Throwing Out the Old Rule Book
The big turnaround in my life in my late twenties, about half my lifetime ago, to which I have been referring frequently in the past few weeks (mostly in talks and when I share in meetings and groups, etc., but also occasionally in blogs such as KaiOaty’s latest), happened in two parts. First there was the epiphany, the spiritual “Aha!” experience. That gave me the inspiration, motivation and drive.
Then came the Family Rap therapy group where I got the practical tools to transcend a lifetime’s accumulation of psychopathology and dysfunctional behavior. Group is where I learned to see behind my own defense mechanisms, and to accept myself as I am so that I might have a chance to become what I want to be. It seems the more I use such tools as I have, the more new tools I gain.
The abstaining reformed heroin addicts who ran the residential treatment program that sponsored the group (as community outreach to social service and public safety workers in Anchorage) had a saying, “But we’ve always done it that way!” They told us those words were on a poster hung prominently in Family House, their program’s residence, and would be pointed out every time a newcomer was struggling with the changes necessary to transcend his or her addiction.
I never saw the poster, but I heard those words spoken in tones of scorn and derision often enough in group that I’m not likely ever to forget them. The idea was that the way we had always done things was what got us in trouble, and so if we wanted to heal ourselves and transcend the chronic trouble, we had to find new and better ways of doing and being.
I don’t know if it can ever be easy to throw out the old rules. Even if one has the personal courage to buck the system and strong convictions that the old ways don’t work, old ways die hard. What iconoclast has ever NOT encountered resistance?
In our recent moves to work more than one 12-step program at a time and to blend twelve-step principles with orthomolecular biochemical protocols for our own recovery from addictions, Greyfox and I have found amazing personal success, and a maze of resistance to our twelfth step efforts.
The twelfth step states: “Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.” It caps off a truly marvelous set of broadly (if not absolutely universally) applicable principles that in their original program have become codified along with some invalid assumptions and obsolete conclusions.
The founders adopted a moralistic stance about “character defects” that current bioscience has revealed to be symptoms of neurochemically mediated personality disorders. Substance abuse and the consequent addictive responses of brain chemistry imbalance, are frequent accompaniments of personality disorders caused by trauma in infancy or later life. Those traumas cause discernible changes in brain physiology and chemistry.
Post-traumatic stress disorder, passive-aggressive disorder, dissociative identity disorder, narcissistic, histrionic, borderline and other personality disorders are all now known, along with every addiction, both the “ingestion” type (substances) and the “process” type (sex, gambling, shopping, etc.) to have similar biochemical components. Imbalances in neurotransmitters lead us to engage in certain behaviors to redress the imbalance and relieve the distressing symptoms of the various imbalances.
Because the Big Book calls the behaviors defects of character and the reactions to alcohol an allergy, many AAs are not receptive to nutritional help in their recovery. A striking irony in this is that one of the founders was an MD, and early AAs were some of the first people to use megavitamin therapy. If Dr.Bob were around today, I think he would be appalled at the way 1930′s-era science has been carved in stone in his program.
Fearing to try any “easier, softer way” against which they have been warned, many of the AA adherents white-knuckle their abstinence, relapse frequently, go in and out of the program through an inbuilt revolving door that rewards relapse by making a big deal over the lost sheep who return again and again.
Transcendence of addiction is never mentioned, and by implication is decreed to be impossible. Recovery is the best they are led to hope for. They are socialized and programmed to think of themselves as “in recovery”, “recovering” for the rest of their lives, never “recovered.” Since the vast majority of them keep the addictive brain chemistry active through addiction to sugar and caffeine, that prophecy of lifelong addiction fulfills itself.
The thirteenth or fourteenth tradition, one of the unwritten set, decrees a steady supply of coffee at meetings, and “birthday” cakes to celebrate every anniversary of a member’s sobriety date. In the old days, all AA meetings were held in smoke-filled rooms. Now, non-smoking meetings have added a “meeting-outside-the-meeting” to the older traditional meetings before and after the meetings. Many nicotine-addicted AAs cannot sit through the hour of a meeting without a cigarette.
Greyfox gave up alcohol, nicotine, marijuana, and all other illicit psychoactive drugs May 23, 2003. I had already given up all but cannabis and caffeine. Since my dope-smoking was largely a bonding ritual and social thing for me, and because I wanted to introduce my soulmate to NA and show him that the steps work for other things than just alcohol, I found it easy to quit. We are both still using caffeine, and my use spiked shortly after I started going to 12-step meetings. Now we are tapering off. Abrupt caffeine withdrawal is painful in the head and dangerous because of neuroelectric deficits in the heart, but withdrawal is necessary to our program.
