es·cap·ism _ əˈskāpˌizəm
The term 'coping skills' is one I learned the meaning of when I entered treatment in November of 2015. I had heard it many times throughout my life, but I never understood what it truly meant in relation to my life. As a young adult, I had no idea that learned healthy coping skills were so important or that they would affect my emotional growth from a difficult childhood up to and throughout my dysfunctional adulthood. They were was just a couple of words, a term that didn't really apply to me and one I usually didn't give much thought to.
Before I got clean, if for some odd reason I was talking about emotions (because emotion = bad) and the term popped up, my personal translation was 'insert head into sand and wait until storm passes'. This has always been my very favorite way to cope, escapism. I got so good at it that eventually I could put my head in the sand AND so far up my ass that I was blissfully unaware of all the emotions I was stuffing up it. Along with coping skills, the human body also has it's own built in responses for stressful situations. It's called Hyper-arousal, Acute Stress Response or as you've most likely heard it called; Fight or Flight. Personally, my body's natural response has never been to fight. It just seems too messy. It also sounds incredibly dangerous and I am a fragile butterfly. I have given this response my own name, to more clearly describe how I learned to react in stressful and difficult situations; I call it Flight or Statue. Flight = Run. Keep running. Don't stop until you've made it to a new zip code, get a new name and SS# and create a new life. Statue = Don't move. Not one inch. Anything you do right now will result in certain death.
As children, our immediate caregivers (for me, mostly mom) are the people who are relegated with the task of teaching us how to deal. Normally this is accomplished by modeling healthy coping skills. That wasn't quite the case for me. Coping skills were modeled, however, they were very unhealthy ones. I had a pretty tumultuous childhood. I've already hinted in a previous entry that my mom was not the best emotional role model and that was due to her own on and off love affair with 'The Big H' (heroin). To expand on that, please know that I absolutely love my mother. I miss her every day and wish she was by my side doing this whole recovery thing. My mom was hilarious, we could take a comedy act on the road and make millions. She was hilarious and beautiful and she did the best she could for us four girls. She absolutely loved each of us with a ferocity, but she had no love for herself. I would never trade her or my sisters but in all honesty my mom should not have had one child, let alone four of them. She had experienced a lifetime of using and stuffing emotions plus all the guilt and shame of being in active addiction while her children could see it. Her emotional growth had been stunted from a very young age, just as mine had been. That cycle began to form with her mom and her mom's mom and so on. This is the cycle that needs breaking and that I'm working on breaking every single day. I've got a long way to go, but every day I chisel a little more scar tissue away.
Let's take a trip, down good ol' memory lane. By the 6th grade, I had undergone nine reconstructive operations on my hands, causing me to miss a lot of school and a TON of important bonding/developing time with my peers. Some time into the school year I noticed that my left shoulder blade was sticking out much further than the right one. When I brought it to my mom's attention she said, "it's fine Court, you're just growing. It's nothing."
*Turned out to be scoliosis and eventually I needed a rod attached to my spine. By the time she realized it was wasn't "nothing" my curve was too severe to correct with a brace* I had no reason not to believe what she said. But believe her or not, in my already bruised ego, this was just one more thing that made me stand out. In reality no one noticed it but because I could see it so could everyone else and therefore I was a heinously disgusting creature. This is where my dysmorphic feature flipped the switch and my brain started in with Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD), and it went hard in the paint. I had crippling social anxiety and a personality with four basic levels; Painfully Shy, Awkward, Melancholic or Verge of Tears. I made eye contact with the ground a LOT. I was convinced by my asshole peers that being different was NOT okay.
My mom didn't do a whole lot of good with my insecurities and anxiety but she did the best she could. She coddled me and told me I was special and that "they are just jealous because you are soooo beautiful and perfect!" She never made me stand up for myself, and how would I even know what that looked like since she never stood up for HERSELF? All I knew was that I desperately wanted to be just like everyone else.
Would you like an example of these learned coping skills in action?? Oh good, I'm so glad! Let me paint you a word picture...
One of the worst things that could happen to me EVER was being late to school. I was not as cool with this situation as Zack Morris was, nor did I have a diverse, confident group of friends that had my back when Mr. Belding hassled me in the hallway (#nosquadup). But really, the idea of walking into a classroom and feeling all 30 pairs of eyes follow me from the door to my desk was my personal version of hell. Most days the bell had already rung as mom crept to a stop in front of Jordan Middle School. It was a barren wasteland littered with soda bottles, Pop Tart wrappers and loose leaf notebook paper. *Cue tumbleweed and theme song a la The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly* This is where level Verge of Tears warped up to Waterworks. Let me be clear, these were not crocodile tears, they were very real. My fear was ABSOLUTELY real in my mind, however irrational. My eyes welled up and my face was red hot within seconds. Soon enough came the stifled sobs only anxiety can create and a nice long drip of snot would be dangling from one or both nostrils. Here is one of those forks in the road I can now clearly see that my mom should have turned right instead of left. Rather than march my crying ass inside, she drove away. She took me home. She let me give in to my fear. She set me on the couch, covered me in blankets out of the dryer and turned on Sally Jesse Raphael. By repeatedly doing this for me in that and countless other situations, I never learned to fight through my anxiety. I was given the message that I didn't have to work hard, that I was special and therefore didn't have to do the same things my peers did.
