9th Renewal Convention on
Adult Children, Recovery, & Trauma
Las Vegas , NV � February 23-26, 2005
Transforming Traumatic Attachment Bonds Into Healthy Growth
Stephanie Brown, Ph. D. (ACOA25-004-Brown)
BROWN: Hello, again. This is the official start. I ' m Stephanie Brown. I think you know that, if you' re in the right place. I ' m so pleased to be at this conference. I want to say thank you to all of the sponsors, the numerous sponsors who are supporting this conference. Many of the sponsors have been supporting the children of alcoholics, adult children of alcoholics, children of trauma movement for 25 years � as long as it ' s existed. Those sponsors are here, and I ' m enormously grateful to all of them � U.S. Journal and NCOA, two in particular.
I ' ll tell you just a little bit about me. You get a bio in the brochure. I know some of you over many, many years, and it ' s wonderful to see you. I was just telling somebody, I have been very rattled about this conference. Feeling what I ' m soon going to lecture to you about is feeling a loss of control, feeling that my normally cohesive self, this put-together me that I ' ve grown all these years, but feeling here, arriving here and feeling beforehand that I ' m totally out of control, that I don ' t know what I ' m doing, I don ' t know what I ' m saying, and that ' s actually quite true about all of this material.
I know from where I speak, but also, a lot of that feeling is because I feel so emotional about what we ' re doing here, and what we ' ve been doing for 25 years. It is incredibly close to my heart, this movement, and here we come for a renewal and a reunion. So I realize that I ' m feeling an enormous gratitude to all the people who ' ve been onboard with me in this journey that we ' ve made professionally; many of us have made it personally as well over the years.
So I speak with a depth of gratitude. I think we have come a long way since many of us altogether on both coasts thought about the idea children of alcoholics, the idea of adult children of alcoholics. It ' s a real idea. It ' s a real thing to grow up in a family with one or both parents alcoholic.
Now that has spread over these 25 years to be children of trauma, to include all kinds of other drugs, all kinds of other addictions, all kinds of other problems as well, if we put trauma in the mix, and I think it ' s very good that we do, very good. There may be some particular differences if we ' re talking about alcohol; we ' re talking about living with a severely depressed mother.
But what is fundamental is how the conditions of a child ' s experience, the conditions of family life, the relationship that is established to the care giving figures � I ' ll call them parents today. But there are many, many other kinds of attachment figures that can come into a child ' s life � some of them really healthy and able to help repair disasters that children have experienced.
But living with parents who are suffering themselves, suffering from predominantly their own loss of control � parents who are living with their own trauma � the loss of control of being addicted, the loss of control that occurs in many other ways. I refer to my own emotional feelings of loss of control, and that can certainly happen, where there ' s a flooding, there ' s a sense of being unable to cope.
We have a cultural loss of control today. It ' s all around us, with people floundering. The latest in the last year, the latest kinds of disorders that are now being dealt with by Time and Newsweek � the disorders of trying to be perfect. Trying to get control � the disorder of trying to have it all contained. That I think emerges today from many sources, but certainly, there ' s an acceptance in the culture, there ' s an acceptance professionally now that we didn ' t have 25 years ago.
But what we talk about is real, that living with and within families where the adults are out of control will cause damage to children. It will cause problems. It will certainly skew their development. If some of you might want to immediately say, � Is it all damaging? � Is it all damaging? I ' ll say, � No, not necessarily. � No, not necessarily. But living in this kind of family is going to skew and distort a child ' s � in quotes � � normal� developmental path. That ' s what I ' m about today.
First of all, what we ' re going to do here - in this hour, we ' re going to talk largely about the child, and the attachment bond that is traumatic. I will also be talking to you about what is a transformation process, what ' s possible for healing, so we will get to repair, healthy growth, healing, although the major focus is on understanding what is the trauma and how is that translated to children. How are they internalizing through the attachments that they form a traumatic self, a defensive self, a self utterly encompassed by fear an internal sense of this loss of cohesion, and the need, as they grow up, to be extremely careful, cautious.
The overarching word that I will use is the defensive self; the child grows up with a defensive self � that is a false self. So the path of normal development, the path of recovery, is to move, to be able to transform that whole developmental course into a real self, for going from a false self to a real self, and that is an arduous, long journey.
The second seminar that I ' m doing this afternoon is a continuation of this one. It ' s not in the program, unfortunately, but it ' s a continuation. This is number one and that ' s number two, and that one is going to cover the adult � what happens for the child as an adult in the adult who attempts to form close, intimate relationships.
A little bit about me. Some of you may know again from the bio, you may know the professional pieces. Some of you also may know that I come to this field, as most of you probably do, too, by personal experience. We don ' t get in these rooms for nothing.
I like everyone to know always, when I ' m talking, when I ' m teaching, that I combine my own personal experience and my deepest need to know. I am a recovering alcoholic. I had two alcoholic parents; they are both gone now. I have an alcoholic brother. We were four for four. So I literally lived and breathed chronic, severe alcoholism. I can readily say from the root of my being that I was born and raised into alcoholism, and I grew up quite nicely into my own severe alcoholism.
So I was very fortunate to find recovery, as so many have, and when I did, I started asking questions. I ' m a thinker, I ' m a theoretician, and I need to know. So I started asking questions in about 1971, which was when I came into recovery.
What happens to the individual who stops drinking? That was me. Then, I knew that my own experience was intimately enmeshed � absolutely impossible to tease apart � my own experiences of growing up, being tremendously attached to my parents, close, loving, severely alcoholic parents. I could not be a recovering alcoholic separate from understanding my family, and I want to say how important that is in our work.
So then I started asking research questions. Who are the children of alcoholics, the adult children of alcoholics, and how do we understand them?
The final piece of research, completed a few years ago now, is what happens to the family in which one or both parents stops drinking? How do we understand the family?
Now I come back here to put pieces together, to put the trauma piece, to put the children of alcoholics, to put recovery, to look at attachment.
I was born and raised professionally in a developmental perspective. I think about attachment. I think about normal child development. What is healthy, if there is such a thing? And definitely, what in the world is normal? It ' s very difficult � what is normal?
There are in fact standard expected paths, tasks for child development, adult development. They may be universal � I ' m not sure of that � but they certainly apply in our culture. Their tasks of development � early behavioral, sensory formation. Cognitive development � how we think, how we see the world. Perception � what I ' m taking in. All of us are going to go through all of these experiences if we ' re going to survive � we have to.
