The good news is you get your feelings back. And the bad news is you get your feelings back.
Often heard in Twelve Step Circles
Tear down the wall.
Pink Floyd, The Wall
Sobriety was my first lesson in the power of vulnerability. I thought it was about giving something up, but it was actually about waking up.
Brené Brown
Last week, on May 12th, Brené Brown, the acclaimed US American writer, academic, and public speaker, celebrated thirty years of sobriety. Thirty years of consciously choosing, one day at a time, to feel all her feelings — the anxiety, the pleasures, and the pain — and to stay present with them.
For those of us who have lived through our own struggles, that number is significant. Three decades made up of ten thousand ordinary mornings, each one embraced with a quiet, calm decision to move forward, regardless of the bumps on the road ahead.
The phone call with your sponsor you almost skipped. The meeting you went to when you really felt like staying at home. The room you stayed in while you shifted from judgement and separation to recognizing the miracle in each person around the table and began to feel the miraculous stirrings within, embracing your new tribe, when your initial instincts were pulling you toward the door.
Brené’s story began on May 12th, 1996, the day after she finished her master’s degree in psychology. By every external yardstick, she was a very successful young woman.
A psychology major studying the human condition — the topics of courage, vulnerability, shame, empathy, and leadership, which, since those early years, she has used to gain a better understanding of human connection — and discovering how we can open the heart, mapping its terrain, building a language for true intimacy, while simultaneously going numb to her own.
That contradiction finally became so unbearable that she put the plug in the jug and ditched the other drugs too. In doing so, she chose her real life — raw, unfiltered, terrifying, jagged edges and all — over the staged version she had learned and adopted in order to survive. The persona. The mask.
There may also have been a party to celebrate the completion of the master’s degree. Who knows? A hefty hangover has been known to become the straw to break the camel’s back when it comes to relinquishing defiance, achieving a glimpse of clarity, and finally admitting that we are licked.
I know lots about the survival strategies Brené had been maintaining before she quit. There have been phases in my own life where the weight of feeling like an imposter felt too heavy to bear, too heavy without some form of distraction or some substance to soften it. To take the edge off the raw pain.
Then there were the many cases of the anxiety before the unknown territory of a new professional assignment or the next deadline, that terrible feeling of facing the world all alone with not a single person to support me or cheer me on.
The pressure of performing professionally when I felt anything but. The aspiring business leader conscientious about his financial responsibilities when raising young children, yet who couldn’t sidestep the blackout at the end of an evening on the town.
Retching, I reached for things. I am no longer ashamed of them because I understand now what I was really doing: trying to endure a level of feeling, of emotional intensity, I had not yet learned to hold.
There is a deep weariness that comes from the loneliness of keeping two lives running simultaneously; the one people see, and the one you actually live. For a long time, I believed that attenuating the signals was the only way through. Simply getting through the day required turning something down inside myself, to dampen the feelings.
The constant battle between hope and resignation had been raging since I was a toddler. As my fifth decade began to gather momentum, hope had all but run out and resignation was writ large in gaudy graffiti which covered the high walls of my psyche. There comes an apparent point of no return, when we sense that if we cannot kindle a spark hope, the resignation is going to take us under, never to resurface.
Some artists have the gift of capturing such moments. My soul sister, Sara Bareilles, released a song entitled Dear Hope in 2020 which contains the following lines:
Read a book on Hemingway
Closed my eyes to see
The man himself appeared to say
To write is just to bleed
So I will write it down, all the jagged edges
The ugliness I’ve seen
Until I change the truth, rearrange the letters
For beauty underneath….
Yes, it was all those jagged edges that bewildered and overwhelmed me, that had me on the run almost from the time that I had learned to walk. Now I can see that these were the product of the unexpressed grief, the denial, and the crazy making which characterized the family in which I grew up.
There was no one there to hold me with my jagged edges, so I simply covered them over in the hope of avoiding further mutilation. When we hide things from others for long enough, they become hidden from us too.
