Relapse

Several posts back, I mused about the possibility of my husband experiencing a "slip" or relapse in his recovery. It's an uncomfortable thing to think about. In the beginning especially, it seems like everything hinges on his sobriety. The point of my program is to learn that while his committment to his program is important to our relationship, I can live a serene and fulfilling life whether or not he experiences a relapse, or even returns to active addiction.

A few weeks ago, I came home from work to find my husband slumped over, asleep on the couch. As I approached him, I saw an empty vodka bottle on the floor. Yes, he had relapsed.

I had hoped that my 9 months in the program would adequately prepare me for a moment like this. It did prepare me, but it didn't prevent me from immediately relapsing into crazy thoughts myself. The first things I was aware of feeling were fear and anger. I wanted to shake him awake and interrogate him. I wanted to know why this had happened, and I wanted reassurance that it wouldn't happen again. Of course, this was not the moment to try to find answers, especially to an unanswerable question.

So, I tried to do the next right thing. I stepped out of the house and called some program friends. I left a message for one, and reached the next one on the phone. She helpfully reminded me that this was not an emergency: no one was on fire or dying. I could go do some things to take care of myself, and discuss this when he was sober. I did want to figure out one burning question: we had a therapy appointment in an hour, and I couldn't figure out whether I should bring him or not. She suggested I ask him, and call the therapist to see if she would object to him coming in this state.

It turned out that he didn't want to go anyway, so I went to the appointment by myself, and it was helpful. After that I went to the gym, and then did some studying. I had to stay out of the house to keep a bit of sanity in the moment, but I was glad that I was able to practice some self-care and remember that what he did was really not my business. Not that I didn't care, but I couldn't control it and it wasn't up to me, for a lot of good reasons.

Over the next few days we were able to talk more about it, and I think it helped both of us. The relapse was a wake-up call for both of us that sobriety is a gift, and one that should never be taken for granted. It taught us both humility in our recoveries, and it really taught me the importance of having my own recovery to lean on and prevent me from simply reacting and adding more fuel to the fire. I could see that reacting out of fear and anger was no better than the addict's behavior. It also served as a warning that he was under a tremendous amount of stress that he wasn't dealing with, and we were able to talk about both his stress and my stress over the same situation. As a result, he is more effectively dealing with the situation which is his to deal with, and I am able to see his committment to a healthier life.

I won't lie, relapse is scary. But with the help of the program, it is survivable, and can be instructive for the addict and the coaddict. I do hope for both of our sakes that it doesn't happen again, but if it does we will get through it.

Then and Now: Halloween

For years, I have felt like some kind of prude when I look at Halloween costumes. Each year it seems the costumes (especially for women) get more revealing, more trampy. Halloween parties, as an adult, have really become an excuse to drink excessively and release one's sexual inhibitions--inhibitions which normally serve a good purpose, i.e. boundaries.

Last year, my husband and I went to a Halloween party thrown by a coworker. The party was lavish, and huge. Many, many people from the facility I work in were there, and displayed some appalling behavior. There was a lot of alcohol. I enjoyed visiting with friends, and I did drink, but I was fairly shocked by some of the things that people who work together all the time were doing. My husband was there, but didn't know many people there. Surrounded by excessive drinking, he visited for a little while but then slunk off into a corner. I imagine it wasn't much fun for him: it was hard even for me to recognize people I didn't know well when they were in costume, and he didn't drink socially because, like many alcoholics, he didn't drink in public. (At the time I didn't realize that he was binge-drinking in private on a regular basis.)

This year, we spent Halloween at a SA/S-Anon retreat. There was no mention of the holiday at the retreat. I am sure that Halloween is pretty triggering for recovering SAs--and their mates, for that matter. Instead, we had several outstanding speakers, lots of meetings, and time to socialize with other people in recovery from the region. It was really nice.

The company party happened again, bigger and better than ever, but it was a relief not to go this year. The excessive drinking and sexual behavior is uncomfortable to me now, and would have been even less fun for hubby if he decided to accompany me. I like dressing up in costume, but it's hard to have fun with hundreds of people you hardly know, especially when their behavior is making you uncomfortable, and especially after recovery has shown you the dangers of this kind of behavior. It's not something I want in my life right now.

Emotional Integrity

The past few weeks I have been thinking a lot about "feeling feelings", and recognizing them in myself. For over 30 years, my MO has been to deny any negative or "unacceptable" feelings that I had, usually before I was even aware that I had it. The reason for this was simple: it was what I learned from my parents, and it was how I survived.

What qualified a feeling to be "unacceptable?" If it would prompt a response from me that would make the other person upset or angry, it was unacceptable. If it would force me to look at a situation honestly that I didn't feel strong enough or ready to look at honestly, it was unacceptable. If it revealed me to be anything other than stalwart, serene, and implacable, it was unacceptable.

My mother is a master of hiding her emotions. There is so much discordance between her demeanor and what is obviously going on around her that it makes the observer uncomfortable. When I was an adolescent. she would spill her guts to me about her emotions and the situations in her life that caused her turmoil--hating her job, hating her body, the strain of having affairs and her unhappiness in her marriage, for starters. But other than these periodic soul-baring sessions (I'll probably post on boundaries and enmeshment at another point), she always had a surface that could not be ruffled, and constant turmoil beneath. I was taught, implicitly and explicitly, that it was unacceptable to do otherwise, especially for women.

