A few days ago, I went to one of my regular meetings and didn't get what I needed from it. Stepping outside, I talked with a couple guys from the fellowship. They said they felt the same way, so we took ourselves out for after-meeting coffee and conversation. We ended up having a great time. We talked about the program, the experiences of our lives, what had brought us into the rooms, and the disease in general. We ended up comparing notes (so to speak) and got into some deep waters about the commonalities all of us with the disease share--things like not fitting in, feeling worthless, the struggle to become comfortable in our skin, etc.
Relationships with women came up. We shared horror stories of previous relationships, then we spent a lot of time talking about how Recovery seems to cause romantic relationships to crumble. We wondered why that might be. Someone mentioned that they just didn't have patience for the bullshit anymore. Someone else mentioned that they used to just look for sex and now they needed more than that. I talked about how Recovery changes us, how we become different people. The kind of people we used to be attracted to, we aren't attracted to them anymore and vice versa. As we change, become different people, we attract different people into our lives.
The literature talks about this. As we progress in our Recovery, we become less attracted to drama and trauma, and more attracted to sanity and serenity. I've seen it happen in my own life and it's surprising to me when it does. Maybe it's a girl I used to be obsessed with, then I'll see her months later and wonder how on earth I was ever interested in her. Or it can be that I meet someone new who has that goofy, zany personality I used to find so irresistible, that I now find myself saying, "eh... no thanks" to.
We all have a natural magnetism. Because of who we are, we naturally attract a certain kind of person into our lives. When we begin Recovery, who we are inside begins to change. Sometimes the change is subtle, sometimes drastic. Regardless of the scale, the change is real. Who we matched with before is, most of the time, not who we might match with now. A lot of the relationships we got into while we were in the grips of our disease aren't healthy. Holding on to those relationships can prevent us from making progress in Recovery. The unofficial 'rule' of not getting into any new relationships for the first year is a really good suggestion to help us guard against this.
As addicts/alcoholics, we are control freaks and we resist change. If we take away our main fix, we look for something else to fix with. Until we've gotten some experience living a new way of life, our disease-colored instincts are still in major effect. Many of us haven't yet learned that we are enough, and so we look to a relationship--another person--to do those things for us that we need to learn to do for ourselves.
Unless our partners are willing to change too, staying in our old, unhealthy relationships can prevent us from changing into the new people Recovery turns us into. It’s not that Recovery itself is death to relationships; Recovery is death to all the old, unhealthy aspects of our lives. As we become more spiritually healthy, the kinds of people we bring into our lives changes. There’s a lot of letting go to be done, a lot of faith to be had, and a lot of trusting in our higher power that needs to happen. But then again, isn’t trusting in our higher power to do what’s best for us the whole point?
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