The Geography of Defiance

The Wreckage on the Shore

The afternoon light is fading. Across the strait, a green landscape is awash with a shimmer of twilight and distance. Behind me, the sun descends toward the mountains. Beyond them is the wide sea. The light is soft, and warm for spring at this latitude—high on the shoulder of the world, where even in deep summer the days could not be called hot. The skeleton of a wrecked fishing boat lies on the beach, its ribs reaching from the sand and its battered wheelhouse slanting off the deck. A mass of rusted iron—the engine, perhaps, or a tangle of old anchor chain—stains the pale sand at the boat’s stern. Most of the lapstrake hull is gone, save for a few bow planks half hidden in the muck. Rust streaks from rotting deck hardware run through what remains of the once white wood. And yet, at one time this would have been a nimble craft, capable of chopping through breakers and cresting the larger swells of this northern sea. Probably the boat was used by several generations of halibut fishermen before finally breaking up here on this irascible shore. The wreck possesses an eerie beauty, a defiance almost, in the face of this windswept and lovely and lonely place.

This wrecked boat—battered but still present, broken but not disappeared, defiant in its refusal to be completely erased—is the metaphor for what I call addictions of defiance. These are patterns organized around anger, powered by rage, maintained through substances and behaviors that provide temporary access to power. These addictions, more than any others, are rooted in experiences of having power taken away, of being controlled, crushed, or violated during the developmental period when a child is learning whether their will matters, whether their “no” is respected, whether they can have power without losing love.

If you are reading this as a parent or loved one, you may recognize someone you care about in these words. The person who fights everything, who cannot accept any authority, whose anger seems always just beneath the surface. The one who drinks and becomes powerful, who uses alcohol to access the rage that can’t be expressed sober. The one whose defiance has cost them jobs, relationships, freedom—but who cannot stop fighting even when the fight destroys them.

If you are reading this as someone who recognizes yourself—who knows what it feels like to have your power stolen, to be crushed until defiance became your only identity, to find in alcohol the courage to express what cannot be said sober—then this chapter is for you too. Not to pathologize you, but to help you understand where the rage comes from, and what might make peace possible without requiring surrender.

Why Understanding This Matters

When someone you love seems to fight everything—using alcohol to fuel anger, defying every authority, refusing to submit even when submission would make their life easier—the natural response is frustration and confusion. Why can’t they just go along? Why does everything have to be a battle? Why do they destroy what could help them?

The answer is more complicated than stubbornness or bad character. The pattern of defiant substance use often has roots that extend back to toddlerhood, when a developing nervous system learns whether asserting will is safe, whether “no” will be respected, whether having power costs you love and connection.

When those early experiences teach that power will be crushed, that asserting yourself invites punishment, that you must choose between having agency and having relationships—a profound vulnerability forms. The nervous system learns to fight back, to refuse submission, to access power through any means available. And when that person later discovers substances that can make them feel powerful, that disinhibit the anger they’ve learned to suppress, that give them courage to fight back—those substances become powerfully compelling.

This isn’t about blame—not for parents, not for the person struggling. It’s about understanding that what looks like pointless defiance is often a nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do to survive being crushed.

The Pathway from Early Experience to Addiction

Here’s what I’ve observed across decades of working with people caught in the defiance pattern—a pathway that connects early developmental disruption to trauma responses to mental health adaptations to addictive behaviors:

Early Disruption: Will and Power → During the critical window from approximately two to four years, the child learns whether exercising personal power is safe. When this stage is disrupted—through crushing control, harsh punishment, humiliation, or environments where the child’s will is systematically overridden—the child learns that power will be taken unless fiercely defended.

The Body’s Response: Fight → Unable to accept powerlessness, the developing system organizes around fighting back. Anger becomes the primary response to any threat to autonomy. Defiance becomes identity. The system learns: I will not be crushed, even if resistance costs everything.

The Adaptation: Anger → Over time, this fight response extends into chronic anger that colors all experiences. The person experiences constant irritation, quick rage, the sense that others are always trying to control them, difficulty with authority, an oppositional stance toward rules and expectations.

