Social Anorexia

This past week I have started joining 12 Step telephone meetings for Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous.  This is a first for me and I've been to three meetings so far, two of which focused on what SLAA calls sexual, emotional and social anorexia.  I identify most strongly with social anorexia and to some extent to emotional anorexia.  I have practiced social anorexia since high school or, in other words, for around forty years.  I've met and known and been intimate with only a few people.  Thanks to the SLAA group I'm starting to see that my self-imposed isolation is really an addiction, too.  I know now that I can't stop this behavior without the help of the Higher Power.  People cannot help me, nor I them, if I don't reach out to them.  My isolation from people is a form of imprisonment.  I'm so used to it that I lose sight of this.  

Returning to the Al-Anon group has given me the confidence to begin reaching out to the Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous group through the telephone meetings.  I feel I belong in the Al-Anon group, but I am starting to realize that I belong, in my present circumstances, even more to the SLAA group, especially to the anorexic group within the group.  My response to the two meeting I went to for anorexia was mixed.  I feel a real gratitude for the meetings and the people who chair them, the people who show up and for the connection between members in the meeting after the meeting.  I also feel sadness that there are so many people isolating themselves the way I have done.  And I feel fear of those fewer members who are so emotionally shut down as to be cold to themselves and others despite reaching out to the group.  

Many anorexics in this group practice self-hatred.  They are caught in a double bind of judging others and themselves equally harshly.  I used to be more like that, but I've found, after surviving domestic violence and serious mental illness, that I am generally kinder to myself and others than I have ever been.  And yet still a sense of shame lingers within me paving the way for me to continue practicing social withdrawal.  Perhaps I've known how pernicious shame is since after I graduated from college the first time in the mid 1980s.  So many people have had people in their lives that actively have shamed them to the point where they internalized it and began shaming themselves daily.  That's how it started for them, often in childhood and adolescence.  But that is not my story.  Why I chose to take on the burden of shame when no one had seriously shamed me in my childhood and adolescence, I do not know at this point, but that's what I did.  It led me right into a love addicted relationship with a young abusive alcoholic.   

I do not know what it is to have a deep, healthy friendship or love relationship.  In my sick state, I don't know what true health looks and feels like, except through the glimpses that my Higher Power shows me when I reach out to others.  Now, I'm reaching for greater awareness and understanding and as it comes to me gradually I am beginning to awaken sadder, darker feelings, the feelings that I have been pushing down deep, trying to ignore.  I don't want to, but I know I have to embrace feeling my feelings if I am to have the chance to break out of this prison I have constructed.  

Of course, the story doesn't stop there.  If I get too dark while coming out of my denial,  I fall back into living without balance and that is not a good place to stay.  I have to search for the good inside me and outside me.  I am close to trying to approach my 4th Step "made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves".  Many of the inventory guides say to pick out 12 character defects or shortcomings first and then pick out 24 character assets.  I did make a list of my shortcomings, but now it is time to make a list of my strengths and never lose sight of all the good that is in me.  I need to love and respect myself as I am.  Self love is not only precious, it is absolutely necessary in order to have a rich and rewarding life with oneself and with others.  

Practicing Peace

There can be no lasting peace on earth until each of us makes peace with ourselves.  Steps 8 and 9 of the 12 Steps are about making amends for the harm we have caused while being actively addicted.  The most important amend we have to make is to ourselves for losing faith in our essential goodness as living beings on this planet.  We are all born innocent, open and receptive.  This is our birthright, the basis of our essential goodness.  How we are taught and treated after we enter into this world will often determine whether we embrace this essence or reject it.

What is self love and why do so many of us mistakenly associate it with selfishness?  I think it is because we don’t really understand the meaning of love.  Love is a verb; it is an action and a way of being.  Love is love because it sets no conditions for itself.  Love is vast, healthy, balanced, healing.  Love gives with no thought of getting.  Love is the most perfect thing we can think of which is why many people identify their Higher Power with love.  But the adults of our species must confront their own imperfections daily and the greatest imperfection of all is this shocking lack of self love.  Yet it is mostly the adult population that breed and bring children into this world.  And these adults teach what they have learned from their parents, caretakers and teachers; they teach the great lie that love is conditional.

When Buddha and Jesus tried to teach us to love our enemies, they were trying to teach us that love must be unconditional towards ourselves and all others.  This world we have set up of reward and punishment is not a world based on love.  We live in a world of rules.  Follow the rule or “moral law” and you will be rewarded, break it and you will be punished.  And yet we break these rules all the time.  Love has only one rule: do no harm to yourself or others.  That’s it.  When you beak that one rule, all you have to do is to return to love once again, that’s how we are able to make the amends we all have to make.

