“The Party”

This blog is second in a five-part series titled “The Dream”, a write-up I did of a very vivid dream I had. Even though it wasn't specifically about the Disease, the dream’s subject—feeling  different, inhuman—is something all those of us who suffer from addiction can relate to.

* * *

I made friends quickly, and everyone there was friendly to me. They accepted me, embraced me, wanted to get to know me and have me join in and celebrate with them. This was not a party where people sulked in the shadows. Everyone was part of the joy, the fun. And it was authentic; no one there just pretended to have a good time or put on airs, fronting for the sake of appearances. Everyone belonged and everyone participated.

It was easy for me to get swept up in it. I stopped worrying about what the others thought, these strangers who had welcomed me to their very special event. I let go of my fear of what might happen if I let go. I let myself be a part of.

No matter what was going on, I joined in. Music was played and performed. It took a little prodding, but I got up and sang with the others, ultimately singing a song or two solo. Somehow there was a way for me to share my own music with them. It was embraced as well--not as some great achievement above and beyond the other music, but as a deeply cherished piece of the greater whole. I had brought my real self to the party, was sharing the deepest parts of me, and that was what was celebrated--the communion, honest and deep and true. We were Dionysian revelers, celebrating celebration with our fullest selves.

“The House In The Woods”

This blog is first in a five-part series titled “The Dream”, a write-up I did of a very vivid dream I had. Even though it wasn't specifically about the Disease, the dream’s subject—feeling  different, inhuman—is something all those of us who suffer from addiction can relate to.

* * *

It was a party, a huge bash. Not just a party, but the annual celebration which was held for no other reason or cause than the occasion itself. I had been invited, or asked to be there, or brought along--I’m not sure; when the dream began, I was already there and it was already happening all around me. It was dark out, and I knew we would be going all through the night.

We were at a house in the woods, far away from any distracting influences. The house wasn’t large, but it was big enough for the fifty or so of us. I assume there were folks hanging out outside, but I can’t tell you what the house looked like because I spent almost all my time inside it.

I knew there was no one around for miles, though. We were far removed from any other people, out where we wouldn’t bother others and they couldn’t bother us. In fact, now that I think back on it, I’m fairly certain there were no other people, period, just myself and those there at the party. There weren’t any other buildings, either, only the people and the party at the house in the woods. Nothing else existed.

There wasn’t anything significant about the people there. No particular overall detail stands out to me, except maybe that almost all of them seemed to be around my age. Perhaps there were children and elderly people, but I don’t remember any. There were men, women. They may have been of multiple races, I don’t know; it didn’t seem important. We were all there and we were all just a group of good folk having one hell of a good time.

Still Thinkin', Part 3

Continuing on with my thoughts on some of the behaviors and attitudes so common to those who suffer from the Disease…

Guilt and Shame

I have an old friend who likes to say when someone tries to make you feel guilty, imagine they’re serving you a shit sandwich—all you have to do is say, “No thanks, I’m not hungry.”

Not too long ago, I got a new sponsor and started another round of the steps. I’m currently in Step 4, and there are some good questions in there about guilt. My favorite part about them is how they distinguish between earned guilt (which comes from things we ourselves have done) and unearned guilt (where we feel guilty about things other people have done/said/felt/etc.)

For the longest time, I carried around a lot of unearned guilt. Thanks to my working the program (and a lot of additional outside therapy), I’m able to recognize the source of it now: not being accepted or loved for who I was, just as I was, by the other people in my life when I was growing up. I remember once, when I was around ten years old, some bullies taped a sign to my back. It read ‘sorry I was born!’  And while that incident is horrible, the more horrible part is how that really was how I actually felt.

At an early age, I internalized the idea that I had to apologize for everything—especially for just being me. As I got older, I learned to hide who I really was and instead pretend to be who I thought others wanted me to be. The irony there is that I still saw myself as an honest person. I railed against people who didn’t trust me and wailed at how people were always accusing me or whatever they happened to be accusing me of. People called me secretive, assumed I was up to something, or hiding something, and I was—me.

You’ll hear people in the rooms talk about how they’ve become comfortable in their own skin. And with the 1,300+ one-days-at-a-time I have in Recovery, it has happened to me as well. I’ve learned that I don’t have to feel guilty about just being me, that it’s okay to be me, that there’s nothing wrong with being me at all. I don’t have to apologize for being who I am anymore.

Earned guilt, the guilt we feel over the things we have done or said, is something that needs to be addressed. And we have a step for that. We can make our amends, admit the things we have done and try to make it up to those we hurt. 

Unearned guilt, however, that to me is the real evil shit. Why? Because that’s guilt we’ve taken on for things we have no control over and can’t affect. We aren’t responsible for other people’s feelings, or for the things others have done. So many people use guilt as a manipulation tool, and we have to learn good boundaries in order to insulate ourselves and learn not to be affected by it. 

