This is part of a series called “The Bottled Scream” A Disease of Self – Understanding Addiction and Recovery. To go back to the introduction click here.

Trauma

Colonization

“…the process of settling and establishing control over the indigenous people of an area….appropriating a place for one’s own use. “

It is possible to view addiction as a chemical, then pyschological, colonising of a family. Valium and addicton entered our life under false pretences. It came to help my mother and us. It was going to help make things better. It did the opposite. It created turmoil and division and discord and scars that have not healed fully, decades later. It created denial about the past and opposing accounts of the past, different storylines. Although there may be a common understanding of the hurt of past, we still retreat into the primacy of our own pain and our own reading of the causes of this shared past. We apportion blame in different ways and create scapegoating rather than empathy, rather than common understanding of a similar human suffering. It turned people, with the most in common, against each other.

This was how power was maintained; by an emotional divide and rule. Some were favoured, and some discouraged, more than others. It created trauma, still unreckoned with decades later. Instead time and it’s progress, it march’s towards today, has glossed, superficially, over deep rooted pain, hurt, sense of injustice. These effects bleed into everyday life and propel behaviour, without knowing what is pushing them into each day, propelling them into attitudes and behaviours written by and enacted on behalf of, this invisble author, trauma. How can it not affect us? It is in our very fabric, our very make up. A silent director running the show. It is the toxic shame called self centredness in the Big Book of AA, the actor trying to run the show.

Even now writing this, I am in shame. How dare I share these private matters with the wider world. I do so, for me, and for some of you. For me, this is where most of my shame originates and, in these secrets, it is where it still festers. I have not properly investigated this puss filled wound in order to clean it out so it still seeps into my consciousness, propelling my behaviours and attitudes to myself and others. It still drives me forward. If I do not address it in public, air it, it will keep me ill and others will continue to play a role in my recovery although they are not part of my life. I will continue to protect the illness while misguidedly thinking I am protecting others and their versions of the past.

This is my recollection of the past and it’s effects, it belongs to me and no one else. I have to own it instead of falsely believing I share the exact same past as others. We see the past based on who we are and how life has affected us. Each sees it differently and I can only tell my story, which will be different to everyone else. Speaking as honestly as I can has been the antidote to the lies of addiction and trauma. Addiction is perpetuated by lies and shame filled secrets. Twelve step recovery implores me to look at my side of the street, not other people’s behaviour. For me, this has only told half my story and only addresses half my disease. It doesn’t address what happened to me, so is an incomplete recovery. Sins of omission make me, as well the sins I committed, in fact, most of the sins I committed were the result of previous sins I experienced from others. They are the result of my conditioning and most conditioning happens firstly in the family.

Addiction and trauma are often family born. Addiction is mostly a family disease. It not only wrecks havoc on families but often is the result of family dynamics. Of emotional neglect. This is where it mostly originates, genetically and environmentally. Most negative views of myself come not from my behaviour to others, my guilt, but from the behaviour and attitudes of others towards me, my toxic shame. It is others who have instilled in me a feeling of uselessness and unworthiness, not me. I have to clean up the other side of the street too. There is no blame apportioned here. Just a desire to understand how addiction and trauma shapes lives.

I have to explore that family history, that conditioning, to see where this negative conditoning comes from, if only to rescue myself from it. To rewrite this negative script that has produced this life. It seems more and more obvious that addiction generally flourishes in dysfunctional familes where primary emotional needs are not met. In society, we view addiction at the endpoint and rarely look at the origin of addiction. Addiction starts way before dependence on substances or behaviour. It starts at an early age when we use external means to solve an internal problem. When we look outside of ourself to fix our inner feelings. This is the start of it and it can be observed in early childhood and this offers a hope of prevention too.

Addiction is generally born and blossoms in family settings and more and more prevention and treatment needs to recognise this. We wait to the endpoint of addiction rather than foreseeing the conditions which lead to it’s blossoming in the first place. It is a family disease helped enormously by some form of family healing, some form of family treatment.

Trauma

Unresolved trauma around the world as the consequence and as the instigator of wars, and heinous brutality across this globe. Without healing generational trauma we are propelled forward in the same manner, decade after decade. This colonising and it’s long term effects in side a family mirrored the effects of British colonising in the North of Ireland. It too created turmoil and suffering, resentment and recrimination, argument, dissent and violence. Rebellion and a longing for healing, closure, reconcilliation.

I have been told to move on, many a time, or to do what I need to do, as if the effects of my upbringing are somehow exclusive to me. The past is the past. Not when it lingers on and influences the present. Their trauma and the trauma of thousands may not have brought them to the abyss like mine did, and created an urgent need to heal but it does not mean it isn’t there. Abuse, neglect and trauma are rife in our world and in society. Trauma perpetuates this from one generation to the next. It blindly pushed us forward.

I felt I was born into two conflicts, two wars, home at home and one outside the front door and in the television, in Northern ireland during the so-called “Troubles”. One seemed to mirror the other in many ways. A divide and rule existed inside the family as it did outside in our wider society.There was no justice, no recognition of past hurts, no peace.

Runs in the Family

My father was in the parlance of AA, a “dry drunk”, he was sober but an alcoholic nonetheless. He sobered up via the Pioneers, a Catholic church organsiation dedicated to temperance but not to recovery in the same way AA and other 12 step recovery is. Although he was more charitable than most AAs I have met, including me. He would become active in th St Vincent de Paul Society, taking pensioners on day trips to the seaside and in a local youth club for people with Down Syndrome. He would also become very active in the Church, more active than anyone else in our Parish. He demonstrated his Chrstianity via works of compassion and love. This would be the future, in my early childhood his alcoholism combined combustibly with my mother’s addiction.