The Addiction: Alcohol and Defiant Behaviors → Substances that provide temporary access to power, that disinhibit anger, that give courage to fight back become compelling. Alcohol doesn’t create the anger; it unleashes it, validates it, makes it feel righteous and powerful. Behaviors that defy authority become part of identity.

The addiction maintains the fight response. Alcohol keeps anger activated, confirming that the world is full of people trying to control you. Defiant behaviors ensure consequences that validate the belief that authority figures are oppressive. Any attempt to impose limits—including treatment—is experienced as the very crushing control that activated the pattern originally.

The Learning of Defiance

Beginning around age two and extending through approximately four years, children discover they have will. They can say “no,” can assert preferences, can refuse cooperation, can exercise power. This is the period when children learn whether their power is acceptable, whether asserting themselves threatens their relationships, whether they must choose between having power and having love.

When this stage proceeds well—when caregivers can tolerate the child’s assertion of will, set appropriate limits without crushing the child’s spirit, allow choices within boundaries—the child’s system learns that power and connection can coexist. They develop what we might call secure agency: confidence in their right to have preferences, capacity to assert themselves without destroying relationships.

But when this stage is disrupted, when caregivers respond to the child’s emerging will with crushing control, harsh punishment, or humiliation, the child faces an impossible situation. The drive to have will is biological, unavoidable. But exercising power leads to punishment or loss of connection. The nervous system must solve this dilemma, and the solution is organized defiance: I will have power even if I must fight for it, I will not be crushed even if resistance brings pain.

Crushing control creates this pattern. Parents who cannot tolerate any assertion of will, who require complete compliance, who see the child’s “no” as unacceptable disobedience. Every expression of preference is met with force. The child learns: my power threatens others, I must fight to maintain any agency. Compliance means erasure of self.

Harsh punishment compounds the wound. Physical discipline, shaming, humiliation, or other harsh consequences for normal assertion of will. The child says “no” and is spanked. The child asserts a preference and is told they’re bad, selfish, ungrateful. The child learns: my will is wrong, but I will not stop having will. Constant internal rage develops.

Power struggles teach a different lesson. When every interaction becomes a battle for control, when the caregiver must “win” every encounter. The child’s emerging will is experienced by the parent as a challenge that must be defeated. The child learns: all relationship is a power struggle, and I must fight to survive. Backing down means total defeat.

Humiliation and shaming leave their own mark. When the child’s assertion of will is met with public humiliation, mockery, or contempt. “Look at you, throwing a tantrum. You’re acting like a baby. You’re so selfish.” The child learns: my power is shameful, but I will not relinquish it.

Inconsistent limits create chronic confusion. When boundaries shift unpredictably based on the parent’s mood. Sometimes the child’s assertion is tolerated; sometimes it’s punished harshly. The child cannot learn the appropriate exercise of power because the rules keep changing. Chronic anger develops as the only reliable response.

These early experiences create a profound developmental vulnerability—a nervous system that organized around fighting back, learned that power must be seized and defended, and developed a stance of perpetual opposition.

These harms are more common than we might expect. Consider spanking, for example—a normal childhood experience. Spanking in childhood is associated with greater risks in adulthood for suicide attempts, moderate to heavy drinking, lower levels of mental health, higher levels of aggression, antisocial behavior, and an increased likelihood of abusing one’s own child or spouse. And studies of spanking find no positive outcomes: no greater self-control, or personal discipline, or any of the other goals parents typically indicate as being the “lessons” of spanking.

There is no meaningful distinction between discipline and harm when it comes to spanking and similar forms of physical punishment. These findings hold across cultures and the neurological mechanisms (threat-system sensitization) are well understood. Even “mild” physical discipline creates lasting vulnerability.

