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| Image credit: Photo by idlelight on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons |
A few months ago, a friend of mine, who is a single mom, asked me if I'd be willing to help her out while she worked late, because she'd missed a few days taking care of her son when he was sick and now needed to put in extra hours to maintain her health insurance eligibility. Now, helping out a friend in that situation is the kind of thing one is usually willing to do without a second thought. But what if she asked me to help so that she could free up some time go out and steal car stereos to get drug money? Or assassinate the President? Or just go out clubbing? Now it may sound ridiculous (at least if you've never been burned by addiction), but in spite of the fact that she has never (as far as I know) deceived me, I did actually wonder about this. It's a little thought experiment I like to do these days called: "What if this person is lying?"
Lying is part and parcel of the disease of addiction, and it was the hardest thing for me to deal with about my husband's sex addiction. The lies hurt so much that I told my husband years ago (as I tried to bargain away my grief) that I could learn to deal with the things he did (the porn and the sex chats and the encounters with other women), if only he would not lie about them. The lies, the deception, the denial, the projected fantasy had been the reality of my world, and when I saw them for what they were — when I knew that Mark hadn't been doing the things he said he had and that life didn't work the way I thought it did — everything crumbled. If my husband, my best friend, the guy who wouldn't call in sick to work if he weren't really sick because he didn't want to lie — if em he/em could lie to me, and in many cases lie so well that I never suspected a thing — then how could I know what was real? Maybe everyone was lying. Maybe my life was some big joke everyone in the world was in on but me.
So, I've been bamboozled big time with the result that I trust no one to be entirely what and who they say they are or seem to be. I learned that, unless I witness something myself (and maybe not even then), I can't really know what is happening at any given moment. My husband is out of the house right now. Is he at his 12 Step meeting or out having sex with someone else? I know where he says he is, but I can't know where he really is. (And if your mind is spinning on how to build a tamper-proof spycam right now, then I have a 12 Step meeting for codependency I can take you to.) My daughter is out of the house right now. Is she having a ball playing with her best friend or being abducted by space aliens? I don't have any way of knowing right at this moment.
I can intuit what's likely. I can evaluate the evidence I do have. I can do my best to judge the possibilities and probabilities based on what I know. I can learn about things after the fact. But I can't know The Truth about everything right now.
So, when my friend asked me to help her out, I played out those "what if" scenarios to help me feel out my boundaries and intentions, to remind myself of what I can't know and to help me let go of the outcome. In the end, I did help because it felt right, in this scenario, to take that leap of faith, even if there was a risk I was wrong, that she was deceiving me, that she was out to hurt me or others, that she was taking advantage of me, that her intentions weren't pure. I can't know or control her intentions, but wondering about them can be a useful tool to help keep me in touch with mine.
This post was originally published at The Second Road.
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