Prompt for November 8/15

 Recovery Writers in November (whether you attend Nov 8 or 15) will use the following prompt:

We are Attracted to Dysfunctional People 

Many of us in recovery are baffled as to how we ended up romantically tangled with an alcoholic, workaholic, narcissist, Adult Child, or other dysfunctional person. Didn’t we know better? This was a personality we grew up with, a cycle of drama that released adrenalin and made us feel alive. Normal people were “boring.” We were programmed from childhood to seek out such people. I can recall my mother criticizing my High School boyfriend as lacking in pizzazz and personality. Today, I see that she was addicted to my alcoholic father’s personality.  

Most of my boyfriends in later years fit the pattern of out-sized personalities and dramatic narcissists.  The one I write about below wasn’t outwardly dramatic, but he was both an alcoholic and an Adult Child.  

 

Watching Walter Cronkite 

 

His dad died when he was three.
Mine hung on longer,
half-dead from Gallo and despair. 
We found each other with the radar
of children unused to being lucky. 
 
Nightly, we’d sit on his college couch,
drink gin, and listen to the man we called “Walt”: 
 

“Today, 30 servicemen dead in Vietnam. 

Tornados flattened a Midwest mobile park. 

Gas prices rose again.” 

 
Beneath his newsman’s voice, a lyric of authority,
and though we knew he couldn’t see us,
bathed in cool blue cathode rays,
we straightened up and listened close. 
 
He sat behind a desk.
We imagined a dining table.
He wore a suit and tie. 
We saw a cardigan, worn at elbows.
His desk was clear of papers, pens. 
 
We saw a jello salad jiggling its bits of pineapple 
holding out its promise of a tart explosion on the tongue. 
As our ice cubes melted, shrank in our mouths, 
 
we were mesmerized as if  our horoscope had said
tomorrow would be sunny, our fortunes would improve. 
Twenty-two minutes. He signed off: “And that’s the way it was.” 

 

  CONNECTION TO RECOVERY 

 

The man I loved was odd, even by Berkeley standards.  He always  wore a black suit and white starched shirt.  In that respect,  he was clearly dramatic. But he loved me and cared for me in the way I imagine both of us would have liked to have  been cared for as children.  He died before I could make  amends for taking him for granted.  

 

                                                PROMPT: 

1. Write about a relationship, past or current,

 with a dysfunctional person.  What did you expect? What did you get ? 

2. Try to  add an  image of a TV show that made you feel safe.

 Explore why that might have been true. 

 

 

What are Recovery Writers?

Recovery Writers are a group of people in 12-step recovery who use creative writing to recover memories, heal their wounds, connect with others in recovery, and practice hearing the voice of a Loving Parent.

I have been practicing 12-step recovery since 2005. I was raised in an alcoholic family. The 12-step program that heals those wounds is called Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACA). Many ACAs also become alcoholic, as I did. The underlying feelings are similar.   There are many people who feel alone, fear abandonment, are entangled in unfulfilling relationships and who don’t know who they are.  I have healed many of my childhood wounds and discovered my true self by writing and listening to the writing of others. I did this through Recovery Writing. 

We know today that 1 in 5 Americans was raised in an alcoholic home. My father was an alcoholic from before I was born.  His alternating manic energy, self pity, and rage created a roller coaster of feelings that led me to adopt a series of survival strategies.  I share these strategies with every child raised the way I was.  They include being super-responsible, a people pleaser, controlling, and afraid of authority figures and my own feelings.

My childhood years created a feeling of emptiness and not belonging. I feared my father’s anger and didn’t know how to deal with conflict. When I was ten, my mother converted to a Jehovah’s Witness, and took her three children with her. I dreaded being a proselytizer, knocking on doors with the Watchtower and Awake magazines. I hated being different, forced to give up celebrating my birthday and Christmas. 

Because I was a Witness, I was not allowed to go to college.  My career was to be a minister. So I was not encouraged to find my gifts and talents.  The religion is all-consuming and Witnesses hold themselves apart from the world.  So from the age of 10 until I graduated High School at 17, I was subject to what I saw as a demanding god who would not allow me to be a normal teenager.

Eventually, I became an alcoholic as well, using alcohol to numb my feelings of fear and give me some relief. My journey to sobriety began in 2005.  I had been writing poetry since the year 2000, but it wasn’t until I began to connect my writing with my recovery that I realized it was a part of practicing my programs. 

                                                            * * *

Recovery Writers use creative writing to reclaim our childhood stories and practice our recovery program. The process of writing, sharing out loud with others in recovery, and then hearing the voice of a Loving Parent as we each comment about what is beautiful and powerful in each other’s writing is one way of doing Reparenting work. It allows the spirit of creativity and our higher power to breathe recovery into our lives.

All of us begin childhood as creative beings. We explore, make art, sing songs. But many of us lose that sense of wonder as age. Writing our recovery stories allows a higher  power of creativity to power our pens into writing that feels both powerful and healing. Often my poem leads me to a hidden truth, which is the essence of creativity.

Recovery Writers is a Community—the family that many of us longed for as children. We are loved for exactly who we are. We don’t have to pretend. Recovery Writers come from all 12-step programs. We offer a roadmap to uncovering feelings through telling our stories—both of alcoholism but more importantly about the childhood events that led us to become alcoholics, al anons, overeaters, or adult children of alcoholics/dysfunctional families Practicing 12-step recovery is a spiritual exercise. Writing is one key to unlock the spirit within.  

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 Here is our Recovery Writers prompt for October 18.  We will meet at 1:30 pm. 

 Zoom info is 996 653 317 password 119868

By articulating what I wanted from my parents when I was young, I can see the feelings of loneliness and fear that underlie emotional abandonment. Here is a poem where the child calls on the parents for what the child needs: 

 

Can Anybody Hear Me? 

 

 Father, I am calling. 

Father, I am hungry.

 Give me peanuts,

clustered tight in papery shells,

or oysters, wrested with your knife

from their tight-lipped home, 

how they hold themselves 

together, resist opening

They are quivering,

helpless to resist. 

 

Mother, I am calling. 

Give me oatmeal,

chocolate pudding.

Show me where to look

beneath the bushes for berries,

the artichokes unfolding

soft and sweet,

their center worth the wait. 

Connection to Recovery:  This is my inner child asking for foods that I associate with childhood.  The message is mixed.  My peanuts remind me of the nuts at bars where my father drank. The oysters remind me of his dramatics in wresting open the shells and telling us kids they were still alive when they hit his stomach! Notice I end with an image of artichokes, bitter and inedible on the outside, but sweet within. This image reminds me of the nature of the innocent child.  I became tough on the outside to withstand my feelings of abandonment and shame, but I was soft and sweet within.  Try for some imagery that will set up conflict in your work.  This is where feelings will resonate in your work.

Prompt:

1.Write a poem in which you ask your parents for food. Imagine foods that you associate with each of them, foods that perhaps you loved or had mixed feelings about, foods that you associate either with your longings or with their nature.

2.Try to include in your request for food the idea that they were not listening to you and did not hear you. 

3. If it works better for you to ask for something other than food, feel free.  The idea is to address the parent from childhood with a request for something that would have made you feel loved and special.