How neuroscience can help your recovery

How neuroscience can help your recovery

A vast majority of the collective is traumatized. It’s our secret, unrecognised, epidemic. Trauma extends far beyond the ‘big’ events. At its core is disconnection from the true self. It presents as depression, as deep lonliness, and anxiety.  All of us have healing to do. All of us are guiding each other home – back to the mind, body, spiritual connection we had at birth. “Broken” is the illusion created by trauma. Wholeness is the truth.

Dr Nicole LePera

girl in blue sleeveless dress

Fighting with your ‘self’ is not the best way

One of the most important differences that neuroscience is helping us with is the idea that there is a better way to recover than fighting with yourself.  Never have we been in such a position to understand our inner workings. All the research results we have point towards working with yourself rather than against yourself as the best way forwards.

Traditional, medical based approaches tend to encourage fighting with yourself as a way of recovering through strength and determination. But this is a fight that most people lose, for two reasons. Firstly it is your core self (from your mind) that is figthing your brain. But your brain does not like to be pushed around.  Remember that your brain is programmed to take over at moments of threat. Secondly, your brain is only doing what you have trained it to do. Don’t attack the brain for working really well!

Neuroscience research has shown that hating your addictive nature is for most people counter-productive. This may be a new idea to you and so I want you to take some time to consider it. Remember that we have all been a little brainwashed by the idea of ‘spiritual diseases’ and the Demon drink. What makes it more confusing is that there are some people who have acheived a recovery doing just that! Well, it may have worked for them, but working with yourself is much more liklely to succeed.

Having ‘parts’ of you is normal!

One of the biggest challenges to the medical approach is the idea that having parts of you is normal. We have been taught for many years that anything like the idea of ‘voices’ or having ‘parts’ of our personality means that we are ‘mentally ill’. How many times have you heard people joke about people coming to ‘take you away’ if there was anything as simple as hearing you talking to yourself. 

Have you ever said “I’m in two minds about that”. Or “I don’t know what came over me”. These are normal signs of the idea that you have both a brain and a mind and that they work separately from each other. Just think about your imagination for a moment, hasn’t it offered you solutions to problems that you did not think of through deductive reasoning? It’s like magic! Another bit of evidence of the complexity of the human condition that we should accept as normal. The trick is to use this idea to produce inner harmony as part of your recovery rather than go on hating parts of yourself and remaining in conflict.

brown eggs on white tray

We now know that this experience is completely normal. For most people this can involve very useful conversations and progress for us. The main thing to consider if you have any doubts, is where any ‘voices’ come from. If you experience them from outside of yourself, hearing them as you would hear anyone else talking to you, then this is something to investigate with a psychiatrist rather than talking therapy, as it is a sign of an issue with the brain itself. But if the voices are heard within the mind as influences or strategies, then you are talking about a perfectly normal experience. And one that can bring enormous benefits for you in your journey of recovery.  

doctor holding red stethoscope

Anxiety and Depression are not diseases that need medicine

The medical approach always starts with the same idea “what’s wrong with you?” Think of anxiety and depression more like warning signs that there is something in your life that needs attention. Dr Caroline Leaf says these feelings are real but not in need of a medical label. Something needs attention, there is a challenge that is not being faced.  I can’t tell you the number of times someone has come into my counselling room and told me that there is something wrong with them because they are depressed or anxious. But after some discussion I have told them that their depression/anxiety is evidence of their sanity! In other words it’s normal given their situation. If they were not depressed there would be something wrong! 

Addictions, particularly substance based addictions, come about mainly because we develop ways of avoiding feelings. Over the years a belief develops that painful feelings are firstly to be avoided, then that they are dangerous and finally, that they will kill you. This belief continues to strengthen over time and has to be challenged and courageously faced by anyone serious about wanting to recover. Once you begin to think of yourself as working well rather than needing to be fixed, you can start to work with yourself more. Understanding that you have trained your brain to intervene at these times. Taking the time to get to know your self and how your brain intervenes when it perceives a threat to you is a much better way of developing your recovery journey.