So what I look at, then, is how does the attachment to parents who are out of control affect these normal processes of development � how does it affect a child ' s behavior, a child ' s earliest sensory experience, the child ' s smell, taste, sound. How does a child take in the world around, and then make sense of it.
Included as a part of perception is cognition � what do I tell myself is going on here? Then, at some point in childhood, if I ' m living in an out-of-control environment, I will be asking what is real? What is real? How do I know what ' s real, what ' s happening? The alcoholic family is utterly dominated by a denial of what ' s real, so that perception, cognition, emotion, and even behavior, from the earliest point on in a child ' s development will be skewed, distorted, on a different path. In order to be able to adjust to the reality that the family is out of control, and then all the explanations that the parents construct in order to deny it � that is the core of the trauma of alcoholism. There is a loss of control often profound, and people in the family, outside the family, say it isn ' t so.
Now you know, there ' s great variety in everything I say � great variety. Well, some say, � Yes, Mama drinks, but she doesn ' t have a problem. � Other families say, � Your dad doesn ' t drink at all; what you see is not what you see. � So there ' s going to be a range of difference. It ' s our job as clinicians to be listening constantly, listening to what it was, the experience with the person with whom we ' re working. We need as best as we can to step back from imposing our idea of what happens to children of alcoholics, so that we make our clients fit.
We want to hear what their experience was, because for many, many children of alcoholics, it was wonderful, it was close, it was good; for many others, it was an absolute horror. For all of them, as they begin to come into having a real self rather than a false self, as they learn the idea, children of alcoholics, and said, �That ' s me, � then they go on this path of being able to develop a new identity, and many of them will feel and uncover a horror that was always there, whether they felt it or not.
Final piece in the part about me. With all that I ' ve told you how I ' ve come here, I always like to add that I am very grateful to be on this side of it, to be able to ask questions and to think.
I ' m hoping that we will have a brief period before the end for your questions as well.
We ' re going to cover two major theoretical frames. Listen for the big, listen for the global. There ' s a tremendous amount of detail, and I ' m going to ask you to shift sets in the middle or even three times. We ' re going to cover a lot of material in a brief time, so listen for the key points.
One of those is attachment. What is attachment? Attachment is part of human development. We can ' t survive without it, nor can the animals, and again, it is widely believed that attachment � the need for a primary emotional bond with another, with care-giving other � is essential for survival. So all human beings form attachments, and they usually come through the mother, through a father as well, through the care giving figures, whoever they may be.
Now, some of you may be familiar with John Bowlby ' s work, Mary Ainsworth � a group of psychoanalytic thinkers and developmental thinkers who did early attachment work in the 50s and 60s. They came up originally with three different kinds of attachment patterns. There are now four and they ' re really changing their work tremendously.
The gold standard attachment pattern was called the secure attachment . That is the experience of the child in relationship to its mother-parent figure � the child who feels a sense of closeness, safety � and this is at a very primitive level. It ' s a very early fundamental kind of safety and security, which is going to allow that child to develop a basic trust. The bond with the care giver, that early parental bond, becomes the primary source of how the child is going to learn about itself � how I learn who I am, how I learn about myself will come through initially my attachments to the parent, who will either be comforting, caring, may be a very anxious parent, may be rejecting of me.
Many of you may have seen pictures of the infant cradled by a father, let ' s say, and the smiles that are exchanged back and forth between the two. The sense of connection in its earliest form � connection is a popular word � comes in primary attachment bond. The connection is going to be strong and healthy, so that there ' s the secure bond.
What ' s going to come of this? The child feels that the world is safe. The child feels that other � I, myself, and my relationship with other. Other people will be seen as safe, secure people.
You then have a foundation for the child to be able to focus on his or her own self-development. The ideal attachment bond that is secure will provide the safety that I mentioned, the trust. But also, the focus will be on the child, the needs of the child The care giving person, the job of the care giving person and us as therapists, our jobs in a similar role, as our clients are forming attachment bonds with us, and going back in their lives to remember, our job is to have our attention on them, as we listen, just like a mother, a father � listen.
My job, then, is to try and be able to hear correctly. The mother needs to learn to differentiate the cries of her infant. What does this cry mean? Hungry. Diaper. The mother has to be attuned to the child.
Well, you know what ' s coming here � all the other, the three other kinds of attachment patterns that are faulty, that have problems in them. They come when there are tremendous flaws in the attachment bond. There ' s no attachment bond that ' s going to be perfect or ideal; it won ' t happen. Parents have to fail, have to miss the cues, have to fail in all kinds of ways in order for the child to actually be able to differentiate, to be able to realize, come into a sense of self. � I see things this way; my mom sees it that way. �
Parents will have to fail, so we are not talking about any kind of ideal here. What we are talking about is when parents become so focused on themselves. They are absorbed in their addiction. They are all absorbed in the defenses that are required to deny that there ' s a problem, to deny loss of control and explain it at the same time. So parents are focused on defense. They ' re focused on being able to maintain their own supply, their need for the substance. They cannot look outward, and in troubled families, when they do look outward, it ' s often with anger, projection, blame.
If they ' re looking outward and they ' re afraid, they ' re defending they need to drink. They look outward and they say, �Leave me alone. Don ' t get near me. Don ' t challenge me. Don ' t question. � Then you hear all these 25 years, children say, �My mom said that if I did better in school that my dad wouldn ' t yell so much. My mom said that if my brother and I didn ' t fight, that she wouldn ' t need to drink in the afternoon. � The children learn that it ' s their job to take care of the parent � that the parent is the child in the family.
This is classic role reversal. This can happen at any point in a child ' s development. It can happen initially right in the core of the attachment bond. It can happen at some point later in development. Kids could start out with a secure bond, and the parent develops alcoholism when then child is five, ten, fifteen. It ruptures everything, it ruptures the bond, because the focus shifts away from being child-centered to being parent-centered, and it ' s so fundamental.
I ' m going to just step down for one minute, if I can. I realize I don ' t have the overhead on and I ' m lecturing from it, so let me do that. Yes.
You have these handouts. Everything I ' m working from you have in your packet. This is what we ' re going to work from largely today and one other in the morning session, the adults in the afternoon session.