My father remained unaware of the underlying factors that drove his sometimes immature emotional reactivity. He may have had  a spiritual awakening via the Church and been a much more loving and giving man than I am or ever likely to be but he struggled with this spiritual malady which like most alcoholics gave way to emotional immaturity, overacreactivity and attempts to etiher dominate or be emotionally dependent on my mother. Equally, he was often crushed by a low self esteem and a shame that he never got to know as the product of his alcoholism and his trauma. He also suffered the developmental trauma of being asked to leave his family home to live with his grandfather for some reason when he was a wee boy. He had been told by his parents there wasn’t even room in the house with him and seven other children.

That fear of abandonment followed him into his marriage and contributed to the problems in it, as did his undiagnosed and treated alcoholism.  This abandonment was at the heart of many of violent rows with his wife. It contributed to a turbulent life at home, a domestic life which was volatile, violent and, at times, traumatic. Although it was my mother who could have done with some from of recovery, even more so than my dad. This would contribute to violent rows and between my parents

Our family would be described as dysfunctional. Emotions were rarely acknowledged, never mind discussed. They were almost to be feared and avoided and in doing so would explode to the surface instead. The emotions of others were viewed suspiciously as causes of potential conflict rather than as common ground to empathise with, so we all grew up guarding ourselves from our, and others’, potentially dangerous emotions. It is strange to view something so fundamental to the human condition, emotions, as so dangerous and troublesome. They were viewed as suspect devices, ready to explode into rows and recrimination. Sometimes, in violent arguments; my mother would resort to hitting my father with pokers or frying pans. He would try not to hit her back as he was a former boxer and knew how to.

How he didn’t relapse and drink is beyond me. It seems a superhuman effort on his part. I can only conclude it was because of this love for us, his children who he doted on. We owe him that. He was a secure attachment for all of us, a consistent source of unconditional love. Sometimes the violence was so extreme, us kids would start screaming and run down the housing estate to my uncle’s house. We would drag him up the estate to our house to intervene with our rowing parents and calm the situation down. The times we ran to him for help! All of this could be seen in full view of our neighbours.

As we were reared in a Catholic family in a Protestant housing estate during the Troubles and this made us feel even more vulnerable and noticeable . Added a new layer of societal shame to our already toxic family and personal shame. There were only a ween of Catholic families and one of them was tearing around the housing estate fighting and half killing each other!

And it wasn’t just fights, Mum was so angry at daddy for not being home enough to help her with the wanes. He had an extra job in the evening packing cardboard boxes at a local factory on top of his day job as a postman. He wanted us to not go without anything, so he worked all the hours he could. It is hard not to see this as his addicted behaviour, workaholism instead of alcoholism. He also played darts in a local hotel twice  a week too which is difficult not to see as selfish behaviour especially when my mother would ask him for more help with the wanes, or for the odd night out among her own kind, fellow Catholics, instead of being cooped up in the house all day, surrounded by Protestants who made her feel alien.

She could have spent more time with his family who were living in two houses nearby but she had fallen out with them. She felt they were beneath her and had little to do with them. This was a real pity because she could have done with their help in rearing us. Mum just felt she needed to get out more, to the local Catholic Parish hall. She hated being stuck in the middle of Protestant families who she barely knew or had little in common with. She felt isolated from her own. She had been very popular growing up among Catholics and now they were all many miles away living in Catholic areas.  Her own mother and father were over 20 miles away! She just wanted to be around a Catholic culture that was familiar and reassuring to her. She just wanted to feel she belonged somwhere again. It was a Catholic culture my father hadn’t really grown up in, he had grown up among Protestants and thought most Catholics had looked down on this poor family of gamblers and loose morals. At least the Protestants only discriminated on the basis of religion. His upbringing was before the trouble when people mixed a lot more than in the 1970s when the constant violence polarised commuinities.

Mummy began to struggle badly, she felt her life was coming apart and felt alone and isolated with her workaholic husband rarely at home to share the burden of the child rearing.  Not many men did then. She felt miles from her own family. I remember the arguments, violence and the emotional, physical and spiritual abuse of my mother from a young age.  My parents would fight, physically, mum would use any metal implement she could get her hands on. My father would feel the effects of it. Neighbours became aware of that crazy Catholic family and my uncles, who were close by, would be fetched by one of us kids to intervene in our domestic violence and chaos. Mum would have to deal with my continuing to pee the bed by often beating me in the middle of the night and I would learn not to tell her and sneak in to my sisters room where my second eldest sister would change the bed sheets and replace them before mum ever noticed. I lived in fear of wetting the bed and a fear of falling asleep still haunts me today.

Mum would revolt against my father and his constant working, day time working as post man and evening work in a local factory, by dragging us kids through the countryside to the local Catholic parish hall, trying to remember and relive her own upbringing, to try and get a break. She never learnt to drive so we would have to rely on strangers picking us up in their cars as she thumbed lifts. They all knew my father as he was a rural postman, travelling in their rural townlands and farmland areas to deliver their post. They worried about his absence, about us being dragged up country roads in the wet nights. It was mortifying.  We waited for Dad to arrive some time later, at the parish hall to collect us and for my parents to row on the way home.

Sometimes Mum would take us on other thumbing expeditions, sometimes trying to thumb a lift to her parents which was over twenty miles away and much more dangerous as we would not be relying on those we knew and who knew us. No one else was doing this? No other mothers were dragging her kids around the streets and country lanes, just ours?  Just us?  The only Catholic family with the only crazy mother.  They felt synonymous and the pitying looks from our Protestant neighbours reinforced that idea. It felt like being Catholic increased the risk of craziness.