One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are,
instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to
fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without
bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what
lies at the root of true harmony.
Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
I was around nine
when Andy decided to wake at me 4 am to walk the pre-dawn streets of our gated
village in Manila. We did it for about a week. The purpose: to walk through our world wide awake while everyone else was
asleep. To do what kids shouldn't: gain secret access to what adults controlled.
We had not known this version of our world: the unrelenting heat and smog turned cool and fresh,
and the grinding traffic subdued to almost silent.
I
say almost silent because alongside the muffled traffic, there was this
other sound, like a tin can dragging behind us.
My feeling on
those walks was strong, almost cosmic: two souls meeting again after
lifetimes of knowing each other. I felt a shared understanding deep in my bones, pre-verbal,
the way the rules of culture enter our bodies implicitly without our conscious
knowing. We made every turn down each street as one mind without uttering a
word. The darkness didn’t scare me because we were together.
After we got home one morning, Andy put on the record player, turning the volume down to barely
audible, and instructed me to listen. As I pressed my ear to the speaker, my
stomach lurched.
Billy, don't be a hero, don't be a fool with your life
Billy, don't be a hero, come back and make me
your wife
And as Billy started to go she said, “keep your
pretty head low”
Billy, don't be a hero, come back to me
When the song was
over, I said I didn’t understand the words. But it wasn’t true. My body had
absorbed what my brain refused to interpret. Someone I loved was going to leave.
Possibly die. I asked Andy to explain the lyrics, not for clarity’s sake but
because I hoped he might tell me a different story, a different ending.
“It’s about a boy who goes off to war and
dies,” Andy said with his signature matter-of-factness already in place. But his
eyes were not matter of fact. And what I saw there frightened me. I began to
cry.
And then I was flooded
with rage, like a screaming baby whose parents won’t come. Would Andy really choose
war just to be a hero? Would he really abandon us – the
people who loved him – for certain death?
And then I felt
terror for my future self. Was there no safety in loving someone if they could
make their own unfathomable decisions and leave me behind?
I wonder now if little
Andy believed war was a boy’s fate. Was he testing this reality with me? Was he
hoping I would tell him a different ending?
As a girl, I had
different fears about my fate. Far too young, I knew about the girlfriends of the fathers: secretaries in Thailand or Burma
or Bangladesh, or even at home in Manila: not-so-secret women who were younger,
more sexually available, prettier, or more whatever it was that the wives were somehow
not. The information arrived matter of factly, like conscription. Girls were
required by cultural law to become mothers or mistresses -- two mutually-exclusive categories. Before you became a mother, you might enjoy a brief moment of
being desired as a girlfriend. If you were really good at sex, you might entice a man into loving
you. Once you became a wife and mother, you and love had a shelf life: only until
someone younger, more sexually
available, prettier, less demanding, or whatever it was you were not
arrived on
the scene. Abandonment was pre-destined.
As I struggled to understand my place in the frightening world I was growing up into, the conundrum remained
that since my basic worth seemed to be as a sexual object, what could a man's
love really mean anyway? Who or what did he, in fact, love?
The question I failed to ask myself at the time (and continue to fail to ask myself) is, how can I love a man, or anyone, who cannot love me? The whole of me, that is, not just my parts.
By age sixteen, having gathered all the proof
I needed around me – an abandoned mother, unrelenting sexist billboards, television
shows, movies, ads, and a constant stream of misogynist jokes as empty and ubiquitous as junk
food – I forged my belief system in the fires of immanent erasure. In a world
where boys grew into men who were encouraged to exploit women in obvious and subtle ways, I would never be
safe. I lived in fear.
Of the three
options fear offers – Flight, Fight, or Freeze -- Andy chose Flight and I
chose Freeze. He learned to fly and I learned to submit.
After Andy died, his
wife announced that she was done with anxiety. She had spent her whole life
worrying that terrible things were going to happen, yet all her worrying had
not prevented her mother, her first boyfriend, her husband (my brother), and her brother
from dying too young, too soon, and tragically, all of them.
Everything I have
ever feared has also come to pass. Andy died. And I have been abandoned, often
in ways so specific to my worst fears that I have started to develop a God
complex. Seeing my nightmares unfold with such uncanny precision can only mean
one thing: I let this happen. I am the author of this horror movie.
