All That Is Bitter and Sweet (41 page)

And Granny P’s story was stupendous: She took her first drink—a long pull from a hot bottle of Four Roses whiskey found under the seat in her granddad’s truck—at age seven; had four husbands; and engaged in all manner of kooky, painful adventures. Having recently celebrated forty years of continuous sobriety, a journey that early on also included inpatient treatment for codependency and anorexia, she sure seemed to know what she was talking about.

By the end of the day, I was swirling. I continued to study the family week booklet they gave us and tried to fill in the addiction questionnaires that would help identify our own problems. I was drawn to a series of pages in particular that illustrated the roles people play in a dysfunctional family, along with their internal and external traits, and to what special assets, in good recovery, those traits could be converted. There is the Victim, the chemically dependent person who is hostile, aggressive, and self-pitying on the outside but filled with shame, guilt, pain, and fear on the inside. There is the Chief Enabler, who is emotionally closest to the Victim and who martyrs him- or herself to the Victim’s care; the Mascot, or the family clown, who covers his or her insecurity with childish antics and humor; and the Scapegoat, the family rebel who is always in trouble, hiding rejection, hurt, jealousy, and anger inside. None of these seemed to fit me, even though I could pin onto others the right assessment. Then I looked at the Family Hero, a responsible, high-achieving “good kid” who follows the rules and is super-responsible, while inside he or she feels guilt, hurt, and inadequacy. I suspected an outsider might think that one fit me, except for the part about following rules (I liked having my own way, thank you very much). But I didn’t feel like the hero child of my family; in fact, it felt more like a convenient label placed on me so as not to have to deal with me.

Finally, there is the Lost Child, who feels rejected, hurt, and anxious on the inside but to the outside world seems quiet and shy. He or she is solitary, lives in a fantasy world, seems mediocre, attaches more to things than people. Shy? Mmm. Mediocre? Not on your life. I pondered if my wonderful fairies, having Catherine the Great as an imaginary friend at age seventeen, fit the “fantasy life” criteria. I certainly went through a hypermaterialistic phase in high school, when all I cared about was the right type of clothes—anything with an alligator on it would do—so that I could fit in with my preppy friends. And I drew those elaborate houses in grade eleven, thinking I would be happy if I just lived in one like that. It passed, thank God, but I could identify. Then I arrived at the bottom of the list for Lost Child and found a characteristic on which I could absolutely hang my hat: “Pets are very important.” When I saw that one thing, I began to have trust in the treatment team. It was only one sentence out of all those pages, but it nailed me.
I am a Lost Child
.

That night I had a conference call scheduled, and all the bed-and-breakfast had was one old rotary phone, and my mobile didn’t have service. The call was important enough to me that it pushed me out the door, willing to approach and knock on a stranger’s door to borrow their phone, using a calling card. The first door I knocked on turned out to be Tennie and R.L.’s house. That was my first interaction with her outside of the group room, and I tried not to look too obvious, surveying her beautiful screened-in porch with a full-size bed as a swing, laden with inviting pillows. When my call was finished, we stood in a plush sitting room full of folk art and oozing family feel. We had a little chat. She asked me straight out if I was anorexic. (Knowing now that bulimia is about anger, I realize that if I had an eating disorder, I’d likely be bulimic.) I knew I wasn’t anorexic, but I told her, “I don’t know,” because I had already figured out that at Shades, a vigorous denial was the same as an admission! She said something about listening to the similarities over the course of the week, not the differences, or something comforting like that, nonjudgmental and inviting. I don’t really know. I just knew I wanted her to keep talking, even as I didn’t want to admit I wanted her to keep talking.

It was a brief exchange, but long enough for Tennie to make the strangest suggestion out of the blue: write my mother a letter with my nondominant hand. She said it would be awkward, illegible, slow, and that was fine, just to do it.

I woke up early the next day, well before I was adequately rested, with the usual brew of anxiety and pain. I thought,
Well, I lie here every morning, trying to figure out how to get through these feelings, why don’t I follow the suggestion given to me by that woman? Why don’t I, for once, try something different?
I sat down at the table, stiffly held my pen in my left hand, touched it to the paper, and to my amazement I began writing like my seven-year-old self. All this
… stuff
poured out that I clearly recognized as coming from the time we lived in Berea, when I had my first episode of depression. It was fascinating, painful, full of a child’s indignation and resilience. Now I was really starting to wonder if there wasn’t something to this place.

