Above all else, I want you to know that you are loved and lovable. You will learn this from my words and actions – the lessons on love are in how I treat you and how I treat myself.
I want you to engage with the world from a place of worthiness. You will learn that you are worthy of love, belonging, and joy every time you see me practice self-compassion and embrace my own imperfections.
We will practice courage in our family by showing up, letting ourselves be seen, and honouring vulnerability. We will share our stories of struggle and strength. There will always be room in our home for both.
I want you to know joy, so together we will practice gratitude. I want you to feel joy, so together we will learn how to be vulnerable. When uncertainty and scarcity visit, you will be able to draw from the spirit that is a part of our everyday life.
Together we will cry and face fear and grief. I will want to take away your pain, but instead I will sit with you and teach you how to feel it. We will laugh and sing and dance and create. We will always have permission to be ourselves with each other. No matter what, you will always belong here.
As you begin your wholehearted journey, the greatest gift that I can give to you is to live and love with my whole heart and to dare greatly. I will not teach or love or show you anything perfectly, but I will let you see me, and I will always hold sacred the gift of seeing you. Truly, deeply, seeing you.
Brené Brown, Family Manifesto, `Daring Greatly´
Late last Monday evening, I returned home from London where I had attended the Recovery Reimagined Conference hosted by the Berlin Friendly Circle. Fatigued from my travels and both grateful for and invigorated by the richness of what I had experienced while away, I thoroughly enjoyed the rest and relaxation of sleeping in my own bed again.
The conference involved five very intense days of learning and sharing, getting to know, in person, fellow travellers in recovery, long familiar only from regular Zoom calls. The intensity was amplified by spending these days at the heart of one of Europe’s busiest cities, a stark contrast to the riverbank tranquillity of my Rheinland home, which I appreciate so much.
When I awoke from my slumbers on Tuesday morning, embers of a dream, in the form of visual flashes and emotional remnants, remained accessible to me. Before exploring the contents of the dream, it will help to provide some context.
At conferences, workshops, and gatherings, I am generally quite active in my participation, especially when the material at hand is interesting, challenging, and inspiring. This was the case at Recovery Reimagined. Friendly Circle Berlin is a global gathering of people from a variety of Twelve Step Recovery Programmes, and beyond, who work together to help each other grow towards Emotional Sobriety.
The workshops, lectures, and ensuing discussions on topics such as the neuroscience of addiction, the role of complex trauma in addiction and recovery, and on augmenting the Twelve Steps (initially published in 1939) with the latest insights, discoveries, and healing modalities from a wide array of scientific fields; these sessions were rich, motivating, and encouraging. Together, we reviewed the latest results of clinical research, shared experience, explored different perspectives, and pushed the boundaries of practical approaches to expand our individual and collective recovery.
Inquisitive by nature, I am generally driven to learn more, eager to join up the dots between apparently disparate phenomena and dynamics, to share nuggets of wisdom I have learned in the Twelve Step community, and to pass on my own experience from two decades of sober living. What I share is coming through me, not from me. We all sit on the shoulders of those who have gone before us.
Our common goal of achieving emotional sobriety and helping others grow in that process, is what charges the powerful energy field of Friendly Circle Berlin.
In that dream sequence which lingered with me, a small group of conference participants, including myself, were animatedly discussing some issue or other which had resonated deeply with us. The mood was exploratory, enquiring, and empathetic, characterised by mutual respect and loving kindness.
Then, a man in his fifties whom I did not recognise, (perhaps a stranger who had walked in off the street) walked past me, turned suddenly and, addressing me directly, asked rather aggressively: `Are you still yapping? Don’t you ever shut up?´
I felt a thud in my solar plexus as I dropped to the canvas, the aftershocks resonating throughout my entire body as I lay prone and stunned, a sure sign that an old wound had been ripped open, the contents now bubbling to the surface, beckoning my attention.
Transported back to my early boyhood, where specific memories are few and far between, I could suddenly clearly remember an incident with my grandfather, whom I feared somewhat while holding him in both great affection and high esteem.
On holidays with the extended family at his beautiful holiday home in the west of Ireland, I was tagging along behind Grandpop, effervescent, eager for connection, wanting to learn from and share some emotional intimacy with this great man.
Here it is interesting to note that such memories, rare as they are, always show me chasing the adult. It is never a case of them slowing down to a child’s pace and bringing the child along with them. Even now, the visceral memory of this dynamic feels exhausting.