Trauma is at the heart of the issue

Whenever we experience harmful or toxic behaviour, particularly in our childhood, our brain stores the experience as something to be watched for. Think of it like a third option that the brain has when given information from our senses. The first two options are, one, throw it away! Not all information is valuable! Your brain decides that what you had for breakfast three weeks ago on Tuesday is not vital and can be discarded. The second option is when the brain decides that the information is useful and passes it back to the memory (into the Hippocampus). This can then be retrieved later. So the third option is rare but when it happens, it is stored permenantly (in the Amygdala) until you change it! That is why it’s so important that you learn to work with yourself. If you fight these parts, it’s like having a go at someone for trying their best to help you! Remember, your brain is working well, you need to acknowledge this and appreciate it!

men's white dress shirt

There is another important aspect of trauma that you need to understandand is one of the reasons it may have confused you up to now. Remember that it is your younger self that was traumatised, not your mature grown up self. This is important because it means that the threat your brain is reacting to and protecting you from may not be threatening to you as an adult! So you don’t recognise it because it was only threatening to you as a child. This is one of the many ways that trauma can be confusing to us. Common sense does not usually get you there. Especially when that common sense is based upon the medical model.

gray concrete tomb stone during daytime

Trauma is much more common than we think

In the First World War or ‘great war’ as it is known, the phenomenon of ‘shell shock’ was noticed. Soldiers returning from war would stare vacantly for long periods and not speak. I have a memory of my Uncle Johnny who fought in the war, but no memory of his voice. I never heard him speak. Before we understood this better, we tended to think of trauma as being down to the size of the explosion. Now we know that it’s not the size, but how the experience affects us that is the important factor. Clearly this leads to the idea that all sorts of things can cause trauma, not just explosions. The other important factor is that little children are much easier to traumatise than adults. They have little or no knowledge of the way the world works and can be made to believe things very easily. Their brains are not fully formed and their security can be threatened by the smallest things.

This means that there it’s highly likely that you have been traumatised as a youngster. For some of you, this will be obvious and you will have a memory of some bad experience. For others, you will not neccesarily remember anything. This is generally because the event does not seem threatening to you now or that you were very young when it happened. The good news is that neuroscience shows us that we do not have to go down the medical (psychotherapy) route and understand all the causes and conditions. We simply need to talk around these things and show our brain that this ‘threat’ is no longer dangerous. This is called rewiring.

You have all the resources that you need

Wouldn’t it be great if you didnt need to go and get anything in order to achieve your recovery? Well the good news is that you already have all the resources you need. Up to now you have probably been telling yourself that you are going crazy. Or some form of this, bad mad or sad as we used to say in the rehab business. Well you may be all of those things, but you do not need to get rid of them in order to recover. You are not crazy, you just need to understand yourself better.

The resources you need you already have. Think of these as the resources of your true self! They are generally understood as calmness, clarity, creativity, curiousity, confidence, courageousness, connectedness and compassion. Many thousands of people have been tested across age, gender, culture, religous beliefs and sexual preference and the results are always the same. We all have these resources! They are natural and available to you, but not when your brain perceives there to be a threat!

 

blue and green peacock feather

Try this little experiment now. As you are reading this, ask yourself how you are feeling. Can you identify any or all of these eight resources? You may not have access to all of them but you will probably feel the presence of most. This is because you are in your core self. In other words, your brain is trusting you to handle this situation. If you can identify with things like calmness and confidence, clarity and connectedness, then take a moment to imagine this with me. Imagine if you could stay in this state all week, no matter what happened! If you could find a way to remain in your core state all the time you would be recovered! This is because you would be following the beliefs and aims of your core self, which is to not drink or act out on your addiction. It’s that simple. The work is to understand and learn to manage yourself in this way.

Remember, it’s a matter of getting your brain to trust you in situations that you have trained it are dangerous. There are certain techniques for this that are very simple, just the fact that you have read this has already started the process of rewiring. If you want to consider this approach to recovery further, call for a free consultation. 07764996223. You can bring your questions and you will get enought time to consider if you feel you can work with me in this approach. Here is a link to an interview with a client who had spent a small fortune on traditional approaches prior to coming into the A2R treatment. Thanks for taking the time to read this. 

Validation

Validation

In this piece you will learn what validation is and how it can be problematic when your source of validation is external rather than internal. I will then talk about the connection between validation and recovery as part of self leadership. Let’s go!

Definition

I want you to think of validation as a form of acceptance, a way of knowing who you are which helps you know how you are. The Dictionary defines the form of validation we are concerned with as; 

recognition or affirmation that a person or their feelings or opinions are valid or worthwhile. 

 In this approach to recovery I use the metaphor of a ‘Captain’ and I say that you are the Captain of the good ship ‘you’. But it is worth remembering that you are also the ship, the crew and the cargo! When you are not recognised as valid or worthwhile, it’s like sending a message to your brain that “I’m the Captain but the cargo is not worth much”. Just imagine the effect of this message over several years, or decades! 

What this often means is that you may have tried very hard to achieve your recovery but didn’t realise that you had one hand tied behind your back the whole time! Without a well developed understanding of, and method of validation, progress in your recovery will always be an uphill struggle.

