I was a sensitive kid from Day 1. I grew up in an alcoholic household – my Dad is an alcoholic. He got sober two years before I was born, while in AA, but he didn’t stay in AA. I think of my Dad as a dry drunk, although the events of our lives have softened his rage. I’ll get to that later.
My Mom had postpartum depression, so both my brother and I were neglected. My Mom’s Mom, Grandma Sciacca (I come from a big Italian Catholic family) was mentally ill and it had a serious affect on her four children. My Mom was the youngest of three older brothers, but she didn’t escape her mother’s parenting unscathed. She went to Al Anon while my Dad was in AA, but neither of them stayed in program.
A lot of the focus in my household as a young kid was on keeping my Dad sober. My parents didn’t tell us that’s what was going on, but there was a lot of rituals of control happening where things had to happen at a certain time. I experienced a lot of fear growing up, fear that I felt from my parents as they worried about Dad’s sobriety. I absorbed it like a sponge-evidence of my codependency early on.
I would sometimes stand at the window when my parents were away, afraid they would die and never come home. I may be wrong, but I’ve never heard anyone else talk about doing that in childhood. I definitely struggled.
I did have one solid loving presence in my life as a young child; my Great Aunt, who was also my Godmother. She and my Grandma had moved down from Long Island not long after we moved to North Carolina to help raise my brother and I. My Aunt Zizi was a great source of love in my life; I have pictures of her with me as a baby hanging in my room. She also introduced me to my Higher Power; both her and my Grandma were devoutly Catholic and they talked about God around me plus prayed the rosary and other pious things. Unfortunately, she got pancreatic cancer and died when I was 7. I have thought of her as my guardian angel throughout my life.
I went to a small Catholic elementary school, and had a small group of close friends there. I do remember some drama happening between me and my two best friends, but my codependent illness didn’t really start affecting my relationships until middle school.
In middle school, I was thrust into a big public school with probably three times as many kids as my elementary school. I was very social at that time; I talked to everyone and had many friends. I became friends with a girl who was not a great influence on me; she had a lot of trauma and abuse from her brother and she encouraged me to lie and steal. I thought she was so cool, and really made her God. That started a long career of making other people God and trying to fit in with what they thought I should be doing.
I had my first boyfriend in middle school, and for a long time I blamed this relationship and my parents for my codependency. We got together when I was 12, and it was a very involved relationship. I wondered why my parents let me do this. He became the center of my world, and the relationship was my identity. At that age, kids are supposed to be learning about themselves and figuring out what they want. I was codependent with my boyfriend and my self esteem was tied up in the relationship. We stayed together for two years, until high school started. My high school was one of only two in my county, and a lot of the middle schools from the area all came to the same high school. My boyfriend ended up cheating on me with one of the girls from another middle school. He lied about it, and I had to find out from her.
After this break up, I started to have increasing emotional and mental health issues. I was devastated, as I had built my identity around this relationship. Though I was young, this was actually one of my most codependent romantic relationships.
I started misbehaving at school, and I had a group of friends that started experimenting with drugs and alcohol. My parents caught us drinking once, and it was at that point that my Dad started to rage at me. My parents also told me for the first time that my Dad is an alcoholic, and sent me to therapy. This was actually a really positive thing for me, and started me on my mental health recovery journey. I was 14, and was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and depression. I went to a psychiatrist and was put on medication. It had been 25 years since I started my mental health recovery journey, long before I got into 12 step recovery.
I went away to college and had a hard time adjusting in freshman year. I am in another program for an eating disorder, and this was really rampant in freshman year. I did have a lot of friends at school; a lot of the kids from my high school went to my college. I also made some new healthy friends through the Outdoors Club. However, I still spent a lot of time away from college in downtown, doing poetry open mics and other creative pursuits. This is where I met the next woman who I would become very codependent with. I was inspired by her creativity and she was very beautiful, and I made her God.
Even more so than in previous relationships, I became like a chameleon and wanted to be more and more like her. My school work started suffering as we became more involved in creative pursuits in town. In junior year of college, I decided I wanted to become skinny and pretty like my friend and so I started down a path of anorexia. It was very unhealthy. I also decided to go off of my mental health medication, and as a result of these actions plus stress I had a nervous breakdown.
