Let me begin at the beginning, the very beginning. Somewhere along the line, and when I say line I'm talking about generations of maternal and paternal ancestors, my genes went awry, rogue, whacky. And when I say whacky, I do mean funny, as in ha-ha, but I also mean wrong, some of my genes took a bad turn, an odd twist. Yes, I realize I'm making a judgment here, but when you're mixing metaphors, everything's allowed.
The truth is I grew up in an alcoholic home and I became an alcoholic. I picked up a drink and drank it on my own and picked up another and another, and some days yet another. I drank when I wanted to drink, and when I didn't want to drink, I can't blame my genes for my behavior, only my predisposition. Today, I don't drink. I've not had a drink for 25 years, yet I still possess the predisposition, and so I practice new behavior. Practice makes perfect except when it comes to addiction. In AA we say, "Progress not perfection." Over the years I've come to accept that I'm perfect in only one way, I'm perfectly flawed.
In treatment, counselors will tell you that when you begin drinking alcoholically (or substitute any other addiction, compulsion, or obsession) you stop maturing; you become emotionally frozen at that age. I remained 17 years old for 18 years. I was living my adult life with the emotions of a teenager, sometimes volatile, sometimes shut down, often clueless. That all changed in 1985 when I was assessed for my drinking and I accepted help.
The problem with drinking, or should I say one of the problems, needless to say there are many, is that I stopped feeling; I numbed out and often that was in fact the end goal, to not feel. Most of my feelings were primitive, simply responses to my environment, monitoring the changes in the behaviors of others in an effort to protect myself and to try and control the uncontrollable. My feelings were essentially codependent. I often thought I knew what you were feeling before I recognized how or what I felt. I didn't always trust my feelings. It was not unusual for me to say, "Did you feel that too?"
Before my outpatient alcohol treatment, I had brief experiences with therapy. You see, I failed at intimate relationships. I succeeded in the workplace and socially with friends, but with family and partners I could not sustain healthy relations. Once I began my recovery program, I was fearlessly committed to the intensive work required to change. I had one-on-one appointments with my therapist and attended daily therapy groups and AA meetings. We were encouraged to describe our feelings rather than talk about our thoughts. I often found myself confused about the difference, on some level I lacked the awareness that I didn't know what I didn't know. I referenced the posters that hung on the wall which asked, what are you feeling today, sad, mad or glad? Some posters featured faces that displayed expressions. If I could match my eyebrows, eyes, and mouth to the cartoon faces, perhaps I would know what I was feeling.
I finished outpatient treatment and began aftercare. Aftercare amounted to one individual therapy appointment and one group therapy meeting per week for six weeks. Following aftercare, I joined another group, a women's group for adult children of alcoholics. Yes, I discovered that getting sober was only the first step, that my journey to recover and make sense of my feelings would require me to explore my childhood and learn to let go of my role as the family hero, the kid who grew up too quickly, who became an adult too soon, a hypervigilant adult with stifled feelings.
In addition to AA, I began attending Al-Anon, meetings for Adult Children of Alcoholics, and Codependents Anonymous; I journaled in an effort to practice self-examination and reflect on what I was learning; I hung out with recovery friends. We tested new behaviors on each other, sometimes with success and when we failed we often laughed, stating, "Well that didn't work!" We leaned on each other and became each others' chosen family. When we couldn't join our families of origin for holidays we pot-lucked and celebrated what we called our "Orphan Holidays."
Six years after I stopped drinking and when my first sober relationship ended, I was sitting again in the office of a new therapist. While I waited for her to get situated, pen in hand and notebook opened to a blank page, I imagined that she wrote the date and the words, "Client: Linda Lenzke, initial intake appointment," I looked at the table in front of me and took an inventory of the objects: Kleenex, Koosh ball, magic wand with sparkly stars and floating glitter and plastic windup toy; I thought, these must be the tools of therapy. I smiled to myself.
The therapist looked up after her fountain pen stopped gliding across the page and asked, "So, what brought you here today?" I immediately began crying, sobbing in fact, grateful for the Kleenex in front of me. The therapist did not change expression when she asked her follow-up question, "Do you know why you are crying?" I didn't know the answer, only that I was where I needed to be, that I was at the beginning of a journey of discovery and restoration, that I was feeling something, emotions are energy in motion and the tears were evidence of the flow, the waves of feelings I would first experience in my body then learn to name with words. It took me ten years of sitting in that chair, talking, crying, consuming Kleenex, picking up the magic wand, praying for insight and understanding, squeezing the Koosh ball, digging deep, winding up the toy and watching it walk, then tip over, winding it up again only to walk and fall over, repeating the cycle until I finally learned how to be sad, mad then glad.