External Validation

So where does your validation come from? Often the bulk of our validation comes from outside of ourselves. It takes the form of what job you do, what achievements you have, how successful you have been, or how much people give you feedback that they appreciate your qualities. Now this is not necessarily bad in itself because your achievements may be great and people may well genuinely appreciate them. 

The problems start to mount up when external validation is the only form you are getting, or when the validation is something you feel you have to have, even if you feel you do not deserve it. This is made worse if you are manipulating it out of people or are stretching the truth in order to get it! So what is the main drawback of this form of validation? 

The main drawback is that it can hold you to ransom, you can be blackmailed through it. Think about it, if you need the approval and good opinion of others in order to build your character and worth, then you will probably live in fear of them removing their approval. Likewise, you may find yourself bending over backwards just to keep them happy. You can see how bad it might get, and I know that some of you are identifying with this as you read it.

Validation is often more noticeable by its absence. In other words you don’t often recognise it when it is still provided. Think about going to work. You may be loving your job or you may be resentful and hate it, either way you are receiving validation every moment you are there just by taking on that role. As soon as you acknowledge that this is your role and how to do it, validation is supplied. It’s the same when you tell someone what you do, or when you talk about your hobby or your passion. You aren’t usually doing it to be validated, which is why you don’t always recognise it.

Internal Validation

The recovery journey can be described and defined in many ways. As the journey from indirect to direct communication. As the journey from private to public. As the journey from the dead world to the living world. It can also be described as the journey from external to internal validation! So what does internal validation look like?

Unlike external validation it does not come from what your job is or what you do, your hobbies or your achievements. It comes from an understanding and a belief that you have worth. It is built on the application of embodied principles. In other words it’s not about what others think of you, it’s more about what kind of person you want to be and are willing to work at being. 

So this brings us to the big difference that often occurs between external and internal validation. External validation can be bought, manipulated or just based on doing things. Internal validation cannot. In fact, people around you may not always appreciate the effect your internal validation is having. You can upset the very people that were externally validating you by being more honest and authentic. When we practice principles like honesty and authenticity, humility and generosity, we have to commit to managing these relationships while we are developing our character and this can be one of the biggest challenges of making this part of the journey into recovery.

Using validation in your recovery

Do you find that there are certain times of the day when you always feel worse than others? Are there times when you know it will be difficult to get through it without your ‘support’? It is at these times when you may be switching from external to internal validation. If your internal validation is poor then this transition will be very difficult. It will sometimes feel like you just became a different person. It is at these times that the fridge may call your name! Or the pornography channel, or the gambling web site. This is not a random event, it is to do with how you feel about yourself.

It may be experienced as an acute discomfort that has no real explanation, you just know that it is often at this time when it starts. It’s no accident that this acute discomfort most often happens at around 9pm. It’s at this time that you are most often left to your own devices. It’s often when you are left on your own, if your family has gone to bed. Or it can be a day off, or a weekend with nothing to do. I have worked with people who simply feel that they cannot be on their own, it’s like they disappear when there is no one telling them who they are. You may also recognise the idea of ‘relationship hopping’ in yourself.

I don’t know if you have ever read the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous. I remember realising that all the examples they give of people returning to drink happen when the person was left to their own devices. When they had finished their work. When they were no longer being externally validated! 

So now that you know this you may feel that you understand yourself a little better. Think of these times as opportunities to work with yourself better. Remember that you (and life) trained you to be this way and you can retrain yourself to be different! We learn through difficulties and so I want you to consider facing this challenge. If you have times of day like this please do not fight yourself or hate yourself because of it. Think of it as training and develop a new training program. 

Congratulate and celebrate

Working to produce a harmonised self as opposed to a conflicted self takes time but it is quite a simple process. Think of this difficult feeling as a younger part of you that needs help. Offer that help by first accepting the part as it is. Try to avoid talking with yourself as needing to change, rather accept that this is the way the part feels. The idea is to train the part to trust you by assuring them that you are able and willing to handle this situation. 

How often do you congratulate yourself for doing something well? How often do you celebrate your success with your partner? I want you to know that these processes are so good for your internal validation! Tell yourself many times each day how you are pleased with what you did and how well you did it. Remember, no fantasy! Always use an actual event, it can be as simple as washing up the dishes. When you do this you are sending a message to your brain that you want more of this and your brain will rewire around these ideas.

Self Leadership in recovery

So internally validating is improving your relationship with yourself. And improving your relationship with yourself is the beginning of self leadership. When you realise that you are a ship and its Captain, and that the ship and its cargo are valuable, you are leading yourself into a better future. You are setting a course for a recovered lifestyle. Thanks for taking the time to read this. I wish you all the best in your journey.