What I am coming
to understand now is that Andy and I didn’t walk two distinct and
divergent paths of war and abandonment. We were both abandoned at a young age by
a parent who had also been abandoned at young age, likely because her parents had
also been abandoned at a young age. I'm talking about emotional abandonment here: the failure to see, cherish, and unconditionally love a child.
And we both went to
war. Along with Flight and Freeze, we also chose Fight. We mostly fought against our selves. The rage we felt
for all our unmet needs,
for generations of unmet needs that lived on inside us, eventually
turned
inward, gnawing dark, ragged holes, tar pits of bottomless pain. To fill these holes, Andy and I developed a menu of pain relievers. For instance, we both binged on junk food with the dedication of
Olympic addicts. Whenever we could, we got high on salt and fat and
sugar until we crashed. As soon as we recovered, we started again. Our
bodies ballooned at the rate of our blooming loneliness,
burying our most vulnerable selves deep inside.
Not surprisingly, our unrelenting hunger could not be fed by food of any kind, junk
or otherwise. That's the nature of addiction. It seeks to minimize pain and maximize pleasure but it never feels full. That's why the fix remains a constant
lure. It delivers the short-term promise of an overflowing plate, brilliantly frosting the long-term bloat with so much saccharine we don't register how we are wearing down our organs and self esteem, often until it's too late.
I spent my childhood living inside a body that felt like an ill-fitting Halloween costume, a body that both represented and hid my lack of self worth, my fear of abandonment, and my pernicious loneliness. I had buried myself alive.
As an adult, I finally gave up junk food when I realized it was no longer delivering me from my pain; it only pounded on more pain. As I shed weight, however, I gained the sexual attention I had feared, confirming my childhood belief that I was valued as a body first, a person a distant second. To escape this old/new pain, I found a new addiction. I quietly slipped upstairs into my mind, leaving my body behind.
The definition of an addiction is anything we use to band-aid anxiety, depression, pain. From cookies to TV to sex, it's not the substance itself or the amount that defines our addiction; it's the reasons for use, and whether use becomes abuse that disconnects us from, and causes harm to, ourselves and others. Addictions are the result of distortions about our worth and loveability, which are the result of childhood experiences of being missed by our significant caregivers, from misattunement to frank abuse.
Addictions, however,
are not evil. They are survival strategies, signs that we want to live.
We just don't know how to live with pain because we don't know that pain
is integral to love, and as such something to embrace, not avoid. Our culture
tells us to avoid pain at all cost, which is why we feel flawed when we feel pain. And
we grab at whatever we can to drown it out.
There is a difference between clean pain and dirty pain, though. Clean pain is the raw experience of feeling our hearts break due to loss and a variety of human hurts. Dirty pain comes from adding layers of self judgment, shame, and other ways we are mean to ourselves on top. Addictions are part of the dirty-pain pattern. They keep us from feeling clean pain, which connects us to love.
In December of 2016, something came in to my life that put the breaks on my own addictions. It held up a mirror of love and healing so profound and hopeful, I have been moved to write this blog. I think it might be saving my life.
The thing I'm talking about is, Love Warrior. As the title suggests, this memoir is about a woman who faces her addictions and does the painful, almost impossible work of rooting out conditional, anemic love that culture has served up her whole life. With nothing but her courage to guide her, she works hard to stay put in her pain through terrifying uncertainty until she can feel the bud of unconditional love inside her, the love she knows she must nurture in order to survive. When I finished the last page, I flipped it over to start again. This book could not have arrived at a better time.
The author, Glennon Doyle Melton, writes that we attempt to escape our “hot loneliness” in life through pressing “easy
buttons.” Her buttons were bulimia, alcohol, and sexual promiscuity in her
youth. Her promiscuity, like mine, was rooted in a need to control what she
feared would control her: culture’s
“rules” about how women must present in order to be loved, serving everyone
else’s needs at the expense of her own. Doyle Melton’s husband’s “easy
buttons” were porn and affairs. As a sober adult, Doyle Melton sought escape from her loneliness through
a life of the mind to the exclusion of her body. Her husband sought escape from his loneliness through
a hyper-sexualized focus on his body, and the bodies of other women, to the exclusion of his heart and mind. Both of these escapes cost them connection. Within their respective easy-button bunkers, Doyle Melton and her husband
were unable to share themselves deeply with each other. In his world, she was a fish out of water; in her world, he was a drowning rat, both
of them gulping for the wrong sustenance.
