“Integration”

I’ve been wracking my brain for a couple days now, wanting to blog, but drawing a total block on a topic. Then, as I was cruising social media, I saw some friends who were no longer friends of mine, but were still friends of my friends. Confused? No matter; it isn’t important to the story. This got me to thinking about how the people in our lives change over time. True, deep, long-lasting relationships are few and far between (at least, in my experience). People come into our lives, they go out. Sometimes someone will be in our lives a long time as just a mere association, then will rise in prominence. A casual acquaintance becomes a best friend; a friend becomes a lover.

Thinking about these things lead me to reminisce on opportunities I’ve had here and there to join in certain social circles, to go deeper into a fold, and the times and reasons why I chose not to. I know I’m being a bit vague, but this is a blog not a book. At those times, the reason I didn’t immerse myself more deeply into their group is because I felt different from them. What I’ve been through in life, the things I’ve seen and what my experiences have taught, give me a certain perspective. And sometimes that perspective interferes with my ability to have deeper relationships.

I’m not referring to the common theme of how those of us who suffer from the Disease have been through such trauma in our lives that we have intimacy issues. What I’m talking about here is how it’s hard for me to just ‘hang out’ with a bunch of people who don’t understand some of the deeper, darker, realities of life. I have a hard time relating to folks who haven’t been through or at the very least peered out into the black. I dated a woman once who very quickly came to understand that I was someone who ‘swam in the deep end’ as she called it. I think I made some comment about how the shallow end couldn’t hold my attention after having been in the deep for so long.

There is an important aspect to Recovery, that of rejoining the larger society. Some of us never leave—further proof of the importance of anonymity. Some of us struggle for years. But for those who are successful in walking the spiritual path, we ultimately find a way to rejoin. The ‘moment’ where we do can be different for each of us. For some, it’s getting a dream job (or a decent paying one). For others, it’s a new car. It can be getting married. It can be almost anything.

I’ve had moments along those lines in my life, but I still retain this feeling of separateness. No matter how I might pass as a normie, I still feel that separation. Not that I think I’m better or worse than those who haven’t seen what I’ve seen, just that what I’ve been through in life has changed me. Recovery from the Disease has changed me further. It’s not a change I would ask to be undone, and I can’t imagine ever wanting to go back to sleep, living my days awake as I do now. But still, there is the fact of who I am, and where I’ve been.

No matter how well I might re-integrate into society, the experiences of my life stay with me. That’s not good or bad, it just is.

“But I’m Right!!”

Here’s a great piece of wisdom I heard in the rooms once: ‘Anytime I find myself insisting I’m right, it means I’m probably not.’ It reminds me of that old-standard relationship advice: you can either be right, or you can be married. Ha! Seriously, though, someone who always has to be right, who is not able to admit when they are wrong, is someone who is deeply insecure. How do I know? That used to be me. Some days, it still is.

That self-righteous, sanctimonious attitude is such a turn-off to others. When we’re in that mode, being right isn’t just about being factually correct; there’s a strong moral judgment streak in there. It’s not just that I’m correct, it’s that I’m better than you because I have this opinion, because I know this truth, and you are less than a human being because you think differently—and a moron. What’s wrong with you that you don’t think like I do? Any idiot can see my way is the right way.

It makes us feel good about ourselves to insist we’re right, and to look down our noses at anyone who sees things differently. Our self-esteem gets wrapped up in our beliefs about our opinions. Sometimes our entire worldview gets wrapped up in there as well. I think of the evolution vs. creationism debates, or even the general belief in god vs. atheism arguments. A lot of moral opinions seem to fall into this category—we have a belief, and part of that belief is that our belief is the ‘correct’ one and that all others are wrong. Yep, we can build ourselves one tall house of cards like that by simply insisting we’re right and everyone else is wrong.

I remember all too well being a know-it-all. I remember my sense of self being all wrapped up in being right, knowing more than others, and the egomaniacal pride I took in showing that knowledge off. (For example, I really enjoy using big words). That tendency is still with me, and something I have to take great care at indulging in. There is a fine line to walk between being who I am, taking pride in my good qualities and standing up for myself, and letting my character defects get out of hand. Humility is a crucial part of the program, but false humility is not the way.

