The question is not why the addiction, but why the pain. – Dr. Gabor Matte
Based on my research and the research of other shame researchers, I believe that there is a profound difference between shame and guilt. I believe that guilt is adaptive and helpful—it’s holding something we’ve done or failed to do up against our values and feeling psychological discomfort. I define shame as the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging—something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection. I don’t believe shame is helpful or productive. In fact, I think shame is much more likely to be the source of destructive, hurtful behavior than the solution or cure. I think the fear of disconnection can make us dangerous. – Brene Brown
There is a difference between shame and guilt. Guilt means I made a mistake. Shame means I am a mistake. Shame is an immensely painful feeling that we are all alone, unworthy of love and belonging. There are incidents in our history that have been hidden from view because they are so painful. The specific incident or series of incidents are not what is most damaging to our lives, it’s the secrecy that does it. – Linda Bloom
What is addiction, really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood … We discover that we are no longer compelled to follow the former pattern of disappointment, suppression of pain, and depression, since we now have another possibility of dealing with disappointment: namely, experiencing the pain. In this way we at last gain access to our earlier experiences—to the parts of ourselves and our fate that were previously hidden from us….For the soul is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath. – Alice Miller
Overview
I can’t fix what’s wrong on the inside with something from the outside.
It’s my belief and experience that the Twelve Steps and AA Fellowship offer me an opportunity to deal with both my addiction and the toxic shame that has fueled it. I can transform my toxic shame that sees me as an unworthy mistake into a healthy guilt that sees with clarity my mistakes and learns how to make things right and thus experience ‘a new freedom and a new happiness’(BB p.83). I can discover how my past, as troubled and destructive as it might be , can become my greatest asset to serve others.(BB p.124) This process of making things right uses timeless spiritual principles to guide and enable me to become an instrument expressing God’s goodness in the unique context and contours of my life. And this simple idea of expressing His goodness in the realities of each day is my mission … it’s why I’m here. And there is never a circumstance where His goodness cannot be expressed if I choose to cooperate and follow the harmonies prescribed in ‘practicing these principles in all our affairs’. I can experience this fundamental shift from a life controlled by my playing ‘little god’ judgements and condemnation as a unworthy mistake into accepting my humanity and imperfections (my not God) as an invitation that relies on God to use me and my mistakes to His greater good. The Big Book(BB) on page 70 expresses it this way:
“Our real purpose is to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God and the people about us.”
My hope is this article will stimulate you to look at how the steps and fellowship can help you heal not just from your addiction but from an underlying sense of worthlessness that might seem unwilling to release itself from its grip on your life even as you practice sobriety one day at a time. I will also suggest some non- AA resources that you can explore more deeply in the sections of the website entitled ‘Healing Our Dr. Jekyll / Mr. Hyde Divided Selves’ and ‘Emotional Sobriety’.
Commonality Of Hiding And Aloneness In My Shame & Alcoholism
This article relates my own experience, strength and hope not some generic principles that can be applied universally to everyone. However, in my discussions with many others in AA and other Twelve Step Fellowships; I have come to see shame as a foundational root many of us share. I believe my toxic shame blocks me from my connection with myself, others and God. You can think of toxic shame as fitting into what the Big Book(BB) describes this way on page 64:
“A strenuous effort to face, and to be rid of, the things in ourselves which had been blocking us. Our liquor was but a symptom. So we had to get down to causes and conditions.”
It’s also absolutely true that my alcoholism and drug addiction greatly intensified my sense of isolation and an experience of unworthiness as I habitually relived ‘the pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization’(BB p.30) of saying I would not drink today and doing what I was so clear I would not do and then believing the lie I will stay sober in the ceaseless illusion of my tomorrows.
There is a secrecy and hiddenness to both shame and alcoholism. The Big Book describes it this way on p.73:
More than most people, the alcoholic leads a double life. He is very much the actor. To the outer world he presents his stage character. This is the one he likes his fellows to see. He wants to enjoy a certain reputation, but knows in his heart he doesn’t deserve it. The inconsistency is made worse by the things he does on his sprees. Coming to his senses, he is revolted at certain episodes he vaguely remembers. These memories are a nightmare. He trembles to think someone might have observed him. As fast as he can, he pushes these memories far inside himself. He hopes they will never see the light of day. He is under constant fear and tension – that makes for more drinking.