Yet beneath the armour, the wounds continue to ache. And then they begin to fester. Only when the pain becomes intolerable do we cry out for hope. Sara’s song continues:
Dear Hope
If you can hear me, don’t go
I don’t feel you now, but I know you’re there
Dear Hope
I could really use you now
Throw me a rope
Throw me a rope
Dear Hope…
Then we take the next step which runs counter to every fibre of the survival strategy we evolved over the years. We ask for help. As in Brené’s case, I knocked on the doors of a recovery community and was warmly welcomed — in a culture of awareness, compassion, and hope. These form the seedbed of recovery.
When, ravaged by shame, fear, and guilt over all the destruction we have brought about during the years of active addiction, we believe ourselves to be hopeless cases, we garner hope from the real-life experience of the others in the rooms.
There is always at least one who has been in that sticky spot, who remembers being exactly as hopeless as we feel now, and who is willing to share how they got through. The broken parts begin to ache to heal, causing even more pain. We learn that things may appear to get worse before they get better.
In hindsight, we recognise that these were the first growing pains but — pain being pain — we could not, in the situation, differentiate this. We simply cowered and allowed ourselves to be held.
I can’t seem to shake it yet, feeling that
Things may never change
It always breaks my heart when broken parts
Ache to heal again
So I will write it down and make jagged edges
Into something I can hold
Don’t wanna lose my way
Like dear Hemingway
So I won’t let go…
Learning, for the first time in our lives, to hold the jagged edges. That’s real progress, and not for the faint of heart.
What Brené Brown gave the world was the liberating truth that we cannot selectively numb. The shield we build against grief also blocks joy.
The distance we place between ourselves and pain also puts beyond our reach those things that make life worth living; love, creativity, and that wild, irreplaceable sense of vitality which comes from being fully alive and present, from moment to moment.
You can have the armour, or you can have life.
Witnessing a woman of Brené’s intellect and influence say that openly, without apology, gave me courage. It reached me. It shifted my understanding of my own struggle, from proof of defect to evidence of humanity. My recovery, whatever form it takes, however quietly it happens, is a reclamation, or, as John O’Donohue so eloquently put it, a `re-membering´.
Her frankness and honesty changed our ideas about what could be possible for us. When Brené Brown chooses to be truthful about her darkness, she makes it safer for everyone around her to be truthful about theirs. She sits down in the same dirt and says: I am here too. I know this place. You are not alone here.
This kind of courage doesn’t dissolve the fear. There are no magic wands in recovery. They belong in the realm of addiction.
The courageous stance means you stop letting the fear lead you in the dance of life. Learning to shift to the energies of love, we begin to explore the gifts and opportunities of our unique journeys. Our True Self is now leading the dance, with gentleness, firmness, and humour.
This discerning exploration enables us — gradually, often painfully — to understand that our edges, those raw, inconvenient parts of us we have spent years trying to smooth away, are exactly where our strengths lie.
`We will not regret our past nor wish to shut the door on it,´ is one of the promises in the Big Book of AA. How true! This is the alchemy of recovery. The darkness of our past is transformed into a beacon which illuminates the path today as we continue to move forward. Not only for us, but for all those close to us who choose to see, in their cultivation of light over darkness.
Thirty years of sobriety is thirty years of staying in the room even — or especially — when it becomes unbearable. A testimony to what options become available to us when we stop running — from a substance, from destructive patterns of behaviour and thinking. And even more profoundly, from ourselves.
Thank you, Brené Brown, for your courage. For your honesty. For the way you turned your healing into a light that helps me and others find our way back to our True Selves.
If you are struggling in early recovery (as most of us did), know that this story began with someone who was struggling too. Someone who chose — imperfectly and bravely — to persevere. And if she could make that choice ten thousand times over thirty years, then perhaps today, just today, so can you.
Dear Hope
If you can hear me, don’t go
I don’t feel you now, but I know you’re there
Dear Hope
I could really use you now
Throw me a rope…
Stay in the rooms. Persevere. Because you are worth it!
