Chapter
1
By Dr.
Steve Frisch, Psy.D.
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Perhaps all the
dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with
beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence,
something helpless that wants our love.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
Looking back on it
all, you never would have dreamt that life could be as good as it has become. Whether it
was quitting to drink, stopping your use of drugs, ending your dance of co-dependency,
changing your self-destructive relationship with food, stopping your self-sabotaging
behaviors, returning sanity to your relationship with sexing, exercising, and spending
money, escaping the aftereffects of being raised by an alcoholic, abusive, or neglectful
parent(s), the journey has been an emotional roller coaster ride.
You’ve ascended from the depths of spiritual bankruptcy created by your compulsions,
diseased thinking, and self-will run riot. You’ve risen to the zenith of spiritual
progression by committing to abstinence, honoring your bottom lines, doing the next right
thing, making recovery-based choices, and turning it over to your Higher Power.
You know and I know that you couldn’t have done any of this alone. None of this would
have been possible without the countless hours you’ve spent in dark, smoke-filled
rooms, your back aching, your ass gone numb from all those hours spent sitting on metal
folding chairs, drinking gallons of coffee, listening to others tell their stories,
wanting desperately to forget yours, all the while clinging by your fingertips to those
hallowed rooms, trusting that they were the only bridge back to sanity. None of this would
have been possible without the support, love, and wisdom of the people that you met at
your Twelve Step meetings! None of this would have been possible without your evolving
relationship with your Higher Power! Simply, none of this!
In the early days of recovery, it was all that you could do to get from moment to moment.
In the beginning, desperation, white knuckles, empty faith, sheer stupidity, blind luck,
and the never-ending support of your Twelve Step Program was all that stood between you
and relapse. It was the people from your Twelve Step meetings that taught you how to crawl
so that you may once again walk. When all you wanted to do was run, you learned to be
still. When all you wanted to do was lose yourself in drama, chaos, and relapse, you
learned to lean on others to support rather than medicate you. When all you wanted to do
was lose control of yourself and your body, you prayed to your Higher Power to exert more
influence over you and your self-will.
You learned, you grew, you developed the tools to get you through each moment of every
twenty-four hours. You picked yourself up out of your emotional gutter, began to mend your
fences, and [re]claimed your right to a life you once believed to be forfeited by the
crimes and misdemeanors you committed against humanity when active in your disease.
But as you [re]claim
what you so richly deserve, perhaps as grateful as you are for recovery and what your life
is, you feel equally disappointed by what you and your life have yet to become. And that
must confuse the hell out of you.
But believe me, you’re not alone. There are many, many people that feel just the way
you do. And I say to you what I tell them. It’s O.K. to be both grateful and
disappointed. They’re not mutually exclusive emotional states. It’s possible to
be both grateful for what recovery has given you, yet, disappointed that you’ve yet
to harvest the full promise of what recovery can and will provide for you.
For your disappointment is not an indictment of you or your program. Your disappointment
is only a sign of your humanness, merely a symptom of unfulfilled human longing.
You long to feel normal--to be and live like any other person. You long to be at peace
with your Self--to love and accept your whole Self.
You long to be honored and respected by your friends--to feel safe and not judged by the
community of humanity.
You long to feel accepted and loved by your family
members--to be appreciated for who you are rather than to be used for what you can do.
You long to experience the give and take of human emotional intimacy--to experience your
soul being touched by the love of another being.
You long to experience the purity of physical intimacy--to be able to remain in the
present moment with your lover rather than regress back to your past and [re]experience
all the ways that sex has become contaminated by you and for you.
You long to live a life of meaning and purpose--to feel like you matter, that your time on
planet earth has made a difference.
But you’re no longer naive about the process, no longer an innocent when it comes to
what your role is in manifesting your hopes and dreams. The program has taught you that.
It’s not enough to wish and hope. After all, you left fantasy land behind when you
chose recovery as a way of life. You couldn’t have gotten this far in recovery
without realizing that nobody else is going to do it for you.
No, what it means is that in order to fulfill the longings that are awakening, the
yearnings that are tugging at you, there’s just that much more work to be done.
Because your disease is a disease of the body, you worked on your body by learning to
manage your compulsion(s). Because your disease is a disease of the soul, you worked on
your soul by [re]connecting with your Higher Power. Because your disease is a disease of
the mind, you must now work
on your mind by working on YOU.
I know what
you’re thinking, more importantly, I know how my last statement must make you feel.
