My Path to Recovery

Finding ACA

ACA stands for Adult Children of Alcoholic and Dysfunctional Families. I’m an ACA. I emphasize the “family" part when I talk, because my life, my journey, is not about alcohol, or even dysfunction: it’s about family. Everyone is affected: me, my parents, my siblings, and our children. And we were affected by previous generations, not just our immediate parents.

If I hadn’t found ACA, my children and perhaps grandchildren might pass this dysfunction on to their children. My family of origin produced this dysfunction, my chosen family started me on my healing path, and I look forward to what my adult children will do with their partners and children.

The ACA “big red book” talks about grandparents of alcoholic and dysfunctional families, because so many people in the family line have been affected. I hear some members say their parents didn’t drink so they don’t know where the dysfunction came from; they blame themselves. Others say alcoholism, dysfunction, belittling, and abuse were not family traits, so they blame their parents for starting that cycle. And yet, as I’ve worked the Steps in ACA, and spent some years doing 3-4 ACA meetings a week, I think those people are probably wrong. Sometimes they don’t know about the previous generations, because those stories were kept from them. Sometimes their sober parents are still living rejection and fear because they had to get away from the grandparents—or were not allowed to get away from the grandparents. Sometimes they haven’t admitted to themselves what their parents did. It’s rare that dysfunctional families just magically appear one day.

I spent eight years in other programs before ACA, identifying with various people and behaviors, and learning many helpful things, but none of it made complete sense, offered the full answers, or opened the right doors until I found ACA.

I had been trying too hard to link everything to my dad’s alcoholism, while ignoring the toxic effect of the family dinner table, my mother’s rage, my pot addiction, my battles at work, and how I internalized those affects and passed them on as an adult in my marriages.

My Childhood

Dad was an alcoholic. Mom was a rageaholic. They had 6 kids. She hated his abusive behavior, but never fought with him; she yelled at us instead. He had money and a good job, but he gave mom an allowance that never quite covered the mortgage and the food. He kept his own income, savings, and spending separate from her account; she paid all the household bills from “allowance” he gave her. I and sometimes my siblings would be sent to the supermarket, with her hiding in the car, to buy food with checks that we knew would probably bounce. She hoped they would let “innocent” kids get away with it if the cart was full, and we were told to make sure the cart was full before we tried to check out. At first the store did let us get away with it, taking pity on us, trusting that mom would eventually make good on the check, but after a while they refused. They were more willing to keep and restock the full cart of food than accept her check.

We were pawns. At least I was; I was humiliated each time this happened, and then I’d go out to the car, and she’d yell at me again to “try harder”. Who was winning? The grocery store with a cart full of food they’d have to put back? My mom? I don’t know, but it left me feeling scorned and unworthy—exactly the way mom and dad had raised me to feel. They’d just found new people, new adults, to join them in this pile-on.

Sometimes mom and I would go to the bank because she’d missed the mortgage payment. The first couple of times, I would be sent in to “negotiate” with them; after that, they stopped allowing me in and said I’d have to get my mother (who was always hiding in the car). But she wouldn’t go in alone; she’d bring me with her, perhaps thinking they’d be nicer to her if she had a child with her.

I thought we were broke, even though dad had a professional career. We were always missing payments, so we must be broke, right? Mom had long since made me take over balancing her checkbook, so she wouldn’t have to look at it, and it was clear that we were broke. This was never openly discussed. I didn’t know why mom was so mad at dad. I just thought missing payments was normal.

I learned later that he cheated with and bought jewelry for his secretary. He had a fancy country club membership, and his name was always on the board by the door as an “overdue” member. Mom was embarrassed by this public display. I eventually learned that he cheated on these bills as well; club members are not allowed to work for the club, but dad had hired the club’s chief operating officer, and once every year or so, they would do a “quiet” exchange, where dad would submit a bill for his legal services that wiped out his debt.

I was the family scapegoat, picked on by Dad, and some of my siblings echoed his scorn. They made fun of me for wearing clothes that were too short or too old; we bought our clothes once a year at The House of Bargains, so when other kids made fun of me, I would be hurt, but not react, because we were broke, right? I was wearing what my mom could afford. But then my siblings would bring it up at the dinner table. “Why didn’t you stand up for yourself?” they’d ask. Dad would berate me for not fighting back or cutting these “bullies” down with wit and sarcasm. He said we were smarter than the other kids, by which he meant we should tear them down with mean and sarcastic insults. I didn’t like sarcasm or insults. I didn’t like being treated that way, so why would I treat others that way? I felt isolated from most of my family. They could all do it “right”, please dad, look good; why couldn’t I?

