BANDAID

last year as i struggled with the hurricane of emotions around my divorce, i leaned heavily on a twelve step program, adult children of alcoholics (ACA), for healing and support. neither of my parents, or grandparents for that matter, were alcoholics, but i checked all of the boxes for qualifying symptoms of an ACA.

the following are selections i resonated strongly with from the “laundry list,” a set of qualifiers aimed to describe the traits of an ACA.

THE LAUNDRY LIST

(aka you might be an ACA if..)

• we became approval seekers and lost our identity in the process.
• we either become alcoholics [i did], marry them or both, or find another compulsive personality such as a workaholic to fulfill our sick abandonment needs.
• we have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility and it is easier for us to be concerned with others rather than ourselves; this enables us not to look too closely at our own faults, etc.
• we became addicted to excitement.
• we confuse love and pity and tend to "love" people we can "pity" and "rescue."
• we judge ourselves harshly and have a very low sense of self-esteem.

the program was tremendously helpful. i learned how it’s possible to give up my attempts to control life and spot when i am being over-responsible for other’s emotions and wellbeing. it helped me find a higher sense of self worth and acceptance. i learned what it means to parent myself as a “wise adult,” giving myself permission instead of sourcing approval from others. the work i learned to do in ACA is something i will continue practicing my entire life to return to serenity, joy, and peace when i venture off the path into worry, doubt, or low self esteem.

the stories folks share in meetings connected with me. it’s grounding to hear someone share vulnerably about an experience they had and be able to say “me too.” i no longer felt crazy, alone in the wild west of my own head. i started doing the step work with the goal of completing all 12 within a year.

i left the program when i got to step three.

the first step was a breeze. obvious- no doubt in my mind.

1. We admitted we were powerless over the effects of alcoholism or other family dysfunction, that our lives had become unmanageable.

my family is loving and supportive but losing my dad when i was thirteen left me with all of the marks of a dysfunctional family. my life was unmanageable. being raised in a christian church did a number on my psyche as well.

the second step is one i tried on for size.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

your higher power can be anything in ACA so i tried to morph my atheistic, scientific worldview into a god-like box. i could certainly consider laws of physics like gravity, quantum mechanics, and the space-time continuum as powers greater than myself over which i have no control. no matter how i squeezed these high powers, i couldn’t fit them into a shape that i believed could restore me to sanity. i did believe, at least, that believing in a higher power could be a placebo pill, so i tried swallowing it.

i choked it back up when i came to step three.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand God.

when i search for a belief in god in my consciousness, its like searching for my own tail.

i don’t have a tail. its just not there.

i can’t find it and, frankly, i don’t want one. no matter what mirror i look in, i don’t see a tail and i’ve spent my life looking in mirrors searching for it.

i realized the program would rely heavily on trusting god, higher power, to take care of me and guide my life, so i left.

i do accept the fact that i’m not in control of much in my life. that’s abundantly obvious. i am here, i exist, because of an absurd amount of events happening exactly the way they did. i didn’t pick my parents, my country, my early friends, my interests, and i don’t even pick the next thought that occurs to me. they just occur. pineapple. karl. fig jam. i’ve never had fig jam. why the hell would that occur to me? you get my point. i have no illusions about being the omnipotent master of my mind, body, destiny, legacy, blah blah.

belief in a god is something i don’t possess. believing a god exists and is in control of my life with a divine plan designed to benefit me is an outrageous notion i cannot entertain with a straight face. does jupiter orbit slowly so as not to throw earth off balance? wow, that is so kind of it. i plan to fully explore the idea of god’s potency and lack thereof in another post. it deserves a book and there are many that discuss the issue, my favorite being the god delusion by richard dawkins.

as i was wading in the deep end of these questions, i enrolled in exposure response prevention therapy (ERP) to treat my newly diagnosed OCD. ERP taught me how to sit with anxiety without creating false assurances, illusions of safety, or delusions of grandeur/catastrophe. ERP was asking me to accept the fact that life offers us exactly 0 certainties. there are no guarantees. you cannot control the future and there’s no one running the show. there’s no way to know what’s next. through this form of treatment i was able to get relief from anxieties that have plagued me my entire life. i use the methods i learned in ERP weekly to break cycles of obsessive thoughts and compulsive behavior by accepting my anxiety, fears, and doubts, without attempting to change them. my mind is constantly coming up with new thoughts to worry about which my partner and i call them “the worms.” they want to convince me of the certainty of horrible things, sometimes magnificent things, but i’ve started learning their voices and when not to believe them.

i learned in therapy when you reassure yourself with illusions, it actually grows the underlying anxiety and required more compulsive behavior. sort of like how eating one donut today feels insanely satisfying until you crave two donuts tomorrow.

i see belief in a higher power as a form of psychological bandaid, sealing the illusion of certainty as an ointment over an open wound, keeping it from healing.

the nuanced work i was doing with ERP clashed directly with ACA’s dogmatic requirement to trust in god, or any illusion i so choose, for a sense of well being and security. in my ACA group i was instructed to trust god’s will for my life as a source of emotional security. in ERP i was invited to sit with, and let pass, the anxiety that comes up when i accept the reality that i cannot rest on assurances which lack evidence or find their fulfillment in the future. nature is intrinsically riddled with chaos. life is impossibly strange and hard to predict. no captain is at the helm. it’s horrifying. and that’s okay. the odds of being here are so low that it actually means any existence at all is nothing short of a miracle.

i understand a belief in god can be fulfilling and reassuring for many people. i’m envious of the comforting effects they report, to be honest. these days i much prefer actually healing the wound via open-air exposure to reality over the application of an illusion for temporary relief which can only make the problem worse.