My Tangled Mess

Image credit: Photo by jamelah on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

I remember a friend telling me that she found it hard at a particular point in recovery to go to Al-Anon meetings because there was almost too much progress in the rooms. So many people were at a place in their recovery where they'd moved beyond talking about a loved one's alcoholism and were really focusing on their own issues. So, they would talk about how they worked through resentments around something a coworker had done or how they came to a new understanding of their fear of abandonment during a disagreement with a friend of where to have dinner. None of those things seemed to address where she was and the problems she was having coping with another person's addiction.

I think of that way sometimes when I sit down to write about where I am in relation to my husband's sex addiction and my own codependency, since honestly, the issues that are most pressing on my mind are the seemingly mundane ones: coping with Mark's work schedule, working through my need to plan outings in detail, finding my way through my inability to schedule in consistent homework time for the kids. These things don't seem like part of recovery, and yet they are. Everything is at this point.

There was a certain crazy way of looking at the world, at life, at myself that led me to be attracted to a sex addict and not recognize his addictness as anything out of the ordinary. And that craziness that led me to marry a sex addict wasn't limited to just this relationship. I had warped ways of dealing with family members and friends and coworkers and my kids' teachers and other drivers on the highway and folks who bagged my groceries. I've really worked on the part of my life that was twined up in my husband's addiction, but I've come to see that my issues still have themselves wrapped around other things in my life. It's all part of the same tangled mess.

But I wonder, when I write about things like almost-resentments around almost-lost stuffed animals, how much of that is going to help someone in the throes of that new hell of find out about the breadth and depth of a loved one's addiction. But of course, wondering about that is part of my own tangled mess too.

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This post was originally published at The Second Road.