“Conflict!” Hedy Schleifer said happily, rubbing her hands together. “A chance for self-knowledge and to get closer to my partner!”

I attended a Hedy and Yumi workshop years ago but still remember the joy and hope and anticipation in her eyes.

Conflict is hard for me because no matter what the person is specifically saying to me, when I sense anger, I have trouble hearing the content of their sentences over the sentences that begin automatically to speak themselves in my mind. The theme of them is that I deserve poor treatment. These sentences are so hard on me.

[Larger image of What I Hear During Conflict]

My head knows that those automatic sentences aren’t true, or are true very rarely. But my heart believes they are true always and deeply, without question.

What I have to do is become aware that I am thinking automatically and counter or replace those bitter sentences with strong sentences that I know are true. The theme of these strong sentences is that I deserve fair and respectful treatment from strangers and acquaintances,  and good and kind treatment from people close to me.

[Larger image of What I Want to Think During Conflict]

I am getting better at becoming aware of thinking bitter thoughts and I am becoming better at identifying and supporting myself with my strong thoughts.

“Do you want to be right or do you want to be close?”

I heard that sentence at a different workshop, also years ago. Some people engage in conflict with me to get their one-up needs met by attempting to put me one-down and in the wrong. Some people engage in conflict with me to overcome a frustrating distance between us. I am getting better at discerning – or even asking directly about – the other person’s motivation when initiating conflict.

In the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind, paranoid schizophrenia takes John Nash and his loved ones through hell. He learns to manage the disorder, however, and in the final scene he is shown walking. The three “individuals” who plague him through hallucinations are walking with him. He acknowledges them but does not interact with them. They all co-travel, but he does not allow their presence or, previously, their words, to have power over him.

In order to grow closer to self and possibly others during conflict, I have wondered if Hedy’s approach – “I welcome conflict as a way to grow closer to self and others” – and John Nash’s approach – “I’ve got thoughts already there that have to be managed” – might need to co-travel.

I don’t remember much about the days before I drove myself to a support group meeting but I do remember vowing I was determined to be happy before I turned 55.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I chunk my abstinence from alcohol and my continuing recovery from moderate alcohol use disorder, according to the DSM-5, by date and time:

• December 28, 2012: Beginning of the absolutely most torturous days and weeks and months I had ever lived in 53 years on the planet
• December 30, 2012: Two days abstinent on my 54th birthday
• First weeks: hell
• First 30 days: a thousand nights of hell
• First 13 months: hell
• December 28, 2013: one year abstinent in hell
• December 30, 2013: turned 55 in hell
• Months 13-16: a different kind of hell
• Month 16: free myself from the hell of silence; still resident of different kind of hell
• Month 17: July 4th weekend, 2014, a woman friend from my old life visited and reminded me of who I might still be
• Month 18: still not happy
• Month 19 1/2 – August 14, 2014: Shaken by death of Robin Williams. Knew it was time to say my story was about more than the substance.
• Month 19 1/2 – August 15, 2014: Swam down deep and got to the essence of my sorrow. Drew chalk art on my sidewalk after. Wrote what I found first here. Wrote what I found next here.
• Month 19 3/4 – Asked my friends to help my lonely little self and they did
• Month 20 1/2 – Wrote today’s post the day after coloring with crayons for the first time in a long, long time
• Month 21: to be celebrated on September 28, 2014
• December 28, 2014: Expect to be abstinent two years in neither heaven nor hell, but in reality
• December 30, 2014: Expect to turn 56 happy (off by a year – not so bad)

I can see only one more dark piece to write. Then I think I will have cornered it sufficiently to pare out the brown spots from this bruised peach of a life – or at least enough of them – to live deep, suck out sweetness and spit out poison, and be sturdily present for the paradoxical seed-and-pit at the essence of the rest of my lovely little life.

Down, down, down I swim, with arms as strong as I’ve been able to make them, pushing aside dark, body-sized lobes of tissue to reach my deepest understanding of the fundamental truth of how life works, and when I stretch my fingertips for the blackest essence, this is what I touch: She is going to be mad.

. . . . .

How tragically, miserably prosaic. I had expected to hear Cat Stevens singing, “Love is all.”

. . . . .

When living captive to rage, one is required to engage, so one tans the rind of one’s awareness to leather to shield against the natural instincts to fight, flee or freeze. Or to attack. Or to feel. Or to think.

One defends.

One lives acutely, electrically observant, intimately learning the captor’s facial expressions, body posture, arm and leg movements, choice of clothing, all for clues of how bad what’s to come – and it will inevitably come – will be. But wait. The captor’s being nice. Maybe it’s over? Maybe the captor does love one after all?

One learns the captor’s body and being better than one learns one’s own.

One becomes the most careful of researchers, changing one tiny variable in one’s self at a time, wishing and longing that maybe, maybe one has discovered the word or deed that will cause the tides to shift, the rage to ebb and the love to flow. One thinks (yearns) to have that power. One shapes one’s attention and bearing and speech and movement and attire, not through an inner discovery of one’s own gifts and values, but in relation to the captor. Day after day, one forms one’s self from data gathered from without, not from within.

Rage is sometimes on, sometimes off, sometimes overt, sometimes covert. One never knows if one will glimpse the Bowie knife first or feel the stiletto upon exit. Ultimately any sentence, any act, will be wrong. One will be knifed.

