Why The Confusion?

Feeling uncertain, disoriented, agitated, unprotected, and just plain stumped can be very good for your spiritual recovery. Children of alcoholics often feel this way, especially when we are making progress with our greatest difficulties.

Our most painful times in recovery often entail the shock of recognition, as protective masks are stripped from us. We experience afresh the panic, the suppressed rage, and the sense of helplessness which compelled us as children to adapt to the illness of our families. And these feelings themselves inspire yet more fear, threatening our sometimes precarious equilibrium. Most terrifying of all, they can make us feel stuck in our past.

The roots of our fear, rage, and heartache run deep in the earliest layers of our souls' experience. In recovery, as we begin to rebuild mentally, spiritually, and emotionally, and our perceptions open up to past and present reality, it hurts — but we find ourselves changing in ways that were unthinkable before. We grow in freedom and in faith. The distorted self-image which we formed in the alcoholic environment (perhaps the greatest "authority figure" we will ever have to face) begins to be challenged daily.

Owning up to the unmanageable past, to the neglect and damage that we have undergone, commits us to a process of grieving and letting go. It is painful, at first, to admit how far our lives have been beyond our control, outside of what seems fair or right. It may seem that it would be easier not to feel at all. We may blame ourselves for our powerlessness, pain, and uncertainty — holding on to our old hope that, if we just "try hard enough," we will finally be acknowledged and taken care of. We may try to impose upon ourselves the cruel and impossible demand that our every move ought now to be a clear step forward, tolerating no further error or uncertainty, choking off our capacity to learn and to love ourselves.

Whether we welcome it or not, we all begin to surprise ourselves, stubbornly refusing to conform with what we supposedly "should" need or "should" feel. After a while, we do become more comfortable in our emergence as emotional, occasionally somewhat difficult individuals, and we can take considerable satisfaction in our increasing integrity. Still, we may often find our emotional landscape in glorious disarray. This is all quite normal for us, and contact with one another can offer crucial reassurance at these times. It takes courage to reach out, as we are sometimes apt to feel that we have nothing to share but our hurt and our shame; it is tempting to slide back into the closet or the bottle or whatever dark place we came from. But please do pick up the telephone or come to a meeting and spread the 'fertilizer' around. It often turns out that the deeper our immediate difficulty, the more COA's we can connect with.

Spiritual recovery for children of alcoholics is rarely a smooth, gracefully assured process; it brings us face to face with sickening circumstances. While contending with them and with their effects on us as children, the feelings and attitudes most rigidly prohibited to us in the past may be the most disorienting ones to experience today. We were continually forced to withhold our strongest feelings and perceptions; we began to disown them, and the result has been confusion, isolation, self-blame and self-doubt. Now, as a step toward regaining our own identities, we must cease to deny the horrors which we are leaving behind us. Recovery may not be comfortable or controllable, but it is yours to keep and to share, it is undeniably real, and you are certainly not alone.

NYC 1984