We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Prayer of St. Francis
Grief is loss that is stuck beneath denial, wilful forgetting, and the fear of being perceived as dramatizing the past. Grief is the built-up defeats, slights, and neglects from childhood.
ACA Big Red Book, Pg 199
We can make ourselves available to the higher vibrations of love and understanding that work like the immune system of the body. The body has an immune system which can take an amazing amount of assault, injury, and sickness – and heal. The psyche can take an amazing amount of heartbreak, anxiety, and depression – and heal.
Marianne Williamson
Before we came into active recovery from addictive substances and behaviours, when life was dictated by unpredictable, sometimes severely destructive forces, we might have thought of grief as something we experience only from overt losses such as the death of a loved one, accidents, divorce, financial ruin, or a devastating illness.
Our experience in recovery generally changes this view.
The classic path of recovery was laid down by the first recovering alcoholics in the Big Book of AA, published in 1939. Since that time, this movement has spawned a wide variety of related fellowships which address substance addictions (cocaine, cannabis, heroine, etc.) and behavioural or process addictions (over-eating, over-working, co-dependency, sex, porn, and media addiction, etc.) These communities are active on site and online throughout the world today.
One of these `cousin´ fellowships is ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics), whereby the founders (in the 1970s) pointed out that it is a fellowship not only specifically for children of alcoholics, but for all who desired recovery from growing up in a dysfunctional family system.
The first stage of recovery is to step out of the addictive dynamic, to arrest the addiction. The alcoholic stops drinking, the workaholic achieves a healthier balance of activities and interests, and so on. This new way of living becomes the foundation for the next phase of growth. The goal of this further stage is emotional sobriety.
With the advent of emotional sobriety, we begin to discover that much of what we experienced in childhood forced us to adopt survival strategies. These were designed to get the attention, affection, and safety – otherwise not forthcoming from our caregivers – which are indispensable to the healthy development of every child.
As we take stock in recovery of our default beliefs, emotional patterns, and habits, we begin to recognize how counter-productive these coping mechanisms have become in adult life.
We also begin to recognize the necessity of grieving the loss of our true identity in childhood and we embark upon developing practices to facilitate this.
As we open our hearts in recovery, the permafrost of our repressed and hidden past begins to thaw. Extreme examples of abuse (physical, sexual, emotional, and spiritual) may rise to the surface of our consciousness. These may require us to seek out the help of trauma-informed professionals as we continue our work in recovery.
In other cases, less dramatic, long-lost childhood memories may gradually emerge. We begin to get inklings of what those childhood wounds might be, such as being regularly and unfairly discounted, ridiculed, humiliated, or criticized, being compared to siblings who were better behaved, being abandoned, bullied, betrayed, or rejected, perhaps even parentified, i.e., given age-inappropriate responsibilities way beyond our state of maturity.
Such wounding happens typically when overwhelmed parents compensate for their own inadequacies by `leaning´ on their young children to maintain the short-term functionality of the family. Such dynamics generally come with a high long-term price tag, sometimes stretching over generations. Under such burdens, we are bound to crash and burn in one form or other.
Understandably, our default script in dealing with these childhood experiences is adaptation, denial, dissociation, and repression. We were not able to handle the emotional overload at such a tender age. We became adept at developing roles (the Greek word `persona’ means `mask´) which, we believed, increased our chances of survival, and in brushing things under the family carpet, to the degree that we lost sight of who we really were.
We embraced roles to cope with the lies we had begun to believe about ourselves in the early years. Originally these were inculcated in us, overtly or covertly, by our caregivers. They were often not conscious of what they were doing at the time, or of the potential consequences of their actions.
Twelve Step recovery is a process whereby we can divest ourselves of these superimposed roles and find our way, once again, to our true selves.
In addition to the Twelve Steps, I have found one further modality very beneficial in recovery over recent years. This is the Positive Intelligence (PQ) Mental Fitness programme designed and coached by Shirzad Chamine and his team at the PQ Institute in San Francisco.
PQ identifies our early, fear-driven adaptations to childhood adversity in the shape of so-called Saboteurs. Each Saboteur is formed around a specific erroneous perception or lie. Examples are listed in brackets below.
