The trauma is not what happens to you; the trauma is what happens inside you….The loss of self is the essence of trauma. The real purpose of addiction treatment, mental health treatment, any kind of healing, is reconnection (with one’s authentic self). ~ Gabor Maté, “How Childhood Trauma Leads to Addiction.” YouTube video: link

Both my parents grew up in homes in which the expression of anger was not allowed. My mother grew up in a home where she experienced the rage-aholism of her alcoholic father. When I experienced her anger, it usually came in the form of sarcasm; when she drank, I experienced her scorn. My father grew up in a home in which rationality ruled over emotion. When he got angry, which was very rarely, it arrived like a dam bursting. If I did something to provoke his anger, I knew for certain to not ever do it again.

In my childhood, the authentic expression of ‘negative’ emotions led to punishment. Children should be seen and not heard. Go to your room. Don’t get angry with your mother/father. Be nice to your sister. Behave! That is, act the good boy in spite of your emotional reality in the moment. Whenever I was angry, it was in my bedroom with the door shut, alone.

Anger created detachment. In order to receive the love I needed, to have the attachment I needed, I had to act accordingly. My freedom to express my emotions regardless of their type—my authenticity—depended on my behaviour. I learned early on that love and attachment were conditional upon me being a good boy. This conditioning ran strong and cut deep. To this day, my brain still does a backflip when I hear the term ‘healthy anger’.

In order to remain attached and loved, I had to suppress my own emotional reality and deny authentic self-expression. I would guess that this is common for children in most families, at least those from my generation.

According to Gabor Maté, however, this is how I began to lose touch with my inner reality. I lost connection with my own emotional needs, and starved myself of love even though I remained attached. If I have lost connection to my self, how can I connect with others? If I am disconnected with myself and all the pain I have stuffed down inside myself, and I reach out to others for love and attachment, I am going to engulf the other with my need. If I cannot express my need, then perhaps I will instead engulf the other with my ‘caring’. I will seek the attachment I crave through rescuing another. I can play both victim or rescuer, depending on the dynamic of the relationship.

In the first article I published on this blog, I talked about the experience of being hit by a car when I was five, and the narrative that developed in the aftermath that I was ‘saved for a purpose’. According to Maté, my trauma was not the accident itself but the internalization of my parents’ reaction to it, and how it shaped my understanding of self in early childhood.

How did the narrative impact my authenticity? (I’m working this out as I write…) If I was saved for a purpose, and I could not possibly know what that purpose was, the result must be that I am not yet the person I need to become. In other words, who I am in the present moment is inadequate, insufficient, and not yet living his true purpose. The messaging could be even more nefarious, telling me that whoever I am and whatever I am doing has no purpose at all. Purpose awaits me in the future; therefore, I have no purpose in the present.

If I was taught in childhood that inner reality took a backseat to proper behaviour, whatever purpose I was ‘saved for’ must therefore be fulfilled by what I do as opposed to who I am. In other words, my current emotional reality is irrelevant except as a tool to help me get to where I need to go to fulfill my purpose. Furthermore, if I am being ‘saved for a purpose’ then I am perpetually in a state of incompletion and whatever I am undertaking is not yet my true purpose!

Imagine having a core program that tells you that, in any present moment, you are incomplete, inadequate, insufficient, and not doing what you should be doing because you’re not ‘there’ yet. It also tells you that your purpose is to do some sort of unknowable great thing, so whatever you’re doing now is a waste of time. I am set-up to fall short, each and every moment. Never good enough.

If am never good enough, then my programming from childhood tells me that I am unlovable and not worthy of attachment. Up until now, I’ve always thought my shame was caused by my failures; no, it’s deeper than that. The root of my shame is not being person I need to become (to fulfill my purpose). Addiction served as a useful distraction from that shame for most of my life.

Relapses happened when I lost sight of what was important and/or when I just stopped caring. Both would happen when I felt angry, and here’s how:

1) I would feel anger;
2) I would want to be angry, but I would feel shame;
3) I would bury both the anger and shame;
4) Buried anger blocks other emotions;
5) Blocked emotions leads to disconnection from self;
6) Forgetting who I am leads to addiction relapse.

What made me angry enough to relapse? Relationships ending! It didn’t matter why they ended, how they ended, or who ended them, it meant detachment. Abandonment.

From childhood, detachment was the punishment for my anger. When I got angry, I was left alone. The inner child doesn’t understand cause and effect. It just knows that when one thing follows another that they always arrive together. My inner child equates abandonment with anger. That means I also equate anger with shame and not being good enough. Whenever I experienced a break-up, it would lead me to disconnect from myself and eventually drink. It could happen in hours or take weeks, but it would always happen.

My last relationship was the most painful experience of my life. I felt a strong and, most importantly, unprecedented visceral and chemical bond with my partner. My body finally got fed what it needed—deep physical attachment. How I responded to her physically compelled me to connect with my own body, perhaps for the very first time in my life since early childhood. But she had needs of her own, and they didn’t include me. She pulled away, again and again, which tore me apart piece-by-piece. Still, I craved that connection and kept going back until she had enough.

Abandoned, I become angry at the universe and everything in it. That’s a lot of anger to bury. I began to rationalize my way out of recovery—‘not enough’… ‘this is a waste of time’… ‘you’re not where you need to be now’—and I went into isolation and relapsed.

That was nine years ago. Throughout the intervening years I avoided relationship, friendship, and community. I spent most of that time clean and sober, but emotionally, physically, and spiritually bankrupt. I’m back in recovery now, and it’s been almost five months of awakening to what’s been going on inside me.

One final but very important experience of abandonment happened in 2019. After a year and a half of caring for my ailing father, he died. And as his executor, I also had to clean-out and sell his house, my childhood home and the roof under which I have spent most of my years in recovery. So much of my identity was tethered to my relationship with my father and with that house as an anchor. Both were my lifelines during the storm. When it was all settled, and I moved into my small apartment near the airport, I was more alone—and without purpose—than I had ever been in my life. In a couple of years, I had reached a place where I felt I could not go on. I did reach out for help, which is how I am here now sharing my experience.

We all experience blind spots. Mine was that I didn’t see the impact of trauma on my inner reality. During my first thirteen years in recovery, I reconnected with most of my emotions, but I never fully reconnected with my body. Somewhere in there lies stuffed anger—with a voice that cries out in fear of abandonment or in shame because I’m not ‘good enough’.

Healing trauma will be a process of listening to that voice and releasing that buried anger and pain from abandonment in a healthy way. I’m not sure what that will look like or what form it will take. This is a journey into unknown territory for which I have no map.