In my 20s, my sustenance was seduction. Because I believed intimacy would never take root, seduction itself became the fix. And because the fix delivers an instant and delicious pain-relieving high, it seduces us into getting the next fix by any means necessary. We resort to lying, hiding, blaming, whatever it takes to get the fix and stop the pain, often resulting in our inability to register the harm we cause others in the name of meeting our need.
I said seductive things to people I could not substantiate, or acted in ways that belied my true feelings. I barely knew my true feelings, having buried them deeply away from harm. I pretended at love when I didn't know how to love. I just wanted to elicit love and I did. But once I had love, I jumped ship for the next shiny fix. Why would I abandon ship when love was right there? Because I didn't know how to recognize love, much less receive love, much less give love. I had been conditioned to believe love was fleeting, conditional, and body focused. As I saw others around me succeed in love, I came to believe I must not deserve love. All I felt was my pain and all I wanted was the fix to solve it.
I had no idea I could do that for myself.
In my 30s and 40s, I experienced my own seduction tactics aimed at me. I felt how much harm I had caused in my 20s. The Seducer tells lies and then gaslights the victim, making them feel responsible for the Seducer's behaviour as a way to reduce the Seducer's shame. The Seducer, however, holds only a murky idea of what they've done because the engine running their machine is bottomless need, not malicious intent. But that's what makes the Seducer so dangerous. They dress up their fear of abandonment as professions of love, and they want to mean it, but the story they tell is dressed to kill. And nothing about it is love.
I wonder if
seduction underpins all easy buttons.
Andy’s seduction
of speed began with cars. He soon graduated to jet skis, then snowmobiles. After
that he learned to fly. Soon, flying was no longer enough. He had to build his
own plane. Then he had to learn aerobatics. Three weeks after his plane crashed,
my father said: “There was no stopping him.” It was a relief to hear
because up to that point I think I believed I could have stopped him, or
someone else could have. It was like watching an addict take a deep dive into a
pool of coke. Even his loved ones standing on the edge couldn’t stop him.
Was there anything that could have stopped him?
Perhaps Andy did
aerobatics at dangerous speeds to prove his worth. But to whom? We already loved him.
Or, perhaps was he simply trying to outrun his
loneliness.
I
think of
loneliness like a tin can at the end of a string tied to our ankles.
Naturally,
the can clatters away behind us the moment we flee. Instead of
realizing we are the source of the noise, we drown it out with addictions –
food, sex, alcohol, sleep – not one related to hearing
the obvious: that the only way to stop the noise of loneliness is to stop
running.
But Andy didn't stop. It’s
possible Andy didn’t know or trust how much love surrounded him, or how
to digest the love offered him. Childhood pain has that effect: we desperately fill our plate to obscure our loneliness, blinding ourselves to the full plate already in
front of us. We see only the white
porcelain underneath. Empty. Cold. Waiting to be filled. Always waiting
to be
filled.
The more I learn about addiction, the more I understand that it's not an outlier affliction. Most of us have an addiction of some type and stripe. Until we are willing to wake up in our present lives and process the pain of our childhoods, knowing as adults we have the power to heal, we are doomed to repeat our past and reach for addictions instead. We will spend our lives fighting ourselves, as we flee or freeze out love.
My addiction to seducing protection against abandonment has not stopped it from showing up again
and again, as matter of factly as the cliché of sexy secretaries. Every time I
see my worth starting and ending with my sexual availability in the eyes of
someone I love, I remove a little more of myself and send out “my representative,” as Doyle Melton calls her. This “Liz” is a pathological caregiver, addicted to fulfilling the
needs of others: a prayer against abandonment that always leads to the same result. I abandon myself.
I hide.
