Triple Jeopardy/The child's Dilemma

Triple Jeopardy/The child’s dilemma
By Gary W. Reece, Ph.D.

Yesterday an 8 year old boy was beaten and tortured by his mother’s boyfriend while she watched.  He had a skull fracture, broken ribs and cigarette burns over large portions of his body, he died of his injuries.  It was reported that Social Services had made several previous visits to his home.  In my recently published book Broken Systems Shattered Lives this type of occurrence is documented.  It was also the subject of  reports in the Los Angeles Times  which has called for and caused many investigations. Over the years it has been well documented that several hundred children have died in care.  I wish to explore the plight of children in the foster/adopt system in this blog.  I am calling it Triple Jeopardy.  First let’s look at the child’s dilemma.

The child’s dilemma is caused by dependency on a parent (s) for protection, safety, security and nurturance.  This is rightfully so.  That is the parent’s job, to provide a safe, secure, and nurturing environment for their children.  The problem for many children not only in Los Angeles, but all around the world, is that their parents are not providing a safe haven.  What is a child to do when he/she finds themselves dependent upon a parent who may be violent, drug addicted, mentally ill, neglectful, dismissive, or just plain inadequate?  It is a very natural and normal instinct for a child to seek proximity to a parent when under threat.  But what is the child to do if the parent is the source of threat? This is the first position of jeopardy.  One author characterized it like being  dependent on a terrorist.  The child cannot leave, for fear of abandonment and inability to take care off himself.  If the child stays, there is realistic danger and the probability of harm.  This is a problem of fright without solution. What is a child to do?

The second condition of jeopardy comes into play when the child is removed because of “dangerous-unsafe home conditions”. Stop and think for a moment about what removal from home and family represents. What is lost for the child? First, as was previously discussed, the child’s place in the family, the personal and family narrative, is disrupted. Because of such an inborn need to belong, when a child is removed from any family the whole context of that child’s life is lost. This is a major connection. Because we all feel a need to be connected to the people of our past, without being able to draw on this connection, this narrative, it is very difficult to have a base for a safe and secure future. Moreover, it is difficult to grow up as a psychologically healthy adult if we are denied access to our own history. It is like a tree being cut off at the roots. Family, neighborhood, toys, friends, pets, extended family, routines, favorite foods, bed time rituals, and the familiarity of your own room; these attachments are all major components of a sense of identity, and it happens with shocking suddenness. Imagine yourself sitting at home on your couch in you sweats, watching your favorite TV program and someone comes in, packs up all your things, and moves you across town leaving you with a strange family. That is what happens to hundreds of children in Los Angeles every day.

This act of removal is another trauma which compounds the trauma history of the child who is removed. Already having experienced complex, repetive, attachment trauma of various kinds and degrees, this new trauma further accentuates what has been described in the literature as the child’s dilemma. The original dilemma of being subjected to “fright without solution” is the same, only the child is entering a new world of fear and threat: of dependency, helplessness and uncertainty. The dynamics are the same with the child being in a helpless and strange situation without recourse to seeking proximity to a caregiver (albeit a dangerous and inconsistent, or neglectful caregiver), but are compounded by having to endure the shock of being placed with caregivers with whom the child has no previous experience. He is placed in a strange situation  with no choice or control. This is the dilemma with a twist. Now he/she has to deal with overwhelming loss while suffering from previous experience of neglect, abuse or sexual trauma and being forced to adapt to a new placement. Is it any wonder they have such complicated emotional psychological, social and behavior problems?

It should be mentioned that trauma and conditions of threat pose real psychological hazards which have a strong possibility of altering the developmental trajectory of a child’s developmental history during a critical developmental period over a lifetime.  In my book I have documented these dangers and results stemming from these kinds of trauma.  The trauma in most cases is serious enough to cause psychological, biological, and social problems sufficient to warrant a diagnosis of “Developmental Trauma Disorder.”  This is all from the impact of early relational trauma, the trauma of disrupted attachment through placement, and finally the third type of Jeopardy:  parental reunification.

After having been removed, because of trauma, then placed in a strange situation, now the next level of trauma begins.  It is called “family reunification.”  Once the child is placed in a surrogate  (foster home) where presumably the child is now safe, there begins a new level of trials.  The court orders a plan by which the birth parents are given a chance to regain their child.  This is done by means of weekly visits to the child while in care of the foster parents.  These visits lately have been ordered for as many as 3 times a week for 3 hours at a visit.  Imagine the trauma you would experience if someone had beaten you regularly and now you are forced by court order to visit this person for 9 hours a week.  This is triple jeopardy, it is a condition which causes secondary trauma.

I was called to testify at The Children’s Court regarding parental visits.  It was the case of a little 3 year old boy who was in foster care and being taken to visit his birth mother twice a week at the DCS office.  On approach to the office, the child would become fearful and agitated.  He would begin screaming and struggling to get away.  He clearly did not want to visit his mother.  The visits went very badly.  He was traumatized and was a terror to deal with days after the visit.  I wrote an opinion to the court that these visits were not beneficial to the child, harmful to the placement and disruptive to the foster home’s normal life.  I was called in to testify and told the judge the visits were traumatizing to the child and should be discontinued.  My reason, I told the judge was that it is normal for a child  when he sees his mother to want to go to her.  That he was screaming and fighting to get away from her indicated that he was frightened of her for some reason and that he should not be subjected to this trauma.  The judge agreed and visits were terminated.

This drama is acted out daily in the Children’s Law Center and daily in foster homes across the city.  I have written extensively about this in in my book  It is a travesty that needs to be remedied.  Our children should not have to be subjected to triple Jeopardy early in their formative years where they are at a critical stage of development. They are at risk for further traumatization, abuse, and even in some cases death.  They deserve much better than this.
 The entire story:  Broken Systems/Shattered Lives--the effects of trauma on children in the foster/adopt system can be obtained through Amazon Books.  Gary W. Reece, Ph.D. author.

Shame: The Naked Self

Shame!   The Naked Self.
By
 Gary Reece, Ph.D.

My client came into my office and sat in his usual space on the couch.  He was the picture of despondency and hopelessness.  His entire demeanor shouted out that he was in really hurting.  Slumped shoulders, down cast eyes, sitting in silence, he vibrated despair.  After what seemed an eternity he said:  “I despise myself, I am worthless, I am good for nobody, I can’t bear it any longer!”  I was stunned by this sudden change in him from last week’s session to today's.   It was as if there had been a total collapse of the self and he appeared to be drowning in a quagmire of self-loathing.  A novelist I have been reading lately captures the experience with a very eloquent metaphor.  “He stood at the “wooden fence of shame, to drink at the fountain of inspiration.  It was temporary, everything, a purposeless existence, a rite of passage, marking time, wasted years, growing up years.” (Deon Meyer, Dead at Daybreak) This was written of a young man who appeared walled off from himself by this fence of Shame and when it collapsed he was flooded  with very painful feelings of hopelessness, disgust, and self-loathing. This experience was so overwhelming that it almost rendered my client Catatonic.

