Anything that assists in ending our dependency to substances has value, but anything that works in one way may also need some amelioration for its unwanted effects. The unwanted effects of intensive and repetitive group and individual discussions of dependency issues and the factors surrounding that dependency arrive in the form of a possible removal of the act of dependency but a strengthening of the meaning perspectives that made for that dependency. Identification with that dependency as the primary source of personal identity makes the search for our becoming self and critical reflection on the meaning perspectives that support the feelings of the dependency much more difficult. Such examination and reiteration of issues can generate a sense of helplessness, powerlessness in the face of dependency. It can inadvertently make the definitional power of dependency all the stronger even if helping to stop the action of dependency in the present.[77]
Students and I discussed the ritual of diagnosis when working with those involved with psychiatry.[78] In order to uncover the disturbances the person suffers, they expose every rotten thing that has happen to them and what that did to them. They center for the first sessions on that body of the life lived and from the point of view of illness. After a few of those sessions, most people feel quite ill and often far worse than they did when the process began. All that examination might have some necessary purpose, but it can leave the people involved with very negative feelings about themselves, even intensified feelings of negativity toward themselves. It can embed them further into the negativity they experienced and to which they responded with dependency. They just might be able to see beyond the limits of those situations and their responses. They might not. It becomes the only story they tell about themselves because it's the only story they see and rehearse about themselves.
We are the story we tell ourselves. That story comes from how we see and respond to what has happened to us and the choices we made in response. When we rehearse the same negativity over and over, we fill up the lenses with which we see ourselves and the world with that negativity about ourselves and our relationship to the world. It's as if we fill up a clear water bottle with these negative fluids, and we raise the bottle in front of our eyes. We don't see through a glass darkly. We see through a distorted lens seemingly clearly, through the meaning perspective we make out of our past. As the unhappy past fills our vision, we can see nothing about the present that exists outside the distortions of the past. Our becoming self plays little or no active part in this vision. Everything is that past identity, and it's an identity that speaks badly about us. It's an identity that deprives us of our power to act successfully in the present. That's the only story we tell because it's the only story we can see, the only story we can tell.[79]
When we take the bottle away from our eyes and put it on a broader, table top vision of our lives, we can critically reflect on the validity of the bottle, the defining meaning perspective, through which we have seen and made judgments about ourselves. Our eyes freed from the obstruction, we can see a fuller expanse of our lives and ourselves. None of the facts have changed. The water bottle full of our issues is still there but it has taken on a very different perspective and serves as only one element, of ourselves and the life we have lived and the life we can live. We find we are not trapped within that past life. We show strengths and actions that make the present different from that past and the future filled with possibilities. We can retell our story in a way that strengthens our ability to get on with life as fully as possible.
A friend asked me to meet with a man she was working with in recovery. As was often the case, he immediately went into the issues he had rehearsed so many times. It felt quite devastating to listen to his story. It began with child abuse, sexual abuse, child prostitution, and ended with incarceration and a bottoming out that landed him finally in recovery. This grueling story took quite a while to hear let alone live through. When he finished he looked at me waiting for some response. In a moment of what I now see as inspiration, I said, "Congratulations."
He looked at me with what appeared to be surprise if not shock and some considerable confusion. "What do you mean?" he asked. He hadn't expected such an answer and hadn't heard it before. "You’re a hero," I responded. Still he couldn't quite make sense out of what I had said. Clearly no one had spoken to him in this way before. I hadn't said it before either. He knew his story as tragic, as it was, and as evidence of his victimization and failure in his life. I said, "You're here." He knew many people who had gone through less than he, and they had died or still remained buried in their dependency. He had voluntarily signed up for recovery. He had survived the life forced on him as a child and the life he chose after that based on the meaning perspectives created by his early suffering. They taught him to make choices that would continue if not increase his suffering. His inner unhappiness showed itself palpably throughout his life. He had been through most of the hells provided in any life, and he lived to tell the tale.
He stood up in recovery and declared he wanted to make new choices to live a life different from that one he had lived. According to Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he had gone through the most difficult and dangerous parts of the hero's journey, and he was still on his way. He had become a hero through all of what sounded entirely negative. The positive came in his survival and in his determination to move on. Those choices realized in him the hero he had always been. That immediate heroism could not be taken from him whatever his next choice. The story of the hero was embedded in his life. In all the retelling of the story of his heroic life, we didn't change any of the details. They happened. They existed. He could, however, change how he saw them, how he interpreted them, and how he would respond to them in the present and future. This critical reflection on the meaning perspectives of his past could liberate him to see himself in new ways and realize all the strengths he had shown in his survival in the face of everything that drove him toward despair and destruction.
In that liberation, in that heroism, he felt the beginning of a return to his becoming self and a restoration toward a whole being. Such awareness is not a technique we employ from outside ourselves but an authenticity we realize from within.
We are all heroes. We are all the heroes of our lives. We can all tell the hero's story about ourselves and choose to turn bad mistakes into learning experiences, costly and heroic gifts, from which we can learn and make choices that renew our lives and the lives around us. When we renew and liberate our own world, we renew and liberate a part of the whole world.