Support: Finding Safe Others to Engage Our Journey

Anyone with compulsive, addictive patterns finds it difficult to trust others. Usually this is due to the residual effects of trauma.  

Many of us, maybe not all, but many of us have been deeply wounded in life. And the resulting trauma affects us in complex ways.

Trauma is a ubiquitous human experience. It’s multi-faceted. It affects us differently.

Trauma results from negative life events, experiences of fear, terror, helplessness, of being overwhelmed.

Physical, emotional or psychological abuse is traumatic. Neglect is traumatic.

The definition for trauma used at Capstone Treatment Center (near Searcy, Arkansas) is helpful: trauma is “an experience or situation that causes a fight, flight or freeze-appease response and leaves an internal message of toxic shame.”

Sometimes we are able to work through how we’re affected by the experience. But other times we’re too flooded; we shut down to survive. 

And that’s when compulsive behaviors can find deep roots in our brains. We find a way to survive. But while many of us seem not only to survive but thrive, living through this early wounding comes at a cost. 

When it’s not processed healthily, the effects of the trauma remain, hidden but impactful. The unresolved trauma affects our emotional stability and we find compulsive behaviors that allow us to stabilize. But they have their costs, too.

We are simply not designed to recover on our own. We need others. But most of us who are compulsive are naturally isolating, withholding and fearful of becoming too vulnerable. 

This lasting legacy of trauma is that it takes our natural desire to connect with others and changes it into a need to protect ourselves from others. 

It’s counter-intuitive: we need to do deep life with others but our experience has taught us to avoid trusting others.

We need others to heal. So…what gets hurt in relationship has to be healed in relationship.

In recovery circles we call this cultivating a culture of support. 

A Few Good Tools

When it comes to developing our culture of support, there are many good tools but I’m going to touch on four: groups; sponsors; sharing your First Step; and developing your inner circle of support.

One essential tool is a healthy, safe recovery group. There are three kinds of recovery groups: basic, support and therapist-led.

A good example of basic recovery groups are Twelve Step groups. They’re volunteer led, have a fairly uniform protocol and are usually safe, healthy places to begin and continue the process of self-disclosing. 

A healthy basic group supplements the work you’re doing elsewhere, like counseling, reading recovery literature, programs and workbooks. The healthiest groups are where the leadership is solid, most everyone in the group is doing their own work and not too many are on extended periods of coasting.

Support groups, like basic groups, are self-supporting (meaning they pay the rent for a space, and incidental costs, but not much else). What makes them different is that there is a measure of input from informed group participants and more give-and-take exchange in the group meeting. They still operate with a protocol, but may have developed their own or supplemented the standard protocols with more specific material.

My home group is a support group. We identify Jesus as our Higher Power, use scripture verses, integrate Christian faith with healthy recovery practices. We have some other commonly held values as well. But no one’s paid to lead the group; it’s volunteer led.

Therapist-led groups bring the expertise and guidance of a therapist trained in treating sex addiction and recovery. Obviously then, there’s a financial cost for participating in a therapist-led group, and the value is drawing on the therapist’s resourcing and the benefit of group therapy. 

A sponsor is a specific individual who has more experience in the same area of recovery than you have, is working a program you respect and is someone you’re willing to practice honesty and vulnerability with. A good sponsor isn’t too directive or too passive. They care, ask questions, may offer brief stories of their own experiences and occasionally pass along useful resources.

Sharing your First Step, a Twelve Step term, is by no means limited to Twelve Step groups. A First Step is an early recovery stage practice, but is also quite useful to revisit periodically. 

A First Step is an admission of our powerlessness and unmanageability. It’s a grounding of ourselves. It’s an accounting of what our addiction has cost us, our lack of control over our addictive behavior and our continuing in spite of destructive consequences. 

We share a First Step only with others in recovery, very safe people.

We develop our inner circle of accountability and support by finding first one, then another, and then another safe person, those with whom we can be both self-revealing, caring and reciprocal.

Final Thoughts

Developing a culture of support is like having a good garden: it takes persistence. We have to be intentional, work at it, nurture it.

And recognize we will often have interior resistance to this. There is still a part of us afraid of intimacy, avoidant of being vulnerable with others. We work through the resistance. 

What’s your next step in developing support for your recovery? tcr