Recovery: "Baggage" and its Positive Aspects

In trying to meet friends and possible love interests outside of my general comfort zone, I keep finding such discouraging posts that state "I have no baggage; you shouldn't either!"; I, like I'm sure many of you have also, had an "interesting" life fraught with difficulties and experiences that we may not necessarily have been proud of, and/or experienced a turbulent childhood that may best had been left forgotten, on top of the mental health challenges.

I think a lot of people fail to realize that "baggage" is the culmination of our life experiences. It's the good, the bad, the things we're proud of, the circumstances wherein we may have stumbled but are still going forward and looking for our own brand of salvation from what has slowed us down in the past. Or even the present. What a person was in the past is not necessarily who they are now, nor does it define who they will be in the future. People do change: we do find better ways to cope and reframe the negative energies that intertwine our souls us into positive ones that help us get the best possible out of life as we can (granted, it isn't always easy, but it most certainly is possible).

I was told a few years ago that the best I could hope for in dealing with my bipolar challenges is a comfortable place on the couch or working at McDonalds. Thank you, for the ever so disempowering medical model of encouragement to light my way, oh worldly and all-knowing psychiatrists. But it was also a challenge to become more than just a couch potato, I later found.

Recovery, as I've mentioned, is pretty broad - it can take the form of recovery from substance addiction, mental health challenges, abuse in its myriad forms, a terrible childhood, or any combination thereof. It is, by any definition, not a complete list of what we can recover from. It helps considerably to have love in our lives - be it the support of friends or family; affection from those that care about us; an abundance of slobbery kisses from our dogs; or to some, the beauty and light that our spiritual connection brings us. Love breeds hope; in turn, hope fosters the empowerment to have the courage to make our own choices and strive to make the dreams we have become reality. The culture which we surround ourselves with adds to that: by being in a safe, mutually supportive environment wherein we are allowed to make those mistakes repeatedly until we learn what that lesson has taught us. The freedom to fail and try again, when needed, is a crucial portion of Recovery. There can be many aspects to what helps a person become all they were meant to be; each of us can open up our toolboxes of what we've personally learned in our Recovery, thus sharing our own experiences and insight; however the steps that person takes is a unique journey for each individual to discover.

Those of us who have been through Peer Employment Training to become Peer Supporters have taken what many people consider as "baggage" and used it (or are in the process of using it) for something greater than themselves - giving back and sharing in the hope that other people can recover also.

I know this because I've been through the system and I'm working toward helping others find discover themselves in a positive, empowering way. I've changed careers toward pursuing a degree in Social Work (LCSW preferably) and am working at an organization that sincerely promotes Recovery in all its forms. I've found that everything in life, the people I've met, the things I see, what I've tripped over and where I've excelled, is a learning experience. I may not know what it meant at that particular moment, but I will learn from it.

And yes, what I've written is mine. The concepts are those I've learned, but the way it's expressed is my own.

I hope this helps, at least partially, to explain what a number of peers here have inquired about. I hope, in the near future, to open a forum or blog to further discuss this.

All the best,
K

Yes, YES!!! You are OH! SO right!!! And said it so WELL!!! I can't WAIT to read it in your blog! Please send me your blog URL so I can read it!!! Sorry for all the exclamation points but they're quite honest and true to my feelings. There is NOTHING you've said that I can disagree with and SO MUCH that I agree with 125%.

I'm STILL in the process of recovery, which I believe is a lifetime task. But things look SO DIFFERENT from where I am now compared to, say, forty years ago. There are those who've had insight relatively early on, whether in their teens or twenties. Insight to use to build upon and climb up out of the dank, dark dungeons our problems have kept us in. And then there are those, like me, who have spent ENTIRE LIVES in those dungeons. Only to begin to crawl out when their time is almost up. It's STILL worth the effort!

I have passed almost my entire life in the mental condition of an animal, impossible to contact because of an entire lack of ability to comprehend inter-human connection, inter-reaction, what they sometimes call "intersubjectivity." You have NO idea how strange the world and people look when seen from this animal-like point of view of complete incomprehension. It was as if the normal circumstances of everyday life and people were translated into the most obscure abstract expressionist paintings. No meaning, no interpretation, just incomprehensible blobs of color and shape. The experience of my mother and my father as an infant led me to place myself in complete solitary confinement from the age of one or two at the latest.

