Take Your Life Back Read online

  Because we were not able to express ourselves verbally for much of the early childhood period, the burden fell to our parents to assist us by determining which of the two tasks we were struggling with at any given time. Did we need more love and connection or more room to explore the world independently? Such naturally conflicting needs and objectives created all kinds of opportunities for misunderstanding and misapplication and opened our tender souls to inevitable wounds, whether well-intentioned or otherwise.

  Our Parents’ Part in Wounding

  The starting point for understanding our woundedness is to recognize that our parents—and their parents before them—were also wounded people to some degree. We all are sinful human beings raised by other sinful human beings, and we all fall short in some way. Some families create and pass down a healthier home environment, and thus the wounding may not be as obvious; but everyone is still wounded in some way. Perfect parents don’t exist. For those of us who came from chaotic, dysfunctional families, our wounds are just more obvious.

  As children, we didn’t think of our parents as being wounded. We simply experienced as normal whatever they did and said. As adults, we often excuse our parents’ shortcomings by saying, “They did the best they could.” But “the best they could” was never enough to keep them from wounding us. Our parents all fell short, and those of us who are parents have also fallen short, if for no other reason than that we were wounded by our wounded parents and have operated out of that woundedness.

  Some parents do better than others, but no parent does a perfect job. In fact, those who try too hard to be perfect may raise entitled, self-righteous kids who are difficult to live with as adults. The good parents are the ones who are “just good enough.” Though the parents’ mistakes may add to their feelings of inadequacy—which is part of what they pass along to their children—those same mistakes may help the children grow strong and healthy, depending on how the children respond. If parents focus too much on their mistakes, it may make them even more apt to wound their children. Or it may prompt the children to defend their parents as a way of minimizing their own woundedness.

  When parents struggle to hide their woundedness, they can end up projecting their brokenness onto their children. They may criticize their children for something they see in themselves, but they can’t or won’t acknowledge that they themselves are struggling. Where they feel inadequate, they see the same inadequacies reflected in their children.

  One common form of wounding that families readily pass from one generation to the next is the sense of never truly feeling accepted by the father. Whether the father abandoned the family emotionally or was simply very critical of them, the children grew up believing that his love, acceptance, and approval were unattainable. No wonder so many people have a messed-up view of God, our ultimate Father.

  Children who experience constant criticism while growing up are more likely to pass that critical spirit along to future generations. The woundedness of one generation becomes the woundedness of the next, and each successive generation buries the pain along with the wound. And because the pain is buried and embedded in our emotions, the wounding of generations happens inadvertently. An example would be the man who felt incapable of ever measuring up to his father’s expectations. Whether he was trying to help his father paint the house or working to improve his grades at school, his efforts were never quite good enough. The painful part was realizing that his father wasn’t even aware of the effect of his critical words. The son simply accepted it as being his father’s way.

  When the son became a father himself, he vowed that he would be different with his own children. But while fixing a leaky faucet in the bathroom, with his young son trying to assist him, he heard himself say, “You’re no help; I’ll take care of it.” Later, he realized that he had passed his own father-wound on to his son, but like his father before him, he never apologized or said anything about it to the boy.

  Both of my (David’s) parents were deeply wounded people. My father was born in Ireland and lost his own father when he was thirteen. My dad was the youngest in his family, and as I learned years later, it was an Irish tradition that the youngest son would take care of his widowed mother until she either remarried or died.

  My grandmother was a big, dominating farm woman who ran my dad’s life for the next twenty years. She wouldn’t let him date, marriage was out of the question, and she constantly checked up on where he was and what he was doing. My father never spoke of her, and I didn’t even know her name until after he died.

  When my dad was finally free of his mother, he was determined that no one would ever control him again. After marrying at the age of thirty-five, he shut down and became emotionally unavailable. But that was okay with my mom because she, too, was emotionally closed down after losing her mother at the age of three. Her father remarried when she was nine, and she became a real-life Cinderella—but no fairy godmother ever appeared to rescue her from her cruel stepmother.

  That was my home environment: Two wounded parents had withdrawn into themselves for survival, and I was left to raise myself.

  The Child’s Part in Wounding

  We can’t place all the blame on the parents, for children also participate in the process of wounding. All children see their parents, even hurtful parents, in an idealized way. After all, Mom and Dad are the only parents they’ve ever known, and children need their parents. I (David) can remember thinking, when I was ten or eleven years old, that my real parents were going to come and rescue me from the imposters I was living with. I didn’t want to be an orphan; I simply wanted relief from the way my parents treated me. In my fantasy, my real parents would come and take me to Switzerland, which seemed like an ideal setting. But like any child, I needed to have parents.