When the defense collapses and a person becomes overwhelmed with feelings of absolute hopelessness   I struggle to help them find words to articulate and express these feelings.  What I was witnessing was the “collapse of the inner self.”  This collapse was signaled by amplification of the feelings of shame and disgust and by the thoughts of hopelessness and helplessness.  It was also accompanied by an instant dissipation of safety and trust.  This was an eruption of feelings from long ago, disconnected and never felt.

 He was unable to articulate any feeling except disgust and a need to rid himself of these intolerable feelings in that agonizingly long session.  Onesurprising  reaction I had  was the way I felt after he left that day.  A whole host of memories came flooding back.  It seemed to have triggered my own experiences of alienation.
I am sure most of us have at one time or another felt this inner kind of torment or even of terror when we get close to our very raw, naked and exposed self.  I experience it as a piercing of the ego, shame that is felt as an inner torment, a sickness of the soul. It does not seem to matter whether the humiliated one has been shamed by derisive laughter or whether he mocks himself. In either event he feels himself naked, defeated, alienated, lacking in dignity or worth.

This brought back memories of when I was in high school, I was the Geek, the one who was bullied and ridiculed for being too smart and the teacher’s pet.  I had to run a gauntlet every day to get to my classes:  this daily shaming felt as if I was “standing exposed under a powerful microscope where my smallest faults were magnified. These were reinforced by daily abuse from  my father and an lder brother.  Sartre described it “as a shame-triggered crack in the universe.”  Others have described it as though something that we were hiding from everyone is suddenly under a burning light in public view.  Shame throws a flooding light upon the individual who then experiences the compelling desire to disappear from view, an impulse to bury one’s face, or to sink right then and there into the ground.   Another author describes Shame as a sort of internal hemorrhage.

For me as as an adolescent it was a torment to go to school each day.  This caused me to want to crawl into a hole and culminated in feeling that I wanted to run away or that I could die. Instead, I buried myself in books and found a modicum of respite that way.

In the case of my client, the origins of this powerful, corrosive and maiming experience occurred as a relational trauma in the first 2 years of life, a rupture of the maternal bond with his mother.  This relational trauma was so stressful and painful and because it occurred so early, before words,  resides not in consciousness, but remains in implicit memory as a “dissociated state.  Shame!  When this form of early relational trauma is so severe, that it cannot be tolerated by the infant it is defended against by Dissocation:  Allen Schore describes it this way:
   
 Disssociation is a dis-integrator of the conscious subjective experience of a present moment—is a      basic  part of the psychobiology of the human trauma response: a protective activation of altered states of consciousness in a reaction to overwhelming trauma. (Schore, pg. 126)

I have been seeing this young man ever since he was an adolescent.  His family history was a whole host of traumatic occurrences, the “perfect family storm.”  His mother was a fearful, depressed woman.  He was her second child and probably suffered from post partum depression after having him while she had to care for a two year old daughter with serious heart problems requiring multiple hospitalizations and a husband who was a drinking truck driver who was gone a lot.  Not fertile soil for raising a healthy child.  These traumatizing circumstances were continued through my client’s childhood and adolescence in the form of physical abuse, harsh criticism, and his mother’s inaccessible emotional states of anxiety and depression.  He learned from this family dynamic that he was worthless, and that the world had nothing good to offer him: to always expect the worst.  This was indeed, a very  bleak landscape in which to grow up.

The very nature of shame is to hide itself; we hide it from ourselves as well as others.  Shame in our culture is out of fashion, it has gone underground, it has been replaced by more fashionable syndromes like depression and anxiety.  Shame in modern parlance is often masked by “low self-esteem” issues.  One distinguishing feature of Shame is its resistance to change because it is so deeply rooted.  It has been very fashionable in today’s therapy world to use “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy” to change such “negative self talk.”  My experience is that this is one sign that Shame is an underground force, a dissociated and unconscious emotion which masquerades as poor self-image. And because of this trying to talk someone out of these thoughts, or change their "negative self-talks" does not work because they are absolutely convinced of their worthlessness.

Many current scholars describe the problem as hiding our shame from others because we want them to be see us favorably and “be blind to what we cannot tolerate seeing.”  Shame is probably the most powerful emotion we are unable to modulate consciously. Much of our own psychology is based on avoidance of Shame and is often unrecognized and untreated. To wit,  my client left the session very depressed, announced to his wife he wanted a divorce, and called and cancelled his next sessions, “he needed a break.”  
It is very difficult to face, let alone feel this devastating level of self-hatred.  It is even more difficult if we are convinced that we are despicable and not worth loving. It is very hard not only for us to look at ourselves but also to expose these feelings to others.  It is particularly hard when the very experience of shame prevents us from looking at ourselves clearly because the primal shame distorts the vision we have of ourselves.

 Shame like so many primal emotions requires careful exploration, slow exposure to examination and a humane, accepting, and supportive environment where we can look at ourselves more compassionately. If we are to do so, we must feel safe, and trusting of the person we let into our inner sanctum, so filled with shame.  Our redemption must come as we see ourselves in a new light as mirrored in the eyes of the compassionate other, one who understands and is willing to experience these horrible states on the boundaries of consciousness.We must find a new perspective in order to soften the glare and restore a sense of hope and worth.

I am confident that my client will return to therapy once he has had a chance to restore his defenses, and have a chance to reflect on what he experienced that day when his deepest pain erupted and overwhelmed him.  It was too much to face all at once. It for him was like walking out of a dark cave into glaring sunshine.  It is difficult to face our deepest fears and torment by ourselves, it is even harder to do it in front of someone else.  In my case, I was fortunate to have a series of healing friendships, corrective emotional experiences and a very compassionate therapist.

The Elusive Search for Identity

The Elusive Search for Identity
By Gary Reece, Ph.D.