We are over at individual development right now. It ' s a little bit foggy up here. Individual development is on the right side � the attachment patterns. I don ' t even have secure attachment on your handout. I have anxious resistant, anxious avoidant, and chaotic. Those three different attachment patterns represent different kinds of pattern, different kinds of reciprocal relationship between child and adult, child and parent.
The anxious resistant pattern will come when a child is randomly gratified. Drinking mother gets it right some of the times and there ' s closeness. This mom can read to the child. There ' s a feeling of the kind of attachment, a sense of connection that is positive for the child.
Then it ' s gone. Mother goes on a binge, something bad happens, and the bond is lost. But then it comes back again. So here you have what Pavlov � the classic behaviorist � demonstrated, that random reinforcement will increase seeking behavior, so that the anxious resistant individual child may feel tremendously anxious, him or herself, but would be more likely to seek other figures on whom to depend, on whom to form a trusting attachment.
So you ' ll see many kids who have wild, out-of-control homes finding safety and security with a teacher. God bless teachers. God bless so many helpers in the world, where there is a stability in the environment, there is predictability, consistency, and so a child can find a different reality than the reality in the home. The anxious resistant child will grow up probably with a lot of anxiety, him or herself. That child is more likely to be able to feel needy � the need for attachment, which we call dependency, dependency relationships.
Now, dependency itself has a very bad name. We are all dependent creatures. We need to be able to be dependent, starting from infancy. If we have healthy relationships, if we have a secure attachment, we ' re going to grow up having been gratified, having experienced being seen, recognized, understood. We will grow up into a healthy sense of self, and able then to care for others, to have others be dependent on us, and to establish the mature adult relationships that include mutuality, reciprocity � what we call interdependence.
So many children of trauma grow up with dependency disorders. They are often hungry, literally emotionally starving, so unseen, and having to develop a precocious sense of self. � I must depend on myself, because those in my world are so unpredictable. �
The anxious avoidant child, this is a child that doesn ' t have much gratification at all. This is a child who lives where there is such trauma, such loss of control, that this child may feel lost, definitely unseen, begins to develop a sense that I can ' t have needs � not articulated as a young child, but the sense is of being lost � � I don ' t exist. �
Is this child going to feel his or her needs? Going to be able to feel dependent? Going to be seeking of others to form relationships? Not likely. No. The world is full of people who say, �The best relationship is to be alone. I don ' t trust people. I can ' t form a relationship. � In children, you will often see the loners.
You ' ll see children who become scapegoats. They really become the focus of sometimes the blame, what ' s going on inside the family. Or they will become very inward. Instead of reaching out in the world to form relationship with others, this kind of child reaches in, goes inside, develops a sense that I must be totally self-sufficient, I must be totally dependent on myself. This can occur at a very young age. What happens is the child shuts down the capacity to actually exchange or connect with others.
Now you ' re probably thinking this sounds like autistic children, and it does sound like that. It can be very, very similar. There is also a psychological term now that ' s much broader than childhood autism, and it also is a description of the autistic self, and that ' s the self that cannot reach out to others, cannot allow others in, and many children of alcoholics � children of trauma � suffer from this kind of attachment pattern.
They find a stable base of development in childhood, screening carefully � a very young, closed-off defensive self. I worked with a person for many years who was an only child, had two alcoholic parents, and he came in saying, �I don ' t know what ' s wrong with me. I can ' t see why people don ' t like me. I can ' t see why I keep getting fired. I have no understanding at all of what it is that I ' m doing in the world. � None. No ability to be able to see outside or to give feedback. He just knew that he kept getting fired over and over again. As I worked with him over the years, he was able to actually begin to look around my office, and finally, he said, �Where ' s that coming from? �
He was able to begin to go like this in my office. It was a miraculous leap in his growth, because what he had grown up with was as if he was a horse with blinders. His world was so out of control. Parents were drunk. They were out of control � physically, sexually � and he was trying all his childhood not to see it. He was trying not to take it in, he was trying not to fear, and when he grew up, he went out in the world as if he was alone in the world, as if there were no voices; he couldn ' t hear them. He had no capacity for interaction in a way that generates dialogue, negotiation and a back-and-forth. No capacity at all.
That day that he sat down in my office and looked around, he took his eyes off me. I had become safe enough � in our attachment and the bond of our working relationship � I had become safe enough that he could look somewhere else. He started to comment about my office. He started then to begin a very long process of working with me that would be able to lift the blinders. What it meant was that he would try to expand his behavior. He wanted to feel freer, but he lived like this, for fear if he opened up in the world, he would be out of control. That ' s all he saw.
That ' s all he knew. He felt there was a crazy, wild, out-of-control, harmful person inside of him, so he lived like this with the blinders. He got through school by focusing, by doing math, by just focusing on the answers to problems, and getting a feeling of control that way.
Over the years, he grew more open, and he grew in terms of ease of behavior. Ease of behavior � so he kicked his shoes off one day, and we both could see that this was a sign that he was feeling safer, and it was okay to try out new behaviors.
He could perceive differently, he was able to begin to take in new ways of thinking and seeing the world, and all through the years of this work, we would come back to his earliest attachments. He learned to be an avoided, because there was no one in his close world that was safe enough where he wouldn ' t feel so endangered, where he wouldn ' t internalize the loss of control that was all around him.
The final, very difficult attachment pattern, which we see more and more of today is the chaotic. The chaotic is the loss of control. Now, all the alcoholic families that I ' m talking about have a loss of control � that ' s the definition of alcoholism, that ' s the definition of addiction. But what happens often is that many alcoholic families, there ' s a tight reign on control � you need to be in control � and it ' s very rigid and tight, so you don ' t feel out of control. In other families, everything is totally, completely unmanageable � out of control � nobody knows who ' s doing what today, and it ' s very chaotic.
A child growing up in this kind of setting, we can think of can learn to be a scavenger, can learn to fend for yourself, can learn to get the last piece on the platter, because everybody else is going to take it and grab it. So there ' s a wildness, a sense that you have to fend for yourself.
But not to shutdown behavior, really. These people often have tremendous impulse problems. Their behavior is out of control, they ' re foraging � they ' re like foragers in the forest. You will see many childhood disorders that are behavioral disorders. Impulse disorder � you ' ll see stealing, shoplifting. You ' ll see lots of hoarding behavior. Hungry for a close bond, hungry to be seen, and the sense is of the intensity of feeling inside that comes from overstimulation, of loss of control, that produces the sense of internal chaos and high, high levels of anxiety, panic, craving, acted-out behavior, really. So these are a lot of conduct disorder kids that you will see.
