Getting Well, Part 5: Staying Out

Oh, the siren song of abuse.

The hope that the abuser will miss you, that they will see the light, value you and change.

It will not happen.

When you leave, which you must, close the door.

Don't go back to see how they are doing.

Don't go back to see if they care how you are doing.

Don't go back to see if it was really all that bad...

When you leave,

which you must,

close the door.

Getting Well, Part 4: Keeping Short Books

Messed up?....

....'Fessed up?

....Cleaned up?

....Grown up!

[It isn't about being perfect.

It's about being willing to know....

....when we might be better.]

Getting Well, Part 3: From Support to Recovery

It's not enough to be aware of what they did to us.

It's not enough to understand how they brainwashed us.

Even if we have grasped these things, even if we are detaching and attempting to understand our stinkin' thinkin', if we don't make recovery our priority, we are going to falter and stall.

I'm not talking about the spiral staircase that we walk as we get well, where we may revisit some issues repeatedly, and sometimes fall back a level or two before we can continue our climb.

I mean a true stall. No power, no progress. Just.... sitting there, immobilized. Like an insect in amber.... forever unchanging. Forever....

This is what we risk when we make support a permanent substitute for recovery.

Support is affirmation and acceptance regardless of one's behavior or past experiences. It is vital for trauma survivors of any kind, for those who are grieving, those who are coming to terms with hard and inflexible facts. And it may be needed for a long, long time, while the traumatic memories recede, and the grief becomes an accepted part of reality.

Unfortunately, while support is a necessary foundation for healing from abuse, it isn't sufficient. In order to heal, it is absolutely essential that we move beyond support alone.

Recovery starts with support, but it also includes accountability. That's why 12 Step groups encourage members to take their own inventory first. If they simply support each other, it's possible to become completely fixated on what 'those people out there' did and said, and avoid ever looking at their own responses to 'those people', to their own maladaptive actions and beliefs.

In fact, as one moves deeper into recovery, one's own accountability becomes the primary focus to an ever greater extent. This is why the 12th Step reads:

"Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs."

There is something extremely important here, well worth bearing in mind.

Ironically, many people who seek only support, who find the demands of recovery too daunting and painful to face and therefore reject any focus on accountability as 'morbid', 'too theoretical', 'too demanding' 'too judgemental', etc., have lacked crucial support in the past precisely because their primary abuser, someone extremely important to them in their own lives, demanded exactly the same thing from them. Support without accountability - affirmation and acceptance regardless of their behavior.

Abusers demand affirmation regardless of how they behave towards us or anyone. They actively avoid looking at their own unproductive actions or beliefs. Think about every abusive person you have ever known; don't they demand this very thing?

In fact, the insistence on being affirmed and supported regardless of what one has done - is practically the hallmark of an abuser.

No-one seeking to recover from the effects of abuse, then, can rationally expect to do so, if we just demand the same thing from others that our abusers demanded from us.... and never move beyond that point.

To restore the support we were never given is necessary and nourishing. But to stop there, to make that our home for the rest of our lives, is to risk living entombment in a neverending game of "Ain't It Awful", where we are always, and only, thinking about what others have done or said or might say or do to us.... but never about what we have done or said or might do or say to them.

Is that a life? Is it enough?

I-Thou, I-You, I-It

The great Chasidic poet, philosopher and theologian Martin Buber wrote that there were three types of relating:

"I-Thou" relating, where people treat others as genuine equals in every way - as though others' welfare was in every respect at least as important as their own.

"I-You" relating, where people don't quite consider others as 'full equals' but consider them to have rights and feelings, and try to take them into account.

"I-It" relating, where others are considered objects, and treated like things.

Buber believed that I-Thou was the ideal, but he understood that most of us who care, and think about what we do, simply cannot manage I-Thou all the time and everywhere - it takes too much out of us. I-You relating is sufficient for human interactions to be both civil and decent.

He felt that there was no justification for I-It relating at all. He saw it as leading to things like the Holocaust. Since he was a Chasidic Jew and a Holocaust survivor, I defer to his expertise on that and won't challenge his logic one bit.

Most sound childrearing seems to me to be focused on making children aware that the I-Thou and the I-You ways of relating exist, teaching them to think in these ways, and persuading them not to pick I-It as their approach to others.

But there is one single major omnipresent defining characteristic of narcissism. And it's there whenever narcissism appears. It's there if we have a lapse ourselves and indulge in narcissistic behavior, if we're sick, tired, irritable, or just tapped out and needy ourselves. It's also there in people who are mildly narcissistic [sometimes somewhere] and in total narcissists [anytime anywhere] and in ultimate narcissists, otherwise known as sociopaths...

I-It relating. Solipsism. Selfishness unbound. The existential position that I, and only I, exist and have rights to consideration and satisfaction; I, only I, am a human being. This can be as transient and mild as wanting all the ice cream for yourself when your spouse asked you to save them some - or as savage and permanent as engineering the deliberate disenfranchisement, bankrupting, confinement, and murder of six million human beings in concentration camps.

Three Little Words (that mean so much)

We've all been taught about the 'three little words that mean so much'...

"I love you."

What we haven't realized is that these three little words don't mean so much, after all, without three more sets of three little words, ever ready to travel at their side.

"I was wrong."

"I am sorry."

"Please forgive me."

If you never hear any of THESE three little words from someone, they can say the first three all they want, and even maybe mean them, to a limited extent, but limited is all it is, and all it will ever be.

You can have a relationship with them, but it will always be lacking something.

If you can face and accept that, if it is worth it to you to relate to them on these terms, well and good;

but if you fail to understand what this means, you may spend decades wondering why there's emptiness just where you thought your life was full.