Isolation

"Our experience shows that you cannot recover in isolation."

Many of our childhood memories center around the isolation we felt in our homes while growing up. We may have had few or no childhood friends. To have friends could have placed us in a position where they would want to come to our house - and we couldn't risk that.

The lack of close friendships deepened the sadness and loneliness we already faced on a regular basis. That loneliness also affected us as adults where many of us felt a social awkwardness that fueled both addiction and isolation.

We experienced the feeling of being alone, even in a crowd; and we felt lonely, even when we were in a relationship. Fear of failure, lack of trust, and fear of abandonment compounded things by leading many of us to choose others who also lacked the skills to have a healthy relationship.

Attending ACA meetings is the first step in breaking the pattern of loneliness and isolation. As we keep coming back, we are amazed to hear our own stories coming out of the mouths of others in the room. We realize we don't have to be alone in our despair; we have found people who will love and accept us, even before we can love and accept ourselves. In ACA we are home, maybe for the first time in our lives.

On this day I will allow my fellow travelers to touch my life and know they will support me through my journey.

Happy birthday

to you

PTSD

"PTSD symptoms can include hypervigilance or the constant monitoring of one's surroundings for potential threat of harm."

Many of us have few concrete memories of childhood. We know we lived through amazing trauma, but if we're asked what happened to us, we often have few examples to relate. We may have defining moments that we remember, but we also have years of "blanks." Some memories we do have were related by our siblings.

We repressed our memories as a protection mechanism. We try to locate them, because they're the key to much of our dysfunctional behavior. Some behavior, such as hypervigilance, seems inexplicable in its intensity. We can even be sitting with our recovery friends, perhaps in a meeting, and we can't seem to let go of monitoring everything that's going on. What we might have previously labeled as a highly overdeveloped sense of responsibility is more likely PTSD.

As we work our program and become willing to uncover our trauma, we begin to free ourselves from the heightened state of awareness that wears us out and causes problems in our relationships. We unbury memories that have gotten us to this state, often with the help of therapy, and by sharing our story and listening to others in meetings.

On this day I will not be afraid to uncover the memories that seem to bind me to my dysfunctional behaviors.

Codependence (mea culpa)

"We focus on others to avoid looking at our own behavior and fear."

Why do some of us want to take care of everyone else so badly? Why do we get so incensed when we see others treated poorly, feeling anger and rage towards the perpetrator?

Yes, we feel deeply that no one should take advantage of other people. But the baggage we are carrying from our childhoods often causes us to go beyond trying to help someone. We can blow things entirely out of proportion with our unresolved sadness and rage.

We learn that we cannot be effective in helping others until we deal with our own issues. We do this by getting honest about the true nature of our behaviors. When we fight someone else's fight, aren't we really fighting for that wounded part of us that remains unhealed? When we feel their pain and hang onto it, aren't we really feeling our own childhood trauma?

Often the best way to help others is to let them learn how to stand up for themselves. And the best way to help ourselves is to be aware of what we're doing and why we're doing it. When we focus too much on someone else's fight, we realize that it's because we have unresolved issues.

On this day I will be clear about my motives before I look outside of myself to take action.

Feelings

"People want recovery, but they prefer it be pain free. That is understandable, but unfortunately, identifying and feeling our feelings is a part of healing."

"Feelings? What are those?!" As children from dysfunctional homes, if we cried, many of us were told, "Stop crying or I'll give you something to cry about!" If we openly showed our feelings, we risked being told we were stupid or that we'd never amount to anything. When our parents failed to show up at our special school events, we learned not to show hurt or disappointment. The more vulnerable we were, the more we were shamed. When we were verbally or physically abused, we pretended it didn't happen. Our broken hearts shut down.

We may have no idea how we're feeling. We've been shut down for so long that numb feels normal. Our tears are frozen. Opening up to our feelings seems threatening and scary.

We learn to heal by developing trust in our fellow travelers. This feeling of trust can lead to the opening of the flood gates, an expression of emotion that eventually feels normal. As we release our old pain, we make room for discovering how to play and have fun again. We open our hearts and feel joy in our lives.

