THREE
Getting Familiar
With Misery
Co-dependency teaches us many ways of dealing with life. Unfortunately, these ways often create prolonged unhappiness, making us so familiar with misery that we come to feel it is normal. We learn that being unhappy and having things go wrong is to be expected. Whether our codependency expectations come from the families we grew up in or from living with someone who is dependent, we are prepared for a life with many disappointments, frustrations and misery. Getting used to the traumas and unpredictable situations is hard at first, but we do learn, in order to survive. These experiences shape our thinking such that we imagine and experience situation after situation that is never what we want, never the way it should be, never right. This is where our familiarity with misery begins as a co-dependent.
Pre-existing Developmental Impairments
Children growing up in dysfunctional (another new word) families where things are out of control, develop emotional impairments which stay with them for life. These may take the form of not trusting themselves or others, inability to talk about their feelings, and the most hurtful, the inability to feel their feelings. Imagine the frustration of having something that hurts inside your body, yet not being able to point to where the pain is. Additionally, we become rigid and inflexible, we only like things that are either black or white, right or wrong, and we hate situations that leave unclear results. When that happens, we have feelings of nervousness and anxiety that we can?t explain but we suffer with them patiently. As adults we see the world this way and cope with it by seeking ways to deal with our distrust, repression of feelings and rigidity. Avoiding boredom, finding excitement and looking for approval and acceptance become our daily tasks.
These conditions set the emotional stage for us to develop co-dependency. They also dictate the direction that many of our adult interpersonal relationships will take. Tragically, we choose persons to have relationships with for all the wrong reasons ? reasons like: "He needs me. I can make him better. Who will take care of him if I don?t? I know I can make him happier than he has ever been. I don?t think I can get anybody else." These reasons show how we feel about ourselves. Woody Allen had a line in his movie, Annie Hall, that fits co-dependents so well. "I would never want to be a member of a club that would have me as a member."
Who would really take us seriously? Our only real value lies in what we can do for others and that is never appreciated. Our self-image is so poor, our way of addressing feelings so inadequate, that we remain hopelessly stuck. We need to understand the origins of these conditions if any meaningful change is to occur in our lives.
Internalizing Feelings And Our Self-Image
Probably the earliest behavior we learn in getting familiar with misery is to internalize or stuff our feelings. Simply put, this means we don?t talk about what feels bad, what feels good, what feels sad or what we feel. Instead, we keep the feelings inside and try to make them go away. Having to push our emotions inside makes us feel that no one cares. For a child, this is devastating. Unresponsive parents, caught up in their own problems, give children inaccurate messages. The distressed mother, struggling with her alcoholic husband, is oftentimes too preoccupied to deal with the emotional needs of her child. I?ve seen this over and over with many adult children of alcoholics. They say, "I never talked about how I felt. I was too busy trying to help keep the peace. I never felt anyone cared."
Familiar Versus Unfamiliar Experiences
Power and Control
The experiences of a child living in a dysfunctional home, be it alcoholic, abusive, divorced or emotionally dead, certainly teach two things ? first, how important it is to gain as much control in life as possible, and second, never to be powerless over anything because being powerless means to lack control and having no control results in misery.
Dysfunctional families give us the terrible feeling of being out of control and the knowledge of how powerless we are. You make a pact with yourself early in life that, as soon as possible, you will gain control and have power over the events of your life. You can see this happen in young children when they begin withdrawing from people. They shy away from others, especially grownups, and want to be left alone. This is the root of shyness or self-centered fear of what others might think about us. Yet we do this as a way to use our power to stop others from controlling us.
Dependent on Feeling Miserable
As the emotional trauma of our dysfunctional family unfolds, teaching us so many wrong realities, our codependency is spawned. Seeing the world as chaotic, out of control and not meaningful, forces us to learn to cope in poor ways. Yet, living with constant stress causes us to use defenses to deal with the real world. We become defended rather than defensive. The psychic numbing, or repression of memory and feelings, starts the misery which begins the dependency. It is what we come to expect. It is what feels normal. It is what we miss when it is absent. We depend on feeling miserable and we find the uncertainty, when that misery subsides, to be frustrating, worrisome and downright uncomfortable.
Attachment and Detachment
Getting familiar with misery teaches us many painful things. The relationships we form become places of great misery, making loneliness and disassociation the only sanctuary for an absence of misery.
Attachment is a process whereby you become emotionally and physically dependent on someone to take care of you. Children attach to parents as a means of survival. The process is appropriate in that case but when adults attach themselves to other adults, relationships are threatened, power and control issues are great and sick dependencies are spawned.
Even though closeness is avoided, misery addicts and co-dependents often become attached to people and relationships that are destructive, uncaring and unsupportive. The attachment provides a false sense of security and belonging. For most ATMs and co-dependents, fear of abandonment is so great that they will do anything to avoid it. This comes from living in families where people were never really there for them emotionally.
The main problem with attachment is the pain and restriction of freedom experienced by being so emotionally connected to someone. The dependency on this attachment makes it impossible to be independent and secure. Until the co-dependent learns to detach, recovery is threatened.
Detachment is a process of letting go of that "I can?t live without this person" feeling. To detach, self-confidence must emerge and the person?s self-reliance must take over. When I explain this to my clients, sometimes they think I am suggesting that they stop loving or caring about their spouses or partners. As I discussed earlier, taking care of is a very unhealthy process, though caring for is certainly desirable. Detaching is learning to care for, not take care of. It is a process of becoming un-dependent on the effects of others. This prevents us from being controlled by the emotional needs of others, or worse, trying to change them, as a way to feel better.
Anhedonia
Most of the discussion in this chapter has been to explain the process of how we get familiar with misery. It is important to understand this and see what getting familiar with misery does to us emotionally.
Anhedonia is a psychological condition, defined as
the inability to be happy, have fun, or experience common sensual pleasures. Becoming familiar with misery results in just these things. We don?t consider ourselves emotionally ill but we find it difficult to balance unpleasant experiences with pleasant ones. As experiences accumulate and we are chronically unhappy and scared, we become anhedonic. Another way to view anhedonia is as a state of numbness. So often, as people seek help, they discover how difficult it is to identify any feelings, after such prolonged exposure to these conditions.
This inability to be happy is not symptomatic only of depression. Certainly, a symptom of depression is the loss of interest in common activities, but that disappears after successful intervention with medication or psychotherapy. This symptom, loss of pleasure, remains only until the biochemical elements kick in, in an endogenous depression caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. In a reactive depression there is a direct causal connection to a situation, e.g. in a divorce, once the person has therapeutically worked through the trauma or crisis, he is able to revert to normal functioning and experience pleasure once again.
Not so with ATMs! ATMs who have left the reactive situations which caused loss of pleasure may continue to have the symptom for up to two years. Their anhedonia is connected to their long familiar history of misery and even when life improves, things just don?t feel good.
This condition must be identified and worked with as a treatment issue if the addiction to misery is to be dismantled. Due to chronic unhappy experiences, it will take time for the emotional system to respond to things as they really are. During the recovery period, we will have to work very hard at identifying and processing these good feelings until they are familiar.
Laboratory Experiments
1. Try to remember what the rules were in your home when you were growing up. Identify what your family taught you about your feelings, about trusting and talking. Be specific.
2. If stuffing feelings is what you generally do, think back to when this began. Ask yourself why? Work hard at remembering how feelings were dealt with while you were growing up. List specific situations when you remember not being able to express feelings.
3. Explore what you think was familiar for you as a child about trusting others, risking, caring for yourself.
4. Think about how long you have felt miserable and how many times, when things were going well, you somehow found a way to mess them up and get back to the misery.