Do no harm to yourself and others.  What would our world turn into if every parent in every culture across the planet taught their children this one golden rule?  It would turn into a place of peace.  Love is peace and harmony amongst us all.  As it stands we are a planet of using addicts.  Addiction is about war and disharmony within ourselves and with each other. Addiction at its core is about self hatred.  Addiction is about reward and punishment. Addiction is about following and breaking “rules”.  Addiction is about being caught in a cycle we cannot willingly stop.  This is the world we teach our children to enter into and to adapt to and they do.

The seeds of self hatred are planted in each of us when we are so very young and vulnerable to attack.  We are told as soon as we are able to understand that if we are “good” and follow the rules, we will receive the reward of love and attention, and if we are “bad” and don’t follow the rules, we will be punished and the affection we need for our soul’s health will be withdrawn or worse we will be verbally attacked or worse than that physically and/or sexually abused.  Most of us choose as children to follow the rules because we wanted  to survive. How quickly we as adults forget that children are dependent on us for their physical, emotional and mental survival.  When we teach the children that love is a thing, a reward, and not an action and way of being, we stop practicing and teaching love.

Addicts who choose to enter into recovery, choose to practice love as a way of being and acting.  They finally take on the responsibility of caring for themselves and loving themselves in a way that their parents, caretakers and teachers did not.  They take the child that they once were and become a true parent to that child.  They give love with no thought of a return and continually teach themselves and that child about unconditional love, how to nurture it and extend it out to all others.  This is called practicing peace.

What Is Love?

“4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”    (The New Testament - Corinthians  13:4-7)

Because I see God as Love, this quote is for me a good description of God.  Just replace the word Love with God and see if it broadens your perspective.  God can be so unconditionally loving because God is not sick, but we human animals are very sick and in our sickness we distort our conceptions of love. The most distorted conception of love that we have conceived and compulsively promote is romantic love.  Conventionally the height of romantic love is marriage and our first example of it is with our parents.  Most of the marriage partners I’ve encountered through my friends and lovers have been dysfunctional.  It does not surprise me that in the US 40 to 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce. The dysfunction within these marriages teaches dysfunctional patterns of interrelating to the children who in turn grow up and seek out what is familiar to them:  another dysfunctional relationship.  And the cycle continues.

Meanwhile the myth of ideal romantic love is fed to the children in the form of stories, particularly in fairy tales, found in books, TV, films and music.  The archetypes of the princess and the prince were in my experience always white, heterosexual, presented as physically “beautiful”, personally flawless. The storyline was one of discovering each other and instantly “falling in love” followed by separation due to an almost insurmountable external threat that primarily the prince has to overcome thus proving his worthiness to union in marriage and living happily ever after in some now ideal world.  And in this world full of “ideal” romance there is no expression of sexuality except for a kiss or two.

The reality that each child confronts in their daily lives is that there are no princesses or princes, no Queens and Kings to be found.  We live in a multicultural world with couples who have different sexual orientations.  Most of us are not  stereotypically “beautiful” and every single person encountered has personal flaws.  Children are very perceptive.  They know what kind of world they are living in.  Perhaps that is why they are taught over and over to seek out fantasy as an escape from the problems and pains of real life.  What’s worse is that the fantasies that are chosen for them are very shallow, very unchallenging, counter to the deepening awareness of personal growth.  Counter to the very thing that parents say they want for their children: to be grounded in reality, to grow up healthy, able to work through the challenges of life.

As a culture made up of so many individuals, we don’t only teach our children poorly, we teach them to be sick.  We teach them to adapt to the dysfunction in society.  It is depressing to me that so many artists not only reflect our collective illness, but promote it and feed their own individual sicknesses, thus continuing the cycle yet again.  It is an addictive cycle.  What fuels any kind of addiction is at first the need to avoid pain and then the compulsion to always look outside oneself for fulfillment.  Romance addiction is not about love and intimacy and growth; it is about trying to use another person to avoid facing oneself.