I didn’t see that I was making choices that were right for me, that I was choosing not to be mean. With the insights I learned later in ACA, I also realized that these incidents were less common than I thought. They were all I remembered, so I thought they were constant, but they weren’t. And I hadn’t been “wrong” or “inadequate”; in ACA, I learned that I had been being true to myself. But I didn’t see that while I was still at home.

Dad didn’t come home for dinner very often; usually he was drunk when he got home, and he would do anything from break things, to yell at us, to make us do things for him, or just pass out in front of the TV. But sometimes, he’d be home early, and I’d see him walk in the door and hold out his arms to hug me. My feet were always bare, because that’s how I lived. (I still do.) And I’d fall for it every time: I’d reach out to hug him back, surprised, and he’d step on my feet with his big fancy work shoes, smiling at me the whole time, and stand there on my feet. I’d glare back at him. I wouldn’t let him see that it hurt. I wouldn’t say anything. It was a staring contest. Sometimes he would add, “You’re not allowed to go barefoot. I’ve told you that before.” I’d think, ‘When did you tell me this? You’re hardly ever here. And why would I care what you think? It’s none of your business how I live.’ So we’d stare at each other until he moved on.

I was not allowed to have an opinion at the dinner table. Dad would say things that I either disagreed with politically, or knew were factually wrong, but if I disagreed, I’d get yelled at. “My house, my rules,” he’d say. Or “I know better than you,” or “You’re not old enough to have an opinion.”

Once, when I was young, I left my bicycle in the driveway, and he came home drunk and ran over it. I couldn’t believe he had just destroyed my bike. He said it was my fault for leaving it there (not his fault for not seeing it and veering off the driveway into the lawn). He refused to replace it, so I didn’t have a bike for the next couple of years. Years later, when I was on the Little League team, I had a bike, and that’s how I got to games. Dad offered to drive me and my brother home one day, and I forgot that I’d ridden my bike. I remembered later and asked him to take me back to get it. He said no. I walked back the next day to get it, and it was gone. I never saw that bike again.

My brothers were athletes, and I was not, so I was always the disappointment. I wore glasses from an early age; they did not. I was playing on the Little League team, where my brother was the star, and my father was the assistant coach (or maybe just a parent observer). Once I got hit hard in the face by a batted ball, and I cried, and he came out to yell at me: get up, it’s not a big deal. I’d been hit in my glasses, so they smashed into my face, which to me meant it was worse than just being hit by a ball; there were serious lines crushed into my face. But how would dad understand any of that? It never happened to him.

Mom would regularly freak out at home, yell at me or us for two or three days, maybe hit a little, then demand that I clean the house for her, balance her checkbook, and listen to her cry about dad, without ever telling me what she was mad about (and never telling him). When things calmed down, she would apologize, and I would always say it’s okay, really, it’s not a problem.

I had no idea I was lying. Anything to keep the peace. Anything to keep from having feelings.

I hated dad, but I pitied mom. She lived life as a victim and I thought I had to support her no matter what.

Perhaps the worst moments were when she would drive me to his favorite bar or his country club. Women weren’t allowed in the men’s lounge, so she’d send me in to get him out. He and his friends would laugh, and he’d say that she can come in herself if she wants to get me, but of course she wasn’t allowed in. He and his friends would make fun of her, but she wasn’t there, so I had to take it. I felt like it was all aimed at me, even though it wasn’t. I would stand there hating dad. I would go back out to tell her he wouldn’t come, and she’d send me back in to keep the argument going. I was a ping pong ball in their game, batted back and forth. I can still picture his sneer each time he’d send me back out to her. But I was also young, so I didn’t think I could refuse to play the game. (Many years later, in a conversation with a couple of my siblings, they told me that she used to do this with them as well, that she would take different kids at different times to go look for him in bars. I never knew that; I always thought it was just me.)