On this day I welcome all of my feelings, especially those that are unfamiliar and uncomfortable. I have the tools to work through them in order to mend my broken heart from childhood.

Indecision

"Children of alcoholics are paralyzed by indecision when trying to separate emotionally from their homes."

When we started telling our story, we may have felt like we were betraying everything we had ever known, and we were - but that was okay. Part of recovery is releasing ourselves from the emotional chaos of our family of origin by rebelling, getting mad, and walking out, saying, "I'm not gonna take this anymore."

We are reparenting ourselves when we detach from our abusers and take responsibility for our own actions. We learn to share what really happened to us with fellow travelers and in meetings. We continue to heal when more memories surface and we work through them. We take care of ourselves by journaling, exercising, and learning to eat healthier.

We may still be paralyzed with indecision at times, but we allow our healed parts to nurture the parts that are still sick and wounded - they show up for each other. We rely on those with more recovery to mentor us by observing how they manage times of stress and peace. We walk towards freedom.

On this day I will make forward movement, even when I am afraid of the consequences. I now have a healthy support system that I know will be there for me, including my inner loving parent.

Grief and Childhood

"Genuine grieving for our childhood ends our morbid fascination with the past and lets us return to the present, free to live as adults. Confronting years of pain and loss at first seems overwhelming."

We may have been going to meetings for many years, lamenting the slings and arrows of our recovery life. Perhaps we thought we were "Living life on life's terms," - doing the best we could.

But often progress seemed to come in dribs and drabs. This left us with a sense of frustration at the little spiritual progress we had made, despite our best efforts.

But what may have been missing was the willingness to genuinely grieve for our lost childhoods. Grief work is not about just learning to tell our story, but about starting to discover and express the underlying trauma and emotions. Doing this level of work is the true path to freeing ourselves.

When we are no longer held in place by the disembodied stories and the undercurrent of repressed feelings, we can begin to take positive action, change our life's terms, find joy in the present, and feel alive for possibly the first time.

On this day I will tell the real story of my childhood trauma. In doing so, I will free my True Self and enjoy this day my Higher Power has given me.

Authority Figures

"Abuse from authority figures in childhood has left us on guard as adults about authority figures. We tend to place people in the category of authority figure when they may not be such a person."

Fear of authority figures in our adult life can add unnecessary stress when old fears get triggered. As children, many of us were always on guard to not displease our parent or to find a hiding place when danger was present. One or both parents may have been experts at creating real or imagined fear in us.

Routinely, we now encounter others who have authority over us, either because of our jobs or theirs. Some of us also allow people to assume an authority role because we are afraid of conflict. It can even feel daunting when a parking attendant tells us we can't park "there," or a sales clerk tries to talk us into a different purchase. Our goal in recovery is to recognize these situations for what they are, and learn to act as adults.

To gain control over our lives, when we interact with someone in authority, we now do a quick internal check. Are we feeling fearful, angry, resentful, or timid? Are we putting our abuser's face on this person? If so, we stop and examine the situation from a new perspective. The interaction may not be pleasant, but it is not our childhood coming back to life.

On this day I will recognize when I am responding to authority figures with childhood reactions. I will now approach things from a new perspective as a recovering adult.

Balance

"We balance our experiences as children with the knowledge that we have a chance to break the cycle of family dysfunction."

Many of our family members seemed to live from one reactive moment to the next. There was little, if any, thought given to planning ahead for possibilities and/or how best to approach situations. Some of us tried to change this pattern as adults, perhaps as we raised our own families. Maybe we became rigid when planning, to overcompensate for the chaos we had experienced, or we may have found ourselves frequently feeling overwhelmed. We did not seem to have the capacity to look at the big picture and act accordingly, and we consistently berated ourselves for this shortcoming.

When we find a new way to live in recovery, we work to erase old tapes and old ways of doing things. But ingrained habits do not disappear overnight. When we feel ourselves at either end of the reaction spectrum - too rigid or feeling overwhelmed - we open our new tool bag and find a way to center ourselves, whether it's through a phone call or using another tool of recovery. By doing so, we reinforce our resolve to live intentional lives. We find purpose and hope because of the balance we are able to integrate. This leads to the peace and serenity we have always deserved.

