Survival skills
What worked for us can now work against us
“The survival techniques we developed while living with the active disease of alcoholism have become a way of life. It may never have occurred to us that there is any other way to live.”
-How Al-Anon Works
Many if not most alcoholics and addicts developed survival skills during childhood. As it can be very difficult—and painful—to uncover the techniques we used to survive growing up, it is perhaps easier to see these ways of living in action as adults.
We project—blaming others for everything. Whether it is our parents for the harms done to us as children, our teachers for being unfair, or our past love relationships that let us down, we are angry and we blame. As adults, we blame everyone in our circle of influence: spouses, employers, the government—anything to keep the focus off of ourselves and our part. Our responsibility.
We avoid—in relationships, we leave before we are left. We are not going to give anyone we begin to love the chance to hurt us. We run before this happens. We avoid true intimacy because being vulnerable is dangerous. We want so badly to love and be loved, but our past hurt holds us back every single time.
We withhold forgiveness—keeping the hurt and staying the victim. We refuse to let others off the hook and end up torturing ourselves as everyone around us holds the power and continues to do things to us.
We deny- we claim we have no need for love or affection. We claim there is nothing wrong with us, that we are perfectly content the way we are. And yet we are unfulfilled and feel an apartness from ourselves and other human beings. We completely lose touch with who we are. We are kind of coasting through life in a neutral bubble of non-feeling and non-experience.
Oh, the denial! When I deny, I am controlling. And this survival skill really worked for me—until it didn’t. I always return to this safe cocoon when things feel so very out of control. This has happened over and over in my life. However, having chosen to live a life in recovery and to really attempt to grow for the past two decades has forced me to look at my past and how the trauma of my childhood and my early adulthood really affected me in a profoundly damaging way.
The damage was so severe that, even though I swore I would never be an alcoholic like my grandfather, I did. I just couldn’t control all of the thoughts and feelings that constantly haunted me. I had to stuff all of these memories, cram it down until I could feel nothing. Vodka helped me do this successfully for quite a few years.
But recovery is a different animal. Continuing to really grow in recovery, apart from just cursory attendance at meetings with limited or no sponsorship and no real focus on the Twelve Steps, required me to start dredging up some of these old hurts. These hurts started being revealed to me while teaching and working with children once again. They were revealed to me with the women I began to sponsor, whose stories reflected back on my own experience. They were revealed to me each morning as I sat down with my books and prayed and meditated. There was no more escaping—I could no longer afford to shove this shit down. It was harming me to jam it further inside.
I honestly think people are afraid to do this much self-searching. And I mean people in AA. I think it is easier to do our one and only Fourth Step, make a few amends, and just become meeting makers for the rest of our lives. Or we leave. Maybe to drink again but maybe not. And there have been times where I have been so frustrated with myself that I have wished I could be one of those people. I have been so angry with God that I always have to be the one to actually learn something about myself. But thankfully God has shown me through the many meetings I go to and constant and consistent work with sponsorship that there are many going through these same struggles. There is a lot to learn and many of us who are willing to grow. We just have to be willing to find each other.
So now you have found me and I hope you will join me the next several weeks into the new year to explore these survival skills—and once and for all, to be able to lay them to rest as we discover who we really are in this life called recovery.
Happy Holidays to all who celebrate! I am so grateful for all of you. Please find some time during this holiday season to give away the gift that was so freely given to you. Be of service. And may God continue to hold your hand and bless you on this journey.