Because this is an area I have struggled a lot with, it’s also one in which I have strong reactions to others. I still feel my ire rise when I’m confronted with someone exhibiting this behavior. Maybe someone lies to my face, or perhaps they are on something I consider to be my turf and insist that they are right when they don’t have all the information on a situation. The part of me that wants to respond and say, ‘no, I’m right!” is still there, ready and waiting to go into action at a moment’s notice.

But here’s the thing about needing to be right—it’s isolating. When we’re in conflict with others, it’s entirely possible that we might even actually be right, but insisting on it can still damage our relationships. Standing on our own perspective when we’re wrong is definitely destructive. There’s a cost to our moral indignation, and again that’s what turns others off. It’s not that we’re right and they’re wrong, it’s that (regardless of who’s right) we’re being total dicks about it.

There are times when it’s important to stand up for ourselves, when we are in the right and we need to make a stand. There are times when we’re wrong and we need to admit it. Life is rarely black and white. In the end, we have to take each moment as it comes, and think about what’s more important to us: do we want to be right? And is it really worth the damage being right will cause? Or is it more important to be in communion with others, to be a part of a whole? And if we insist that we’re right, even when we’re wrong, how can we learn? If we chose to isolate ourselves from others, how can we continue to change and to grow and to become more than we are?

Being right and being wrong aren’t the be-all end-all of who we are. It doesn’t have to reflect one way or another on us or on our character. No one is always right. No one is always wrong. But we are, all of us, always human.

“Emotional Abuse”

After my homegroup Friday night, some of us went out to dinner for the usual post-meeting fellowship. There’s this great taqueria a few blocks from the meeting and it’s a pretty regular sight to see some number of us there on Friday’s. The staff all knows us, knows what we like to order. Whether it’s just a horchata, or a big wet burrito and a side plate of French fries.

As we sat, chowing down on some of the best cheap Mexican food in town, we talked about a whole range of subjects. It’s like that for us. At one point, we were sharing childhood stories. One member talked about how they were always getting beat on, and how their response to it was to just turn and laugh as sort of a ‘is that the best you got??’ response.

For myself, the childhood experience was almost the exact opposite. I was very prone to crying. In fact, the bullies learned early on that they didn’t need to hit me at all; they could tease and taunt me to tears, and they did so. Frequently. After I shared this, one of our dinner group quickly made the point that my experience was much worse than that of the other member’s. I demurred, saying that no one’s pain is better or worse than another’s.

These days, psychology circles are beginning to recognize emotional abuse as capable of causing far more damage, being even more destructive to a person, than physical abuse. They also recognize one of the common themes of those who suffered emotional abuse is that they tend to minimize their trauma. Emotional abuse can be a tough one to get my head around. I find it easiest to think about as a form of abuse that isn’t so much about the things people did to you, but what they didn’t do. Emotional starvation, lack of validation, making someone (particularly a child) responsible for emotions that aren’t theirs, the lack of an accepting and loving environment, these are the things I think of from my own past.

I sometimes write about how much the 12-step program has done for me—that I’ve tried religion, psychology, pharmacology, and on and on, and nothing worked until I got into Recovery. That’s mostly true. What’s also true is that I have done a HELL of a lot of therapy, and a lot of work on myself on my own. I’ve had to accept and learn to deal with some basic truths about myself, not the least of which is that I have a lot emotional depth—especially for man. This can make life pretty damn tough at times, but I’ve found that by staying in touch with what’s going on inside me, it’s manageable.

This is not to say that it’s easy. I can still have strong emotional reactions to certain types of people and situations. Sometimes things come up that are very hard for me to deal with. Things like when someone lies straight to my face, or is having a bad day and throws their shitty attitude at me; when my integrity is questioned, or if someone is making constant crises out of situations that don’t call for it. To me, these situations can get interpreted almost like… well, actually, sometimes they don’t get interpreted at all. When stuff like this happens, sometimes my brain just shorts out trying to process. If I had to put them all under one umbrella, I’d call it times when my reality is called into question. Hmm. That might not make sense.

