Turning Pain Into Purpose for Adult Children

Because of the uncertainties of the physical world and the free will everyone has in it, lives can—and often are—plagued with obstacles, struggles, problems, pain, doubt, and darkness. Although God seldom intervenes to thwart such situations, He seeks to do the greatest good for the greatest number by turning pain into purpose for them afterward. He can transform adversity into value, wreckage into riches, and victims into victors.

This certainly applies to the upbringings that create the adult child syndrome and the Adult Children of Alcoholics Program echoes this concept by stating, “We progress from hurting to healing to helping.” And that help, because of a sufferer’s pain, can be far more beneficial than that of a person who sincerely tries to offer support without it.

“By working the ACA steps, we learn that our past can be one of our most important assets in our effort to help others and ourselves,” according to the Adult Children of Alcoholics textbook (World Service Organization, 2006, p. 282). “We don’t live in the past, but we can help another adult child when no one else can, or when sincere attempts by professionals have failed.”

Wounded, traumatized, isolated, hypervigilant, and distrustful, adult children are difficult to reach, but frustratingly most need the intervening aid and wisdom of others to ameliorate and improve their conditions. It often takes kindred-spirit connection with another who has survived the same adversity and suffers from the same disease to open the crack through which he can help a fellow-sufferer by sharing his own, sometimes-identical stories and difficulties to build identity. The one who succeeds in this difficult task understands the shoes the other walks in because they were once his own. With it, comes gradual trust and connection, tenets the uninformed adult child has only been able to tenuously achieve with others, if at all.

“I remember how skeptical I felt when someone said my abusive upbringing would be my most valued asset,” according to a share in the Adult Children of Alcoholicstextbook (ibid, p. 279). “I did not see how my exposure could help anyone… (But) I have (now) come to believe that my childhood places me in a position to help others when no one else can.”

None of this can happen until concerted recovery work sufficiently pulls the person out of the quicksand of his past so that he can do the same for others in the present. But this dynamic is effective in several ways.

The first is in twelve-step meetings and the channel to it is the share—or the verbal expression of a person’s plight, past, feelings, emotions, observations, understanding, and sometimes solutions. As a person gives a voice to his pain, that of others can flush out. When burdens are shared, the load lightens for all. The result is identification, unity, and healing.

The second way is through meeting leads. Although those who volunteer for this role use various methods for doing so, many choose topics based upon their own recent difficulties or struggles, such as fears, conflicts with a particular person, or the need to isolate. Others dig deeper into the subject by examining their pasts and the manifestations that result from them, researching, preparing notes to consult, and referencing program literature pages. This significantly increases the parameters of understanding and recovery of both the person and those who hear the qualification, and his introduction often becomes the trail others follow.

Another pain-into-purpose channel is sponsorship, in which a more experienced recovery member guides a lesser one with his new-found insight and strength. Aside from the potential help, it also results in two initially unexpected benefits.

Because adult children are exposed to parental powerplays and even abuse in which they are minimized, stunted, and often damaged, they only understand safety in terms of strength and consequently live adult lives vacillating between the powerless, intimidated children they once were or becoming the ego-oriented, in-charge, authority figures their parents modeled for them. Sponsorship eliminates both extremes.

“For many, ACA sponsorship represents the first time we have tried to establish a relationship on equal footing with another person,” the Adult Children of Alcoholicstextbook advises (ibid, p. 366). “This is an unfamiliar concept for us, since we come from families in which healthy relationships and mutual respect were not practiced. In ACA, we need not fear sponsorship as a reenactment of the domination, neglect, or control we experienced as children.”

Aside from the understanding, empathy, identification, and person-to-person connection between the sponsor and the sponsee, the sponsor himself can secondarily experience what can be labeled “return benefits” by reconfirming his own recovery, receiving grace for helping another, avoiding potential relapses, gauging his own growth, and, in the process, helping himself, in the ultimate completion of the pain-into-purpose cycle.

This sponsorship dynamic need not always be of a formalized nature, however. Even casual conversation with those who identify themselves as adult children and those who do not, can result in an interchange of support and wisdom, such as “Have you ever considered looking at this from a different angle?”

While the imperfect and impermanent nature of the physical world will continue to exert negative effects on those in it, the pain that results from it can often be turned into purpose by using a person’s past adversity to help others in the present, and, ultimately, himself.

Robert G. Waldvogel has earned the Interdisciplinary Certificate in Behavioral Health for Late Adolescence and the Emerging Adult and a Postgraduate Certificate in the Fundamentals of Cognitive Behavioral Treatment at Adelphi University’s School of Social Work. He has led Twelve-Step support groups on Long Island for almost fifteen years, and created the Adult Child Recovery-through-Writing, and the Strengthening Our Spirituality Programs taught at the Thrive Recovery Community and Outreach Center in Westbury. He is a frequent contributor to Wisdom Magazine.