Live More Kindly: It Benefits You and Your Clients

“I’m curious if there is a kinder way you can say that to yourself?”

With those words, my therapist, Jude Rittenhouse, set my spirit, mind and body on a journey during which I have made a concerted effort to embrace daily, loving kindness to myself and others.

Her sentiment, posed in the form of a gentle, consciousness-raising question, has been reinforced in the last five years of supervision and therapy by an ever-increasing mindfulness. This mindfulness has been bolstered by a daily practice of meditation. That meditation has resulted in greater recognition and “catching myself” throughout my day thinking and living out of my core goodness, compassion and self-care. And when veering from that path, with negative self-talk or condemnation, I gently guide myself back to a thought, action or experience that is reality-based and exhibits kindness and reinforces the reality of my goodness and compassion.

Point blank, I can’t loathe me and love you. I can’t denigrate myself and help lift my clients with co-occurring disorders up and out of their despair.

When I feel vulnerable, I can choose to exercise my coping skills and not give myself over to re-enacting in some way, shape or form the negative thoughts and behaviors that historically served to reinforce an all too familiar cycle of shame, guilt and remorse.

I am a man in long-term recovery from alcohol use. Several factors have led to my efforts at being a consummate recovery counselor and an engaged and dedicated Dad to my thriving now adult children. Much of my success in both my professional and parenting roles is ascribed to my willingness to participate in individual therapy (27 years and counting, on and off), my active involvement in 12-Step meetings, and my creative work with clients during a 20-year recovery counseling career. All my efforts have served to reinforce my innate goodness and competence.

In addition, my discipline of daily prayer and meditation has allowed me to process a shocking revelation from August 2015. But first I have to take a step back. One year sober, at age 35, I became aware I was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. The recovered memory I had was of an elderly, intoxicated man sexually abusing me while I slept. Then, another male relative divulged in 2015 that he and two other males had regularly sexually abused me from age four to eight.

The bombshell disclosure prompted familiar feelings of shame, guilt and remorse for wanting to take responsibility for the abuse. Prior to the disclosure, those three faceless, dark and horrifying horsemen, galloping but hidden from my consciousness, were running rampant. They were my constant companions, becoming the drivers of my internal critic. I was a stable boy, shoveling the manure and carrying the stench of family dysfunction, stained but still a curious and adorable being.

While dutifully feeding the black, roan and Palomino horses, they grew in strength, their surrogate hooves battering my soul. Instead of grooming, I was groomed, now feeling I was sex-trafficked within my own family. It was an early life experience played out over and over again, according to my primary perpetrator. Yet to this day, I have no memory of chapter one of my horrible trauma.

Also unrealized but felt was the net effect that I wore life like an emotionally inhibiting straitjacket. It was an invisible, strictly confining straitjacket, which looked to me and the outside world like a very comfy, plush jacket. I was the accidental “Great Pretender,” because very unconsciously, I knew no other persona to present to the world than that of a thumb-sucking, nail-biting, freckled, sometimes toothless, broadly smiling boy. In my wallet, I carry a black and white photo of Tommy, a reminder of the thriver I am.

Carrying secrets I didn’t know I was bearing

I wore many masks as a consequence of enduring at least four years of regular sexual abuse by male perpetrators. At various times in my dysfunctional family, I was the perfect child, the kewpie doll and the joker. Originally my way of soothing my pain and receiving external validation was through academic achievement, especially in high school. While I was painfully shy, I also cultivated the ability to counterbalance my introversion temporarily by being extroverted. I exhibited this capacity by joking around in class, saying something self-deprecating, and being the butt of my own jokes. I also have a history of recounting life experiences from the negative, even if there had been a positive aspect or result.

I now understand that my childhood sexual trauma had me living my adult life often fearful, regularly immersed in self-doubt and harsh criticism. Being Irish-American, I’ve described it as using an invisible shillelagh (a short, heavy club usually made of blackthorn or oak) to verbally beat myself around my head and shoulders. Initially this cudgel had only the natural wood knots, but over the years as I re-experienced my childhood shame, guilt and remorse, I made the club even more pain-inducing by drilling metal screws into it.

Unaware what my core issues were, I struggled for years with my unrealized trauma history. Billy Joel’s “Angry Young Man” was my theme song in the 1980s. Today I am in the loving embrace of change, not the crucible of change. Second, being unaware when my inner child is fearful, I have acted out instinctively, and would numb out with alcohol, pornography and sex. This was an unconscious mandate, owing to not understanding the connection between my childhood sexual trauma and intimacy issues that dogged my adulthood between ages 34 and 54. Third, my perfectionistic and controlling behavior and my 20-year-career as a wounded healer became fertile ground for me to seek help in therapy, and most recently attendance in meetings that support adult children of dysfunctional families.

Helping our clients

Recovery from the co-occurring disorders of substance abuse and a (trauma-based) mental health condition requires attention to an array of issues with a variety of tools. “Given all the givens,” as my therapist Rittenhouse has encouraged me to view my life experiences and choices, I offer the following to help our clients seek a better quality of life:

1. Listen even more closely to the words your clients use. Hear the negativity, the self-deprecation, the self-loathing. Validate the expression and experience: “That sounds like a challenging incident (or environment in which to grow up).” Gently point out the negativity you heard. Invite the client to rephrase the statement in a kinder, positive and reinforcing manner.

2. Encourage clients to avoid spending time in shame and self-blame, also known as self-flagellation. There can be no debating, there’s nothing to be gained by self-flagellating! One of the greatest gifts my late sponsor, John D., imparted was the encouragement that I could revisit any conversation I wanted or needed to explore again.

3. Ask the client how he/she profited from a seemingly one-dimensional negative experience. “What did you learn and what could you have done, or will you do, differently?”

4. Encourage clients to retell the story of their life experiences from the positive first, to help avoid emotional dysregulation and possible retraumatization.

5. Help your clients incorporate a greater capacity to work through their feelings. Invite them to respond to three fill-in-the-blank statements: I am feeling______________. The reason is___________________. The reality is_______________________.

6. Assist clients in talking about the experience of fear in their lives. To one degree or another, sometimes our fear is False Emotions Appearing Real. Parsing fear from fact is the challenge and goal.

7. Speak to yourself as if speaking to a beautiful, innocent child you love or loved. Ask the client if they think their best friend would remain on speaking terms with them if they spoke to that person in the same negative, condemning manner that characterizes their internal dialogue.

Above all, model positive, life-affirming language with each of your clients. Let loving kindness to self be our guiding principle in 2019 and beyond.

Thomas M. Greaney, M.Ed., CCDP, LADC, is the owner of Savvy Communications, a private practice dedicated to “Assisting Others in Healing and Growth.” An author, conference presenter on creative approaches to group and individual therapy, and proud Dad to Matt and Laura, he can be reached at (860) 912-2944 or savvycomm18@gmail.com.