On this day I will pause and think about how I want to live my day. I affirm that I deserve to live the balanced life that I choose, not a life that simply happens to me.

Stored Trauma

"Clinical research strongly suggests that childhood trauma or neglect are stored in the tissue of the children. The emotional or physical trauma does not go away without an effort to address the original cause."

"It's in your bones" they might have said. "There's something the matter with the whole family." These statements only beg the question that often gets overlooked, "Why?"

Though the trauma of our forefathers and foremothers is stored in us, then so too must be the restorative part of the body. In fact, when we work the Steps, reparent ourselves, attend meetings, and join with a fellow traveler, we are using some of the most powerful tools known to restore our bodies back to a balanced, natural condition. This is not easy and often takes considerable effort and persistence, and may even include an occasional or even a frequent relapse.

However, there is no easier, softer way. The process of recovery involves real work and determination that pays dividends beyond our expectations. If we are willing to stay on this recovery journey, if we trust the Steps and Promises, our bodies can release the stored trauma, which brings us true relief. The miracle of recovery is the destination and we can get there.

On this day I will pay close attention to my body and the clues it gives me about my stored trauma. I reaffirm for myself that by using the Steps and reparenting myself, the trauma energy can be released so that I may experience a wholeness I could not have possibly imagined.

Promise Seven

"We will learn how to play and have fun in our lives."

Just as we learned to fear our alcoholic and dysfunctional families, we can now learn to play and enjoy ourselves. (This does not mean playing solitary games on our computers, tablets, or game consoles.)

A way that many of us learn to become more lighthearted is by finding real enjoyment in the company of others. While we maintain a certain structure in our meetings, we can also experience fellowship before or after the meetings and share good times. This may feel weird to some of us at first because we are learning to relate to people differently than we're used to, but as with the rest of the ACA program, daily practice helps us become more comfortable with the idea.

Laughter starts to flow more naturally as we begin to let our guard down. We become less concerned with saying the right thing and more concerned with just being in the moment. Where we once filled every waking moment with activity as a way to keep ourselves occupied, we can learn to become more of a human being than a human doing. We can now have fun because we are finally free from the fear of showing our True Self. Did you hear the one about two adult children who walk into a meeting…?

On this day I will practice playing and will enjoy having fun with others in a wholesome and positive way.

Codependence

"We focus on ourselves for the surest results. We gradually free ourselves from codependent or addictive relationships."

Before we entered recovery, it seemed like our relationships were codependent or addictive. It's what we were used to; it's what we grew up with. If anyone wanted something different from us, we were uncomfortable, because we didn't really understand what that "something" was. We could keep up the act for a short time, but the walls eventually went up. We had no role models for healthy give and take.

As we learn to focus on ourselves, at first it seems awkward. Most of us are not used to taking care of ourselves emotionally. Gradually we begin to see that we can walk away from those who still abuse us and we feel a sense of freedom that's new because we don't feel guilty.

We gather strength from those who have come before us. We hear how they have faced difficult changes with faith and trust in their Higher Power and those they share their journey with. We see the promises of this program being fulfilled in others, and we now have the courage to ask for the guidance that's available.

On this day I release my codependent and addictive relationships in favor of those based on mutual respect. I will learn a new "dance" that fills me with life.

People-Pleasing

"By transforming our people-pleasing manner, we do not stop caring about others. However, we stop going over the line to ensure that we are never abandoned."

As children, we looked to others such as our parents or teachers for approval. Doing so often kept us safe. Over time, this practice taught us to abandon our own sense of worth in favor of someone else's external measure of our value. Without others' approval, we felt like failures.

We learn to listen to our own inner loving parent's voice, no longer needing to rely on others to give us a sense of ourselves. We learn to be true to ourselves, acting in ways that are aligned with the core values, beliefs and feelings that are becoming part of us. We seek no one's approval but our own.