And yet, many people who experienced spanking and other forms of physical punishment will often say (and believe) that they “turned out fine.” This is a common adult blind spot that often prevents people from recognizing and addressing the harms they carry—harms that can fuel mental health struggles and addictions. And, in the absence of self-awareness about these unaddressed harms, they often unintentionally pass them along to those they most love: spouses, and, especially, kids.

Collective Trauma: When Entire Communities Lose Power

I’ve spent time teaching in Indigenous communities in the far north, working with people healing from what colonization has done to entire cultures. I have worked in many situations like this. I know what happens when a culture is almost destroyed by childhood trauma, disease, and spiritual devastation: people drink. Alcohol is almost always the substance of choice for trauma survivors dealing with powerlessness and rage. It promises power, and pride, and redemption delivered by way of anger.

When an entire culture is systematically stripped of power—when children are torn from families, language is forbidden, traditional governance is destroyed, land is stolen, spiritual practices are criminalized—the disruption happens at a community level across generations. Almost every child growing up in this context receives the developmental message: we have no legitimate power, our will doesn’t matter, resistance brings destruction.

But the human spirit does not accept powerlessness quietly. When power cannot be expressed legitimately, it emerges through defiance, through alcohol-fueled rage, through self-destructive assertion that says: you cannot completely control me, even if the only power I have left is the power to destroy myself.

This is collective developmental trauma—entire communities stuck in the fight response, organized around anger as one of the only acceptable emotions, using alcohol to access power that has been systematically denied. Understanding this helps us see why traditional addiction treatment often fails in these contexts. Treatment that demands submission, that requires accepting powerlessness, that positions helpers as authorities who know better, replicates the exact dynamic that created the addiction in the first place.

For Parents: What This Means About You

If you’re a parent reading this, you may be experiencing something complicated. Perhaps recognition—I did crush his will, I couldn’t tolerate his defiance. Perhaps guilt—I humiliated her when she said no. Perhaps defensiveness—I had to maintain control, I couldn’t let him run wild.

Here’s what I want you to understand: the developmental perspective is not an accusation. Many of the factors that disrupt the Will and Power stage—your own unresolved trauma around power, the crushing control you experienced in your own childhood, circumstances that made you need compliance for survival—are not choices you made. They’re conditions you lived through.

If you couldn’t tolerate your child’s defiance, you probably had reasons. Maybe you were raised in a home where obedience was demanded and defiance was punished severely. Maybe your own power had been crushed, and your child’s assertion of will activated something you couldn’t bear. Maybe the circumstances of your life required a compliant child—poverty, single parenting, overwhelming stress. Your need for control wasn’t a character flaw; it was often a response to your own constraints.

At the same time, the impact on the child is real regardless of the cause. Your best might not have been enough for what your child’s developing sense of power needed during that window. This is painful to hold. But not being enough doesn’t mean you failed as a parent or person. It means you were human, limited, doing what you could within constraints that may have been severe.

The developmental perspective asks us to hold multiple truths:

• Early experiences of crushed will create vulnerability to anger and defiant substance use
• Most parents do the best they can with what they have
• Your best might not have been sufficient for this particular child’s needs
• Not being sufficient doesn’t make you a bad parent
• Understanding what created vulnerability helps guide what might help now
• The person struggling with alcohol and anger isn’t just stubborn—they’re responding from a nervous system organized by early experience

And here’s something else: these patterns often run through generations. The parent who crushes a child’s will often had their own will crushed. Understanding this can help break the cycle, not through blame but through awareness.

If You Recognize Yourself

If you’re reading this and recognizing your own pattern—the rage that lives beneath the surface, the drinking that lets it out, the defiance that costs you everything but that you cannot abandon—I want to speak to you directly.

First: this pattern makes sense. Not in the sense that it’s serving you well now, but in the sense that it developed for good reasons. Your nervous system learned, probably early, that your power would be crushed if you didn’t fight for it. The defiance protected you when submission would have meant erasure. The anger is not pathological—it’s often an appropriate response to real violations.

