Breaking Free. A Christmas message.

Breaking Free.  A Christmas message.

Last week, a week before Christmas, I finished with the first ever Breaking Free Group here at SPP, known as the Lifeskills 2 group. The group ran for 12 weeks and was based on Pia Mellody’s Breaking Free Workbook, using Facing Co-dependence as its text. A temporary close, as most of the group has become excited to keep the group going in the New Year. The enthusiasm of "Trudging the Road of Happy Destiny" (Pia Mellody) is alive and well.

My life had been changed by Pia’s work many years ago. After getting clean myself on 14/4/86 and dedicating myself to the recovery road, about 2 ½ years clean relational issues sent me desperately into therapy, and from their into my own Family of Origin recovery, and adding to my recovery claims and attendance at another fellowship, Co-dependents Anonymous.

When Bill Woods shook my hand and offered me a job at South Pacific, many years ago now, it gave me the chance to immerse myself in Pia Mellody’s  work, from the assessment of a client right through to recovery planning and relapse prevention. Facing Co-dependence and Facing Love Addiction became two working tombs of information. If I received a royalty each time I recommended one of her books, it would have made for a tidy cheque over the years, I am sure.

Breaking Free though, became under used and even drifted out of our bookstore here. When I returned for this tour of duty here at SPP and noticed it wasn’t here, I got it back in, and we pillaged it from time to time for exercises for clients. However it sat in the bookstore primarily unused, until Breaking Free, I mean Lifeskills 2 came to fruition.

Even the process of gaining interest in it was more difficult than I expected. Because it deals with the Primary Symptoms as outlined in the Developmental Model of Immaturity and not the secondary symptoms, when the question came, “What diagnosis is the group for?” I said, all of them! Our Model states that untreated Primary Symptoms lead to Secondary Symptoms, so therefore we are dealing with the underlying impact from our childhood trauma. Eventually I was able to get the group across the line linking it to Lifeskills 1, and the green light was given.

The group that came together was some Alumni that had started trudging the recovery road, and there was an excitement of what lied ahead. Recovery has that sort of irony. Pia Mellody calls it Joy/Pain or Pain/Joy. This is what comes up when we start to identify with the Model at depth and no longer feel the loneliness and desperation of being trapped unaware in the symptoms, and yet the awareness, as one of my group members coined the phrases, is in itself “a booby prize “ It’s  been long said that the “examined life is not picnic,” Robert Fulghum, but the depths we get to go to in Breaking Free are enormous.

Starting with a Trauma log, and in most cases, this is the Changes 1 work, we look at the Physical, Sexual, Intellectual, Emotional and Spiritual Abuse issues, as well as the Abandonment and Enmeshment issues from childhood. This is the where we get the information for the heart of the book. Working through our Developmental issues using the 12 Steps. For the purpose of the exercise, Pia goes one step further than Co-dependants Anonymous which states “We are powerless over others,”  and suggests we look at the powerlessness we have over the Core Issues of Value, Vulnerability, Reality, Needs/Wants and Moderation. The focus is twofold. How are we powerless over this core issues?, and when we are trying to be powerful over that we are powerless, what’s the

evidence of the resulting unmanageability? When we try and be powerful over these symptoms of co-dependency,  the resulting unmanageability makes itself know in the areas of Negative Control, Resentment issues, distorted and non-existent spirituality, avoiding reality through Addiction and mental health issues and impaired intimacy.

This is where the Steps become the solution to the symptoms which are the problem.

So we admitted we are powerless over ourselves, that our lives have become unmanageable. Powerless over the Self Esteem Issues, the inability to set healthy boundaries,  this difficulty owning your Reality ( Body, Thinking , Feeling and Behaviour),difficulty acknowledging and meeting your need and wants and difficulty experiencing and expressing your reality moderately.

 Defining the first step is important. Currently the Interpersonal Neurobiologists and drawing on the attachment research and seeing the impact developmental trauma has on the development of a child, and all of a sudden this work which was initially inspired experientially working with folks in treatment, is now having a sound scientific basis, goes to show just how insightful Pia Mellody’s perception was of this dis-ease, all those years ago.

This year I attended the Australian Childhood Foundations Trauma Conference in Melbourne. It was an exceptional gathering of the giants of modern trauma treatment.  The Attachment work of Ed Tronick and Allan Schore to name two of the field’s leaders has certainly informed us better as therapists on how to work more scientifically with the effects of Trauma. Dan Hughes Attachment Focused approach to Family Therapy inspired me that our Family Program based on Pia’s belief that Untreated Primary Symptoms lead to Secondary symptoms resulting in Unmanageability, Crisis and Relational issues is right on track . The exceptional insight Stephen Porges has given us with his life’s work on the Polyvagal Theory has guided us to help inform clients and work with clients more specifically in how to understand what happens in dysregulation in the body as a result of the trauma. Pat Ogden’s Somatic approach to working deeply with clients topped off by the Mindsight Interpersonal Neurobiological approach of Dan Siegel helped me to feel confident that SPP and Pia Mellody’s Model has been way ahead of its time.  Adding to this the  Trauma specialists such as Peter Levine and Bessel Van The ground breaking work encapsulated in their releases of In an Unspoken Voice and The Body Keeps the Score respectively highlighted  better  ways to understand and work with PTSD and in particular Developmental Trauma Disorder ( it will be added eventually to the DSM!).

With all of this floating through my head, inspiring me in ways that haven’t happened for a long time in recovery, it had me approaching the Breaking Free Group with a mission in mind, to make sure that client s knew what was out there in best practice treatment of trauma and recovery.  In Pia Mellody’s Mapping your Recovery lecture she points out that she wanted her model to be a Map , not just for the Therapist, but specifically for the client. So they could identify where they were at at any given time in their recovery. It always felt therefore it was my mandate as a therapist, and now as the Program Director to make sure a client leaves SPP knowing about the Model, and where they are in it t any given time. Breaking Free just gave me an opportunity to do that at depth.