Say I know things to be one way and someone insists to me that they’re not, or say someone tries to make me responsible for something that I had nothing to do with, my brain can short out. It’s like I’m left without footing, without a leg to stand on. And there is definitely a part of me inside that regresses to that young child who wants to burst into tears. Even today, I don’t do well with being teased. Someone may be trying to goad me, push my buttons, maybe for no other reason than to fuck with me or see what will happen.

That’s the kind of stuff that I really have a hard time with, and even though I’m much better at dealing with it than I used to be, I’m well-aware that it can be dangerous territory. Sometimes, someone will be pushing me and I reach a point where I have to tell them, straight up, “stop fucking with me!” This bear-ish response, of course, is the defensive cover-up for the child inside who is crying the much truer, “stop hurting me!”

I’ve been accused many times in my life of being overly sensitive and overly emotional. I don’t see myself that way anymore, but not because I’ve stopped being sensitive or emotional. That awareness, those perceptions, and the thoughts and feelings that go with them, have been tempered. Good boundaries have helped. Resolving issues from my past has helped a lot to. Learning to recognize the things I can’t change and let go of them has been an immense relief. But I remain who I am.

I don’t think of myself as sensitive and emotional anymore. These days, I am merely someone who has a lot of emotion and is in touch with it; I am sensitive to the world around me and the people in it, but I don’t have to let it affect me. Like anyone else who has endured trauma in their life, I retain the scars of those experiences. They may have healed, but they are still there. And with that healing, I am able to move on.

“One Helping Another”

Even in Recovery, life still has its ups and downs. It’s that whole ‘living life on life’s terms’ thing we always talk about. The program gives us tools to use, things we can do, so that we can deal with life in different ways instead of our old ways—like getting loaded, getting loaded, and getting loaded.

When I’m going through a rough time, one of the things I find really useful is to go to a meeting I haven’t been to before. I love my homegroup, of course I do, but there’s something about taking myself out of my comfort zone and being around folks who I don’t know, have never met, and yet are like me. It helps me to know that there are so many others out there who struggle with the same issues I struggle with, in the same way I struggle with them.

One time I tried this, I was having a hard time with some toxic people in my life. Hard time? Okay, that’s an understatement. I was going absolutely bonkers trying to deal with them. I was talking to my friends in the program, my sponsor, and I was still stuck. I could even think through the situation, recognize my powerlessness over these other assholes folk and how my life was becoming totally unmanageable. Still, things weren’t getting better. I could tell myself all day long that ‘this too shall pass’ but it wasn’t enough. I could practice patience, but I needed help to get through the pain of going through it all. So I called a friend and asked if they knew a good meeting.

Once there, I listened as I did when I was new—I listened for the similarities, and I heard them loud and clear. At one point the speaker started talking about toxic people and how to deal with them. My ears perked up and once again I was amazed by the power of the rooms, and of the rewards I receive from allowing the big G to work in my life. The speaker kind of grimaced at first. He scrinched his face up and paused for a moment at the subject. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Yeah, that’s hard.” And I knew in that moment that I really was going to be okay.

He did have some useful advice for how to deal with people like that, but the thing that was the most helpful was knowing that I wasn’t crazy. What I was going through was as hard as I thought it was; the feelings I was having weren't unreasonable, they were what anyone might feel, going through what I was going through. Dealing with toxic people is hard, and it’s particularly hard for those of us in Recovery because we used to BE the toxic people. (Some of us still are, but that’s the subject for another entry.) Being around folks who are the way we used to be can pull us like a magnet back into our former selves. It’s no different than how being around people who are currently using or drinking can lead us right back to getting loaded.