That was my life until the beginning of high school, when I was diagnosed with advanced scoliosis and put in a body cast for what turned out to be fifteen months. It was supposed to be six weeks in a brace, but immediately turned into nine months of a “curative” body cast, where my body was wrenched into a tight corrective posture for a month, then they’d take it off, measure the curvature, decide I wasn’t straight enough, and wrench it tighter for another month. They finally gave it up when it wasn’t getting any straighter, and did the surgery, inserting a Harrington rod and fusing my spine with bone chips. I spent the next four months in a welfare rehabilitation hospital 2 1/2 hours away, immobilized, the cast running from my knee to the top of my head, sharing a ward room with five other teenage boys. I was allowed a one-hour phone call each week, and I was filled with complaints and anger when I got to make that call. The staff would lift me onto a cart, roll me down the hall to a pay phone, and I would then vent at mom on the phone for an hour, always running out of time before getting through my list of complaints and requests. Most of my family would come down on Saturday for a few hours. Whatever feeling of abandonment I’d developed early on was massively reinforced during these months, yet I didn’t confront it or question it; I had been conditioned to be appreciative that they made the time to see me for a few hours a week.

When I finally got out of the rehab hospital, there was another four months in a mobile cast, from my waist to my chest, and that felt like freedom.

Dad always blamed the doctor for not catching the scoliosis earlier, and I bought his story for years. Decades later, I was a guest speaker at an AA meeting telling this story when I realized we had stopped going to the doctor every year because we couldn’t afford it, so the doctor hadn’t had a chance to catch it earlier. It wasn’t the doctor’s fault. It was dad’s.

Dad blamed me for the huge financial cost. He never acknowledged his part in that, for not having health insurance. He just said that I had really done a number on the family, and they were all suffering because of me. That didn’t stop him from quitting his job and going to law school while I was in the cast, though.

I missed two years of high school with that cast, then came back for my junior and senior years. All I did at that point was *everything*: I took Advanced Placement courses, became President of the Student Council and editor-in-chief of the school paper, editor of the yearbook, joined the math and chess teams, stayed late every day for various extracurricular clubs, organized activities for students, fell hard for three different teenage girls. I wanted to live. I wanted to do all those things I hadn’t done before. I came in second in my graduating class, having one course where I got an A-; the girl who beat me was a cheerleader who didn’t take a single Advanced Placement or challenging course, so she skated through with all As. I thought it was my fault for not doing better, not hers for taking the easy route.

I went to college. I got into every place I applied, perhaps partly because I had great test scores and high grades, but mostly because I missed two years in the body cast and wrote about that. At every interview for college, they referred to me as the boy in the cast, and sometimes mentioned the riot I had written about (when four of the fellow patients in my room beat up the other immobile bodycast kid while the nurses “magically” managed to not hear it or see my repeated pressing of the “Help” button). That kid was so broken that he had to be helicoptered out. I never gave myself credit for getting into top colleges; I figured they were just intrigued by the boy in the cast.

My Marriages

From college on, I was a daily pot smoker. For brief periods, I was also drinking once or twice a week, but my drug of choice was pot. Both my wives were heavy daily drinkers.

My first wife was a rageaholic, and I knew that behavior well. I thought she couldn’t get along in the world and needed someone like me. That was a bad idea. Rather than being good at being raged at, since I knew I had experience with it, I hated it (because I had experience with it!). I put myself into that situation and got more angry and withdrawn at being treated the way my mom had treated me. That first wife eventually divorced me. We had never been right for each other, but we had three great kids. We were together for seventeen years.

My second marriage, only a few months after the first, was to a woman who was desperately underwater financially, owing more money on her car and house than either one was worth. I had recently become a software engineering VP at a startup and I had money. I bought her out of all her debts; she and her eight-month old twins moved in with me. I could support my first wife and the new second family. My other kids were with us half- time. I doubled the size of my house so everyone could fit. I bailed her brother out of his debts. Eventually, years later, she tried to get me to give her mother $1500 a month, and I said no. We fought over it. I think that was the first time in my life that I stood up for myself and said no, at least in a marriage. (I had stood up to bosses before, usually creating chaos and resulting in a split.)