 

silver French-door refrigerator

It’s at this time you might hear the fridge calling your name

The observer position

The observer position

The ‘observer’ position 

I want to say something more about one of the key points in this approach. In order to understand, develop and practice my method you must first develop your understanding of what I call the ‘observer position’. Things like a raised awareness of your parts and what triggers them. How and when they were constructed. As well as being able to communicate with them in a way that is ‘age appropriate’ are all things that depend on a good understanding and working knowledge of this ‘observer’ position.  

Did you ever say to yourself “why am I doing this” as you began yet another disastrous course of action? Somehow able to see how bad this is going to be and yet seemingly unable to stop yourself? If you have always thought of yourself as one thing doesn’t this double view seem strange? Who was talking to who at these moments? These questions are very difficult to answer from a traditional perspective. Actually, what you were doing was likely to be ‘observing’ yourself in a triggered moment. So what do we mean by this? And how can it help us to develop our recovery?

Defining the observer – your ‘core’ self 

The first thing to make sure of is that you have an idea of what this ‘real’ or ‘core self’ is. Who is it that is doing the observing? The first challenging idea to get hold of is that everyone, no matter how damaged, abused, has a core or real self. No matter how much of a checkered past you have, there is a core part of you that is unaffected by circumstance. That does not carry the flaws that you may have identified yourself with. If this is the first time you have read about these ideas then this will probably come as a shock to you so just take a minute to digest this. It means that every time you said something to yourself like “I’m such a liar” or “I’m a hopeless addict” or “I’m a waste of time” you were actually talking about a part of you, not the real you. 

The filter 

Your ‘core’ or ‘real’ self is your consciousness, your mind. Because it’s the part of you that makes sense of everything, you could think of it as the filter through which everything must pass. A translating point that makes meaning from everything you experience. You are doing it now as you read this. It is your consciousness in an un-triggered state. I want to promise you that if you could find a way to maintain this state even through difficult moments, you would never drink, use drugs or act out addictively again. Just allow yourself to imagine this now, remaining in your core state and making good decisions, improving relationships, and making progress in your chosen field. Unlike traditional forms of treatment that diagnose you and attempt to make you change and be less like you, this approach is asking you to be more like you!

Parts and self

So if that is your true self then any feeling, thinking belief or attitude you experience is what we call a ‘part’ of you. That counts for anything that differs from your calm clear confident self. So how do we distinguish between you and your parts? I want you to keep this very simple. Think of the space above your eyes as ‘the front room’. This is your mind, where you live, where your consciousness resides. Imagine another room at the back of your head. This is where the part of your brain that reacts to threat lives. So we have a simple picture of two rooms that are communicating with each other. These rooms will eventually develop a better relationship as you practice. 

The front room is generally running your life, making decisions and deciding the next course of action, for the most part. The back room is watching out for threats constantly and reacts like lightning when it sees one. These times are what we call triggered moments or episodes. The best way to think of this is that your mind (front room) is running your life, it is doing so on licence from your brain! This licence can be revoked in a fraction of a second if your brain (the back room) identifies a threat.

Protection is normal

There are two issues we have to understand before we can use this idea effectively. The first one is that the idea of your brain protecting you this way is perfectly normal. You’ve probably heard of fight and flight? So it’s not a mental illness. Okay, but the second thing is that life teaches us that certain things are threatening when they never were or are no longer. Things like these are kept in the back room where there is no timeline, and so they remain fresh as the day they happened, even though you may have forgotten all about them in the front room. This can be a big problem for anyone vulnerable to addiction. So the point is that there are times when a very basic part of your brain is running your life, not you.

Taking on board the idea that at these times it was not your core self running your life but was actually your brain trying to protect you from threat is a big deal. Understanding that you have an untainted core, a part of you that is not just a bit calmer, but is pure calm. Not just a bit clearer but is pure clarity. Of course the way you have been viewing yourself in a more traditional negative view fits right into the medical model and has probably had you reading lots of books, doing lots of exercises and maybe taking some pills. Once you start to practice working on the relationship between your parts and your core self you probably won’t be needing those things any more. No need to work on ‘changing’ yourself any more, now you can learn to access what you already have. Changing yourself is a bit like asking a tiger to change to spots instead of stripes! 