A few of those in one or the other of our groups are hip to cross-addiction and realize that one thing leads to another. Greyfox knows that for him, smoking a cigarette can lead to taking a drink. I know that sugar is my first and last drug of choice, the most dangerous drug for me personally because of the inevitable cascade effect, the slide into other addictive use if I should slip with the sugar abstinence.
One thing that made weed easy for me to quit was the knowledge that I’d be averting the munchies and making my sugar abstinence easier. It works, and I have found my new-found clear-headedness and increased energy levels to be great unanticipated rewards for my abstinence from pot. I never realized how dopey I had been. I used to (but no longer) avoid making appointments because keeping them was so hard. Now I don’t hesitate to schedule my time and commit myself to as much as I can feasibly do. I function.
Besides the improved day-to-day personal and social function, I’m functioning also in ways that fly in the face of many other conventions besides those of the 12-step programs. I am acting as therapist to my husband. We: Greyfox, Doug and I, are treating Greyfox for his personality disorders.
This came about synchronistically along with his addiction recovery program. He found the online personality disorder test near the beginning of his new commitment to living clean and sober. Taking it, he found that its conclusions meshed with what I had been telling him about his behavior, and he formed the intention of transcending the personality disorders along with the addictions.
Viewed one way, this could seem like a tall order, a set-up for failure and disappointment. From another perspective, one I am sure is a higher perspective, combining those efforts is the only way either of them can succeed. Likewise, I feel that working within our family this way, in contravention of the conventional wisdom, is the only way this could work for us.
We have no money for therapists, no health insurance to cover it. Besides that, the prognosis for recovery in therapy from histrionic, narcissistic and borderline personality disorders is very poor. Few clients ever stay in therapy long enough to develop the rapport and trust with a therapist that is needed for success. Few therapists have the ego strength and acceptance to be able to deal with personality disorders. These people are massive pains in the ass.
The thought of a therapy group filled with histrionic narcissists conjures up visions of Hell. They would be trying to elicit their narcisstic supply from each other, vying for center stage all the time, doing each other narcissistic injury and then reacting with either aggression or depression, like narcissists do.
In our household, most of those problems are solved. Narcissists force a choice on everyone with whom they associate: either supply their sick needs or hurt their feelings and accept the consequences. Doug and I have the perception to realize what Greyfox is up to and the mutual support between us that keeps us from accepting the blame when he takes a narcissistic injury from our treating him like a human being. (One of the best websites on NPD heads all its pages, “Should we call them human?“)
Greyfox realizes on an intellectual level that he is sick. He is committed now to getting well. In recent weeks we have made a lot of progress in talking about his early experiences and tracing the roots of his early narcissistic injuries. There is much of it that he doesn’t recall. Some of the prevailing wisdom on this disorder is that it originates in the first 18 months of life. We have done a lot of deductive reasoning, from what we know about cultural norms and family dynamics, to determine what the baby Greyfox might have experienced. What we know about those things goes a long way toward explaining what we now experience with the personality disorders.
For the twelve years that the three of us have been living together, Doug’s and my perception and understanding of Greyfox’s psychopathology have been growing. Greyfox refers to this as our “bullshit detectors.” Good term. Another thing that has been growing in that time is Greyfox’s trust. He knows, now, finally after much experience, that we are not trying to hurt him when we deny him the narcissitic supply he seeks. Greyfox tells people that I am the only person in the world from whom he would accept a handful of pills without question, and swallow them all. I suspect that I am also the only person in the world who could function as his therapist for these disorders.
So, I’m chucking the rule books, and the family is working on healing itself. It’s not just Greyfox, you see. Now, after all these years of living with a histrionic / borderline / narcissistic alcoholic addict, Doug and I have some trust issues of our own to deal with. Greyfox has already begun helping us with them.
Need I add, “Don’t try this at home kids!” ?? I honestly don’t think this would work in everyone’s families. We’re weird. We can live with that. Fuck the rules.
Today I took shots from within the woods, looking out…
The first image, above, is full-frame, natural light, uncropped and unmodified, not digitally manipulated at all except resized for this page. Later shots, as light increased, were washed out and so I altered the brightness and contrast, and did some cropping on some.
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