Category Archives: addiction

Apr3

when it’s nobody’s business

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Heart pounding anxiety woke me up at 3 a.m; which is not unusual anymore. I managed to talk myself off that ledge in about a minute. I’m getting better at it. My goal was freedom. The goal is always going to be freedom. Because I feel like my dream world, my rest, was hijacked. It’s mine. I want it back.

My friends and I are all worried about our adult children. They are struggling to find their footing in a culture that is undermining them every step of the way. And we are not sure how to help, or if we can. Mind you, they were raised as we were, in decent middle class families. We were well educated, but our current incomes are not cutting it. We don’t have the financial security we thought we were building all our work life. Our children left school in debt with no guarantee of a job, let alone a living wage. I read a news article last week that shocked me to my core: recent studies have shown that at least fifty percent of the baby boomers in the U.S. are financially supporting adult children. In many cases it’s the adult child and their family. They came home to get their feet back on the ground – in one case cited, 13 years ago.

Children or not, everyone I know is struggling. We are all trying to figure this out as we go along. We have no role models. We’re outliving our parents, and we are in entirely uncharted territory. We are the first generation that is openly talking about the abuse our parents and grandparents kept secret. No one was consciously dealing with narcissistic abuse 20 years ago. Or 10. No one recognized that past generations were being groomed for sexual abuse. The culture tolerated it, they tolerated verbal abuse, even laughed about it. They tolerated bad behavior, made excuses for it. Hell, we’ve voted it into the White House. Taking accountability for your behavior was optional. Do you wonder we have an epidemic of dementia?! (Help me forget!) Addiction? Of narcissism? Of sex trafficking? Of all manner of spiritual bankruptcy? Can no one connect the dots here?! That pandemic was no accident – it was a physical manifestation of a spiritual problem. It’s time to pull our heads out of the sand.

Meanwhile, I’m struggling with my health. Last week I called for a doctor appointment and was reminded that I have to be interrogated by a nurse over the phone to determine whether or not I am sick enough to qualify for a precious appointment. I have to beg just to be seen. Then before I can be given the necessary antibiotic I have to endure a week’s worth of tests. Meanwhile, I was prescribed a temporary superficial treatment. Medicare doesn’t cover that prescription, so I didn’t fill it. I can’t do that and buy groceries. And I’m angry about that.

Now, lest you think me ungrateful, or just a whiner, I am aware of opportunity hiding here in plain sight. When worry and anxiety seem to steal my peace I know my training is not yet complete. And I’m not havoc-ing it anymore (see blog post of March 15th.) Intellectually I know that the way out of angst is gratitude. But my intellect is not easily coerced. I can’t expect to start pontificating about big, general platitudes and get myself free. Those old affirmations aren’t working anymore; this feels like spiritual warfare.

But. I can start small…go back to basics. I’m sure glad I bought an orange desk chair instead of black. Orange is the happiest color. Wow, I love my bed. I love my wide Frodo feet. I walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and I say “Thank You” to everything I pass (yes, out loud) – the floor, the countertop, the cat, the doorway, the moon outside. Try it. There are big things I am grateful for, too – like my son having survived cancer. He is struggling through his self-proclaimed “mid-life crisis”…but he’s here for it. Not all of his friends have made it past 40.

I can re-member myself whole. I have resources in my spiritual tool box: friends, some of my family, a loving therapist, tarot cards! At 3 a.m. with a racing heart I call in invisible help: “Christ Jesus, Archangel Michael, Ancestors! Any and all available light workers.” That’s step one. I am NOT TO BE TOILED WITH here. Neither are you – know that. God didn’t make a mistake. You were not a cosmic afterthought. You do not need to “find your purpose”…you ARE your purpose. Live like you belong here. There are no qualifications you haven’t fulfilled. You have exactly the same right to be here as 8,019,876,189 other people. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Since that has been established, I can be the narcissist’s worse nightmare. My home, my mind, and my body – my sanctuary – is a no tolerance zone. No talking down to anyone. I carry an expectation that you will be on your very best behavior around me and show up as present as possible. Don’t ever settle for anything less from anyone. Not your teacher, not your boss, not your doctor, and certainly not your family. I can laugh at myself with the best of them – when I’m silly or wrong. But don’t make fun of me at my expense. Don’t ridicule me. I’m a fucking spiritual Jedi, and I’ve trained my boundaries to be stronger than my empathy. Everybody sing along now…

Mar24

your great mistake

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“Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.”

