#HealthyAdult: Pivot from Fantasy to Reality, Confusion to Clarity, Isolation to Connection

By Lori Jean Glass

Do you find yourself in the same, unfulfilling, destructive relationships time and again? Or do you know your relationship has potential, but you can't seem to unlock it? If, like so many others, you find yourself stuck on a "crazy train" of secretive, addictive, and self-sabotaging behavior, it's time to turn your life in a different direction. It's time to experience true healing and relational freedom!

Lori Jean Glass's personal experiences with childhood trauma inspired her to develop the PIVOT Process, a powerful method for identifying and overcoming the root causes of attachment problems. In #HealthyAdult, Lori Jean provides insight and tools for addressing the psychological issues that are sabotaging your relationships. With her expert guidance, you'll create new, more positive behaviors and stop making decisions that harm you and the people you love.

At last, you can get off that crazy train, onto a connected highway, and find your way to a healthier, happier you

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9781544503554

Book preview

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Advance Praise

Lori Jean emulates strength, love, authenticity, and compassion. Her work on attachment, and the language she uses surrounding it, cuts through the harsh and stigmatizing language of love addiction and into a space where healing resides.

—Robyn Cruze, co-founder, Wide Wonder; co-author, Making Peace with Your Plate

Lori Jean has had the courage to go deep within herself to heal her emotional wounds. She is a healer, ready to share the journey to a healthy adult with those who want it. Follow her path!

—Richard Lipfield MA, MFT

Lori Jean navigates the space between STUCK and CHANGE. Lori helps my clients move from the blind spots keeping them in self-defeating patterns into a place of self-awareness and change-making. #LoriJeanPivotsRight

—Brad Lamm, teacher; founder, Breathe Life Healing Center; author, Just 10 Lbs. and How to Help the One You Love

Lori Jean Glass has a deep understanding of the multiplicities and complexities of human systems, trauma, and compulsivity. Lori Jean has woven a beautiful recovery tapestry out of the disparate threads and models of treatment theories. Lori Jean has integrated various theoretical models effectively into a foundational springboard. It is from this springboard that we are able to dive safely into the deep end of the joys and rewards of intimacy, with ourselves and our loved ones.

—E. Hitchcock Scott, PhD, trauma and addiction services for 34 years

I’ve had the privilege of witnessing the transformative work Lori Jean has provided thousands of people. The unique process she leads clients through creates radical change for lifelong happiness. Her dedication, commitment, and expert knowledge on the subject of healthy relationships surpass anything I’ve seen.

—Rosemary O’Connor, founder, ROC Recovery Services; author, Sober Mom’s Guide to Recovery

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Copyright © 2019 Lori Jean Glass

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-5445-0355-4

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For my sons, Paul and Seth, who inspire me daily to be my best self and for giving me the greatest gift—being your mother.

I love you—tons and tons.

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Contents

Introduction

Part 1: Acknowledging the Crazy

1. Getting on the Crazy Train

2. Different Tracks: Attachment Styles and Our Stories

3. From Fantasy to Derailment

Part 2: Locating the Source

4. Childhood: Developing Survival Patterns

5. Adolescence: Individuation

6. Adulthood: Tolerating until We Choose to Change

Part 3: Becoming a Healthy Adult

7. PIVOT: An Overview

8. Whole Perspective

9. Relational Circle Boundaries

10. Survival Patterns + Healthy Adult Repairs = Relational Alignment

11. Attaching with Your Healthy Adult through the Lens of Reality

12. True Vitality

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Introduction

Here I sit, alone in this dark hotel room. I’ve already taken the aspirin—how much, I don’t know. The bottle of vodka is still in my hand, but I’m already drunk. How can a person feel this much pain and be so disconnected all at once? I am not in my body, am I?

Life outside swirls around as it always has. Why am I in this town? Oh yes, the hair show—L’Oréal. I’m really good at my job. Does that matter at all now?

Does anything matter? My sons, my boys! They need to know it’s not their fault. They need to know I love them. Someone needs to tell them.

Surviving

The events of March 2, 1997, seemed to happen to me as in a trance. I moved from one step to the next until I was there, stomach full of pills washed down with alcohol, waiting to die. It wasn’t until guilt hit my consciousness that I had the thought to call someone. And that was what I did.

My supervisors at work had no idea how bad things were. All they knew was that something was wrong with me. They didn’t want to get rid of me, so they invited me to get some outside help.

At their request, I paid a therapist to tell her what I thought she wanted to hear. I wasn’t in touch with my feelings when I went to see her, as many people aren’t. So, I wasn’t benefiting from the therapeutic process, as many people don’t. But calling her from the hotel room that night, I felt there was no longer any point in hiding.

