AC's Recovery and Healing Blog

Being a hero is about the shortest-lived profession on earth.
Will Rogers

In every dysfunctional family there are certain characters or roles that each member takes on.

There is The Enabler, The Scapegoat, The Lost Child, The Mascot and the Hero.

The Hero, who is usually the oldest child, is characteristically over-responsible and an over-achiever. The Hero allows the family to be reassured it is doing well, as it can always look to the achievements of the oldest son or daughter as a source of pride and esteem. While the Hero may excel in school, be a leader on the football team or a cheerleader, or obtain well-paying employment, inwardly he or she is suffering from painful feelings of inadequacy and guilt, as nothing he or she does is good enough to heal his family’s pain. The Hero’s compulsive drive to succeed may in turn lead to stress-related illness, and compulsive over-working. The Hero’s qualities of appeasement, helpfulness and nurturing of his or her parents may cause others outside the family to remark upon the child’s good character, and obtains him or her much positive attention. But inwardly, the Hero feels isolated, unable to express his or her true feelings or to experience intimate relationship, and is often out of touch with his or her own sources of spirituality.

I played the hero role in my family for decades.  The alcoholism, adultery, constant fighting and tension between my parents gave me ample opportunity to figure out how to create some kind of safety and security on my own.  The way I chose to deal with the issues in our family was to be the best student, and most well behaved (while others were watching..), least amount of burden, and make my family proud of me type of kid.  My grades were very good; I stayed out of trouble, my friend’s parents used to tell them that they trusted me and that it was great that they were friends with me because of that.  I could not wait to turn 16 so I could get a job.  During my senior year of high school I did not want my family to worry about any expenses for college so I applied for scholarships to any kind of school that I could think of.  I eventually received one from a technical and trade school in electronics and computer technology.  I figured since I did well in math and took electronics in high school that was good enough. I actually had my hopes set on being a writer but I went where the scholarship money took me….

After excelling at the technical school (I received the highest overall grade average in the history of the school up that point) I found a job at a major defense contractor – Hughes Aircraft.  I was 19 and went to work with a whole department of people that were all at least 8 years older than I was.  I then bought a condominium and was engaged to be married.  All before I was 20… Responsibility was a way of life for me.  I believed that if my family had something in their life to be happy about it would be ME….

Within a few years I became involved in a church that taught the bible and my relationship with Christ started.  The first thing I did was go to my family and preach the gospel to them believing that I had found the only hope for them to be what they were supposed to be.  There was nothing wrong with that except that it furthered their perception of me as there hero and confirmed in me the belief that I could somehow control the family’s health and well being.

As time went on I continued to have “success” in my career working for some great companies.  I worked at Motorola and then Qualcomm during its early days until they sold off our division to Ericsson.  I had traveled all over the world for business – Japan, Korea, Singapore, China, Peru, Brazil, Malaysia, and Montreal, Sweden.  I climbed the ladder and led a department of 22 engineers most of whom had advanced degrees – Masters in Electrical Engineering or Computer Science all while I only went to that trade school…

During the course of my career it was very common for my family to let others know of my success as any family would.  It also became common for them to ask me for help when they needed financial assistance – which was often more than just a little bit of money.  They had accumulated a rather large amount of credit card debt and were getting behind on other payments as well.  My codependency and hero status kicked in hard for awhile and I rescued them from that financial situation.

After 22 years of working for big technology companies I was laid off when Ericsson closed their facility in San Diego.

I then took the big risk and pursued the American Dream of owning my own business.  I bought a computer services franchise.  During the next few years of my life the bottom fell out for me in my life in numerous ways.  My business failed and I lost more money than I want to count. Of the many casualties of this downtime in my life was in the area of my finances.   I am no longer a “successful businessman” and my financial losses caused great pain down the line – including my ability to subsidize my parents life…

But a funny thing happened while I was losing all the money, material and status things in life.  I found recovery from Anger, Codependency, and being an Adult Child of an Alcoholic.  With that recovery began an awareness and ability to create boundaries in my relationship with my family.  For me it has been great and very healthy.  For them – they do not see it as great.  In fact the more I respond in healthy ways the more awkward and upsetting things have been for them when it comes to interacting with me.

You see, they want me to be the hero that makes them proud.  But I am not.  I am working at a very low paying job, I have no money at all, I am divorced, and I am only willing to interact with them when I believe it is necessary.  They don’t know how to deal with that.  They don’t like it and they are not happy with me.  They want the hero back but he is gone…

Recovery is probably the hardest thing we will ever endeavor.  The circumstances, behaviors, and consequences that lead us to a recovery program are known as “our bottom”.  The way up is scary and yet is really our only option. In order to recover it takes courage, hard work, perseverance, faith, God, people we allow into our life, and a process or a program we are willing to work on consistently.

Did you pay attention to that list?  The majority of the responsibilities belong to the person in need of recovery. God is there and definitely doing the miraculous, the things that seem “impossible” to our mind and comprehension.  Other people are necessary to encourage us, challenge us, be an example, and experience some commonality with. A structured 12 step program is also critical – I will devote an entire article on why this is true at a later date.  But realize, that all of those last three things (God, other people to help, and 12 step programs) exist regardless of whether the individual wants to recover or not.