The state is where we start

All your parts are consistent. This is an important idea when you consider that you will be coming up against many years of training from the medical model that told you that you were very inconsistent. Of course this is a rational conclusion when you think of yourself as one thing. I want you to think of this recovery approach as swapping one inconsistent self with a set of consistent selves. Each of your parts is extremely consistent. They tend to turn up in the same way and for the same reasons. The difference is that the core self is the ‘untriggered’ part. The ‘you’ that is present when no triggering is happening. In order to know your parts better you need to understand the core ‘state’ of your adult self. This state is described in various ways by different religions, philosophies and therapists but, many years of neuroscience research has identified eight words which characterize and encompass the qualities of the core self. These are the ‘resources’ of the adult self. The good news is that you already have them! You need to learn them and, by understanding them better, you will be able to identify when they are not present.  

 

The resources 

Here are the eight words we use to understand our adult states resources. 

Calm Clear Curious Creative Confident

Courageous Connected Compassionate.

When you are in your adult state you will be able to identify with all of these words. Try first making a list of all eight words and ask yourself if you can identify with all of them in your current state. Notice any that seem to be absent. Now write another list alongside the first. This list should be how it feels when the resources are missing, their opposite if you like. So Calm becomes ‘panicky’ etc. It might look something like this;

Panic Confused Dogmatic Flat

Unconfident Frightened Disconnected Cold

Here is a table that makes these opposites clear.

 
Calm
Panicky
Clear
Confused
Curious
Certain, Dogmatic or having a strong agenda
Creative
Flat or feeling you have no options
Confident 
Unconfident, nervous or anxious
Courageous 
Frightened, maybe a feeling you must stay safe
Connected 
Disconnected from people and life
Compassionate
Cold or having no feeling for others

.

Think of these opposites as the default position (on the left) and the way you often feel (on the right) when you are triggered by something and your brain takes over. So any time you find yourself losing any of these resources because of how someone has spoken to you or dealt with you, or even if you have had a thought yourself that has changed your state, you should assume that you are no longer in your adult state. The thought or observation that you are no longer in your ‘real state’ is made from the observer position.  

If you have found yourself saying things like “I’m hopeless and unreliable” or “I’m too angry to hold down a job” then this practice can help you massively. Since these flaws are not part of your adult self you can learn, as part of your practice, not to ‘act out’ of them but to observe them. The first thing to realise when you start practicing is that your core state is not something to achieve, it’s your default position! This is another massive shift from the traditional approaches. You have probably thought of recovery as something that is almost impossible to achieve, wrong! Something you have to fight for, wrong! Think of your core state as something that happens when the other states ‘step back’ and trust you more.

The practice

The simple way to understand the aims of the ‘observer position’ is to think of ‘re-triggering’ the adult. So when circumstances trigger your brain to protect you, your practice is to get your core self back in the driving seat. This is done not by fighting or demanding things of yourself, but by negotiating with your brain, asking it to trust you more. Think of your core state as a state of trust between the two rooms. When you decided what you wanted for breakfast this morning your brain ‘trusted’ you to make that decision. So triggering is a lack of trust, a way your brain protects you because it does not trust you to stay safe in this particular circumstance.

 Try this experiment now. Think about the last time (or the next time) you experienced this triggered state. Run it as a movie in your head or, if this is too triggering, run it as a movie on a clear space on the wall opposite you. As you watch this movie of yourself in an agitated state, notice how calm the part of you that is doing the observing! Even when you are triggered into an extreme state you can often observe from your ‘core’ state of calm confidence. It is from this position that you can start the negotiations.

 If you feel anything other than calm when you observe your parts behaviour then put the brakes on the negotiation. This is because, occasionally one part can observe (and judge) the other. These are called ‘polarised’ parts and usually take an opposite (and judgemental) position on the part that is triggered. The main thing to notice is always your ‘state’. Itis your calm confident courageous state that tells you that there is a good blend of adult. If you are feeling anything else then assume it’s a part and step back another level and observe the two of them interacting. Once you get the calm centre you can begin the negotiations.

The Family Car 

Think of yourself driving a car. In the car are several others (your parts). You could consider these parts as your ‘inner family’. Your brain is looking a long way down the road and sometimes sees a problem. Saying to itself “if we carry on down this road we are going to be in danger”. Removing you from the driving seat one of the parts takes over and turns down another road (to be safe). This road could involve activities such as drugs or alcohol, gambling or any other form of addiction or dependence. The part does not see the difficulty with this, only that it has protected you from the threat of the road you were on. This is because your parts are younger (sometimes much younger) than you are now. Think about it, if your part is eight years of age then you can only expect the kind of solution an an eight year old would come out with. Your parts do not have your experience, your maturity or your wisdom. Often they do not share your beliefs or your attitudes. Thinking about the age of your part will often give you an idea of how to engage with it. But however you try to engage, always avoid fighting!