We sometimes find that our new actions may cause conflict with others. But with confidence in our new inner compass and no longer fearing abandonment, we hold fast to our beliefs, speak our truths, and strengthen our sense of self. We no longer need external forces to justify our existence.

On this day I will listen to my inner loving parent and know that is all the approval I need for my thoughts and actions.

Inner Loving Parent

"Learn to validate yourself by becoming your own loving parent."

In ACA, we pay attention to how we talk to ourselves in our heads. Mindfulness helps us stop those thoughts that say, "What's wrong with me?" and replace them with, "I have a lot of things going for me. I am amazing!" As we work our program and make progress, we become our own loving parent and learn to take care of ourselves by affirming our growth.

It seems second nature for us to be critical of ourselves - even about our recovery work. We can tell ourselves that we aren't doing it right, or it's taking us too long. But when we see children learning to read, is it okay to criticize them along the way? Or do they need to hear encouragement and support, and have someone say positive things like, "Outstanding! You're doing great. Keep it up." Most of us didn't hear these words in our dysfunctional families, but we can learn to say them to ourselves now.

Our inner loving parent can tell us some of the most wonderful words a parent can say to a child, words a child remembers for a lifetime, words that help a child know they are okay the way they are. "I love you and I am proud of you." This is what we've been waiting to hear.

On this day I will capture positive moments, feel proud of myself for the work I am doing, and tell myself I am loved for who I am.

Long Term Trauma

"Through the first 18 years of our lives, our families had 6,570 days to shame, belittle, ignore, criticize, or manipulate us during the formative years of our being."

How could we have turned out any other way? We grew up in dysfunction, and it's not our fault we were affected by it. We were just children. All we knew of the world was what we were shown by our parents - the people we were hardwired to trust and emulate. It's not our fault we didn't find a way to stop the abuse. We learned the language of abuse, just as we learned to speak our native tongue - it was automatic.

We're not whining, over-thinking it, or making mountains out of molehills. Our Laundry List Traits are a legitimate reaction to long-term trauma.

The good news is that something magical happens when we accept we are powerless over our childhood trauma and its effect on us. It doesn't mean we give up and let it have power over us. The opposite happens. It loses power over us. We begin to have a choice about how we respond when the dysfunction manifests itself in our adult lives. It's like admitting there's a leak in the roof, and now we can put a bucket on the floor, change out of our wet clothes, and fix the roof. And we can do it without guilt because the leak was already there before we came along.

On this day I embrace the freedom that comes from accepting there is nothing I could have done to prevent the dysfunction I grew up in and the effect it has had on me.

Step Seven

"Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings."

As we begin to find peace, we listen for when the wheels get squeaky and learn to seek appropriate help, knowing that we don't have to do this alone. We see our Higher Power everywhere we go, especially in the people around us.

We are no longer fearful. Our shortcomings are being removed and they no longer define us. We are not a collection of wrongs. We realize that recovery is a process - that there is no race to the finish line.

But we don't take the slow route either. We have sobered up to the grim reality of the effects of dysfunction in our families and have decided we are out of their game. It no longer pays any dividends. We have been on that other side for so long and we simply don't want to be there anymore. The way we related to the world no longer works.

We see the results of our efforts in recovery, and we like ourselves better as we allow the process to work within us. We begin to attract healthier people, leaving behind the dysfunctional relationships that show no promise. There is nothing better than this new feeling as we move into the future. We are walking out of the fog of dysfunction towards who we truly are.

On this day I will continue on this journey to work with my Higher Power to remove my shortcomings. I choose to be healthy.

How Kindness Became Our Forbidden Pleasure

by Maria Popova

“We are never as kind as we want to be, but nothing outrages us more than people being unkind to us.”

“Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now,” Jack Kerouac wrote in a beautiful 1957 letter. “Kindness, kindness, kindness,” Susan Sontag resolved in her diary on New Year’s Day in 1972. And yet, although kindness is the foundation of all spiritual traditions and was even a central credo for the father of modern economics, at some point in recent history, kindness became little more than an abstract aspiration, its concrete practical applications a hazardous and vulnerable-making behavior to be avoided — we need only look to the internet’s “outrage culture” for evidence, or to the rise of cynicism as our flawed self-defense mechanism against the perceived perils of kindness. We’ve come to see the emotional porousness that kindness requires as a dangerous crack in the armor of the independent self, an exploitable outward vulnerability — too high a cost to pay for the warm inward balm of the benevolence for which we long in the deepest parts of ourselves.

