Softness and gentleness : my current reflections and insights into recovery

I felt a great deal of anger over the past day towards the family friend who consistently puts me down for being too this or that, but its been a good experience for me to see how just this small amount of contact with someone who invalidates me sets me back and hurts my body. My Mum seemed to have several people like this in her life who could put poison barbs into me and as I think of it my Mum was not a great one on showing empathy at times.

I was thinking too, this morning about my ex husband who never really validated me either and how when we first met said I was ‘soft’ but it was meant in the English kind of way as in ‘soft in the head’, it seems to me that if you are passionate or emotional or have carried anger and frustration due to emotional hurts and betrayals or abandonment and you act out of that place you are more than likely to be sidelined by many people. They devalue you, as if not having ‘control’ over your emotions makes you suspect, inferior or a worthless person.

As adults we do have a responsibility to ourselves to see where we got wounded emotionally, where we had to learn early on NEVER TO RELY ON ANYONE and both of these factors drive addiction. I don’t know how many of you have seen the movie ‘Burnt’ with Bradley Cooper but in it he plays a bolshy chef/addict who has been scarred by life and the watershed moment comes towards the end when he realises he needs softness as well as other people who genuinely care about him and love him for himself, warts and all.

It is probably an impossible call to ask for wounded people to be soft and gentle. As I was sitting down to write this the AA slogan ‘Easy Does It’ came to mind and I was thinking in this regard of how this was NEVER the way of the household I grew up in. It was a constantly on alert place and my mother carried huge wounding and Dad just stood by and laughed off her temper tantrums and rages which was probably just as well, if he was volatile too the entire thing would have exploded. However, growing up it meant I had no template for how to handle conflict or deal with nasty things being said and I did not often see effective communication going down in response to everything.

One thing that Elton John said in the short interview link I posted yesterday with Variety magazine really stood out to me about his journey in sobriety, He spoke of how he had to learn how to communicate in sobriety and its only natural as he had a father who was so emotionally distant and really gave his son no place to go to to talk about things. I think for many highly creative people music and art then become even more powerful refuges for our broken hearts and we use these mediums to work out our feelings, conflicts and issues but often we cannot talk them through and so often it all goes into a highly symbolic form.

I thought it was interesting too how in the movie Rocketman, certain of EJ”s songs got interspersed with the script and listening to them in that context made more sense of me of the deep emotional significance of many of those tunes I listened repeatedly to in childhood.

I thought of how progressively over time Elton devolved into a very angry person who was triggered about nearly everything, to the point that he was driving people away. Luckily he had Bernie Taupin and I am sure there is so much more to his story than was portrayed in the movie, in the end he softened when he got into sobriety and came to understand the pain that drove him into acting out. I cried so much in the final scenes (sorry readers.. ‘SPOILER ALERT HERE’) where his parents come into this 12 step circle saying all the mean things and he tells them in a calm and gentle but forceful way never to speak to him like that again, and of course when he kneels down to embrace his inner child, the young Reggie Dwight I also came undone.

The movie does not really make clear how Elton’s rage and anger and tantrums coming out of his wounds probably protected him on one level, while driving others away too. For each of us to know the exact places where the poison barbs have lodged into us is very important work in healing and sobriety. We don’t just act out addictively due to ‘character defects’ the wounds lay deeper and cause the character defects which are nothing but survival skills gone haywire that eventually cease to stop working in the long term.

I felt a bit sad reading about Elton’s 29 years sobriety anniversary posted on Instagram showing his AA chip. I haven’t attended more than an handful of meetings in the past few years. I was very actively involved in AA for the first 8 years of my sobriety and then I was drawn to Al Anon in an effort to understand the ‘family disease’ and see how I set myself up feeling I needed to ‘save’ my older sister in some way. At that point my marriage and attempt at a new life overseas had collapsed and had aborted my first serious attempt at therapy. I got involved with another guy who was an adult child of a very abusive alcoholic man and I see how rocky our relationship was because on one level though he admired my sobriety he was actively hiding his own addiction and in the end he lashed out at me about things that had to do with his own unhealed wounds, in such a way as to blame me.

When that fell apart I had no where else to go but back to my home town and family, none of whom were actively in recovery. I see now that I perhaps should have called on the meetings more but I decided instead to pursue psychotherapy which has been enormously beneficial as I was scapegoat identified and worried that in the fellowship I may continue to take on the role of ‘sick damaged one’.

I know where my wounded places lie now. I know how hard I struggled to build a healthy ego, I know how much I got shot down in flames and I know now why I struggled for so many years with very, very unwarrantedly low self esteem. Elton John admits in that short interview that he will probably always carry the wound of poor self esteem due to early attachment wounds and negative parental introjects. I probably will too, but I am no longer willing to be dumped upon by people like my Mums’ friend. I called her out last time in an assertive, non aggressive way. And while I am a soft and gentle person I also know there is a time to fight my corner.

In the end for me emotional recovery is all about self love, humility, wisdom, understanding and compassion as well as developing insight and realism into the woundedness of others and how these wounds dovetail with powerful psychological defences and interplay. Slowly, painfully slowly at times I am making progress in no longer suffering from such a negatively deflated ego. Slowly, very slowly I am learning to have compassion for the little one in me who struggled so very painfully to grow up into a mature woman after so many years of intense family trauma, personal injury and emotional affects.