It All Begins With A Story- Part 1
We have been blessed with the fortune to have worked with thousands of couples in our combined tenure in the addiction treatment field of over 76 years. The settings have included conjoint and group therapy as well as two-week-long intensives and therapeutic retreats. Our passion for promoting healthy families who share in the recovery process has been burning since we were the forgotten children in our alcoholic homes. Our ongoing commitment to working with marriages and families impacted by addiction is embodied in our third corporate pillar of service: Awakening …
The first meaningful contribution to this pillar came in the form of our 2010 publication One In the Spirit: Meditation Course for Recovering Couples. The input we have received from couples working with the mediation course has been most positive since its release. While working on a second volume of that publication, our extensive work with couples whose romance and marriage that has been decimated by the betrayal that frequently accompanies addiction took us off course a bit. The side track led to the development of a framework for couples looking to restore or enhance their romantic health regardless of how the need had arisen. Our most recent release, Awakening To Your Soulmate: A Decision to be IN Love, grew out of our personal and professional experience with romantic betrayal but the therapeutic framework has wide application to couples embarking on a new relationship, those trying to learn from their past mistakes and many others simply looking for an enduring romantic bond.
A Brief Introduction to Our Story
The book introduces its readers to four building blocks critical in restoring romantic health through the developmentof a firm foundation of mutual support. The readers are first introduced to the importance of knowing each other’s stories so we begin with ours. We have introduced you to some of the highlights below.
John
We have had been married for the past 42 years but it probably should not have lasted that long. We thought we were a great match, but we never paid attention to the warnings we received that suggested that perhaps our marriage was premature. The clearest warning came from the 12 Step recovery literature.
One such text, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions reads: “A.A. has many single alcoholics who wish to marry and are in a position to do so. Some marry fellow A.A.’s. How do they come out? On the whole these marriages are very good ones. Their common suffering as drinkers, their common interest in A.A. and spiritual things, often enhance such unions. It is only where ‘boy meets girl on A.A. campus,’ and love follows at first sight, that difficulties may develop. The prospective partners need to be solid A.A.’s and long enough acquainted to know that their compatibility at spiritual, mental, and emotional levels is a fact and not wishful thinking. They need to be as sure as possible that no deep-lying emotional handicap in either will be likely to rise up under later pressures to cripple them.” These words were first published in 1953 and while we had been exposed to them and similar concepts, we unfortunately never heeded the warnings.
Neither Elaine nor I are parent bashers. We do not blame our parents for who we are and discourage that defect of character in our clients. Having said that, I will add that the families that Elaine and I grew up in were ones that if we had a choice, we might not have chosen them. Both of us were born into alcoholic homes and the world that Elaine and I grew up in was shrouded in fear, abuse, emotional neglect, and spiritual deprivation.
During our romantic courtship conversations, it would seem that we had grown up in the same house even though our cultural environments could not have been more different. We often related the harrowing tales of our respective childhood stories and marveled at how similarly we grew up. This intimate sharing created a close bond that formed early in our relationship and provided mutual support and personal validation. It was as if we had known each other always. We would talk for hours about the lessons we had learned growing up in the grip of the alcoholism our parents had failed to escape or insulate us from.
Our professional work with families and couples has taught us that a child’s pre-teenage years are a time for intense training for romance and intimate communication – a sort of marriage college if you will. Most children study their parents or caregivers intently to learn how people who “love” each other are expected to behave towards each other. The courses we had taken in marriage college would leave us ill-prepared as adults to be nurturing even if we had managed to keep our prayerful childhood promise that we would never drink. In their best moments our parents lived like married singles who were engaged to be divorced and in the dark times they taught us why we should never marry. We did not remain abstinent as promised but we did manage to retain the college lessons well.
Elaine
The hardships that John and I bore as children growing up in alcoholic homes are far from unique. Most of the “forgotten children” of alcoholism know what it is like to grow up with a huge hole in their heart. Most of us are no strangers to trauma. The sexual abuse I endured and the lessons that John was taught, that his father claimed would hurt him more than John, are stories that many forgotten children can recite by heart. The experiences we had endured had become a source of strong attraction we felt towards each other. Our work with couples reveals a pattern similar to our own. Romantic partners with traumatic childhood backgrounds are attracted to the depth they find in each other. The bonds that they develop are formed quickly and generally run deep. The problem with this pattern is that we tend to be attracted to mates that have been pretty mangled up by life and not taken the steps to un-mangle themselves.