Learning those good boundaries that the program teaches us—that we’re not responsible for others, only ourselves—helps to fight that unearned guilt. Nowadays, when sometime tries to take me on that ride I can see it, recognize it for what it is, and think to myself, “aw, you’re trying to make me feel guilty for something I had nothing to do with. You’re trying to control me, what I think, how I feel and what I say and do. You know, that is so thoughtful. What a delightful shit sandwich you’re offering me! But, you know . . . I’m really not hungry.”

Guilt, and unearned guilt especially, is a reaction. The program teaches us how to stop being people who react, and instead we learn how to be people who take action. I’m responsible for me and how I feel, and no one else. No one else gets to make me feel guilty anymore, not for who I am, and especially not for something that isn’t mine.

Still Thinkin', Part 2

Continuing on with my thoughts on some of the behaviors and attitudes so common to those who suffer from the Disease…

Misery

“Miserable people will always try to get others to join them in their misery; someone else’s bad day (or life) doesn’t have to become yours, too.”

I wrote that quote the other day and shared it around with some friends. A lot of people could relate to it. I look at the whole subject as a two-headed monster; those of us with the Disease know misery, but we also have seriously poor boundaries, which lead us to take on other people’s misery in addition to our own.

When we’re miserable, we spread that misery to everyone nearby. It can be the way we snap back or bite someone’s head off when all they did was as a simple question. It can be general negativity, throwing our attitude around. Maybe we carry a dark cloud. Maybe we’re just bitter. We think we can’t help it, and we tell ourselves that it doesn’t affect other people. 

But it does. We are not alone in this world. How we act and react to others and to the world around us does affect the others in our lives. Misery can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, too. Maybe we’re convinced no one could like or love us or want to be around us. If someone does the unthinkable and tries to do one or the other, we push them away. Then, when they decide they’ve had enough of our bullshit, we think to ourselves with self-righteous satisfaction about how right we are.

We certainly don’t admit the truth—that it’s our own behavior keeping others away, or that we feel inside that we’re unlovable and can’t bear the thought of showing our true, wounded selves and giving others the chance to know and love us.

The other side of the coin, and something I think can be especially difficult for those of us in Recovery, is taking on other people’s misery, letting their attitudes affect us. We talk about this in the program all the time. In some ways, 12-steps is one huge stress-reduction program based around stringent boundaries training. Why else would we pray at every meeting for the ‘wisdom to know the difference’ between the things we can and can’t control?

But we are addicts, and we walk into the rooms with deeply ingrained patterns in our lives, patterns based on unhealthy relationships and coping strategies. Some of us (like myself) learned that we are responsible for other people’s feelings. We’re not. Some of us were taught that if someone is suffering, it’s our job to rescue and save them. It’s not. 

When we begin receiving the gifts of discovering a new way of life, we want to share those gifts with others. Sometimes we try to make others feel better because we hate seeing them suffer; sometimes we do it because we are still suffering ourselves and focusing on others allows us to escape from ourselves. That can be a good thing. But it can be a trap, too. 

We need to pay attention and make sure we aren’t giving advice where it hasn’t been asked for; we need to watch out to make sure we aren’t imposing our ideas of how another should live their life. And we really need to pay attention and make sure we aren’t trying to control someone else’s feelings. Other people get to feel how they feel, even if what they feel is misery.

We can change our attitudes, address our own misery. We can help others to feel better when they ask for help. And we can keep our own boundaries strong and makes sure that we ourselves are not dragged down into the mud with those people who insist on remaining miserable. I know for myself, one of the hardest boundaries for me to keep strong is allowing other people to have their misery. I see them suffering, I want to help, and I want them to ‘wake up’ and realize how much easier their lives would be if they simply let go.

Then I remember that my real motivation is that I don’t want them to be miserable so that I don’t have to deal with their shit. And once I’m there, then I’m back in line with the Honesty a spiritual way of living demands, and I can let go.

Still thinkin'

So I guess we can consider the blog reactivated, yes? Why no posts in so long? Life has been very full.  Between the stresses of work, my service in the program, my work with sponsees, hangtime with friends, my music endeavors, and making sure to take time to care for myself . . . well, you get the picture.

This is not to say that I’ve stopping thinking about the Disease. How can I not?  Aside from the work I do to stay strong in my own Recovery, I’m still surrounded by the Disease in my everyday life. These days, it’s the behaviors which are so part and parcel of our spiritual malady that are my main challenges. Not in myself so much (thank god), but in others.

