Childhood Set Up- Elephant In The Living Room

I recently took this post down to consider whether I wanted to post it. My commitment is not to put down the people in my life, and I considered whether this post painted too brutal of a picture of my mother. In the final analysis I decided that the whole point is to begin to tell the truth to ourselves and others. There is nothing wrong with any of us- except we are caught in a vicious circle. We are trapped between how we'd like to be and how we actually show up in life. And we have to admit how it is it to be able to change it. I am clear my children could well have written a similar entry about me and my behavior previous to my journey of growth and healing. But we all do what we learn- or the exact opposite which is just as bad. So as you look at this post I am asking you to look in your lives as well. It is not only my story I tell- but our story and our journey to growth. In addition I ask you to read my May 23rd post about my mom to really get a true picture of her as a human being- and a very amazing one, I might add.

"Look Ma, there's an Elephant in The Living Room" is a phrase you would never hear in the addicted household. If there were such a thing as an elephant in the living room, the family would squeeze around it, crawl under it, and place their coffee on it's trunk like it was an end table. But they would never acknowledge its presence. It would hang over every conversation in subtext- but no-one would say the words.

In every dysfunctional household there is inevitably some not-spoken-of elephant, but of course the elephant varies from house to house. In my house as a child, the elephant was my mother's erratic behavior. Now it needs to be said that my mother was and is a wonderful woman. She has beauty of mind and soul that I can only dream of. However, like all of us, she grew up how she grew up, and that life experience created how she was. She was a product of the vicious circle. And I can't say exactly where my mother pick up this erratic behavior, since I wasn't there and I never lived her life. But there she was, an elephant, sitting in our living room. And there we were- pretending it away.

How the elephant showed up in our lives was myriad. For instance things might be going along pretty peacefully as I snoozed on a Saturday morning when suddenly I would hear a loud bellow from below. I would sit bolt upright on my bed. "She was on the rampage." (Oddly enough, that was the thought I used to have long before I even knew of the elephant analogy.) Next there would be a mad scramble of children, husband, 1 or 2 dogs and 3 or 4 cats. All raced to the scene of the crime, or away. What was she upset over? Was it shoes on the floor, a misplaced set of car keys, a scrap of paper she could not find? More to the point, with whom was she upset and how long would it take to appease her? What in fact was the method of appeasement dujour, which was known to vary greatly?

Such a start to the morning could well bring on a full day of moodiness. This was especially disturbing if there was a family outing involved- which of course would go sour very quickly amid the dark silence that could not be broken. My father made valiant attempts at humor and offered gifts of delectable edibles-his way to show love and make peace. These gifts were of course ignored, with a moody grunt.

Still we went on through our day- never acknowledging out loud or to each other that there was even a problem.

My mom did other things as well that were very elephant-like. Once she hurled a 5 lb bag of sugar across the room. Another time in an upset she took a 12 hour walk and landed at the mall across town. Another time, upon learning that my sister had been smoking, she went to bed for three days and cried. Not a word was ever said about the oddity of all of these things. Though my dad, God bless him, had a lot of porch-side talk about how it was very normal for families to argue and fight. And we sometimes spoke of the fact that mom had a hard childhood and was in fact, going through 'the change of life.' We didn't know what 'the change of life' was, but we knew it lasted almost our whole childhood.

Who really knows what was up in my mother- admittedly a wonderful person at other times- to have her act this way. Was it some haunting past trauma that came back at her sometimes? Was it depression? Was it the nutritional deprivation of her myriad starvation diets? Was it bi-polar disease, which they then called manic depression? But the true elephant in our living room was that no-one ever said "This is crazy. This is insane." We mostly laid our soda cups on the elephant and wondered why they kept sliding down to the floor.

Now at this point I have to repeat that we had no known addiction in our lives. It was only as an adult in recovery for food addiction that I began to wonder. As I looked back, I could see. My dad loved food, and was very nearly food obsessed. And my mother had bouts of unrecognized anorexia where she subsisted for weeks at a time on a slice of toast per day.

And we wondered why she was crazy.

Or even more disturbing, we didn't wonder!

And again I have to repeat, my mother grew up with what she grew up with. So I can't judge her. And most of us are diligently about the business of repeating whatever was dysfunctional in our childhoods in some way shape or form. We do this largely not recognizing it- or if we don't repeat dysfunction, we do just the opposite. And this is equally as bad because 360 degrees from crazy is still nuts. Now it's true that everyone deals with some level of dysfunction. And mankind has suffered from it since the beginning of time. It's just that it was largely undistinguished in the past. But now that we have uncovered it- and we can actually see how crazy we truly are- it makes sense to be about the business of stopping the vicious cycle. In addition, the insanity circle widens year by year especially with the ever increasing influx of mind changing, mood altering substances and behaviors. But to see the insanity, and to know it, is the first step in shifting it.

Addicted or otherwise dysfunctional families have all kinds of elephants. Everyone knows dad is sleeping around- but they step around the issue. Everyone knows mom passes out on the couch at 6pm everyday, but no-one says so. Everyone knows incest is happening, but no-one speaks of it. In my ex-husbands family I am inclined to think the elephant was "how is dad feeling on any given day?" So on and on it goes in such families as the elephant twists and twirls, flailing his trunk, breaking the furniture- amid the loaded silence.

So the children of such families, without knowing it, are out in the world, looking for a flailing elephant. Why wouldn't we be? Our whole identity is wrapped up in how to move around that thing, and pretend it's not there. And that's the first part of the 'set-up' for a later life of living with or around addiction.