For me, long before I took my first drink, there was a restless, irritable and discontent voice within me relentlessly reminding me of how far I was from the ‘shoulds’ I demanded of myself to get what I thought I needed in terms of belonging, love and acceptance. I was also leading a life that was dedicated to hiding my shame … to creating an appearance on the outside of control that denied the reality of all the anxiety and chaos within. I was in denial and suppression of what I felt in my inside world as I attempted to focus all my energies on managing and creating outcomes on the outside. I was trying to deny rather than deal with my emotions and feared their volatility and lack of conformance to my desire for them to be the pleasant ones I wanted. There was a fundamental disconnect between what I presented to you on the outside and what I experienced on my inside. Dr. Allen Berger, a psychologist with over 50 years of AA sober time, describes the basis of my toxic shame this way in his book the ‘12 Essential Insights for Emotional Sobriety’:
“You see, the anxiety that we won’t be loved, that we won’t be accepted, that we won’t belong is so disturbing and intolerable that we must find a solution to it.”
Dr. Berger goes on to describe the tyranny and bondage to an idealized false self this disturbance creates that alcohol and drugs initially seemed to solve. The origins of my double mindedness about my alcoholism is a profound experience of the paradox of alcohol as both solution and problem.
For me, this imagining of who ‘I should be’ began at a very young age without any conscious consent or agreement. It was my unconscious way to cope with my desire to feel loved and secure. I thought I was required to stop feeling what I was feeling and meet the expectations I thought were necessary to be loved and accepted. Any desire to experience my life and emotions with honesty, authenticity and integrity were subservient and derailed by the contortions I believed necessary to feel this secure attachment to being loved. Here’s the way Dr. Berger describes this:
“We imagined an idealized self, better than who we were, that would always feel secure, always be liked, always feel loved, and always feel welcomed. The process of adopting this idealized self resulted in us rejecting our true self, our real self. We actualized a concept of who we should be…The idealized self is our blueprint of a personal fantasy of how we should be, how we should look, how we should behave, how we should think and feel. It also includes the various self-imposed rules and goals we believe we should live up to. These should demands take over our lives. (A should demand is any one of thousands of things we tell ourselves are necessary for us to do in order to be deserving of love, acceptance, and belonging.)”
Commonality of Powerlessness Over Shame And Powerlessness Over Alcohol – 1st Step
For me, I experienced a Step 1 bottom with both my alcoholism and subsequently with my shame. In both cases, the ‘self’ that created the problem was not capable of solving the problem. Joe McQueen in his book ‘The Steps We Took’ describes it this way:
“Self-will cannot overcome self-will. Our great trouble is that we are trying to make ourselves better. We can’t really do that. We have to have God’s help. We have to quit playing God because it hasn’t worked.”
As I put the plug in the jug, I had a deeper awareness of my shame and unworthiness. I became more conscious of it when the mask of changing how I felt by using alcohol was removed. I also began to see how my desire to ‘manage better’ was built upon a delusion of control that placed me in the center of the universe with no room or empty space left for God. I was desperate to manufacture outcomes in my life that would satisfy the ‘should’ demands and temporarily relieve me from an experience of feeling the shame and unworthiness buried and hidden deeply within me. When the tyranny of these incessant demands to manage better became too great; I had escaped experiencing these feelings of shame by drinking and using. I was trying to protect myself from experiencing the pain of my shame by managing better and when that failed I impulsively was using alcohol and drugs to deny and mask my feelings of worthlessness and shame. The delusion of control is described beautifully in the book, Recovery the Sacred Art, by Rami Shapiro. Here is a quote that captures some of his insight from his own recovery:
“People addicted to control—which means almost all of us—use drink, drugs, food, work, and other substances and actions to cover over and hide the fact that control is a delusion. Workaholics are driven by the delusion that control is possible, and the illusion that working 24/ 7 can ensure them that control. Their compulsivity covers over the reality of life’s fundamental uncontrollability. This is true of all addicts, regardless of the substance or behavior to which they are addicted. The genius of the Twelve Steps is not that it re-covers reality with the blanket of delusion but that it continually uncovers reality and forces the practitioner to face reality and her inability to control reality time after time. It is only by facing the truth of life’s uncontrollable nature, and hence our powerlessness over it, that we can shift our lives from the futile quest for control to the potentially rich quest for learning to live without control.
