French Braid

Quan Yin

Last week I was listening to a tv actor talk on his podcast about falling off the wagon after sixteen years of sobriety. His deep pain, his disappointment, his humility, his sense of responsibility to his twelve step community and the sober community that has grown in the years he has been podcasting were astonishing and so inspiring. But then I listened as he began to talk about his shame, and that's when my heart just truly broke.

I cannot begin to know what it is like to relapse in that way nor to do so publicly. When the gods were handing out addictions, I was apportioned sugar and butter and eating for comfort. Not benign by any stretch, but not mind/personality altering in the way that drugs and alcohol are, and not potentially catastrophic in the short run. Still, from it, I do know what it's like to leave my body and mindlessly reach for a substance, even after long periods of abstinence. Even though I grew up with an alcoholic father, still, I don't know personally what it's like to live with that kind of monkey on my own back. I do know, because of my father, the way that kind of substance abuse destroys people. And by extension, entire families and lives.

So much is known about addiction today. We know its intimate link to pain and suffering, be it physical, emotional, or spiritual, and in a plurality of cases, to trauma and PTSD. My dad was a veteran of both an alcoholic father who beat him and hand-to-hand combat in World War II, in which he was injured. Dr. Gabor Mate, who has worked with drug addicts on the streets of Vancouver for decades, has brought such compassionate understanding to addiction, believing that there is no way that we can begin to understand addiction~any addiction~without asking what it is that the addict is desperate for relief from.

There is an old, wrinkled black and white photo of me taken on Thanksgiving Day when I was eighteen months old. I am in my pretty holiday dress and I have climbed onto a chair and then up onto the dining table, with it's pretty china and tall tapered candles, and I am eating butter with my fingers. It seems far fetched to think I was already anesthetizing myself, and it's possible that I simply loved the taste of butter. But years after that, when I learned that I could push a chair to the counter and reach the peanut butter in the cupboard and eat spoon after spoon of it standing alone in the kitchen, having told my best friend that I needed to go to the bathroom, leaving her alone outside in the playhouse, I'm not so sure.  

Once years ago, on what was an already hard morning, I was stuck in traffic on the Bay Bridge on the way to visit my youngest daughter in the city. Crawling not even at a snail's pace, I could feel myself getting more upset by the minute, feeling the urge alternately to kick and scream, and to break down and sob. I was not even yet to Treasure Island when it hit me that once off the bridge, however long that would be, I would find a place to buy chocolate, even though I had not had sugar in months. That's all I could think about, chocolate, and where in the world I would stop to get it on the way to my daughter's apartment, a route I knew by heart in the congested and confusing big city streets. I still remember spotting the Peet's, where they just happened to carry my favorite chocolate bars back then, finding my way in circles on one-way streets looking for a place to park, standing in line, walking out with two large candy bars in my hand (plus a sugary coffee), then ripping into them once I was back in the car, those first bites soothing all the raw and jagged edges just like I knew they would, until I could breathe again, then hiding the wrappers and picking up my daughter for an early lunch. 

What I didn't know then is that being stuck in traffic, especially on a bridge where there is no escape at all is a big post trauma stress trigger for me; I was a wild animal caught in a trap. That morning was not unique but it stands out in my memory because it was the first time that it was ever so conscious, that I was actually aware that I was in a place of deep pain and at the same time aware that eating a particular kind of food would literally make me feel better; that once I had had the thought, nothing could have deterred me, not getting lost in the city, not being late to pick up my daughter, because there has been, since childhood, a well worn pathway, a deep and abiding groove in my brain connecting pain and food and soothing. 

Embedded in addiction and trauma is shame. There is both intergenerational trauma and intergenerational shame. Like their trauma, I breathed my parent's shame into my body like I did the air around me~just as my beloved daughters breathed in my own. In their ways, both of my parents shamed me but it was my dad, his breath smelling of whiskey and cigarettes, who would get into my face, jabbing his finger so close to my nose I was cross-eyed, and say, in his most disgusted voice, repeating my full name after each incantation, Shame on you, Debby Suoja, shame on you; my poor little 5, 7, 9-year-old frozen in place, utterly alone, annihilated, spirit felled by the monstrous toxicity that is shame; that I am shame. Though that is only one, and definitely not the most powerful of the host of reasons that I know shame and its effects on me, on my relationships, on my ability to thrive, like I know the back of my own hand, though some of those do also involve my father.

When my girls were kids I used to French braid their hair. I would pick up hair from the top of their heads, separate it into three pieces, braid those together and then with my baby finger, pick up more hair and weave it in, first one side, and then the other, weaving and braiding until at the very end, when I put the rubber band in it, and there, in the little tail, it was all one again. That is what trauma, addiction, and shame are like for me. All braided together in a way that I have no idea where one begins and the other ends. 

But I do know this. It is not my fault. It is not my fault anymore than it was my father's fault, or my grandfather's, or my mother's, or the tv actor's, or Hunter Biden's, whose struggle has so pathologically become part of our national narrative, whose losses and traumas are staggering, whose pain is unfathomable. It is not shameful to have found a way when so isolated and in such anguish to soothe one's pain. It is a natural impulse, and kudos to the spirit for doing the best it could. And now, with all of the contemporary knowledge about trauma and about addiction, after so many years and decades of struggle, the door opens not to more shame, but to understanding. And understanding paves the way to love, and love brings us face to face with the Buddhist's Goddess of Compassion, Quan Yin, She Who Hears our Cries, She Who Feels our Wounds. And these three, understanding, love, and compassion become the new strands in the braid, one small plait at a time, weaving the way to wholeness, and to healing.