Each week the focus was on how that Developmental Trauma and its relating Primary Symptoms could be addressed with the power of the 12 steps. The focus being internal. The admittance of the Powerless over ourselves, our beliefs, the defence mechanisms, the limbic reactions and the feelings that got triggered all started to be highlighted when the steps were applied.   One paragraph which I returned to time and again for reflection was

“I believe that this step is third in the order of steps because if we truly do step one and become aware of our disease, we have a tendency to feel overwhelmed with how sick we are. In Step Two we see that our behaviour is self-defeating to the point of insanity. At this point, Step Three keeps us from being overwhelmed by what we have learned in Steps One and Two. We say in effect Higher Power, I turn my skewed reality and my co-dependent life over to you. I can hardly stand to even acknowledge my codependence right now.”

When I first started my recovery from addiction, I felt the hole that admitting step one leaves, and how desperately I sought out the other steps to fill that hole. At 2 ½ years clean, when relationship issues lead me to a therapists office, and then to Co-dependants Anonymous, that hole became so much bigger for the steps to fill. However, when the pain of remaining the same becomes greater than the fear of moving on into the unknown, we stop bargaining, we hand our will and life over and recovery can begin.

Step Four asks us courageously to review when we had been offensive to others realities and journal it, then sharing it in front of our Higher Power and another in Step Five. Resulting from this enquiry we have beginnings of the Step Six defect list, combined with the mammoth task of reviewing just how these symptoms of codependence untreated have resulted in patterns of defence mechanisms that if we remain unconscious about have been offensive to others. Out of all the Steps, in Breaking Free, Step 6 was intense, yet as the title of the book would suggest, we are in the process of Breaking Free, as Ken Keyes famously quoted “to see your Drama clearly is to be liberated from it” , more aptly put by Pia as “ If you don’t hug your defects, they will bite you in the Bum!”

Step 7 once again, gets us to involve God in the mammoth challenge of recovery, as this job is bigger than I alone can handle, and I humbly ask God to remove these defects of Character.

Steps 8 and 9 help us become aware of and then move away from the isolation of this disease towards intimacy, making amends from a space that does not harm ourselves or others.

The maintenance Steps of 10, 11 and 12 keep us taking inventory, promptly dealing with what we need to own, keeping in relationship with our Higher Power, now praying only for the knowledge of its will for us and the power to carry it out, and as a result of this Spiritual Awakening as a result of this process of working the steps, we carry the principles in all our affairs.

In Narcotics anonymous, they say It sounds Like a big order. Breaking Free certainly does not hide this fact. It is a big order, but an order that we need only tackle One day at a time. Most importantly though, a big order that we do not need to  tackle alone. In the Breaking Free Group, I saw the healthy Functional Adult Relationships drive enormous support of each group member. The empathy, of one co-dependent helping another, was without parallel!

So much so, that when we had our last group, I had noticed that there was a third section to the book titled Beyond Denial About your Recovery. As I pointed out at the beginning of this article, the group will continue as  Lifeskills 3, Breaking Free after Christmas. A great gift for our inner children.

I have been grateful over the years in my own recovery to have the company of other committed souls as I trudge the road to my happy Destiny. I still get given so much by giving away what I have been so freely given, even as a professional.

I have always joked that I would love to get a job as the cleaner at The Meadows. I just want to sit in the lunch room, and hear Pia Mellody, John Bradshaw, Claudia Black, Peter Levine and Patrick Carnes just chew the fat; just hear them share about their work, their recovery. What a gift they have given us all. Receiving this week Patrick Carnes brand new book, Recovery Zone, at over 70 years of age, he still remains an inspiration and ground breaker. For my 28 years of recovery I have been deeply changed by the gifts their work has offered the recovery community.

 South Pacific Private, through the courage and vision of Bill and Lorraine, bought that gift down under. In Testimonial Ceremony we state that “Today another recovery ripple goes out into this great nation of ours.” It sounds grandiose, but it’s a fact. Every time a client starts on the pathway of recovery, we are a ripple at a time changing the Family legacy, Healing Families and Changing Lives.

Breaking Free, is just another powerful group a client can continue their ego deflation at depth.  A group were they can be with people that are Trudging that road to their happy Destiny.

We also say in testimonial ceremony, “Thankyou for trusting us with your story, as you cannot help someone get halfway up a hill, without getting a little further to the top yourself.”

I have been working with Pia’s material for over 20 years, and once again, in Breaking Free, each Thursday night, and via all the supportive emails from the group through the week, I have learnt so much. I have from my first 12 step meeting over 28 years ago been overwhelmed by the Honesty, Openness and Willingness I have experienced from deeply distressed people, when they have had enough of fear ruling their life, and they want to change.

 I look forward to continuing with the Breaking Free group on their Journey, and also there is 14 more people lined up, excited and nervous to start another group January 6^th.

For now though, as I finish this, it’s Christmas Eve, I am now going to pack up my desk, head home, grab my wife and boys and head with Gran to Nana’s house, my mums. This is the second Christmas without Dad, so when I get there I will mow the lawns, tidy the yard, just how mum likes it. Just how Dad did it. I am grateful that one of the great gifts of my recovery is that I can finally have the intimacy that this program promises.

I wish all of you in recovery a safe and emotional Christmas, with people that care about you. Remember we can’t save our face and our ass at the same time, so reach out for the support. The universe will provide.

All my love.

Steve