Family of Origin

One of the first things I was confronted with when I started attending 12 step meetings was the idea that I am a codependent, and that nearly every "codie" (can I just say "every codie?") comes from a family where there was some kind of addictive process present in the family. This was hard for me to accept. One of the reasons I've had so much trouble understanding the personal dynamics and reasons for addiction is that there is no history of alcohol or drug use in my family. My parents rarely drank, and when they did it was with moderation--a glass of wine with dinner, a single Becks beer that my father would occasionally buy to drink while watching a football game. There was no sign of any drug use in any family member, except one estranged cousin.

As I have done more reading and thinking, I have tried examining my memories of my family to see where I learned to identify with addicts. It became clear early on that there was definitely codependency in my parents. Our home was chaotic and always felt unsafe to me, but I could never identify why exactly. I can recall even as a very young girl, maybe 5 years old, watching TV with my entire family in the living room, and thinking that if a bad man came to our house at that very moment and attacked us all, nothing would keep us safe. I always knew my parents loved me, but I never felt protected.

My parents are good people. None of the headline-grabbing traumas have ever happened to me: they didn't abuse me physically or sexually. No family member ever did. My parents made little money, but did their best to provide physically for me and my two brothers.

Still, the home was always in chaos. My mother had to go back to work when my younger brother was about 3, and she always resented it. My father worked about an hour from our home, and he'd be up at 4am and not come back home until after 6. When he was there, we rarely saw him, and he rarely spoke. Our house was very messy, with piles of papers and stacks of every kind of thing everywhere. From about age 12, I made it my job to try to clean the place. I never brought friends over, because I was embarassed and ashamed of the house--but not just how messy it was, I was also ashamed of the emotional chaos. Five of us lived there, but we never connected.

Now I am starting to see some of the connections. I always knew that my mother had eating disorders. She actually taught me her methods as I entered adolescence. She told me the best ways to purge, telling me that "this is what women do" and expressing frustration over my weight as I became a teenager. (This worked. I was bulemic through junior high and high school, and kept my weight down this way.) She was anorexic in college and through her first pregnancy with my older brother. Then she transitioned to bulemia and was an active bulemic throughout my childhood. Her relationship with food has always been disordered. My father is a compulsive overeater and has been for my entire life. He has always been morbidly obese, except the few times he was able to diet and drop 100 or so pounds. Now he weighs around 400 lbs, and he has had to retire prematurely because he can no longer walk comfortably. The thought that my parents might have used food as a drug and been every bit as much addicts as a junkie or an alcoholic never really occured to me. If I follow this line of thinking, I can see that my mother was influenced by her mother. My mother has always believed that my grandmother was an anorexic, although the term didn't exist for most of her life.

There are no alcoholics or chemical dependants in my family of origin, but the problem of addiction was there. My methods of dealing with the problem included going outside the family for love and support, dating older men (starting with my first boyfriend, who was 24 when I was 16), and learning to depend only upon myself. When I turned 18, I found an apartment and a couple of minimum-wage jobs and moved out as soon as I could. Ever since I moved out, I have had a distant relationship with my parents. I have learned to accept their shortcomings and love them anyway, and my expectations of them (particularly my mother) are minimal.

There might have been sex and/or love addiction in my mother. I know that my mother had several affairs when I was a child, because she told me about them. She treated me as her confidante, sharing her secrets: the marriage wasn't valid because my parents didn't love each other, and she was going to leave and take me with her. I spent all of my teen years waiting for the other shoe to drop. I knew my parents had gone to therapists and divorce attorneys when my brothers had no idea. But even after the divorce papers were drawn up, nothing happened...and I waited. For years after that point, nothing more was said of divorce, and I lived in limbo, knowing I couldn't ask, that it was a secret like so many other things in our family. And it wasn't until after I moved out and went to college that my mother had another affair, with a recovering alcoholic who was also a paranoid schizophrenic. She finally left my father for him. Three days after my parents' divorce was final, they were married. The rush my mother felt to marry him was the essence of codependence: she had to get him on her insurance as soon as possible, because he needed medications for his heart and psych meds. Now they have been married for 17 years, and long ago my mother realized that she married a child that she will have to care for for the rest of her life. The irony is that she and my father are now friends again, and at holidays we are all together, with my father laughing to himself at the situation my mother got herself into.

I have been in private therapy twice in my life. Both times I tried to make sense of my family of origin, but it always seems that I can only view the situation through a cloud, not seeing the connections clearly. Understanding this piece of the puzzle helps the entire picture make a little more sense.

I have become very functional as an adult, and in this way my husband and I are very similar. Both of us come from backgrounds that could easily produce very warped, disordered adults who might not be capable of functioning in the world. Instead, we both are extremely presentable, both have successful careers, both come across to others as mature, capable, insightful and balanced. And in a lot of ways we are. But I have been unable to understand the significance of the disorder that I was raised in, and this has left me stunted in certain ways, of which I am only now learning the significance. And of course, when we are viewed through the lens of addicted family origins, it makes sense that we both present a perfect picture of centered, self-aware adults while internally we hide a certain amount of disorder and turmoil.

I am proud of the work that I am doing, and that my husband is doing. We both have a long way to go. Last night I was reading about the famous 3-legged stool of couple recovery. Two of the legs are the individual recovery of each partner, and the third leg is the recovery of the couple. Without any one of the legs, the stool falls over. I think we both want this marriage to recover, and we are doing the right things, with the right intention, to help this happen. It's no guarantee that we will make it together, but at least it is what we are both working for, and if it doesn't happen, we are recovering ourselves.