  From an early age, we work hard at keeping our parents in the “good” category, regardless of how bad they may actually be. It’s about survival. How can young children survive if they see their parents as inadequate or bad? They can’t. Some theorists have suggested that this defense of the parent is operational even in the first months of a child’s life. For example, when a baby cries from hunger and the mother comes and changes the baby’s diaper, the child may internalize the blame for the mother’s mistake: “I guess I didn’t cry the ‘I’m hungry’ cry. It’s my fault!”

  It’s normal for young children to idealize their parents. Over time, this pattern becomes deeply ingrained, and as the children continue to try harder, they also blame themselves for any problems that arise.

  As the children strive to help their parents be good parents, their emerging sense of their own real self begins to be buried. Because children think in dichotomies of all good or all bad, they assume ownership of all the bad as a way to keep their parents good. To preserve this delicate and often volatile balance, children try to act in ways that are “helpful.” When Mom gets upset, the child tries to comfort her. When Dad yells at Mom, the child holds on to Mom as reassurance that “somebody cares.”

  Children also naturally believe what their parents tell them—including what their parents say about them and about other people. I (David) remember working with a woman named Katherine, who kept saying that she was stupid even though she had advanced degrees from a prestigious university and worked in a very demanding profession. As I asked her questions, trying to understand how she could feel that way, Katherine suddenly began to remember examples of how her mother had told her she was stupid. She recalled a specific event when she had spilled a glass of milk and her mother had raged at her. These memories had been buried along with her real self.

  As we continued to talk, many more examples popped into her consciousness of statements her mother had made to her and about her—a consistent pattern of calling her stupid. Though she was now a successful middle-aged woman who was anything but stupid, Katherine still believed and acted on what her mother had said years ago. Although the actual statements had been deeply buried in her subconscious, and although she
had forgotten the source of her beliefs, she had never forgotten the message.

  Over the years, Katherine’s attempts to avoid the pain of her woundedness were channeled into academic pursuits and her career. It was her way of burying her real self. She created a false self that tried hard to pretend she wasn’t stupid, but part of her still believed what her mother had said. She may have convinced others with her confident outward appearance, but she remained unconvinced herself until she brought her woundedness back into her consciousness, worked on recovering her real self, and began to take her life back.

  Classic Dependency

  What we have just described is commonly known as classic dependency, or codependency. The problem begins with the way we seek to avoid the pain that resulted from the wounding that we experienced as children and were unable to deal with because it involved our parents. This pain was an internal experience that embedded itself in our emotions. As ill-equipped children, our only strategy was to bury the pain, not realizing that we were also burying our real self, our very soul. From there we developed external coping strategies designed to keep us from ever touching the pain, and we set about trying to fix other people’s problems.

  The consequence of this deep emotional suppression is that we eventually lose touch with our inner life. Instead of experiencing a full range of emotionally healthy feelings as human beings, we become human doers. Everything in our lives becomes based on performance, to the point where we no longer know what we truly feel. Instead, we struggle with emotions of anger, fear, emptiness, shame, and numbness. Obviously, these feelings are painful as well, but we anesthetize them by focusing elsewhere, poking our noses into other people’s problems while neglecting our own. Even those whose problems we are trying to fix, such as the alcoholic, struggle with the issue of dependency underneath their addictive behaviors. In truth, dependency itself is an addiction, and in order to recover, the dependent person must eventually come to terms with the same issues caused by any other type of addiction.

  Though we as codependents are focused on taking care of other people, we are actually attempting to restore a sense of safety and security to our internal world. As adults, we may try to prevent conflicts and upheaval in our relationships by appeasing others. But as long as our focus is on the externals, we will never resolve the internal root issues.

  Classic dependency can be summarized as follows:

  It is acquired early in life.

  It is a pattern of learned behavior.

  It is developmental.

  It focuses on externals.

  It is chronic—it won’t “just go away.”

  It is a progressive problem—that is, it gets worse.

  It causes us to worry about being seen as selfish or controlling.

  It causes us to worry about being liked by others.

  It seeks to keep the peace at any cost to ourselves.

  It requires us to monitor the moods of others.

  It causes us to be too trusting of others.

  It makes excuses for the other person.

  It easily sacrifices for others but not for ourselves.

  It is an addiction.

  Secondary Dependency

  If you were raised in a healthier home environment, you may not relate completely to the discussion of classic dependency. When you look inside yourself, it may be hard to come up with deeply painful experiences. Or maybe you were the type of child known as resilient, who isn’t affected as deeply by painful childhood experiences. In either case, the dependent behaviors expressed in your life, though still present, may be less severe.