As a child, I hid in my body. As an adult, I hide in my mind. I hide what makes me most lovable: my whole body's truth, my past pains and my strivings for health, my failures to connect and my deepest longing to do just that. I hide the whole mess of me, utterly worthy of love. When I hide some of me, I hide no less than all of me, my MindBodySoul. Hiding not only means am I not seen (if I hide my self respect, it's harder for someone else to respect me), it also means I can't see. For instance, I can't see when someone tries to fills their plate by emptying mine.
Hiding has
been my survival strategy since probably ever: both instinctual and deliberate, and as
necessary as breathing.
And hiding has been the source of my betrayal, a living death almost impossible to bear.
On the seven-year anniversary of Andy's death, I find myself wondering if Andy hadn't hid his pain in junk food and speed, would he still be with us? If he had faced his childhood pain and healed his ragged wound, would he have chosen to moderate his speed to ensure he would come home that night to his family? Would he have felt how cherished he was and, therefore, not taken his life, or the lives of those he loved, for granted? I don't know. It's painful to even write those thoughts down.
My own addiction to seductions-without-substance has led me to cut off my body and ignore my soul to chase fairy-tale endings. As with any drug, in my addicted state my MindBodySoul goes offline, leaving me vulnerable to the blind harm of someone else's addictions. When properly attuned, the MindBodySoul can be an incredibly accurate barometer for
truth (and bullshit). Without the whole system humming, the attuning instrument is crippled. Like someone who has lost an
eye, I lose my depth perception.
The
fastest way to stop addiction is to stop. That part is easy.
But the
road to health is not. It involves living through the sickening pain of
withdrawal. That's the warrior part of becoming a Love Warrior. Andy did not have that chance. But I do. It's what I'm living now. And I'm here to tell you, it's as bad as they say. Every day, I want to reopen the door I've slammed on my addictions. I want one more chance to hear seduction tell me a different ending. And every day I sweat it out as I stay the course, knowing all seduction will ever tell me is lies. Stories without substance.
In Love Warrior, when Doyle Melton's husband discloses all the affairs he’s had over the course of their years-long marriage, hoping his wife might still find a way to love him, she slams her own door.
Next, she grabs at every thing she can to escape her pain. Instead of reaching for her stand-by addictions of alcohol, drugs, and sex, she ricochets
between bed-bound depression and righteous rage. The former are easy buttons. The latter are the soul's expression that something is wrong, that something has to change.
The betrayal is so big, she doesn't know how to unpack it. When did this betrayal start? With her husband's infidelities months after their wedding, or with her own hiding so much longer ago? Was it culture that betrayed her by making her feel unworthy as girl and woman, cutting her off from her own body? Or was it culture that marinated her husband in porn from an early age, along with the notion that it was his birthright to help himself to his wife's body at will, and if she didn't comply he had a right to fill his plate elsewhere? Yes, all of it. The betrayal lives in culture and is enacted in people. Especially hurt and traumatized people desperately seeking a salve. As the saying goes, "Hurt people hurt people."
For Doyle Melton, the pain will not yield to a fix this time. It has cracked her open to a truth she can no longer ignore. She caused untold pain to her family before sobering up from booze and drugs. At her lowest point, her parents asked her if she even loved them. To her the question is shocking: of course she loves them! But the addiction was bigger than her, so how she behaved didn't look like love at all.
She sees now that she and her husband have utterly lost themselves to addiction. So she chooses healing instead. She chooses connection to herself, and eventually they each choose connection to each other.
But before she knows that's even possible, Doyle Melton first settles
into the raw experience of her searing pain because this time she has nowhere else to go.
Another word for this could be rehab. In a yoga class (her way of reconnecting with her body), she has an epiphany: the
only thing she can do, the bravest thing she can do, is “stay on
her mat” when the pain hits. This is the training of the Love Warrior.
Doyle Melton gets so serious about feeling her pain that she does
not allow herself the sweet relief of distraction: she denies herself the
escape of writing her blog (I'm not there yet), or asking friends for partisan ears (I'm not there yet). Instead, she sits on her mat and lets every last cell in her
body fill with the pain of disappointment, betrayal, and loss, along with the shame
and regret of knowing she has also been both victim and victimizer. She
sits there while the burn rampages through her body. This is not an intellectual
exercise. It’s primal. It’s pre-verbal. It’s a reunion with her most
vulnerable, most whole self.