Kindness has become “our forbidden pleasure.”

So argue psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor in the plainly titled, tiny, enormously rewarding book On Kindness (public library).

Taylor and Phillips write:

"The kind life — the life lived in instinctive sympathetic identification with the vulnerabilities and attractions of others — is the life we are more inclined to live, and indeed is the one we are often living without letting ourselves know that this is what we are doing. People are leading secretly kind lives all the time but without a language in which to express this, or cultural support for it. Living according to our sympathies, we imagine, will weaken or overwhelm us; kindness is the saboteur of the successful life. We need to know how we have come to believe that the best lives we can lead seem to involve sacrificing the best things about ourselves; and how we have come to believe that there are pleasures greater than kindness ..."

"In one sense kindness is always hazardous because it is based on a susceptibility to others, a capacity to identify with their pleasures and sufferings. Putting oneself in someone else’s shoes, as the saying goes, can be very uncomfortable. But if the pleasures of kindness — like all the greatest human pleasures — are inherently perilous, they are nonetheless some of the most satisfying we possess."

[...]

"In giving up on kindness — and especially our own acts of kindness — we deprive ourselves of a pleasure that is fundamental to our sense of well-being."

The most paradoxical part of the story is that for most of our civilizational history, we’ve seen ourselves as fundamentally kind and held kindness as a high ideal of personhood. Only in recent times — in large part thanks to Emerson — did the ideal of independence and self-reliance become the benchmark of spiritual success. The need for belonging has become an intolerable manifestation of vulnerability — we’ve stopped believing in our own kindness and the merits of mutual belonging, producing what poet and philosopher David Whyte has elegantly termed “our sense of slight woundedness.” On a mission to examine “when and why this confidence evaporated and the consequences of this transformation,” Taylor and Phillips write:

"Kindness’s original meaning of kinship or sameness has stretched over time to encompass sentiments that today go by a wide variety of names — sympathy, generosity, altruism, benevolence, humanity, compassion, pity, empathy… The precise meanings of these words vary, but fundamentally they all denote what the Victorians called “open-heartedness,” the sympathetic expansiveness linking self to other."

Perhaps because open-heartedness is impossible without vulnerability — an open heart is an aperture through which the world can enter us, but also one through which exploitive and cruel forces can penetrate the softest core of who we are without obstruction — the original meaning of and longing for kindness has been calcified by our impulse for armoring and self-protection. Taylor and Phillips write:

"Today it is only between parents and children that kindness is expected, sanctioned, and indeed obligatory… Kindness — that is, the ability to bear the vulnerability of others, and therefore of oneself — has become a sign of weakness (except of course among saintly people, in whom it is a sign of their exceptionality)… All compassion is self-pity, D. H. Lawrence remarked, and this usefully formulates the widespread modern suspicion of kindness: that it is either a higher form of selfishness (the kind that is morally triumphant and secretly exploitative) or the lowest form of weakness (kindness is the way the weak control the strong, the kind are only kind because they haven’t got the guts to be anything else). If we think of humans as essentially competitive, and therefore triumphalist by inclination, as we are encouraged to do, then kindness looks distinctly old-fashioned, indeed nostalgic, a vestige from a time when we could recognize ourselves in each other and feel sympathetic because of our kind-ness… And what, after all, can kindness help us win, except moral approval; or possibly not even that, in a society where “respect” for personal status has become a leading value."

And yet despite our resistance to kindness, some deeper, dormant part of us still registers it, still cringes upon encountering its absence. This paradoxical relationship with kindness, perhaps more so than anything else, explains the “outrage culture” of the internet:

"We usually know what the kind thing to do is — and kindness when it is done to us, and register its absence when it is not… We are never as kind as we want to be, but nothing outrages us more than people being unkind to us. There is nothing we feel more consistently deprived of than kindness; the unkindness of others has become our contemporary complaint. Kindness consistently preoccupies us, and yet most of us are unable to live a life guided by it."

