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| Image credit: Photo by c@rljones on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons |
When I first discovered my husband's addiction, I knew I was going to need healing from the pain and devastation I was facing, so I looked for support groups for partners. But I couldn't seem to find plain old support; all I could find was "recovery." You know, from my "disease" of codependency. What?! I was not the screwed up one here. All I did was unwittingly marry an addict; he was the one with all the problems. My only problem was that he had problems: fix him and my issues would magically go away, right?.
Well, since I couldn't find anything else, and I did need relief from this hurt I was in, I dragged myself off to some meetings. And I'd sit there, grumpily, listening to recovery literature that didn't make any sense to me. There was a lot of talk about how badly people like me had handled some of the situations in our lives. I heard about how unhealthy it was to do things like spy on my husband or try to control where he went and what he did. (Well, duh, I wouldn't have to do those things if he did what he was supposed to and didn't lie.) And I'd always think, "Silly recovery writers, if you're so smart, what would a healthy person do in my shoes? You're telling me what I'm not supposed to do, but not what I am supposed to do."
Now, years later, I'm a healthier person and I do much more of what "healthy people" do. And I can see what impossible things I was demanding of the wisdom and experience I was hearing, because I had the whole thing backwards. It's not what I do that makes me feel better, it's how I feel that makes me do better.
The old me at this point would be saying, "That's impossible. How can I feel better when my life sucks so much? When my husband stops being an addict and when I stop having so much to do and when my kid's principal stops being such a jerk and when my kids are older and don't demand so much of me and when I can make a little more money... then I'll feel better." And the old me wouldn't have liked the answer I found: Faith. Faith that the world will be ok without me needing to fix it. Faith that I'll be ok no matter what. Faith that my kids will be ok no matter what.
The truth is a lot of my "healthy" actions aren't very different from what they used to be. While some do look very different (I don't check phone records anymore or fish through pockets for receipts), in many other cases some of my healthy new boundaries can look a lot like my unhealthy old attempts to control. But in coming at them from a place of faith and balance in letting go of the outcomes and trusting myself and others they feel different, to me and to everyone else around me.
I don't ask myself any longer "What would a healthy person do?" If I'm in a healthy mental and spiritual place, knowing what to do is easy. Getting to that healthy place from which I can do it is the hard part.
This post was originally published at The Second Road.
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