“The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.”
– Carl Jung

Three things:

One, in my childhood home there was a baking table in the middle of our kitchen. It had two giant metal drawers for flour and two heavy smaller drawers above them that were impossible for me to open. My mother had to do it. I found one like it online for the purpose of determining its size.

Second, there is a professor at UT/Austin, James Pennebaker, who has spent much of his career proving a hypothesis: that writing on a difficult topic can be as helpful as in-person therapy.

Third, my child has an eating disorder.

*

If you’re up for hearing more, here goes. On that baking table is where I was hit. I remember the sense of the table against my skin. (I do not remember the feeling of being hit; I stopped living inside my body.) I recall not being able to feel the edges. I remember being much smaller than its width. I remember when the edge of the table touched my ankles. I remember her face; it didn’t look like her normally. Today I take the tape measure out and look at how tall I was then.

I am trying to teach myself that I am a grownup now. And that I was a child then. I was smaller then. I am bigger now.

I am an adult child.

*

G, my own adult child, has had disordered thinking about food and her body for many years. I have indulged, dismissed, researched, investigated or griped about it, depending on the circumstance. I also have diminished it and protected her, and in so doing, perhaps I have made it worse. I just wanted it to go away, the same way I wanted my mother’s mood swings and rages to go away. I thought they could. I thought they would.

Over the past year, my child got worse until it was so bad she started asking for help. I didn’t understand. I am not always good at providing help or knowing what that is. At times, I may be more of an enabler than a helper. But some sort of wisdom beyond me encouraged her toward twelve-step recovery while others looked at treatment programs.

Twelve-step allows you to start today. Right now. Somewhere in the world there is a meeting happening every minute. Many, in fact. Treatment programs want interviews and financial agreements and diagnoses and doctor approvals.

It was serious enough that G did both. Let me re-write that: she is taking it that seriously. She really wants to get well, most of the time. Emphasis on the subject, she. In classic fashion—when G actually wants to do something, her energy is boundless. She began attending virtual meetings one after the other, started sharing, found a sponsor and began to immerse herself.

With each edit of this piece, I revise the status. It should be noted that recovery, like grief, is not linear. She works a step, she gets worse, she works another step, she gets better and then “acts out” again. The road is still being paved toward recovery. It is in fits and starts, but she is on it.

(I think. I hope. I pray.)

Fairly early into her EDA journey, she learned about ACA or Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families.  “Mom, this sounds like you,” she said. She found a meeting for us to attend on zoom. I bought the books and started listening.

*

I have been doing therapy off and on for over twenty years. Alone with a notebook or in a room with one person, my writing began in part as Pennebaker’s exercise. Through one close friendship, I learned that children of alcoholics could manifest a bit like I do, but I never dreamed that millions of people might.

I never imagined ACA.

(Not that I necessarily like it. Or what it brings up.)

I have begun to imagine it like this: it is as if we start as children with three primary colored crayons. By the time we make it to adulthood, we have every crayon color imaginable, and our stories are illustrated in equally disparate ways. But when we are little, our responses to dysfunction are extremely limited and our survival tools, similar. They reveal themselves in hyper-vigilance, people pleasing, excessive sense of responsibility, loss of identity, fear, guilt, shame and self-doubt.

This toolbox protects us then, but it far outlives its purpose when we carry it blindly into adulthood. Many children dissociate physically or emotionally or both, like I did.

I slowly unpack these thoughts over the course of the first meetings, which began a few weeks ago.

*

Coincidentally or otherwise, I already was working on some other aspects of self discovery. Over the past five years, I have been taking steps toward greater embodiment and have written about the role of yoga a while back and recent role of home construction. Scrapping metal and loading dumpsters, hauling lumber and hoisting beams. Blazing heat and freezing rain. A village block of snow to shovel; an acre of lawn to mow. As I sweat and froze and cursed, I felt really unpleasant feelings housed in my body. I yearned to stop, but there was no one else to do the work. By doubling down on it, I recognized that my body was the repository of my mother’s anger and pain; sometimes my own simple movements summoned bitterness. Sometimes I could break through them into light. Sometimes it made me want to drink a bit and smoke a cigarette late at night by myself to dissociate back into ease, into softer lenses.

The invitation to return to my body began positively with motherhood, but when tough life lessons presented themselves—like the terminal sickness and subsequent death of a good friend and fellow mom—my body shook with anxiety. With the beginnings of our marital separation, I got vertigo, and as divorce became real, heart PVCs. It’s almost comical, in hindsight, to see how apropos they were. As I incorporated them, they gradually eased. A body-mind conversation on more difficult topics began and continues today.