I ' m absolutely certain that a lot of the learning disorders that we now see, a lot of these diagnoses of childhood disturbances are coming from these kinds of families and these kinds of attachment bonds, is that these kids are trying to adjust, they ' re trying to adapt, and they ' re trying to defend. There is too much going wrong in their environments and it ' s centered right in the bond. So there you have the traumatic attachment.
I mentioned child development is often based on role reversal. So many children learn through either being the anxious resistant, the avoidant, or the chaotic. They learn that it ' s their job to watch out for a parent, perhaps, to watch out for other children.
Many children will develop a precocious identity � young children. I ' ve talked to children who were taking care of siblings when they were four or five years old � not the siblings, the caretaker child � was fixing meals, trying to change diapers, trying to tend to children. Many young children will also be trying to care for passed-out parents. The inexperience will give the child a sense of self. It ' s a false self; it ' s a sense of being needed myself � � My mother will survive because of me. �
I was talking with a client yesterday whose mother was alcoholic, out of control, for much of this client ' s life. The client, as an adult in her 40s, says, �My mother will not kill herself if I keep watch. � Today, she says, �I only know that I exist, I only know that I have a self, and I feel my relationship with my mother when I am frightened to death she ' s going to kill herself. When I ' m worried and when I am active, pursuing her, trying to watch out for her, then I know that I exist. � That ' s an example of how in the present, her experience harkens back to the anxious past. She carries within her the pain of her closest bond with her mother and she reenacts it in the present.
Now, is this not really happening? Sometimes it ' s not really happening anymore, but the growing child and the adult carries the reality inside. My internal models of self are as if it ' s all still happening.
In this example I ' m giving you right now, the mother recently told my client that she ' d like to commit suicide, that no one needs her anymore, and that she thinks she ' ll commit suicide. And it goes on and on � the trauma is restarted; the client, in a sense, cannot separate, she cannot grow into a separate self, because of her deep, life-long anxiety that she keeps her mother alive. I ' ve already said that child development is organized by defensive adjustment � that is the defensive self.
I ' d like to say that in this attachment is a central core bind � a Catch-22 � a conflict for the child, in that child is dependent ; needs the others. The people on whom they most depend � parents and care givers � are the ones who are abusing them. The people on whom you most depend are the ones who are abusing you, and I use the word abuse very loosely in this context. It is the whole constellation of the skewed reality that I ' m talking about. A child growing up in this kind of attachment bond is going to have to adapt to seeing the world, seeing the self, as the parents see the world. And that means, in order for the child to feel attached, that child ' s going to have to go along with the distortions, the skew.
Many children who have grown up hearing that they were to blame for everything � and this is really standard � � I was too much of a burden for my parents. My mother had to drink. I was a kid. I was a burden � � these children will continue to feel, as they grow, that � I am a bad kid. I am bad, and if only there was help to help me be a good kid. � Well, in this process of recovery, you don ' t go from bad to good; you go from false to real, and it is arduous to tell the truth, to name reality. Let me just briefly go to the system � I ' m working backwards here. We talked about the actual relationship attachment pattern; that ' s the person-to-person bond that is the core of how I will know myself, how I will come into having a self and being a self. But there are several other very important domains of being, domains of experience, that have a huge impact on child development, on my development, and often we never look at these. We never consider that I, as a child, am affected by the mood inside my home � we don ' t think about that. But, children will form attachments to the environment and the dynamics of the family system, in the same way that they form an attachment to an individual, so that over development, the child will be internalizing systems dynamics and environmental feel. So what kind of a systems dynamic runs the alcoholic family? How does it work? The addicted family, alcohol or the addiction becomes the central organizing principle. That means, everything else follows. Being addicted, maintaining addiction, denying the addiction, centering the life of the family around protecting the addict � all elements that relate to the addiction organize family life, the same way that that focus on the addict organizes attachments. Exactly � the human attachment. So the family structure, which includes behavior, beliefs, affects, are all supporting a distorted, skewed family system, and the affect that would go along with that.
Now, I ' m assuming you all know what family systems are in dynamics. A brief word about it. The family system is the operational dynamic. It ' s the way the family works together. There are all kinds of different structures. The alcoholic family system actually functions often very well. Now, you may be saying, well, she ' s saying it ' s a functional family. I am saying � many alcoholic families are functional because they rely so much on defense.
They rely on denial, they rely on rigidity. It ' s a dictatorship in most alcoholic families. So while everyone learns to function, they become defended. They turn themselves into pretzels. Everyone adapts themselves to the greater need of the out-of-control parent.
As they ' re adapting themselves, the family learns to work. But is this family healthy? Absolutely not. It ' s an unhealthy system that works, and it grows tighter and tighter and tighter � like this person with the blinders on. No one can move. You can ' t know reality. You have to go along with whatever the family story is; you have to deny what is real, in order to protect the family and the system. It ' s a family; just like the individuals, the family is dominated by defense. It is unhealthy. It is rigid and often tightly controlled. This makes it restrictive, and as you see down at the bottom � on this one; this is an old overhead, you have a newer handout � it ' s unsafe. It ' s unsafe. These are dangerous families. They may be dangerously physically. There may be boundary crossings, sexual boundary crossings, physical � all kinds of difficulties within the system. It is unsafe for the children, who are largely unprotected. When you have the workings of a system � when we talk about family systems dynamics, we ' re talking about the cybernetics, the way parts relate to a whole � in families, you ' ll see this as what kind of regulating mechanisms a family has developed. How do things work? What do people expect and know?
How do family members come together? What ' s known? Regulating mechanisms that largely work. These are extremely dominated by tight control in addicted families. Everything is tightly regulated. It ' s as if you ' re trying to push down, push down, push down, on a balloon that ' s being blown up. You can ' t do it and it ' s going to explode at any minute. That ' s the tightness of this system.
Living in a rigid system like that will create all kinds of anxiety disorders. Panic, because there ' s a sense of the brittleness and the tension that exists in the home. You ' ll also have hierarchical disturbances galore, because there ' s role reversal, so you often have children who are actually admonishing parents, telling them what to do, taking care of them. The hierarchies are terribly skewed. Now, what ' s the child doing in this system, forming this attachment we ' re talking about? The child is internalizing, �This is what relationship is all about. This is how families work. � Now, there may be, in the deep inside of me, a part of me that says, �There ' s something terribly wrong here. This can ' t be, and I ' m going to be a better parent. � That may save my life, that kind of thinking, that ability to see and know, and I ' m going to do it better. As a child, that may save me; it gives me something to live for, something to hope for � some idea that I ' m going to find the way.
