Healing Touch for Children of Alcoholics

Massage Maganize, Feb/Mar 1989, Issue 18, 20-22

Mom’s arms embrace baby, welcoming him to the family. She and father gently count all the toes: “This little piggy went to market....” Soon he is a toddler. His bedtime usually means back rubs, and when his brow is fevered, he is soothed with soft strokes. Years later, understanding hugs acknowledge his teenage successes or failures, and he and his family treat his rapidly maturingbody with respect and love.

Nourishing families supply their members with touch that conveys assurance, pleasure, warmth, vitality and self-esteem. Nurturing touch is a natural part of a healthy, functioning family unit. The children of alcoholic and other dysfunctional families, however, often grow up experiencing primarily abusive touch, such as violent beatings, sexual abuse, and/or neglect, both physical and emotional.

Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACoA’s), experience a childhood environment of uncertainty, chaos and pain. Abandonment, emotional and sometimes physical abuse, hurt and shame characterize their early family life. Many experience one or a series of catastrophic events that are not resolved physically or psychologically, leaving them in a state of chronic shock.

While there probably were some good times, basically they survived by their own internal protection system. The child of a dysfunctional family must construct a physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual fortress as the only stronghold in the chaotic alcoholic landscape of his life. Within, the wounded child hides, and so enters into adult life feeling increasingly alone, hollow, and aching-only temporarily able to numb himself with activities or substances.

The physical manifestations of the fortress are tight muscles (particularly in the neck, shoulders andlower back), sexual and gastro-intestinal dysfunction, and allergies. Accompanying emotional aspects may include distrust, fear, anger, sadness, numbness, overly aggressive or overly passive behavior, and the inability to distinguish loving healthy touch from aggression and abuse. Within these protective walls, the individual is not only isolated from his dysfunctional family, but also becomes divorced from his own sense of Self. Connection with his own body and feelings is broken. Boundaries and limits within relationships are often illdefined as well.

BODYWORK AND ACoA’S

When the ACoA feels ready to break down the walls of his old defenses, therapeutic massage can provide a safe context for change. Through appropriate hands-on therapy, muscle tension can be decreased and body awareness increased. In a professional setting of touch and sensory input, boundaries can be explored and the issues of touch, trust, intimacy and communication often arise. Knowing, loving, non-intrusive touch can facilitate the recovery and release of traumatic memories buried in the body’s defenses. Nurturing ways of touching and being touched can be investigated and incorporated into anew, more mature sense of Self. Of course, many ACoA’s need the care of a psychologist or counselor as well.

Over the past thirteen years, hundreds of individuals from dysfunctional families have come to process, recover and rest on my body therapy table. Some came initially for relief from injury, chronic tension or pain. Some just wanted to relax and escape the stress of their lives. Psychologists and counselors have appreciated my massage and integrative body therapy as a very direct approach to the locked bodies and feelings of some of their ACoA patients. I’ve witnessed much inspiring growth. I’ve had to accept the unresolved struggles of others. Here’s a summary of my experience with one of my most inspiring clients.

Suzanne had been in therapy for several months when we first worked together. She told me of the tension in her neck and back. Characteristically of those in chronic shock, she also felt generally numb. I listened to several stories of sexual and emotional abuse from her childhood in an alcoholic, dysfunctional family. She and her counselor hoped that she could release the physical and emotional tension that she retained and that she could learn from the inside when touch and intimacy are okay.

On the table, Suzanne vigilantly kept her eyes open and alert to my every move. As I kneaded and stroked tight areas of her back and neck, she began to experience herself as a little girl, alone and sad. When my deeper compressions uncovered painful spots, she knew that she could numb herself to any pain she felt. Then she discovered that if she relaxed and observed, the muscle began to soften and pain transformed into awareness. What an empowering, undeniably real lesson!

Touch can bring to consciousness what can be hidden in thoughts and words. Over the weeks our work sometimes included graphic recall of abusive, traumatic incidents in her early life. Initially the memories would intensify the rigidity in Suzanne’s back and neck and the generalized lack of awareness in her body, especially her legs. With encouragement and direction, she was eventually able to express the associated unresolved feelings and incomplete actions of those events. Though she had talked about all of this before, now she sometimes cried, fought, and yelled. She knew in a more tangible way not only the trauma but the necessary responses her body and heart had made. Her body awareness and her sensitivity to her feelings began to increase dramatically.

Soon the subtle rocking and shaking movements I was making with her legs were not just a challenge to her protective fortress. Sometimes she could feel the pleasure of kinesthetic awareness in allowing her hip and leg to be passively floated through its range of motion. The tightness in her shoulders was softening and, as the muscles melted, releasing chronic tension, she felt delicious relief.

Sometimes Suzanne requested relaxing circulatory massage as an enjoyable, nurturing reward for her progress. Her sense of her Self-physically and Emotionally-was strengthening. She came to know and trust that my touch was respectful, knowledgeable and loving, and that positive experience helped generate more trusting, expansive movement in her life.

Outside of therapy sessions and off my table, she started to live in a more adult, internally successful way. She had always been "functional” (she was an effective labor and delivery nurse), but now she enrolled in classes for the counseling career she wanted to enter. Instead of a series of incompatible roommates, a woman who became her friend moved in. Eventually she entered into a healthy relationship with a man, a need that had both enticed and totally terrified her previously. As we completed the year and a half of our bimonthly work, the fortress in her body and emotions could be erected when needed, and dissolved when not.

RULES OF THE DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY

In his book, The Adult Children of Alcoholics Syndrome, a Step-by- Step Guide to Discovery and Recovery, counselor Wayne Kritsberg identifies four rules of the alcoholic family: 1)The Rule of Rigidity; 2)The Rule of Silence; 3) The Rule of Denial; 4) The Rule of Isolation.

