Tian Dayton

Part of Dr. Dayton’s Recovery Month Series

Situations that turn our sense of “normal” on its head, put us regularly on emotional overload, and cause us unusual fear and stress can be traumatizing. Living with addiction, let’s face it, falls into this category. For starters, it’s disturbing to our sense of an orderly and predictable life. Normal routines get thrown off, feelings get hurt, doors get slammed, hearts get broken and families get torn apart. Family members are all too often left staring, dazed and disillusioned, as they witness the lives of those they love, in spite of their best efforts to avert catastrophe, fall apart at the seams. Mistrust grows, “normal” feels out of reach and the fabric of faith in an orderly and predictable world becomes frayed and worn.

The Cost of “No Talk” Rules
Because alcoholic family systems are often steeped in defenses such as denial and minimization, they may actively resist talking about the fear and anxiety they are experiencing. Instead intense emotions explode into the container of the family and get acted out rather than talked out. Though acting out brings temporary relief, it does not lead to any real resolution or understanding, so nothing really gets fixed, mended or amended. Walls go up and battle lines get drawn as family members silently collude to keep their ever widening well of pain from surfacing, blaming it on anything but what’s really going on. They avoid talking about their worries, thinking that if they don’t get discussed, they aren’t really all that bad or might just disappear on their own. Perhaps they worry that talking is a tacit “call to action” that they don’t feel ready to take.

Because these families are not finding healthy ways of staying on emotional middle ground, they tend to achieve balance by swinging from one end of the pendulum to the other. Their emotions and behaviors seesaw back and forth from 0-10 and 10-0 with no speed bumps in between. They have trouble staying balanced and living within a range of 4,5 and 6.

The Trauma Extremes: High Intensity vs. Shutting Down
How does the dynamic of seesawing between emotional and behavioral extremes get set up?
Here is one explanation that grows out of trauma theory.

The intense emotions of fear and high states of stress, that so often accompany living with addiction, ignite our natural fight, flight trauma response. They flood the body with adrenaline so that we can prepare to flee for safety or stand and fight. When we can do neither, when fighting seems exhausting and pointless or when children or spouses feel that they are trapped and cannot really get away, which is often the case in pain filled families, we may simply shut down or freeze so that we don’t have to feel our intense, negative emotions. Shutting is our body/mind system trying to preserve itself from overheating, in this case, with too much emotion. Watch any frightened cat, dog or salamander freeze (read: shut down) because it senses danger and you are seeing a natural trauma response.

When these swings from feeling flooded with feeling to shutting down, happen over and over again, they can become central to the way we process emotion.

Following are some ways in which this see sawing from one emotional extreme to the other, may manifest or creep into in the thinking, feeling and behavior of the family:

Impulsivity vs. Rigidity

Impulsive behavior can lead to chaos, wherein a pain filled inner world is surfacing in action. Painful feelings that are too hard to sit with, explode into the container of the family and get acted out. Blame, anger, rage, emotional, physical or sexual abuse, over or under spending and sexual acting out, are some ways of acting out emotional and psychological pain in dysfunctional ways that engender chaos.

Rigidity is an attempt to control or shut down that chaos both inwardly and outwardly. Adults in an addictive/traumatizing family system may tighten up on rules and routines in an attempt to ward off the feeling of falling apart. Or family members may contract in their personal styles becoming both controlled and controlling.

Recovery Option: Self regulation is a basic developmental accomplishment that allows the growing child and eventually the adult to regulate their thinking, feeling and behavior so that it is within an appropriate range for the situation they are engaged in.

Despair vs Denial

Denial is a dysfunctional attempt to ward of ever growing feelings of despair. Reality gets rewritten as family members attempt to bend it to make it less threatening; to cover up their increasing anxiety, guilt, resentment and fear. Denial takes the place of honest self disclosure, worries and anxieties are hidden rather than talked about and as a result, despair deepens.

Recovery Option: Reality orientation or an ability to live with life on life’s terms is an important part of recovering one’s balanced sense of self and a balanced orientation toward the world.

Enmeshment/Disengagement

Enmeshment is a relational style that lacks boundaries and often discourages differences or disagreement, seeing them not as healthy and natural but disloyal or even threatening. Enmeshment can also be a way of coping with the fear that the family is falling apart in which certain family members huddle together for a sense of safety and may develop traumatic bonds. Enmeshed styles of relating formed in childhood tend to repeat themselves in adult relationships.