Sixteen years into that second marriage, I finally was unable to keep working in the software field, drowning my feelings, earning money just to support two households where I didn’t feel appreciated. I didn’t consciously realize how much I hated it; I just couldn’t do it. I had a mini-breakdown, stopped working, saw a therapist, who told me to stop the pot; I did, and it didn’t change anything. He didn’t believe I had stopped, since I didn’t magically get healthy and happy. Over the next year, the second wife spent all my savings; I eventually got angry and started smoking again. I wasn’t bringing in as much as I had before, now doing contract work, but I kept paying all the bills while she went back to work and saved most of her income. She never slowed down on her spending; I told her that if she could cut her credit card spending down to $5000/month, we’d make it, but she never dropped below $12,000. She asked me to add her to the deed on my house, and to my bank account, so she would feel “secure". Once my savings were gone, she divorced me. I never saw it coming. But now she was on the deed and on my bank account; everything was half hers, except her personal savings account. I broke down for real this time.

I got lucky: she was trying to kick me out of my house (that I had purchased on my own, remodeled, and expanded), and my therapist said nope, she can’t do that; she has a job, you don’t, she can’t kick you out, plus she’d already bought a new place and was just waiting for me to leave so she could sell “our" place. I came home that day and told her I wasn’t moving out. She was furious. She wanted me gone, out of her life, out of “her” house. I stuck with “nope”, you can’t make me leave. You can leave; you already have a new condo. I borrowed money from my brother and bought out her half of the house.

I was almost suicidal. I couldn’t get up. My daughter came up from D.C. to drive me to a hospital day program, 9-3 every day. They put me on the substance abuse track and sent me to AA. I realized in the hospital program that my wife had always been my dealer, not my friend: she gave me sex in exchange for money, jewelry, fancy meals, and vacations; when the money ran out, she didn’t care about me anymore. Perhaps she never had. Perhaps I was just a customer, and no longer relevant since I wasn’t “using” and didn’t have any more money to spend. She needed a new customer, one with money, and she soon found one.

AA

My very first day at AA was amazing. My daughter took me there. I identified with the people I met. I watched them get happy. I felt accepted. I was suddenly having feelings, having spent decades numbing my feelings, and I loved being allowed to have and express feelings. Those feelings were initially overwhelming. People in meetings recognized this and supported me. About eight weeks in, still crying some, doing three meetings a day, I asked when the feelings would end. Someone said soon. I said, “That’s not good enough.” He said, “Two more weeks.” That calmed me down. By the time two weeks had passed, I wasn’t counting; I just knew I could survive. My former brother-in-law came and sat with me for two days, reading Tolle’s The Power of Now out loud, and it suddenly made sense to me: I was making my own suffering, living in my head, in my stories. I wasn’t the dispassionate Watcher looking at my reactions; I was living them as if they were real.

They weren’t real. They were just complaints, attacks, surrenders, worries, fears. The real me, the unspoiled me, the place that had never been wounded, was still inside me. I knew how to find that person. I knew how to detach from the turmoil.

I got better.

I learned the serenity prayer: the serenity to change the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

But AA was also a lot of self-condemnation. We’re supposed to take responsibility for everything, no matter how small our part. Everything was our fault. We can’t heal ourselves; we need a magic god to guide us. We have all these defects of character!

And was AA the right place for me? My dad was a conservative bullying alcoholic; I was a barefoot pot smoking wannabe hippie. Did AA really apply to my story?

AA helped, but it did not explain how I’d become what I was. It was hard to find the healing I needed. Something was off, but I kept going.

AlAnon

A couple of years in, I found AlAnon, the recovery group for “friends and families of alcoholics”, and for a while I thought that was the solution. I found a Double Winners group, where everyone is both in AlAnon and has done the Steps in AA, and that felt like home. Instead of talking about my dad, we were now talking about my mom’s history and impact:

She presented an idyllic life to friends and neighbors, keeping all the inside turmoil and abuse secret.
She never told anyone dad was an alcoholic, though I think many of them knew it.
She made us join her in her victimhood, and help her, and drive around looking for dad in bars, while keeping this secret from everyone else.
She took out her rage at the “unfairness” of it all on us, rather than ever talk to dad about it.
If she caught us (or perhaps just me) complaining in public, she would grab us, take us home, and hit us once we were behind closed doors.
She would never consider leaving dad, even when he forced her into a home for elderly disabled patients, even when his secretary moved in, because she “couldn’t do that” to us kids.

I realized in AlAnon that my life was more than just my being a pot addict: my life had been determined in childhood by the family dysfunction, the alcoholism, the secrets, the rages, by my mom more than my dad. Dad wasn’t home that often; mom was always there. And he mostly didn’t engage with us when he was home, but she transferred her anger at him to us (mostly to me and my youngest sister).