I recently concluded writing a book about the effects of trauma on children in the foster/adopt system.  It was a great learning experience for me as I pursued a life-long interest in Identity, how it is formed and what happens when we undergo life crises precipitated by trauma.  In fact this theme was the topic of my doctoral dissertation:  The Dialectics of Identity.  And here I am now, years later, still consumed by the same questions.  The research I did  for my book as well as working with severely traumatized children has been an illuminating as well as a disturbing experience.  I believe I have found, surprisingly, not only comassion, but some understanding as well in the experiences of traumatized children.  I have come to believe that we learn a great deal about the human condition when we gaze through the optics of a microscope focused on individuals in crisis.  Having worked as a therapist for years with individuals who came to me shattered, unaware of why their lives were so dysfunctional. This has given me a rich source of understanding as well.  When I  explored the experience of children who were undergoing the trauma of living in abusive and neglectful homes and then being removed and placed in a dysfunctional system which abused them further I learned even more.

The questions these experiences raised for me were:  how can adults do these things to children?  What is the impact of this behavior on their embryonic sense of self?  How do they survive such ordeals? What can we learn about the long term impact of trauma on human development, particularly in regard to the self?  Finally, how can we help grown individuals heal their fragmented, wounded, distorted selves.

In popular culture the self has many faces.  We use it so casually.  For example:  what does it mean to say, “just be yourself?”  I have to find myself?  I don’t know who I am!  To thine own self be true!  He betrayed himself?  Self-transformation.  The enlightened self.  Who are you?  Apparently there are true selves, false selves, fully actualized selves, secret, shadow selves, monster selves, narcissistic selves, crippled selves, self-destructive selves, implicit selves, dark and hated selves, grandiose, and borderline selves.  It would seem the self has many manifestations, and the word itself is sometimes used in place of the soul, spirit, and personality.  It can also undergo crisis, be transformed, enlightened, lost, buried, split, found, and saved.

I sometimes amuse myself by thinking about what would happen  in the morning when I confront myself in the mirror if each time I saw a different person.  Just how disturbing would that be?  If there is one thing we all count on is the continuity of being ourselves,  whoever that is.  Our personal history, life story, narrative seems to be what holds all of this together.  Through my story, I know who I am.  But what does it mean to know oneself?  How did I come to be this person thrown into this particular time and place in this vast universe? I am defined by many things, my roles and public persona,  the sum of all my attachments, or am I just the result of a bunch of electricity firing in  limbic system of my brain?  Does it convey any meaningful information to tell you that I am  tall, Caucasian, 70, heterosexual male, American, Democrat, who lives in California and has a Ph,D. in Psychology, divorced, father, grandfather, likes sports, and  a Laker fan? Or does the list of illnesses of age I have acquired add to the identity package.  It certainly helps my doctor to know me. This information is probably useful in categorizing me, but does it tell you anything about who I am?  Does where I was born and raised help? Who my friends are? My recreational activities, hobbies? Pollsters, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers all have weighed in on this topic.  Each contributes  a piece to the puzzle.  But the whole remains elusive, mysterious. Who is this person asking these questions and writing and seeking answers?

I think the search for identity, the self, is more elusive than this conglomerate, this amalgam of traits can tell us. Just as a Gestalt is more than the sum of its parts. In my quest, I find myself fascinated by individuals and their stories.  I want them to tell me who they are.  As I hear their stories, where they are in their journey makes sense.  It is the history, the story, the narrative that reveals the inner, mysterious, core self.  So I have become a collector of stories.  I am fascinated, I love to have people tell me their stories.  It is in these meetings, these intimate moments that I get a glimpse behind the curtain.  Some of these stories I have put in my book.

The stories I have collected in my book are told in their own words. From difficult beginnings, their lifelong struggles have been a search for identity, for an integrated, coherent, cohesive life story that makes sense to them. The very roots of our sense of self I have found, are in our families of origin and early attachments and if we are torn from that family, uprooted and displaced, how can we possibly find a secure sense of self?

For many children in the system, their search is often an unspoken question, a lived-with knowledge of being different from the moment of placement. Nevertheless, regardless of circumstance, theirs is a singular search, an imperative to discover the what, how, why and finally, who, in their elusive search for identity: to make the implicit self a more conscious and whole self.

What is remarkable is that as one courageous person tells his story, it shines a little more light in the darkness, and illuminates the path for others who find themselves on a similar quest. Then, as I discovered, these individual adventurers find each other and for them it becomes like finding lost family; someone who understands what it is like.

 Speaking of finding lost family, recently I had the privilege of attending a support group for individuals who belonged to a triad—Adoptees, Foster Care children and Parents. This group is provided by a former colleague with whom I have worked for the past 10 years. It was hosted by Vista Del Mar, a residential facility for adolescents and children in the system.

Jeanette Yoffe, the sponsor of this group, is a survivor of the New York child welfare system and grew up in foster care and was adopted. She has an understandable passion for her work, and it is no surprise that she has devoted her career as a psychotherapist to dealing with foster-adopt issues. She has created a public forum that meets once monthly called Adopt a Salon. At this particular meeting (during National Foster Care awareness month), she decided to share her story, which she previously presented as a one-woman stage show. She developed the show when she was an actress and with the help of her husband, a videographer, developed it into a video.

She hosts a free support group for all members of the Adoption Constellation on the first Wednesday of every month in Los Angeles. the attendant residual problems in adulthood.  The monthly group that she facilitates told their stories after seeing Jeanette’s video. Like survivors of a ship wreck washed up on a deserted island, they told harrowing tales of abandonment, confusion, being lost in the system, living with guilty secrets, and seeking lost family and home with an almost primal urge to reunite with their original family.
Many were confused about their origins, trying to sort out myth from illusion and their own fantasies about the families they had lost. Searchers all, they struggled with the mixed feelings of wanting to know and not wanting to know. They live with a free-floating anxiety of uncertainty about themselves, their place in the world, a fantasy world of what might have been, and the illusions of finding paradise and reunification with a mythical family.

One woman described a group she had gravitated to as misfits, outsiders and aliens. Another divulged that he felt like an actor miscast in a play who did not know the plot or his lines. Each time they would gain a tidbit, glean a bit more of their history, it would have the portent of an information time bomb. Sometimes overwhelmed by what was discovered, they would shut down and try to integrate some new bit of information. One man found his father who did not want to be found. Not having family leaves a person feeling guilty, ashamed, and severely conflicted about their right to find their families. The bottom line of the search is a search for coherent identity. A room full of survivors, some 30 individuals, responded to Jeanette’s story with questions, and tears:  identifying and telling their stories. As I listened to them talk, I had the feeling of coming upon a lost tribe, the remnants of a lost civilization who had all washed up on the shore. Unknowingly, they were unconsciously attracted by the Trauma Bond of the implicit self. They were survivors and refugees, all with amazing stories--a modern-day Gilligan’s island.

