In The Center Of Our Deepest Pain

In the very center of our deepest pain lives a warrior part of each of us. Anastasia, Exploring Your Dark Side: The Adventure Of A Lifetime

To lose sight of this pain is to fight a battle without deep meaning; to be aimless, losing oneself  in the fight without truly paying attention to its more authentic significance.

I offer my own story as an example. I share some of it here in a systematic way by extracting a few sentences at a time from  my account of “Meeting Groder” as presented on the Exploring Your Dark Side: The Adventure Of A Lifetime blog site.

If you are willing to look closely at my story and put it up against your own, you will see how similar we are when one gets to the core of things.

  

I begin my story about meeting Marty (Martin G. Groder, M.D.) and being drawn to him as having something to do with his being: 1. A former prison psychiatrist; 2. Someone who could teach me about surviving/survivors and addictions; and 3. Someone who could help me understand Nixon’s role in Watergate.

I go on to say I had had two marriages that I had already left, at the time of our meeting, experiencing each as a prison. I also suggest that I was in the process of leaving a third because it, too, had failed me.

Although I describe myself as "needing" to leave these relationships to get away from continued victimization, is there not something strange to you about my “needing” to do this three times?

Was there not something of a deeper nature going on here?

Truth be told I did marry two abusive men. Both in my twenties. The first was sexually abusive. The second was an alcholic/rageaholic. Okay, so there’s good justification for getting away from that kind of behavior.

But doesn’t something seem off to, again, be carrying out this pattern of leaving a third time?

Could it not be possible that leaving, for me,  had become a survivor/addict response/inner warrior fighting back mode by “fleeing” as a way of solving a relationship problems, other than directly fighting, straight up or, better still, actually leaning in to solve my people problems with the best of me?  Not the worst?

(The Groder-Rosen Addiction Development (GRAD) definition of an addiction is any behavior, attitude, feeling state or body response that has become habituated – and – serves as a substitute for the pain of unmet needs, originating primarily with the mother-child relationship.)

That, as it turned out, was the case. Unfortunately, I was to discover this survivor/addict pattern in me too many years after I had created a good bit of damage for a lot of people, including my two children, and it was far too late to remedy the hurt I had caused.  OMG!

There was the center of my “deepest pain,” the Inner Warrior in Dark Side drag, a fighter all the way by fleeing, started long ago by trying to avoid my mother’s abuse.

Unfortunately, husband number three who was a true and good prince charming was already deceased by the time I realized what the convict part of me had done, how and why.  So I never got to even say “sorry.”

But at least, by then I had come to understand the answers to my query about Nixon and the Watergate break in and its ensuing scandal. 

And, had come to realize that Nixon had been a stand in for me for the crazy mother in my head. The rest of the Watergate players representing the dysfunctional family I had grown up in who had colluded with her to abuse me.

Small comfort, right?

Check out my “Do You Have A Survivor/Addict Personality?” inventory and see if this brief piece of me, shared, can begin to aid your understanding of how this Dark Side/survivor/addict/inner convict operates in you.  And throughout our society and politics.

It’s the same game; convicts, exalted leaders, celebrities or just plain ordinary people like you and I.  Check out Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus and Lindsey Lohan as other examples.

See how the game I am addressing here plays out there.

(Well, maybe Cosby’s or Bieber’s mother didn’t abuse them but something else like overindulgence can also set the survivor/addict pattern in motion too. We will get to this variation of root causes later.)

For now, remember that at the time I began my journey my score on this inventory would have topped 125, the highest possible score.

I was a bonafide survivor/addict, active Dark Side/inner convict inside!

I looked so good and could, as I was later told, “nice people to death! That’s the Passive Survivor/Addict, nice girl type I was, dressed up especially in the winning bare ass ways of today. 

For fun, you might also try taking the Survivor/Addict inventory for one or more of your favorite or famous people. This will help you discern how the survivor/addict is running our society and politics.

Try it out on a terrorist, if you’re bored. You’ll soon be getting my drift, if you stick with it.