  Adults from healthier backgrounds can still develop dependent patterns of behavior. For example, if you are in a significant relationship with someone who is actively addicted or extremely dysfunctional, it’s easy to focus on those issues until you develop a full range of dependent behaviors. After all, an addiction demands attention from the other people in the addict’s life. And if that attention is reactive, soon all the caretaking behaviors will be there. If you continue in that relationship, eventually there will be no difference between your actions and those of a classic codependent.

  The difference between classic and secondary dependencies can be seen in how long it takes for recovery and in the focus of that recovery. Those with a secondary dependency seem to recover more quickly than those who are classically codependent. Instead of digging into their childhood to see how the real self was lost, people needing to recover from secondary codependent patterns will seek to understand their adult relationships. Either way, however, some form of life recovery work will be necessary.

  Life Recovery

  To begin the work of taking your life back, you must first get in touch with the buried pain if you are a classic dependent. If you are seeking to take your life back as a secondary dependent, you must get in touch with how and why you were drawn into your relationship with the needy person. Either way, it’s not going to be easy, because most of us have spent years trying to either avoid or cover up the pain. We’ve also spent years practicing and incorporating into our lives the behavioral patterns of codependency.

  Part of the work necessary for taking your life back will require the help of others, even though no one else can fully understand the depth of your pain. And because pain is a relative experience, you may be afraid that others will try to minimize your pain. As you share your journey in the process of regaining your real self, remember that nothing hurts as much as your own pain. But in order to recover, someone else must be able to understand and feel your pain, and you must understand it as well. It always takes someone else to help us find our buried pain and also to validate the pain we’ve tried for so long to avoid.

  Taking your life back also requires that you be open and honest with yourself and with someone else about what happened to you to create the dependent patterns of behavior.

  Along the way, you will seek to identify the destructive behavioral patterns you have chosen to help you avoid your pain. You will break free when you’re courageous enough to share your pain and make yourself accountable to someone. You can start by looking at the ways in which you’ve been wounded.

  3

  WHERE DOES IT HURT?

  WE’VE ALL BEEN WOUNDED in some way, and we’ve reacted to that wounding with various methods of acting out or acting in. But the common denominator is that we all have lost touch with our real self and have created false selves to help us survive and cope. We want to be more specific now and look at five primary ways in which many of us were wounded. All of these involve our being abused to some degree.

  We realize that not everyone was explicitly abused during his or her growing-up years. But as you read through the descriptions of the five types of abuse, you may identify subtle elements of abuse that may have affected you and may have been part of your wounding. If you believe this chapter doesn’t apply to your experience, that’s not a problem. In subsequent chapters, we’re going to look at other ways in which wounding can occur.

  Mental Abuse

  Mental abuse can be hard to identify because it’s so subtle. Yet for many of us, it’s how our woundedness began. Starting when we were very young, and long before we had developed the necessary interpretive and expressive skills to make sense of it all, we began to bump up against other people—primarily our closest family members and caretakers—who themselves were navigating life with various degrees of unresolved pain. Though differing in scope and intensity from family to family, some measure of woundedness was naturally passed along to us.

  As children, our natural neediness made us susceptible to fears of abandonment by the most important people in our lives. Out of their own wounds, our parents invalidated our individuality and stifled our inner life of feelings. We gradually began to interpret our emotional life as being wrong or even toxic.

  For example, Katherine, the woman we mentioned in the previous chapter who thought she was stupid, developed feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing as t
he result of mental abuse. Her mother likely had no idea that she was wounding her daughter, in part because she herself had been mentally abused as a child. And because the grandmother had died by this time, Katherine’s mother wasn’t able to talk with her own mother about her childhood. What Katherine remembered, however, was that her mother always tried to avoid being around her grandmother. It was not a loving relationship, and it was easy to see how the mental abuse of one generation had been passed along to the next.

  What makes it all worse for children is that there’s nothing they can do about it. After all, in most families, children have no say, and anything they say can be used against them and would only make things worse. Because children instinctively know, or soon find out, that they have no power to correct things, they end up feeling inadequate, ashamed, and bad. Children use the early defense mechanism of “splitting,” in which they divide everything into categories of all-good or all-bad. And because they have to reserve the “all-good” category for their parents, on whom they depend for their survival, it leaves the “all-bad” category for themselves. Many still struggle with that dichotomy as adults, thinking that their parents are still always right and that they are still the bad ones.

  In order to cope emotionally with being “the bad guy,” we must silence our real self. And then we try to fill the void by focusing on taking care of others. We work on our external lives in order to avoid having to confront the wounded inner life that is filled with too much pain.