But, the difficulty is, where am I going to find it, because I don ' t have it inside of me. I don ' t have the internalized learning, the modeling that I need to get as a child. I learn from others. I learn from my parent, who ' s teaching me. I learn from modeling. So I may see it. I may see it in school, I may see it on the playground, I may see it in movies and read about it in books. I can ' t tell you how many people do improve, get well, become able to live with a traumatic self, and nevertheless, have much healthier relationships, not because of what comes from internal learning, but because of what they were able to allow to take in from the culture.
The environment, the final piece of attachment. The environment is the what it was like, what it is like. This is an elusive piece; it is so phenomenally important. What happens, what it feels like, what ' s seen in this world, what ' s not seen � this is the context of family life. The conditions of trauma exist in the environment, because the environment contains the feeling. The feelings will be in the attachment bond as well, but the feelings of what ' s really happening in this relationship in this family are going to be contained in the environment.
The atmosphere. Is it warm? Is it inviting? Is it icy cold? A person, an ACOA who was in a long-term group with me for many years, I asked him in an interview, I said, �Could you take me home with you. Bring me on a guided imagery. Bring me home with you. Tell me what you can see and hear. �
He just froze, and his eyes grew big, which we know is the sign of terror, coming from the past. He said, �I can ' t take you home. I can ' t. � I said, �Why? � He said, �I can ' t go in that door. � I said, �Well, tell me where you are. � He said, �Well, it ' s after school, I can come down the road, I can see all that. Around the corner, you know, the sun was just shining; walking home, I could feel it. Things felt good, and around the corner to my home, and suddenly, it ' s dark, it ' s just black. �
I said, �Can you take me further? � He said, �I can ' t get you further. � I said, �Where can you go next? � He said, �I can get you upstairs with me in my room. � I said, �Let ' s go there. � We went upstairs in his room � all in our minds. He said, �I ' m all by myself. I learned that I had to take care of myself. I ' m all by myself, and I hear the screaming downstairs. I put the blanket over my ears, and I bury myself under the covers. That was what I did every day after school. �
So then you hear him describe what it was like. He has internalized all of the sights, the sounds, the feelings, the memories, and that comes from the earliest, preverbal experience of young children, infants � the affect, the feel, the connection with a smile. Before I have words, before I have cognition, to tell me my mother loves me, before I have words to think, I have the sights and the sounds and the feel. I know if my mother ' s dropped me because the glass dropped out of her hand � I felt it. I know if my mother ' s shaking � I felt it.
These memories may be gone or blocked; they may be only too clear in the context of early childhood, growing up. They ' re clear in tremendous anxiety disorders; disorders of the sense, of self-fragmentation. I ' m going to lose myself; something bad is going to happen.
There are changing standards of parental behavior logic, chronic tension, unpredictability, inconsistency � there ' s a lack of physical and emotional safety, that earliest sense of affective bond. The emotional attachment, as I ' m saying, that comes first, that ' s what we feel in these earliest infantile bonds is the emotional connection. It may be impaired, as I said about in the actual attachment bond; it may be chronically disrupted because of the chaos in the environment, because my mother, as she ' s cradling me, as she ' s singing me to sleep, starts slurring, and she falls over, and I ' m an infant, I ' m a toddler. One more thing here about child development, because I ' m really wanting to accent how young this can all start, and the profound, in-depth impact. Children under about seven or eight years old have young thinking; they think what we call concretely and preoperationally. They don ' t have abstract capacity yet, so they can ' t look at a parent and say, �My parent ' s drunk, and my dad won ' t be that way tomorrow.�
Young children see a parent get drunk over and over and over again, and every single time, they think the parent has died � often. It ' s a horrific retraumatizing over and over and over again for the young child. As that child gets to be seven, eight, nine, cognition is operating now on clear levels. If reality can be known in their world, they can begin to seek, and we ' ve seen it. In our family recovery project, we saw countless families who identified in recovery where there had been a process of repair, redevelopment and recovery, because the parents went into recovery, and then reality could be known.
Children cannot develop a different reality than what the parents are saying is true; it is enormously difficult, although it can happen if there ' s an aunt or an uncle, a neighbor, it can happen. But the power of the traumatic attachment bond will settle in, reinforce itself over and over and over again.
Now I ' m going to switch the overhead and I ' m going to ask you to switch sets � just turn the switch. I ' m going to ask you to move now from when we were before was the impact of interpersonal trauma on self-development. That ' s the interpersonal experience of the developmentive self.
Now that ' s a lot right there � how as an infant, child, teen, adult, how I know myself via others. If I come from a healthy family, at the moment of birth, I will be learning who I am. My self-development is going to start with the process of reciprocity, mutuality, with my parent, with the attachment figure. That ' s healthy development, that ' s the secure bond. The mother smiles at the infant, the infant smiles back, and there is active engagement. I learn about myself through you and then from myself as well. It ' s not one way or another; it ' s not unidirectional.
But the child in which there ' s traumatic attachment, the child has to cut off self knowledge. I have to cut off a lot of what is coming from me, because it isn ' t matching what ' s happening in my world and what I ' m told is happening. So I will squelch the self in me, in order to adjust to learning about myself through others and from others.
So the process of recovery is going to be one of bringing forth self, being able to be safe enough to open up me, and often going back to childhood experiences, memories, to remember so that I can develop a self coming from me, coming from me in the context of new relationships and recovery.
But I ' m running ahead of myself, because I still have problems to address, which I ' m going to do pretty quickly here. Now, what in the world is all of this? This is a way to think about the development of self. Now, separate from the interpersonal influence, what ' s going on in the self in development? So that ' s where we ' re going and switching is just to think about that. I ' m going to give you some examples about the child in traumatic family. Across the top, you see behavior, perception, cognition, affect. These are the domains of self-development, tasks of self-development that I mentioned a lot already. This is what we all are going to experience growing up. Then we have key elements of self-development.
