The Vicious Circle of Addiction

Today I was thinking of my maternal grandmother. A sad story, to be sure. She had three marriages, two of which were alcoholic and abusive. Her third was finally a winner. Unfortunately it took her sixty plus years to get to a good man and relationship. They say that addiction often runs in families and there is a strong tendency for people who come from addicted families to become addicted or marry into the same situation. I don't really know my grandmother's family history, but with two alcoholic marriages, it's clear she didn't stand a chance.

In some ways, my mother was fortunate. She was not raised by her mother, and hence had no alcoholic father around. She was also raised inside of a church-going sobriety. Consequently, she never drank and escaped the sickness herself. In her line of children we all did... or at least so it seems. But one has to wonder, how does it come that I, one generation removed, also managed to find an alcoholic man for my life? Is it just some odd, twisted fluke of inexplicable fate? Or is there perhaps something more at play in this odd coincidence?

My mother was brought up living around the corner from her real mother. She was raised by an elderly woman who had a lot of love to give, and gave it freely to children who had no-one else to rear them. Being born under questionable circumstances from my grandmother's one night of extra-marital love with her childhood sweetheart, my mother became one of those children. She lived down the street from her mother, but never knew who her mother was. So here comes the first clue to the mystery of how addiction grows and flourishes as a way of being in families. Namely, it is the web of secrets and shame. In this we find some understanding. For if you look closely, secrets and shame hover around addicted families like flies on the compost heap. Inside this strange atmosphere of no-speak, open communication is hardly heard of, and the weather is the primary source of pretend discourse-discourse that is often fraught with the discomfort of the unsaid, wanting to be heard, and often a lot of pain, being stifled and covered up.

I too grew up in such a climate- hiding my pain, grinning and bearing it. It was no-one's fault. It just was 'how it was.' This was how everyone had always learned it through the families and through the ages. And here I will talk about clue number two in the mystery of how addiction passes to new generations. Both women who raised my mother at various ages were related to my grandmother! One can only surmise that they were similar families, with similar silences, and similar rules of no-speak. So even though the actual alcohol was not present in either of the women who raised my mother, the alcoholic 'way of being' was alive and well in their families. It lived in a variety of commonalities, ways of seeing the world and reacting to it- ways of being that quite simply put, did not work so well. In addicted families down through the ages there are many commonalities; things like parents who have one controller and one controllee, one giver and one taker, one carer and one could-care-a-less, someone who jumps and someone who says jump, a pleaser and someone who must be pleased, a henpecked and a henpecker. And then in addicted families there are the host of children scurrying around to make it all right, with or without the presence of alcohol or drugs- although it is common that these problems will show up eventually somewhere. And those children are learning what they will then pass down to the next generations. And this passing-down of the sickness does not even include the very real factor of genetic inclination.

And it can be said that this code of silence, this no-speak, this holding-in of pain and hiding it was just one such effect of this family dysfunction that was alive and well in my home life as well as my grandmother's, as well as in the lives of the people who raised my mother. Good people, all, but just living out the rules that they had grown up in.

And now I take a minute to look to my ex-husband's family. As I look I don't find it odd that I see the same strange occurrence. My ex-husband's family were speaking, and speaking a lot- fabulous discoursers one and all- but they said nothing outside of the rules. And if you managed to blunder on the wrong thing to say, as I certainly did as a young newcomer to the family, You received 'the look.' And it did not matter if you were three or forty-three, when you got the look, you stopped talking.

At least I stopped talking when it happened at Christmas dinner or over a cup of coffee and dessert. I had not learned the rules at that point, but clearly I had broken them. Now there is something odd that happens in this type of situation. And it may just be at the very heart of how we choose our mates, as a good fit not only for what we may want in life, but also for what we don't want. You see for me, when I encountered this silence, I was, at home with it. This was familiar. In this family, I was comfortable and I knew what to do. I just had to keep quiet. And I could do that. I was good at that. I knew my place and I could fit into the pie. So it only made sense that I would stick around this family. And of course I also loved the wonderful man who was the love of my life. But that gets back to the distinction between the man and the disease, which I discuss in another entry.

But I remember particularly my first time meeting of Dave's parents. At a surface level they were quite different from mine. They were cosmopolitan and polished, refined and elegant- fabulous, funny and entertaining. I sat in their space for dinner that evening in my finest clothes, and it seemed my jaw would hit the table from amazement. How different they were. My parents, wonderful, loving, generous- were not the glamour and glitz type. There was nothing wrong with their sort of homespun New England-ness. But I had never been around this level of charm. So on this particular night, I felt like I was in the presence of greatness. I laughed and smiled the night away. Soon it became time to go, and we said our goodbyes, amid lots of niceties and a general soothing joviality. I stepped from the door of this 'castle' into the bright moonlight feeling like Cinderella. I smiled at my love. It was my brightest, happiest, most mesmerized smile. Whereupon he said "I can't believe what a bad mood my father was in tonight." Had I glanced down in that moment, I'm sure I would have seen my famed glass slipper dropping from my foot.

What I had not know, what I could not have known being so very new to the family, was that during the evening a veritable smorgasbord of dialogue had passed in the land of the unspoken. It lived in just a word here, a slight tone there, a pause too delicate for me to notice. And that dialogue, my friends, is the dialogue that is listened to and remembered in such families, regardless of whatever else my be said. For it is much more poignant to not-say, then to say. And as time went by I learned the unspoken language and the rules of this particular family. The rules to not-speak were different in their family than in mine. But still they were rules not-to-say, rules I also gained a level of proficiency at, rules that would later have me unable to relate the awfulness of what was going on, either in my life or their son's, and have me living alone and defeated for years without end.

And not speaking what there is to say is a primary tool of the disease of alcoholism. It may just be the main reason that this sickness goes on and on ad nauseum. It is the tool of never bringing the darkness to the light, of never letting the problem be spoken of. And this tool has people living with addiction forever and ever, through generations and millennia, since the time of Christ and his turning of the water to wine. So this silence, my friends, is one very powerful tool . But on the good side, when you break it, the sickness begins to crumble into dust. For alcoholism and addiction need silence to survive, and you have all the power when you open your mouth and speak.

But have a care. For this sickness, and those who have it, will fight- and fight hard- to have you stay in your silence. And if you do not interfere, this no-speak rule will be passed down from generation to generation, you will find it in your lovers and friends, in your children and children’s children. For this is the vicious circle.