Second: the alcohol isn’t just about getting drunk. It provides access to power you can’t access sober. It disinhibits the anger you’ve learned to suppress. It gives you courage to fight back, to say what you really think, to refuse submission. That’s not moral weakness. That’s a nervous system finding a way to express what cannot otherwise be expressed.

Third: understanding this doesn’t mean you’re trapped. The same nervous system that learned to fight can learn that power doesn’t always require battle—slowly, incrementally, through experiences where asserting yourself doesn’t cost you connection. It won’t happen through willpower or because you decide it should. It happens through accumulated experiences that teach your system something new: that your “no” can be respected without fighting, that power can be constructive rather than destructive, that you don’t have to choose between having agency and having relationships.

Fourth: recovery doesn’t mean eliminating your capacity for anger or your refusal to be controlled. These can be genuine strengths. Righteous anger at injustice, fierce protection of boundaries, refusal to submit to genuine oppression—these are not problems to be fixed. The question is whether you can choose when to fight rather than fighting everything, whether power can be expressed constructively rather than destructively.

What Alcohol Provides (And Why It’s Hard to Give Up)

To understand why defiant alcohol use is so difficult to change, it helps to understand what drinking provides.

Alcohol provides temporary access to power. Courage, disinhibition, the capacity to assert will, the ability to express anger. For someone whose sober state feels powerless, alcohol creates the experience of being powerful.

It allows expression of legitimate rage. Anger that cannot be expressed sober—because it’s too dangerous, too overwhelming, or too legitimate—can be expressed while drinking. Alcohol gives permission.

It protects against powerlessness. The pain of powerlessness is unbearable. Alcohol numbs this pain while simultaneously providing the illusion of power.

Drinking becomes defiance itself. An act of resistance, an assertion of will, the refusal to submit. You can’t control me becomes You can’t stop me from drinking. The substance use itself becomes the vehicle of defiance.

It validates the fight response. Alcohol-fueled anger confirms the worldview: see, I was right to be angry, people are trying to control me, I need to fight. The substance validates the trauma response.

Each time alcohol provides power, it confirms the original learning: sober life means powerlessness, you need the substance to access your will. The fight response is validated as the correct strategy.

You can’t simply remove the alcohol without addressing what it provides. If you take away someone’s only access to power, you leave them worse off than before. Recovery must involve discovering that power can be accessed without alcohol—a terrifying proposition for someone whose experience taught that sober means crushed.

Why We Resist What Would Help

There is another layer families need to understand: people with defiance patterns resist help precisely because help comes from authority, and authority is the enemy.

Think about what traditional treatment looks like to someone whose system is organized around fighting crushing control: mandated attendance, required compliance, rules that must be followed, authority figures who claim to know what’s best, demands for submission (“admit you’re powerless”). This is not experienced as help. It’s experienced as the exact crushing control that activated the pattern in the first place.

The defiant person resists treatment not because they want to keep suffering but because treatment feels like another attempt to break their will. Every requirement triggers the fight response. Every authority figure becomes another person trying to control them. Every rule becomes something to defy.

This is why arguments don’t work. You cannot argue someone out of a fight response. The defiant system doesn’t negotiate verbally—verbal negotiation itself can feel like a power struggle. The system responds to accumulated experience, to repeated encounters that contradict its predictions about power. Recovery requires not coercion but invitation, not control but collaboration, not demands for submission but acknowledgment that their power matters.

The person isn’t choosing to fight everything. They’re protecting themselves from what felt—and may still feel—like annihilation. What looks like defiance is often the system doing exactly what it was designed to do: refuse to be crushed.

The Polar Bear: Archetype of Fierce Healing

While waiting for a small plane to return me from the north, I found myself thinking about polar bears. The polar bear is reputed to be the most dangerous of all land mammals. An adult male is a thousand pounds or more of claws, sharp teeth, colossal strength and frightening speed. Each paw is a foot wide, with claws as long as my fingers.

And yet, while polar bears have been known to attack people, in most cases the bear was either provoked or starving. Many bears have been shooed away, without incident, from homes and stores in the Far North. A woman once chased a bear from her porch by striking it with a broom.

