The Great Weight Of Guilt

The following is an edited excerpt from the book #HealthyAdult: PIVOT from Fantasy to Reality, Confusion to Clarity, Isolation to Connection by Lori Jean Glass.

***

Here I sit, alone in this dark hotel room. I’ve already taken the aspirin — how much, I don’t know. The bottle of vodka is still in my hand, but I’m already drunk. How can a person feel this much pain and be so disconnected all at once? I am not in my body, am I?

Life outside swirls around as it always has. Why am I in this town? Oh yes, the hair show — L’Oréal. I’m really good at my job. Does that matter at all now?

Does anything matter? My sons, my boys! They need to know it’s not their fault. They need to know I love them. Someone needs to tell them.

Surviving

The events of March 2, 1997, seemed to happen to me as in a trance. I moved from one step to the next until I was there, stomach full of pills, waiting to die. It wasn’t until guilt hit my consciousness that I had the thought to call someone. And that was what I did.

My supervisors at work had no idea how bad things were. All they knew was that something was wrong with me. They didn’t want to get rid of me, so they invited me to get some outside help.

At their request, I paid a therapist to tell her what I thought she wanted to hear. I wasn’t in touch with my feelings when I went to see her, as many people aren’t. So I wasn’t benefiting from the therapeutic process, as many people don’t. But calling her from the hotel room that night, I felt there was no longer any point in hiding.

In those days, I didn’t have access to Wi-Fi or texting. All I had was the number of an office landline. It was almost nine o’clock at night in Chicago when I called, and seven o’clock where my therapist was in California. She just happened to be back at the office to pick something up before heading out to dinner. Our paths crossed that night in a miraculous way. I don’t know what would have happened had she not picked up the phone.

By the time we spoke, I was a total mess. I told her I couldn’t go on. “I don’t know how to be a mom,” I let out through shallow breath. “I don’t know how to be a wife. I don’t know how to show up. I don’t know what to do with the pain that’s inside me.”

I was drunk but coherent enough to ask her to pass along a message to my boys. I wanted them to know how much I loved them and that this wasn’t about them. It was in that moment that my therapist saved my life with a single sentence. Without pause, she said, “If you kill yourself, you’ll leave your boys with what your mother left you.”

Despite the state I was in, I felt the full weight of what she was saying to me. I sat still for a moment, unable to think. “Well, what do I do?” I finally asked her.

Understanding the situation, she kept her words brief. “You’re going to have to come back and start by not drinking,” she said. “Right now, you need to go make yourself throw up.” I hadn’t told her about the pills, but she knew I was drunk.

When she told me I needed to throw up, reality hit me once again. All I knew was that I needed to follow her instructions. I was fairly successful in throwing up the pills and plopped myself down on the bed. I felt horrible, but I was still alive — alive enough to walk into my first support group the next day.

Under The Surface

Now looking back, I know what was happening. My pain-body, a term Eckhart Tolle refers to in his book A New Earth, was getting activated. I describe the event as a pain-body attack. Tolle defines the pain-body this way:

It is an accumulation of painful life experience that was not fully faced and accepted in the moment it arose. It leaves behind an energy form of emotional pain. It comes together with other energy forms from other instances, and so after some years you have a “pain-body,” an energy entity consisting of old emotion.1

On the trip, I had called home to talk to my husband. He told me he was done with our marriage because of my actions — the alcoholism, the impulsive shopping, the constant need for positive regard outside of my marriage, all of it. When I heard those words, I didn’t know what to do. I felt completely devastated. My abandonment had been activated big time, and I literally felt like I couldn’t breathe.

At the time, I was working and seemingly successful. My husband was building his real estate business, and everything seemed to be going well. Behind the scenes, however, I felt lost and alone. Even though I had a family, this old wound of abandonment that lived inside of me daily made me feel like I didn’t belong. Our two small children were being raised by a nanny. Our marriage lacked intimacy, and I didn’t know how to fix it.

My husband and I had both suffered a great deal of trauma in our early lives, but I never connected my past experiences to our current relational patterns. I couldn’t connect the dots and see the ways the deep wounds remained present in our lives. I felt them every day, but I had no understanding of the weight they carried in every relational decision I made. There were no podcasts or internet sites helping anyone understand how to crawl out from underneath a heaping pile of shame. I paid a therapist to listen, but I could not speak.