When I was 17, I discovered that alcohol (first drug/substance I fell in love with) made me feel better and quieted my mind, I thought I was golden. Alcohol made me funny, pretty, outgoing...everything I thought I wasn't. But it also felt like something else, a familiar feeling from my childhood. Alcohol was that warm blanket out of the dryer my mom would heap on top of me when days in the real world were too hard to get through. I didn't drink every day, usually only on the weekends. But every time I did drink I did so in order to get drunk. Thinking back now, I can pinpoint the first time I used alcohol as a solution. It was at my sister Megan's wedding. I was 18 and a bridesmaid. I was absolutely happy to be standing with her, but that joy was overshadowed by my constant...and I really mean constant...negative thoughts and the fear that all these people saw as I walked down the aisle was everything I hated about myself. If walking down the aisle wasn't enough, I then had to give a toast to the bride and groom during the reception. I wanted to be anywhere else. But wait, open bar you say? Open bar, indeed. I proceeded to get nice and tossed and I did it because I KNEW it would shut up that voice in my head telling me I wasn't good enough and that I was a real life Quasimodo. When the open bar dude stopped serving me I went around to deserted tables chugging half empty champagne flutes, I draped myself in that warm blanket and I don't remember a word of what I said.
There are countless examples of this theme playing out in my life. I continued that way with alcohol and then with love/sex and then finally pain pills until I entered treatment. As I mentioned before, my head was so far up my own ass, that I was oblivious to what I was really doing. I was doing what I was taught; I was escaping.
So, that brings us up to now. I have been free of all chemical substances for about two and a half years and I have learned many things. But here is what I have very recently realized...without the drugs and the alcohol and the love and the sex, I am still that 17 year old looking for a way to quiet her mind. I am still that person with horrible anxiety and even worse life skills. I still go backwards sometimes... I still pull a Houdini once in a while but for the most part I trust that the brand spankin' new coping skills I've acquired are enough to help me get through any obstacle...
...and I never...ever NEED to use again.
❤coco
Before I got clean, if for some odd reason I was talking about emotions (because emotion = bad) and the term popped up, my personal translation was 'insert head into sand and wait until storm passes'. This has always been my very favorite way to cope, escapism. I got so good at it that eventually I could put my head in the sand AND so far up my ass that I was blissfully unaware of all the emotions I was stuffing up it. Along with coping skills, the human body also has it's own built in responses for stressful situations. It's called Hyper-arousal, Acute Stress Response or as you've most likely heard it called; Fight or Flight. Personally, my body's natural response has never been to fight. It just seems too messy. It also sounds incredibly dangerous and I am a fragile butterfly. I have given this response my own name, to more clearly describe how I learned to react in stressful and difficult situations; I call it Flight or Statue. Flight = Run. Keep running. Don't stop until you've made it to a new zip code, get a new name and SS# and create a new life. Statue = Don't move. Not one inch. Anything you do right now will result in certain death.
As children, our immediate caregivers (for me, mostly mom) are the people who are relegated with the task of teaching us how to deal. Normally this is accomplished by modeling healthy coping skills. That wasn't quite the case for me. Coping skills were modeled, however, they were very unhealthy ones. I had a pretty tumultuous childhood. I've already hinted in a previous entry that my mom was not the best emotional role model and that was due to her own on and off love affair with 'The Big H' (heroin). To expand on that, please know that I absolutely love my mother. I miss her every day and wish she was by my side doing this whole recovery thing. My mom was hilarious, we could take a comedy act on the road and make millions. She was hilarious and beautiful and she did the best she could for us four girls. She absolutely loved each of us with a ferocity, but she had no love for herself. I would never trade her or my sisters but in all honesty my mom should not have had one child, let alone four of them. She had experienced a lifetime of using and stuffing emotions plus all the guilt and shame of being in active addiction while her children could see it. Her emotional growth had been stunted from a very young age, just as mine had been. That cycle began to form with her mom and her mom's mom and so on. This is the cycle that needs breaking and that I'm working on breaking every single day. I've got a long way to go, but every day I chisel a little more scar tissue away.