But the tale that stays with me involves a man who was alone on the ice and was chased by a polar bear. The bear came after him slowly, taking its time. The man fled to exhaustion and eventual collapse on the frozen terrain. And to a final, hopeless turning toward this beast who had pursued him.

The man crouched on the ice. The bear approached, head down. There was a moment of stillness, of expectation. Then the bear came forward, head extended, mouth open, rows of teeth exposed. The man closed his eyes or held his hands before his face.

The bear licked one of the man’s hands, and did no more, and wandered off again into the North.

So gentle, that white bear, and so fierce. Black skin beneath shimmering translucent fur. A fusion of shadow and light.

This story captures something essential about defiance addictions and their healing. The bear represents the fierce power that was stolen, the rage that lives beneath the surface, the capacity for both destruction and gentleness. The man who stops running, who finally turns toward the bear rather than fleeing, survives not through submission but through presence to the power pursuing him.

Recovery from defiance addictions requires this same movement: not controlling the rage, not running from it, not demanding it be eliminated, but turning toward it, acknowledging its legitimacy, learning that fierce power can be expressed without destruction. The bear that could kill with one swipe instead offers gentleness—this is the transformation possible when power is acknowledged rather than crushed.

What Actually Heals: Being Seen, Not Controlled

Research on recovery from addiction reveals something that traditional treatment often misses: the mechanism of change is not compliance with a program. What heals is belonging. The actual predictive factors for sustained recovery are social support, recovery-oriented networks, and purposeful contribution to others.

For people with defiance patterns, this is particularly important. Their addiction formed in response to having power stolen, to being controlled. Recovery through more control—mandated treatment, required compliance, demands for submission—often fails because it replicates the original trauma. What works is the opposite: experiences of being welcomed without having to submit, being valued without having to comply, having power acknowledged without it being crushed.

The defiant person doesn’t need another authority telling them what to do. They need a community where their power matters, where their “no” is respected, where they can contribute something only they can offer. Not busy work to keep them compliant, but genuine participation where their presence and their will make a difference.

I think of a woman at a workshop in the north who had lost everyone she loved to alcoholism—her husband, her brother, her son. Her rage was volcanic. She screamed about the unfairness, the injustice, the way her heart had been shattered. What I offered her was not control or redirection or demands that she calm down. What I offered was acknowledgment: your rage is legitimate, your losses are real, the unfairness you speak of is actual. Your power matters. Your “no” to this injustice is valid.

What made this possible was not technique alone. It was the container we had built across three days—the group that had shared their own stories, the trust established before this moment of crisis. When she and I returned from a walk together, the others received her without judgment, without trying to fix what could not be fixed. The container was collective, not individual. Her rage could exist within it without destroying anything.

This is what defiance patterns need: not control but acknowledgment, not crushing but witnessing, not demands for submission but experiences where power and connection coexist.

What Might Actually Help

Given everything we’ve explored about the defiance pattern, what can families and loved ones actually do? And what can people caught in the pattern do for themselves?

For Families

Understand that you’re seeing the fight response, not just stubbornness. When your loved one defies everything, fights every authority, uses alcohol to access rage—they’re not just being difficult. Their nervous system is in a protective mode it learned long ago. This reframing won’t eliminate your frustration, but it might help you respond with patience rather than engaging in another power struggle.

Understand why they resist help. Traditional treatment feels like more crushing control to someone organized around defiance. Don’t take their resistance personally. They’re not rejecting you; they’re protecting themselves from what feels like another attempt to break their will.

Don’t engage in power struggles. Every battle you “win” confirms their worldview that relationship means someone has to lose. Wherever possible, offer choices rather than demands. Frame requests as invitations, not requirements. Let them have power in the interaction.

Acknowledge legitimate anger. When the anger is about real injustice—and often it is—don’t try to minimize or redirect it. “What happened to you was wrong. Your anger makes sense.” This doesn’t mean accepting destructive behavior, but it means honoring the feeling underneath.

