So I was fixing for an argument when I called the home, and a gentleman named R.L. answered the phone. I love country people and rural accents, and he had one of the best I’d ever heard in my life. But it didn’t make me feel any more confident about Shades of Hope.
These people are trained professionals? What is this place?
I was thinking, quite unfairly, while R.L. went to fetch his wife. Then another voice came on the phone, as soft and dry as a West Texas breeze. “Hi, I’m Tennie. And I want you to know how much it means for you to be here.…” Before I knew what had happened to me, I had been charmed. I was arriving on Sunday and leaving on Friday. What’s more, I was excited about it.
I hung up the phone and said to Dario, “You have to come do this thing! It sounds amazing!” But he was not having any of it. He had something to do that week and could not be persuaded to be anything more than mildly interested in Shades, even though he loved my sister and was glad she was somewhere she could be helped.
On Sunday evening, I arrived alone at a charming village in the farm country south of Abilene. The tiny, bewitchingly decorated bed-and-breakfast where I was staying was a short walk from the cozy-looking treatment center. Actually, everything in Buffalo Gap is a short walk from everything else. After I settled in, I took a stroll around the quiet streets lined with picket fences twining with roses, rows of ancient-sized live oaks, and winter plants such as lamb’s ear, which I loved as a child. I noticed that in lieu of garbage cans, each block of modest homes shared a Dumpster set right out on the curb. To spruce them up, people had painted them with fanciful sunsets and forests, or bucolic pastoral scenes with horses, which I found annoying. They seemed tacky and interfered with the otherwise picture-perfect loveliness of the village.
The destination of my evening ramble was a cluster of yellow clapboard buildings set among leaf-blown lawns and little rock-lined flower beds. There was no fence separating the Shades of Hope center from the rest of the town, and nothing seemed institutional about the facilities. The main building looked like an old, overgrown farmhouse, a bit frayed at the edges, with rocking chairs and porch swings set to enjoy the views. I stood in the dark street, trying to peer inside from a safe distance, and sure enough, I saw my sister through a large beveled window. She was standing at the water cooler, having a conversation with someone just out of view. She obviously belonged. It was a wistful moment for me; I was the outsider looking in, a deep, unarticulated idea already forming that I wanted some of the benefit of this experience for myself, but with no clue how, or why, or that in a week’s time I would be the one standing by that water cooler.
I woke up early Monday morning and met joyfully with Sister in the center, where we were permitted to visit for thirty minutes before the serious business of family week began. I was impressed with the client art on the walls, replete with healing and promise, the upbeat and loving atmosphere, the obvious support directed toward my sister by her peers as she greeted our family. Once our thirty minutes ended, we transitioned into something called “no talk,” meaning interactions with my sister were strictly confined to the context of group meetings expertly guided by clinicians who would lead our suspicious, tense bunch from a scary start to a wildly improbable, healing end on Friday.
Out of respect for their privacy, and to maintain the necessary confidentiality of what occurs in treatment, I am deliberately vague about the identities of most of the various family members who gathered in Buffalo Gap. But I can say that, as always, I had no idea what to expect when everyone assembled. Family gatherings can be volatile affairs, and adding Dad skyrocketed the tension. My dad and my sister had not spoken in nearly ten years. It was nothing less than extraordinary that he was there and that their greeting was not charged with hostility. His readiness to show up, especially with others present who utterly reviled him, was flat-out astounding. When Ted had called Dad to inquire about his willingness to attend, he said, “Anything for my girls.” And, of course, the willingness of the others to stay in the room, however tentatively, is enormously to their credit, too.
All family weeks take place in a lovely group room at Shades, with hand-painted vines climbing the walls and a quote that repeatedly caught my eye: “Our spiritual purpose is to fit ourselves to be of maximum service to God and our fellows.” I was handed a family-week booklet that I began to devour. I was intrigued that it contained questionnaires for me and very little information about how to fix my loved one, the “client,” or her mother, who in my eyes was clearly the problem! We met a well-dressed, confident, and gregarious woman, a marriage and family counselor who would be in charge of our family week. Rather than presenting her academic credentials and rattling off the many impressive letters that trailed her name, the therapist, whom I’ll call Erica, introduced herself to the group by running through her own list of “claims,” addictions from which she was now in recovery. She seemed so human sharing her own litany of things likes debting-spending, codependency, and survivorship of different kinds of abuse. It was all so interesting! She had such a clear bond with my sister and her peers.
The counselor then explained how the week would progress and was up front that at times things would get very rough, emotionally volatile, and polarized within our group. She described how each of us was there to throw personal ingredients into a stew and that during certain exercises, the fire would be darn hot and things would bubble over. She also vowed that by Friday we would—each and every one of us—break bread together and partake in peace and friendship of that same stew, sitting at a family table. I didn’t know if I wanted to scoff more at the corny stew metaphor or at the delusion that my family would “break bread” together.
I went with, “Yeah, right, lady. That might happen with other families, but you ain’t got a chance with mine.”
“Trust the process,” she said. “Don’t quit before your miracle happens.”
Didn’t you hear me?
I thought, but decided not to say anything further aloud. She would see for herself: As much as I hated it, we would absolutely be the exception. There was no such miracle available for my family. Individuals? Well, I would hope so. I think so. As a family?
There is no way on God’s green earth
.
During this orientation, I met Tennie McCarthy, who turned out to be a striking woman with short black hair and pale skin, wearing bright red lipstick and nail polish that matched her beautiful kimono-style jacket. She seemed elegant and loving and formidable all in one package. She was quiet, yet clearly a great authority. I also met her professional partner, a no-nonsense, grandmotherly woman named Phyllis, whom I came to know as “Granny P.”
