Today you will meet Michelle, who, as she says, comes to recovery “fully loaded” with ancestral trauma.
As a child, and grandchild, a sister, an aunt, a mother, a grandmother.
The disease of addiction creates chaos and trauma in the family—Michelle shares how she began her healing journey.
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See full transcript of episode below.
You are listening to The Embrace Family Recovery Podcast. A place for real conversations with people who love someone with the disease of addiction. Now here is your host Margaret Swift Thompson
Intro: Welcome back to The Embrace Family Recovery Podcast. Today we have a new guest, her name is Michelle. And Michelle has graciously agreed to come on and share her story of generational addiction and trauma and the steps she has taken to heal from the disease of addiction’s imprint on her life. You will hear lots about the different levels of recovery many of us go through because as we know we never graduate on this recovery journey. Let’s hear from Michelle.
The Embrace Family Recovery Podcast.
Margaret: I’m excited Michelle to have you with me today to talk about your journey in recovery. We’ll wet our whistle and start with whatever part of your story you want to begin with miss Michelle.
Michelle: Thank you Maggie I really appreciate the work that you’re doing in this space and the amount is service and contribution. I just really appreciate a how you show up, how you’re willing to be vulnerable, and how you make space for the different stories because each of us contributes to this, to the walk from width of the tapestry we’re weaving as complex humans.
So, I come from this fully loaded. As a child, a grandchild, a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a mother, a grandmother. I am fully loaded with ancestral trauma, and this came very clear to me. I don’t know if you ever did any other retreats on Perrot’s Island.
Margaret: No, I never got the chance.
Michelle: Yes, well I’ve got to go there, and boy were my eyes opened. I did a genogram in the late 80s and I realized without a doubt woman in my family married alcoholics or people with an addiction.
And I was absolutely horrified and on reflection found myself in the same space. Plus, I had a father who was an alcoholic and a mother who was, I would loosely term a rageaholic and I don’t wish to tell their stories other than my father did find AA in the last ten years of his life. And I’ll touch on that a bit later, but I have been a 12 stepper since in the late 80s and right through to this century.
Margaret: I wonder as a youngster before you even did the genogram, growing up in that environment if you’d be willing to share at what age you knew something was off in your home?
Michelle: That is an awesome question and I’ve done a lot of work around this with Adult Child of Alcoholics that’s really opened my eyes. And it’s a fabulous question because I had this situation where my dad was my hero, and he was working four jobs to pay for a house. In essence from the outside looking in our house, it was violent, it was angry, and my mother was an extremely angry person, and I can understand having been in an alcoholic relationships um and of course it was the 60s, so everything had to look perfect.
But after my father left, again I repeat it’s the 60s I was dubbed as coming from a broken home, would be pregnant at 13, my brother and I were delinquents. And I found it safer to say my father was dead than my parents were separated and that really lived a residue of toxic shame for me because my father was my hero. He loved and adored me, and I had the incongruencies of watching this wonderful man when he was drunk become violent but also watching my mother instigate these violent situations and I know from between three and eight years old I was breaking up adult physical fights.
Well, I was to probably too young to realize but I can tell you this I loved to be in anybody else’s home in the neighborhood and I was one of the oldest kids, so I made myself and indispensable babysitter. I was very articulate, so these poor lonely suburban women had someone to talk to um and I hated to be in my house. And my mother was one of the most popular women in the neighborhood. She could um tailor ballgowns, she was charming, she was beautiful. She looked like she had it all.
That was my normal, so I loved to be in other people’s houses, but I wasn’t sure, well I didn’t even think about whether they were different from mine. I was just glad to escape the Vipers nest.
Margaret: So that’s a really interesting perspective because many times I hear from clients and people I’ve worked with over the decades that when they went to other people’s homes is when they realized wow this is so different. They were looking for the same things in their home that weren’t in this home. And yet there was for you more a sense of escapism and just the lightness of not being in the home rather than a comparison.
Michelle: Absolutely and one of the Al-Anon recovery slogans ‘anger is just one letter short of danger’ and I lived in a in a physically violent household. Now I must qualify this, my brother did not live in that household. He physically lived here but when we had conversations as adults, as parents, he has no recollection of any of that type of thing. You know he’s very much grew up a very loved, adored child and protected child. That was not my experience.
