Defending the Truth
When my bedridden grandfather was dying of cancer, the former six-foot-six two-star Rear Admiral who had thinned out and shrunk such that his feet no longer hung over the end of the mattress, was shaking, on his last leg, struggled to speak, and who presented in a way too unsettling for my sisters to pay him visits, impressed what were some of his most valued principles upon me as an eight-year-old. Hearing my name echoing from the stairwell, I’d ascend to the upper level and take my place at his side.
The man who was born during the depression in a dirt floor shack, whose first plumbing luxuries were enjoyed upon joining the Navy, who dropped out of school in the third grade to work and who cried upon his wife’s presenting him with his first birthday cake, thoroughly emphasized these three things as if leaving them in a will for me to carry forward with:
First, it’s OK for a man to cry. Second, every man puts their pants on the same way in the morning. And third, tell the truth. Stitched as engrams and with heavy emotion bedside of a dying leader, carry them forward, I did.
Having paid attention to my elders, I learned that parenting is hard, and noticed the pattern addressed in the preface, that your infants turn into teenagers overnight and with the transition comes adult consequences that you didn’t see coming. The hardest part is that the phrase we were made into addicts is usually accurate. If it happened in your home, it is your fault. Or at least the wellbeing of the child, is your responsibility. However you wish to hash it up, the opposite displaces parental accountability to the child and we cannot do that.
Look, you have the hardest job in the world. You make mistakes. To these, the people from whom you so fear their judgment, are surprisingly empathetic. Because we value our challenging children, we engage with them in an article of faith that they are under our care and we are responsible for their flourishing—not just the doctor’s or the athlete’s or the holy one’s. All of them.
When you hold your infant, see the grown up. Intuit that your hard road is ahead of them but in a terrain overloaded with options and confusion. The consequences of not minding their every gradation of growth are more serious than you know. When they become overwhelmingly challenging, assure that most children are, and resolve yourself to hold their hands as best you can while they learn to match perception with environment to enable precision, which they do not yet know how to do. And when you can’t, when you fall, know that falling is human.
When struggling emotionally remember van der Kolk, “The fundamental purpose of emotion is to initiate movement that will restore the organism to safety and physical equilibrium.”[1] Don’t run from the emotion that so unsettles you, which is often a symptom of fearing a truth too unbearable to begin a dialogue with, giving way to a narrative displacing the emotion upon the even more vulnerable, as “the unconscious transmission of family secrets that get repeated for generations…crops up again and again in the family history. And although reason rebels and says that we don’t know for sure how this phenomenon takes place, only that it often does.”[1] Written nearly 30 years ago, today we do, which is why I delivered this information to you.
I agree with the late Pia Mellody who laid the intellectual foundations of the Meadows and over oversaw it for decades, who tells us, “In looking over our own histories and attempting to get them straight…we may have to change our minds about some of our own inherited cultural values concerning what is acceptable and unacceptable,” noting specifically, “parenting.”[1]
Making these types of priorities and walking this path is an order taller than it seems as, “our society often exhibits many unconscious ‘antichild’ cultural values,”[2] such as not being allowed to talk about some of the problems hurting them, or that already hurt them. If you are a parent actively using, you must read Chapter 7 as if I am in your corner and not as an adversary.
If you must seek help, do that. It speaks dignity into your life as one whose priorities are in place. And if you seek help, mind the narrative you pass along to those helping, particularly therapists. Try to understand yourself from an outsider’s perspective when dialoguing with professionals, and if you must seek that outsider perspective, seek it from one who will tell you the truth, as I would, in honor of the youth.
In every facet, corner, and culture of recovery there is one systemic thing everyone agrees on: Seek the truth. Learn it. And tell it. The path separates the weak from the strong, the indignant from the virtuous, and most pertinent to Petals in the Sun, those parents who sacrifice themselves in order to ensure the most ideal futures for their kids, and the one’s who confabulate narratives because they failed to, and so their kids inherited the burden.
Grow into your destiny with grace and dignity by confronting the family secret, by confronting yourself. By sacrificing not your children, but your old self. That way, you will break the “Unspoken legacy.”[1]
That way, you will honor your lineage.
[1] Claudia Black, “Unspoken Legacy: Addressing the Impact of Trauma and Addiction within the Family (Central Recovery Press: 2018.
[1] van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, 75.
[1] Mellody, Facing Codependence, 99.
[2] Mellody, Facing Codependence, 99.
[1] Mellody, Facing Codependence, 140.
[2] Mellody, Facing Codependence, 140