John
By the age of thirteen, I had already committed the most egregious acts that I had ever witnessed in the shadows of my father’s alcoholism. I was 5’ 6” tall and 225 pounds of what my mom called “baby fat” when I discovered sloe gin in the boy’s room at the Immaculate Conception church dance. As I reached for the brown paper bag, I vaguely remembered my own childhood pledge to abstain from alcohol that I prayerfully offered every night before bedtime. I promptly dismissed the vow as an immature resolution of a child trying to calm his mother’s fears that her son would grow into an alcoholic like her husband and her father before him. But I thought to myself “What mom did not know would not hurt her,” and “besides I was never going to get as bad as my father any way” – the memory and the resolution vanished. By the time that I eventually left the restroom, one sip, “ just to see what it felt like”, became ten and I was off to meet my “one true love ” on the dance floor like some kind of 60’s version of John Travolta. Can you imagine – a short drunken 13 year old whose obesity prevented him from seeing his shoes, with a Saturday Night Fever and a belly full of sloe gin, trying to boogie his way into the heart of the first girl he met on the dance floor when he had never danced a step in his life? It was not a pretty sight. The evening ended, I am told, when I cursed the church and told the crowd that God was dead and a priest, leading a mob of students, chased me and my friends from the church property warning that we should never darken the doors of the church again. I was on my way to becoming just like my Dad. The scene at the church dance was to be repeated many times over during my active addiction.
That same year I found the girl of my dreams in the lingerie section of the Sears and Roebucks catalog and it was love at first, second, and third sight. A dual addiction to addictive substances and sexually and romantically addicted behaviors was born. I was not going to draw a sober breath for another 5 years and the pursuit of romantic and sexual fulfillment was going to become my second drug of choice, right after Southern Comfort, and remain a matter of fantasy and self-delusion for another three- and one-half years after I got substance sober. This was not the way that it was supposed to turn out. I had a sense that I was in trouble. But Dad usually drank too much and hurt people. Dad ran around with other women and used me as an alibi to my mother. Dad was the problem – not me! I was going to be different, but the prophecy seemed to be unfolding and I lacked the power to do anything about it. I would end up just like him if I did not change. I had imagined better from myself.
Elaine
I don’t know that I imagined that my life would be different then my parents. I spent most of my early childhood denying just how very bad things were.
I spent my childhood living in the world of fantasy. It didn’t matter if the story came from the thousands of books I read or created during the time I spent playing with Barbie and Ken dolls, or from the pictures I saw in my father’s pornography stash. By the age of seven, I had already perfected the use of fantasy as a way to disappear as I already felt defective and powerless. I can recall feeling like I was flowing down the aisle of St. Peter’s church dressed in my white dress and veil during my first holy communion ceremony. Sadly, I have no other memory of that sacred event, as I quickly resorted to fantasy to quiet the storm of anxiety within me. You see, my parents and I arrived late for this event as they were fighting off a hangover from a late night of heavy drinking. We arrive at the church and meet Sister Agnus who was waiting to start the procession and angry that I was late once again. My parents blamed our tardiness on my irresponsibility but Sister and I both knew the truth and neither of us was going to talk about it. She rushed my parents off to their seats and enlisted me in her denial that my parents never meant any harm as she assured me that they were good and loving people who were only going through tough times. When I protested and tried to explain the horrible scene in our living room last night, she reminded me of the fourth commandment that I honor my father and mother and I quickly departed one more time for the world of fantasy that had become my anesthesia. I spent the remainder of the communion ceremony in the zone of self-delusion that I would migrate to again and again in the years to come. The fantasy that took hold that day was one of me being married to my partner and the thoughts were of us living happily ever after. This theme – of my pursuing men to rescue me – was to return over and over throughout my life until I addressed my sex and love addiction.
The years that followed were marred with the pain of sexual abuse that, as much as I tried, could not be numbed. My flights of fantasy or my attempts to assume the lives of the heroes and heroines I read about in the library books I devoured day after day did not even dull the pain. I would need more. I found alcohol by age fifteen and was secretly engaged to be married to a 15-year-old boy that worshipped the ground I walked on. I was not exactly sure what that phrase meant but I had heard it while attending marriage college and being worshiped was definitely a phenomenon associated with a soul mate. I wonder if there is a connection between beginning to drink and getting engaged at 15? I am guessing – yes.
I defiantly took risks in order to feel good and when that did not work any longer I found myself going to any lengths necessary to feel nothing at all. By the time I reached high school I had gone from a good little girl who could not understand why others did not see me or treat me that way, to an alcoholic who desperately sought and attempted to conquer every possible suitor – especially the ones that worshiped me. There was no fidelity, no honor, no decency, and most of all very little conscience to get in my way. Instead, I was filled with anger at all of the men who had abused me and for the many who I thought failed to protect and care for me. I was determined to get even with them all no matter what it cost me. Within a year of graduation, I found myself at odds with everything and everybody and barely able to come up with one good reason to not take my own life.
Like many adult children of alcoholics, I tried to avoid having my drinking behavior look problematic, so I usually sought out other drugs that were available like marijuana. There was no way that I was going to be an alcoholic.
It Got Worse Before It Got Better
Part II will introduce you to the paths to recovery we each embarked on and the road we traveled to a still greater bottom before understanding that if we were going to be truly sober there would need to be only one version of John and one version of Elaine.