Category Archives: codependency

The Way Things Ought To Be

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Every addict I’ve ever met has, in one way or another, had the same answer to his or her own happiness: If (he) (she) (they) (it) (the world) would just do things our way, that’s what would save the world and make us happy.

Those of us with fake self-esteem (the noisy ones) let everyone else know our solutions. If we’re the doormats — the ones who always seem to get hooked up with the noisy ones — we may not explain it to the world, but we still have our own ideas about what would “fix” our problems. All of these visions of The Way Things Ought To Be (TWTOTB) have one thing in common: they all depend on things outside ourselves, “the things we cannot change”.

The big problem is that things outside ourselves are often under the control of someone else, and some things, at least in theory, are under no one’s control — certainly not ours. Just as there can only be one boss in the workplace, whose ideas of TWTOTB most likely differ from ours and who may not want to listen to our counsel, so can there only be one, or at most a few, winners of the lottery. If we pray to win the lottery we are, in effect, praying for millions of othe people to lose. Many of those may need to win more than we do. Disregarding the likely failure of a millions-to-one gamble to provide a solid financial future, most folks of our kind who have won have failed to prosper regardless of the millions of $$, ¥¥, €€ or whatever, and such windfalls have been the downfall of many an addict.

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Trust Your Gut

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There is nothing mystical about hunches, intuition, and trusting your gut. We are all the sum total of millions–billions–of experiences, and we remember most of them on some level. We are well-equipped to let our subconscious minds help us out with problems, armed as they are with that wealth of experience.

But we often–if not usually–force ourselves to ignore those gut feelings, the feeling that something is just sort of “icky.” We want to do something, say something, buy something, to fill that empty place inside, and we think up all sorts of ways to justify our wants to ourselves and ignore the message that our subconscious mind is sending loud and clear, if we choose to hear it. Then we go on with the self-deception and make up ways to justify whatever it is to others–our partner, our business associates, our sponsors, our friends but, ultimately, to ourselves.

Good, healthy ideas seldom need justification. Feeling a need to explain, to justify, should tell us that something’s wrong somewhere. It may simply be a neurotic need on our part to assure ourselves and everyone else that we’re really OK, but there’s also an excellent possibility that we’re about to venture where we ought to fear to tread, guided by the child inside who is telling us it’s OK because I Want, I Want, I Want. In either case, there are two possible clues: the urge to hide whatever it is, or the urge to justify it. Both should set off our alarms.

Thought for the day: 02/04/2023

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Each Step, first taken in our conscious minds, has to be absorbed to take hold. Absorption happens during rest and play. Some describe being kind to ourselves in thoughts and actions as reprogramming our subconscious minds. If we want the benefits of the work to last, we have to concede that (a) we can’t get it all done in one sitting, (b) we will never get it 100% right all of the time and (c) being gentle with ourselves is part of Healing. Sponsors tell us to go meditate on this fact because, after all, meditation comes so easily to restless addicts. Sponsors are such comedians.

C., Joe. Beyond Belief: Agnostic Musings for 12 Step Life (pp. 100-101). Rebellion Dogs Publishing.

Here Comes The Judge

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no-finger-pointingHow judgmental am I?  Plenty.  It’s a character defect that I’ve worked hard to change, with only limited success, ever since I’ve been sober.

It runs in the family. My granny was one of those old French women who could never give a compliment without modifying it with a matching put down.  “She’s pretty, her, but look at that dress!”  My mom was the same way.  She’d drive down the road commenting on every fool that came across her path.  An otherwise quiet, gentle soul, she never missed a chance to point out a shortcoming.  Thankfully, that didn’t carry over to her kids, but any relative beyond her own siblings, or other passersby, was fair game.

So I came by it honestly, and I reveled in it.  There’s nothing like the ability to look at others and see their faults to perk up the spirits of a kid with chronically low self-esteem.  We won’t go into detail.  Suffice it to say that by the time I was a full-blown alcoholic, I was also skilled in letting you know that I knew — as Rush Limbaugh titled his book — “The Way Things Ought To Be.”

In all fairness to me, I was as hard on myself as I was on others.  For many years (sixty or so) I never measured up to my own standards.  An uncommonly handsome young man, I always thought I was skinny and gawky, with a big nose.  It wasn’t until 15 years into recovery when I saw a yearbook photo of myself that I was able to get my head around the fact that I had been a good looking kid.