“I must now work on me? What do you think I’ve been doing all along? I thought I
had been working on me since day one. I’ve been poked at, picked on, prodded, told to
take the cotton out of my ears and put it in my mouth when it came to accepting other
people’s opinions of me and my program. I’ve been questioned, tested, doubted by
anyone who cared to take an interest in my recovery. I’ve done my Step-Work exactly
the way my sponsor told me to. I’ve prayed, meditated, taken quiet times, read from
front to back, back to front, even between the lines, whatever I’ve been told to
read. I’ve done service work, without complaint, without question, all in the hopes
that I would transform who I was into whom I hoped to become. Time to work on me? Buddy,
you’ve got your nerve!”
Your reaction is understandable. But, believe me, I mean no offense to you or the program
you’ve been working. I only mean to help. It’s not my intention to criticize but
to enrich and enhance the impact of the work that you’ve already done and will
continue to do.
I know you’re feeling frustrated, perhaps even angry. You have good reason to be
angry, scared, confused, and overwhelmed by what is unfolding within you. But let’s
see if we can put that frustration to work for you rather than against you.
There’s so much
that you’re [re]discovering about you that’s at the same time both frightening
and empowering, overwhelming
and uplifting, confusing and inspiring, depressing and encouraging. I’m sure that
there are days when you feel like you’re going crazy, that you’re losing your
mind. Why, I’ll bet that there are days when you look at yourself in the mirror and
don’t even recognize who it is that’s staring back at you.
Abstinence, your new
found practice of rigorous honesty, your Step Work, all of it has stirred things up. As
you’ve poked at your insides, unacknowledged, unexpressed, thoughts and feelings have
begun to resurface.
Feelings that
you’ve spent a lifetime avoiding have been [re]stimulated. Thoughts that you have
trouble recognizing as belonging to you are rising to the surface of your conscious
awareness. Experiences from your past are emerging that you thought you had buried a long
time ago. The desires, needs, and longings that have been [re]activated are not as easily
silenced as they once were. And, perhaps, what’s most frightening of all, this is all
unfolding without your consent, without your say-so, seemingly beyond your control.
Do the words
vulnerable, fragile, or brittle come even close to describing what you feel like. Day
after day, stripped bare, feeling skinless, reduced to nothing more than raw nerve
endings. There’s seemingly an eighteen-inch gash that runs from the bottom of your
throat to the tip of your navel. Split in two, you feel fragmented, unintegrated as if
there are a hundred voices pulling you in a thousand different directions, all at once.
In the past, fear,
shame, and resentment had been your constant companion. But now, different, even more
intense feelings have surfaced within as you’ve begrudgingly consented to turn things
over to your Higher Power rather than impose your self-will on the people and
circumstances of your life. Emotions that you’re struggling to acknowledge and
understand, much less give a voice to, have confused and overwhelmed you.
You’re told to talk about your feelings, but these reactivated feelings are emotions
that you’ve spent a lifetime squelching, denying, and/or medicating. To talk about
these emotions requires your mastery of a second language--one different than any language
you’ve spoken up to this point in your life. Sure you may know the words to the
language of feelings, but never before have you had to put the name of a feeling with the
actual experience of that feeling. And that’s what’s so confounding. That’s
what has you asking yourself everyday, “What should I do when I feel what I’m
feeling other than get angry, run away, medicate myself, and/or create some drama to stop
feeling what I’m feeling?”
And there’s something even more disturbing that’s stirring within you. I call
them emotional needs. It’s likely that you refer to them simply as being weak or
deficient. But if you stop and think about it, it’s nothing more than your humanness
bubbling to the surface. Your guard is down like never before. As a result, you feel more
exposed, more vulnerable, less defended than you can ever recall feeling. Where the idea
that you had emotional needs was once just a bizarre or, perhaps, even a dangerous idea,
you’re no longer able to ignore or silence these unfulfilled longings.
Loneliness is no
longer just a dull ache you stopped paying attention to a long time ago. It has become an
ever constant reminder of how empty your life has been and continues to be. Where love
once was little more than bait used in your specialized dance of seduction, manipulation,
and exploitation, you’ve finally acknowledged that loving and being loved is the
emotional nutrition of your spiritual life. Where being respected and appreciated was once
your justification for losing yourself in the needs of others, you now see it as the
cornerstone of any honoring relationship. Belonging, feeling affirmed and
validated--it’s what
you long for, it’s what you’re feeling so needy about these days,
it’s what defines you as being human. But it still begs the following begrudging
concession, “O.K. Maybe I do have emotional needs. But what should I do about
them?”