Let's take a trip, down good ol' memory lane. By the 6th grade, I had undergone nine reconstructive operations on my hands, causing me to miss a lot of school and a TON of important bonding/developing time with my peers. Some time into the school year I noticed that my left shoulder blade was sticking out much further than the right one. When I brought it to my mom's attention she said, "it's fine Court, you're just growing. It's nothing."
*Turned out to be scoliosis and eventually I needed a rod attached to my spine. By the time she realized it was wasn't "nothing" my curve was too severe to correct with a brace* I had no reason not to believe what she said. But believe her or not, in my already bruised ego, this was just one more thing that made me stand out. In reality no one noticed it but because I could see it so could everyone else and therefore I was a heinously disgusting creature. This is where my dysmorphic feature flipped the switch and my brain started in with Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD), and it went hard in the paint. I had crippling social anxiety and a personality with four basic levels; Painfully Shy, Awkward, Melancholic or Verge of Tears. I made eye contact with the ground a LOT. I was convinced by my asshole peers that being different was NOT okay.
My mom didn't do a whole lot of good with my insecurities and anxiety but she did the best she could. She coddled me and told me I was special and that "they are just jealous because you are soooo beautiful and perfect!" She never made me stand up for myself, and how would I even know what that looked like since she never stood up for HERSELF? All I knew was that I desperately wanted to be just like everyone else.
Would you like an example of these learned coping skills in action?? Oh good, I'm so glad! Let me paint you a word picture...
One of the worst things that could happen to me EVER was being late to school. I was not as cool with this situation as Zack Morris was, nor did I have a diverse, confident group of friends that had my back when Mr. Belding hassled me in the hallway (#nosquadup). But really, the idea of walking into a classroom and feeling all 30 pairs of eyes follow me from the door to my desk was my personal version of hell. Most days the bell had already rung as mom crept to a stop in front of Jordan Middle School. It was a barren wasteland littered with soda bottles, Pop Tart wrappers and loose leaf notebook paper. *Cue tumbleweed and theme song a la The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly* This is where level Verge of Tears warped up to Waterworks. Let me be clear, these were not crocodile tears, they were very real. My fear was ABSOLUTELY real in my mind, however irrational. My eyes welled up and my face was red hot within seconds. Soon enough came the stifled sobs only anxiety can create and a nice long drip of snot would be dangling from one or both nostrils. Here is one of those forks in the road I can now clearly see that my mom should have turned right instead of left. Rather than march my crying ass inside, she drove away. She took me home. She let me give in to my fear. She set me on the couch, covered me in blankets out of the dryer and turned on Sally Jesse Raphael. By repeatedly doing this for me in that and countless other situations, I never learned to fight through my anxiety. I was given the message that I didn't have to work hard, that I was special and therefore didn't have to do the same things my peers did.
When I was 17, I discovered that alcohol (first drug/substance I fell in love with) made me feel better and quieted my mind, I thought I was golden. Alcohol made me funny, pretty, outgoing...everything I thought I wasn't. But it also felt like something else, a familiar feeling from my childhood. Alcohol was that warm blanket out of the dryer my mom would heap on top of me when days in the real world were too hard to get through. I didn't drink every day, usually only on the weekends. But every time I did drink I did so in order to get drunk. Thinking back now, I can pinpoint the first time I used alcohol as a solution. It was at my sister Megan's wedding. I was 18 and a bridesmaid. I was absolutely happy to be standing with her, but that joy was overshadowed by my constant...and I really mean constant...negative thoughts and the fear that all these people saw as I walked down the aisle was everything I hated about myself. If walking down the aisle wasn't enough, I then had to give a toast to the bride and groom during the reception. I wanted to be anywhere else. But wait, open bar you say? Open bar, indeed. I proceeded to get nice and tossed and I did it because I KNEW it would shut up that voice in my head telling me I wasn't good enough and that I was a real life Quasimodo. When the open bar dude stopped serving me I went around to deserted tables chugging half empty champagne flutes, I draped myself in that warm blanket and I don't remember a word of what I said.
There are countless examples of this theme playing out in my life. I continued that way with alcohol and then with love/sex and then finally pain pills until I entered treatment. As I mentioned before, my head was so far up my own ass, that I was oblivious to what I was really doing. I was doing what I was taught; I was escaping.
So, that brings us up to now. I have been free of all chemical substances for about two and a half years and I have learned many things. But here is what I have very recently realized...without the drugs and the alcohol and the love and the sex, I am still that 17 year old looking for a way to quiet her mind. I am still that person with horrible anxiety and even worse life skills. I still go backwards sometimes... I still pull a Houdini once in a while but for the most part I trust that the brand spankin' new coping skills I've acquired are enough to help me get through any obstacle...
...and I never...ever NEED to use again.
❤coco
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