That gave me a new way to look at the world.

I learned many useful things in AlAnon.

The biggest and most famous is the three Cs: I didn’t Cause it, I can’t Cure it, and I can’t Control it. That was written about alcoholism, about the alcoholic in our lives, but I learned pretty quickly that it applies to other things as well: if a sibling treats me poorly, or a boss, or one of my kids is creating havoc, it’s not on me to change them. I didn’t cause it, I can’t fix it. Stop trying to fix the other person. Detach!

I learned other lessons.

Don’t take things personally. Chances are, whatever the other person is doing is not about me. They’re not really focused on me, even if they’re talking to me. Their noise is not about me—it’s about them, and things that have happened or are happening to them. Don’t do something to make it about me. Detach.

Forgiveness is not a favor we give the other person. We do it for ourselves, to find freedom, to let go, to get them out of the rent-free space in our head.

Don’t get mad, don’t get even. Get over it.

Fine is not a feeling. Sometimes people in AlAnon say they feel fine, and I did that at first, and it was gently called out: fine is not a feeling. It’s not? It’s not an answer to the question? I was given some acronyms. When I said I was fine, did I mean I was Frustrated, Insecure, Numb, and Empty? Because I wasn’t expressing any true internal feelings. Or was I Feeling Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional? Or holding Feelings Inside Not Expressed? “Fine” dances around the question. It’s hiding. There’s no requirement that you answer the question; you can choose not to answer it, or you can use it truthfully, or you can make up a lie, but “fine” does not describe a feeling.

After decades of not feeling, and then early years in AA being overwhelmed by feelings, it was hard to start acknowledging and allowing feelings.

One day I found myself saying that I would be at peace if things changed, if everything was okay. A fellow Double Winner told me to reverse it: if I am at peace, then everything automatically changes: things become okay because I’m no longer trying to change them. That was extraordinary, and it still works to this day.

The challenge for me in AlAnon was still that everything is about alcohol, even if the focus is on you, rather than the alcoholic. It’s a much broader program and its lessons apply to all aspects of life, but that kind of thinking is discouraged in AlAnon: you’re supposed to keep the focus on alcohol, on the alcoholics in your life (even if they’re long dead), on your love and acceptance for them while also separating from them. You’re not supposed to broaden the lessons to things outside of the alcoholic. I was often stopped if I tried to relate the AlAnon work to non-alcoholic people and concerns, or to broaden the conversations into other forms of trauma and abuse. It’s always alcohol first, even though the message is that you can only change yourself, not the alcoholic(s). It’s a narrow world view.

Codependents Anonymous

I then added CODA to my work, and the Patterns and Characteristics of Codependency were amazing to read. My first week, I felt that more than 90% of them applied to me. At my one year anniversary celebration, I read the list out loud again, and less than half of them still applied.

One of the dramatic things I noticed in CODA is that some people, after a bit of time, maybe a few months, maybe longer, start talking about themselves and their own feelings. Other people, years in, kept saying that if only their partner would come with them to a CODA meeting, everything would be okay; or if only their partner, their caregiver, their parents, or their friends or siblings, would change, everything would be okay. Perhaps because I watched other people change in CODA, perhaps because of my experience in AlAnon, I could see this for what it was: if you keep complaining about the other person, you’re not getting better. You’re codependent. You’re not focusing on yourself. You’re blaming them, wanting them to fix you. You’re not at peace because you are choosing to stay in conflict, wanting others to change.

It doesn’t work that way.

I watched friends change the way they worked with each other, stop blaming each other, start working on themselves. I saw real change in many people. And I saw some people stuck in the same swamp of complaints and blame.

ACA

And then five years ago I went to an ACA meeting in Northampton, MA. The first thing that hit me was the serenity prayer: serenity to accept the PEOPLE I cannot change, courage to change the ONE I can; and wisdom to know that ONE is me. That is actually the point of the serenity prayer in all 12 step programs, but it’s never said that way; you have to figure it out yourself, and it always feels weird to talk about the things you have to accept or change, while in the back of your mind translating “things” to “people”.

At my first meeting, I read the LAUNDRY LIST. I felt like I’d found home.