These profound identity issues, revealed in stories, revolve around core dynamics: longing for home and family, the ambivalent nature of the search, wanting to know, and not wanting to know, conflicted loyalties, fear of what might be discovered, dealing with feelings of abandonment, the trauma of placement, the shock to self-esteem of not being wanted by the original family, grief and loss, the rising tide of powerful emotions of shame, guilt and fear, as well as the difficulty of making conscious the dissociated and unconscious implicit self and integrating the unfolding narrative into one’s current sense of self. Richard Rose writes:

This powerful, regulating, rewarding quality of belonging to a group, a family, a community and culture is not just focused on the present. We each feel a need to be connected to the people of our past, and without being able to draw on this connection—this narrative—it is almost impossible to envision hopes and dreams for a connected and safe future. (Rose,  Life Story Therapy with Traumatized Children, p. 9)

The legacy of abuse in childhood: primary relational trauma and disrupted attachment with the ensuing loss of family connections threatens the very foundations of all later development: a secure sense of self and identity, the ability to regulate emotion or soothe oneself, and the ability to engage in trusting, intimate relationships. Not only do primary relational trauma and disrupted attachment forever alter the normal trajectory of development, they also create an unhealed wound which becomes a deep reservoir of sadness, longing, fear, rage, guilt, shame, confusion and a sense of not belonging anywhere. Most importantly, it often resides in deeply dissociated and unconscious regions of the brain. Allan Schore writes extensively on this area:

The regulatory processes of affect synchrony, which creates states of positive arousal, and affective repair, which modulates states of negative arousal, are the fundamental building blocks of attachment and its associated emotions; and resilience in the face of stress and novelty is an ultimate indicator of attachment security. Through sequences of attunement, misattunement and reatunement an infant becomes a person, achieving a “psychological birth.” This preverbal matrix forms the core of the implicit self. (Schore, Pg. 32)

In essence, by seeking  a lost family and home with an almost primal urge to reunite with their original family what we witness in these stories is primarily about individuals achieving “psychological birth.”  
For many children in the system, their search is often an unspoken question, a lived-with knowledge of being different from the moment of placement. Nevertheless, regardless of circumstance, theirs is a singular search, an imperative to discover the what, how, why and finally, who, in the elusive search for identity: to make the implicit self a more conscious and whole self.

What is remarkable is that as one courageous person tells his story, it shines a little more light in the darkness, and illuminates the path for others who find themselves on a similar quest. Then, as I discovered, these individual adventurers find each other and for them it becomes like finding lost family; someone who understands what it is like.
     
Richard Rose put it rather succinctly, “What we needed as children to become securely attached, i. e., safety, stability, warmth, security, and engagement with caring people, we still need as adults.” We also needed to learn how to be self-regulating. However, the problem for children of the System is that they have to overcome the trauma of being given away, the disruption of placement, violence, and abuse. The task for children in Care, is to create within the boundaries of their own lives a sense of safety, security, control, stability, purpose, meaning, and a sense of worth through meaningful attachments. In other words they still need as we all do, to have a coherent narrative. Their lives need to make sense, need a secure base, a sense of belonging, and a place called home. Each step taken in that journey is a defining moment which takes us closer to home.   This, I have discovered is the “Dialectics of Identity, a continual process of seeking, questioning, and interacting with what we find.

While they are accomplishing this, they still struggle with old wounds and questions about who they are, their worthiness, and a primal longing for family. The miracle for all of them is that somehow they found just enough within themselves or found someone at just the right time, and were able to survive against rather overwhelming odds and circumstances. They also survived being in a system that more often hindered their struggles than helped them, and in so doing created a coherent narrative which preserved the fragments of their past, without being destroyed by shame, doubt, and fear. The many crises of identity they each weathered resulted in a process of transformation and a stronger sense of personal identity. Their stories, of course are still ongoing. They still struggle with their unhealed wounds, struggle to feel good about themselves, to forgive themselves by letting go of guilt and shame. They struggle to trust and establish intimacy with those they love and to let go of regret and old losses. The struggle to channel the longing for home and family into the dynamic and vibrant present opportunities for creating a home of their very own, thereby making a world of their own choosing, a world they can call their own. This is the elusive quest for identity: Being able to affirm ourselves and say ‘yes’ to our lives in spite of all the circumstances which challenge our efforts.  These ultimately become defining moments and form the mysterious, elusive entity we call by many names : Self Identity

The Trauma Bond/Abusive Relationships

By Gary Reece, Ph.D.

Over my long career as a therapist, one of the most frequently encountered problems is the perplexing and vexing case of a client who is stuck in an abusive relationship.  Its most common feature is found in their own description of the problem.  “My friends all tell me I am crazy and that I should just dump him.  I know they are right, it makes no sense, he hurts and humiliates me and I keep coming back for more.  I know this is going to end badly.” And it frequently does, either violently and sometimes even death.

Much of human behavior is that way, we find ourselves in the grip of powerful emotional vortexes we don’t understand and feel powerless to change.   We act in ways we know are contrary to our best interests.  It seems on the surface to be a conflict between emotion and reason.  Romantics describe it as driven mad by love.  It has nothing to do with love.  But it is madness.

The key to this repetitive self-destructive behavior does not reside in our conscious minds because we often find ourselves doing things we know are really against our nature.  It is really dumb, but we feel driven to do it anyway.  Some compulsive behavior is harmless and even very functional.  I want my brain surgeon and pilot to be very compulsive.  And being compulsive got me through graduate school.  Not all compulsive behavior is destructive.  My children tease me because I have a drawer full of rubber bands,  a behavior learned from my mother who grew up in an age of scarcity, and I drive them crazy by always showing up 15 minutes early for appointments with them.  I know it makes no sense, but the whole point of this essay is to examine this form of compulsive behavior.  Behavior that makes no sense: the mystery of self destructive behavior.   The first thing I have learned in my career is that in order to understand behavior we musy understand its origins, it is always found in a person’s history.  I have found that once I know their history their behavior makes sense:  psychological sense.

