Under a shadow
by Barbara Comito, WT
I came to Anna Ogden Hall in May 2017,
just so broken. I
didn’t think I could get more broken. I was
like no smile at all. I
would cry all the time and had triggers every
five minutes. It was
getting pretty ridiculous. I didn’t think this
program was right for
me at first. I would tell staff, “I don’t know.
I think you got the
wrong girl. I don’t have a substance
addiction.”
My addiction was people pleasing. I
became the queen of
people pleasing, but even as I was pleasing and
pleasing, it never
felt good enough, and I was on this constant
mission of trying to
fix my family.
Both my parents grew pot for a living.
My mother struggled
with alcohol addiction while I was growing up.
I had a brother who
had a drug addiction and also an older sister
who battled addiction.
My sister took her life back in 2011. I
was just overcome by
grief and sorrow. The grief and the pain and
the shame…it just
became my identity.
Elizabeth had continual thoughts of
suicide. Elizabeth isn’t
a drug addict or an alcoholic. She became a
Christian years before
coming to UGM. She read her Bible, prayed, went
to church. Growing
up in a very liberal area of Northern
California with parents who
grew marijuana for a living, she wanted nothing
to do with that
lifestyle.
“I was trying to be like, ‘I’m
different. I’m choosing a
different path.’” She went to Moody Bible
Institute for a year. She
loved Jesus. And, yet, she struggled with
paralyzing depression and
nearly constant suicidal ideation.
None of it made sense. Elizabeth
remembers thinking, “Hey,
I’m really trying here, but every time I go out
that door to get a
job, I am hearing this lie that I deserve to
die. Like, what am I
living for? I just deserve to die.”
Over the course of the last 16 months
in Women’s Recovery at
Anna Ogden Hall, Elizabeth has done the hard
work of unraveling this
mystery of self-hatred. She has learned that
she is dealing with
survivor’s guilt, post-traumatic stress
disorder and co-dependency –
all of which are somewhat related. For her, the
recovery process has
been like peeling the layers of an onion.
“There were so many
layers. I had no idea until I came into this
program how many layers
there were.”
A quick Google search defines co-
dependency as “excessive
emotional or psychological reliance on a
partner, typically a
partner who requires support due to an illness
or addiction.”
Elizabeth defines it like this: “To me
personally, it’s when
I have placed someone else as my savior or I
have placed myself as
somebody’s savior instead of God being God and
everybody being
human. My main goal in this program was to
become less and less co-
dependent and more God-dependent.”
Prior to coming to UGM, Elizabeth was
fixated on one goal:
to fix her family. It sounds like a good goal
on the surface, but in
truth, it was killing her.
Mental Health America sheds light on
what happens in
dysfunctional families: “Attention and energy
focus on the family
member who is ill or addicted. The co-dependent
person typically
sacrifices his or her needs to take care of a
person who is sick.
When co-dependents place other people’s health,
welfare, and safety
before their own, they can lose contact with
their own needs,
desires, and self.” Elizabeth relates to that
loss of self and
finding worth in being needed.
Elizabeth’s sister struggled with a
mental illness for years
before she killed herself. She was diagnosed
with bi-polar,
schizoaffective disorder. “She heard voices,”
Elizabeth explained.
Her sister’s illness and later her addiction
often took center stage
in the family, and yet, no one talked about it.
“In my family, our way of coping was
denial, like there was
this big elephant in the room. It was
frustrating for me at first to
see this going on and nobody’s talking about
anything, but at the
same time, I didn’t feel like I had a voice and
the matter is too
big, too chaotic… It really taught me to
survive in a way that was
very silent. In the background.”
“When my sister was alive, she got a
lot of attention,
whether it was positive or negative, and then
when I lost her, she
also got a lot of attention. And so for me it’s
almost like I’ve
felt for so long that I’ve been living under
her shadow…”
Elizabeth sought purpose and meaning in
being needed, a role
she now identifies as “the rescuer – the one
who feels responsible.”
One of the problems with being the rescuer is
that it distracts you
from your own stuff, the issues within you that
need attention.
Elizabeth wanted desperately to fix her
family. At the same
time, she felt helpless to do anything. “It was
my dream to be able
to grieve as a family. I had this picture of me
being close with my
family and us all being close together… But my
family was just as
broken as I was, so we were all broken
together. It wasn’t like I
could depend on them to support me. We were
just all trying to do
our best in our brokennenss.”
The harder she tried to make her “big,
happy, family” dream
come true, the worse things got, until one day,
as she was
obsessively trying to rescue her brother, her
uncle said to her,
“Elizabeth, the most important thing is that
you take care of
you.”
Elizabeth describes that moment as her
“aha moment.”
“Somebody from my family saw what was going on
and knew the ins and
outs of my family but still said to me, ‘You
need to take care of
you.’”
She realized she was avoiding her own
pain, her own grief,
her own shame, by focusing on everyone else.
And so her journey of
healing began. It wasn’t an immediate,
miraculous healing. In fact,
there have been lots of starts and stops, hills
and valleys, but in
what Elizabeth sees as a glimpse of divine
irony, her pastor
recommended Anna Ogden Hall as her next step.
“God is really funny sometimes, a lot
of times. I think he
knew that the way for me to get the kind of
healing I needed was to
be immersed in this environment with women who
struggle with drugs
and alcohol addiction…women who would tell me,
‘No, it wasn’t your
fault.’”
To heal her from her obsessive need to
fix her family, God
placed her in a house full of recovering
addicts. And showed her
that they had healing to offer her. “I was very
surprised at how
many random acts of kindness I would receive
from these women here.
And it would just kind of make me scratch my
head, like, what is
going on here?”
Over time, Elizabeth grew to realize
how much she had in
common with the women around her and that she
was under no
obligation to “fix” them. In fact, they didn’t
want her even to
attempt it.
“It’s been such a process of letting
that go. Letting that
responsibility go. And I don’t want it. I
really don’t. It’s too
much of a burden for anybody to carry.”
She and the other residents at Anna
Ogden Hall are all on a
journey of healing together. “God sending me
here has just been the
greatest thing he could have ever done for me
because here I get to
talk about it. I don’t feel alone in my pain
anymore. I get to share
it. There’s no secrets anymore. That’s been the
biggest healing
medicine for me honestly.”
“I just feel wrapped around – like a
blanket of support. I’m
very grateful to God for that. He knew I needed
it.”
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