As of now, I’m approximately four years into my intentional recovery from addiction and living a double-life. During this time, I have been fortunate to learn from some of the most loving, compassionate, and wise therapists, life coaches, psychiatrists, fellow men in recovery, and the like. Through books, workshops, seminars, intensives, podcasts, individual/couples/group therapy, retreats, classes, etc, I have been blessed by these individuals who have dedicated their lives to helping people like me understand their stories as they walk a path of healing.
What I share in this and future posts is my own personal synthesis of the wisdom provided either directly or indirectly by such individuals. Needless to say, I am forever grateful for this invaluable aid poured into my life from the hearts and minds of some truly wonderful people. With their practical help and the grace of God, I am in a significantly better place today than I was five years ago. And the journey continues.
Introduction
In part one of this series, we talked about how our past (our story) affects us in the present. How we have made sense of our history influences us today in the way we show up in conflict, decision-making, and adversity–with our co-workers, family, and romantic partner. If we have come to the conclusion that we are a miserable piece of garbage, we are prone to show up in these realms as a miserable piece of garbage.
Tangling with shame can look like being a helpless victim or martyr (pseudo-humility), but it can also look like narcissism. In my own attempts to reckon with shame over the years, I have employed both tactics. I can adopt a victim-mentality, steering others to affirm and rescue me from my sense of low self-worth. Alternatively, I can present like a hotshot, seeking praise and adoration as I try to compensate for that same low self-esteem.
We Are All Needful
You and I were born into this world with acute needs and desires. The degree to which our parents/caregivers were able to attune to and meet our needs has played a huge role in how we developed, physically, emotionally, and relationally.
Yes, we came out of the womb with practical, basic needs such as food, shelter, and clothing. Designed as relational, conscious beings, our requirements for a healthy life also include nurturing of our emotional self. The interpersonal neurobiologist Dr. Dan Siegel suggests we all deeply desire to be Seen, Soothed, Safe, and Secure.1 There are other lists out there that encompass perhaps a little more nuance, but this list is perfectly sufficient for illustration.
Drs. Sharon and Terry Hargrave further simplify this list of needs to the categories of Love and Trust.2 A loving caregiver is responsive to me and my pain, seeing and intentionally acting to soothe me. As a child, if I was sad because my toy broke, this might look like my parent validating my emotional distress and helping me process it.
Notice that my parent did not simply tell me, “It’s okay!” or “You have plenty of other toys to play with, so you don’t need to be sad.” These statements are a step in the right direction, but they richly fail to meet my actual needs. Statements like these act to minimize my feelings and send the message that my emotional response is too big.
Being soothed involves a bit more finesse. As I’m sure we will discuss in future posts, there is an omnipresent temptation to fix someone else’s problem versus just be with them and seek to understand their pain. As a man, I am particularly liable to try to “fix” versus offering empathic listening and validation.
Sometimes, there are practical solutions to a given issue. Other times, even as men, what we really seek is to be heard and understood.3 As a child, I felt the most cared for when my emotions were seen as valid and I was given the space to feel and work through them. Maybe I felt soothed by a hug, a calming and gentle voice, and being given an Otter Pop. Indirectly, then, my “problem” was reduced because someone was there to share the weight of my emotional turmoil–without judging or belittling. My toy might still be broken, yet I feel capable to move through my difficult emotions and seek a practical solution (if appropriate).
When I am seen and soothed, a deposit is made in my safety deposit box (get it?). Particularly in my formative years, I was constantly assimilating my experience with my parents. Ideally, I learned that my caregiver is both aware of (attuned to) my emotions and will try to be present with me in them. Combining these two elements translates into emotional safety. I know I can both have and express difficult emotions, and I won’t be shut down or ridiculed for them. Safety also, of course, encompasses physical safety. If I don’t feel physically safe, I cannot feel emotionally safe.
A cousin of safety is security. I like to think of security in relationship to mean the strength of the bond between two people. Throughout the rigors of life’s ups and downs, is this person going to remain connected to me, and can I trust him or her to be there in my times of need?
So, there are the basics of core needs. We all (yes, women AND men) desire to be seen, soothed, safe, and secure. Reflecting on your own upbringing, I’m sure you can think of many times these desires went unmet. Of course, no parent is perfect. Even with the best of intentions, there are going to be areas of our development that were not adequately nurtured by one or more caregivers. Varying degrees of neglect are a part of everyone’s story, from caregivers who were well-meaning to those who were emotionally and physically absent (and every type in-between).