As a writer, for decades I stayed away from anything that wasn’t cut and dried.  I wrote technical articles and manuals, and eventually edited the work of others, because I believed that — even though I had a passion for writing — I wasn’t good enough to do “that other stuff.”  Those ideas and feelings carried over into the rest of my life in ways too many to count.

Yet I was always ready to point out where you were wrong, where he had screwed up, where she could have done better — anything that would let you know that I was on top of things, knew how it was, and that you’d better work hard if you wanted to measure up.  I was the guy who damned you with faint praise; who, when offered by a wife a choice of a special meal, would say “Yeah, that would be OK,” instead of, “Oh, wow honey!  What a great idea!”  Who would tell a child, “Nice job on the picture, honey, but wouldn’t it have been better if you had….”  (I still get tears in my eyes when I think of that stuff, and believe me I’ve made amends to both my daughters.  But it didn’t fix all those years.)

And why did I do those things?  Simply because my own opinion of myself was so low that I couldn’t let anyone else excel. Pointing out people’s so-called defects made me able to feel better about those I imagined were mine.

As a drunk, it got worse.  I was a bombastic pain in the ass.  I alienated people right and left.  Simply didn’t know how to act — and didn’t care.  I was the smart guy.  I was the cop.  I was the martial artist.  I was the Mensa guy (another shot at proving I was as good or better than you).  I was the one who knew The Way Things Ought To Be.  I was the asshole.

Anyone relate?  A lot of you should….

Years in recovery have helped.  Meditation has helped.  Therapy has helped.  Living with a woman who tells me when I need to pay attention to my thinking has helped.  But I still have the days, especially when I’m driving (of course, I used to be a driving instructor, chauffeur, blah, blah, blah…) when there are far greater numbers of jackasses out there with me than one would reasonably expect.

I’m not, by any means, the guy I’d like to be.  But I’ll tell you this: every time I catch myself doing the judgment thing, it reminds me of how much worse it used to be, and that I can move onward, become more skillful, and that the program I’ve been trying to live by all these years really does work.

Sometimes I have to ask myself, “Just how big a jerk do you want to be today?”  That, and the fact that I’ve come to realize that it makes me look really bad, keeps me trying.

Journaling In Recovery

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I’ve been journaling for going on sixty years, off and on. During that time I’ve filled up ledgers, spiral notebooks, diaries, the back pages of pilot logbooks, and several megabytes of disk space. My current drug of choice is the pocket-sized Moleskine notebook with the graph paper pages, or a similar one sold by Target for about half the price. Over the past few years I’ve started putting everything in it: shopping lists, notes to self, jotted addresses and phone numbers, the better to create a true daily record.

I say “drug of choice” because journaling has become an ingrained habit with me, if not actually an addiction. (Writing, on the other hand, qualifies fully, including withdrawal symptoms.) I’ve lost most of the journals I kept in my youth and through the years of my addiction; a shame, really, since if I had those I could actually write a book, although I can’t help thinking that the embarrassment factor might be seriously off-putting. Anyway, that doesn’t matter.

I do have my jottings for virtually all of the years I’ve been in recovery, and it has been highly instructive to go back and check out the cringe factor in those. When I read something and find it makes me squirm, I become aware of one more way that I’ve changed — or not changed — and it shows me a lot about my successes and also the areas where I need more work.

I consider my journals an integral and essential part of my recovery. For a couple of years I tried keyboarding, and it just wasn’t the same. I have to put pen to paper and actually write things down. My-wife-the-shrink informs me that physically writing things engages different parts of the brain, and the inability to make changes easily causes us to think more deeply and carefully about what we’re recording. I agree with that. I find that my handwritten musings have far more gut-level effect when I re-read them, so I have to assume that I’m digging deeper to begin with.

I require those I sponsor to journal, as well — those who know how to read and write. (The others go to literacy classes.) I give them each a notebook, so they’ll have no excuse for procrastinating. I don’t demand to read them, but when we meet I expect them to show me that they have been writing. Those who have remained sober and in contact often mention that they have continued to do so, and remark how much they get out of looking back at who they were early on. Some have remarked how much it helped them when they got serious about a 4th Step.

Try it. You may not like it, but you’ll benefit. The rules are simple: use the same book, use ink (no erasing), and write something every day — even if it’s just the date. No one but you will be reading it, so you have nothing to fear but fear itself.