The basic orientation was followed by the key message the treatment team would underscore all week: Addiction is a
family
illness. It involves far more just than the “identified patient.”
Everyone
in the family system is affected, particularly if there has been untreated addiction over generations. We were told that our own illnesses and reactions to childhood abuse might look very different from those of our loved one, but we came out of the same wounded family system, we shared a common source of pain, and some of our behaviors were adaptations to cope with that pain. Those behaviors, such as denial, minimizing, medicating feelings with people, places, and things, had probably served us well initially but eventually became obstacles to our own spiritual growth and well being. I also learned that there was help available for all of us, and the treatment repeatedly stressed, surprisingly, that the absolute best thing I could possibly do for my sister … for my entire family … was to get my
own
help and give recovery a try. We were told things like “Don’t walk,
run
, to open meetings of AA, to Al-Anon, to Co-Dependents Anonymous,” whatever that was.
I still could not imagine what all this had to do with me. I wasn’t an addict, and although I had to change my answers around a few times to do so, I answered “yes” to fewer than three questions on the alcohol abuse questionnaire. But my butt was in the chair, and I was listening.
As the clients who were in treatment joined us, we shifted our chairs from our small circle into many rows. I was asked not to sit by my sister or other family members, so as to maintain enough physical space to allow me to have my own distinct experiences, feeling my feelings autonomously, without the risk of filtering them through another’s, or adjusting my feelings to match someone else’s, or distracting myself with rescuing or caretaking someone who seemed uncomfortable. So I sat, rather like a big girl, with total strangers and listened with my own ears and my own heart. Next to me was a beautiful young woman with enormous doe eyes, eyes I realized later looked so big precisely because everything else about her was small from self-starvation. All around me, in fact, were otherwise warm and welcoming, empathetic, seemingly “normal,” typical-looking people. But as Granny P began to explain the “umbrella of addiction” concept, and she interacted with the clients (she knew all their stories, and although some were shy, they were startlingly honest with her and the entire group), it became clear that this was indeed life-and-death business.
The concept underlying the umbrella of addictions is that at the core of every addict of any type is loneliness. As Bill Wilson, cofounder of AA, wrote, “Alcoholics are tortured by loneliness.” The all-addiction model shows we can use anything, and I do mean anything—alcohol, drugs (street or prescription), shopping, sex, relationships, work, debting, spending, nicotine, and so on—outside of ourselves to try to soothe our core pain and loneliness, fill the hole in the soul, to try to change the way we feel.
The most generally known type of addiction is chemical dependence, including alcoholism and narcotics addiction (nicotine and caffeine are in this category, too; they are mind- and mood-altering substances that enter the bloodstream and affect brain chemistry). There are also behavioral addictions such as compulsive overeating, compulsive purging via vomiting, excessive exercise, laxative abuse, and anorexia (restricting food), among many others. Sex, shopping, and gambling addictions fall into the category of process addiction, because the gratification often comes not only from the behavior, but from the anticipation of that behavior. The idea of executing the act begins to build, living rent-free in one’s head. It becomes an idea that overcomes all other ideas (an obsession) and culminates in the act itself. Coming down from the act sets into motion a cycle of “pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization,” intense shame, and self-loathing … which sets up the desperate need for relief once more. These process addictions, Granny P was explaining, are actually the hardest from which to get sober and abstinent. Like alcoholism, they are progressive, meaning the more you do it, the more you need it—with ever-diminishing returns—and they can be fatal if left untreated. Such behaviors can initially be quite brilliant, in that they do make us feel better; we do something only because it
works
, even if the behavior seems ultraweird, like cutting. But after a time it quits working, and our delusion is that
this
time it will be different, it will work again. The persistence of this delusion is astonishing.
After revealing all the different types of chemical and process addictions folks may use to medicate, Granny P talked more explicitly about exactly what it is we try to medicate. I am not sure I had heard of codependency before, and I certainly didn’t know what it was. Codependency is a relatively new term in psychology that describes an array of behaviors and choices that are formed as strategies to survive dysfunctional family systems and are a direct result of trauma and abuse. The first cases were identified among spouses and family members of substance abusers who had become enmeshed with the addicts they were caring for and were driving themselves crazy trying to control the addicts’ behavior—make them change, clean up, go to bed, get up, go to work, sign the Christmas cards, whatever. The definition has expanded to include anyone who tries to control the behavior of others (or themselves) as a coping mechanism to medicate loneliness, that hole in the soul left behind in the aftermath of abuse—which does not have to be radical, dramatic, big-time abuse. Codependence can be a hard concept to grasp because it’s so broad, so by looking at its core symptoms is useful. According to Pia Mellody, a nurse and recovering codependent who has written extensively on the subject, codependents have difficulty
This first, fleeting encounter with the term was sending little shock waves through my system. It was as if I had been living alone in a soundproof room with no way to express myself with my family, and now I was acquiring language for the first time. I would glance at the patients around me, whom I strangely already considered
my
peers, and they would offer a squeeze of my hand or empathetic glances that seemed to understand far more than our brief knowing of one another would merit.
After a much-needed lunch break, we returned to the group room for Granny P to deliver a classic introductory lecture on the Twelve Steps as a way to restore sanity to our lives. A succinct summary I will never forget is this: In steps one, two, and three, we make peace with the God of our own understanding. In steps four, five, six, and seven, we make peace with ourselves. In steps eight and nine, we make peace with others. In steps ten, eleven, and twelve, we grow in peace.
Yowza. That sounded to me like a pretty good deal.
Granny P told us she was a longtime member of Alcoholics Anonymous. One of the most remarkable things to me about Shades was that every counselor at the center, including Tennie and her daughter, Kim, are recovering addicts themselves who rely on the Twelve Steps fellowships, while also availing themselves of appropriate professional help during the course of their recovery journeys.