Addiction- A perfectly normal response to unhealed, unacknowledged, unsupported, long-term, ongoing trauma.
Trauma is an experience that overwhelms our capacity to process and integrate what is happening.
Without recovery, I would still possess only the tools and beliefs of dysfunction; a fixed mindset with a Zero-sum mentality-- all conflicts resulting in a winner and a loser. Winning and losing are suitable for games and wars, but not for safe and trusting relationships. I have no desire for relationships where one of us must lose in order for the other to win. I prefer the shared work of identifying a mutually desired and agreeable resolution---A Third Way. I…
In relationships, if it is conditional, it is not kind. Nothing was more confused and distorted than my early ideas about kindness and connection. For more decades than I care to admit, I mistook kind people for people who wanted a relationship with me, and unkind people as enemies out to get me. Painfully childish. But how could I have known differently? I did not understand kindness as a value practiced by some and not by others. I understood it…
If the people we looked to for love and protection imposed traumatic shame for our failure to conform or submit, that was a breach of their power. They were wrong. Period. Maybe not evil—but wrong. If wrestling with pain was treated as weakness or disobedience by those we relied on to raise and teach us, we learned that expressing feelings was bad, broken, troublesome, shameful. We learned fear—and perhaps became bullying or mean-spirited ourselves. Maybe we managed the pain through…
For much of my life I treasured, even sought, the opportunity to align with one person (squee –closeness, right?) against another for any reason at all-- instant, cheap, and easy bond. I had consistently witnessed how “Your enemy’s enemy is your friend”. I found it to be intoxicatingly powerful to collude, mock, gossip, undermine…and far better to be on the giving end of that business, than the receiving end. Recovery relieves me from agreeing to be on either end of that. I have…