Margaret: That also speaks to something very powerful Michelle, right? That even though there may be five people in a home everyone’s perspective and experience is unique to them.
Michelle: Absolutely but feelings aren’t facts because my brother wrestles terribly with addiction and so do some or all of his sons. So, I’m very careful not to look back by staring and I work really hard to keep my mind and heart quiet because um, you know there’s nothing, I could do about that because I was his big sister. So, I’m pretty much raised him when my mom couldn’t cope, or my parents were fighting, or my dad left when I was eight, so I started parenting my parent. I was the babysitter. I was even cooking meals and doing laundry at 8 years old.
Having had relationships broke breakdown my mother was just being human. But for me as a child what I took away from that and this feeds a bit into dissociation and adult children’s work was I became a latchkey kid cause she eventually got a job. And I thought of people like the mother in Lassie the actress June Lockhart or Lost in Space. I went home to that mother in the afternoons, not the tired one who came in who was really angry. I came home to that one. Now again my mother was only being human and of course I’m watching these TV shows that are you know really old, of the 50s where they wanted women to be like that. Well, I’m sure my mother felt quite betrayed that you know her beautiful home and life, you know got all up ended. But my parents were in the relationship of insanity. I mean that literally is what I’ve come to learn, and they just were not equipped to be parents. And they also came from dysfunctional homes.
Margaret: So, the generational legacies continue through the home and through the families.
Michelle: I would say generational trauma. My maternal side, my mother’s side I know very little about. I have no maternal health. I have a huge disconnect, and of course my parents broke up there was a huge disconnect from the paternal family who were very clannish and continued to show up, but my mother kept us distant.
Although my childhood and teenagehood were minefields of trauma and violence, I’m so grateful because those experiences, I was awake and aware, and met head on. I went and got help. Given our childhoods and how we were raised, I came out of that like a warrior. I you know I very concerned about single parents, children. Very concerned about social inequities yeah for sure.
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Margaret: So, you shared Michelle that you got help, and you also just kind of came out with a mission, it sounds like. You almost were indoctrinated by your experience to go in the courses of which you did. But back up to the help you got. You know you’re back in the 60s, divorced parents. What type of help were you exposed to or able to get at that point in your life?
Michelle: Well interesting enough, to be frank there was no help in the 60s for women and children. We I’m pretty sure we were still seen as chattels, or you know seen and not heard. But I did have the opportunity, well a, there was an advertising program, see girls could do anything. So rather than signing up for secretarial courses and home economics courses I was signing up for metal work and woodwork. We had a new neighbor move into the into the neighborhood her and her husband were physiotherapists and she had met him at university, and she was running his practice and raising his children. So, she was one of the homes that I would migrate over to help with babysitting and things and of course you know if you’re educated and you’re out in the work world, suddenly at home with two kids before Kindy and all that kind of thing was available. You know you were really glad of any quality company, and I was quality company. You know, I was curious, I was engaged, and I was so happy to be there. She gave me some books like The Naked Ape and Ann Rand, so my whole books were my escape. The library at school was my escape pretty, pretty typical. But she gave me books that challenged my mind and made me intellectually curious. Now I was also in the jurisdiction that I was in I could get my driver’s license of 15. Which I did by hook or by crook, signed my mother’s signature on that one because she wanted me isolated right.
Margaret: Sure.
Michelle: And ended up racing cars, and being out with people where I was, I got the chance to work on a vintage car, and I got to work on hot rods then I got to race cars and so I was not only intellectually curious, I was also a risk taker.
When I met my first husband, I had gotten a passport when I was 14 because I’ve been on a school trip. And I was about to start traveling and when I met my first husband, he followed me around and I’m like I do not wanna get married. I do not want children. I wanna own my own home, and I want my own business. And he’s like OK. And then I’m like I’m not even 18 yet so I’m too young.
So, you know and, (laughter) but he literally was my friend. He didn’t push any relationship stuff, actually kept me safe cause I had left the country with $300, and a passport, and one of those global explorer tickets that you could get from BA and go around the world. You just had to keep going. I mean if one of my daughters had left with a passport and $300, I would be constantly checking on her.