And so it goes. An
expanding and deepening awareness of your Self, [re]connection with your feelings and
emotional needs, new frontiers within your Self opening up, previously unexplored issues
in your relationships finally being addressed, it all has precipitated a frantic search
for the skills necessary to survive in these new frontiers. That’s recovery,
that’s growth, that’s healing, that’s evolution, that’s the rhythm of
life.
So, yes, there’s much to be grateful for. At the same time, there’s good reason
to feel frustrated by where you’re at as compared to where you want to be. But no,
you’re not going crazy, you’re not losing your mind. What you’re
experiencing right now is what anybody who has worked a good program will experience by
default--YOU’RE EXPERIENCING A DEEP AND PROFOUND AWAKENING. As your feelings, needs,
thoughts, and past experiences flood your consciousness, PARTS of you that you
haven’t touched, experienced, connected to, nor felt in years are awakening inside of
you.
Who and what are these parts of yourself that are awakening within, that you’re
beginning to [re]connect with? I refer to them as your supporting cast members. The
Program refers to them as your character defects. I believe them to be one and the same.
Just who and what are your supporting cast members?
Your supporting cast members are the wounded, underdeveloped parts of who you are. Either
unacknowledged or disowned by you, your supporting cast members exist split-off from the
core of your Self. Existing on their own, your supporting cast members are disconnected
not only from you but from your other supporting cast members as well. Existing mostly on
the periphery of your conscious awareness, these are the parts of you that are obvious to
everyone but you. Acting in an autonomous, rigid, conditioned, preprogrammed fashion, they
are the force behind what sabotages your emotional and spiritual well-being.
Why do I believe that your supporting cast members and your character defects are one and
the same?
Just like your supporting cast members, your character defects are wounded parts of your
Self, needing only to be embraced as a fundamental element of your God-ness.
Just like your
supporting cast members, your character defects are underdeveloped parts of your Self,
needing only to be nurtured and [re]parented.
Just like your
supporting cast members, your character defects are unevolved creations of Ego, needing
only to evolve into parts of your higher consciousness.
Just like your supporting cast members, your character defects are unacknowledged aspects
of who you are, needing only to be noticed and listened to.
Just like your
supporting cast members, your character defects are disowned parts of who you are, needing
only to be [re]claimed as essential qualities of who you are.
Just like your supporting cast members, your character defects are the parts of your Self
that you judge unmercifully, who need only to be accepted as fundamental human
characteristics that make you who you are.
Whatever you call
them, whether it be supporting cast members or character defects, these awakening parts of
your Self,
are the personification of the personality traits that define you as you--a unique blend
of your best and worst, good and bad, open
and closed, available and withdrawn, loving and hateful, kind and mean, courageous and
fearful, liberator and oppressor.
Your character defects
are not evil embodied within you. They are the spiritual qualities of your Self that are
in various stages of evolution--from Egoness to Godliness, attachment to letting go,
willfulness to surrender, grandiosity to humility, shame to self-love, entitlement to
gratitude, judgmentalness to tolerance, resentment to forgiveness, control to faith,
pettiness to compassion, lower consciousness to higher consciousness.
Your character defects
are not all of who you are--merely singular aspects. They’re the yin to your yang,
your opposites that attract, the dualities that exist within you, all cut from the same
whole cloth--your Higher Power. They’re your inner Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, Austin
Powers and Dr. Evil, Andy Kaufman and Tony Clifton, Patty Martin and cousin Cathy, any one
of the three faces of Eve, Sybil in each one of her seven glories.
Your character defects
are not aspects of your Self to be despised, but merely the manifestations of your
internal energies that push or pull, oppose or comply, revere or disrespect, judge or
honor, rebel or conform, approach or avoid, invite in or push away, assert or remain
passive, agitate or pacify, risk or play it safe.
I’m sure
you’ll agree that knowing what your character defects are is one thing. But knowing
what to do about them is quite another. For when it comes to your character defects, the
idea of free will is nothing more than a rumor, a myth, a nice idea to practice if only
you could get out from under the weight of your character defects’ conditioned
reactions, automatic avoidance responses, and preprogrammed self-sabotaging ways--all of
which sends you spiraling deeper into your shame, self-loathing, and alienation. In fact,
it’s likely that your inability to shake free of the influence that your character
defects exert on your life is what currently has you so paralyzed. If that’s the
case, then there’s one fundamental question that you need to learn the answer to.
“Once I’ve acknowledged the existence of my character defects, what is it that
I’m suppose to do about them?”
The question is
reasonable, even necessary. You see, when it came to abstinence, you knew just what to do.