Distinguish anger from violence. The anger is legitimate; the destruction is not. Help them find expression that creates rather than destroys. “I hear how furious you are. What would it look like to fight this injustice in a way that doesn’t destroy you?”

Find opportunities for legitimate power. Can they lead something? Advocate for something? Contribute something only they can contribute? Recovery happens when people discover their power matters—not through compliance but through genuine agency.

Support without controlling. This is the hardest part. You want them to stop drinking, stop fighting, stop destroying their lives. But every attempt to control activates their defiance. The work is to be present, to offer support, to acknowledge their power—and to let them make their own choices about whether to accept help.

Take care of yourself. Living with someone organized around defiance is exhausting. You need your own support—friends, therapy, groups for family members. You cannot be a non-controlling presence for someone else if you’re depleted and desperate.

For People Caught in the Pattern

Understand that your anger often makes sense. Much of your rage may be response to real violation, real injustice, real crushing of your power. The pattern isn’t that you’re angry; it’s that anger has become your only response, and alcohol your only access to expressing it.

Understand why you resist what might help. If you find yourself fighting treatment, defying therapists, refusing to follow programs—this makes sense. Help feels like control, and control is what hurt you. The resistance isn’t failure; it’s protection. But the protection that saved you may be imprisoning you now.

Find communities, not programs. What heals is belonging, not compliance. Look for communities where your power is welcomed—where you can contribute, where your presence matters, where your “no” is respected. This might be recovery communities that emphasize mutual support over authority, or communities organized around something you care about, or anywhere you can belong without having to submit.

Choose physical activities that explore yielding, not more fighting. This is counterintuitive, but important: activities that feel intuitively right—combat sports, heavy weightlifting, high-intensity competition—may simply channel the aggression into more acceptable forms without transforming it. The nervous system learns to fight better, not to find other ways of being powerful. What might actually help is exploring the strength inherent in flexibility rather than rigidity—tai chi, gentle partner work like contact dance, practices where power comes from yielding rather than forcing. The goal isn’t to eliminate your capacity for fierceness but to discover that power has many forms.

Practice saying “no” without fighting. Notice moments when you expect a battle and one doesn’t come. Notice times when your “no” is respected without having to escalate. Build evidence that power doesn’t always require war.

Find constructive outlets for legitimate rage. If your anger is about real injustice—and often it is—can it be channeled toward fighting that injustice in ways that create rather than destroy? Political advocacy, community organizing, artistic expression, any form where the rage becomes fuel for change rather than fuel for destruction.

Consider that recovery is not surrender. You don’t have to accept powerlessness to recover. You don’t have to submit. Recovery can mean discovering other forms of power, other ways of asserting will, other expressions of agency that don’t require alcohol or destruction.

Be patient with setbacks. Recovery from defiance addiction rarely follows a straight line. The system has been organized around fighting for decades; it will return to that configuration when stressed. Relapse isn’t failure—it’s the system reorganizing back to its familiar state when the repair work is incomplete.

The Two Tasks of Recovery

Two fundamental tasks lie before those recovering from addictions of defiance. The first is to reclaim legitimate power—to discover that will and agency matter, that “no” can be respected, that power can be exercised constructively. This learning cannot happen through submission or through being controlled; it requires experiences where the person successfully asserts power and maintains connection.

The second task is to transform rage from destructive to constructive expression. The anger is often legitimate—rage at actual injustice, fury at violations, appropriate response to having power stolen. The work is not to eliminate this anger but to help it find expression that creates rather than destroys, that fights injustice rather than fighting everything, that asserts power rather than simply opposing.

Sometimes I notice the moment when anger softens without disappearing, when defiance becomes assertion rather than opposition, when power is claimed rather than grasped. A person who has been fighting everything suddenly discriminates—this battle matters, that one doesn’t. Someone who could only say “no” discovers they can also say “yes.” Someone who experienced all authority as crushing discovers one relationship where power is mutual.