The therapies used at Shades of Hope call for a tremendous amount of written work to make an honest appraisal of one’s difficulties and strengths, including an “auto”—a long, unfiltered autobiography and histories of all one’s addictions. Tuesday of family week is set aside for the client to read his or her written work aloud to the family. My job was simply to witness Sister’s process, to hear what it was like to be her, how being in our family affected her, to hear her courageous admissions of powerlessness over her addictions and the heartbreaking descriptions of the unmanageability of her life, including how she hit bottom and her plan for going forward. We weren’t allowed to write or take notes and were asked sit still and be perfectly present. Nobody could minimize or say, “No, that’s not the way it happened,” or, “You’ve been such a jerk!” Hearing my sister’s story in that setting was one of the greatest experiences of my life. I thought it was rock and roll. It was something I had wanted for her and something I’d been looking for my whole life. It was what I tried to do for other people in my advocacy work—to allow them to be truly witnessed in their context, in their process, in their reality. By the end of the day I was exhausted but exhilarated, and I had loved repeating back to her, even the wildly painful parts, exactly what she had said. It was empowering. Others in the family weren’t as tickled, and that corny stew was starting to bubble.

Wednesday is devoted to a form of experiential therapy called “the sculpt”—a three-dimensional representation of a family’s dynamics. It is directed and managed with great creativity and skill by the therapists, but it’s scary as hell for the family at first. Sister asked a few of her friends in treatment to represent various people in our family. Then she placed each member of the family in a symbolic position. One member, for instance, was asked to stand on a chair, because they had ruled the family, functioning as ultimate authority. Being up high like that illustrated how they were up on a pedestal, in a position above and separate from others, wielding inappropriate power. And then divorce was represented, addiction, enmeshment, all the different manifestations of the disease. Questions were asked and answered, dynamics explored, memories unpacked, the effect of things on her revealed. When it was time for me to be born and join the family, I was asked to play myself. I sat on the floor, representing the time in my life when I was the baby.

Tennie asked gently, “What are you doing down there?”

“Oh, I’m praying,” I said. “I’m constantly looking for some sort of spiritual solution.”

“But what are you thinking?”

“Um, well, right now, how ridiculous this is, how [So-and-so] always gets away with this bullshit.” I had been watching all the family stuff I had already been witnessing helplessly for thirty-seven years, and it was crescendoing inside of me.

Tennie asked me to stand up. “How do you feel?” she persisted.

“I feel absolute and total rage in the seat of my soul,” I said.

“Who are you so angry at?”

I looked around the room, my arm flew up, and I pointed at someone.

And Tennie said, “Tell them.”

The first thing I said was, “How do I know you are lying? Your lips are moving.”

As for the rest, well, the things that are said in treatment are confidential for good reason, and individuals typically discharge hysterical, historical emotions
without
the family present. This moment was unorthodox. Afterward, the treatment team told me my anger preceded me into a room, that on a scale of one to ten, I was a fifteen. It was something I had heard before, but most people either couldn’t tell me in a way that did not constitute abuse or simply wouldn’t tell me I seemed angry. Either they raged at me about my rage, which prevented me from being able to consider that what they observed might have some basis in truth, or they said things like “You are so intimidating, you seem invincible.”
Imperious
was another word I heard from time to time. Both approaches, of course, made me angrier, the former entrenching me in how justified I felt in being angry and the latter baffling me when I felt exceedingly vulnerable inside and yearned for that part of me to be acknowledged. Since first thing Monday morning, the staff had been saying, “If you hear something about yourself three times, you may want to take a look at it. There just might be some truth in it.” Well, I heard all the time from certain people that I was angry, and in this setting, it was becoming harder to duck the feedback.

It was extremely unconventional, to say the least, but the treatment team began as a group to lead me in anger work, a process that moves old, stuck energy out of the body. In a room full of strangers and my family, in front of whom I had not felt safe to express my real feelings for decades, with the staff’s encouragement, a primal roar came out of me. It was shocking for me, and the anger work took on a life of its own. Later, I was told that I seemed to be “doing” my whole family’s anger, which was considered an unacceptable emotion in many ways. That I took on not only my own but other people’s, people who were so enmeshed with others that they could not risk ever expressing anger toward them (because they might alienate the person on whom they were reliant). It was a brand-new idea, and it made perfect sense.

Eventually, my head of steam—which dated back to … oh, what? Age seven? Eight?—began to dissipate. When I sat next to clients, they quietly celebrated me, congratulated me, held my hand, gave me those empathetic knowing glances again. (By contrast, of course, my family was stupefied and horrified.) At the beginning of sculpt, as everyone was settling in, offering their feelings check, and being given an explanation of what lay ahead, I had been nearly passing out for some inexplicable reason, nearly levitating out of my chair with feelings I did not understand. After the anger work, I could feel something was happening, and it seemed good, as though I had burst out of a too-tight husk, as though I could breathe.