Rami goes on to say:
Recognizing life’s fundamental unmanageability leads to freedom if we realize that our inability to control life is not the same as having no way to meaningfully navigate it. Just because I can’t control the sea doesn’t mean I can’t learn how to swim in it. Just because I can’t manage the wind doesn’t mean I can’t tap into its power. Just because I can’t manage my life doesn’t mean I can’t live it justly and with compassion. Manageability and control are beyond me, but living wisely and well are not.
I was trying to manage my feelings of restless, irritable and discontent by creating a delusion of my control. Ernest Kurtz in his outstanding history of AA , ‘Not God’, describes it in the paragraph below. I think you can easily see how this desire to actualize an imaginary idealized self of my own making is cut from the same cloth of trying to control and manage our need for love, acceptance and belonging.
The drinking alcoholic demanded a control that was inappropriate and so impossible. This demand for control involved a claim to the absolute; it strove to reach beyond the limits of human finiteness. The alcoholic attempted to achieve by the drinking of alcohol what reality would give only by living as fully human. Reality does not grant to humans absolute control over moods and feelings; emotions are meant to be responses to reality, and mainly to realities outside the self. Absolute control over emotion, in the sense of absolutely autonomous self-determination of moods and feelings, involved a claim to unlimitedness, and so a claim beyond any human. This striving demand for such absolute control led, with all the perverse irony characteristic to its very opposite—absolute dependence upon a most finite and tenuous limited creature, spiritous liquids. The First Step of the A.A. program pointed out to the alcoholic this frustrating irony. His refusal to accept dependence upon ultimate reality—the refusal implicit in the claim to inordinate control—had led to a perverted dependency upon the unreal.
The Insanity In My Shame & How Steps 2 and 3 Can Help My Self Talk As I Gain Awareness Of Toxic Shame
The story I tell myself matters and I should pay attention to it. When my story is filled with the judgement of self hate and condemnation, it is a very good indicator that I am in the trance of toxic shame and unworthiness. If I want to change my life; I need to change my story. I need to remind myself that I am more than just this part that may feel unworthy at this moment. When I get so identified and blended with this unworthy part; I am distorting reality and have moved into the lie and lack of consciousness that can only see from the perspective of this unworthy part of me. Rather than condemning this part that is, in my case, very young and unable to defend itself; I can learn to offer it love, care and protection. I can learn to talk to this part with kindness and compassion as I seek to understand and comfort it. The 11th step St. Francis Prayer comes to mind with its clarity to ‘seek to comfort; not be comforted’ and ‘seek to understand; not be understood’.(Twelve & Twelve p.99). These are ways of responding not just to the ‘other’ I experience externally but to the ‘other’ that lives within me as I attempt, however imperfectly, to follow the suggestion the prayer offers of being an instrument to this unsuspected inner resource of Grace within me.
There is a Grapevine article which I love that describes this ‘unsuspected inner resource’ (BB p.567) in the quote below. Dan H. captures my experience beautifully when he writes in the February 2016 Grapevine:
It is easy enough to give alcoholism a personality: it’s cunning, baffling and powerful. It is patient, doesn’t discriminate, and it wants to kill me. It’s tied up in a tangle of knots with my selfishness, pride and fear. So it seems reasonable to personify the other side, the “place” within from which emanates love, honesty, compassion, sanity and a willingness to help others. And it seems reasonable to appeal to this place—to state a willingness to live my life under its guidance. I call this appeal “prayer.”
I may feel powerless to be kind and loving to this part of me that I hate and can’t tolerate. But I can practice steps 2 and 3 to wake up the ‘Power greater than myself’ that can act and speak with kindness and compassionate. I need to stop reinforcing the false idealized version of myself that inflates itself into a little god judging me as unlovable and unacceptable. The steps help me discover an ‘unsuspected inner resource’ (BB. Appendix 2 Spiritual Experience) that can offer curiosity, compassion, caring, connection, clarity, courage, creativity and calm to the part of me that feels so unworthy. As I learn to rely and trust this ‘unsuspected inner resource’ I have an experience of God doing for me what I can’t do for myself … both with my alcoholism and my shame. I can begin to learn how to love what I find unworthy in me and to heal what I once hated within me by learning to first accept it as real and then love this part until it learns to love itself. Doesn’t that sound familiar to what the fellowship does?