Margaret: Right! How things change right.
Michelle: Exactly, so I already made it very clear that I saw marriage as a cesspit, a trap and I was not doing that until I got to university. You know I needed, very controlling. But what you do when you’re when you’re used to living in drama and in dangerous situations you control what you can.
Margaret: Right. But it served you well. In fairness Michelle one of the things, I think works so counterintuitively in recovery is those things that work well for us to survive those insanities and those challenges get to a point where they become a liability but they do work for a long time.
Michelle: Absolutely now my first husband died before we were married 10 years. So here I had this quality man, quality father of my children and suddenly he’s gone and I’m in another crisis. So what do I do, I revert to my normal. Which was to marry an alcoholic I mean hey.
Margaret: What I’m hearing is he was not an alcoholic, your first husband?
Michelle: No, no he was very healthy. If anything, my biggest issue was dealing with the boredom of normal.
Margaret: That’s an important piece to talk about Michelle, cause I don’t think people realize that, that can be very much a trap that we fall into when we’ve had any kind of trauma and chaos around addiction in families of origin. What is normal? And how do you cope without that rollercoaster when that’s your norm?
Michelle: Absolutely now I’ve told you as a latchkey kid you know watching Lassie and Lost in Space with that wonderful June Lockhart who played the mother, I wanted to be a June Lockhart, but I can tell you I was struggling, you know to be to be the perfect homemaker. And I was growing herbs, and canning, I was spinning wool and doing all sorts of fun things, so I really enjoyed learning all those things, but they just weren’t enough. So, I after he died of course what do I do, I end up marrying an alcoholic. So, I was back to normal, and the gift of that relationship was it banged me out of my abyss in into Al-Anon.
And Al-Anon gave me a huge pickup because I then stop I, no let me be very honest, I went in to get him sober.
I know it’s so important to say this because you know if you have, if you if you want to have that source of comfort and progress it’s really important to remember what Elie Wiesel once advised “whoever survives a test, whatever it may be, must tell the story, that’s her duty”. So let me tell you I was an Al-Anon who went in to get him sober and it did not work. It just about made me crack up, so um and it took a stupendous crisis so that all to collapse under me. So, um you know Al-Anon, my first tour of duty and there was for all the wrong reasons, doing all the wrong stuff and in the end the late 80s early 90s sponsorship wasn’t the thing. I know it’s part of the program but there were no sponsors, I never even heard the word other than in the preamble and then in those types of things. So that marriage and Al-Anon gave me such a shakeup and what’s really interesting is this is before my father went into AA, and he was, we were living on different sides of the world, and I did not know until after he died 10 or 11 years later. But literally um around the same time I was in Al-Anon he was in AA and we’re on different sides of the world, we were not even speaking to each other.
So, after he died and I accepted the invitation to go and scatter his ashes, that was when I learned that he had been in AA, and I was so happy.
Now the other side because this is worth the telling, my dad his partner was the image of my mother without the rage. looks like her, was all the beautiful parts of my mother and she had a daughter named Michelle, and a son named my brother’s name plus one other which was a bit different. And her daughter also had three children about the same ages of mine. So, my father actually in the last 10 or 12 years of his life recreated his happy family, was well loved, well celebrated, and he was sober. And let me tell you that was another bottom for me because I was so happy for him, and I was so freaking angry for me.
Outro: I so appreciate Michell’s authenticity and honesty in sharing her motivation for attending Al-Anon the first time. Many of us find our way into the rooms, out of love and best intention but to look for solutions to change someone else. And we soon come to find out that’s not within our wheelhouse or control.
I’m always humbled by the listeners who choose to download the podcast and I appreciate your support. I want to encourage you, that if you know someone who loves someone with this disease who could benefit from hearing these stories, let them know about the podcast.
Come back next week and Michelle will share more of her journey in recovery. I want to thank my guest for their courage and vulnerability in sharing parts of their story.
Please find resources on my website
embracefamilyrecovery.com
This is Margaret Swift Thompson.
Until next time, please take care of you.