Without real understanding of what was happening within me, I kept making the wrong choices. I was acting out in multiple ways, and I would use anything I could in an attempt to manage and tolerate my feelings. I couldn’t feel anything but the pain — the constant ache of unmet longing.

On that dark night in Chicago, my therapist brought me back to the beginning of my pain, and I immediately thought of my three- and five-year-old sons. I could not go through with suicide. There had to be another way.

My Story: The Abandonment Button

I was born into a beautiful family. My father was a basketball player, a record-breaking scorer at West Virginia Tech. He and my mom had already married before he graduated college, when he decided he would pursue coaching.

They moved to Virginia, where my father started his career as a basketball coach at McLean High School. They had my older sister, Joy Ann, and I was born when she was two. The first couple of years of my life were truly wonderful. I was cared for. I was held. I have photos of my father with his arms around me. Both of my parents loved me, and I felt their love. I experienced a very secure attachment with them early on, especially with my father.

When I was a toddler, everything changed. We were at a camp for all the players and coaches from McLean. My dad went out into a canoe with another coach and two players. The story goes that they were joking around, splashing water at each other, when the canoe tipped over. My dad never surfaced.

It took them a long time to find his body. No one knew what happened; they could only assume he bumped his head. Different people concocted different theories over the years, but none of that mattered. What mattered was that my dad died that day — the day that everything went gray.

That event represents the installation of what I call my abandonment button. The loss left a strong imprint on my life. Everything was fine one day, and the next day the person I felt most attached to — with whom I could be safe and secure in the world — was gone. When my father drowned, I experienced my first big attachment wound, which gave me what psychologists call attachment disorder.

From that point forward, my mom checked out in her grief. To make matters worse, the doctor told her to start drinking a couple of glasses of wine at night so she could fall asleep. Back then, there were no assessments for alcoholism within a family system. She started with two glasses, but it quickly turned into four and then eight.

My mom was a beautiful woman. Soon after my father died, she was out at a bar in Washington, DC, and met the man who would soon become my stepfather. Within six months, they were married. By four years old, I had essentially lost my mom; she was gone to her own alcoholism and a new man. At such a young age, I couldn’t understand what was happening.

My stepfather traveled a lot for work as a park ranger, and my mom didn’t like that. As the years moved on, they fought more and more. He got stationed in Mount Rainier National Park, and we left the East Coast. After that, we moved around while my stepfather worked his way up the ladder to become western regional director of the National Park Service. Life as I had known it was completely gone.

The Great Weight Of Guilt

Guilt. It was the only reason I had it in my mind to call my therapist the night of my near-suicide. When she picked up the phone, I started talking about my boys right away. Why? I still carried the great weight of guilt connected to my mother for all those years.

By the time I was a teenager, my mother could do very little because of her alcoholism. She couldn’t even drive.

One day, I came home from school and found her sobbing at the kitchen table. That was unusual for my mom. I was familiar with seeing her happy, angry, or passed out. I rarely saw her cry.

I asked her what was wrong, and she told me her father, my pappaw, had had a stroke and had only two weeks to live. She was very close to him, but he was all the way back in West Virginia. I looked at her and asked, “Are you going to go back and see him?”

I’ll never forget her reply. “No, I’m not strong enough to go,” she said.

In that moment, something inside of me flipped. My mom and I had never gotten into big fights, but when she said those words, I was absolutely livid. I could not understand why she would not want to go back to see him. “What is wrong with you? I hate you!” I yelled.

I rushed at her with every ounce of venomous ferocity my teenage self could muster, slamming my hands into her shoulders so violently that she flipped over in her chair and onto the floor. I pounced on her like an MMA fighter in my tight-fitting Ditto jeans and high heels. I punched and kicked her and even spit on her. The violence I felt inside from years of neglect was finally being unleashed.

Today, I believe my anger was multiplied because I didn’t get to say goodbye to my own father, and she had the opportunity to say goodbye to hers. In that moment, all I knew was that I was done with my mom.

She did all that she could to fight me off, but only the sight of scarlet blood streaming from her nose could snap me out of my rage. My fight response turned quickly into flight. I turned and bolted up the stairs to pack my bags as quickly as I could to leave.

I went to stay at a girlfriend’s house, unable to manage or tolerate my feelings. The next day, I went out to my car and found a note on it, a note that I would carry around for years. It read, Leaving tomorrow. Call me. — Mom

As an adolescent, I didn’t have the emotional intelligence to call her. I still felt so angry. Plus, I didn’t believe she would go.