We became isolated and afraid of people and authority figures.
We became approval seekers and lost our identity in the process.
We are frightened by angry people and any personal criticism.
We either become alcoholics, marry them or both, or find another compulsive personality such as a workaholic to fulfill our sick abandonment needs.
We live life from the viewpoint of victims and are attracted by that weakness in our love and friendship relationships.
We have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, and it is easier for us to be concerned with others rather than ourselves; this enables us not to look too closely at our own faults.
We get guilt feelings when we stand up for ourselves instead of giving in to others.
We became addicted to excitement.
We confuse love and pity and tend to “love” people we can “pity” and “rescue.”
We have “stuffed” our feelings from our traumatic childhoods and have lost the ability to feel or express our feelings because it hurts so much (Denial).
We judge ourselves harshly and have a very low sense of self-esteem.
We are dependent personalities who are terrified of abandonment and will do anything to hold on to a relationship in order not to experience painful abandonment feelings, which we received from living with sick people who were never there emotionally for us.
Alcoholism is a family disease; we became para-alcoholics and took on the characteristics of that disease even though we did not pick up the drink.
Para-alcoholics are reactors rather than actors.

Many of these traits are touched on in CODA, but often without answers. So many things about my life came into focus, or changed my perspective, as I worked the ACA program, starting with these traits. I pursued people who I thought valued me, AND needed to be rescued. I was then hurt when they would minimize me, tell me I should just accept things, that we don’t need to talk about disagreements, that they get more support from friends than from me, that my opinions are not relevant to them. I realized how much I had valued being validated in AA and AlAnon, and failed to see the little games I played to pretend to agree, to conform. I realized that I pushed both wives away by expecting, and demanding, that they accept me; I had not learned to be responsible for my own boundaries, my own self-worth. My second wife kept saying that this marriage will last forever (despite my being her third husband), and I kept thinking it would not; and of course, my defensiveness made that forecast come true.

I had spent years as a boss, usually managing most of the company employees, and always sticking up for them; I lost jobs over this. CEOs who I thought did not understand, who had 5-10 employees while I had 70-100, would keep telling me how I *should* manage my people, and I would get more and more protective of my teams. I wanted my boss to like me, to value me, but I tried to earn that by succeeding with my teams, not by understanding my bosses. I did not compromise. I did not try to make the CEOs understand; I *knew* I was doing it right, even if they did not, and so of course there would be chaos and conflict. Often I left. I thought I’d been taking care of my people, but how did it help them when I left? ACA showed me how these behaviors were all in response to my lack of support at home; I would no longer “obey”, and of course that had consequences.

I taught my kids “You’re Not The Boss Of Me”, and it’s a phrase we all us to this day: YNTBOM, we’ll say or text casually. I thought I was helping them, showing them they could be independent, they did not have to listen to others, but that was my trauma keeping them from finding a middle path.

All of these behaviors turned out to be from ME. They’re not about my pot addiction, or my mom’s false stories and rages, or my wives needing to be rescued, or my kids needing to be protected. It’s about what happened to me as a child, and how I was still reacting to that conditioning.

The Laundry List is not something I can magically fix or remove. But I work on noticing when those behaviors are driving my actions. Awareness is key for me. It’s also an incredibly powerful list because it talks about traits, becoming aware of them, and pausing before reacting. These are not “defects of character”; there’s no scorn, no need to ask a magic deity to fix me. These are things I learned, and things that *I* can see and control.

It was in ACA that I learned that all of the family childhood stuff had specific impacts on me. I had been primed to be crushed in adult relationships; it was my job to rescue people, wasn’t it? Hadn’t my mother taught me that? It was my job to hide my feelings; hadn’t my father taught me that? Wasn’t I now doing everything “right”, by fixing people, by hiding myself? If only my parents were still around, they’d be so proud of me for doing what they’d taught me to do!

So it was shocking, and far more painful, when adult friends, employers, siblings, and employees would say things that triggered my childhood feelings of rejection; or worse, they would laugh at me, tell me I was wrong, tell me I had no right to an opinion. That adult scorn felt more true and had more impact than my buried childhood memories. After all, my parents were gone; they couldn’t hurt me anymore. But now it was fellow adults saying these things, so that must mean it’s true, right?

