“Outside Issues”

Ah relationships. For folks like us, that’s the last frontier. A daunting landscape full of pitfalls and landmines, a wasteland of previous mistakes and the ashes of What Was. It’s ripe territory for second guessing ourselves. The relationship zone challenges everyone. Want to see your character defects appear? Just get involved in a relationship. They will sprout like weeds on miracle grow. Those weeds can entangle and suffocate us and those we care about. Next thing we know, a brand new trail of wreckage has been blazed, a whole new round of misery and self-loathing has taken over, and our sobriety (if not our very lives) hangs in balance, teetering on the edge.

Am I being melodramatic? I doubt it. I’ve known so many folks in Recovery who have gotten involved in a relationship and endured exactly what I just described. It was like that for me. Ultimately I came up with a set of rules for myself for whenever I meet someone new, because I would really just rather not go through all of that again. The list is extensive. The top level? Is she a normie or someone who suffers from the Disease. If it’s someone who isn’t a normie, there’s a whole other subset: does she have over a year? Has she worked through all her steps? Does she have an active relationship with her sponsor? Last (and perhaps most important of all), is she working a program?? And even if the answers to all those things are ‘yes’, I still proceed with extreme caution.

The next level down, though no less important, is whether she’s involved with anyone else. All integrity and moral issues aside, this is one is there because of some things I have learned about myself. I have made the mistake many times in the past of involving myself with someone who isn’t available. That doesn’t mean so much married or has a boyfriend (though my slate is not clean in that area either!) It means more that I get trapped into trying make something work that doesn’t. What I’m referring to most specifically is whether or not she is emotionally available.

Because of what I have been through in my life, what’s familiar to me is women who are emotionally unavailable. It’s what I’m drawn to, the way my brain has been programmed as the result of how my life has been. I fall into the trap of trying to open someone up. It’s not good, to be blunt. It feeds my ego, thinking I will be the one to help her become the person she could be—totally unacceptable because it means that not only am I trying to make someone be who they’re not, I’m also not accepting them for who they are.

I’ve done a lot of therapy when it comes to the way I am in a romantic relationship. It’s taken a lot of work to figure out what my patterns are, what my triggers are, and what I really do need and want versus what I only think I need or want. I still don’t entirely trust my instincts when it comes to this area, but there has been a sea of change in terms of my insecurities and hanging on too long. I don’t stick around in bad relationships anymore. And I’m able to conduct myself with integrity and let go of something—even if it’s good—when I know that it’s not going to work in the long run. That last one can really hurt like hell, but my life is better for it. I respect myself more for it, and even though it may result in pain for others, I know (or least hope!) that it saves causing more pain in the long run.

The 12-steps are an awesome, life-changing program, but most of us aren’t doctors or therapists. If we’re having difficulty in any particular area of our lives, it’s important to get the help we need. The program isn’t made to be a cure-all for everything that ails us. Instead it teaches us something very important: the importance of asking for help. For me, that meant getting outside help for my relationship difficulties. But it can mean other things, too, like seeing a psychiatrist for medication. The what isn’t important, it’s the asking for help that is. And let's face it: a lot of us need extra help in the relationship department.

The program can’t solve everything, but it can teach us the willingness to ask for help.