The key to understanding behavior found in abusive relationships is to look at the very early years of childhood.  Relational trauma is at the root.  In order to comprehend the dynamics of abuse we must understand Attachment:  The bond established at birth and the critical first two years of the parent child relationship.  In these important activities of mutual interaction between parent and child the child is very dependent and vulnerable, needing the parent for safety and survival:  dependency on the parent is every child’s predicament.  This is the child’s dilemma,  secure attachment is successful if the parent is loving and attentive and interacts in ways to soothe and meet the child’s needs.  However, if the parent is threatening, instills fear, or is neglectful and abusive the outcome will be quite different, and will affect the child's developmental trajectory for years to come.  In this case the child is trapped, is in effect held hostage by a terrorist.  The dilemma is caused by the child’s needs for safety and security which are found in proximity-closeness with the parent who is dangerous; what is the child to do?  Closeness represents danger, withdrawal represents fear, abandonment--psychological death; the alternative is a problem without solution.  Beverly James calls this problem the Trauma Bond:

“The child trapped in an abusive environment is faced with a formidable task of adaptation.  She must find a way to preserve a sense of trust in people who are untrustworthy, safety in a situation that is unsafe, control in a situation that is terrifyingly unpredictable, and power in a situation of helplessness.  Unable to care for or parent herself, she must compensate for the failure of adult care and protection with the only means at her disposal; an immature system of defenses.  The abused child’s safety strategy is her focus on the wants, and emotional state of the abusive adult.  It is her best shot at maintaining safety for herself.”  (Handbook for Treatment of Attachment Trauma, pg. 35)

I had a client, a brilliant young, talented musician who came to see me because she was “going crazy because she was involved in a relationship with a man who was talented, charming, brilliant, and charismatic.  The only problem was that he enjoyed having relationships with multiple partners all at the same time.  Even more diabolically, he let them all know about each other.  The problem for Jane was that she wanted “to be the one.”  Here is the irrational component.  She knew this about him because he was notorious for his wild life style and “crazy womanizing.”  Yet she continued in spite of the pain, my advise, and the advise of friends.”  “What are you, nuts?”  The would all say.  “Dump him, you don’t deserve to be treated this way.”

She continued in the relationship, seeking various ways of coping with the roller coaster ride from euphoria to despair, depending upon the day.  She felt entirely out of control.  She was reeling from rage to panic attacks, and despair.  Her self-esteem was taking a terrific pounding. One very important  marker of  the Trauma Bond, is who regulates the emotions, and who is in control of the interactions.

In her own words, “It feels really bad, everything hurts, I’m riding these waves, I want to burn everything down.  Still, my instincts just want to take an axe to everything.  I know, of course, I have control over these things, and am not going to destroy anything.  But I am going to try to figure out where these things are coming from inside me  and embrace them, I feel nauseated, I don’t know what to do.  It is quite a roller coaster from high to low.  It feels like the whole world is stale and rancid.  Forgive my poetics here, but it feels as though it is old spilled blood, crusted around a dead body.  I know how dark that sounds.”

This all sounds familiar, doesn’t it.  This kind of drama was portrayed well in the movie, “Fatal Attraction.”  And we have seen it acted out and covered in the 6 o’clock news as the domestic violence of murder-suicide.

There are several features these kinds of relationships have in common.   The first is, they are deeply ambivalent, reflective of the Trauma Bond:  fear, dependency, need, fear of abandonment, despair, the realization of helplessness, and rage.  This is an amalgam of very powerful emotions which drive and make the relationship so unstable.  The ambivalence vacillates in the polarity between intimacy and separation. The emotional cost of being stuck in this dance of ambivalence is shame and humiliation. One eventually ends up hating both oneself and the partner.

The second feature of this kind of relationship is that it is a compulsive reenactment.  Most individuals have a long history of failed, abusive relationships that have the same painful outcome.  It is a kind of “Ground Hog’s Day“, a continuous loop of repeating the act over and over again.

Allan Schore, an attachment expert put it this way.  “A further complication of unresolved trauma is narrative reenactment of the trauma wherein the victim unconsciously recreates the original traumatic event over and over.”  The original trauma in Jane’s case occurred when she was two years old.  She vividly recalls hiding from her father in a closet  while he raged about tearing up the house and terrorizing the entire family; her mother and older brother.  Another memory, just as vivid was of her hiding under the piano behind the Christmas tree, alone and cowering in fear.

These memories are an accurate depiction of the formation of the Trauma Bond and in actuality is what makes these kinds of relationships so hard to terminate.  In fact I told Jane that she would never heal as long as she was in that relationship.  She terminated therapy rather than lose him.  That’s how powerful the Trauma Bond can be.  She chose the admittedly destructive relationship rather than the path of liberation and health.  Because she feared she could not survive being alone.  Again Beverly James accurately describes the power of the bond and what sustains it.

“There are two powerful sources of reinforcement of an abusive relationship:  The arousal jag or excitement before the violence and the peace of surrender afterwards.  Both of these responses placed at appropriate intervals, reinforce the Traumatic bond between victim and abuser.  In effect attachment is intensified in the face of danger.”

In this way, abusive relationships are as addictive as Cocaine.  And it has the same dynamics, if the user stops, she immediately begins to go into withdrawal, which leads to craving or longing and then fixing again---euphoria, then the rebound crash.  Abusive relationships are cyclical and very predictable.  Discovery, euphoria, build up of intimacy, then tension and ambivalence, angry break up, reunion and honeymoon.

Interestingly enough, the ambivalence fueling this destructive cycle is fear.  Fear of intimacy, and fear of aabandonment,  How odd and paradoxical.

The solution is just like recovery from any addiction.  The person must stop using.  In this case drop the relationship and then  withstand the fear, loneliness, and sense of abandonment and then do the work of therapy.  Which is to uncover the original trauma, feel the pain, recover the memories consciously,  integrate the conscious and unconscious aspects and grieve both the current loss and the loss of what never was: a loving relationship with her father.

As one is doing this kind of very deep work in therapy there is the reward of self-discovery, regained self-esteem, and control, and the empowerment of being self-determining.  The antidote to helplessness is empowerment and the growing reward of growing trust in our emerging strength.  And finally, one must learn what our parents did not teach us; how to lovingly heal ourselves, set boundaries, and be self-reliant.  This leads to respect for ourselves and the capability of having relationships based on love, respect and trust, not fear.  It takes courage to choose ourselves when it may mean losing a relationship we think we cannot live without.  In a very liberating and powerful act we are participating in our own psychological rebirth:  the creation of a new self.

Violence/A meditation, by Gary Reece, Ph.D.

Violence:  A Meditation
           by
 Gary Reece, Ph.D.

Last Saturday I did what I have often done throughout my childhood and adult years.  I went to a Saturday Matinee to see a film for a few hours of escapism and relaxation.  It  is a tradition I find very soothing and enjoyable; to sit in the dark and enjoy a story well told.