When the Pattern Doesn’t Change

And for some people, the pattern doesn’t change. They try these approaches—find communities that welcome their power, explore physical practices that don’t reinforce fighting, work with helpers who don’t try to control them—and the defiance persists. The anger remains volcanic. The alcohol remains the only access to power they can find.

If you are one of these people, or if you love someone who is: this is not failure. Some systems are organized at such depth that transformation requires more time, more resources, or more accumulated experiences of legitimate power than one lifetime can provide. Some people will manage the fight response rather than transform it—learning to live with the anger, finding harm-reduction approaches to alcohol, accepting that this is the configuration their system takes.

For some, medication-assisted treatment becomes not a bridge to eventual abstinence but a long-term component of stability. Naltrexone or other medications can reduce the pull toward alcohol without requiring surrender. This is not failure. The goal is not purity but a life where connection and meaning become possible.

The Child Walking Away

I think of a vision that came to me during a workshop in the north—an image of a child walking away from her community. She walks down a long road in the early morning. She’s running away, not in panic but with deliberation. She’s claiming her power the only way she knows how: through departure, through defiance of the community’s expectations.

This child represents everyone who has had power stolen, everyone who must fight to maintain any agency, everyone who has learned that defiance is survival. She walks away because staying means submission. But she’s also walking toward something—toward a life where her will might matter, where her power might be legitimate, where she doesn’t have to choose between having agency and having love.

The healing of every community depends upon this child. Not on her staying or leaving, but on her discovering that she has power, that her “no” matters, that will and connection can coexist. Whether she comes back or keeps walking, whether she finds her way through defiance or through something else, her journey is the journey every person with defiance patterns must make: from reactive defiance toward claimed power, from fighting everything toward choosing battles, from anger that destroys toward anger that creates.

The wrecked boat on the shore, defiant in its refusal to completely disappear, reminds us: even when crushed, even when broken, even when facing attempts at erasure, the human spirit persists. Power cannot be finally stolen. Will cannot be ultimately crushed. And healing—fierce, defiant, inevitable healing—goes on.

For Further Reflection

If You’re a Parent or Loved One

• When you watch your loved one fighting everything—defiant, angry, using alcohol to access power—what happens in you? Can you notice your own reactions without engaging in another power struggle?
• What was your loved one’s early experience of will and power? How did caregivers respond to their “no”? Was their assertion of will tolerated, or crushed?
• What was your own relationship to power when you were raising them? Were you able to tolerate their defiance, or did you need to win every battle? Understanding doesn’t mean blaming yourself—it means seeing the pattern more clearly.
• How can you acknowledge their legitimate anger without accepting destructive behavior? Can you separate the feeling (often valid) from the actions (sometimes harmful)?
• Where might your loved one find legitimate power—opportunities to lead, to contribute, to matter? Not busy work, but genuine agency?
• Can you offer support without controlling? Can you let them make choices, even ones you disagree with, while staying in relationship?
• How can you take care of yourself while continuing to care about someone whose defiance may be exhausting?

If You Recognize the Pattern in Yourself

• When did the fight response begin? Can you trace it back to early experiences of having your power crushed?
• What does alcohol provide that sobriety cannot? Access to rage? Courage to fight? Temporary power? Understanding the function helps find alternatives.
• Why do you resist what might help? If you find yourself fighting treatment, defying therapists, refusing programs—can you recognize this as protection rather than failure?
• Where in your life has your “no” been respected without a battle? If no such place comes to mind, that’s important information. Finding one community where your power is welcomed may be the most important step.
• What physical activities might help you explore strength through yielding rather than forcing? What would it feel like to discover power that doesn’t require fighting?
• Where might you find belonging—not a program to comply with, but a community where you can contribute, where your presence matters?
• What would it look like to fight injustice in ways that create rather than destroy? Can your anger become fuel for change rather than fuel for destruction?
• What would recovery look like if it didn’t require surrender? Can you imagine claiming power without alcohol, without having to submit first?