Violations of Love and Trust
Well, we all developed with some level of unmet needs and desires. I want to emphasize that, regardless of the quality and quantity to which they were met, these needs and desires are legitimate. We all have them, and they are real and valid.
On one front, we may have had good things unintentionally or intentionally withheld from us during development. On another front, we may have had bad things happen to us in the form of abuse. This can include physical violence, sexual violence/coercion, verbal offenses, and psychological offenses, all wreaking havoc on one’s emotional well-being and sense of self for years to come. When abuse comes from a caregiver or family member, there is a major violation of love, trust, or both.
If you grew up in a household that included any forms of abuse from a caregiver, it’s likely you have struggled with giving and receiving love from others. When the people in your life who were supposed to love and nurture you betray your trust and instead mistreat you, it makes sense that you would be at minimum suspicious of the next person to offer love and care.
Abuse can absolutely devastate a person from the inside out. All sorts of distorted and false beliefs can arise from an abusive background. Maybe you believe that nobody can be trusted because they’ll invariably end up betraying you. Maybe you blame yourself for the abuse you received. Maybe you believe that you need to always be on the offensive–hypervigilant to danger–in order to avoid getting hurt again.
Coping with Violations and Unmet Needs
So, now what? Even if we view our childhood as “generally good,” there are going to be parts of our story that involve some degree of neglect, abuse, or both. We all have wounds from our formative years. Often, these wounds have not been properly addressed and continue to fester into adulthood. Despite our home remedies (or full-on avoidance of treatment), lesions get infected and turn into even more significant issues down the road. In my work, I have seen several patients with amputations of a foot or leg after a long journey of failing to take seriously and properly care for a wound.
As children, we are not inherently gifted at taking care of injuries. We rely on our caregivers to teach us at least some basic first aid. If we got really hurt, we depended on someone to take us to the doctor’s office (or the emergency room).
In the context of neglect and/or abuse, what if we didn’t have someone to teach us proper wound care? What if we observed our caregivers rubbing dirt in their own lacerations? It’s likely we were given some poor advice or had bad habits modeled for us in this arena.
Gleaned from someone else or discovered on our own accord, we learned ways to manage our psychological/emotional wounds. Whether or not those ways are healthy is another story.
What is Coping?
When I say ‘coping,’ I don’t mean it in a positive sense. I know we typically consider coping as a favorable response to hardship or change. I agree that coping in this general definition may be a better response than, say, beginning a life of crime. For our purposes here, I’d like to present coping actually as a poor response to life’s challenges. Let me explain.
To revisit (and risk emulating a broken record) the wound analogy, coping would be like taking a mess of pain meds and going about your day after breaking your arm. It may stifle the symptoms, but good heavens, you need to go to the ER. You addressed the pain, but it wasn’t the best response to the circumstances just to take pain killers. I don’t know if that’s the best analogy, but we’re going to forge ahead anyway.
I think of coping now as tactics I picked up and put into practice early on in life that ultimately act to reduce emotional pain. If I went with a need unmet or was mistreated, I employed one or more of these strategies to mitigate my distress. The kicker is that coping does not actually address the pain–it’s moreso a means of not addressing it.
Going through life merely coping with our pain is like putting it on credit. Keep making purchases without paying off the balance, and you end up crushed under the weight of an ungodly APR. Okay, this analogy is a little better.
Analogies are great, but what does coping actually look like in our daily lives?
The big four categories of coping I have learned from the Restoration Therapy framework are these: Blame, Shame, Control, and Escape.2
Blame
If I respond to conflict or distress by blaming another person (or thing, I suppose), for how I am feeling, I am coping. While I might not be responsible for what happens to me, I am responsible for how I react. Nobody else can make me feel a particular way. They can certainly set the stage for a difficult emotion to well up within me, but another person is not responsible for how I feel. So, blame is essentially saying that this person in question is the problem, and I am more or less absolved of responsibility for my actions or attitude.