Because I am inexplicably blessed with remarkable women as friends, I have been engaged in an ongoing conversation about what it means to live alone and to be isolated. Is isolation a healthy choice? There are many of us who have chosen to live alone in recent years, despite being women of advancing age. It certainly doesn’t look wise. But what if compromising our mental and emotional health in order to remain attached isn’t a viable option any longer?

In recent years I have seen friendships fall away simply because we were at different stages in life. Some friends have become caretakers for grandchildren, and don’t seem to have time for me. I have gone no contact with several friends as my boundaries have become healthier and I was less available for their demands. Beloved family members have died, or slipped into the oblivion of dementia. As I watched alcoholism destroy the minds and bodies of those closest to me, I’ve become less tolerant of addiction. I can’t stand to be around people who are drinking. They think they are entertaining and fun; they aren’t. They are defensively unconscious. My compassion for them has increased; I still love them. But I don’t want to be around them.

And then coming to terms with narcissistic abuse takes it’s toll on everyone. It deals a particularly cruel penance, a psychic solitary confinement. Much like alcoholism, and often combined with it, it extends it’s creeping tentacles into our psyche and rips apart our very lives. Here’s my analogy: You went to sleep in your cuddliest pajamas and you woke standing naked in a distant field, the tornado having just dropped you there. Nothing is recognizable. Dramatic? If you know, you know.

Chosen isolation is transformative. When embraced it is healing. Solitude is a welcome adjustment, health chosen over dis-ease, dysfunction. There is psychological room to breathe, and growth can finally take place. You gain some essential perspective…and then you begin to see the workings of life in the cult of fear. The man behind the curtain is no wizard.

It seems to me that once you can tentatively poke your toe out of survival mode and assess, there is much accountability to face. If you can get beyond your defenses and self loathing, you win. I confess that I used to scoff at people who said that joy can be experienced equal to the grief you have known. Psychobabble alert. But as spring is beginning to emerge here in the cold north (and it is still mighty cold), I am noticing…I am noticing a remarkable expansion. I am feeling less isolated and more connected, even – or maybe especially, to an invisible mystery. It’s enticing me toward something unknown. This is not the end of my story.

Perhaps there are different kinds of isolation, or different levels. Perhaps some isolation is healthy and some is unhealthy; maybe it’s a stage, a transition..maybe…just maybe everything is waiting for you.

“Some bridges are beautiful when they burn. There’s a calmness that takes over when you can’t go back. When you’ve changed. When you’ve decided. When you’ve left behind a version of you that is no longer you. The end of everything is the start of anything.” – zach pogrob

Mar13

the nature of rest

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They call it toxic positivity for a reason. I have a photograph of my family taken in my parent’s kitchen where we are all tan and smiling broadly. We all look so happy. I remember commenting back then that we look like we’re posing for a toothpaste ad. It would be decades before I uncovered the truth of that insight.

We looked happy because we were told to smile. One big happy family. And much of that was true, but not as it was directed – rather, as it was felt, intuitively, unconsciously, in the moment. In glimmers through a child’s heart.

Despite the dysfunction of drug and alcohol abuse, there were also fantastic experiences together as a family. My happiest childhood memories are of long vacations on the boat. We had a Chris Craft cabin cruiser and traveled in caravan with other young families, all over the Great Lakes, through the 1,000 islands of the St. Lawrence Seaway, and to my favorite destination: Georgian Bay, Canada. It was barely populated back then, and is still one of the most beautiful places on earth.

Nature was our sanctuary. Everything moved slowly. We scooped our drinking water from the lake. Spent hours in the hills picking wild blueberries until scared off by a distant bear. Lingered lazy hours away in the sun. I remember swimming underwater as a shortcut from one protruding rock to another, only to surface right under a snake as long as me! (I would later identify it as a water moccasin.) Life was fun and blissful, otherworldly. I purchased my first record album in a little country store on a remote island – Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon. I’d never heard of the singer, but I was fascinated with the drawing on the cover. It looked like something I would draw. Some awareness would wake up in me that summer and my life would never be the same. Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?

At the age of 12 my brother Ward was the youngest registered member of The American Power Boat Racing Association. My parents bought him an outboard hydroplane which would have to be weighted to prevent becoming airborne, and he would blur past the back porch practicing for the annual race on the Detroit River. He was having the time of his life.