Today’s experience was very different from the bucolic times of childhood of a cartoon followed by a newsreel and a double feature of  Roy Rogers and The Lone Ranger: super heroes of another age.  A bag of popcorn and a few moments sitting in the dark viewing images of fantasy and heroism; an afternoon well spent.

That was not to be today! For 15 minutes of previews of coming attractions I was bombarded by “Surround Sound.”  Explosions, guns in rapid fire, car wrecks, visually intense images terror, of people being machine gunned. The sounds andd flashes of computer generated effects.  After 15 minutes of this very overwhelming sensory implosion the movie began:  0 Dark Thirty.  And for the next 30 minutes I was flooded with images of “Enhanced Interrogation” an Euphemism for Torture.  I said to myself after this experience, “No wonder America is saturated with violence!  We tortured the enemy, they killed some of our guys in retaliation, we killed some of theirs, we finally get Ben Laden.  But the violence continues.

This experience led to a blog: meditation on Violence.  I was disturbed and distressed by this unexpected reaction to the whole experience. After much reflection I decided that there is much to be learned here.  It is instructive to look at what I saw and experienced that afternoon.

When I got home the instruction continued,  I watched the evening news.  I saw in the following order:  Another school shooting in Houston Texas, a child killed by a drive by gang shooting in Compton, a 12 year old boy massacred his entire family, and to cap it all off there was a kidnapping and a murder- suicide in a domestic dispute.  And there were also other stories as well, a child molester arrested after a 40 year career as a teacher with numerous victims, and  a mother charged with starving, beating, and imprisoning her two children.

What‘s the cause of all this violence, I wonder?  So many different kinds: Child abuse, gang violence, domestic violence, terrorism in Algeria, Libya, Mali, Syria, and violence between nations.  Hundreds of thousands living in refugee camps. Are there threads which are common to this litany of inhumanity?

For the past 10 years I have been working with abused and traumatized children.  My book, soon to be published, looks at the effects of abuse on their development.  In my work I see many parallels between the dynamics of child abuse and the torture I witnessed in the movie.  I would like to share these similarities.

I will begin by setting the stage by sharing one of my favorite quotes from Alfred Adler:  “Self esteem?  The supreme law of life is this:  The sense of worth of the individual self shall not be allowed to be diminished.”

In torture and child abuse we see several common elements.  First the individual is dehumanized and rendered helpless.  The interrogator in the movie taking total control, said, “I want him to know he is absolutely helpless.”  He is dehumanized as the enemy, and then the second event happens, the victim is shamed and humiliated: subjected to demeaning physical acts, bound and gaggged and then water boarded.  Secondly the interrogator said, “I am going to hurt you and I can do anything I want to you.” He lets the victim know there is nothing he can do, he is helpless, and without hope.  He wants to get very deep inside his head.  There is no respect, he is an object to be used and manipulated for his own personal purposes.  The agenda of war.

Again I am reminded of a quote from another favorite,  Erik Erikson who writes:  “Shame supposes that one is small, completely exposed and conscious of being looked at--in a word, self-conscious.  One is visible and not ready to be visible…shaming exploit’s the increased sense of being small.

Children as well as others held hostage who experience the loss of control and their inability to find any “coherent survival strategy’ become terrified and then enraged.  In the mirror image of the self, they either turn the rage against the other, or themselves.  Allan Schore writes of this experience as a condition called “Shame-Rage.”  He writes:  Exposure to shame-humiliation is an all too frequent accompaniment of early child abuse, and it  may serve as an interpersonal matrix for dissociated rage (shame-rage).  He points out that there are certain kinds of mothers who are giving their children  early training to become violent when they grow up.  How do they do that?  In much the same way as an interrogator.  “They tease the boy until he loses control and strikes out…they ignore or ridicule his signals of anxiety and vulnerability…and they are consistently rough and bossy with him.  Paradoxically when the boy does strike out… the mother is at a loss to put an effective stop to his behavior.”

Ernest Becker once wrote:  “Unlike the baboon who gluts himself on food.  Man nourishes himself mostly on self-esteem.”

I believe parents in a sane society are equally responsible to provide opportunities for our children, and the rest of us to feel good about ourselves, to feel competent, creative, powerful and free in the enterprise of self-hood.  When those opportunities are denied and we experience humiliation, shame, and failure, in our vulnerability and inability to have control over our lives the consequences are dire for both the individual and the society in which it occurs.   I believe authentic community must preserve, sustain, and encourage individuals in their quest for meaning purpose and fulfillment of their self esteem project.

In the past few years I have had opportunities to work with whole communities in their attempts to recover from tragedy.  These opportunities had several qualities that led to healing.  It is a well known fact that recovery from trauma requires a certain kind of environment.  And it is the quality of the environment which determines the outcome of  recovery from trauma.  These qualities are found in all healing and healthy relationships. They are the same kind of environment which fosters and supports the pathway from childhood to mature selfhood and self-esteem.

I once had the opportunity to visit an exhibition that was on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.  It had Artifacts from King Tut’s Tomb on display.  This appears to be a somewhat bizarre segue from Terror and Torture, but bear with me. I left the exhibit with a singular thought.  “How similar that sacred burial site was to the human psyche.”  When we are born, hopefully we are greeted with a sense of “hallowed presence”  and in that moment we begin with the help of skilled parents to construct the inner sanctum of the self.  This is the second womb. In that inner sanctum we fill it with sacred objects, and things of great value to ourselves.  We through trust allow others to enter and appreciate our collection of sacred objects, the most sacred of course is our very self which is vulnerable and exposed inside the sacred place.  When we allow others into our sacred space and they appreciate our uniqueness and the things we value most; cherished objects, dreams, and visions of the self we want to be we feel confirmed and valued.  There is even an unspoken covenant, “If I let you in, you will do so with reverence.”  This is a covenant born of trust and intimacy.  Parents must provide a stable, safe,  consistent, and respectful haven for this venture of the self: a secure base.  It is a sacred duty.  Society also bears a share of this responsibility to provide opportunities for the self to flourish and be validated.

Jules Henry a social psychologist once talked about betrayal as Black Sham.  This occurs when we allow others to see us as we really are and then are subjected to ridicule.  In other words they desecrate the shrine.  This is the experience of humiliation and shame which leads to rage and I believe, sows the seeds of violence.  A humiliated child is a vengeful child.

As in Columbine, Littleton, Newtown, Aurora, Oklahoma City, Waco, and Jonestown, we are shocked and ravaged by these  episodes of mass violence, but on a daily basis there are acts of violence being carried out on a smaller and unnoticed scale.  Small acts of humiliation, ridicule, shaming, and failure to appreciate and cherish each other.  We soon learn it is not safe to be vulnerable and  guard our innocence, inside we harabor our accumulated wounds.