These, I felt like it was a godsend when I discovered Althea Horner ' s The Primacy of Structure , because she outlined in a way that no other theorists have that I have seen at all, dynamic theorists, analytic theorists, thinking about the child development. She calls them the Desiderata of healthy child and adult development, and the Desiderata are the key, foundation elements that have to exist for children to develop into healthy self.
Those are inside the self, an experience of cohesion � a cohesive sense of self. Reality test. What have I been talking about so far? The skewed and distorted reality that forms the basis for all family interaction. Reality testing. If it ' s going to be a healthy self, the child ' s experience of what is real, what I take in, what I put out, what I give back, the child ' s experience of what goes on in me needs to match what ' s actually happening in the world.
So you look at number 3, object relations. Object relations refers to the capacity for, the need for, healthy interpersonal relationships and experiences. We ' ve talked a lot about object relations so far, in terms of traumatic attachment, traumatic bonding, and the impact.
Now, you know without my saying right now if we go down, we ' re going to do it. Cohesion, reality testing, object relations. Then they all cross when we look at the impact on behavior, the impact on perception, the impact on cognition, and affect � all the elements that go into the development of any one of us. Then we look, cohesion, reality testing, object relations � they ' re all massively distorted. They are the core of addicted, traumatic families � the core.
Now, what do I mean? Let ' s start with cohesion � what is it? Cohesion is a sense of a put-together self, a sense of self that feels secure, feels safe � all of the elements of the secure attachment bond.
A cohesive self comes right at birth. We speculate that the infant just born has a very chaotic inner world, and the mother, father, parent figures are there to soothe � to provide soothing, comfort, accurate responsive. What ' s the impact of that? The child calms down. What ' s the impact on us, if we feel heard, understood, if we ' re panicked, anxious? If we come to therapist, come to friend, 12-step? If we feel free enough to seek help and find soothing comfort, we sigh, we settle down. When I settle down and feel safe, I feel put together; I can feel again my sense of the world is okay.
Now, many, many children never get to feel that sense of cohesion. They live with the trauma, they live in that chaotic bond, the chaotic world, and so they never feel any sense of that.
Behavior, where you have a lack of cohesion, is likely to be out of control, chaotic, or it could be withdrawn. But the child ' s focus has to go inward to try and grasp some kind of relief for the panic. The child who ' s growing up with panic, again, will develop all kinds of learning disabilities, may develop childhood depression, panic disorders. You may see a lot of other signs of the depth of the anxiety itself.
Loss of self is what is defined as trauma � it is the loss of a cohesive, viable sense of self � the fragmentation of self.
Perception. In the best of all possible worlds, the healthy attachment, the child ' s going to be able to see, to focus. The child starts out with a wide world of perception � not needing blinders, not afraid of what I might see � unrestricted. Parents are there to watch out, so that my perception can be clear. As I start to develop language, as I start to develop cognition � thinking,
I 'm saying, �What's this? How do you spell dog? � I ' m beginning to make my continuous, interdependent exchange, my development of myself to know through exchange with the environment, the people in my system and my attachments. All these processes of what I can see and know can become grossly impaired when the reality is distorted and the focus is off of me, onto the parent as primary.
Cognition, ideally, would be clear. We make sense of things, and a very important part of cognition growing up is the ability to link cause and effect. If I save this, you will do this. Now, you ' re hearing elements of a capacity to have a self in a sense of other, and a sense of reciprocity � mutuality. � If I do this, this will happen to me. � Often, there is no link in traumatic families between cause and effect.
If anything, there is active distortion � the distortion of the reality. � Your mom isn ' t drinking; she just has a headache � � an active distortion. So the child learns that, �I can ' t trust my perceptions; I can ' t make sense of my world. � What does this lead to? Tremendous anxiety about the viability of myself. Children are terrified in the world; they have school phobia, often � the anxiety that I mentioned.
Now, some of you are saying, there ' s a lot of precocious kids out there; there ' s a lot of kids who are going to do really well coping with all of this, and that's right. These are the kids that develop the precocious false self early on, where they often actually have very a grandiose, an omnipotent sense of themselves at a very young age, because they're required to be parental. They're required to be adults at a very young age, and so they, in essence, put on a false self, to cover up their needs, the absence of the cohesiveness, but they function well in the world�they function well in the world.
Many of us who are therapists, many of us who were in this movement, have been in this movement for a long time, fit that category. I do. Do you want to ask now, �Why am I somebody who needs to make sense of things? Why?� Here you are.
Then affect. What is a child going to be feeling, growing up in such a traumatic world? Well, terror; a sense of impending disintegration of self. In addition to all the other problems I've mentioned, these young children may also have night terrors�terrific nightmares�the anxieties. If your world, your child's world of thinking in motion, sees your parents dying every day, you feel then the wrenching separation in the connection, over and over and over again.
The parent wakes up in the morning, you check out first, what's the mood? How's it going to be? So you're vigilant, watchful; you're ready to be defendant. Maybe the parent is smiling and happy, and you feel, "Ah, Mom's okay." By nighttime, over it goes again, and Mom is drinking till she passes out, and she dies for you, because you feel alone.
In the process of long-term therapy, countless people go back to the inner state of profound emptiness, profound sense of loss, and the emptiness that they've been warding off all their adult lives, that sense of emptiness. When they can find it in the safety of the therapeutic relationship of whatever it is, they find that emptiness, and they feel the sense of being very young and alone, with no figure in their world, and the sense of terror that emanates from that experience.
I'm going to give you a couple of examples from therapy group here of cohesion. I'm going to only cover in this segment cohesion and reality testing, and object relationships will come this afternoon. But I want to tell you and let you hear real voices of people who are in group therapy in this case. I work with individuals in very long-term work. None of what I am telling you, I believe, is short-term�I'm sorry.
These are not fixes; we're talking about redevelopment, and it takes a long, long time. And the world isn't safe enough for all of us to develop in it; many of our attachments aren't safe enough either. But there are plenty of pockets where it's possible to make new attachments as children and adults to a new reality, where we will find soothing and comfort.
Let me read to you. Long-term therapy group; all the people in this group today, this is the first group I started with Tim Cermack back in 1978. This group is still going�and none of the original members, although close�26 or 27 years. As people join in group, they grow in their ability to look around, to be able to start to interact with others, and initially, being in group therapy is all about bringing my defensive self, and it's going to be all about challenge, so it's going to be tremendous anxiety.