The double bind, the position of having no safe option, of having no self without the other, the captor, divides one in two. Even when given a choice, one can’t bear staying and one can’t bear leaving.

. . . . .

One is put in a double bind when one hears sentences or experiences actions that are conflicting and one negates the other. Anything one does in response is wrong. A classic double bind is “Do as I say, not as I do.” More subtle examples: “I love you unconditionally” and “You’d be pretty if you didn’t have such a big nose.” Or, as a small child, one is called to sit in a smoker’s lap, one is embraced, and the smoker says, “Ever seen a match burn twice?” and the smoker moves the hot match tip towards the child’s arm.

Dogs will avoid the parts of an experimental floor that deliver shocks. When the whole floor is electrified, the dogs struggle frantically. When they realize every response is hopeless, they just lie down.

Living with a person who offers up double binds breaks the heart. It can also break the mind.

. . . . .

A functional adult’s psychological job is to take new experiences and fit them into the self’s inner grid. Using inner awareness and outer observation, the person notes what’s happening or, if it happens too fast, examines it later, and either integrates and assimilates it into the inner grid or feels and thinks his or her way through transforming it – alone or with help – into something that does fit.

The trouble with living with double binds is that one learns one is trapped and therefore helpless and powerless to transform very much. One maneuvers and suffers and endures. If the self survives, it seethes with hidden rage.

In If 2007 Could Be Different, I wrote I had some challenging “new experiences.” In response to those new experiences most people would have been able to say, “Too bad,” slide them into the self’s grid cells on the outer edges of awareness, and move on. I could not. I won’t go into detail, but my heart and mind have taken hits from double binds for a long time. As an adult, if I feel trapped, I alternately thrash, rage, and drop to the floor sobbing helplessly, repeat.

I think I began drinking because I had no more capacity for double binds. I could not take one more in.

• I so wanted to have a child that when I was a teenager I bought little baby clothes decorated with tiny, orange ducks and put them in my hope chest. I am unable to conceive a child.
• My classroom is a sacred, holy place. I experienced violence in my classroom.
• My hometown is a sanctuary. A mass murder occurred in my hometown.
• I believe awareness is the way to bring in enlightenment and healing. Every time I turn my awareness to what happened, I feel I am trying to bring in sharp stars with knife edges.
• I drink too much. I cannot stop drinking.
• I cannot bear what is happening to my mind from drinking. I cannot bear my feelings and thoughts when I am not drinking.
• If I drink, I feel terrible. If I abstain, I feel terrible.
• You’re only as sick as your secrets. Keep this secret.
• I write to free myself from silence. I will be imprisoned by stigma if I write to break this silence.

I have been abstinent from alcohol for 20 months. That’s 600 days of choosing to live with the thrashing helplessness of double binds.

Let me see if I’ve got this. I was an occasional social drinker until I was 48, then stuff happened in 2006-2007, then I began to drink wine in an increasing amount over the course of 5-6 years, then I couldn’t stop drinking, then at 53 I stopped, and at 55 I’m still stopped.

Huh? If I couldn’t stop, how come I’m stopped?!

To the best of my ability to understand those ages and dates, I found my feelings and thoughts about the events of those years unbearable. I could not hold and carry these experiences in my arms. They heaved themselves onto my back and bent me double.

Wine at night lifted the heaviness of my heavy memories, my heavy heart, my heavy thoughts. More wine lightened the load. Why wouldn’t I seek relief from such burdens each night? And then the properties of alcohol and my physiology and my psychology did their interweaving and I couldn’t not pick up a drink.

Couldn’t not? Really?

I absolutely could not find a way to stop drinking on my own. I was seeing an individual counselor weekly at the time I was trying to stop. I was trained as a counselor myself! None of it worked.

Only in the company of others was I able to stop. I look back 20 months ago when I could not stop drinking, and look at today when I am stopped, and am flabbergasted. Why now and not then? It doesn’t make any sense.  I was Anne then and I am Anne now. What’s the deal on this?!

If I were a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker, I can understand that I might not need to know the answers to these questions. I might not even be interested in the answers. All I would need to do to achieve my goal (mine is abstinence but others may seek harm reduction) is to not take the first drink that, for me, inevitably leads to the next and the next.

But I am a teacher, a counselor, a writer. People in recovery hear and read my words. A scholar’s, teacher’s, counselor’s ethics require that I know what I am doing and what I am passing forward. I need to understand and know as deeply as I can what works and what doesn’t and why.

Becoming and staying abstinent from alcohol is the hardest endeavor of my entire life. It has been the time of my greatest suffering ever. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Ever.

Couldn’t stop drinking? Did.

How and why? Humanity requires I attempt to answer.

. . . . .

I am profoundly interested in the social network effects of mutual support groups in recovery from addictions. Titles are abbreviated and/or excerpted, and the most recent are listed first. Thanks to Laurel Sindewald for her research assistance.

• Association between social influences and drinking outcomes... (2012)
• Determining the relative importance of the mechanisms of behavior change… (2012)
• Group cohesion… (2012)
• Mobilizing adaptive social network changes… (2011)
• The role of mutual-help groups… (2011)
• How do people recover… (2009)