I was posting this as a comment on another share, but I realized that I was going to do my usual pattern of starting to comment and writing pages and pages and pages... so I might as well share here instead!
I'm kind of fascinated by my feelings about therapy and my experience with it, compared to 12-step work. I guess this is in part because I had one particular therapist who I thought was just mediocre at the time, who in retrospect was AWFUL. Mediocre therapy is awful, tho, because it costs time and money that could be going to actually changing things for the better. And therapists are in a position of power and authority - or at least that was how I always saw them - so I always assumed that even if it seemed like they were wrong or clueless that they must be going somewhere with it!
I've had good therapists too, but my experience has also been that none of the therapy, self-help books, etc. could really help me very much until I was working the steps. I've heard that from a lot of other people in various programs. I don't really know what exactly it is about the steps that clears away everything that blocked me from taking self-help actions before, or really integrating what I learned in therapy, or progressing very quickly.
I know that working this program lifted my trust issues, which were really blocking me in therapy before; I didn't trust anyone enough to share what I was feeling, or a lot of times what I was thinking, and that makes it REALLY hard to get anywhere! I didn't even trust myself enough to let myself know what I was thinking or feeling a lot of the time.
Working all the steps where I have to take my own inventory really gave me a deep understanding of what effects the abuse had had, too, and what patterns I have had in my own life that hurt me, and helped me get to know my own self and where my boundaries are and where I never knew how to set those boundaries before... and that growing clarity makes it a lot easier to progress in any kind of self-help way. That's what lets me grow as a person, and grow in my relationships and goals and stuff too.
The other thing is that a lot of therapists I've had don't get how wide-ranging the effects of abuse are. Like, their approach to abuse tends to be dealing with the memories and with my feelings about having BEEN abused, and then it's like if that stuff is no longer "bothering me", the problem is solved. Or maybe they'll look at how that affects my patterns in my other relationships with people. But it's only been in SIA and other 12-step programs that I've seen that my perception of my body has always been anorexic, or that my overachieving perfectionist relationship to work of any kind has always been workaholic, for example, and that those are direct effects of the abuse.
Like: my anorexic thinking about my body has been self-punishment, always struggling not to act out the belief that I don't really deserve food, deep down wanting to make myself safe by shrinking away to nothing so I will just disappear. I took on the shame that belonged to my abusers, and thought if I disappeared, nobody would be able to abuse me! Or: like the fact that I will always compulsively just do "one more thing", whether it's reading one more page or chapter of a book, or helping one more customer, is a way that I try to dissociate and control things. I always wanted to do more, do better, because my parents pushed me and emotionally abused me around school. I thought that if I could just be perfect, I could stop their abuse. I thought that if I just kept doing more, I would eventually get to the elusive point where they'd be happy with me. I could escape what I was experiencing inside by keeping on "doing" instead of "being". I had a pattern of choosing abusive workplaces, and then trying to control that abuse (and, somehow, all the abuse I had ever experienced!) by pushing and pushing myself. As if I had ever deserved anyone's abusive behavior toward me - including my own!
I want to bear witness to all these things because I think that we as abuse survivors lose out. Alcoholics Anonymous started before anybody had ANYthing that worked for dealing with alcoholism; alcoholics were "hopeless cases". So AA was the first thing that worked, and it obviously worked very well, and as people started developing ways for the medical and mental health fields to do something with alcoholism, they based it all on what they learned from AA.
Survivors of Incest Anonymous, though, and related programs, started after people thought they had ideas of what would work. There was already a bunch of different approaches to therapy, most or all of which had ways of dealing with the most obvious effects of abuse, like suicide, depression, rage, and flashbacks. So rather than informing and changing the whole field, we end up being informed by it. For example, our newsletter for a long time asked for submissions of art and poetry, like every other survivor newsletter, rather than writing about the steps or traditions or people's experiences with SIA, like every other twelve-step program's newsletter. I think we have had a history, as a program, of drifting away from how it works and why, and toward things that already existed that just help with a part of the problem. Even though as individual groups and meetings and intergroups people in SIA are working their programs like crazy and growing like wildflowers!
I had great therapy once I had been working my program for a while and learned to choose therapists who actually had healthy boundaries and had worked through abuse themselves. My work in therapy helped make the work I was doing in program go somewhat farther and faster. I think it can probably help people in a lot of ways. But it's the steps that really go to the core of the abuse that I experienced, and scrape it off of my life, layer by layer, like scraping barnacles off of a ship's hull.
I guess what I want to share here is that there are a lot of awesome tools out there that have nothing to do with twelve-step programs, and which can really enhance the work we do in SIA. Therapy, bodywork, healthy detoxing, EFT, and so on. Different ones work for different people. But most of all: really deep, amazing recovery from abuse is not only possible, but in my own experience and what I've seen from people around me, it's inevitable if we keep working the steps.
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contemplative
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