Violence is a symptom of a failure of community:  a failure to cherish, safeguard, and empower the young, to provide opportunities and support the voyage of the young and vulnerable through the rough waters of a complex, impersonal and often insensitive and violent voyage to adulthood.  We bombard our children with images of violence, put guns in their hands, subject them to humiliation and render them powerless to achieve their dreams of being a person of worth who has the power of self-determination.  And then we witness the fruit of the seeds we have sown and wonder why they strike out, killing themselves along with others who became a target for their despair and rage.  It does not take much interpretation when a child shoots his mother in the face.

What we need to stem this insane epidemic is a certain kind of community.  A community which has several necessary qualities:  it must be intentional, inclusive, safe, secure, empowering, authentic, respectful, affirming, congruent, just, and trustworthy. I have participated in communities like these which helped their wounded to heal.  They provide the means to understand, educate, support, care for, and share stories of their woundedness and grief, their confusion, shock, terror, and rage.  And yes through this sharing and commitment they found a commonality and a way to find meaning, purpose and a way of reviving hope.  Bearing each other’s burdens, we are not alone in our healing.

The antidote for violence is community, the antidote for fear is community, the antidote for shame and rage is community.  The antidote for helplessness and despair is empowerment through community.  Acceptance is the antidote for humiliation.  Grace is the antidote for hatred, not guns.

Newtown/Everlasting Arms

Newtown/Everlasting Arms

By  Gary Reece, Ph.D

It has been a week since a lighting bolt struck with unprecedented, unimaginable, catastrophic violence in a small town in Connecticut.  It was an act of terror committed by a young man who lived amongst us, not some foreign Jihadist.  His wanton act hit Newtown with shattering, traumatic force.  It shattered the security, serenity, safety, beliefs, hopes, and dreams which form the secure base that is the foundations of all communal life.

These attachments form the very essence of what it is to be human and are the vital force which make life together possible.  It is through attachment that infants are made to feel valued, safe, secure, and trusting.  It is through attachment that infants develop a working view of the world.  It is through attachment that we learn love, empathy, compassion, and the ability to intimately connect with an other.  It is our attachments which give us a sense of meaning, purpose and significance.  It is through attachment that we learn to be self reliant, regulate our emotions, and govern our impulses. And it is attachment that binds us to our family friends, community and our country.

Last Friday’s travesty followed an all too familiar macabre tableau.  A gunman enters a public building, armed to the teeth with multiple weapons and hundreds of rounds of ammuntion: ready to make war.  He begins randomly shooting, an alarm goes out, first responders appear on the scene and begin to deal with the bedlam and chaos of multiple gunshot victims.  Shortly there after the media arrive in droves.  Reporters frantically search for a story begin  thrusting  their microphones and cameras into the faces of shocked children and parents:  searching for the “epic” shot that will capture the essence of horror in the faces of the victims.  They want to display the moment on national TV.  The story goes viral. The parade of interviews of victims; talking heads telling us how horrible, shocking, and unprecedented this unfolding story will be.  “Breaking News, more at 11.”  As the memorials pile up, the President addresses a shocked nation.  He expresses sorrow and indignation:  “this is enough, this can not happen again, we must do something!”  And then the funerals begin.  The coverage continues and the media look for “Heroes.”  There is nothing like hero stories to capture an audience.  And then in all probability the media moves on to the next tragedy of the day.

Also predictably families, and the community respond with normal reactions of shock, terror, and horror to an extremely abnormal situation.  Because of the terror unleashed by such a random, horrific act of violence we all feel vulnerable and helpless.  There is a terrible fear of recurrence.  We are made to feel vulnerable and helpless, so fragile and terribly mortal.  Everyone becomes hyper vigilant and rushes about frantically trying to find a way to reestablish some vestige of control.  This is very understandable, we have experienced the worst kind of trauma:  a sudden, random, act of overwhelming violence by a member of our community.  This is the worst kind of betrayal.  It is a terrorist act perpetrated on the innocent, the undeserving, our children, neighbors and friends without apparent motive. We are defenseless.  People asking the unanswerable:  Why? Why?  Why?  It is senseless!  There is no logic; there is no answer, even so we struggle to find a coherent survival strategy in order to make sense of it all.

As a result we get responses that are driven by fear and panic.  One artifact of these attempts to regain control is very concerning to me:  gun sales went off the charts and established one day sales records.  Another proposal got publicity.  “We need to arm our teachers,” gun proponents advocated, if more people had guns these things would be prevented.”  From the NRA, “we should put armed personnel at every school.”  Not recognizing that we are having to lay teachers off because of lack of funding. It is too ignorant and frightening to seriously consider turning our schools and public places into fortresses.  Another proposal came in the true spirit of American Capitalism:  body armor for children.  For only $150 you can protect your child.  All of these are responses to the terror,  and the fear of losing more children to violence.

As a parent I know what it is to lose a child, and as a psychologist I have spent my entire career working with victims of trauma.  As part of the concentric circle of victimization this event opens wounds of all who have experienced similar wowrld changing events.  Parents, teachers, pastors, first responders, no one is exempt from such shock, terror, horror and grief.

I remember standing  with my wife and  our two children by the grave site of my daughter and looking into the grave, it was like looking into the abyss.  The little white coffin was so small.  We were surrouded by friends while a friend delivered a few words of support and comfort.  All I remember from that moment was the feeling of utter numbness and unreality.  My friend said, “you feel like you have fallen off a cliff and there is no bottom, but you must trust that you will fall into the “everlasting arms.”  It took me a long time to understand the import of his words.

In Newtown, one parent said it well as she spoke to a reporter:  “What we need is for all of you to leave so we can start to heal.”  Scott Peck once wrote, “It is only through Community that the world will be saved.”  I believe he had it right.  Newtown and its citizens will hopefully discover the power of covenantal community.  I have found that we do not heal alone.  Grief is best born by the everlasting arms of people who love and support each other.  Yes the night is dark, life feels devoid of meaning, the grief is fierce, the losses seem unbearable and the road to recovery seems only a distant possibility.

Recovery will come slowly as we do the work of community, binding up each other’s wounds with acts of kindness and sharing each other’s burdens. We discover ourselves in each other as we share our stories and create a common narrative. The nation is reaching out with cups of coffee, Penguins sent to comfort the children, and memorials spring up spontaneously.  Rituals are performed, funerals attended, and condolences offered, all are important first steps. Arms reach out from around the world to touch with acts of Kindness.

