"Break The Rules"

Okay, so this blog is about my life in Recovery. And in my life, I've gone back to therapy. I did a little bit when I was first getting sober. It was a huge help. I told my therapist at the time that he was helping me to reprogram my brain ;-) That comment, though, really isn't a joke. For nearly a decade, I'd been functioning with some sort of substance in me. My brain had learned to operate in an intoxicated state. Going sober, I knew that I would need help learning to think differently, literally.

The 12-step program is amazing, and it can help us to solve many problems, but not necessarily all. Some of us have issues which require professional help. Sometimes issues come up that we need to work on, but don't have the right person to ask & talk about with in our circle of friends, meetings, or our sponsor. When I told my sponsor I was going back to therapy, he gave me mad props for it, saying that he's glad because he himself is not a therapist, just another guy living clean and sober who happens to have more experience doing so than I do. I smiled when he said that. It's something I tell my guys, too.

I had my first session back with the therapist last night. There were no mind-blowing revelations, it's not like that. He's like a guide. When I'd seen him before, I'd felt almost like I was on some cross-country ski course, moving through the wilderness, and he was there to show me the out-of-bounds markers. This time, I went in and told him about what I was wanting from our sessions and he did much of the same. 'You want to get there? Okay, go this way...'

One of the things we looked at are some things I learned early in life. I didn't grow up in an alcoholic household specifically, but my mother is definitely the daughter of an alcoholic; she has the disease. And I can look back at the way things went down in my household growing up and see it. My therapist is big on recognizing what he calls the language of alcohol. It's the style of speaking, of interacting with others, that is common to those with the disease. They are the rules we learn for how to deal with other people when we grow up with the disease. He gave me a list. I won't reproduce the whole thing, but here are a few of them:

1. Lie (including by silence or omission)
2. Secrets
3. We have to LOOK good
4. No confrontation
5. No resolution
6. No emotional honesty (either with ourselves or with others)
7. Deny anything and everything

The list goes on, of course. These are the things we learn, growing up with the disease; these are the things I learned. It's what is most familiar to me--on an almost instinctual level. In a sense, it's how I have been hard-wired to interact with others.

As human beings, we are drawn to the familiar. It's biological. It's in our genes. To those who subscribe to the idea that the disease is genetic, so is getting loaded. But those of us who have worked the program of Recovery and found a different way to live know that just because we are predisposed to be a certain way, that does not mean we have to be that way. We can learn to do it differently. Even though I grew up in a household where I was taught these rules, where I learned that this is how I have to relate to the world, to myself and other people, that doesn't make it so. I can do it differently.

The program addresses a lot of these issues. The first step teaches us Honesty. There is a common saying in the program that we are only as sick as our secrets. It's helpful to me, though, to have this list. It's helpful to have these rules laid out for me as a guide for doing things differently. It's like a sign that says, "don't go here; out-of-bounds". Making the change isn't easy. Breaking these rules is difficult because they are ingrained in my brain as The Truth. But as I wrote the other day, just because I 'know' something to be true, that doesn't mean it is.

Ol' Z has got some new rule-breaking to do over here.