Resilience is letting the past be past rather than allowing it to control the present or forecast the future.
Of course I carried this uncertainty into every relationship. I watched my partners like a hawk, certain they were soon to dump me. And dump me they did, of course. My terror about abandonment escalated. It brought tension into a marriage that was troubled by alcohol from the start. My tension, and his too, coupled with our alcoholism, made manifest my worst fear. He abandoned me for another woman.
The result was that his action propelled me deeper into my alcoholism, which was fortunately followed by eventual sobriety. It was in early sobriety that I sought the help of a counselor because my fears around abandonment continued to negatively impact my behavior in every romantic relationship, and with every friend. The counselor's nearly first words were, “You were abandoned in the womb.” What allowed her to intuit this I'll never know, but I didn't doubt, even for a moment, that she was right. However, what to do with this information provided my next stumbling block.
Not coincidentally, I was enrolled in a class on the dynamics of the family of origin at the same time. The two experiences, in combination, changed my life in a profound way. The teacher of the family of origin class assigned each one of us to talk to our families, particularly our parents, about their life experiences. The purpose was to see how our experiences mirrored theirs, or perhaps were a reaction to theirs in some significant way. I made the call to my parents, explaining that I wanted to interview them. The silence on the other end of the line was deafening, but they agreed to my request. I went home to talk to them a couple of weeks later. And my life made a right turn!
Resilience is a decision before it's anything else. And then it's a commitment to execute the plan.
I sat with my mother first, bless her heart. For sure neither of them wanted to be interrogated, but she did the motherly thing and agreed to go first. “Tell me about your life, Mom?” Almost immediately, the tears began to flow and then turned into sobs. “I never felt like a good wife, a good mother, and I didn't want you when I was pregnant with you.” Bingo. My counselor had nailed it. My life began to make sense. The abandonment issue that had plagued me my entire life was born in the womb. Having this confirmed at age thirty-eight shed light on my journey, a light that has never been dimmed.
When I spoke to my dad, he shared openly the fear he had lived with his entire life, a fear that was shrouded in rage. At the time, it was a new concept for me to see rage as the cover-up for fear, but it made perfect sense. Rage kept people “in their place” and away from the interior spaces of his being. What an eye-opener my trip home was. My own hard exterior began to develop cracks, and my incessant certainty that every relationship in my life was on a trajectory of inevitable rejection began to ease.
With my changed perception about how life was unfolding, I became more willing to trust the process of daily life and to embrace each experience as the next perfect one. This allowed me to truly feel resilient and undaunted. I no longer waited for the bottom to fall out of my world. I no longer waited for everyone else to define my happiness. Being resilient makes it viable to stand tall rather than be knocked down. We can make a decision to stand, resilient, as every wave of experience hits us.
Resilience wears many coats. One of the more brilliant ones is worn by Allison, a fascinating interviewee. She was the first in her very large family to seek help for her addiction. Perhaps I shouldn't say she sought the help. She was institutionalized first, and an insightful counselor could see that her problem wasn't as simple as extreme incorrigibility but rather alcoholism. The acting out, which included running away and frequent fights in bars, was her cry for help—a cry neither she nor her family recognized initially.
Allison's story is long and complicated and I will cover many parts of it throughout this book, but right now I want to highlight her resilience. She has a truckload of it. She was the middle child in a family of eight children. It was easy to get overlooked in a family of that size, particularly when it was troubled by alcoholism too. Her acting out was probably a way of seeking attention, but it was also the direct result of drinking uncontrollably and doing drugs. For sure it won her attention, but not the kind she really wanted.
Following treatment for the mental problems and the alcoholism, she married. Her life seemed to settle for a time, but her decision to have children meant giving up the medication that stabilized her. Back into the hospital she went, but this time it didn't feel like prison. She found her equilibrium again. She kept going back every time there was a setback. It was as though her lesson in life was to rebound and show the rest of us what resilience looked like.
Resilience is a trait that can be honed by all but is avoided by many because of fear of failure.
Her struggles were far from over, however, and when her children were small, she was diagnosed with bone cancer. Her pelvic bone was removed and she lived in a body cast, for the most part immobile, for an entire year. How she managed that test of acceptance was amazing to everyone who knew her. And if the result of this trial was the freedom to walk again once the year was over, one might understand how she managed to live it. But that outcome was not to be—never again would Allison walk unaided.
She is a testament to resilience, however. She lives with joy and a sense of humor about the insanity of life. Her life was the embodiment of dysfunction, starting with the family she was born into and moving into her own diseased body. But nothing has kept her down. She lives her life to the fullest and helps others live theirs too. She did not transfer the dysfunction she was imprinted with in her family of origin to her own family. She broke the pattern. She blocked the trail of alcoholism.
For sure it could be said that every person I spoke to about survival in a family that seemed destined to defeat them actually gained strength from the experience. As is so commonly said, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Perhaps no one reflected this more than Dawn. Dawn is an Oneida Indian from Wisconsin. I met her in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. I had no idea when I met her that we would travel this same path for nearly three decades, a path we still travel, in fact. Dawn is an amazing woman, one of sixteen kids, one of only seven still alive. Alcoholism has taken the lives of all the rest of them.
There is nothing about Dawn's upbringing that would have suggested she'd be one of the survivors. But survive she has, and thrive she does in her own way. It would be a vast understatement to say that her family was dysfunctional. Both parents were dead from alcoholism in their early 50s. Her father shot himself because he couldn't stop drinking. Her mother died of liver disease. All sixteen children were placed in foster care and Dawn and her younger sisters were molested again and again. The authorities never stepped in.
Dawn has carried the guilt over not being able to protect her younger sisters all of her life. She began to drink and gamble and run away as a way of coping at thirteen, and her path was grooved by the time she was sixteen. Amazingly, she proved to be a good employee for many years, in spite of her alcoholism and absenteeism. The past eventually caught up with her, however, and she was brutally beaten by a cop using a billy club while in a drunk tank. Many brain surgeries were not able to repair the damage that was inflicted on her. Her speech continues to be affected, as is her handwriting.
Resilience is getting up again and again when one falls.
Dawn has rebounded from unbelievable odds. She now has Parkinson's disease, along with the brain damage. Her gait is compromised. The seizures from epilepsy hit at the most unexpected times. Fortunately she receives disability and food stamps and is able to work part time, which gets her out of the house and around people two or three hours a day. A friend picks her up for AA meetings and an ex-husband makes sure she gets to family functions.
In spite of all the challenges, Dawn does not complain. She feels lucky to be alive and to have friends and family who continue to love her even though she put them through hell. She is determined to hold her head high and continue to face the world with dignity. She sees the bright side of life, even though her own life has been mostly dark. She helps others see the humor in the unexpected occurrences of daily life. She laughs heartily at herself and helps others to do likewise. She is the epitome of resilience.
When