The next day, my stepfather called and said, “You need to come home. I need to talk to you.” Reluctantly, I drove home. When I walked into our house, I saw that his face was serious. He sat me down, and my heart sank. “Your mom went back to West Virginia,” he started. “She took a bunch of pills and alcohol and died.” This is what he told me with the limited amount of information he had.

And that was that. A single moment that would again change my life forever.

I love that Brené Brown has illuminated how toxic shame is. Her work has had a HUGE effect on me. I believe many of us carry a great deal of shame throughout our lives, but what I carried with me after that moment was an unbearable burden of guilt. Yes, I had shame that my mother was an alcoholic and killed herself, but what was tormenting me was the guilt that somehow I was responsible for her death. I couldn’t get the images out of my mind — of her dying alone in a room. She never even made it to the hospital to see her father.

Years later, on the night I took those pills, my therapist reminded me that killing myself would bring similar torment to my sons. It was my wake-up call.

I was still running in circles.

Running In Circles Without Answers

Why do people who were abandoned pick unavailable people? Why do people who grew up with a “helicopter parent” choose an engulfing partner? If we have unresolved trauma, we will find ourselves re-creating events that evoke similar feelings caused by the trauma in an effort to have a do-over. The experience is what is familiar, and there is something in our spirit that wants to get it right this time, so we end up in the same place over and over again. Trying to WIN.

I spent a lifetime trying to fill the holes left inside of me from the abandonment and neglect that I knew so intimately. But in my attempt to somehow feel better, I only kept falling down into deeper darkness.

After we experience so many of these repeated patterns in our lives, we start to believe that answers simply do not exist. The truth is that they do; we only need to know where to find them. For me, I had no chance of finding answers until I got sober.

On one level, getting sober was critical to my life. I have not had a drink in several decades. I learned that I don’t drink no matter what. For those revelations, I am grateful. However, getting sober alone did not treat my attachment disorder. In fact, in some ways, it led me to form new, unhealthy attachments. Once I was sober, I found myself becoming extremely codependent. I wanted to save everyone else because I couldn’t save my mom.

Eventually, I had to realize for myself that alcohol was not the root of my problems. It was a survival pattern. It helped numb my attachment wounds — my unmet longing that was bleeding throughout my body and had never been treated. So just because I got sober didn’t mean I got well.

Even after being in therapy for years, I was unable to treat my core wounds or fully understand why I was so anxious. From the outside, it appeared that I was happily busy — throwing big parties, going to the symphony, and belonging to various organizations. All the while, I grew further apart from my husband as he threw himself into work and avoided his own pain, climbing the ladder of business success.

My therapist’s words certainly awakened me that awful night, but afterward I continued to search for seemingly unreachable answers. My inability to create intimacy coupled with feeling disconnected from my husband continued to trigger my abandonment button, and I continued to look for positive regard outside of the marriage. Ultimately, our marriage came apart, and the old wound — the feeling that I didn’t belong — was once again confirmed.

As the cycle of searching continued, I wondered if there was any hope at all.

The Diagnosis Dilemma

I believe we live in an overassessed and undertreated population.

In our current systems for diagnosis, many people have experienced a prolonged focus on the pain of their past. They have talked and talked, but the behavior hasn’t changed. Symptoms of the label are treated instead of the wound itself.

Many people also stop the healing process once a condition is named. Then, with no active individualized plan in place for change, they become attached to their label and become dependent on others to fix the problem.

Many ultimately repeat their painful stories over and over again, looking for solutions to their pain and never finding them.

I am NOT suggesting that talk therapy is not healthy. It is VERY healthy. Beyond just reciting our painful pasts, we also need to fully understand where our patterns come from. We need to be willing to look back in the rearview mirror. We also need to learn how to process all the stored-up pain and move forward.

I am also NOT suggesting that diagnosis has no place. However, we must understand that a diagnosis itself does not fix anything. If we want to have a different outcome, we have to move beyond diagnosis.

So, as an invitation, I invite you, the reader, to ask yourself: What are you doing to participate in your own behavioral change? Are you looking for ways to become responsible for your actions? Are you being empowered to manage and tolerate your feelings? Or are you staying in situations that are familiar regardless of merit? It’s critical to be honest with your answers in order to move forward as a healthy adult.

