All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [117]
The therapies used at Shades of Hope call for a tremendous amount of written work to make an honest appraisal of one’s difficulties and strengths, including an “auto”—a long, unfiltered autobiography and histories of all one’s addictions. Tuesday of family week is set aside for the client to read his or her written work aloud to the family. My job was simply to witness Sister’s process, to hear what it was like to be her, how being in our family affected her, to hear her courageous admissions of powerlessness over her addictions and the heartbreaking descriptions of the unmanageability of her life, including how she hit bottom and her plan for going forward. We weren’t allowed to write or take notes and were asked sit still and be perfectly present. Nobody could minimize or say, “No, that’s not the way it happened,” or, “You’ve been such a jerk!” Hearing my sister’s story in that setting was one of the greatest experiences of my life. I thought it was rock and roll. It was something I had wanted for her and something I’d been looking for my whole life. It was what I tried to do for other people in my advocacy work—to allow them to be truly witnessed in their context, in their process, in their reality. By the end of the day I was exhausted but exhilarated, and I had loved repeating back to her, even the wildly painful parts, exactly what she had said. It was empowering. Others in the family weren’t as tickled, and that corny stew was starting to bubble.
Wednesday is devoted to a form of experiential therapy called “the sculpt”—a three-dimensional representation of a family’s dynamics. It is directed and managed with great creativity and skill by the therapists, but it’s scary as hell for the family at first. Sister asked a few of her friends in treatment to represent various people in our family. Then she placed each member of the family in a symbolic position. One member, for instance, was asked to stand on a chair, because they had ruled the family, functioning as ultimate authority. Being up high like that illustrated how they were up on a pedestal, in a position above and separate from others, wielding inappropriate power. And then divorce was represented, addiction, enmeshment, all the different manifestations of the disease. Questions were asked and answered, dynamics explored, memories unpacked, the effect of things on her revealed. When it was time for me to be born and join the family, I was asked to play myself. I sat on the floor, representing the time in my life when I was the baby.
Tennie asked gently, “What are you doing down there?”
“Oh, I’m praying,” I said. “I’m constantly looking for some sort of spiritual solution.”
“But what are you thinking?”
“Um, well, right now, how ridiculous this is, how [So-and-so] always gets away with this bullshit.” I had been watching all the family stuff I had already been witnessing helplessly for thirty-seven years, and it was crescendoing inside of me.
Tennie asked me to stand up. “How do you feel?” she persisted.
“I feel absolute and total rage in the seat of my soul,” I said.
“Who are you so angry at?”
I looked around the room, my arm flew up, and I pointed at someone.
And Tennie said, “Tell them.”
The first thing I said was, “How do I know you are lying? Your lips are moving.”
As for the rest, well, the things that are said in treatment are confidential for good reason, and individuals typically discharge hysterical, historical emotions