I let the hurts mean more because they came from adults in my life, not from my parents. I felt as if people should know better than to keep poking those old wounds. (I dislike the word “should”, and object when people tell me what I should do.) But I’ve learned that those people are living in their own worlds, with their own pasts, and often their own traumas. I’m almost irrelevant to them, and they aren’t thinking about the impact of their words on me. They’re just doing their thing, from their own place of hurt. I can take it personally, if I want to, but that doesn’t help me. Or them.

That scorn hurts more when it’s coming from adults in my adult life, because I can’t wave it away as false statements from the past. In ACA, I had the opportunity to list those many triggers and behaviors, from childhood through to the current day; the things my parents did, my siblings did, bosses did, I did to my wives and children. (There are fourteen worksheets in the ACA steps, plus a detailed family tree with labels, and hundreds of questions to answer. It never feels long or unnecessary; it feels deep and important and empowering.)

I thought the family tree would be sort of silly; I already knew my family history. But when it was laid out in a diagram, with labels next to all these people, it took on new meaning, and new impact. I know what happened to my dad when he was a child, and when he got married. I know why he had such difficulty with his dad and stepmom; I know why we don’t know our true grandfather, and about my mom’s family of alcoholics, particularly her parents and her brother. I saw the labels I gave my siblings, and I can now see that they treat me how they treat me because of what they learned, and what they needed to do and perhaps still need to do to protect themselves, and to please our parents (or their memories of our parents), and how they circle the wagons to create a certain life for themselves so they don’t have to look at this stuff. And I know this is not about me, even when they blame, attack, or criticize me. It’s about them.

A lot of things I had buried came up. I got to finally see the impact of my grandparents on my parents, and realize that many of the hurts I had suffered from my siblings were because they had no choice: they were just going along, keeping the peace. It wasn’t about me. I got to see how all this past trauma had led to my two marriages, both 17-year relationships. I raised five kids, but I got into those marriages because I thought these women needed to be rescued. Who but me would be willing to do it?

I discussed some of these events with my adult children. I had many days when an ACA meeting would trigger my feelings of guilt and shame; and then I got to work on those feelings, identified the root cause, took ownership for my behavior, and changed that behavior. Not all at once, and not always correctly, but my eyes were now open: I was seeing not just what had been done to me, and what I had done to others, but how I could change. I didn’t have to blame people or hide from people; I could look at this insanely long list of past wrongs done to me, and the way I had hidden, and the ways I was continuing those behaviors, and say to myself:

“I’m not a bad person. I’ve done some things wrong. I’ve put myself in some dangerous and inappropriate situations. I’ve tried to fix people who didn’t want to be fixed. I’ve blamed people for their behavior even though I’m the one who went in with my eyes wide open. I take what people say to me personally, even though they’re carrying their own history and trauma. None of that history determines who I will be in the future, what I will do tomorrow, what I will do in the next moment. Those choices are up to me, IF my eyes are open.”

I still freeze in conflict. I don’t have a fight or flight response; I only have a freeze reaction. I still see my dad in many confrontations, and the occasional (more rare now) need to rescue people like I rescued my mom. I don’t know what to look for in a woman who doesn’t need to be rescued. But what I can do today is, if not prevent the automatic reaction, at least notice it as soon as possible and then walk away from it.

I’ve raised five adult kids. I have a lot of wonderful nieces and nephews. I’ve never lived alone. I thought it would be hard; I thought it would be terrible, and lonely. It’s not. It’s relaxing. I take care of me. No one is mad at me. I’ve gotten better at hearing my kids, seeing them and their partners for who they are, giving them space. I still think YNTBOM is good advice, but it’s not a command, and I use it more often as a joke than an instruction.

I know my life is not about my past addiction, my recovery, my dad’s alcoholism, my mom’s false front to the world, my siblings’ defensive behaviors, my need to rescue people, my fear of authority, my freeze response. Those things are all reactions to how I was shamed and laughed at and abandoned as a child. My life today is about how I react to those triggers.

I haven’t been able to forgive my parents. I can’t say they did the best they could, even though they were so unaware, so full of blame and scorn and rage; but I can acknowledge that they were the product of their own dysfunctional families, their unwillingness to look at themselves, and their refusal to grow, to change, to take responsibility. It’s not forgiveness. It might not even be acceptance. But what it does for me, is it tells me everything they did to me was not about me. It was about them. I’m free of that.

That freedom is its own form of healing.