So much of the power of the rooms, the healing I get from going to meetings, is from that feeling of not being alone. When I hear someone I’ve never met share how I’ve felt, it helps me to not feel alone. I still get chills when it happens. I still fall back into that old way of thinking that I’m unique and that what I think and feel, what I deal with in life, is a problem only I have that no one else could ever understand. It isn’t true. It’s such an amazingly powerful part of the program, one addict/alcoholic helping another. We’re able to let ourselves be helped because we know the person on the other end has gone through what we’ve gone through.

After that meeting was over, I walked up to the speaker and thanked him and we shot the shit for a few minutes. I let him know how much he’d helped me and how glad I was that I’d gone that night. The miracles that happen in Recovery are still amazing. I hope they never stop being so.

“Thinking About Codependence”

A lot of us in Recovery have issues with codependence. Our families tend to suffer from it to an even greater extent, and make no mistake it can be every bit as painful as what those of us dealing with the Disease go through.

I had the fortune (misfortune?) to begin recognizing my own codependent thoughts and behaviors early on in my Recovery journey. In a way, I was working on these issues before I had even started the work of recovery from my addictions. Naturally, I didn’t make much progress until I began addressing the latter.

I’ve heard codependence called ‘addiction to people’. I’m not sure I see it quite like that. I tend to look at it more like the Disease, just without substances. A lot of the behavior patterns, the ways of thinking and relating to others, are so similar to active addiction. And certainly codependence walks hand in hand with the Disease; it’s pretty rare to find a couple where one is an addict or alcoholic and the other isn’t codependent.

The work I’ve done on my own codependence has taken a lot of forms: learning to have and enforce strong boundaries for myself; not offering help in situations where it hasn’t been asked for; allowing others to be responsible for themselves and the situations they’ve gotten themselves into; not making assumptions about what others think and feel; asking for help when I need it. There are many others.

Changing these patterns has been tough for me. Something I still struggle with is the idea that my allowing someone else to have their problems and deal with them themselves does not mean I don’t care about them or what they’re going through. It’s meant learning the difference between having compassion for someone, versus feeling sorry for them. And also that having compassion for someone and what they’re going through does not automatically lead to action on my part. Just because someone is having a hard time in life, that does not mean I have to abandon my own boundaries that I’ve set for myself.

Just because someone is having a bad day (or a bad week, month, or year), that doesn’t give them the right to treat me poorly. Just because I feel compassion for someone else’s situation does not mean I allow others to manipulate me. If anything, when someone else is going through a hard time, I have to be extra vigilant about maintaining my boundaries because I know my tendency is to abandon those boundaries, to cancel out myself and rescue the other person--even if only temporarily from their own feelings.

Codependent manipulation can be downright insidious. Throwing a pity party to try and get others to rescue us? Not healthy behavior. It keeps the pity partier thinking of themselves as helpless, and prevents them from doing what they need to do to take care of themselves. And it’s bad for the helper, too. I know from my own personal experience that being a rescuer leads me to have an inflated opinion of myself. It feeds my ego in unhealthy ways. I start thinking about how great I am that I do all these wonderful things for other people—and without even being asked! That’s not about being someone who cares for others, that’s about me puffing myself up.

It’s taken me some time to learn to recognize the difference between when I’m being a rescuer and when I’m genuinely helping someone. I have to watch my motives, my thoughts and my feelings. I need to keep on asking myself, ‘am I doing this to try to control the other person?’ It applies to my emotional sobriety as well. I still catch myself having imaginary conversations all the time that aren’t about anything else other than me trying to control a situation in which I feel powerless.

I like to tell my sponsees that codependence work is like 12-step graduate study. Work through your steps for your addiction first, I tell them. A lot of the work we do on our addiction helps combat those codependent ways of thinking and behaving. If we get through all our steps and are still having trouble with codependency, there are a ton of books out there on the subject. (Followers of this blog are familiar with my deep love of Melody Beattie, just to name one author.)

In the end, though, this is yet another one of those ‘quality problems’ that we get to work on. Once we’re living the spiritual lifestyle, once we’ve put together a few one-days-at-a-time, life begins to open up for us. Instead of our lives being what our addiction brings on us, they become what we make them.