Gradually the shock will wear off and be replaced by the acute,  aching pain of grief, sadness and endless tears, only to progress on to the deep valley of despair and suffering as the moments are relived, rooms are found empty, and school lunches no longer need to be packed. And then a deep anger at the senselessness of our loss sets in. Somewhere in this bereavement process we must find faith and hope that we can rebuild as we search for meaning and purpose.  We must rebuild our shattered lives through community and a commitment to find loving ways to build a new safe base, and create secure and firm new attachments which will keep our children safe and restore our wounded souls.  Guns will not heal.

A line from an author I have been reading frames it this way:  “A fundamental and permeating strength of humankind is the capacity to form and maintain relationships-the capacity to belong.  It is in the context of our clan, community and culture that we are born and raised. . . .We each feel a need to be connected to the people of our past, and without being able to draw on this connection-the narrative-it is almost impossible to envision hopes and dreams for a connected safe future.”  Richard Rose

We must also learn from this tragedy:  it is the children who do not feel this inclusion, who have been marginalized and have become fragmented and damaged and do not feel this affirmation of community who grow up full of rage and strike back because of their wounds.  It is the failure to love them that is the source of such terrible, rageful violence.  And it is a careless, neglectful nation that allows  weapons of war to be so easily acquired by these wayward, wounded children.

Tragedy and loss is a universal human experience and in that way Newtown is every town.

Trauma and Addiction

Trauma and Addiction
By Gary W. Reece, Ph.D.


There are many consequences that follow an experience of trauma.  One of the more common reactions often goes unrecognized because it takes a while to develop and as a result people fail to make the connection.  Following a traumatic experience there is a relatively high probability that a person will develop one or more addictions.

It has particularly been noticed in certain high risk professions such as first responders, police, fire fighters and soldiers.  In one study done after the Oklahoma City bombing, they noted a higher than usual number of  individuals who developed addiction, there were also a high number of suicides, divorces and related symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder.  There were other high risk behaviors also noted such as thrill seeking, gambling, and other self-destructive behaviors.

There are many reasons for the development of an addiction.  Some individuals  are more risk prone because of such factors as a family history of addiction, hence you would be at greater risk.  Or being in a high risk profession where individuals are exposed daily to danger. There are also personality types who are more vulnerable, particularly those that are considered Macho so that a person is thought to be weak if he exhibits any kind of weakness such as an open display of emotion.  Men are more prone to this because we are expected to be strong, and that means we do not show weakness, feelings,  neediness, or vulnerability.

The dynamics of trauma make us particularly vulnerable to addiction because the experience itself subjects us to “an overwhelming event which exposes us to violence, harm, or death and renders us helpless in response to it."  Furthermore, during that experience we are hit with a shock, a surge of emotions which are too great to handle.  It is this shock wave of overwhelming terror, fear, or horror which immobilizes our psychological defenses so that in the initial stage we experience a state of numbness, shock and helplessness.  This is a natural psychological reaction to shut down when too many painful feelings come all at once.

What most people do not realize is that we are at the highest risk psychologically right after the traumatic event.  What we do to cope is critical.  The people most vulnerable are those who are isolated:  do not have a good social support group and have difficulty experiencing painful feelings.   This is particularly true in single event traumas.  In the case of the military or law enforcement, these individuals experience a different kind of stress.  They are exposed daily to a variety of stressful experiences, many of them do not rise to the level of trauma but fall into the category of multiple, chronic stressors.  High stress over a long period can lead to addiction as the individual begins to gradually use substances to help deal with the tension, fear, frustration or helplessness attendant to the profession.

The dynamics of addiction are relatively simple to understand.  It is a simple law of learning.  If a person experiences a high level of  emotional or physical discomfort and then by chance does something to cope and experiences immediate relief, this associative connection gets linked.  Pain=relief=positive reinforcement=reliance on whatever “worked”.

In my particular case, for example, I was in a prolonged state of shock and emotional deadness after the sudden death of my daughter and discovered that by going back to work and working long hours I felt better.  I felt the reward of being in control, I could work, be successful and be rewarded by making money.  Hence I became addicted to work.  This helped me feel back in control, powerful, and socially validated.  So, in essence, whatever we do immediately following a traumatic event can potentially be addictive.  If we have poor coping skills then we are more vulnerable.

My poor coping skills were an inability to feel or express strong emotion, difficulty trusting others by exposing my felt fear, vulnerability, weakness, neediness , and helplessness.  I felt so much rage and disillusionment and did not know what to do with it.  So I found great relief in avoiding it all together.

Instead, I found great relief and real magic in buying new Jaguars and Porsches.  About one a year.  The sales men were so glad to see me, I felt so powerful driving off the showroom floor with my new Red XKE roadster.  It felt so good to show off and feel the excitement of driving it.  But the high lasted only about a year and then I had to get a new fix.

There are all kinds of addictions: shopping, sex, alcohol, drugs, affairs, the list is potentially endless.  It is whatever helps us feel better.  Trauma shatters self-esteem, our sense of control, our beliefs, and overwhelms us with painful feelings.  Whatever helps us cope has the power to be potentially addicting.  If it helps us to feel like somebody again, restores our damaged self-esteem, helps us feel less isolated, lonely, afraid, and empty:  in short a shattered lonely nobody, then we have found indeed the magic elixir.  As they say in the addiction community, it is a short term solution which becomes a long term problem.

Addiction, then is a failed attempt to restore the shattered harmony of our lives.  It is a symptom of failed mourning.  I have told many who came to me for therapy that you cannot grieve and practice your addiction.  Overcoming addiction is doubly painful.  First, there is the problem of abstinence-withdrawal, very painful and uncomfortable, requiring a great deal of courage to give it up.  And then there may also be repairing whatever damage we have done to our lives by the addiction.  It took me years to overcome the financial disaster of buying new cars every year.

There was also the matter of a divorce as the cost of my self-indulgences. That was also emotionally and financially catastrophic.  Secondly, in giving up the addiction we then open ourselves up to feeling the grief we have been avoiding.

But the good news is that once I began facing my demons, I was able to begin cring again,  feel the feelings, feel more alive, and that led to being more authentic which enabled me  to genuinely respect myself.  In healing I had to give up my addictions, feel my pain, restore my shattered life, and find authentic ways to feel good about myself.  This route may initially be the harder path, but the rewards are infinitely greater because of the joy and peace that is found in facing the darkest moments of one’s life.  I also found that healing cannot be done alone.  And I might add, it took many years to create a life of meaning and significance with family and friends at the center.