“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.

“Decisions, Decisions”

‘Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.’ --Step Three.

There’s an old saying about how all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. I like this idea a lot. It really highlights the need for being active, for taking action. If you aren’t doing something to stand up against what’s wrong, you’re giving your silent approval to what’s happening.

When I took my college classes on diversity, we discussed the same idea. We talked about racism, sexism, and all the other ‘isms’, as systems of oppression. These systems exist and are inherent to the way things are, and will persist until changed for no other reason than because they are the status quo. Therefore, if you aren’t actively working to fight against these systems, then you’re accepting them and—again, through your inaction—making a tacit admission that they are okay.

This way of thinking applies to Recovery, too. Those of us who’ve been in this for more than a few one-days-at-a-time know that we don’t get to stagnate. We don’t get to just tread water. If we aren’t moving forward, we’re moving backwards. That’s just how it is for folks like us. If we aren’t actively fighting, taking action to keep the Disease at bay, then we’re letting the Disease win. It never quits. It’s always there, waiting for us to get lazy, for us to let our guard down, and to drag us back to the hell we’ve worked so hard to escape.

A big part of the third step is recognizing the enormity of what we do in it—and it’s not so much what we decide to do, but the simple fact that we made a decision at all! Sure, it’s huge that we make a decision to turn over our will and our lives, but just as important is the fact that we made a decision in the first place. We begin our transformation from people of inaction into people of action. We begin to become people who are actively in charge of the direction of our lives, instead of just following the path of least resistance and avoidance.

As time has passed for me in my Recovery, I have begun to see being active or being passive, making decisions or not, differently. I’ve become more conscious of how not making a decision is in itself a decision. If I put off making a decision, then I am passively deciding to continue accepting things as they are.

One example of this from my own life is my current job situation. I think a lot of aspects of my work environment are unacceptable. So, I’m applying for other jobs and going out on interviews. If I wasn’t doing these things, or taking some other form of action, then all I’d be doing is complaining. And no matter how loud I might complain, my actions would still show that the situation is, in reality, acceptable to me.

Another example (which, admittedly, is a bit harsh) is someone who’s in an abusive relationship but has not yet made the decision to leave. Until they make that decision, they are—by default—deciding to stay. And by the way, I don’t mean to ignore the enormity of life-changing decisions. I know how tough big decisions are. All I’m saying is that not making a decision to change can, in effect, be the same thing as making a decision to not change.

When it comes to fighting evil, fighting racism and sexism (and all the other ‘isms’ of injustice), it’s really easy to feel that the fight is futile. And maybe it is. Maybe the quest to change these things is an impossible one, a task that will never be completed. But if I don’t at least try, if I don’t work to try to change things, then I’m saying I’m okay with things being the way they are. I’m not.

The same is true for me in my Recovery. If I stop the work of Recovery, if I cease that daily maintenance of my spiritual condition, then I am saying that it’s okay to move backwards and to go back towards being the old me I used to be. It isn’t.

Recovery is a daily decision. Every day, I get to decide whether I’m going to move forward or backward. If I don’t choose to move forward, then by default I will end up choosing to move backwards. And that is not acceptable to me. So I keep choosing to move forward—one day at a time.

“But I'm Not Using”

It's a refrain of mine: the Disease never quits. All that I am, everything I have inside me, all my addict tendencies, thoughts behaviors, and actions, that potential is still with me. I've learned a new way of living, that I don't have to use or act out on my addiction, that it is possible to live a different way. But I've found it important to remember, to reaffirm on a regular basis, that my potential to live that way, and to cause all the chaos and wreckage I used to cause, never goes away.

It's another common comment of mine is that the Disease isn't about substances. The thoughts and behavior, the actions we take when we're in our Disease, that symbolizes the disease more than our use. People didn't hate me because I was fucked up all the time, they hated me because I was an asshole. And even though the program of recovery can help us to stop using, far more powerful for me is how it's helped me to stop being an asshole. (For the most part--I'm still not perfect ;-)

It's about the difference between sobriety and recovery. And this too is a really important point. If I'm not using, then sure that's great; but if I'm still being an asshole, then why would anyone care?

