Recently, I was sick as a dog, and while I was in bed recovering, I worked my way through several books that had been collecting dust on my beside table for months, including The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. The book is a memoir about growing up in a deeply dysfunctional family, dominated by an alcoholic father. Every tale of life with addiction is different, but every tale is also the same, so much of the book resonated with me. But at the end, I was left feeling that the whole book could serve as metaphor for codependency, because the story wasn't really about Jeannette Walls at all.The majority of the book covers Walls' life from the age of three through the time she left home, at the age of seventeen. Then it's as if, once her parents aren't part of the daily workings of her world anymore and the drama of living with an active and spectacularly dysfunctional addict is gone, she has nothing left to say of herself but "I'm fine now. Nothing to see here. I have a degree and a job and a nice house and a 'normal' life. I'm going to go live happily ever after. The end." And that focus on the addict as the source of all that is interesting and worth telling reminded me of my own story as much as any of the details in the book did.
I remember when I first started going to 12 Step meetings and reaching out to other people who were affected by someone else's sexual addiction. I was so frustrated that the shares were supposed to focus on us, on the partners. The stories I wanted to hear were about what the addicts had done. "Here's how my addict hurt me," I wanted to say, "How did your addict hurt you?" After all, they were the ones out contracting diseases and getting arrested and blowing all of our money; we were just trailing along in the wake of their storm. I had to slowly build the story of my own storm, long unnoticed by me because I was riding in the eye of it. And as I began to heal from the damage done, I started to see that the story of rebuilding and repair needed to be told as much (or more than) the story of how things were ripped apart in the first place.
The Glass Castle tells the story of how mental and emotional scars are formed, but from where I sit now, it leaves out the most interesting part: the work of self-discovery and healing.
This post was originally published at The Second Road.
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