These rules are created and enforced as an attempt to bring order and stability to an increasingly chaotic and unstable family situation. Often, even though there may no longer be an actively drinking member in the system, the rules will continue to operate and even be passed on from one generation to another as “the way families work.” The massage and bodywork therapist sees and confronts these rules in the architecture and language of the body.

THE RULE OF RIGIDITY

The alcoholic family is inflexible and unable to adapt to change easily or willingly. To create and maintain this rigidity, the bodies of family members themselves will be inflexible as well. Tight, tense muscles are common in the neck, shoulders, and back. Tension in these areas is necessary in an attempt to control the chaos of the dysfunctional family system.

When tested in range of movement measures, joints of the spine and the pelvis are especially limited and rigid. Gait is often observed as disjointed, arhythmical, or lacking in grace and fluidity. I use fluid, rhythmical, passive rocking and shaking movements to soften this controlling rigidity. To bring more flexibility to the recovering ACoA’s body, I assist in stretching muscles. Deep compression and stroking on knotted, hard muscles softens the physical rigidity, while on an emotional level the need to control may also give way to more spontaneity in expression. Playfulness and real happiness then become more possible.

THE RULE OF SILENCE

The alcoholic family does not freely talk about what is happening in the family either with its members or others. In fact, talking about any feelings is usually avoided. Thus the fear, anger and hurt which the ACoA has grown up with are usually very difficult to cope with and are repressed.

As the soft tissue of the body undergoing therapeutic massage begins to yield some of its rigidity, I encourage a corresponding change on the emotional level. Long suppressed feeling often explodes in angry tirades, slips to the surface in sighs and groans, or unleashes floods of tears. In the trusting intimacy of a bodywork session, feelings and traumatic incidents can be explored, expressed, and resolved. I facilitate closure and resolution with my clients using Gestalt techniques and creative visualizations. I also refer to counselors and therapists those who I feel need psychological services. Many already participate in ACoA support groups.

THE RULE OF DENIAL

Many ACoA’s lived for years with denial that there was an alcohol problem in their family. Children are taught to deny what their eyes show them, their ears tell them, and their hearts feel. Thus a tremendous conflict develops between what the child sees happening and what he is told to believe is occurring. Denial of his own feelings and lack of trust in his awarenesses is the usual outcome of this conflict.

The immediacy, intimacy and sensory reality of body therapy directly challenges the ACoA to feel. The immense tactile input of the stroking, kneading, and percussion movements of Swedish massage is usually effective in overwhelming the denial mechanisms. As his skin and muscles are rhythmically rubbed and milked, not only are blood and lymph circulated, but the ACoA also begins to notice the messages from his body. To move deeply into expressing emotion, I sometimes utilize techniques from Gestalt therapy, primal reeducation, bio energetics, guided fantasy and breathing, and movement and sensory awareness exercises.

THE RULE OF ISOLATION

The alcoholic family is a closed system, prohibiting its members’ intimacy with others and within the family. The rules of rigidity, silence and denial isolate the family as a unit from the community and its individuals one from the other. Therapeutic relationships with counselors, psychologists, and other group members in support and therapy groups can provide a protected environment for experimenting with intimacy. My body therapy clients and I are engaged in a therapeutic relationship that offers an opportunity to experiment with issues of trust, honesty, respect, physical contact, and empathy.

AN INTERACTIVE RECOVERY PROCESS

Recovery is always process, not a goal to be reached. It involves emotional discharge, cognitive reconstruction and behavioral action, all occurring interactively. Integrative body therapy and other touch therapies employed by massage therapists, movement awareness educators such as Feldenkrais practitioners, and other body therapists can be effective in these three areas of recovery, particularly in facilitating emotional discharge and behavioral action.

As Kritsberg states: “In recovery...the anger and hurt lose their potency, and a true sense of happiness and joy can be experienced. This does not mean that recovery equals no problems or pain. What recovery does mean is that the AcoA becomes much better at dealing with life’s bumps and crunches in a way that is healthier and healthier...There is a sense of wonder and joy that goes hand in hand with recovery.” And wonder and joy are experiences of the body, the emotions, the mind and the Soul.

INFORMATION RESOURCES FOR DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES

28 million Americans are Adult Children of Alcoholics. For more information about recognizing dysfunctional families and facilitating the healing process, the following sources are recommended:

Adult Children of Alcoholics , Jane Woititz. Over a year on the The New York Times Best Seller list, this book is the primer on Adult Children of Alcoholics. (ISBN 0-932194-15-X, Health Communications, Inc., publisher)

Bradshaw On: The Family;A Revolutionary Way of Self-Discovery, John Bradshaw. Focuses on the dynamics of the family, and how unhealthy rules are handed down. Guides the reader out of dysfunction and towards wholeness. (ISBN 0-932194-54-0, Health Communications, Inc. publisher)

“Changes. For and About Adult Children of Alcoholics.” Informative, Professional, and compassionate articles and personal experiences offered as “part of the new vision of hope for ACoA’s everywhere.” Magazine subscription available from: The U.S. Journal, Inc. 3201 S.W. 15th Street, Enterprise Center, Deerfield Beach, FL 33442. 1-(800) 851-9100 (1 year, 6 issues, $18.)

National Association for Children of Alcoholics. 31706 Coast Highway, Suite 201, South Laguna, CA 92677-3044. (714)499-3044

The Adult Children of Alcoholics Syndrome, a Step-by-Step Guide to Discovery and Recovery. Wayne Kritsberg. Shows how to recognize and remedy the long-term effects of the dysfunctional, alcoholic family. (ISBN 0-553-27279-9, Bantam Books, publisher)