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Healing Series: Breaking Patterns
Day Two
Healing Series: Breaking Patterns
“If we break the chain of addiction, violence or other inherited, limiting beliefs, our children, and their children and those who follow them are given access to possibilities not available to the ancestors. And thus, the entire lineage evolves.” ~Dr. Judith Rich
I was born into a family with a history of alcoholism, anxiety, depression, and codependency. When I married my first husband, I knew he was an alcoholic, but he told me he would quit drinking. That was how naïve I was about drinking and alcoholism in 1980. As if he could just decide to quit drinking and everything would be fine. I didn’t understand the behaviors that lead someone to abuse alcohol, the addictive qualities of the body needing alcohol and the behaviors of people pleasing and denial that are within codependency and enabling and hyper-vigilance of the non-alcoholic.
When my daughters were young, we used to go to Cape Cod and spend a week on the land of my mother’s childhood home. Spending time with my parents and grandparents, I had an opportunity to observe the family dynamics, including my father’s and grandfather’s alcoholism, and my mother’s and my enabling roles in the family. By this time, I had divorced my husband, and we were co-parenting with the same dysfunctional behaviors. Spending time at the Cape with walks on the Bay and a pond with lily pads and a row boat, picking bayberries and beech plums, and walking through the woods blanketed with pine needles and pine cones was restorative.
At the same time, that week on Cape Cod was a place to practice using new behaviors and skills I was learning in personal growth seminars, Al-Anon and self-help books. I was trying to change and heal. Every year, something would upset me, or I would discover another layer of dysfunction mixed into low tide experiences at the bay, eating scallop and clam dinners and listening to my grandfather tell stories about mermaids in the ocean. (He was a fisherman, a writer and a conservationist.)
Returning to my home in Maryland after every trip, I would journal, process, and heal another layer of physical, emotional, and mental recovery.
My deeper commitment in life has been to heal intergenerational trauma and make…
