[Note from Jill Karson: Tian Dayton specializes in addiction, trauma, and PTSD. She is a nationally renowned speaker and a prolific writer; her books include Emotional Sobriety, Trauma and Addiction, Relationship Trauma Repair Therapist Guide, and many others. I'm happy to report that Dayton plans to share her library of videos and other resources here at ACEs Connection. Look for them coming soon to the Books! Educational DVDs! Documentaries! and the Practicing Resilience for Self-Care & Healing community pages.]
Many of us in the field think that we came here because we need therapy 40 hours a week. This was true for me. Once I found help for being a child of addiction (parental addiction being a top risk factor for ACE’s), I felt I had come home, well to a new home that is.
When I was a teenager I wanted to write a book and call it, “A Sense of Loss”. My family lost its way. We stopped talking about what really mattered. When subjects came up that hit too close to the bone we exploded, withdrew or both. We couldn’t sit through talking about our own feelings much less listen to each other. Emotions that hurt too much got denied, laughed off, made about Dad’s drinking rather than our own hurt or our own behavior or we just projected them onto each other splatting them like a breakfast tossed across the room on a wall.
What we could not do is sit with a feeling long enough to translate it into words and talk about it. To elevate it to a conscious level so we could actually take a look at it.
We just couldn’t.
When I got a taste of the freedom that came from naming and talking about feelings I couldn’t get enough. And once I discovered experiential therapy and psychodrama I saw a path lit up not only for me, but for the thousands of others I have worked with these past three decades.
There is life after ACEs. Heck there is life during ACEs and we all know that.
The important thing is to open our own eyes to how and where we’ve been hurt, to grieve those losses, to mobilize our own strengths and use them to move forward. This is not to say that our ACEs disappear, only that they will no longer be in the driver’s seat.
Make no mistake about it, this is a long term commitment, it’s an action plan that involves many pieces. For example, you can have all the insights in the world but if you’re eating junk, not exercising and smoking, you probably won’t get much better. Or you can be perfectly fit and eat well but if you’re denying pain or making it about other people, places and things rather than owning what is inside of you and looking at it, you’ll probably stay stuck.
Recovery is a kind of middle path and that path will include at one point or another many of the following activities:
- Therapy (group and one to one)
- Twelve Step Programs
- Exercise
- Good Nutrition
- Meditation/Spiritual Nourishment
- Work
- Play
- Relationships
- Creative Hobbies/Interests
- Learning/Reading/Information Gathering
Becoming curious about what makes you tick, about what happened in your family of origin, about what goes on within you and inside of others, is the beginning of taking back your life.
You Will Likely Stay Stuck if You:
- Use drugs, alcohol, food, sex, cigarettes etc to self medicate
- Do not give your body the nutrition, rest and sleep that you need
- Isolate and withdraw into yourself
- Project your feelings outward and make them about everything but yourself
It’s important to take responsibility for your own life, it gives you a sense of personal control and it’s positive. You may have very legitimate gripes and reasons to blame others for where you are, but just blaming and griping will only get you more of what you already have. While it’s important to understand what happened to you, to feel angry and hurt and even to want revenge, those are inner territories to pass through, not to live in. And it’s important to know things don’t get solved once and for all so that you’ll never feel bad again. What you want to develop is a tool box for managing your emotions when they hit. You want to develop emotional literacy so you can talk about your feelings rather than act them out. You want to get a health body that you feel good about walking around the world in, it’s your calling card, your dwelling place, your friend. You want to find some creative interests that fill you up inside. You need some good friends and hopefully some meaningful, long term relationships, some people to love and feel loved by. You want a home. A good home.
So get started; how far you get is up to you.
When I found such a thing as therapy some 50 years ago now, and recovery some 35 years ago, I knew a good thing when I saw it and I climbed onboard. You can, too.
Don’t try to do this alone. I recommend finding a 12-step program that speaks to you. Try a few out; they tend to be regional so, say, Al-Anon is great in some places, ACoA in others, OA, DA or CODA. You will find like-minded people to travel this journey with.
Remember: Information is just the beginning; you will need to walk the walk to make the changes necessary to recover from the effects of ACEs. Recover! You Deserve It!
I am very happy to be a contributor to this site. The areas of addiction, trauma and PTSD have been my areas of research for nearly 40 years. I wrote The ACoA Trauma Syndrome and Emotional Sobriety so that anyone who grew up with addiction and relational trauma, the way I did, could come to understand what I came to understand. That when you’re an adult with a childhood of addiction/abuse/neglect, your pain from childhood is getting triggered and recreated in adulthood ….it’s part of a post traumatic stress reaction.
But there’s such a thing as post traumatic growth, too. As we say in Al-Anon, “you will come to know a new freedom and a new happiness.”
I have listed the AA Promises below; they apply to all 12-step programs. Those of us who have had ACEs in our lives need and deserve recovery just as much as any addict, we need to find emotional sobriety.
Welcome to recovery.
1. If we are painstaking about this phase of our development, we will be amazed before we are half way through.
2. We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness.
3. We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.
4. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. 5. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others.
6. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear.
7. We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows.
8. Self-seeking will slip away.
9. Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change.
10. Fear of people and of economic insecurity will leave us.
11. We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.
12. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.
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