Ward died last year at the age of 62, apparently of a heart attack in his sleep. I am still reeling from the shock and grief. Ward was not speaking to me at the time of his death. I was hopeful that we would get through that and become friends again in our old age. But Ward’s story is not one of childhood fantasies come true, it is instead of enduring abuse, of giving up cigarettes, of overcoming alcohol and drug addiction, of never being able to kick his gambling habit. It is a story of decades of struggling with mental illness and depression.

Ward was crazy smart. He could fix anything. He didn’t know how to rest. He worked hard all of his life. As it happened, he called his employer and apologized for feeling too sick to work the day he later died. We shared a love of music, especially the blues. He would never have a successful love relationship, he would be homeless from time to time all throughout his adult life. I would kick him out of my home twice, decades apart. I accompanied him to court when unfairly accused of domestic violence for defending himself. He would be violent at times, and he would be the victim of violence. Like me, he would always be a loner and prefer the company of animals to people. I am the eldest of 5 children; he was the fourth born. We had the same parents, grew up in the same house, had some of the same teachers in school. His story and my story are intricately entwined, as are the stories of our other 3 siblings. It feels like a betrayal to tell Ward’s story, and it feels like a betrayal not to. I love my sweet little brother deeply and I will miss him the rest of my life.

Our other 3 siblings will not speak about the abuse in our childhood. So from now on I will only tell my story, and note the common thread, the scarlet thread, the blood that bound us. Perhaps then I will enjoy rest. Until then I will practice rest as resistance. And I will allow nature to be my sanctuary.

“You are exhausted physically and spiritually because the pace created by this system is for machines, and not a magical and divine human being. Your body has information to share with you, but you must slow down to receive it. There is power in knowing you are enough right now and always.” – from The Nap Ministry’s REST DECK by Tricia Hersey

Mar10

But Mostly, It’s Both…

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Imagine a world without oppression. There is a powerful movement I am only now learning of as I read Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto. The Nap Ministry is compelling us toward stillness because grind culture is killing us before our time.

Author Hersey refuses to “donate my body to a system that still owes a debt to my ancestors for the theft of their labor and dream space. We will have to take a look at the ways in which this culture traumatized us,” she declares. I agree entirely, “…and then begin the lifelong process of healing.” It requires we grieve. If I know anything of grief, it is that we must acknowledge more than the physical loss; we must also grieve the lost potential of what might have been and never was. Imagine a world without oppression. “Grieving in this culture is not done and is seen as a waste of time because grieving is a powerful place of reverence and liberation.”

This book is written from the perspective of a black American woman. She is speaking about a history built upon unrelenting greed, cruelty, and enslavement. I cannot speak about this; I can barely imagine it. I do, however, know oppression. I do know trauma. And I can imagine a world without oppression.

My ancestors owned slaves. I am the direct descendent of more than one founding father, and cousin to more than one American president. When I turned 18 I was courted by the Daughters of The American Revolution. And in my rebellious, bratty, way I told them where they could shove their corrupt theology. But I could do so at no personal risk, couldn’t I? I grew up in the affluent suburbs of Detroit, and my private school classes were cancelled during the riots of ’67. The Vietnam war was on the television day in and day out. Bess Myerson told Mrs. Smith how not to buy war and we talked about it in the kitchen. We wouldn’t buy a used car from that man – but then, we didn’t buy used cars. My parents were listening from the comfort and safety of our home on the hill overlooking the pool and the river. But we were listening. And despite the addictions all that privilege enabled, my dysfunctional parents inadvertently gave us the greatest gift: they taught us to think for ourselves. Always a loner child, I took the horrors of observed injustice to my room. And I thought and thought…the seeds of an inner revolution were being televised.

Like you, my personal story is complex. I am an old woman now. I watch my genius child and my beloved family suffer the ravages of multi-generational addiction and abuse. They think the cancer of their poverty and sickness is about finding the right job or getting the right prescription. They know nothing of the immorality that financed their ancestors. But psychically our bodies know. The DNA remembers; the sins of our fathers have created a legacy of exhaustion.

I still recoil at the political and environmental atrocities perpetuating a dying culture, a culture too far gone. First you have to survive shock to even realize you’ve been traumatized, before you can stop and take a stand and have a hope of healing. From inside a deep knowing of right from wrong, of the healing that comes only with grieving, I identify with Tricia Hersey’s story. We are profoundly tired, and the only way out of this is through grief. It is time to honor ourselves and each other, to still ourselves and listen to the innate wisdom of our sentient bodies. We must learn to be more human. We must rest.

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” – Rumi