I think the very first lesson children should be taught is to love themselves unconditionally.  But how can a child learn that if they are being taught by adults who have adapted to the dysfunctional, addictive society they live in?  These are adults who continue to love themselves and others conditionally, which I believe is not true loving.  The answer is these children can’t, unless they are blessed by having regular contact with some self loving healthy adult that agrees to take them under their wing from time to time.  This doesn’t mean that these children don’t have contact with examples of healthy love growing up, but these examples are short in duration and can get overwhelmed by the many more examples set by self rejecting adults and peers.  And so as these children grow up they cobble together a mixture of health and sickness in their relationships with others.

I think we all really do want health and happiness in our lives, but all too often we are blinded by our own sickness, which is so deeply rooted as to be passed on from generation to generation.  Adolescents and adults feed on conflict in romantic relationships in their lives and in the stories they read, watch, listen to which includes intrigues, infidelity, lies, manipulation, mistrust, misrepresentation, all of which seem put in place to sabotage self love and love of the other and neatly avoids the necessary inclusion of any positive spiritual orientation.

The essence of love is spiritual, not physical.  Learning to love yourself is a spiritual process.  If the Higher Power is Unconditional Love, then when you reach out to love and care for yourself, you are reaching out to God in and around you.  The usual pattern is to reach out to love and care for someone else, but if you skip over the most important step, that of committing to loving yourself first, you will never find the love you seek.  More likely you will encounter conflict and pain.  Without unconditionally loving yourself, in essence removing the Higher Power from the picture, you are left with a lot of sickness.

Though we try to convince ourselves otherwise, love and hate do not mix.  Love is health; there is absolutely no sickness in love.  Hate, in all its guises, is all sickness;  there is no health in hatred.  That we can recognize genuine love at all in a world so full of distortions of it, is a miracle in itself.  That’s God’s grace at work in everyone, everywhere.

My Return To The 12 Steps

There’s an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting that meets once a week in my town.  This meeting has been active since before I arrived here 25 years ago.  It has always had the reputation of being a very good meeting.  I went to this meeting a couple of times when I was in a relationship with an alcoholic many years ago.  Last Friday I went to my first meeting and yesterday I returned again.  I plan to go each week from now on.  The reason I can go is because it is a beginners meeting and open to anyone. Though I am not addicted to any substance except the nicotine in cigarettes, I consider myself an addict, too.  I am a recovering codependent addict.  I crossed the line into addiction when I chose to begin a relationship with a young alcoholic who was cyclically abusive to me.  I remained in that relationship for over 5 years, which was plenty of time to establish this chronic illness inside of me. Some people may claim that addiction can be cured; most do not.  The 12 step program is meant for those affected by addiction who believe that they must follow a lifelong recovery program based on strict self-honesty combined with compassion for themselves and others.  The basis for this program rests on coming to believe in a Higher Power and then turning one’s will over to that power by continuing to ask for help and by following the guidance that comes.

It took me four or five attempts to leave my codependent relationship with my abusive, addicted lover. In the final year I prayed to be released and was given the ability to do so in the summer of 1995.  But I haven’t all these years treated the root cause of my addiction.  Instead I chose to avoid all romantic relationships and have been on my own since the day I left him.  Part of why I chose to stay alone was because I became psychotic in the Spring of 1998. For over 3 years I was too sick to be in a relationship with anyone.  Gradually, after committing to take the anti-psychotic medications, I entered into an early recovery stage but was plagued by depression and the continuation of voices in my mind. Several years later I believe I could have tried to find a new relationship with someone, but hid behind the weight I had put on because of the medications I was taking and continued the self hating practice of calling myself “fat and ugly”.  I had also entered into middle age and had to come to terms with the fact that I was no longer young.  I was aging and my body was gradually changing.  I held onto the slight possibility that I might have a child still, but let go of that once I reached my mid 40s.  The truth was that I continued to struggle to take care of myself and was not fit to care for a child and I knew it.

Now, at almost 52 years old, I am finally ready to address the roots of my addiction, which began to develop I believe in childhood.  I have decided to commit to the 12 Step recovery program.  This program has been my guide during the most traumatic times in my life when I was in a self destructive mutually codependent relationship and when I was in the acute stages of my psychotic illness.  I never fully dedicated myself to going to either Al-Anon or AA meetings, but I did embrace the study of 12 Step daily readers and other support literature and worked to apply the concepts to my daily life.  Self-honesty has been the foundation of my recovery.  I know now that there can be no recovery for me without this practice.  By the end of 2006 I did two things that set me going in a healthy direction; in addition to a written journal, I began an audio journal using a small tape recorder and I began my Yin And Yang blog.  The audio journal became my daily self honesty practice just for myself.  The Yin And Yang blog became my public self honesty practice.

