls, walls to protect us from psychological barbs. Barriers to keep our
own emotions in and to make sure outside emotions cannot get in.

We adopt a stoic stance, a poker face, never risking to show what we really think
or feel. As Paul Simon put it in the lyrics of one of his hit tunes: "I am a rock, I am
an island."

Our extreme sensitivity makes us anticipate pain. Our memories make us relive
our past suffering over and over again until our natural capacity to anticipate and
experience suffering becomes over-developed.

Living under a ubiquitous cloud of doom, we may sense threats where none exist,
a feeling Shakespeare aptly described:

Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easily is a bush supposed a bear.

We may also exaggerate the dangers that do confront us, magnify small incidents
all out of proportion, and in so doing, create a real crisis where none existed
before. These two patterns can make us extremely unhappy and they can damage
our present relationships.

Amy, a 37 year-old grocery checker, sought counseling because her second
marriage was in trouble. She complained, "You can't ever trust a man. They'll
always run out on you when you need them most."

When asked about her family of origin, Amy described a tumultuous childhood in
a family preoccupied by her father's drinking and her mother's frantic efforts to
hide his bottles. After years of broken promises, fights, and financial hardship,
Amy's parents separated.

"They tried to hide it from me," Amy said, her voice breaking. "One day my father
packed his bags and said he had to go away on a business trip. He never returned.
At first, I suffered the horrible fear that he'd been killed. Why else would he stay