Why
would anyone
choose to stay with searing pain, you ask? Because that’s the only way
through hiding and addiction -- to face it, to accept it, and to transform it. And the only person who can do that is the person in pain.
Doyle Melton soon learns
that the longer she stays on her mat, the more the pain metabolizes into something else, something nourishing, something her body can process. As she gives herself space to feel what she has warded off all her life, she realizes it's not only survivable, but it's healing to mourn one's losses, to face the traumas that have shaped us. She calls this process "unbecoming." She peels off layers of culture that distorted her sense of self and rebuilds her self from the inside out, with the rock-solid knowledge of her basic worth. She does no less than build her own personal culture, one that won't tolerate any form of not being seen or cherished.
I, too, am in the process of unbecoming. Like Doyle Melton, I know I have to first undo everything that has misshaped me so that I can become the whole person I was meant to be. Having watched helplessly from my hiding place as my addictions and their attendant betrayals unraveled me, I know hiding doesn't protect me in the end. So I am coming out to meet the pain.
I didn't know my heart could break
into so many pieces, for so long, and so deeply that my soul's bruising
has made it unrecognizable. Every morning I wake up to unspeakable loss, to heart-stopping betrayals, and to the deep disappointment that I survived the night. A number of friends have fed me a variety of
painkillers by the dozen because apparently emotional pain registers in
the same place as physical pain in our brain. It sure feels physical, as
if the bruising travels from my soul through every cell in my bones,
organs, muscles, and all the way to the surface of my skin and back
again. I have cried every day for months and every day I wonder how someone who hates drinking water could produce so much.
None of my easy buttons work anymore.
Even if I could get one to work, I know now that every time I press an easy button, I stand to lose what I hold most
precious. And what I hold most precious is my self respect, my ability to set and honour my
boundaries. At almost 50, I have finally learned that I'm allowed to have boundaries, and that this deep honouring of myself is the gift I have to offer friends, family, lovers. My boundaries are not a rejection of someone else's needs; they make me a more loving, compassionate person. I have finally learned that someone who loves all of me will want to protect my boundaries, too, as I wish to honour theirs. And when I'm in the presence of this kind of love, my boundaries become doors and windows.
Precious to me is my worthiness of unconditional love, the kind that stays put
through pain, through struggle, through imperfection, through time,
through
disappointment, through fear, through shame, through loss.
Precious to me is the ability to hold myself steady when
the pain hits, and to stay steady when the person who was holding my
hand a moment ago has
let go.
Precious to me is my courage to honour my truth and to
behave ethically towards myself and others even when it spells my own
loss.
Precious to me is my body. I want to learn to love my body again, to invite it back into the fold of my mind and soul, to understand, as Doyle Melton comes to understand, that the body is a conduit for love and wisdom.
Precious to me is my courage to grieve. If I could reduce this blog down to one quote it would be this: "Grief is love's souvenir. It's our proof that we once loved. It's the receipt we wave in the air that says to the world: Look! Love was once mine. I loved well. Here is my proof that I paid the price." (Glennon Doyle Melton, Love Warrior)
I can't make love show up or stay. But I can focus on what is within my power to heal. I am here. In excruciating pain. So why not become a warrior? Why not do the work?
Why not unhide my wholeness - my MindBodySoul - the only wholeness that can stop seduction's deceptions in its tracks. The only wholeness that can turn
me around by the shoulders to see what's causing all that racket and walk me back towards my loneliness.
Why would I want to go towards my loneliness? If you saw the movie Inside Out, you
understand how integral sadness is to our well being because it magnetizes others to support and love us.
Likewise, the loneliness is integral to
waking us up to our addictions. It's like our inner child pulling on our pant leg crying, "What about me? Love me! Love me!" Loneliness leads us back inside to see where we are abandoning ourselves.
I will never untie loneliness from my ankle because
if I can
hear the sound of a tin can, it must mean I'm running. The clatter is a reminder
to stop, turn around, and walk back towards my myself. Without the clatter to ground me, I might disappear into a cloud of distraction, another addiction, and disappear.
Besides, profound pain has a way of peeling away the layers of
self-deception and self-protection until the raw bud at the centre is finally
exposed: tender, vulnerable, precious, worthy, and lovable. This bud, the
Buddhists believe, can never come to harm because it's the core of a person's basic
goodness: irrefutable, indestructible, eternal.
