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We need relationship in order to survive. If you were raised without a secure base you likely learned early on to modify yourself. In this episode I am talking with Kelly McDaniel, LPC, NCC, CSAT, author and psychotherapist, about the complex trauma of chronic loneliness and how to heal from the toxic stress of disconnection.
Kelly McDaniel’s first book Ready to Heal (2008) was written for women healing from addictive love and sex. Her new book Mother Hunger arrives July 2021 from Hay House.
SHOW NOTES:
Kelly works with chronic disconnection or chronic loneliness, not just the loneliness that is part of the human condition, but condemned isolation.
The researchers at the Stone Center in Wellesley, MA. Gene Baker Miller wrote the book Toward a New Psychology for Women (1976)
Condemned Isolation — shame woven into the loneliness
Our collective experience during the pandemic will reduce the shame around loneliness and around talking about it.
Addictive relationships- continued use despite trying to stop, consequences and still the inability to stop.
Ready to Heal — women are raised to modify ourselves to be good relational people. We then take those skills into our relationships from a place of our own heartache, wounding, and attachment injuries. We have to be in the relationship and yet we don't have the skills for it because we didn't learn them growing up and it's a risky opportunity for the relationship to become addictive.
We are talking about addictions as a compulsive behaviors where we loose a sense of agency and choice.
Gabor Maté’s says the essence of all addiction is abject fear.
Between 0-3, we most need connection and if we don’t have it not only do we feel disconnected, we feel terrified.
Mix loneliness and fear and it's a breeding ground for addiction to grow.
Explicit messages / explicit memory- what we have access to, it's part of our cognition, we can usually know where that memory and belief comes from.
Implicit beliefs / implicit memory- forms before our language, not something we know consciously, something that is embedded in ourselves
The formation of the self happens through relationships as we mature, we're in direct relationships with people who take care of us, and in those relationships we are learning who we are, we're learning our connection to ourself. We can't know who we are if we don't have those relationships.
When those relationships are healthy, safe, warm, it's really beneficial to our development, Kelly writes for those who didn't have a healthy reflection of who they are.
These messages then get internalized and that isolation compounds the ways we need to survive.
“The child learned early on, if I am going to survive in this family system I am going to have to disappear. And that disappearing act is so thorough that the self doesn't develop. And this is also why there can be so much ease and comfort with dissociative states. There is a lot of dissociating that goes on when we have to swallow who we are and not be present because it's just too unbearable."
Dissociation happens when there's chronic fear and toxic stress that comes from caregivers that truly are unkind, cruel, and abusive.
When we learn so young to auto-regulate, it's not a huge leap to auto-regulate with other things such as food, television, exercise, masturbation, or sex. All of these things can be really healthy, and all of these things can be compulsively sought out to seek comfort, in that auto-regulatory kind of way, when there's a deeper need that isn't being met or healed.
These systems- patriarchy, systemic racism, misogyny, etc. It's not to point fingers at one person, but these things can flow from generation to generation and it's about showing up to understand what's happening.
The family system is a reflection of the dominant hierarchy, dominant way of thinking.
Femininity training teaches us that we must be good to be worthy of love, and if we're too sexual something is bad about us and yet we need to be sexy to be worthy of love.
Femininity training is a breeding ground for love addiction.
Our ancestors may or may not have worked through the problems that they pass down. Humans raising humans
Covert sexual abuse/enmeshment: the relationship between the parent and child gets inverted. The parent needs the child, even if there's no inappropriate touching, it forms a psychological and emotional marriage where the child feels responsible for the wellbeing of the parent. It’s a boundary violation. As an adult after experiencing enmeshment, if you try to get close to someone, they might feel kind of icky when a parent has these needs from you, it can start to feel “icky”.
The “ick” feeling is a feeling of shame, and it's the feeling of shame that the parents felt and carrying it for them is part of the backwardness of what's happening. That then teaches us how to be in relationships through this space of pleasing others, saying no, of not listening to our own needs and that is what we act out later in life.
There is a reason why we do what we do, and once we realize it, healing is possible.
To heal internally- to cultivate a new sense of attachment within ourselves it starts with identifying where we are in the process.
Love addiction acting in or out
Those that act in- sexual/emotional anorexia
Those that act out- Love and sexual addiction
Both come from the same attachment injury, they're just manifesting differently and in different degrees.
In the process there may be things that stop happening, then there are things that start happening. The creative energy that has been going toward love and sex, or has been suffocated and restricted under the gear that goes with anorexia, starts to bloom.
The erotic energy that fuels an addictive type habit feels dirty vs the erotic energy that you get to reclaim as you get to know who you are- feels clean
We reference episode 10: Mending Racialized Trauma: A Body Centered Approach with Resmaa Menakem
Clean pain vs dirty pain
Clean pain- we're designed to manage and handle and work through
Dirty pain is full of shame and it gets unmanageable really fast
Whether we're carrying shame that is not outs from our caregivers or from a partner who is unkind, or it's our own shame from acting outside our values system
The healing process starts with identifying where we are. Are we in the ick or are we in the clean place.
Self care, self acceptance, and self love are all so important in regards to how we enter and re-enter into healthy relationships. We learn to take care of ourselves in a new way, in a way that we wish we had been cared for.
It's hard to wake up to grief. For the childhood we lost, the adult dreams that we didn't create or have, and maybe dealing with the fact that you've passed this onto another generation.
Part of healing is facing pain, and that brings a huge capacity for pleasure.
Finding language, sharing language, connecting, talking, so that the shame comes out from hiding.
Disenfranchised grief — Kenneth J. Doka
If this episode resonates with you and you want more help for having grown up missing so many things that you needed, find a therapist who is attachment oriented, somatic trained, and that they have a solid grasp of trauma therapy (SE, EMDR, NARM, etc) with an attachment focus.
Resources:
Find Kelly on Instagram: @kellymcdanieltherapy
Supporting Your Relational Self | Begins February 2021
6-week-online-course focuses on your relationship to Self, other intimate relations. Cultivate practices to sustain during these chaotic times.
Essential Skills Relationship Bootcamp | April 24-25, 2021
This is an authorized presentation of Terry Real's Essential Skills Relationship Bootcamp. Open to individuals, couples and therapists. A combination of lecture, role-play, small group exercises and personal work.
Jules, Vickey and I are seeking listener questions to fuel the production of our upcoming podcast at whydoesmypartner.com
This podcast is not a substitute for counseling with a licensed provider.
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