I've had T's over and over try to reach me, try to somehow penetrate beneath the twenty feet of reinforced concrete that protected my totally frozen, petrified, terrified self that had never learned to talk, to exchange, to communicate. And only now, only now am I ready to emerge and learn, at the age of 65. I don't believe I've ever come across anything like an adequate description of what I've been through, and I read a huge amount. So while similar things MUST have happened to other people, I've never been able to find their old age memoirs or even someone else's (therapist, psychiatrist, whatever) observations on such cases. If you know of any, please, PLEASE let me know of them. You may well have read of individuals who have been kept without human contact throughout their childhood and adolescense, so they do not even have language. I wonder about their mental, emotional states and what it was like being them. Superficially I have language, an excellent command of language, but beneath that superficiality was something totally dark, totally inhuman, not even rising to Kafkaesque proportions.

Thank you for your post. Thank you for what you have said. I really, really look forward to reading your entire blog. Take care.

Well, I went and read about "A Boy Named 'It.'" While I haven't read the book itself, from what I have read about it it doesn't seem to reflect my experience. Of course, if I actually read it in the future then my opinion might change. And yes, "feral children" is the term I was trying to come up with. People like Kaspar Hauser.

And it's important, I suppose, that at least at my conscious level now, I do not blame my parents. Underneath it all I probably am completely outraged by them and what they did and did not do. But consciously, no. They always intended the best for their children (I'm the eldest of four brothers). They just had significant (VERY significant) problems of their own. Problems that prevented them from giving their children what children desperately need (and, usually, at least from normal parents, do actually receive). All of my brothers and I reached adulthood with very, very serious problems, despite the fact that both parents were very, very highly educated, cultured people.

Some of it may well have been inherited. I really have no basis for so concluding or otherwise. I have no training in psychology or genetics. All of my grandparents, without exception, seemed to me, growing up, to be completely normal individuals. Though, of course, the problems had to come from somewhere.

My original reaction to your first post was so excited because I've never before been able to react in that way. That was a first for me. I was in therapy many, many years ago. None of it worked in the slightest. I knew something was very wrong, but I was so lost that no therapist could reach me. Three weeks ago I started therapy again, for the first time in 25 years. This time I think that I've crawled out of the dungeon sufficiently to participate in my own therapy, to ask questions, to be able to bring dreams to my T. All of which was impossible before.

Of course, I was never a "feral child." It's just that, looking back now, I know that because of what I went through, very early on, I had to shut out all human contact with my real self. I had to (and did) conform to everything my parents wanted. The price of not doing so was absolutely impossible. So the person I was, as a child, amounted to a monstrosity consisting solely and only of what my parents wanted, with no consideration whatsoever of who I felt myself to be, of what I myself wanted, of what I myself needed. There was no conflict, because I had buried every single bit of my real self so deeply that I had no idea that "I" really existed other than in my parents' desires.

I've previously said to other people (and correctly said) that I've never felt lonely in my life. And that's the truth, unless somewhere under the concrete, somewhere with which I have yet to get in touch, there is a loneliness that I now only conceive of in a totally abstract, intellectual manner. The only safety was in solitude. The ONLY safety. From about the age of 1 or 2. I always wonder, when reading in the newspapers about prison experiences of solitary confinement, at why people would find it so difficult, even provocative of psychotic reactions. I could do it, as they say, standing on my head.

I've read quite a lot of developmental psychology, starting in the seventies. All of Bowlby except his posthumous bio of Darwin (which I'd LOVE to read, Darwin being a favorite of mine too). Ainsworth. And their followers. And some self psychology too. Stolorow, Kohut and such. And they've contributed to the slow, terribly slow, process of digging myself out from under the concrete. All these people have helped me. I could not describe exactly how, but they have.

I don't know if you know, even vicariously, what it feels like to start a life as late in your biological existence as I have. I relate to all those three-decade prisoners liberated by DNA who've spent all that time in prison without being guilty. But I don't get a million dollars after coming out of confinement. And it doesn't matter. Real life just by itself does feel good. Even if real life is just beer, cheap liquor, cigarettes and food that tastes good even if it's not healthy. And the love of a good woman, because my wife does love me (as I love her), and she is a good woman. (We've been together for over 40 years now.)

Well, I think that's about all for right now, though I hope that we'll have an exchange for quite some time. I apologize if my rather excited first message to you was off-putting. I couldn't help it. I'm very interested in the kind of program that you're in, dealing with "recovery" and all that. That's certainly where I am now and will probably be for a while. So. Take your time. Adjust to PC. And when you do have a moment, please respond. Thanks!