The Gospel According to Gorski pt. 1

Working my way through steps in CoDA, with the additional reading of Terry Gorski's classic "Addictive Relationships: Why Love Goes Wrong in Recovery." Gorski pulls no punches, leaves no room for much grey area, and has all the fervor of a lot of the family system and relationship therapists of the '90's. I think, historically, the "discovery" of the structural causes of relationship dysfunction, arising from the dysfunctional family, was such a supernova of epiphany that a lot of people went extremely hard to the black or white thinking around all of it. There's an undercurrent of ideology to some of it that I find obvious now, but when Bradshaw had his show "Bradshaw: On the Family" on PBS, I found it riveting and I was a true believer. It is probably ultimately a good thing that a lot of the framework is blunt and leaves little room for middle ground, since our denial around these realities can be so intense. Having the bullshit stripped away is painful- which reminds me of what A used to say to her son when she was going to remove a bandaid- "do you want the slow pull or the fast pull?" He would always choose the fast pull, which always made sense to me. Why not get it over with?

Gorski doesn't address denial very much in this little pamphlet, but I've thought and encountered the following stonewalling pushbacks in myself and others when it comes to doing family of origin work: "They did the best they could." "They were better than their own parents were." "You never lacked for anything- food, clothing, school." "I was a spoiled brat anyway and deserved the punishment I got." "Sure, this is all true, but it's universally true- get over it." Or even just flat out: "wow, it sounds like we grew up in different families," from siblings. Their rosy picture is met with my litany of emotional and intellectual abuse. They may be right and I may have fabricated all of it, who knows? The plain fact is that it is true for me, and I decided back in the '90's not to be gaslighted about it, although I didn't think of it that way at the time. 

Another side note on a lot of family system things- extraordinary efforts went into dismantling a lot of my inherited toxicity from my family of origin, from about 1987 to roughly 1997, on and off, but none of that work got me sober. In fact, I was somehow able to navigate intense explorations of how I had swallowed hook line and sinker the bullshit of my family system but without ever even questioning my drinking or relationship addictions. This experience leads me to believe that sobriety *has to come first*- there has to be a baseline of the essential principles of sobriety in recovery before family system work can have much overlap with recovery, for an addict. This is just my opinion of course. Few people really talk about this, that I am aware of. And a lot of family system therapies seem to me to not be particularly behavioral, and so it would be possible to "gain insight" into a ton of dysfunction without *changing a single thing* about how one operates. 

Gorski outlines "the relationship process" in the following steps:

1. go into yourself and know what you are feeling and experiencing.
2. Articulate that experience responsibly to your partner
3. Listen to their response. 

Repeat, and/or be open to many variations.

I don't know about you, but this is a ridiculously rational framework for relationships, from my perspective. Jung talks about the encounter with another human being as fucking ALCHEMY for God's sake- both people are transformed- like a chemical reaction. I wonder what I would have said, or what I would say, if someone said to me "what is the relationship process, in your opinion?" 

Here's an attempt:

A relationship is where two people trigger each other's unconscious strengths and weaknesses and engage in a shared enterprise to make the unconscious conscious through a series of painful projections and owning those projections. Relationships are mysterious and fraught with risk and we are changed by them in ways that we never expect going in. Since we are all essentially not trustworthy, all relationships are essentially risky and probably foolish, and to be intimate with someone is to invite them to hurt us or even destroy us to the core. However, relationships are the main way we access the truth about ourselves and learn, grow and change. 

So you can clearly see that I load relationships with a lot more than what Gorski is talking about. I exaggerated a few of those items based on pre-CoDA world view- but some of the basic outline is still there. 

I would say that my actual behavior around even the very first step- examining myself and knowing what I am feeling and finding a way to speak it- is a short circuit and a catastrophe for me a lot of the time. I spend or at least uysed to spend a shit ton of energy trying to figure myself out. I also used to strategize and censor myself a lot, even unconsciously. Let's say I look inside and discover I am angry with my partner. Oh fuck no. I am in no way shape or form going to express that. Not even in a responsible way. So right at the very beginning, I am already looking for ways to short circuit Gorski's framework. 

A few things that are apparent in the Gorski paradigm:

1. Clean and clear boundaries. I investigate my own experience enough to know it and own it and be able to communicate it. 
2. I commnicate it using I statements and taking ownership for it. 
3. I stay open and willing to hearing what my partner says in response. 

There is a very strong sense of two separate people engaging in a fairly well delimited exchange. The other person does not get put in a position of feeling causal in my experience or like he or she has to fix me or say or do anything to change how I feel. I am not asking for the other person to change, only to listen and validate. 

I'll be thinking a lot about this framework. I will confidently say that I had zero experience of this kind of well-delimited and safe, reasonable, open minded and attentive exchange in my family of origin. My memory is that it was not only rare, but literally non-existent, ever, at any time. And I can dimly see where some more well skilled partners of mind have expected it, and have gotten some very strange and confusing shenanigans from me instead.