The spiritual path I chose to follow combined elements of Christianity and Buddhism.  I was raised by parents who had rejected their Catholic upbringing and chose to become committed to atheism.  But I knew at a young age that I was different from them in that I believed in something greater than myself that I could not clearly define.  I studied Christian history and art in college, but did not become converted to it.  It wasn’t until I was around 30 years old when I first went to Al-Anon that I began to consider deepening my shaky faith in a Higher Power.  I read and studied the Al-Anon daily readers and read books on defining and treating codependency addiction.  One of my favorite authors was Melody Beattie who was an expert on codependency and a firm believer in the value of applying the 12 Steps to daily life.  She wrote a daily reader for codependents called The Language of Letting Go and this book, along with the Al-Anon daily readers, gave me permission to put the focus on myself and my recovery.

Ms. Beattie wrote several times that it was important to believe in a totally benevolent Higher Power and also to believe that I was exactly where I was supposed to be, even though I was desperately miserable because I was stuck inside self hating attitudes and behaviors.  But at least I was coming out of the fog of denial about my own sickness.  I was learning to take responsibility for myself, for my thoughts and actions.  I began to see that I had many more choices in life than I had thought and that, with the help of a Higher Power’s guidance, I could have the courage to change myself from an actively addicted mess into a person who could practice recovery attitudes and behavior, into someone who could heal.

Twenty two years have passed.  I did have the courage to leave my addictive relationship, but did not have enough faith in myself to try to have a healthy love relationship.  Before I was pulled into psychosis, I did not return to Al-Anon, only temporarily saw a therapist, continued being reclusive, and continued my practice of relying on addictive fantasies about unavailable men.  Too often I chose fantasy over reality.  In my journals of the time I realized that on some level I was hating myself and yet I did not reach out for help.  I thought going back to college and getting a second bachelor’s degree in art and photography would be enough to give me a fresh start.  It did not.  By the end of my first year I was delusional and paranoid and had to take a leave of absence from school.

I believe now that I was deliberately led by the Higher Power into an even deeper mental illness than my codependent addiction because I had continued to live according to one of my deepest character defects:  self imposed isolation.  How could the Higher Power help me when I refused to seek out help from other recovering addicts, when I refused to practice a recovery program, when I refused to be of service to the people in my community?  I had been given many opportunities.  In fact, once I left my addictive relationship, I had been given another chance to really get well.  I don’t think God had any other choice but to bring the abuse that had once attacked me in the form of my lover into my mind, into the one place where I could not run away from my core issue of self hatred.

The voices in my mind, which I had been conscious of since my mid 20s, now transformed from mostly benevolent guides that did not intrude upon my life into two groups.  One group was devilish and the other was angelic.  It was as if my very soul was being fought over.  While the devilish group tried to convince me that I was some kind of anti-Christ figure, the angelic group tried very hard to teach me how to help myself.   In the midst of my desperation, I was directed to get admitted into a hospital, which I did.  I stayed only over night, but it was enough to get my diagnosis of schizophrenia from a psychiatrist and a prescription for an anti-depressant and an anti-psychotic.  My father arrived the next day from Florida and stayed with me for a month and then my mother came an stayed with me for another month.  From there the helpful voices told me to get a therapist and to go to two support groups:  Al-Anon and a domestic violence support group.  From there I was told to pray for the people in those groups and actively try to help them however I could despite the fact that I was still very psychotic.  I agreed to take the anti-depressant, but not the anti-psychotic.  It would take me over three years and three break downs before I would take them.  I mark January 2002 as the beginning of my recovery from severe mental illness.

That was 12 years ago.  I have come a long way in that time following a spiritual path that includes elements of 12 Step philosophy, Christianity and Buddhism.  I have been vigilantly honest with myself.  I go to therapy every two weeks and I take my medications, get enough sleep and eat well.  But all through these last 12 years I have continued to be reclusive, going to support meetings only sporadically and never fully going through all the Steps.  But two years ago I reached out to someone in my town in friendship and we have been close and mutually supportive since then.  Now I know for sure that I am ready to push myself farther by going to the AA group each week while working the Steps each day.  It is my turn to be of service to others while taking very good care of myself by continuing on my spiritual path.  One thing I do know for sure and that is that somewhere along the line, I don’t exactly know when, but I have turned my life and my will over to the Higher Power.  And so I have a strong foundation to work from as I go through the rest of the Steps.  I know that after all I’ve been through that I love and respect myself very much.  I know that I love my life and am grateful every day.