How can I really authentically express acceptance and love to others if I am so unwilling to offer this to myself … to the parts of me I find most objectionable and so easy to hate and condemn? Am I beginning to see how ‘the bondage of self’ in the 3rd step prayer (BB p.63) is expressing itself with the darkness of its lies and judgements that condemn and hate me? And how the Light of compassion and kindness I offer myself to in this 3rd step prayer(BB p.63) can overcome this darkness both on the inside and the outside?
Doesn’t the reality of my life experience show me the insanity and futility of believing so blindly in my unworthiness? The insanity of that the ‘old idea’ (BB p.58) that I can somehow earn love, acceptance, belonging and worth by pretending to be something I’m not when this program is experientially showing me how to receive these as gifts offered by an unearned Grace by first accepting who I am. Am I beginning to connect with how I have used alcohol to try to manage my shame … that as I surrender my delusion of control and my powerlessness over alcohol; I am now faced with dealing with this shame. And that dealing with this reality of my shame is an inside job that requires my cooperation with this ‘unsuspected inner resource’ that already loves and accepts me as I am and can teach me how to love what I judge to be unworthy and weak. And that no real, sustainable change is possible without first accepting how powerless I am to manage and control that part of me I hate for its weakness and unworthiness. And as I see this unworthiness as the fuel to my impulsive out of proportion reactions to the realities in my life ; I realize the truth in what the Big Book describes as insanity apply not just to my alcoholism but to the shame and worthlessness that I thought I was solving with my substance of choice. From BB page 37:
Whatever the precise definition of the word may be, we call this plain insanity. How can such a lack of proportion, of the ability to think straight, be called anything else?
Fellowship – We Can Love You Until You Learn To Love Yourself
I have found the fellowship and community of the ‘WE’of AA (i.e. the first word of the first step) to be incredibly non-judgmental and accepting. Like so many others, the foundations of the isolation in my addiction and shame can be transformed into bridges that unite me to others through the experience of belonging, love and acceptance so freely offered me as I walked into the rooms. They were able in their shares to express the real me much more clearly in their shares than I could express myself … they tell me my story with words that I can’t quite put together yet. There is a collective Life Force in an AA meeting and especially a home group where I experienced a profound authentic sense of belonging. And ironically, this belonging relied not of my believing in all the ‘shoulds’ of my imaginary false self but when I accepted the realities of my alcoholism, my shame, my experience of ceaseless restless , irritable and discontent … these very realities I had spent my life trying to escape were the foundations to this undeniable belonging I felt with others who shared the truth of this same experience in their own lives. Of course , context and circumstance often differ greatly but the underlying current of their experience gave me a sense of authentic belonging I had been chasing for decades with alcohol and drugs.
A Grapevine article simply entitled ‘Love’ written by C.C. In September 1988 describes it this way:
“The role played by love in our program emerged even more clearly when I was told, “Let us love you until you can learn to love yourself” and “Live in our hearts and pay no rent.” How well I knew then that I belonged in AA, that I was at last home, that I would never again be alone, that I would, as our book tells us, make lifelong friends in an atmosphere where there is always love.”
Reframing and Redirecting – ‘Move Toward’ Not ‘Move Away’ From What Disturbs Me
My disturbances bave a lot to teach me if I’m ready to listen and seek to understand them. I love this ancient wisdom from the Tao Te Ching:
“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear”
A key learning for me is that I am more than my disturbance. My disturbance may involve a part of me but there are other parts of me that are not disturbed. An further that much of what is disturbing me is wrapped up in my desire to care and protect this imaginary false self I’m trying to create from the ‘little god’ delusion of false power and control. This will be discussed more in the Part 2 and Part 3 articles that will follow.
My recovery challenges me to differentiate between the toxic shame which tells me ‘you are and never will be good enough’ TO a new experience that I can ‘seek to understand’ my self judgement and fear (i.e. false evidence appearing real) about myself and uncover, discover and discard ‘old ideas’ with the help of an ‘unsuspected inner resource’. I’m learning to transform this fear into a realization that the program and fellowship can help me ‘face everything and recover’.