Excerpts from Recovery Zone, Volume 2The decision is made. You realize you can no longer live like this. The costs are too high. For some of us the decision had to be remade at times, but inch by inch we resolved to make it different. The phrase that makes sense is that there is a "dark passenger" in our head who argues about our choice to be better. To make it an even greater challenge as a decision, the question is how to do it. We ask how to take the dark corners of ourselves and bring them into the light. The commitment wavers and so does the struggle.
Yet, consider a child in danger. Even the most hard bitten or self-adsorbed of us instinctively will protect children in danger. Without hesitation, we will place ourselves between the threat and the child. If a child wanders in front of an oncoming car we will grab that child. We will do all that we can to ensure the protection of that child even if it is life-threatening to us. Most everyone upon reflection will remember a previous effort to help a child. There was no deliberation. No stopping to reflect on whether that child was worthy of life.
Nor was there consideration of whether the child was a friend, a family member, or unknown to us. We just did it. Collective consciousness, genetic coding, or cultural imprint, it did not matter. The decision was made to save the life of the child. In the world of addiction, the willingness to go to any length to make life different is elusive to both addicts and loved ones. We have compared the addictions and the accompanying attachments and feelings to a "black hole." The analogy is that negative dark energy in a star becomes so powerful, the star system collapses in on itself. Nothing -- not even light -- can escape.
The systems of our life including our very biology, recycles the toxic, the unreal, and the destructive through the electrochemical rivers of our brains. Obsession keeps us in a series of closed loops as families, as persons, and as organisms. The original decision to be who we are is lost in the turmoil and gravity of our own darkness. What we would commit to for a child, we could not do for the child within us. Yet that original sense of self was in us from the very beginning. That part of ourselves that says a profoundly personal "yes" to a dream, talent, or way of being is visible from the outset of life. In traditional peoples, it was common to find the elders of the tribe take on the task of observing the early affirmations and tendencies of the young. Reflections on those tendencies went into a process called a "naming" ceremony around the ages of five or six.
The name that was given reflected the gifts and propensities of the child that the elders perceived would be assets to that child as an adult and to the community. The process allowed nurturing of the talent and self-knowing of what trauma therapist Marilyn Murray and others call the "original feeling child." Busy parents and events in life can obscure these early desires. Furthermore, Alice Miller describes in the Drama of the Gifted Child that the theft, brutalization, or denial of these original inclinations gives wounded feelings the power in addiction. As we now know, trauma and shame are not just toxic thoughts but become encoded as biological realities. They are etched into the synapses of the brain. Massive scientific evidence shows that these dark events are encoded at a cellular level. Even though the cells reproduce, the message is carried forward in the new cells.
Like circles in the core of a tree which encodes the impact of the year, the tree will always know. The human body does keep score. More than voices of the past, they become us. I now have had some firsthand experiences with the power and value of those early inclinations. After Recovery Zone I was finished, my wife of twenty years, Suzanne died. When we met as single parents, we had seven children between us and ultimately ten grandchildren. One of those was a granddaughter named Kiran who at the time was six going on seven. She was a very gifted first grader.
She had an older sister who had blazed a trail in high school of many accomplishments. Yet Kiran was very talented and also very different. She admired her sister but was already determined not to be in her sister''s shadow. After the funeral, Kiran and her family stayed with me at our cabin in northern Minnesota. It was Christmas time and the snow, the smell of pine trees, and the presence of family was a great comfort to me. Kiran''s parents came to me concerned for Kiran because she was having difficulty sleeping. The issue was that Kiran knew how proud Suzanne was of her sister, Brianna, and of all of her achievements. Kiran wanted her grandmother to see who she was and all she was about, but now her grandmother would not be able to see it.
She felt cheated by her grandmother''s early death and being denied that affirmation. I understood that loss, but was at a loss myself about how to help her through that. I had the task of sorting through Suzanne''s clothes and personal items as part of post funeral realities and I asked Kiran to help me through this painful task. As we sat there touching the things that Suzanne had touched, her energy was around us. I asked Kiran about her sorrow and her sleep. She told me about profoundly wanting her grandmother to know her the way she had got to know Brianna. I shared the history of the naming ceremonies of Native American tribes and how elders were more than just old people. They had many responsibilities, but one special task was to watch their young ones with great care.
Then at about age six the character traits, abilities, interests, and behaviors were discussed at length by the elders. At that time a new name was given in a ceremony that reflected the true nature of the person. I shared with Kiran that Suzanne and I were the elders of her clan. We watched our young carefully. I told her of the many conversations her grandmother and I had about her. I was very specific how Suzanne would remark about how creative and witty Kiran was. Suzanne was often impressed at how disciplined and determined Kiran was and how she speculated about her artistic abilities. Kiran and I spent a couple of days together sorting and talking.
I am not sure who helped who more. I do know that Kiran started to sleep soundly and that I got through Christmas. The bottom line is how important the early acknowledgement of the inclinations and strengths of a young person is. Already the DNA pulls energy like little tuning forks that tell the body how to develop and call for the strengths and abilities that person is to have. Natural inclinations had started to emerge, and Kiran knew them already. When I brought those specific examples up, she knew . Sometimes we laughed and sometimes we cried, but I knew she knew . Kiran knew enough about life to know she needed the validation.
As an elder of the tribe, I was a witness to her reality. Being a witness is sometimes all that we can do, all that is necessary, and sometimes enough. Randy Pausch wrote a very moving account of this phenomenon in his book The Last Lecture. The book describes his struggle in learning that he was dying of cancer. He realized that it was important for him to leave a legacy of the most important realizations of his life in the form of one last lecture at MIT. His family resisted this effort at first because they had little time with him left. But his passion won the day and in part he speaks to how he was able to reconcile his passion with his love of family and leave an important legacy to all. I encourage you to read the book and actually watch the lecture on Youtube.
com. Core to his message was that to be fulfilled you have to be in your passion, but to do that you have to be true to yourself and do whatever you have to do to make it part of your life. And the parallel truth was making his intimate relationships more meaningful as a result. Pausch states that at an early age he knew his dream was to be an engineer who designed adventures for kids and he knew that he wanted to work for Walt Disney. His career as an engineering professor at MIT was integrated with assisting in the design of the Disney theme parks. He got to do his childhood dream and fulfilling that dream brought him happiness. And a happy person is a great person with whom to be in a relationship. This formula was so important that he felt a significant catalyst of his legacy was to tell people that.
(Note the importance of legacy is passing it on - a form of being a witness.) Once you know your dream, he urged his listeners to use the formula that you follow a vision with a priority. The guiding phrase he suggests is "if nothing else, I will." (A phrase that parallels Alcoholics Anonymous'' call to "going to any lengths" or Yoda''s famous phrase from Star Wars, "Do or do not. There is no try ." Randy Pausch was clearly living in his best energy even in his dying process. Not always is everyone so fortunate to have that clarity from the beginning. I knew that by the fourth grade I wanted to be a writer.
I loved words. I loved reading. I had no idea I would be a psychologist or a specialist in addictions. That call came much later. All I knew is that I loved reading stories and science. My father and I had a constant struggle over "book learning." He felt that I needed to be in the real world and that I was escaping. He saw it as laziness and a way to avoid my school work and chores.
He put a limit on how many books I could read in a week for most of my elementary years. When I completed my Ph.D., one of his cutting phrases was "even a Ph.D. should know that." My uncle, who was a physician, felt compassion for me and told me that both my mother and father flunked out of the University in their freshman years, a secret kept well hidden from me, and that alcohol was a part of that. I know that my father struggled in school and life.
He and my mot.