The Crazy Train

This book is for adults with known and unknown patterns from relational wounds, which are inhibiting or sabotaging relationships. When we engage in using learned survival patterns in our relationships, we end up hurting ourselves and others in the process. We quickly find ourselves boarding what I call the Crazy Train.

The Crazy Train is fueled by old feelings ignited by current relationship dynamics. The train ultimately ends up off the rails and in an abyss of protest behavior, secrets, and conflict. The burning of unmet longing continues, creating further distress within the relationship.

In part 1 of the book, we will acknowledge the reality of the Crazy Train and why we board it. In part 2, we’ll spend time understanding the source of our choices and actions. Finally, in part 3, we’ll explore the way to becoming a healthy adult, where we experience relational freedom. By acknowledging, understanding, and then choosing to move in a different direction, you will have a repeatable solution for getting off the Crazy Train and onto a connected highway.

The Answer: PIVOT

After my marriage ended, I was still stuck in my endless patterns, and I knew I needed to find a new path. Lying in my bed one day, feeling depleted, I began to think through a process for managing and tolerating my emotions in a way that brings behavioral change to my life and relationships — a process I came to call PIVOT.

The PIVOT Process is the solution to getting off the Crazy Train, but the process must be individual to you. You are not defined by a label itself, but the label is there for a reason. I’m asking you to know why the label is there and then explore what to do with it. In order to stop the train and get off, you have to understand why you respond the way you do.

I’m reminded of clients who have come to me saying, “I’m unhappy and I am not in a good relationship.”

I always ask, “Do you know why?”

“Well, maybe because I didn’t have a good childhood,” they respond.

“OK,” I say. “How does that show up in your life today?”

At this point, there’s often a pause in the conversation. At the most, they will say, “Well, I don’t know. I am not a child anymore.”

So many people can’t connect the dots. I couldn’t either. That’s why I feel so deeply about sharing this process with others. I want to help you connect the dots to your own storyline rather than letting your familiar past become your predictable future.

Throughout these pages, I’ll weave in my personal journey and what I have learned by working with others all these years. The book structure is sequenced to follow the timeline of life because that is how we understand the different parts of ourselves that are activated.

My story of pain and loss in childhood ran deep. It drove me toward the Crazy Train without even knowing it. My confusion and rebellion during my teenage years wasn’t uncommon. Adolescence is the time when we begin to use more aggressive actions to cover up the wounds. My troubles in adult relationships from those wounds are universal. On the outside, I had it all together, but I was mislabeled, misdirected, and unseen, with no clear path off the Crazy Train.

Today, I can confidently say I know that people can and do change. I have experienced change firsthand and see it every day in the lives of the many people PIVOT has touched.

Throughout this book, I will use particular words and phrases that are part of the PIVOT “language.” I use these words and phrases purposefully. Along the way, you’ll see callouts that explain the terms and why they are important.

Before You Begin

This book is not a quick fix. It’s not an easier, softer way forward to healthy adulthood. Instead, I am providing you a way to be responsible and accountable for your own emotions. This process requires willingness; you’ll need to take responsibility for yourself and become vulnerable and honest. You will need courage to move into uncomfortable feelings.

This process also requires motivation and accountability. You must first want to change to be able to apply a personalized plan. And you must hold yourself accountable. The minute you don’t, you start making other people responsible for managing and tolerating your feelings.

After years of study, I realized just how addicted so many people are to their own pain-body wounds. We remain victims because that is the only way we have known how to be relationally. In this book and through the PIVOT Process, I am calling you to a higher level of consciousness — out of the role of victim and into personal freedom.

Please understand that we are often victims to horrendous actions done to us. However, if we can’t find a way to process through our feelings and live in a manner that protects us, then we risk living with a constant fear of intimacy.

The good news is that you can begin this process today, with just a little curiosity. The more motivated you are to understand and apply what you learn about yourself, the more you will find and experience peace and freedom in relationship with yourself and others.

If you give yourself to this process, it will be truly life-giving. All I ask is that you don’t hide from the truth. See the truth. Know the truth. Speak the truth. If you truly want to embrace your highest, healthiest self, I invite you to continue reading.

***

To keep reading, pick up your copy of #HealthyAdult: PIVOT from Fantasy to Reality, Confusion to Clarity, Isolation to Connection by Lori Jean Glass.