Don’t drink. Don’t drug. Don’t enable or caretake. Don’t binge or
purge. Don’t cross any bottom line behaviors. Go to meetings. Call your sponsor. Come
early and stay late. Make coffee. Clean the ashtrays. Put the chairs away. Go out for
coffee. Call your contacts. Read the Big Book. Pray on it. Let go and let God. Those
weren’t empty words. Those were lifelines that saved your butt on more than one
occasion.
But working with your character defects, where so much new about who you are is awakening,
where so much of who you are and don’t want to be is in your face day after day,
doesn’t come with a similar set of instructions. Because it’s much less obvious
to you what to do about your character defects, working with them can be so much more
difficult, murky, and painful. And what’s undoubtedly the most difficult aspect about
working with your character defects is that the more you try to let go of your
character defects, the tighter you hold on to what you are losing of your Self.
That last statement reveals what’s so tricky and confounding about working with your
character defects. This is the paradox of
all paradoxes. The harder you try to release yourself from the death grip that your
character defects have on you, the tighter the death
grip becomes. It’s this double bind that’s always pulling you in two different
directions at the same time. What are the paradoxes that
you must unravel in order to be free from your character defects and their influence?
To be who you want to become, you can no longer be who you are.
To give birth to your authentic Self, you must let go of your false selves.
To free yourself from the pain that is created by holding on to who you are, you must
experience the pain of letting go.
To be open to love and being loved, you must be opened to love and being loved by the very
parts of your Self that you so hate and despise.
So what do you do about these paradoxes? How can you escape the emotional and spiritual
prison that these paradoxes create?
This book is dedicated
to helping you become disentangled from those very paradoxes by learning how to
spiritually transform the relationship you have with your character defects. If you
remember nothing else from this book, please remember this: THE AIM OF WORKING WITH YOUR
CHARACTER DEFECTS SHOULD BE TO SPIRITUALLY TRANSFORM THE RELATIONSHIP YOU HAVE WITH YOUR
CHARACTER DEFECTS RATHER THAN TO PURGE YOURSELF OF YOUR CHARACTER DEFECTS.
That’s the key to working with your character defects-- spiritually transforming your
relationship with your character defects rather than purging your character defects.
It’s all about the relationship that you have with your character defects. For the
source of your unhappiness, hurt, pain, and your never-ending self-sabotage is the
relationship you’ve created with your character defects, not the character defects
themselves.
This relationship is at the core of the war that you wage with your Self. Your
relationship with your character defects is the source of your emptiness and loneliness,
your isolation and alienation, your confusion and lack of direction, every disconnect that
exists between you and your supporting cast members as well as you and the people in your
life.
How best to
characterize your relationship with your character defects? Up till now, it’s likely
that you’re relationship with your character defects has been one of disconnection,
oppression, and/or annihilation. You’ve done everything in your power to extinguish
your character defects, drown out their voices, medicate their pain, silence their fear,
eliminate them from the face of the earth.
It’s likely that you’ve done so by losing your Self in the indulgences of your
compulsions, deifying your Self-will, and/or maintaining a tight-fisted grip of control
over you and your
environment. But if you want to be free of the toxic impact of your
character defects, you must first transform the relationship you have with them.
To work with your
character defects means one thing and one thing only--you must work on the relationship
you’ve developed with your character defects. How does one work on their relationship
with their character defects? Years ago I posed that very question to my mentor, Stanley
Phillips. Stanley Phillips’ formula has been the foundation for the work I’ve
done with
thousands of people just like you who have wanted to spiritually
transform their relationship with their character defects. The following was his response.
To spiritually transform the relationship you have with your character defects, you must
go beneath the surface of all that distracts you from seeing and experiencing who you
really are. To do so you must be prepared to bump into your underdeveloped, wounded, lost,
silenced, and disowned selves. You can only bump into these parts of your Self by
discarding your facade of false selves that inhibits you from revealing who you are,
prevents you from awakening your spirit from the emotional and physical numbness that
prevents you from experiencing who you are, and stops you from transforming your deeply
ingrained conditioned reactions that prevent you from expressing who you are. Once
you’ve begun to [re]connect, [re]claim, and reconcile with all of who you are, you
will have begun the slow and unglamorous miracle of personal transformation.
Stanley Phillips’ formula is the underlying foundation for the work we’ll be
doing together throughout this book. Together, we’ll master the art of how to
spiritually transform your relationship with your character defects by touching these holy
creations of your Higher Power with faith, surrender, humility, gratitude, tolerance,
forgiveness, and acceptance as you: 1.) [re]connect with your character defects; 2.)
[re]claim your character defects; 3.) reconcile with your character defects.
G.B.U.
Steve
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