Healthy as a Second Language

Image credit: Photo by Hatters! on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons

You may not realize it, but my native language is Codependent, with special fluency in the Implied Requests and "Helpful" Advice dialects. As I've worked on myself, I'm learning to communicate in ways that are healthier, not only for me, but for my relationships with others. But it is still a struggle not to fall back into old patterns.

A friend of mine in recovery told me that asking a codependent for advice is like offering an alcoholic a drink; we codies find it hard to resist. Now unsolicited advice (I say with tongue firmly planted in cheek) is unconscionable, but solicited advice? I mean, it would be terrible for me to just help myself to a drink at someone's party, but if the host offers me one, now it would be rude to refuse, wouldn't it? And recently I've had a number of folks ask me for advice recently, making it hard to resist slipping back into my my native tongue.

I know the rules of my new language, Healthy, but I still find myself jumping in with Codependent first and then having to translate in my head:

"Well, since you asked, here's what you should do about your problems at work. You should talk to your supervisor and you should say..."

No. Damn. I'm bossing. Let's start over. How do I say this in Healthy? Don't say "you," say "I."

"When I had a problem like that at work, I talked to my supervisor and said..."

Ok, that's better (and this is often as far as I'm able to get), but if I'm honest with myself, I can see I'm still passive-aggressively trying to solve that particular problem. Deep breath. Let go of the outcome. Remember it is not my job to fix this. This is not about me. It is better for me to seek to understand than to be understood.

"Wow, that sounds really upsetting. I really struggle with these situations because I have a lot of fear around angering someone and losing my job."

Whew, better still. I empathized and spoke to the general situation rather than trying to jump in and solve the problem for someone else.

And all I have to do after all that translating is take out my codependent earplugs and listen.

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This post was originally published at The Second Road.