First and foremost, though, I have to own up to my own shit, which means remembering that, yeah, it’s totally true that the program teaches us not to take others’ inventory. And I need to remember, too, that the things we see in others that we don’t like are all-too-often the characteristics we don’t like about ourselves. 

So having said that, I guess all that I’m about to write about could just as easily be viewed as insight into the character defects of my own that I work on and try to change and not practice any longer. Who knows? Maybe the very fact that I work so hard not to practice these things is one of the reasons they bother me so much in others. Or maybe I just continue to have crazy fucked up people in my life, like everyone else.

Regardless, I've been needing to write on some themes of the Disease that I have been thinking about lately, the first being...

Finger pointing

How many of us are familiar with the thinking that it’s always someone else’s fault? I can’t tell you how many times and for how many years I blamed the rest of the world for everything that was wrong in my life. It was always something someone else had done to me, some external reason for why I was miserable and my life a disaster. It was never my fault—are you kidding? I was the victim! It was all about what was done TO me. I was convinced that the Fates were at war with me—personally. 

I look back on that thinking and shake my head at how self-centered it is. Being (mostly) on the other side of that now, and understanding that type thinking, what it is and where it comes from, is interesting to say the least. I can see it in myself when it happens now, and I can recognize it in others, too. That’s both a blessing and a curse, because even though I might think I know what’s really going on with someone else—that they made a mistake and don’t want to admit it, or are covering up for some greater incompetence, or just flat-out don’t want to take responsibility for themselves—it’s not my job to shake my finger at them. In fact, my job is to do the exact opposite, to avoid taking others’ inventory and try to not be judgmental.

My friends in the program are people I depend on to call me on my bullshit, and vice-versa. We have an understanding about what it means to work the program, to try and correct our mistakes and change the way we live, and we need each other’s help to do it. Outside the rooms, our job is to let go and let others live their own lives their own way. We can take responsibility for what we’ve done wrong, the times we’ve slacked off in our own responsibilities, but we can’t make others do the same.

“Perfection”

Sometimes I wonder if the most bitter pill in life to swallow is a deep disappointment. It’s like that moment when you realize your dad isn’t a superhero. Or when someone you thought was a genius makes a truly moronic comment. It seems so strange; we walk through molestation, poverty, death, and more. Yet there’s nothing quite like that feeling when you realize someone or something isn’t perfect--and that someone can be ourselves.

When that moment happens, there’s an innocence that dies. A hope gets dashed. Where we once held a belief in something as ironclad, we now see it in a colder, more realistic light. Our disenchantment can be mild, or it can be bitter as bile.

A lot of addicts I know (myself included) hold ourselves to impossible standards. We expect ourselves to be perfect. We expect others to be perfect, too. We expect situations, even life itself, to be perfect. And when it isn’t, oh are we ever bitter about it. In the rooms of Recovery, we say this: expectations are pre-meditated resentments.

I was thinking today about a situation I was involved in. A member at my home group was having some behavior problems (not unfamiliar for 12-step rooms). This member regularly talked far longer than the allotted time and had a very bad habit of interrupting other members during their shares. The member was talked to outside of meetings, asked multiple times to shape up and show respect to others in the meeting. The behavior didn’t improve, and the member ended up leaving the group after being told that their bullshit would no longer be tolerated.

Now, certainly anyone who’s been in 12-step rooms for any length of time knows that we can’t expect them to be perfect sanctuaries of peace and tranquility; they aren’t. They won’t ever be. Learning that they aren’t, seeing our fellows, our sponsor ‘fall from grace’ is difficult to walk through and a rough patch on the path to long-term Recovery.

But I wonder, too, about that member who walked out. They weren’t told to leave, but I wonder if there wasn’t an expectation there that the room was supposed to be perfect for them, the perfect place where they could say whatever they wanted and just talk and talk and talk. The fact that it was an unreasonable expectation doesn’t really matter. I imagine the bitterness that member felt had a very bad taste. Having reality intrude, get in our face, it seems to do it in the rudest way sometimes.

I try to remember that I’m not perfect. One of the best gifts Recovery has given me is the knowledge that not only do I not have to be perfect, but that I couldn’t be if I tried. Perfection isn’t possible. We are human. We are flawed. We make mistakes. It happens. In my better moments, I even find a way to laugh at myself and take joy in merely being human. In my worse moments, I am my own worst critic.

There is no such thing as perfect. Beating up on ourselves for not being perfect is a waste of time. Or worse, a form of denial because if we’re blaming ourselves for not being perfect, then we’ve forgotten a basic truth of our existence--that we are human. The same could be said of blaming life, situations, or circumstances for not being perfect. They aren’t; they won’t ever be. And that’s okay!

And of course, if it’s unjust to blame ourselves for not being perfect, it is truly unjust for us to blame others for not being perfect themselves.