Negotiate never demand

If you fight for possession of the steering wheel you will probably lose. Remember your brain thinks it is protecting your life! It’s not going to stop doing that. So your practice is to aim for a negotiated settlement. Always try your best to avoid any fighting or demanding when triggered. Even if you were to win the steering wheel back for a little while it is likely that your brain will eventually overpower you. Trust is the result of a negotiated settlement. Once your brain trusts you with something, it will trust you forever! So this is the best approach for two reasons, the first I have already mentioned, which is that you will probably lose. The second reason is because it is the appropriate approach when someone is trying to help you! It’s a good idea to think about the age of your part before attempting to negotiate. This is because parenting works best of its age appropriate. If you get the sense that your part is a toddler then parent in the way that seems appropriate for that age. If your part seems more like a teenage then negotiation is the way forwards.

Taking responsibility for yourself 

Western culture has for years taught us to expect that a ‘special someone’ is going to be our primary ‘caregiver’. We are encouraged that when we find them they will effectively manage our flaws and vulnerabilities. Of course this idea can also lead us to believing that we are supposed to do that for someone else. This leads to all sorts of problems with our boundaries and, like any other stored belief, will not change until we change it.

Developing the observer position, as well as the practices that follow from it, will encourage you to become your own primary caretaker. The Captain of your ship, the driver in your car. Whether you think of yourself as a Captain with a crew, or a car driver with a family, you will benefit from the practice of ‘observing’ your parts from the core position.

Building your ground floor

Building your ground floor

From survival to flourishing

Whether you have been down and out, or what used to be called a ‘high functioning’ addict, you will have been used to employing some form of manipulation, denial or downright deceipt. Probably a mixture of all the above. These things become a lifestyle and ensure that anything you build will not last.

Because you have taken the building Recovery approach you will now have planned your recovery. Thought about where you want to live and what design is good for you. You have thought about the cost and made sure that you are willing to pay it. You have built a solid and stable foundation that your new home will stand on. Now it’s time to think about your approach to life and how that has shaped your relationships.

 

white and pink petaled flowers

There is always some form of deceipt in any addictive lifestyle. It’s part of secrecy and the need to keep people out, as well as the security acheived when we know something they don’t! It’s now time to consider the nature of this strategy. I would basically describe it as a survival strategy. Now there’s nothing wrong with that. If you hadn’t survived you wouldn’t be reading this and you couldn’t build anything! But we survive in order to flourish and the ground floor is all about learning how to flourish as part of a normal lifestyle. So how do we shift from survival to flourishing? We use the right materials to build with.

What materials will you use?

When we think about a building we think about something that will last, something that will shelter us in good times and bad. This means using the best materials we can afford. Your aim is to build something that will last a lifetime. Something that you are happy to live in. A home that is fit for purpose. This can only be done with the best materials. 

Appearance over Reality

Your addicted lifestyle meant using survival techniques a lot of the time. This meant lying and trying to cover things up when your addiction got in the way of what you had promised someone you would do, or somewhere you would be or something you would pay. This is all part of a survival approach and is very short term. It does not build good relationships. It does not really build anything.

assorted metal bars

As we move from a survival strategy to a flourishing strategy we must use better building materials. I want to look at some of the most important materials now.

Honesty, Integrity, humility, vulnerability, boundaries and relationships. These are character qualities but in this approach we think of these things as building materials. The better the materials, the better the build!

But first the question, what is it that attracts us to poor quality materials? Obviously it’s the cheaper price. When you skimped on honesty, when you didn’t consider integrity. When you were too afraid to show vulnerability. When you didn’t build good relationships by managing the boundaries. All these times added up to a poor standard of building and so when the bad weather came, the whole thing would come crashing down.

These things can be grouped together in this way, appearances over reality. When we use poor quality insulation in the walls no one will see it. When we use cheap wiring, wood and other materials that are not the required strength or thickness, we are more interested in appearance over reality.  

The reasons you did this are both complex and simple. In that the psychiatrist would cite narcissistic tendency (complex) and the people who know you would say you are a liar (simple). The point is that we want to change to a flourishing strategy, so how do we need to do things differently? Number one advice, avoid extremes!

People with addictive tendencies tend to be people of extremes. More is always better, right? So your first reaction tends to be to change everything, now! Try to avoid this. Think about a dial, say to a stereo player or to the central heating. Think about turning that dial 5% more. That’s right. 5% is a good shift. And there are two reasons for it not being more. First you don’t want to over challenge yourself. Second you want to be fair to people that know you. 5% means that they wouldn’t be too shocked by the changes. 