With disengagement family members are seeing the solution to keeping pain from their inner worlds from erupting as avoiding subjects, people, places and things that might trigger it. They retreat into their own emotional and psychological orbits and they don’t share their inner worlds with each other. They isolate.

Many addicted families cycle back and forth between enmeshment and disengagement, they yearn for closeness but lack the kinds of healthy boundaries that would let them take space, hold different points of view or hang onto a sense of self while in each other’s presence and allow others to do the same.

Recovery Option: Balanced relatedness is neither a withdrawal from another person nor a fusion with them. It allows each person their own identity and to move in and out of close connection in a natural, modulated fashion.

Over functioning vs. Under Functioning

Over functioning can wear many hats; spouses may over function to maintain order and “keep the show on the road” while the addict falls in and out of normal functioning. Children may over function, taking care of siblings when parents drop the ball. Or they may work over time striving to restore order and dignity to a family who is becoming increasingly neglectful, irresponsible or strange.In a maladaptive attempt to maintain family balance, some family members may over function in order to compensate for the under functioning of others. .

Under-functioning may be associated with the learned helplessness that is part of the trauma response, in which one comes to feel that nothing they can do will make a difference or make things better, so they give up. Family members may freeze like deer in the headlights, unable to mobilize, think clearly or make useful choices.

It is also not uncommon, that the addict themselves, along with others in the system, may do both, over functioning to make up for periods of under functioning.

Recovery Option: Balanced functioning is the obvious in between of over and under-functioning. When we do what is appropriate to the circumstance and when we have conscious choice around the degree to which we function.

Caretaking vs. Neglect

Caretaking can be an attempt to attend to, in another person, what needs to be attended to within the self. We project our own unconscious anxiety or pain onto someone else, seeing it as about them rather than understanding it as our own. Then we set about fixing in them what actually may need fixing in us. It is a form of care that is all too often motivated by our own unidentified pain rather than a genuine awareness of another’s. Because this is the case, neglect can be its dark side. We neglect or don’t see what is real need within another person because we can’t identify real need within ourselves.

Neglect can take the form of ignoring or not seeing another’s humanness, withholding care, nurturing and attention or a shutting down of the relational behaviors that reflect attunement and connection.

Neglect can be particularly difficult to address in recovery because there is no obvious parental abuse to point to. Clients are left feeling that they have too many needs for anyone to meet and are often mistrustful of deep connection. Consequently, they may push away the very vehicle that might help them to heal, mainly relationships.

Recovery Option: Balanced care of self and others is part of living a healthy life.

Abuse vs Victimization

When individuals are unable to process personal pain, anger and hurt and talk it out, they are at risk for acting it out instead. Generally these roles are traded back and forth many times within the same interaction as family members bully and hurt each other over and over and over again.

Sometimes the roles become stratified and certain family members become the obvious abuser while others become the obvious victim, certainly small children are sitting ducks for being abused and victimized by out of control parents and older siblings. Both roles can become personality styles or relationship dynamics that get carried along through life.

Abuse and Victimization are roles that often get passed down intergenerationally, the abused child or the victim, is at risk, without recovery, of becoming an abusing parent. Rather than identifying and feeling their own helplessness and rage at being a victim of abuse, for example, they act out their childhood pain by passing it on in the form in which they received it,(e.g. the abused child becomes the abusive parent) or in an opposing form (e.g. the abused child becomes either the over distanced or over controlling parent). At the center of abuse is the inability to sit with and process painful emotions, abuse is acting out pain at another person’s expense.
Recovery Option: Emotional modulation is a skill that we learn literally in our parents arms and within our family systems. When children have extreme emotional responses they are “wooed” back into emotional balance through the nurturing and sustaining actions of parents and caring adults. Over time they absorb the skills of self regulation through these family interactions. As we see in this article the opposite is also true, we can equally learn the skills of emotional disregulation if we live with disregulated patterns for long enough. The good news is that the skills of regulation can be relearned in recovery through regulating activities like twelve step programs, therapy, meditation, yoga, massage, deep breathing and exercise; activities that quiet and soothe the emotional system and teach skills of mind/body regulation.

For more information log onto nacoa.org