I've known people who went through some seriously rough times in their lives. I mean deaths of parents, children, life-threatening illness, and did it without picking back up. They talk about how hard it was, how they didn't get through it perfectly, but at least they didn't use. It's an affirmation.

I've know people who use that same phrase in a negative way. Maybe they're going rough spots in their own life, but instead of doing what needs to be done to take care of business, they sit in inaction and tell themselves it's okay because they aren't using. Next thing you know, their lives are going all to hell. Maybe they've found other ways to fix without drugs. Maybe they're fixing with food, or with sex; maybe they're obsessing themselves with other people and others' lives. The deep, dark, hole of their lives keep getting deeper and darker. Instead of affirming their sobriety, they use the fact of their abstinence as a crutch, as a blanket of denial or an excuse to take not take action.

Sobriety isn't the same as Recovery. If we stop working the program, if we cease our pursuit of living life by spiritual principles, we aren't living in recovery. We might not be using, but so what?

“Life After Drugs”

I wasn’t one of those people who thought their life would be over if they quit using, but there are plenty who do (or did). Some people don’t ever even try sobriety because they don’t want to become a ‘boring’ normie. Some folks have the misfortune of walking into their first twelve-step room and being faced with dour, depressed faces. News flash: Recovery does not have to be a funeral. If it feels like it is, then you’re doing it wrong.

My fear was always that life never would become anything other than misery. Actually, I can’t even call it a fear. I was convinced that was what life was, or at least what my life was. I thought everyone did it that way, that anybody who claimed to be happy was merely pretending. I was convinced that the agony I spent each day in was how everyone felt and that getting fucked up was how we all dealt with it. And let’s not forget the final piece of that particular insanity of mine—that I was a grade-‘A’ fuck up because I couldn’t keep doing it anymore.

I am still amazed that my life can be so full of joy. I used to think joy and happiness weren’t ever attainable, that at best all I could achieve was to be so deadened from substances that I felt nothing. That was my pitiable attempt at achieving happiness and balance in life—to be so fucked up that I was dead to all feelings, to the people around me, and the world I lived in.

These days, it is so different. Like night and day. No, more like the cold and dark of absolute zero in the middle of space, versus dancing on the surface of the sun in eternal brightness. I get to have a life now. I get to have a balanced life, too. I get to work, to play. I get to have my moments of struggle and the times of reward. I have hobbies, friends. There are sacrifices and payoffs. There is balance.

I never thought to myself that I didn’t want to quit because I wouldn’t have a life if I did; I never thought I had a life to begin with. I wasn’t a party user. I was a depressed, lonely soul who hid from the world and desperately tried everything he could to get the world to leave him alone. I tried everything I could to be emotionally dead. I even tried to make being dead a reality—without any success, obviously, and I can tell you that there is really nothing worse for a disastrously low self-esteem than failing at committing suicide!

Yes, there is a life after getting clean and sober. For those like myself, it’s a life like we’ve never known was possible; it’s the first time we’ve ever truly even had a life.

“Transitions”

It’s been over a month since my last entry, so I’m giving myself permission to be long-winded today.

I’ve been doing this Recovery thing for a few one-days-at-a-time now. Last month, I passed my 4-year sobriety birthday. I’ve had the opportunity to see a lot of newcomers come in, go back out, and stay. And I’ve seen people with some clean time continue to struggle with how the Disease never quits trying to run their life. I have my struggles, too. Fortunately, they’re what we like to call ‘quality problems’. Things like how I’m no longer out of work and desperate for a job; these days I have a job—a pretty good one at that!--and my problem is the struggle to find a different job, one that’s a better fit for me and that I can be happy doing.

As I’ve been looking for a new job, I’m having to spend a lot of time in a mental place that is really uncomfortable for me. I like certainty. I like knowing What Is. Waiting for a call to interview, or to hear about whether I’ve gotten a position or not, that is all ‘what if’ territory. And no matter how hard I try to let go and let god, I still struggle to do so. And in the meantime, the Disease keeps feeding me all kinds of crap, tempting me to jump on board and ride the Obsession Express train back to crazy town.

I don’t like what-if anymore. Not knowing drives me crazy these days. I can’t do anything with what-if. Good news, bad, or indifferent, that I can deal with. But what-if is all about waiting, having patience, trusting. And the more I want something, the harder it is to sit in that place of uncertainty regarding it. This uncertainty is difficult when it comes to romantic relationships as well. And, just as it is with a job I want, the more interested I am in someone, the harder it is for me—especially when it comes to trying to read the situation and the others involved.

