when everything you’ve always wanted to become, everything you actually are, and everything you know you’ll never be, all slam into each other with the deadly force of three high-speed trains. It’s the night of your reckoning, the terrifying moment when your mask falls away and you’re forced to see what’s actually been festering underneath it all these years. You finally see who you really are, instead of who you’ve always pretended to be.”
PET PEEVES, FINGER POINTING, AND YOUR “SHADOW”
Self-awareness also involves learning about the “shadow” side of your nature, those unconscious aspects of self that influence behaviors and beliefs, yet remain mostly hidden. The late Dr. W. Brugh Joy, author of Avalanche: Heretical Reflections on the Dark and the Light, a book about excavating those hidden aspects, your shadow material, conducted Dark Side Conferences across the United States. One exercise in the meetings involved “the pointing finger,” an examination of what pointing your finger at someone or something reveals about your own judgment or defensiveness, your true self. (As we say in recovery, if you point a finger there are three fingers pointing back at you.)
“Pet peeves are wonderful ways to catch the shadow because the pet peeve is actually the key to something about you,” said Dr. Joy.
This is a delicious exercise: Criticize an individual, work on expressing everything—just unleash all of it—no tiptoeing around, no modulating the energy—just get in touch with these forces and get them out, let them out fully.
Then begins the process of re-weaving the forces back into your own nature. You point your finger, but then you begin to see that there is a pattern to it, that it has shown up in your life from time to time as well, this very same thing. Not the same person doing the exact same thing, but you begin to read the pattern. Is it abandonment, or is it a rejection mystery, is it martyrdom? There are various kinds of patterns that you’ll see. Then you trace it back as far as you can go in your own life, where other circumstances had exactly the same kind of patterning to it.
(For more about Lesson #1, including the results of several research studies, visit our website, www.Recover2Live.com.)
LESSON #1: PARTING SHOT
Stop what you’re doing right now (reading this book) and ask yourself the following simple questions. Some will be more relevant to you than others. All should make you think—and that’s exactly the idea:
• Do you like what you see when you look in the mirror? Do you smile at yourself?
• What are your two best qualities?
• What are two of your personality traits you don’t like?
• Would you want to be your friend?
There are no right or wrong answers, of course. Just your answers. Socrates’ advice resonates down through the centuries: Know thyself. Introspective questions like these help you do just that.
ACCEPT PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY
The willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life is the source from which self-respect springs.
—JOAN DIDION
People in recovery from addictions must take responsibility for their own actions and eventual wellness. Imagine how much more harmonious and healthy all human interactions would be if everyone stopped playing the blame game and the role of victim.
MEET JACK GRISHAM. As Jack’s father lay dying in a San Diego naval hospital following a heart attack, he looked up into his son’s eyes and mumbled, “I love you.” It was only the second time in twenty-three-year-old Jack’s life that he had ever heard his father say those words.
Not knowing how to respond, Jack replied with the only thing he could think of that might make his father happy: “I’ll go home and mow the lawn.”
The next day his father died, and Jack immediately bagged up all of his father’s clothing and other belongings and threw them into Dumpsters.
Not long afterward, Jack’s mother filed a lawsuit alleging that her husband had died prematurely from the stress induced by the demands of his shipping industry job. The employer fired back with legal documents arguing that the elder Grisham’s stress was due entirely to his son Jack, whose outrageous troublemaking had constantly weighed on Grisham.
There could be no doubt that Jack had caused his parents considerable grief. Jack’s mother affirmed that when she confessed to him years later, “Not a night went by that I wasn’t praying you wouldn’t get killed.”
Alone among the family’s five children, Jack had been arrested—taken into custody at least two dozen times, in fact—on charges ranging from vandalism and assault, to throwing a brick through a cop car window and incitement to riot. As the lead singer for a notorious West Coast punk rock band, Jack defiantly called himself an anarchist. He considered violence, drug use, and debauchery badges of honor. He painted his face pasty white, wore cowboy boots with sharpened spurs, and generally acted like a maniac during his band’s punk rock performances. He intentionally cultivated an aura of glowering menace.
Through all of the years of senseless mayhem, including having their home shot at and his car firebombed, Jack’s parents had stood by him, if only passively. They never kicked him out of the house. To this day, Jack marvels at that, though part of the reason may have been his father’s paralyzing alcoholism, which rendered the family dysfunctional on many different levels.
Within a year of his father’s death, Jack began trying to get sober from his drug and alcohol dependencies. He had simply grown tired of being out of control, and he had a girlfriend nursing a serious drug problem of her own. He wanted to get sober with her. Given the rampant drug abuse within the music circles he traveled, getting sober was a radical thing to do. Instead of thumbing his nose at government and other institutions of society, as his song lyrics so frequently did, he was now rejecting a central lifestyle tenet of the subculture within which he had become a role model. His friends thought he had either gone crazy or was pulling yet another prank on everyone.
His sobriety came in fits and starts. His wife, the girl he had gotten sober with, relapsed and left him, but he continued going to 12-Step meetings. Jack finally broke free of drugs and alcohol for good on January 8, 1989. He has been sober ever since.
“For me, when I got sober, it was like a tidal wave had come and I was swept along with it,” he explained to me several decades into his recovery.
I’m not really seeing what’s happening, and the tidal wave dropped me off, and as the water recedes, I start to see things. Like, I’m in my twenties and living with my mother. The water sucks back some more. I’ve got a daughter I haven’t been seeing. It sucks back some more. I am being blamed for my father’s death. It keeps receding, more and more, and I am able to see all of the damage my behavior has caused. It was like a coroner’s blanket being pulled back slowly from over a frightening mess. I had started to wake up, and my head began to clear.
Though some people tried to convince Jack it wasn’t his fault his father had died at age fifty-five, Jack wasn’t buying it. He said:
