The Effects of Recovery
If I am not the problem, then there is no solution
Above: My stress and anxiety, 1998–summer 2024.
As children many years ago, my siblings and I were invited to a dinner party at my father’s business partner’s house. We lived in the solidly middle-class house in the suburbs while his partner lived in a major city. My father and his partner had worked as accountants in a downtown office and, after several years, decided to go into business together with the knowledge they’d accrued auditing companies on behalf of the federal government. Their strategy involved approaching companies, assessing how much could be recouped from taxes paid, and pocketing a hefty commission once they delivered.
The man’s wife gave us a tour of their palatial home and when we rounded a corner to discover a full-sized indoor swimming pool in the basement, my siblings and I turned to look at each other in clear consensus. Six pairs of eyes filled with judgment swung in the direction of our father. Our home didn’t have a swimming pool in the basement. Where was our marbled palace? Where was all the freaking money going?
Later, at home, my mother responded mildly to our accusations, saying, “What do you think all those ski trips cost? And all of you do multiple activities.” We were skeptical; the discrepancy between our house and dad’s business partner’s house had been great. Sure, his partner had a single child while there were six of us then. But we knew, with the righteous certainty of a child wronged, that something didn’t add up.
This was the first time I can remember feeling a distinct sense of unease around my parents’ ability to meet my needs. And as I aged into adolescence, my father assumed less and less of a parental role in my life to finally disappear from it altogether when I entered young adulthood.
While I always suspected his absence had some sort impact on me, I wasn’t sure what on earth it could be. So I went through life almost entirely unaware of how that experience shaped me – that is, until I began to sense my own recovery from the impacts of living with another person’s alcoholism.
I’d had no idea that my father’s absence had so thoroughly shaped my attitudes, mindset, and emotions. I’d had no idea that the effects of recovery could so thoroughly change my daily life.
The absence of a parent, and especially a father, can have significant impacts on a daughter. As one therapist recounts, this is especially true if the absence occurs during crucial periods of life transition such as adolescence or young adulthood. The impacts include the following:
an enduring sense of being about to “lose everything,” of being one bad day away from the loss of a lifestyle, basic resources, and relationships. When a child is left largely to their own devices well before they are able to meet their own needs, the child learns that major loss is one mistake, one uninformed choice, one misfortune away.
an acute fear of abandonment. The absence of a parent or parental figure can create what I’d call a sort of “loss fatigue” – a deep aversion to sustaining more losses after losing such a central relationship. The outcome is a tendency to cling to relationships (especially the ones that met emotional needs at one point) long after they become unhealthy.
hypervigilance. Having to create their own emotional support system instead of being able to rely on parents can cause a child to develop irrational fears and anxieties. The loss of a support system effectively destabilizes a child’s sense of stability, which in turn creates a sense of nervousness or of constantly being on edge.
I hadn’t realized the extent to which the way I engaged with life – the nervousness, the way I struggle to sit still or rest, the way I seek out peace and calm as though my life depended on it, the cold sense of fear that arises in response to sudden or unanticipated changes, and even how my marriage ended in 2014 but I didn’t file for divorce until 2022 – was shaped directly by the absence of my parents at critical points in my development.
Most people have gotten drunk enough times in their lives to know who they are deep down; the alcohol typically reveals whether they’re angry or happy or sad. In my early 20s, I quickly figured out that I was a sad drunk and before I was sad, I got angry. Grief and anger were embedded deep within me and the longer I failed to acknowledge those emotions, the more they leaked out in my daily interactions. The more I felt irritation, impatience, and frustration, the more I disliked myself. I couldn’t figure out why I always seemed to feel that way.
Over time, I learned coping mechanisms to help me deal with my fears and hypervigilance. I relied on exercise to help me move stress through my body, for instance, and adventure to treat my fear of being trapped in a situation that made me unhappy.
Yet coping mechanisms did not resolve the underlying anxiety and stress that emerged around having needs at all. That stress and anxiety attached itself to tasks, ostensibly because tasks represent meeting needs. If you have a health need, say, you make an appointment with a doctor. But I’d had so many difficult experiences in my adolescence and early 20s trying to meet my own needs that tasks inevitably triggered a full range of negative emotions.
One particular task that could stoke a ferocious degree of anxiety was owning and maintaining a car. In a final parental act, my father tried to make up for stealing my savings by splitting the cost of my first car with me. He helped me get a credit card in order to buy a Honda Civic, a red hatchback with a manual transmission I couldn’t drive. Then, he took me on a brief practice run to ensure I got the gist of using a clutch and sent me on my way.
I was living on Greek Row at a university 90 minutes away, not far from a neighbourhood of steep hills near where I worked. I’d scream in horror as my car rolled backward from a stop at the top of a hill and stalled, every time, while I struggled to accelerate into gear. Rapidly reversing strangers would exit their vehicles to stand next to my open window, talking me through how to feel the balance between the clutch and the gas pedal. Once, a cop coached me on how to drive away after writing me a ticket.
Later, as an aviation electrician in the US Navy, I bought my second car — a bright, screaming yellow lemon. Like clockwork, the car would silently coast to a stop in the middle of nowhere each and every time my military husband was deployed for a period of weeks. It once coasted to a stop in the middle of a very lengthy bridge, blocking traffic for miles as my face burned in shame.