Embedded in our ambivalence about kindness is a special sort of psychological self-sabotage — by denying our own kind impulses, we also deny ourselves the powerful pleasure our acts of kindness produce. Taylor and Phillips consider how, given our natural inclination for kindness, we end up cheating ourselves of this deep spiritual reward:

"The forms kindness can take … are partly learned from the societies in which we grow up, and so can be unlearned or badly taught or resisted… Children begin their lives “naturally” kind, and that something happens to this kindness as they grow up in contemporary society."

Picking up where Rousseau left off a quarter millennium ago, Phillips and Taylor consider what it takes to nourish our natural benevolence, asserting that it must begin with embracing the very vulnerability from which kindness springs:

"Everybody is vulnerable at every stage of their lives; everybody is subject to illness, accident, personal tragedy, political and economic reality. This doesn’t mean that people aren’t also resilient and resourceful. Bearing other people’s vulnerability — which means sharing in it imaginatively and practically without needing to get rid of it, to yank people out of it — entails being able to bear one’s own. Indeed it would be realistic to say that what we have in common is our vulnerability; it is the medium of contact between us, what we most fundamentally recognize in each other."

At some point in our lives, however, vulnerability becomes a threat and a trauma. Phillips and Taylor trace the developmental origin of that shift:

"The child’s first, formative trauma is his growing acknowledgment of his need for others (in actuality the mother is as vulnerable to her need for her baby as the baby is to his need for her; parents need their children not to worry them too much). The needy child experiences a trauma of concern (“How can I take care of my mother to ensure that she takes care of me?”), which calls up his natural kindness; but this concern — and the later forms of kindness that emerge from it — is too easily turned away from. This turning away we call self-sufficiency, and when we want to pathologize it we call it narcissism. The pleasure of kindness is that it connects us with others; but the terror of kindness is that it makes us too immediately aware of our own and other people’s vulnerabilities (vulnerabilities that we are prone to call failings when we are at our most frightened). Vulnerability — particularly the vulnerability we call desire — is our shared biological inheritance. Kindness, in other words, opens us up to the world (and worlds) of other people in ways that we both long for and dread."

In a sentiment that echoes Phillips’s illuminating earlier work on why developing a capacity for risk-tolerance is essential to our self-reliance, Taylor and Phillips elegantly capture the dark counterpoint to our tendency to desire safety at whatever the cost:

"If there is no invulnerability anywhere, suddenly there is too much vulnerability everywhere."

[...]

"It is not that real kindness requires people to be selfless, it is rather that real kindness changes people in the doing of it, often in unpredictable ways. Real kindness is an exchange with essentially unpredictable consequences. It is a risk precisely because it mingles our needs and desires with the needs and desires of others, in a way that so-called self-interest never can… Kindness is a way of knowing people beyond our understanding of them."

But rather than a lament, undergirding these observations is a powerful message of hope: For all of its pervasive undertones of and platforms for outrage, contemporary culture — and the digital universe that is part of it — offers fertile new soil in which to grow the natural inclinations that give rise to the pleasure of communion and kindness. Taylor and Phillips capture this beautifully:

"By involving us with strangers (even with “foreigners” thousands of miles away), as well as with intimates, [kindness] is potentially far more promiscuous than sexuality. But … the child needs the adult — and his wider society — to help him keep faith with his kindness, that is, to help him discover and enjoy the pleasures of caring for others… People have long known this, and long forgotten it. The history of kindness … tells the story of this knowing, and forgetting, and reknowing, as central to Western ideas about the good life."

In the remainder of the altogether wonderful and acutely necessary On Kindness, Phillips and Taylor explore how we can build a society that nurtures rather than corrupting our natural kindness by learning, from childhood on, to feel comfortable with the uncomfortable risks of making ourselves vulnerable enough to be kind.

On being

KINDNESS - by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.