I do have my life experience, what brought me to the program, the work I’ve done in the program and the tools I’ve learned to use. I know that, as uncomfortable as it is for me, the worst thing I could do would be to try and control the situation. To try and do something, reacting from a place of what-if and my discomfort with those feelings, well that is all to the bad. Because if I do that, then I’m trying to run my life and that shit does not work. God takes care of me. Always has. All that’s required of me is to do my part and let him take care of the rest.

The parallels of the two situations keep going, actually. Even if I’m called in to interview for a new job, that only adds to the already heavy stress and unhappiness I have about my current one. The same is true as I struggle to meet someone, or on the rare times when I do—I have all the uncertainty of that new situation, compounded by all the feelings associated with being alone. First dates are obscenely stressful. It's an important point: my fears my insecurities are still there, despite my time in the program. They don’t fully go away. I handle them much better now than I used to (maybe even better than most folks out there), but they don't vanish.

Ironically, the guidance for how to handle each of these two totally different situations is the same. Whether it’s work or romance, all I can do is honestly present myself. The other will be interested, or they won’t. And sure, I may be disappointed if things don't go the way I want them to, but I know (from painful experience) that it does me no good to try and manipulate the situation. That’s what my experience has taught me—when I try to make reality resemble my own designs, that’s when I go crazy, shit gets fucked up, and people get hurt.

But like I said before this very meaningful tangent, what I deal with now are quality problems. And I find myself thinking often about how REALLY lucky I am. I’m in good health. I haven’t developed any cross-addictions. There have been moments where I’ve seen the potential for them and have taken action to ensure they don’t develop (one example: I used to be a good poker player; I don’t play poker anymore). My best guess as to why I’ve been so fortunate in this area is that I have a fierce devotion and determination to work and keep on working the program. Perhaps that is where I am the most fortunate.

I'm not sure if I can say how or why I have so much willingness to work the program, to turn immediately to it when times are rough. Maybe my higher power decided to bless me with this gift. Maybe it’s something I’ve learned from my experience that the program works only if I work it. Maybe it’s an instinct I’ve developed over the past four years. Or maybe it’s because the program is the only thing in all my long years of suffering I've ever found that actually, truly helped.

Hmm… writing that last line leads me to a different thought.

I had coffee with a fellow member recently. I asked them why they continued to work the program, what it was that kept them going. In their response, they talked about how it feels to no longer spend every day wanting to die.

The statement is true for me, too. Before I found Recovery, that was how my life was. I didn’t want to go to bed at night because I’d just have to wake up in the morning and go through it all all over again. Every day was misery, walking around so emotionally raw, in constant pain that was so unbearable, pain I had felt for so long that I couldn’t even begin to tell you why. And it had been like that for so long I couldn’t even tell you when it had started. If you went back and talked to me in my days of self-mutilation (late teens, early 20s), I would have told you the exact same thing—that I’d always felt like this, that I was in constant emotional pain, and even then I wouldn’t have been able to tell you why or when it started.

I wish I could explain this to others—how it feels to live every day of your life wanting to die, and then to not feel that way anymore. And not just no longer wanting to die, but feeling genuinely joyful to be alive, happy to have a life that works. The best parallel I can think of would be to tell folks imagine starving for over thirty years and then eating for the first time. And at first it’s just scraps, then it becomes full meals, then steaks and fresh vegetables, and every bite is a pleasure beyond words.

If someone were to ask me to put a finger on it, that’s the reason I would cite for where my willingness comes from: I used to spend every day wanting to die; today I don’t. And I really don’t want to go back to wanting to die. More than any other reason, I used as a way to escape being miserable. The fact that I'm not miserable anymore is a miracle I once thought impossible.

So even as I walk through the desert of ‘what-if’, I can work the program, listen to the guidance of my higher power and have patience. It’s hard, it’s uncomfortable, but I can do it. And hey, I fully admit that I am largely writing that right now in order to re-convince and remind myself that I can. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just a little good old fashioned acting as-if and remembering that This, Too, Shall Pass.