My
only goal for
2017 is to stay on my mat, tin can at my side, feeling my pain in every
cell of
my body. I'm learning that the only way to stay on my mat is to do what Doyle Melton did, and what a dear friend of mine also suggested: focus on Just the Next Thing. Get out of bed. Drink coffee. Walk Shy. Go to work. Let in the love my friends and family send every day. Only staying on my mat
will keep me close to my MindBodySoul, and build my strength to stay put unconditionally for myself (and eventually for someone else). Only MindBodySoul can teach me to act ethically, with integrity, care,
clarity, and love towards myself and others. Staying on my mat is
the most profound act of love I can think of right now.
Until I metabolize my pain, I will only see the world and others as an endless dining hall of empty
plates. The only promise addiction can ever fulfill is broken self-respect, broken relationships, and the heartbreaking-but-inevitable result of hurting others along the way.
I won't spoil Love Warrior for you because it's a memoir well worth reading. But I will say
her husband impresses the hell out of me. Not because he's honest,
courageous, a feminist, and everything that's the stuff of fiction. He
impresses me because he's a flawed, broken man, a product of culture
like the rest of us. But he doesn't keep returning to his easy buttons
to solve his pain. He finds the courage to say no to the parts of
culture (and his childhood trauma) that harm him, his wife, his daughters. He works through his
own addictions to find the boy who once wanted genuine, loving, mutually
respectful connection and grows himself up to become that man. Even when Doyle Melton tells him she might no longer love him, he keeps showing up to love her and his children. He leaves groceries at their door, takes the kids to their various medical and dental appointments, buys them presents for their friends' birthday parties, etc. To atone for using women's bodies to soothe his anxieties and trauma, he volunteers at a women's shelter. What impresses me is he does the work. The work of healing requires enormous courage and endurance because it's a pain like no other.
Doyle Melton recognizes for the first time that what her husband is offering is not the usual "transactional" love that gives to get. He's offering love as service. What he learns to give is unconditional love. Love that sees and honours and cherishes. And it's this love that heals them both.
As I close Love Warrior after the second reading, I think about Andy, about how hard he fought to stay connected to his wife and his sons, even as he reached for another cookie, or pushed the speed limit of his airplane: his tin can. He may not have known he was in pain, or that he used speed to cover it over. I'll never know what Andy felt, but I don't believe he meant to disappear.
These days, disappearing feels like the only thing I want to do. But I won't. Instead, I am training to become a Love Warrior. To fight for my life, my heart, my body, my mind, my soul. I'm doing it because as a human being, I was born to bond with another. I want loving connection. But as a woman conditioned in a culture that devalues me in almost every part of my life, I am also conditioned to mistake addiction for love and to expect transactional love instead of unconditional love.
It
is my deepest
wish that in the not-too-distant future I wake myself up in the pre-dawn
darkness to walk the cool streets of
my own neighbourhood, accompanied by the sweet sound of my loneliness,
my most honest and loyal friend. I can't wait to trust my instincts for
which street to take next, sensing
that despite the dark, I am not alone. I want to feel that I am here, alive in my MindBodySoul, and I
am safe because my precious self always transcends addiction, betrayal, and anything else that is not love. I want to remember that I am love. I want to feel that no matter where
I have walked in this neighbourhood, in this town, in this world, I will
eventually end up somewhere I can call home.
(Note: For any
woman (or man) who’s had the maddening experience of feeling dismissed when trying
to articulate the ways patriarchal culture has shaped and harmed them, Love Warrior
is the book for you. Even
my own therapist dismissed my complaints about about how culture undermined my self respect, my self worth. She insisted I was projecting my
family-of-origin pain onto culture. As if the two are mutually
exclusive! As if there could be
some other source that shaped my mother's belief, and my belief,
along with many women I know, that our worth lies primarily in our
sexual availability; or shaped the beliefs of the men in my life that
women should be available on tap, usable within the scope of culture's moral
compass, which does not value women. Doyle
Melton validates the profound and unmistakable harm our misogynistic
culture
causes women and men. And she does so
with clarity and compassion for everyone.)
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