In those days, I didn’t have access to Wi-Fi or texting. All I had was the number of an office landline. It was almost nine o’clock at night in Chicago when I called, and seven o’clock where my therapist was in California. She just happened to be back at the office to pick something up before heading out to dinner. Our paths crossed that night in a miraculous way. I don’t know what would have happened had she not picked up the phone.

By the time we spoke, I was a total mess. I told her I couldn’t go on. I don’t know how to be a mom, I let out through shallow breath. I don’t know how to be a wife. I don’t know how to show up. I don’t know what to do with the pain that’s inside me.

I was dysregulated but coherent enough to ask her to pass along a message to my boys. I wanted them to know how much I loved them and that this wasn’t about them. It was in that moment that my therapist saved my life with a single sentence. Without pause, she said, If you kill yourself, you’ll leave your boys with what your mother left you.

Despite the state I was in, I felt the full weight of what she was saying to me. I sat still for a moment, unable to think. Well, what do I do? I finally asked her.

Understanding the situation, she kept her words brief. You’re going to have to come back and start by getting honest, she said. Right now, you need to go make yourself throw up. I hadn’t told her about the pills, but she thought I was drunk because I blamed my behavior on the alcohol.

When she told me I needed to throw up, reality hit me once again. All I knew was that I needed to follow her instructions. I was fairly successful in throwing up the pills and plopped myself down on the bed. I felt horrible, but I was still alive—alive enough to walk into my first support group the next day.

Under the Surface

Now looking back, I know what was happening. My pain-body, a term Eckhart Tolle refers to in his book A New Earth, was getting activated. I describe the event as a pain-body attack. Tolle defines the pain-body this way:

It is an accumulation of painful life experience that was not fully faced and accepted in the moment it arose. It leaves behind an energy form of emotional pain. It comes together with other energy forms from other instances, and so after some years you have a pain-body, an energy entity consisting of old emotion.1

On the trip, I had called home to talk to my husband. He told me he was done with our marriage because of my actions: the secretive behavior, the impulsive shopping, the constant need for positive regard outside of my marriage—all of it. When I heard those words, I didn’t know what to do. I felt completely devastated. My abandonment had been activated big time, and I literally felt like I couldn’t breathe.

At the time, I was working and seemingly successful. My husband was building his real estate business, and everything seemed to be going well. Behind the scenes, however, I felt lost and alone. Even though I had a family, this old wound of abandonment that lived inside of me daily made me feel like I didn’t belong. Our two small children were being raised by a nanny. Our marriage lacked intimacy, and I didn’t know how to fix it.

My husband and I had both suffered a great deal of trauma in our early lives, but I never connected my past experiences to our current relational patterns. I couldn’t connect the dots and see the ways the deep wounds remained present in our lives. I felt them every day, but I had no understanding of the weight they carried in every relational decision I made. There were no podcasts or internet sites helping anyone understand how to crawl out from underneath a heaping pile of shame. I paid a therapist to listen, but I could not speak accurately about what was happening inside of me. I didn’t (couldn’t) understand it at the time.

Without real understanding of what was happening within me, I kept making the wrong choices. I was acting out in multiple ways, and I would use anything I could in an attempt to manage and tolerate my feelings. I couldn’t feel anything but the pain—the constant ache of my unmet longing.

On that dark night in Chicago, my therapist brought me back to the beginning of my pain, and I immediately thought of my three- and five-year-old sons. I could not go through with suicide. There had to be another way.

My Story: The Abandonment Button

I was born into a beautiful family. My father was a basketball player, a record-breaking scorer at West Virginia Tech. He and my mom had already married before he graduated college, when he decided he would pursue coaching.

They moved to Virginia, where my father started his career as a basketball coach at McLean High School. They had my older sister, Joy Ann, and I was born when she was two. The first couple of years of my life were truly wonderful. I was cared for. I was held. I have photos of my father with his arms around me. Both of my parents loved me, and I felt their love. I experienced a very secure attachment with them early on, especially with my father.

When I was a toddler, everything changed. We were at a camp for all the players and coaches from McLean. My dad went out into a canoe with another coach and two players. The story goes that they were joking around, splashing water at each other, when the canoe tipped over. My dad never surfaced.

It took them a long time to find his body. No one knew what happened; they could only assume he bumped his head. Different people concocted different theories over the years, but none of that mattered. What mattered was that my dad died that day—the day that everything went gray.