Ask yourself, could I be 5% more honest with this person? Could I be 5% more vulnerable in this relationship? Could I be 5% more direct with this situation? All these changes help you in your aim to build well and to build substantially.

What are my challenges?

Everyone is unique! Your challenges will be subtly or majorly different to others. So there is no general fit here. I just want to make sure that you are able to discern what your particular challenges are. And that you know the reasons why you might find this difficult.In your addicted lifestyle, you developed the belief that suffering of any kind, even ordinary discomfort, was to be avoided. And worse, that it was dangerous to your health! Neither of which was true. No matter what drug you took or what behaviour you acted out with, it became a substitute for feelings. It helped you to avoid the pain of growth.

It’s time now to accept the idea that challenges are good for us. That they help us to grow. But that they are also uncomfortable and that discomfort is a part of normal life.

For some the greatest challenges are honesty. This is often because they are used to the security of knowing something others don’t.

For some the greatest challenge will be authenticity and vulnerability. This is often because they have a history of ridicule or physical abuse. They have learned not to let others have anything that they may use against them.

chess pieces on wooden chess board

Check your relationships room by room

couch near painting

The rooms you have designed offer you a way of looking at your relationships in a more focussed way. By placing each relationship in a particular room you are setting a context for the relationship and, as a result, a way of assessing the quality of the relationship.

When you place a person in a certain room that room sets certain expectations of that relationship. It helps you think about what the relationship should include and not include.

So the initial question is “is this person in the right room?”. If you have the wrong room then the relationship will always be problematic. It may surprise you to find that you have people in the wrong room, but it’s quite common.

This is often found in the rooms of friends and work for instance. Sometimes our relationships need to be divided in more subtle ways, such as mutual intrest aquantances, friends and close friends.

Once you have our rooms designed you can then make sure you have the right people in the right rooms. Only when you have the right people in the right rooms can you properly understand and then apply the idea of boundaries.

Let’s do that together now. 

Are your boundary fences in the right place?

Boundaries are a whole subject in themselves. I want to keep this idea simple and powerful for you. There are only three possibilities here. Number one – Your boundary is in the right place. Number two – Your boundary fence is too far from your house. Number three – Your boundary fence is too close to your house. Let’s assume that option one is fine and needs no further scrutiny. We’ll take the other two one at a time.

Option two – your fence is too far away from your house. This means that you are expecting someone to mow your lawn! In practice this means that you are not taking enough responsibility for your stuff, or you are not recognising what is yours and what is not yours. When you move your fence a little further from the house you may experience some reaction from your own ‘parts’ or from the other person in the relationship. Remember, there’s a lot of history here. 

pink petaled flowers blooms near fence

Option three – your fence is too close to your house. This means that you are mowing someone elses lawn. In practice this means that you are expecting yourself to take responsibility for something that is not yours. Again, when you move the fence to the right place expect some reaction from your own ‘part’, which may expect you to keep doing what you have always done. Or the other person, who may well expect the same.

In this context we are thinking of the people in your life in terms of developing relationships. This involves some risk. When you put your boundary in the right place it could mean the end of that particular relationship. When you put your fences in the right places you will be changing the structure of your social life. It could mean difficulties at work. This is one of the main challenges of moving home.

Which rooms am I neglecting?

Remember when you designed your floor plan for your recovery building? Well don’t neglect this idea. You have a plan, now stick to it. Check your plan against your lived experience. Are you spending the right amount of time in the right rooms? Or are you tending towards the old building floor plan? Constant scrutiny on this will serve you well over time.

Am I building too fast or too slow?

black and white wooden board

I’ve touched on this in the ‘NORMALITY‘ Blog but just to underline it’s importance let me go over the main points. This is all about maintaining the level of challenge to yourself. In order to keep growing and developing you must keep the challenges to yourself at the right level. Not too easy but not overwhelming. In our metaphor we think of this as building too fast or too slow.

If you are in your second year of recovery but have not yet developed relationships with your close family or have not yet applied for that job etc etc. Then you are building too slowly. If you are in your first year of recovery and have started your own Company and hired dozens of people to work for you, then you are probably building too quickly.

Of course this is a general assessment and cannot take into account your personal abilities and history.

 

pink petaled flowers blooms near fence
black and white wooden board
couch near painting
chess pieces on wooden chess board
The effect of addiction on children

The effect of addiction on children

Families in addiction

Over the past few years I have felt more and more moved to work with the families of addicted parents more than the addicts themselves. I am committed to getting the best information I can out there. Particularly for people who are often not well informed as to their issue. There are lots of well meaning publications out there that will tell you that it is progressive disease and other scary ideas that are not always true for your family. You need an effective way to manage this situation and to recover from it.

