All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [126]
I also began to benefit as much from my friends’ work as from my own. In experiential group, held in a cozy, small, womblike room, a recovering drug addict who in her previous inpatient treatment practiced her eating disorder the entire time (a sadly common occurrence, it was soon clear to me) began to do deep work on the core pain that set up her addictions in the first place, triggered by abandonment and neglect of an alcoholic mother she loved “like a drug.” She read aloud a letter she wrote to her now deceased mother, and by the time she was on line three, I was the one in a heap crying. Our stories were quite different, but that did not matter. I identified. A grief I could not contain swelled up in me, and by now I was willing to let it do so. As I had been encouraged to do on my first night, I began to let it all go.
My friend, unsurprisingly, vomited after she read her letter. Purging was how she had been handling her feelings for years; by now it was an automatic response. While she was being attended to, the treatment team focused on me. “Lord almighty, what was going on with you?” they asked in their inimitable West Texas accents. It was wonderful to say I didn’t know, to just be, to feel, to cry, to be paid attention to in this way while I grieved, to be accepted and validated without being minimized or told I had the story wrong and facts mixed up, and to begin to see for the first time that with enough of the right kind of work, “this, too, shall pass.” My deepest fear had always been that I could not heal. In spite of how agonizing the work was, it seemed I was not terminally unique, as it says in the Big Book of Co-Dependents Anonymous, and that it would finally be “possible for me to mend.”
I haltingly read my first big chunk of written work one evening in a reading group. In such groups, held a few times a week, those ready with written assignments would read them to peers and staff, who would reflect back what they had heard, as well as offer observations on the text and how to go further with the work. I tried to read in a clear, confident voice, hoping my presentation would make sense of the insensible, this baffling, cunning, and powerful disease of codependency and the behaviors it spawned. I had difficulty with the questions, from section headings such as “noetic disorders” and “otheration,” and I took a tentative stab at providing responses. There was one paragraph I wrote that came to me in a burst of hyperlucidity. For the first time, I intuitively captured and described how whenever I called a certain person in my life, my voice mails followed a pattern: friendly, warm greeting (make you like me, make you glad to hear from me, make you want to listen more). Description of my day (make it upbeat, interesting; engage them: seem attractive, independent, someone to admire). Emotional content (glimpses of how I really felt, truth coming out, hint at that hole in my soul). Download my thoughts about them and how much I love them, what they should be doing (present in a “good way,” but goal is to make them do what I need and want them to do; address my deeply hurt feelings. The “If only you would … I would feel better” section). Summarize all of the above, condense into a nice little paragraph nugget that would be very clear (Goal: make them think this all makes perfect sense, do not think I am crazy). Inquire about their day (be interested in them, altruism, back to upbeat woman at top of message. Goal: Hook them into calling me back). Repeat, day after day.
My peers that first week included a sixty-three-pound anorexic who couldn’t be in a top bunk lest she break a brittle leg descending from it, a crystal meth addict who had been forced into prostitution, and others with serious chemical and process addictions. Yet when I finished this work, as well as