On my wife’s side of the family, when a niece or nephew suffers a physical injury, I’ve observed a funny sort of blaming. If one of the kids, say, trips over a Nerf gun and bumps his knee while running through the house, an adult aligns with the injured in condemning the toy for causing the fall. “Mean Nerf gun!” they might remark. This is an innocuous enough form of blame, but do you see how it shifts the responsibility from the child to the inanimate object? Taking responsibility would look like acknowledging the act of running indoors (and leaving one’s toys on the floor in a walkway) as cause enough for the incident.
Silly children, always blaming others for their misfortune. Ah, but I am pretty good at blaming as an adult. In fact, I’ve just evolved my blaming to appear like something else. Blame as an adult can emerge as holding a grudge, using sarcasm, or being passive-aggressive. Boy, I’ve got those and more on speed dial.
Shame
If blame says you’re the problem, shame says I’m the problem. Shame is a sneaky devil and shows up in oh so many ways. For me, shame often takes the form of specific jacked up beliefs about myself. I can start thinking I am defective. I’m not good enough. I am worthless. I am a slug.
Shame is interesting in that it can be both a belief and a coping mechanism. It is essentially blaming myself for whatever is going awry (coping), but it’s also subscribing to the painful beliefs behind that coping. In action, shaming myself can look like being negative, hopeless, cynical, and inconsolable.
This concept of shame is going to come up a lot. As I grow in my awareness of and ability to identify the faces of shame, I see how pervasive and insidious it can be. I’ve gained a great deal of insight from Dr. Curt Thompson (a Christian psychiatrist) in his book, The Soul of Shame (listed at the end of this post).
Control
If I am succumbing to one of those nasty core beliefs, such as being not good enough, I might respond by (attempting to) control. For me, this often looks like performing in order to prove I’m not a worthless slug. Maybe I receive some critical feedback on my annual review at work. A response of control could look like hustling even harder and trying to be perfect with the sole intent of proving to my boss (really, to myself) that I am good enough.
Hold the phone. Is responding to constructive criticism with renewed effort and attention to detail a bad thing? Inherently, of course not. But sometimes a “good” thing can be the wrong thing when done for the wrong reason (I know this is a quote from somewhere…). Working harder just to prove your worth is a seemingly responsible action taken, but only to achieve an unhealthy goal. What I’m doing here is trying to control another person’s perspective of me to elicit acceptance and praise.
Escape
This has historically been a go-to for me and continues to be a challenge to overcome. If I’m faced with a difficult feeling, my favorite thing to do is avoid it. This might be achieved by numbing that yucky feeling with food, alcohol, sex, pornography, or even exercise, over-working, or sleep. Just give me a distraction, so I don’t have to feel the pain.
Distraction is too dang easy. Aimlessly scrolling through social media feeds, Netflix binging, impulsively ordering food delivery –these are some of today’s drugs of choice for a quick and dirty escape.
Fantasy lands itself a big spot in this category of coping. Yes, this could be sexual fantasy, but it could also be fantasy of success, material possessions, or eating the world’s most delicious brownie. Whatever kind of fantasy it is, indulging here is always a cry to be rescued. I want something or someone outside myself to save me from my misery.
Abrupt Conclusion
To avoid (not coping here, I promise) an unpalatable length of post, I’m going to leave us in this miry place of pain and coping.
Ah, but not without some hope sprinkled in.
Yes, we all believe some funky, unhelpful things about ourselves that are simply not true. These core beliefs generally arise from childhood event(s). Yes, we all have adopted some detrimental responses to these beliefs and feelings. Unfortunately, our means of coping do not actually work in the long-run.
The good news is we all have the power to make choices. We can choose to rebel against these lies we’ve told ourselves for all these years. We can choose to face our pain instead of avoid it.
Alas, I’m getting ahead of myself. All I’m trying to insert here is that you and I have agency. We don’t have to perform the same ol’ song and dance just because it’s what we’ve always done.
Stay tuned for Part 3 of The Importance of Your Story.
NOTES
1. Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson, The Power of Showing up: How Parental Presence Shapes Who Our Kids Become and How Their Brains Get Wired (New York: Ballantine Books, 2020).
2. Terry D. Hargrave and Franz Pfitzer, Restoration Therapy: Understanding and Guiding Healing in Marriage and Family Therapy (Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, 2011).
3. Mark R. Laaser and Debra Laaser, Seven Desires (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2013).
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