The effect of addiction on children

All poor and defective parenting has the same effect on the children. It encourages, causes or forces them into the adult arena. In other words they are expected to perform at an adult level even though they are still children.

The family with the issue of addiction is an extreme example of this and everyone who works in the addiction field has heard the story of the child who comes home to find their Mum passed out on the couch and then feels the pressure to ‘become the Mum’ and parent the other children and in some cases Parent the parent. I call this reverse parenting, I’m sure you get the picture, or recognise yourself in this story.

This pressure of developing an idea that you are responsible and must act in situations were you are not experienced and should not be held responsible results in trauma of various strengths.

In the personality there are two major effects or results and they are immediately recognizable. I have seen this sibling formation again and again over the years and I will now offer a definition of these two types.

The Two choices for children of families in addiction

When you are faced with the extreme circumstances of addiction in the family as a child you effectively have two choices. I will describe them in the form of ‘mission statements’ for both below.

“Everything will work out if I get everything I want”

This is the mission statement of the addict. Faced with the prospect of being recruited into a world where they must be continually thinking about the other, they ‘escape’ into utter self centredness. The technical term for this is narcissism.

They create the one place where they cannot be reached. They create a ‘world of one’. They create a place of safety. Like all unhealthy strategies this one appears to offer the perfect solution. The problems only come later as the strategy fails to produce a healthy life and healthy relationships.

“Everything will work out if everyone else gets everything they want”

This is the mission statement of the reverse addict. Faced with the prospect of being recruited into a world where they must be constantly thinking of the other, they choose to take on the task and start to identify with the role. Whereas the addict develops a fantasy life followed by drugs, alcohol or addictive behaviours, the reverse addict escapes into concern. The constant worry and pressure offer lots of opportunities to not think about their own state. This becomes habit forming and addictive.

The effect in later life

The effect of addiction on children as they grow is that they have been placed one way or another into the ‘adult arena’. This often takes the form of ‘reverse parenting’ when their parents do not fulfill their responsibilities to the children. Often in my work I meet adults who started looking after their siblings when they were only seven or eight years old.

So we now have the narcissist and the co-dependent. The addict and the reverse addict. I will go more into brain chemistry and the way these things affect choices at another time. For now I want to explain to you more of what you will see when you witness these personalities.

The addict personality has been well covered many times and so my concentration here will be the reverse addict or co-dependent. One of the biggest influences on their personality is the way ‘acting grown up’ eventually replaces ‘being grown up’. Circumstances made them responsible for things they did not have the experience or the maturity for..

The Hermeneutic of addictive relationships

In many ways this bifurcation of the two types is indicative of their future, and their future partners. The two types will ‘find’ someone from the opposite group to form a serious relationship with. In this way the addicts will partner with the reverse addicts and vice versa. And what a perfect fit!

In this type of relationship it initially feels to both parties that they have found perfection. The narcissist gets someone who seems happy to completely subjugate themselves to their cause, whilst asking for nothing in return. And the reverse addict gets someone who not only gives them a full time caring role, but always takes centre stage and never puts the spotlight back on them.

The unhealthy aspects of the addicts relationship

If only this worked long term! Everybody would be happy and no one would be in need of recovery! Unfortunately like any other unhealthy strategy it offers a quick fix but fails in the long term due to the side effects of this fit. Do not mistake a good fit for a healthy fit. There is no balance here. There is no intimacy because there is no vulnerability. Any conversation of any importance is usually had ‘under the influence’ and often leads nowhere.

Eventually the novelty wears off and both parties learn to protect themselves behind a resentful layer of self justification. Years of relentless selfishness has worn away the genuine caring of the codependent. The addict has long since learned to totally take their partner for granted. It is important to understand that these relationships are not only completely unhealthy but actually get worse over time. As a tendency in one fits with an opposite tendency in the other. These ‘tendencies’ slowly strangulate into extreme positions that cannot be maintained without serious mental health implications.

The more he behaves like a child the more she feels she has to become the parent. Or in the other formation where the addict is the female, the more irresponsible she behaves the more he feels he has to be responsible for the whole family.

There are many helpful articles on the nature of narcissism, but what can help more is an understanding of how people fit together in relationship.

The only way to authentic recovery is to outgrow your difficulties

These are serious issues and I see them again and again in my work. But they can be overcome! You can recover! It takes a commitment to growth and personal development and cannot be acheived through regular counselling sessions. You need expert and experienced support which is long term and as committed as you are.

In some cases people split up, but not always. In most cases the partner is our best teacher in that we learn best in the circumstances of the relationship. When we have the right support and guidance. We learn to use our difficulties to grow.