One key source of dialogue is in my solar plexus. The first time I felt it was when my former mother-in-law exhorted me to divorce her son. It felt like someone had stabbed me straight through my body. (I stopped wearing a bra for a bit, it hurt so much.) Some time later, it happened equally strongly when my parenting was attacked by the father of G’s boyfriend at the time.

Now when I get pain in that area, I understand. My body is trying to reply. It also eases sooner now that I am listening. I learn that children house trauma in this space from as early as their first three years. It has been called the seat of the soul (Zukav).

*

In the midst of all this, I recall a line in Death in Venice, “’You see, Aschenbach has always lived like this’—here the speaker closed the fingers of his left hand to a fist—‘never like this’—and he let his hand hang relaxed from the back of his chair” (Thomas Mann).

And in the play Equus, “There is now, in my mouth, this sharp chain. And it never comes out” (Peter Shaffer).

I remember my first impressions of both from decades ago: Yes, exactly.

I remember thinking: I don’t want to be like Aschenbach. And: my mother put the bridle on. I don’t know how to take it off. But I want to, somehow.

I am fifty-three years old, and I am still working on this.

*

Over the weekend I spilled some oil on the wall and couldn’t get it off. My first thought was how to clean it. Then to hide it. Then to fight it. And then, lacking remedy, I began to shrink into an emotional cocktail of shame, blame and self-loathing. Tears of a child began to fall, expanding into waves reminding me of all of the responsibilities I should have managed better. How I was to blame for my mother’s moods and my failed marriage and my child’s eating disorder. But also for other childhood shames hidden even deeper, from long long ago. Things I hid. Like staining the bed when I bled in my sleep, and laughing so hard that I couldn’t hold it. So much shame. So much helplessness over the pain of others I could not ease. So much sorrow over what I could not control. Innocent mistakes, accidents.

I shared the story of the oil on the wall in an ACA meeting. I shared it with a “fellow traveler” (they don’t use sponsors in ACA as we are all traveling alongside one another). I heard myself say, it was an accident, and I heard that word reverberate throughout time.

I am so sorry mommy. It was an accident. I didn’t mean to. I see her face. We are always in the kitchen. It is always too late to reason. Instead I find reasons why I did it. Why I really am to blame.

I put the oil down on an uneven surface. I was not paying attention to what I was doing. I was having too much fun. I was happy.

As I run old film of memory, I see how I am often lit with happiness just before the kitchen table. How it is a surprise. How I try in vain to change her mind.

*

To ACA newcomers they say try six meetings and see if you can handle what comes up. I begin to see what they mean.

After twenty years of therapy, I figured that I would be a rockstar at this. I never imagined that it would hurt this much, I would see this much, and it would feel this fresh again to look at the past.

Also it is difficult to look at the present and recent past. I see how hard I seek approval and focus on the needs of my loved ones—most notably my child—holding a sense of responsibility second only to Sisyphus. I never imagined this as wrong albeit maybe unusual in its intensity. I never imagined my actions might have been making things worse, or that childhood adaptation may have created the architecture of these actions.

In past therapy, I did a lot of work on anxiety, most notably with Paul Foxman’s Dancing with Fear. Foxman created a laundry list of his own, indicating that those who experience anxiety are more apt to have: a sensitive nature, an active mind and overactive imagination; a highly critical parent; an “atmosphere of denial and unpredictability”; violence in the household; parent-child role reversals; family secret(s); many rules and rigid patterns; lots of “shoulds” and a tendency to worry about “what-ifs?” They are eager to please others, lean toward perfectionism, and struggle with setting boundaries, reasonable goals or limits and taking care of themselves. They are sensitive to criticism and rejection, conflict avoidant, passive in relationships—especially with authority. They ignore body signals, have a difficult time relaxing, and often say yes but mean no. At the same time they are loyal, kind, responsible, determined, hard-working, devoted, loving people (36-40).

When I read this years ago, it was a huge relief to see myself and identify with it, even down to the family secrets that pervaded my childhood. Today I can see that Foxman’s anxious personality type sounds a lot like an Adult Child.

*

I have been managing fine, I said.

A fellow traveler called out the word, managing.

I am new to Twelve Step, even though I have done a lot of the prompts over the years out of curiosity. I try to hold regular moral inventories, clear my deck and seek amends as needed. I have a close relationship with Spirit. But I am discovering there is a missing link.

I have also noticed how much this work can sometimes help me communicate with my girl.