In John 5 Jesus asked a paralytic a very interesting question.  “Do you want to get well?” The paralyzed man had been invalid for 38 years and told him nobody has been able to help him get into the healing pool.  Jesus then said – “pick up your mat and walk”.  The paralytic was hanging around the healing pool for a long time with many other people with very similar problems and issues.  He was in the place where others got healed.  He knew that the answers were close by him.  Notice Jesus did not say “I am here to help you get well” and he did not even address the man’s excuse “nobody will help me get in the pool”.  Jesus said – “pick up your mat and walk” he did not even say – “let me help you get up because I have healed you now and I want you to know that everything is better…”.  What assurances did the man have that things would be better at that point? None.

Ultimately we need to pick up our mat in order to experience recovery.  We need to do the heavy lifting.  We need to commit to the program.  We need to want to get better.  We need to get ourselves to the meetings.  We need to participate in the meetings.  We need to go through the steps.  We need to get with our sponsor.

I became a Christian for some good reasons and some reasons that were not that good.  Among the reasons that were naïve or just plain not good was that I believed that if I had a spiritual foundation in my life and I married someone with a spiritual foundation I would be protected from a dysfunctional marriage and family that ended in divorce.   I experienced a lot of dysfunction growing up in my family of origin and was bound and determined to not end up that way myself.  I was scared to death of divorce before I ever got married.  I wanted a guarantee.  So 23 years ago I became a Christian and two and half years later I met and married someone from the church I was attending.  Even better was the fact that this girl was the daughter of the minister of the church.  So she had grown up in what seemed like to me, the ideal environment.  Christian home, Christian values, Christian heritage.  I was very active in the church.  I was around Christians all the time. How could anything go wrong?  .

Here is how. I was still a spiritual and an emotional paralytic in many ways.  I carried my dysfunction right into my marriage and parenting.  Just because I was walking around the “healing pool” did not mean I was any better.  After 20 years of marriage and three kids and a lot of associated damage due to my dysfunction, I find myself divorced and seeing my kids every other week.  I had to get to the point where I wanted to get well and stop making excuses before any recovery and healing came to me.  I am not talking about religion and going to church.  I do attend church regularly but real recovery is a decision to get help with your specific issues at a level that is beyond a bible study or praying in order for something to change.  It is a process that takes time, effort, and commitment on my part.

So, do you want to get well?

Thank you so much for reading.  I hope what is shared here will be an encouragement to you!

Take Care,

A

If you think this article is not for you then I am going to go ahead and bet the farm that it really is…

How can I say that?  Well because denial is the easiest way to deal with your issues…..

Everybody is in denial about something at some (most of the..)  time in their life.  If your reading a recovery blog you  have at least acknowledged that maybe just maybe you have a problem that has caused your life to become unmanageable, hurt others, hurt yourself, and is not as easy to get over as your will power..

The problem with denial is that we are really good at it.  It doesn’t take a lot of work to deny the reality, minimize the reality, or project your own issue onto someone else.  In fact many of us are so good at it that we can do it without even thinking about it.  It is a default strategy for issues in our life.  Of course the problem with this strategy is that the denial gets so thick that denial becomes your reality….

“My problems are not as bad as……………”

“If you would only…then I wouldn’t ……………”

“I think you are the problem because…………..”

I’ve used all of these lines and ones very similar for years. The interesting thing about the conversations or one way speeches where I used these lines is that the speech never helped the relationships I was in get any better.  In fact it often worked in the opposite way.  It led to more damage and more isolation.

The reality that my anger had caused so much damage in my family came in small chunks at first and then in one big wake up call.  I will never forget the day I was asked to move out because the kids and my soon to be ex-wife needed “a break” from being around me.  Up to that point my biggest denial tool had been minimizing.  “It really was not that bad a problem.”  “I was working on it.”  What I failed to understand was that the reality that was created for my family, the years of angry outbursts, had already damaged the relationships sufficiently that any work that was being done was not going to be enough to change the hurt and disappointment already experienced.  My denial stemmed from a lack of perspective because it did not include how much my family’s wholeness had been wounded.

And while I am on the subject of denial, it is striking to me that the issues that we strive to recover from primarily ( always…) affect our relationships. Denial keeps us from getting better and that keeps us from getting closer or maintaining closeness in relationships.  It really does not matter how you act out.  The denial leads to a breakdown in your ability to contribute positively to a healthy relationship.   What would we have to deny if there were no relationships to work on?   And yet, we can’t get better unless we come out of our denial for ourselves and by ourselves.  Meaning if we are waiting for someone else to “get it” – we are not moving out of denial.  I once heard a therapist say it this way:  “in a relationship you cannot put the problem and the solution on the same person.”

If you are new to recovery then it is important to understand that breaking down the denial in your life is not a one time event.  It is a huge first step that will need to be repeated many times over during your recovery journey.  But it gets easier as you start to see that denial can be overcome by increasing your awareness of your issues at the deepest levels.

And if you have been in recovery for a long time you know by now that the issues we came out of denial at the beginning of our recovery were really just the “hem of the garment”.  There is a lot more digging to go to get to real health.  It is a journey after all..