Unluckily for me, the great man must have been somewhat agitated on this sunny summer’s morning. At some point, as we were walking along the riverbank in the bright sunshine, he turned on me suddenly and, looking down from the heights of a six-foot man, told me that I was a case of verbal diarrhoea, instructing me to put a plug in it. Perhaps 6 or 7 years old at the time, I was devastated.
The message imparted in that encounter was not only that I was clearly defective and not worthy of attention (not to mind affection), but that I was also responsible for the behaviour of the abusing adult.
I hesitate when I write the word `abusing´. This is part of the denial that had clouded my vision and kept me stuck for the best part of my life. It is now clear to my why this denial is so strong. Part and parcel of the emotional abuse of children is the inculcation in the child the belief that he or she is, in fact, to blame for the abuse. The only logical explanation beneath this layer of insinuation is that the child deserved what he got. Take that!
As a result, we go through life making excuses for those who didn’t provide for our basics needs, the needs which must be met for any child to thrive emotionally and develop a healthy sense of self. While the focus is often placed on the material realm (food, clothing, roof over our heads, education, etc. — and these are important) it is the emotional side of things that often gets neglected or idealised in our memory.
Collective denial tells us that a tough upbringing is the best preparation for later life in a tough world. I could give further examples, which, under scrutiny, melt like snowmen in the May sunshine. The bottom line is that we are caught up in a generational dysfunctional dynamic which must be healed if the human species is to overcome our current collective challenges and is ever going to achieve its full creative and loving potential.
I never heard an apology from a parent , grandparent, or any member of the older generations of my extended family. Things are changing, thankfully. In recovery circles we have the tenth Step which tells us to `Continue to take daily inventory and when we were wrong promptly admit it´.
New modalities are coming on stream which teach us similar new approaches in the vernacular of the 21st century. The Positive Intelligence (PQ) Mental Fitness modality is a case in point.
Empathy, Exploration, Innovation, Navigation, and Activation; these are the Sage Powers as defined in PQ, which I find so useful in my daily practice of recovery.
Our mind can be our best friend, if we can only learn how to apply this most amazing of resources. If left to its own devices, however, it is the fear-fuelled Saboteurs (Judge, Controller, Hyper-Rational, Pleaser, Victim, Avoider, Hyper-Achiever, Stickler, Hyper-Vigilant, Restless) which rule the day.
When we live in a constant state of Saboteur hijacking, we simply rinse and repeat the emotional abuse we ourselves have suffered. We first internalize the abuse and treat ourselves as unworthy, and then pass on the wounds to the next generation, as had happened to our parents and their parents.
Mental fitness enables us to intercept the Saboteurs, switch to Sage, and apply the Sage Powers in a loving response to whatever challenges emerge as we go through each day. But I digress.
Inevitably, I went on to internalise the false message of my grandfather. Filled with the corresponding shame linked with the conviction that I had to somehow validate my existence, there was a time in young adulthood when my behaviour was, indeed, driven by the need to be in the spotlight, to be seen, to compensate for the absence of self-esteem. That behaviour, with imposter syndrome lurking on the fringes, induced even more shame, contributing to the downward spiral of addiction, self harm, and abandonment.
Living in recovery has shown me that we all need our own individual practice that touches our unconscious conditioning where our wounds and defence mechanisms lie. That’s the only way we can be changed at any significant or lasting level.
In a global community now governed by Western values, the Saboteur-ruled dualistic, calculating, and judging mind is almost exclusively the way most of us think. This gives us a false sense of superiority, security, and self-righteousness. Is it any wonder that our natural environment, our culture, politics, and societies are as they are?
Nevertheless, I still have hope. And that hope has been nourished by what I experienced in London last week. More and more people are discovering true community and contemplation as a way of being, reconciling, and bridge-building, guided by their inner experience of a power beyond the human ego, a Great Spirit.
We’re not throwing out our rational mind, but rather placing it in the service of nondual, contemplative consciousness. When we have both, we’re able to see more deeply, wisely, and justly. This leads to humility, patience, and loving-kindness.
As this latest experience has shown, lived loving-kindness engenders trust, which, in turn, allows old wounds to re-surface after decades in darkness, on the run. It also provides us with the resources which enable us to sit with those wounds as they mend in the healing light of day.