But over time, as the group becomes safe�the same thing happens with the 12-step programs�as it becomes safe, I become better able and more courageous actually about being able to see myself, to feel and see myself, to be able to take in feedback, which I've had to screen forever through my defense.
So here's Frank in the group, and he's illustrating cohesion. Frank said he suddenly felt lost, scared, and desperate. As he was talking, he had a sense that he had become lost and he didn't know where he was going or what was happening. He said he was trying to keep going, asking questions to get himself out of this feeling of desperation. Frank then realized that he is listening to people in the group from the framework of his own internal model. He suddenly realizes that he is young Freddie, right in this very moment; he realizes he feels about seven years old. When that old internal model of his gets triggered or active like it did just now, there's no present reality that Frank can allow in. You all become his early parents, early figures; he's in a regression.
Frank said that he runs with his old ideas and feelings. Now, as he got it that he was young Freddie right in that moment, and he had grown-up Freddie right alongside of him, and he says, "I can see that people were tuning me out, that I was losing them. I began to feel a deep sense of abandonment right there. And I felt an aching loneliness, I got so afraid, and then I felt lost; I felt like I couldn't find my way home�I can't find my bearings. This happens to me all the time in this group; I see you all tune me out.
As Frank continued, he remembered a memory of watching his father unable to hold his head up as his father got drunker and drunker. So you see, then, that memory brought young Freddie to his feelings at the time he was growing up, that he would be talking to his parents, his family, and everybody would be tuning him out, because they would drop off�they would literally fall away�and he had a depth of a sense of abandonment and loss.
Where did he go to? The sense of any kind of cohesive self is gone; he feels a fragmentation, and he feels lost, as he described.
Another example: Stephanie said she knew that Katie was very upset, though she had said nothing; she was quiet. Katie's eyes were big and frozen, suggesting to Stephanie that Katie not only was upset, but that she might be feeling terror. Katie suddenly recalled hearing the grown-ups say that her mother had been murdered. Then there was screaming and crying�the sounds that she holds in her body, in her preverbal memory. No one came to get her; no one came to tell her. She sat in frozen terror, with the words and the sounds.
Later, in the meeting, Katie brought herself back to the present. With anger now, she expressed her rage at other group members who were talking about her as if she wasn't present. Do you hear how simple an experience in the present can trigger a memory frozen inside from the past? Trauma is being frozen; trauma is arrested development. Trauma is carrying all of the trauma from the attachment bond, the system requirements, and the environment of chaos and loss of control. That's what is the self; that's who's home in there�this kind of internal experience, and Katie found it, right there in group.
Let me just say something about reality testing, and then I will wrap up, so we have some time for comments and questions. Reality testing is the second Desiderata , and I've talked a lot about that. It is so core to our being as cohesive, healthy individuals.
If we cannot know a reality that's inside of us, or what is our reality in the world�and they differ for people; what is true differs�but if we cannot know, if I do not have the safety or the permission to know what's real for me, I will live with the need of constant defense, because what I'm going to do, then, in my behavior, my perception, my cognition, and my affect, I'm going to grow up watching what your reality is, so that I can shape mine to match yours, so that I can win your approval, so that I can avoid a beating, so that I learn absolutely that I cannot know a reality that exists separately from what you will allow me to know�that is that dominance of the perspective of another.
I then give up myself, or that real part of me dies, goes into dormancy. So I don't learn with reality testing that my behavior leads to consequences. I can't take in feedback. I can't have a sense of security and safety. I actually live with a fear about the world; I live with a fear of myself, about my own behavior.
So many children of alcoholics feel that they are just all tied up. Rather than being impulsive and out of control is they just can't move. If I move, I will be out of control, or I will be so damaging to somebody else. I will become the out-of-control parent that I have internalized. I know what it's like to be my mother, to be my mother; I know what it's like, it's inside of me, so I keep it down and hidden and quiet, and only I know what's in there.
If nothing else from this whole grid, take away right now reality testing and perception and cognition as the core of the bind for the repair and recovery process. What is real? What can I articulate? What language will I use? What am I going to call it? Then, what am I allowed to feel?
If reality has to be denied, it is not possible to see clearly, to think clearly, or to feel the feelings that match the reality. If I'm scared, if I see you drunk and I'm terrified, I have to quiet myself, because it isn't supposed to be happening. I tell myself, �It's just silly me. What's wrong with me that I have all of these feelings? My parents are okay. They laugh at my fears. They say they're fine; they tell me there's nothing wrong.�
So I then become more and more focused inward, perhaps. Or, I cannot house it any longer, and I start to act out. My behavior becomes out of control. I need to have actions, because I am so tied up with the constrictions on my world of knowing. Being a child of trauma in the bond�the system, the environment�being a child of trauma is going to be distorting, restricting; it's going to limit me tremendously.
Because I need these people, I am going to go along with it until I can't anymore and something happens, actually. I act out, I get into trouble, horrible things happen, I get help. I read a magazine and I read about children of alcoholics, and oh my gosh the light goes off. I become able to seek help. What is the transformation? How in the world does anybody with what I think is a pretty severe description of what happens to children, how does anybody recover from this?
I don't know that we recover, actually. I know we regrow. We find that self that's in there�that's what happens. We've got to go looking, and the journey is full of anxiety and dread, because we have to reach out to other people, and other people are the source of the harm. Most children of alcoholics, children of trauma, hold within them a fear of others, tremendous fear of people in humanity.
But I'm going to have to reach out, so what is the transformation? It involves paradox, paradox, paradox, constantly. You're not going from bad to good, as I said; you're going from false to real. False to real is very different, because it means I have got to be able to become
open to myself, and what's in there.
But I can't do this alone. I want to do it alone, but I can't do it alone. I will have to become real to myself in the context of a feeling relationship. It's full of paradox; I will have to find my way to those who will help, because I cannot grow alone. If I grow alone, I will emphasize what's inside of me. I will reinforce the self that's in there. I will see all of you as potential helpers, but I can't trust you, and I go inside, and I reinforce all of my own perceptions, cognitions.
I have to have real exchanges with you in the world, whether it's therapy groups, 12-step programs�profound redevelopment in 12-step programs, because what are people talking about in 12-step programs? Reality�this is what I did; this is what happened. So over and over and over again, you then have the environment of the therapy�the 12-step, friendships, church, religions of all kinds, perhaps, not automatically, none of these of what I'm saying here necessarily are going to be healthy, but you'll have the opportunity to hear other realities, and to sift through it.