In our conversations occasionally we model the meetings, sharing our days without comment or “cross-talk” as they call it. We mute ourselves for the other to speak. We hold space and listen without any kind of expectation of reply that is not compassionate. “You are heard. Thank you for sharing.” Both of us are trying to do the work. We share milestones and break down painful memories.

I like this, as it makes our conversations much safer. I notice how I have grown hesitant in normal interactions, not wanting to set her off. I walk on eggshells with my child, just like I did with my mother. Proof positive: I am an adult child.

Despite my close relationship with Spirit, I find making this connection hard. The step between resurrecting old painful patterns—as they seem to be arising without prompting—and then what? I try on this concept of re-parenting. God as the ultimate parent, but it is more than I can handle at moments. I try to speak directly to little Cressey and invite her happiness into the room.

I recall work I did when G was very little on positive and negative intent—with the realization that I was raised with the latter, the bad seed that needed to be fixed. I wanted to raise my wondrous child with the opposite. Not only did I want to raise her that way, I believed wholeheartedly in her essential goodness.

I want to believe in mine, too. (I find this is all well and fine until I do something wrong.)

*

Pema Chodron writes, “The only reason we don’t open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don’t feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else’s eyes.”

I can’t help but sense that my work right now is to keep attending ACA meetings and allow wave after wave of these experiences to reach me. To see anew how my past created patterns in my body and mind that are universal to children in similar circumstances. This acknowledgement alone has opened up a well of compassion within me for myself and other adult children. An awe, in fact. An awareness of our common humanity, and a tenderness for the child within me who is just like all of the rest.

A lot of the messaging in my childhood was that the same ruler could not be used for me that was used for other kids. I was different. I was Cressey. While it made me feel helpless and isolated, it also made me very self-reliant and strong. But I was not a grown up then, as much as I aspired to be, and I am not a child now, as much as I see myself sometimes as a four year old dancing for a fifty-three year old’s needs.

I am accustomed to dark nights of the soul coming out of external circumstances, and how they make me go internal to evolve, transmute and heal. What is fascinating about right now is that I am happier than I have been in ages. Many of the external factors carrying me stress have been relieved.

As G rides the ups and downs of her attempted recovery, I note how I can respond with retreat or repulsion. I pull away as I once did from my mother.

ACA again: we learned as children not to trust, not to feel, not to talk.

One area of progress since childhood, I definitely have learned how to talk and to write.

I get hugged more these days than I have in years, and I feel safer. In these moments, I tell myself—every aspect of me—that it is okay to feel. It is ok to unclench the fist, to remove the bridle. It is possible to breathe, to run, to stretch into possibility.

It is okay to be happy and not expect the other shoe to drop. Or to feel like everything is a delicate balancing scale of good and bad and superstition.

I also look deeper at the role of approval seeking/people pleasing and realize just how much this has been a guiding principle. Combined with hyper-vigilance, I have a radar for others’ moods and needs. While this can serve me well, it is also exhausting. It is also predicated on the outdated notion that without my near constant attention I can be bolted onto the kitchen table again.

It is strange that it has taken me so long to see and understand all of this. I am amazed at the way these new feelings are emerging. One ACA meeting—my favorite one, coincidentally the first one G found for me—starts with focus on a “feelings wheel” which is basically a list of feelings from simple to complex. We are quiet for a while as we look at it, asking ourselves what we feel, what we have felt recently. We all suffer from difficulty defining our feelings.

In this basic element, I feel understood. I have shared how, early in therapy with EMDR, my therapist would ask, “what did you feel,” and I would reply, “could you give me a list of feelings?”

I see how much energy it has taken to please others, to stay vigilant, to be responsible, to stay in relationship. In many ways it is no surprise I enjoy my own company so much; it’s a relief not to have to worry about anyone for a while.

Also: I see how much work it has taken to survive, and maybe, just maybe, this helps explain my shame at how little I have done with my life. Let me keep that first thought and then re-write it: maybe it helps reveal to myself that I succeeded in surviving. I have transmuted the pain, fear and shame into words.

More: somehow I have gotten brave enough to share my words.

More yet: somehow I trust enough to keep sharing them even though I get anxious each time.

Trust is ever fragile, but I sense that a vulnerable little girl part of me is slowly releasing her hold on her three crayons. Now that I can feel her better, I am in touch with her fear and her resistance. One adult action at a time, I am trying to build her trust and show her that we are capable of so much more.

ACA has its own serenity prayer:

God, grant me the Serenity to accept the people I cannot change,
the Courage to change the one I can
and the Wisdom to know that one is me.

For more information:
https://adultchildren.org