At every turn, I felt abandoned. I didn’t know how to drive a stick well enough to actually be driving in a city, and I didn’t know how to repair my own vehicle beyond changing a tire or troubleshooting its electrical systems. The people I should’ve been able to rely on for help simply weren’t there, whether by choice or due to circumstances. The unexpected expenses of endless repairs further exacerbated my financial anxiety and eventually, just the thought of owning a car would cause a cold wave of cortisol to roll through my body.
So I didn’t, for years. In fact, I studiously avoided all of the tasks I hated. I became passive, responding to life as though I had no control over what occurred. I wasn’t completely at a loss as I was aware that I didn’t want to occupy a victim role. But over and over again at various times, I found myself thinking, How much can one person take?
Through Al-Anon, I learned how to identify my own responsibility for the things that happened to me. Of course, terrible things can happen in life and none of us has any control over if or when they might occur. But what I mean is that no matter what occurs, there’s always some small room for agency – there’s always a space for us to respond in one way or another.
If I couldn’t see myself as the problem, then I wouldn’t be able to find a solution for my problems. I’d be stuck waiting for life to drop one in my lap instead of working to change myself and my relationship to the surrounding world, by extension. So I learned to identify what choices I’d made in response to various situations and to consider the result. What might’ve happened if I’d made a different choice?
The outcome of this self-scrutiny was a new ability to carve out an area of choice for myself when it came to life-long stressors. Almost immediately, I knew the first change I wanted to make was developing the ability to go through life and not feel constantly on edge or overwhelmed by mundane tasks. I wanted to not give a shit about maintaining my car or driving in general. I wanted to call a garage, make an appointment, drop my car off and settle in with a book, tap my credit card to pay without a moment’s thought, drive away into the sunset, and never think about any of it again.
That, to me, was freedom. That was the serenity promised by Al-Anon.
Better yet, I wanted to be able to field my son’s complaints without getting exasperated. I wanted to not let having to search for some object (a frequent occurrence in my increasingly scattered lifestyle) ruin my day. I wanted to be able to apply to the two teacher certification programs in my area without struggling to breathe as I scrolled through the endless application demands and thought about the million emails I’d need to send or the people I’d have to depend on for help.
I wanted out from the emotional prison of hypervigilance, fear of loss, anger, and grief.
I started to notice the effects of recovery in the summer, particularly after I was able to complete several rounds of vehicle maintenance without losing sleep. Oddly enough, the costs didn’t eat away at me as they usually did. I wasn’t feeling the fear that my life was just two or three more large expenses away from total collapse.
Hmmm, I thought. I wonder what’ll happen if I push myself to do all the things I haven’t been doing for myself because I dread doing them? What’ll happen if I focus on simply making my life better – for me? What’ll happen if I stop letting a task take over my day or week and simply refuse to give it any more emotional weight than it deserves in the moment?
I made more appointments, bought new rims and snow tires, and called around to get various quotes from garages. I opened the application portals for the teaching certificate programs and decided to spend a little time each weekday accomplishing just one part of the process. I paid attention to how my body felt while juggling all of my tasks with work deadlines and when I caught myself with my shoulders up to my ears or chewing away at the insides of my cheeks, I closed my laptop and did something I enjoyed instead.
When I found my blood pressure rising as I ran up and down three flights of stairs searching for my damn keys, I stopped and reminded myself that this was not going to ruin my day. I made a cup of tea and as I drank it, I thought about where I’d last seen those keys. I found them, and I went on with my day.
Every morning and night, I read Al-Anon literature. I shared more in my meetings. When I sensed my anxiety returning and that sense of uncertainty, overwhelm, or fear I won’t be able to change my life, I reminded myself that I was simply having a bad moment and it would pass by the next day. I felt more open and connected. I felt more emotionally stable.
I began to settle more into myself, expressing my emotions to people around me, and my self-confidence began to return. Talking to strangers became much easier after making multiple phone calls in a morning and I started to enjoy and even initiate the interactions. I asked for help from my network of contacts when needed and without spiralling into the internal dialogues of low self-esteem.
Task by task, step by step, day by day, I felt the tension, nervousness, and chronic stress slowly recede within my body.
Recovery didn’t happen overnight. By the time I began to feel its effects, I’d already been in weekly or biweekly individual therapy for six months. I’d been writing about my emotional state on Substack for five months. Organizing my thoughts for readers had forced me to become more intentional and I’d begun to make connections between my present and the long-distant past.
The grimness of my father’s death in July pushed me to think more deeply about why he’d made the choices that had led him to die alone, not a single one of his eight children present. As I developed more compassion for him, I was able to gain perspective on that long-buried grief and loss as well as the impacts of his absence on me. Processing and letting go of my anger at my parents meant it no longer leaked out in my daily interactions.
Although they emerged slowly and tentatively, the effects of my recovery are unmistakeable. Ironically, it’s by seeing ourselves as the problem that we’re able to start focusing on solutions to our problems. Once we do, we wonder why we ever accepted the way we lived before. Soon, the way recovery feels becomes all the motivation we need to continue.
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