The process of growth is going to be moving from a defensive self to a real self�a self that leads in the world, that knows myself only by how well I'm defending, to the whole notion of coping. No, I am not everything to everybody. I still am a bundle of nerves. I still feel, I don't know, but now I have internal foundation, I have external foundation; I have more sense of cohesive self, and I can deal with reality. I do not get well until I have the capacity to allow reality in, to make it mine, to think about and reflect what I feel, see, think, believe.
There is no recovery without reality. You can make a lot of gains, but if you have to keep holding the distortions, it's going to drive you back into defense.
I think we've got it, so I will stop there for comments, questions. I �ll give you more examples if you don't.
AUDIENCE : How do these concepts apply to the child of an alcoholic parent or parents, and the parents get divorced and the child is living outside of the alcoholic home?
BROWN : That's a fabulous question as a global question for variability. There's not one family that's the same. They may have patterns that are similar, but there's not one family that's the same, because of all the intricacies of this particular family.
That's one pattern; that's a common pattern, where the family dissolves at some point. There may be one alcoholic, one non-alcoholic. But a non-addicted person is going to be tremendously traumatized�out of control also�having accommodated and adapted to the unhealthy dictatorship. I will listen for the history in this family, and if I hear there was divorce, I want to know what age were the children, because I now want to assess what's the impact on the normal tasks of development for a four-year-old, a six-year-old, a ten-year-old. That's how I'm listening�developmentally.
Divorce itself is a trauma for most children, so you trade one�dangerous environment�and produce another trauma in the process; that's part of it. What happened then after the divorce? That's what I want to know. What happened? What was the impact?
Oftentimes you'll see, perhaps, as the active addiction is taken out of the context of the family, whether by divorce, the environment can become safer, because the environment may no longer be dominated by loss of control, but it takes a while, because divorce produces loss of control, rage and anger. So the parent that isn't alcoholic may have a long road to creating the healthy home environment.
There are so many variables, which is why you have to listen, and be open to a variety of different impacts on a child. How is the parent who is alcoholic talked about? All those kinds of things, and often, because of other dynamic issues of attachment, identity formation, where we didn't even get, but you can separate a child from a parent�you can remove them. They may never see the parent, and they're going to go looking for the lost parent sometime in their life, in their development�they will.
I'm thinking, because I don't think it's in the bigger books�this is in papers, old papers. You can come and talk to me if you want. Oh, wait, the book's out of print. Health Communications published it, and it's out of print. It's Adult Children of Alcoholics in Treatment . There's some three articles, early articles about the development of self, really, through group therapy. You would find some of that there. There's one article, Erikson's Stages of Development and the Impingement of an Alcoholic parent.
JOYCE : In a child that's in a family with out of control, with the trauma, and develops learning disabilities, is it possible that those learning disabilities will be correct if the environment changes?
BROWN : That's one of the most important research questions we must ask. We don't know yet. I actually have my view, coming from clinical work and seeing many people, that the deepest core of self that we're talking about here remains�the vulnerable self, the anxious self�and that we grow stronger, the ACOA grows stronger.
As it becomes safer to know reality, indeed, the person feels that the confusion clears up. How many clients say, �I'm so confused�? When you say you feel confused, it's a reference to the cohesion, or to perception or cognition. �I can't see.� �Well, what do you think would happen if you could see clearly?� �It would be horrible.� So then there's a long process in the work of being able to see more and more clearly.
What I've seen clinically, what actually happens is children from alcoholic families often have packets of clarity. Their thinking is clear and solid in areas that are not threatening. They can do math or they can�or they can't do math�they can do school studies, they can focus. As soon as you get into the realm of emotion or interpersonal relationship, they get all confused.
They can't see clearly; they can't see cause and effect, because they didn't see growing up any links for cause and effect, and that is often a core of all kinds of learning disturbances. A core of it is you can't make the links. If you could make these links growing up, your development can proceed without arrests or holes.
But again, because I've seen that it is pockets, actually, so where it looks like, in the therapy setting or the emotional setting or the emotional setting, it looks like people live in internal confusion and can't make links, but they go out in the world and run corporations. So it's again saying, �Okay, so what's going on here?� It has to do with safety. It has to do with the ability to function in the world without having to have attachments that are too close, too threatening�those kinds of ways of thinking. None of this is linear; none of is simple.
AUDIENCE : What do I think about the chaotic attachments coming in now?
BROWN : Did Bowlby and his colleagues miss something? I don't know, actually. Don't know. It may be a function of a different world; it may be indeed, and I think that has an impact. It's just like the environment has an impact, and the world is so much faster, chaotic, and everybody tends to recognize.
More and more people live with the feeling of chaos; they can't find their cell phone, they can't�I mean, that's exactly . . . were they traumatized as children? Don't know. But we sure have it in the culture. So it may very well be a function of the culture, this chaotic attachment, and I think they're asking that now. They're looking to see. Again, I don't know whether it was missed or not; have no idea. It had to come up, that question.
This is about increasing diagnoses of children with psychiatric disorders and medication. First of all, I don't know. I wish I knew. I want to know and I don't know, because it's such a dilemma of what's biological and what's not.
I come from the psychological side of things, so I feel that I know that side, and I don't know the biological or the neurological. So I'm going to come in with the arguments about how something resides in the attachment, the culture of the family, the culture of the playground, whatever it is.
That's where I'm going to come from, and I'm going to stay from that position, wondering about any other kinds of medical treatments, referring for them, and wondering where my problem is currently with the medical world, medication, diagnoses, is that it's often viewed as a fix. It is viewed as the end of attention to the issues, and I have every problem in the world with that, because then you don't have the opportunity to find what are the problems in the environment, in the home, that are going to keep feeding whatever it is that's been diagnosed, whatever it is�I have a terrible problem with that.
So I will say in closing�with my thanks to you all�but I will say, I see that our culture is out of control, that everything I'm talking about today is in the culture. It's out of control that for better or worse, we have become lost in chaos, often, in pursuing speed�pursuing speed.
I'm not talking about the drug speed, but to get someplace as fast as we can, and children are�again, it's in Newsweek , it's in Time �we're getting there, thank goodness, that the disorders of childhood are not just in the family but in the culture. Too much speed; kids have no capacity to receive more�it's an onslaught. That's just like the overstimulation in an alcoholic home.
Thank you very much. |