That event represents the installation of what I call my abandonment button. The loss left a strong imprint on my life. Everything was fine one day, and the next day the person I felt most attached to—with whom I could be safe and secure in the world—was gone. When my father drowned, I experienced my first big attachment wound, which gave me what psychologists call attachment disorder.

From that point forward, my mom checked out in her grief. To make matters worse, the doctor told her to start drinking a couple of glasses of wine at night so she could fall asleep. Back then, there were no assessments for alcoholism within a family system. She started with two glasses, but it quickly turned into four and then eight.

My mom was a beautiful woman. Soon after my father died, she was out at a bar in Washington, DC, and met the man who would soon become my stepfather. Within six months, they were married. By four years old, I had essentially lost my mom; she was gone to her own alcoholism and a new man. At such a young age, I couldn’t understand what was happening.

My stepfather traveled a lot for work as a park ranger, and my mom didn’t like that. As the years moved on, they fought more and more. He got stationed in Mount Rainier National Park, and we left the East Coast. After that, we moved around while my stepfather worked his way up the ladder to become western regional director of the National Park Service. Life as I had known it was completely gone.

Abandonment Button: The core wound, trauma, or loss that first disrupted your secure attachment with a parent or caregiver. When triggered in the future, this core wounding can get activated or triggered, sending you into an attachment storm.

Attachment Storm: A trauma response causing you to feel overwhelmed and out of control when a deep, interpersonal connection is severed through a breakup, death, or separation. These emotional and physical responses are primal and intense and make no sense to the mind. A person in an attachment storm feels like their center has dropped out and their world has been turned upside down.

The Great Weight of Guilt

Guilt. It was the only reason I had it in my mind to call my therapist the night of my near-suicide. When she picked up the phone, I started talking about my boys right away. Why? I would feel guilty for leaving them—the same way I felt about not being able to help my mom. I still carried the great weight of guilt connected to my mother for all those years.

By the time I was a teenager, my mother could do very little because of her alcoholism. She couldn’t even drive.

One day, I came home from school and found her sobbing at the kitchen table. That was unusual for my mom. I was familiar with seeing her happy, angry, or passed out. I rarely saw her cry.

I asked her what was wrong, and she told me her father, Pappaw, had had a stroke and had only two weeks to live. She was very close to him, but he was all the way back in West Virginia. I looked at her and asked, Are you going to go back and see him?

I’ll never forget her reply. No, I’m not strong enough to go, she said.

In that moment, something inside of me flipped. My mom and I had never gotten into big fights, but when she said those words, I was absolutely livid. I could not understand why she would not want to go back to see him. What is wrong with you? I hate you! I yelled.

I rushed at her with every ounce of venomous ferocity my teenage self could muster, slamming my hands into her shoulders so violently that she flipped over in her chair and onto the floor. I pounced on her like an MMA fighter in my tight-fitting Ditto jeans and high heels. I punched and kicked her and even spit on her. The violence I felt inside from years of neglect was finally being unleashed.

Today, I believe my anger was multiplied because I didn’t get to say goodbye to my own father, and she had the opportunity to say goodbye to hers. In that moment, all I knew was that I was done with my mom.

She did all that she could to fight me off, but only the sight of scarlet blood streaming from her nose could snap me out of my rage. My fight response turned quickly into flight. I turned and bolted up the stairs to pack my bags as quickly as I could to leave.

I went to stay at a girlfriend’s house, unable to manage or tolerate my feelings. The next day, I went out to my car and found a note on it, a note that I would carry around for years. It read, Leaving tomorrow. Call me. —Mom

As an adolescent, I didn’t have the emotional intelligence to call her. I still felt so angry. Plus, I didn’t believe she would go.

Two days later, my stepfather called and said, You need to come home. I need to talk to you. Reluctantly, I drove home. When I walked into our house, I saw that his face was serious. He sat me down, and my heart sank. Your mom went back to West Virginia, he started. She took a bunch of pills and alcohol and died. This is what he told me with the limited amount of information he had.

And that was that. A single moment that would again change my life forever.

I love that Brené Brown has illuminated how toxic shame is. Her work has had a HUGE effect on me. I believe many of us carry a great deal of shame throughout our lives, but what I carried with me after that moment was an unbearable burden of guilt. Yes, I had shame that my mother was an alcoholic and killed herself, but what was tormenting me was the guilt that somehow I was responsible for her death. I couldn’t get the images out of my mind—of her dying alone in a room. She never even made it to the hospital to see her father.

Years later, on the night I took those pills, my therapist reminded me that killing myself would bring similar torment to my sons. It was my wake-up call.

I was still