It was terrible. I stopped being able to do school work or even pay attention in class. I experienced psychosis, and my parents actually had to come up to my college town and move me out of the house I had been living in with one of my new healthy college friends. The course of my life changed forever as a I had to move home with my parents. After a few months, they begrudgingly took
me to an inpatient hospital and I was hospitalized for mental health and the eating disorder. Obviously, this was a big set back on my mental health journey. I got some more significant diagnoses and got on a lot of medications. It was in the hospital that one of the social workers recommended 12 steps.
When I got out of the hospital I was devastated, confused, and lost. I started going to 12 step meetings for my eating disorder, and that provided an anchor and some solace by meeting other people like me. However, this was not a Big Book program and I did not recover at this time. I left after a few years because I was not getting better. I spent the decade of my twenties trying to figure things out on my own. I still didn’t know anything about codependency, but I knew about 12 steps. I also knew about mental health recovery. I started getting healthier through therapy groups and learning about mental health. I did a yoga teacher training, which has been a big part of my recovery. But I was still struggling with self esteem, relationships, and body image issues. I kept calling in to 12 step meetings for my primary program, and in 2014 I found Big Book Solutions Group.
Unfortunately, at this same time I had gotten into the most toxic and dangerous of all of my codependent relationships. I started dating someone who was controlling and emotionally and verbally abusive. I realize now that I picked people who related with me at the level that I thought I was worth. He encouraged me to distance myself from my friends as well as my family. We did move back up to my college town together, which had been a goal of mine.
In Fall 2014, I got my first job in the mental health field. I had gone back to college online to finish my undergraduate degree, and afterwards had taken a certificate course to become a Peer Support Specialist. I worked in this job which my partner decided to go off to travel (which I paid for, by the way). It was during this time that I started to experience a spiritual awakening. I was learning about mental health recovery in ways I never had before, including complex post traumatic stress disorder and trauma recovery. I had an amazing supervisor on the crisis team, and I also discovered I am very good at working with other people with mental health challenges. I started feeling successful and better about myself, and started gaining some self esteem from my work and relationships.
Unfortunately, my partner returned from traveling and things got much worse there. He lived with me and my roommate, and his behavior scared my roommate so much that she moved out of the house. She also called my parents to tell them what was going on, as my partner had become physically abusive.
My parents called my supervisor at work, and she is the one that helped me leave that relationship. I stayed with my supervisor for weeks until my partner left town (he was relying on me financially and once I said it was over he couldn’t support himself). Unfortunately during this time my brother had started to struggle with some of the same mental illness that I had been struggling with. In October 2015, my brother took his own life. I didn’t have much left and the only thing I could really do was start down the road of 12 step recovery through the Big Book Solutions Group. This was my rock bottom, but I truly believe through my brother’s death he freed me from that relationship and a life of addiction and pain.
That was 10 years ago this September, and I have been in Big Book recovery ever since. It has been a long road with my eating disorder, but I am in a much better place with food recovery than I have ever been. I started attending meetings for family members and loved ones of alcoholics, and started learning about my Dad’s illness and how spiritual illness is a family thing. This led me to codependency recovery, and in 2019 I joined Recovered Codependents.
I have learned so much about myself and my character defects through codependency recovery. I realize now that this was my first addiction, before the food behavior even started. It was my addiction that led me to fear that my parents would die when they left the house, and my obsession with my mother and father being okay. My codependency started at a very young age.
I have come a long way in the 10 years that I have been in Big Book recovery.
I have been through ups and downs, but in the past 4 years especially things have been going so much better. I found a job as a Peer Support Specialist that I really like, and through my job I’ve been able to buy a house. I completed at Master’s degree. All of this has been possible through the program actions I take on a daily basis to be restored to sanity. I work my 10, 11, and 12 steps every day, and I get the beautiful opportunity to sponsor others. I have a wonderful sponsor who is very inspiring, and I am actually in my first healthy romantic relationship now. I couldn’t do it without my program actions on a daily basis, and the loving support of my sponsor. Though the 12 step path is not easy, it has become a way of life for me and I wouldn’t be where I am today without it.