Conyers - The recovering heart: emotional sobriety for women
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THE RECOVERING HEART
Emotional Sobriety for Women
Beverly Conyers
Hazelden
Center City, Minnesota 55012
hazelden.org
2013 by Hazelden Foundation
All rights reserved. Published 2013.
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this publication, either print or electronic, may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the express written permission of the publisher. Failure to comply with these terms may expose you to legal action and damages for copyright infringement.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Conyers, Beverly.
The recovering heart: emotional sobriety for women / Beverly Conyers.
pages cm
Summary: You are finally sober and drug-free. Your old, destructive lifestyle is fading into the past and now you are a woman in recovery. What an amazing gift youve given yourself. So why arent you happier? As sobriety takes hold and your head starts to clear, a wide range of emotions can begin to emerge-feelings that until now youve medicated with chemicals. Yet to stay sober, and to grow and flourish as a person, you must engage in healing and take responsibility for these emotions that have been neglected since you first starting using. Beverly Conyers, a prominent voice in recovery, uses personal stories and informed insight to guide you in achieving emotional sobriety by addressing behaviors and feelings unique to the female experience. Learn how to develop the inner resiliency to face and process difficult, buried emotions-such as shame, grief, fear, and anger-while freeing the positive feelings of self-worth, independence, and integrity. Discover how to heal your damaged self by improving your communication skills, expanding your capacity for intimacy and trust, and reawakening a spiritual life. It is through your own personal journey of healing your wounded heart that you can free yourself to a life of self-acceptance, and lay the foundation for a rewarding and relapse-free second stage of recovery.Provided by publisher.
Summary: Offering guidance to women in recovery from alcoholism or other addictions, Beverly Conyers gives readers wisdom for the journey. She depicts several recovering women and their hard-won lessons, showing how they overcame trauma to regain their self-respect and lead productive, joyful lives.Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-61649-437-7 (pbk.) ISBN 978-1-61649-497-1 (ebook)
1. Self-esteem in women. 2. Self-perception in women. 3. Recovering addicts. I. Title.
BF697.5.S46C666 2013
616.8603082dc23
2012049787
Editors note
The names, details, and circumstances may have been changed to protect the privacy of those mentioned in this publication.
This publication is not intended as a substitute for the advice of health care professionals.
Alcoholics Anonymous and AA are registered trademarks of Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc.
17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5 6
Cover design by Percolator
Interior design and typesetting by Madeline Berglund
And the day came when the risk
to remain tight in a bud was more painful
than the risk it took to blossom.
ANAS NIN
For M.V. and women everywhere who face
the darkness and find their inner light
I am amazed and humbled by the generosity, honesty, and courage of the women who shared their stories for this book. They lived through long periods of pain, shame, and despair. Many of them faced rejection, abuse, and devastating losses. Worst of all, most of them came to doubt the value of their own existence.
Yet, each of these women found within herself some kernel of inner strengtha stubborn refusal to be destroyed by what had hurt her. By daring to believe in the possibility of a better life, they worked through their fears, overcame setbacks, and slowly moved toward a place of healing and self-affirmation.
In telling their stories, these incredible women revealed their hard-earned wisdom and opened my eyes to the boundless potential of the human spirit. I learned much more from them than I could have anticipated at the beginning of this journey. For showing me what healing really means, I thank them from the bottom of my heart.
To protect their privacy, I have changed some identifying details about the women in this book. Most of the names that appear were chosen by the women themselves.
What scares me is that Im going to ultimately find out at the end of my life that Im really not lovable, that Im not worthy of being loved. That theres something fundamentally wrong with me.
DEMI MOORE ,
actress , Harpers Bazaar interview, 2012
L oneliness. Fear. Self-doubt. Self-criticism. These feelings lie at the heart of the shadowy inner world of many women todayeven women who seem to have it all. Regardless of how successful we may appear to others or how much weve accomplished in our lives, were often our most determined detractor, our most unforgiving critic.
We might catch a glimpse of ourselves in a mirror and think, I look old and tired. I look fat. Or we lose a job through no fault of our own and tell ourselves, Im a failure. I cant do anything right. Perhaps our marriage ends or we yell at our children and we conclude, Im a terrible person. I dont deserve to be loved.
For women in recovery from addictions to alcohol, drugs, food, and compulsive behaviors, this painful self-criticism goes even deeper. Our life experiences have led us to question our own value, to deny our fundamental worth as a human being. Many of us were subjected to some sort of trauma at a critical point in our development, often at the hands of someone we trusted. Trauma damages our core sense of self and fills us with shame.
Our addictions inflicted new traumas: fractured relationships, public and private humiliations, and lost opportunities. On top of all that, we bear the stigma of being a woman with addictions.
All addictions carry some degree of stigma, whether the addict is male or female. But a greater stigma is attached to women. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, there are about 18 million alcoholics or problem drinkers in the United States. By some estimates, about a third of them are women. Yet Al-Anon membership is overwhelmingly female. (Al-Anon is a mutual support group for friends and families of problem drinkers.) Shame surely plays a role in mens reluctance to publicly acknowledge and seek help for the problem of an alcoholic partner.
We can also see the stigma of female addiction in the publics response to celebrities with substance abuse problems. Consider the well-publicized struggles of actors Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan. Many people seemed to regard Sheens antics as nothing worse than the hijinks of a notorious bad boy. Lohan, on the other hand, garnered widespread ridicule for her many failed attempts to get clean.
As one alcoholism counselor put it, A man who falls down drunk is still a man, but a woman who falls down drunk is a tramp. The double standard was also observed by the late Carolyn Knapp, who wrote in her memoir Drinking: A Love Story , A messy drunks an ugly thing, especially when its a woman.
For women with addictions, the stigma becomes part of our self-identity, further damaging our already shaky emotional inner world. Our fear and our pain and our shame saturate the very core of our being, shaping our decisions, coloring our relationships, and defining who we think we aresometimes even after years of living clean and sober. But thats hardly surprising, especially when we think about women in recovery within the broader context of womanhood today. Traditional and modern interpretations of femininity have been at odds for generations. In the mid-1800s, womens rights activist Susan B. Anthony wrote, Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother. A century later, First Lady Bess Truman observed, A womans place in public is to sit beside her husband, be silent, and be sure her hat is on straight.
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