Having grown up in dysfunctional environments, some of the typical lies we end up believing about ourselves may include:
- I’m no good, not worthy of love (Judge)
- To be safe, I must be perfect (Stickler)
- No one and nothing can be trusted (Hyper-Vigilant)
- I am only as good as I produce (Hyper-Achiever)
- No one will ever love me (Victim)
- Feelings are dangerous, so must be excluded (Hyper-Rational)
- If I don’t get involved, I won’t get hurt (Avoider)
- Maybe they will accept me if I give them what they want (Pleaser)
- Life is a struggle, so I need to keep on top of things (Controller)
- If I stick with this, I might miss out on something better (Restless)
Many of us carry a bag of different lies around with us until we begin to take stock of our lives. We may, therefore, have two or three main Saboteurs which are the cause of most our problems. We each have a unique Saboteur profile.
Just as it is necessary and beneficial to handle more overt losses by grieving in a healthy manner, – rather than avoiding, numbing, and dissociating – we learn in recovery to practice loving ways to grieve our childhood losses and the alienation of Self.
By working the programme of self actualization known as the Twelve Steps and learning to have dialogue with our Inner Child, we gradually begin to remember the neglectful and shaming experiences of the past, which, though repressed, had long been stored in our psyche and body at the deepest levels.
Sometimes these fossilized childhood snippets come to us in our dreams, which is what happened to me earlier this week.
On waking one morning, I found myself in a tense and troubled emotional state. The image that lingered in my mind was that of an old-fashioned thermos flask which had been dropped on a stone floor, shattering, – with a loud bang – the inner chambers of thin silver-plated glass into countless jagged shards.
Only that flask was me. Something had happened to shatter me emotionally, and it felt as if my lungs, stomach, and entrails had been ripped downwards, out of my body. This visceral sensation was eerily familiar to me.
The child in the scene had experienced some form of annihilation, a loss of sense of self. This is the reality for the Inner Child. The adult me, however, processing the emotional state, knows that the annihilation could not have happened. It was an illusion. I was still alive after all. Something had ensured my survival of a seemingly catastrophic event.
Where was the proof of this unshatterability? It lay in the fact of my breathing, here and now. Each inhalation (inspiration) was followed by a corresponding matching exhalation. My being was clearly intact. The shattering was an illusion. Though very compelling in the context of my childhood perception, it remained an illusion, nonetheless.
The soul, in which the body resides, is sacrosanct. It is our essence. In this essence lies the true Self. As I sat in early morning contemplation, the reality of this truth became personal.
Bringing these two seemingly irreconcilable perceptions together to form a new narrative; that is the opportunity afforded by embracing the excruciating childhood experience in the absence of judgement, interpretation, or rationalization, and grieving it unconditionally with compassion for self, others, and circumstance.
As a counterpoint to the Saboteurs, PQ offers the concept of the inherent Sage Powers, which include Empathize, Explore, Innovate, Navigate, and Activate.
With growing Mental Fitness, we get to draw upon these Sage Powers to craft a conscious response to any stimulus rather than engaging in the reflexive unconscious reactions of old. They are utilized with compassion in the context of the Sage Perspective which states that every situation encountered encompasses a gift or opportunity.
By intercepting the Saboteurs before they can hijack us and shifting to the Sage Powers to formulate a response to the stimulus at hand, we can begin to find new, loving ways of dealing with the realities of life. This is the bread and butter of Recovery Phase II, emotional sobriety. It has been defined as learning to live life on life’s terms.
Returning to the incident that transpired earlier this week; unearthing such memories, and facing the feelings buried within, isn’t easy.
Carl Jung once noted that: One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
Ideal resources for achieving this include Jungian Psychotherapy and living in the Twelve Steps, in conjunction with other modalities such as PQ, EMDR trauma therapy, the Internal Family Systems (IFS) approach, and Bert Hellinger’s Family Constellations, to name but a few. We are truly privileged to be alive in this Golden Age of innovative and creative resources which have come on stream over the past five or six generations.
Making the darkness conscious always involves pain and grief. An invaluable reward beckons on the other side of this grief, however. It is the experience of being more fully alive, creative, and self expressed than ever before. It is the gradual unfolding of our full spiritual potential, one day at a time.