Now I am in recovery, years later, and I am learning how this "skill" of showing a game face at all times and portraying an outer image of calm and poise has worked against me. I have begun to think of emotions as a kind of integrity. I always considered myself to be a person of integrity, and in many ways I always have been. But in a very basic way I wasn't, because my emotions didn't match what I showed others or even myself. I have been thinking of this as internal and external. I need a certain level of internal integrity with myself, an acknowledgment of my own feelings rather than denial. And I need external emotional integrity, so that in my dealings with other people what I express matches what I am feeling. In being true to myself by owning how certain situations make me feel, I am also allowing others to see who I really am, which is a kind of integrity.

I don't feel that in order to be a person of integrity, I must wear my heart on my sleeve at all times. For once, this isn't about how others see me so much as me living who I really am. It's not always comfortable to change my old ways; in fact, every time I have to own one of those unacceptable emotions, it makes me want to deflect and deny, as I always have before. But I'm only harming myself by doing this. Integrity is about consistency: "...consistency of actions, values, methods, measures, principles, expectations and outcome," according to Wikipedia.

Without an internal dissonance between who I am and who I portray to the world, I can spend the energy I save on improving my relations with others further. This is a gift of recovery.

Daily Life in Recovery

For the first time in months, hubby and I are reestablishing a social life. We are both at a point in our recoveries that we feel like making the effort to socialize with friends regularly, if possible. Life doesn't always allow this as much as we would like, but we are trying. We had a nice weekend out of town reconnecting with friends of mine that I haven't seen in years, and hubby got to meet them. We all had a pretty enjoyable time. I now approach friendships with the same kind of eyes I've developed for the rest of my life, trying my best to see things "as they are" and not "as I wish they were." People have their problems and issues, but it is now much more important to me to spend time with people who don't feel the imperative to pretend their lives are perfect. That's not to say that everyone I spend time with is 100% honest about who they are and what goes on all the time, but at least I can be with people who try to keep it real and try to break through the denial as much as possible.

I feel like our life is a bit more solid now than in the beginning of the year. Things are definitely still not easy--school, rebuilding trust in our marriage, trying to work a recovery program, dealing with multiple difficulties with family--but honesty is improving, and right intention and commitment to one another is clearly there. We have a spiritual life that is fulfilling and fruitful. We don't have all the answers, and certainly there are days that I feel defeated and less than hopeful, but they are getting fewer and further between. Meanwhile, I have a little more patience with life, and am trying to be a little more honest and a little less controlling every day. It really isn't any more complicated than that.

Making Space

I've been away for a bit...but this blog has been on my mind. I think there might be enough disconnected thoughts of blog posts floating around that perhaps I will have a little flurry of posts in the next several days.

I've had a difficult week this week. A lot of my codie thinking and habits have been triggered by life circumstances and people who probably don't have my best interests at heart. I've been thinking a lot about trust, and how to rebuild trust after it has been broken.

I learned a new (to me) term this week: "gaslighting", which is basically subterfuge and redirection designed to make another person feel crazy so they believe the lie the "gaslighter" is trying to pull off. That happened to me a lot, as my SA husband tried to keep his activites from being discovered. This kind of thing has a lasting effect on a person, because you end up doubting yourself and most insidiously, your instinct. It was my very instincts that were targeted by this behavior, so that now what was once one of my strongest tools is constantly subjected to doubt.

I started suspecting my husband of relapsing. Rather than call a program friend or even just stop long enough to remember that his program, including his sobriety, is his business, I spiralled into crazy thinking. I began to think that I would never be able to trust him--or anyone--again.

Finally, I started to see that his program and his sobriety are his business. I have to count on his own investment in his recovery to prevent relapse, or to enable him to recover from a relapse if one happened. Once I could see that, I realized that what I wanted most was for him to be able to tell me if he slipped or relapsed, but that I had made it impossible for him to do that, through a series of ultimatums and insinuations that any slip would be the end of the relationship. There was no room in our relationship for that kind of honesty, and therefore no basis to rebuild trust. It's not just me that needs to be able to trust him; he has to rebuild his trust in me, too, to be able to share something like that with me. If I am not a safe place for him to share his struggles without risking our marriage, where is the trust?

I do understand that for many people, relapse is a part of recovery. I don't like that, but I do understand it's true. That certainly doesn't mean that it is inevitable for my husband or for anyone in particular. But I have to be prepared for the fact that it could happen, and the only way to minimize the damage is for us to be able to talk about it and for him to feel that it doesn't spell doom to our marriage. If he feels that there is no space for a conversation like that to happen, not only does resentment build up, but if a relapse does occur there is that much more reason for it to be a big one, rather than a small slip. After all, if it's going to mean the end of the relationship anyway, why not "do it right?"

If it does happen, what he does next is his to decide, and is a subject between him and his sponsor, and probably our therapist. I hope at some point along the way he would feel comfortable sharing it with me, if I didn't know already. But none of that is up to me. All I can do is try to create the possibility for understanding and trust between us, without closing off any possible avenues to communication and growth.

I feel a lot better that I was able to finally get this, and share it with him. I've behaved poorly up until this point, and have suffered for it, as I think he has too. I have a lot to learn still, but I'm grateful to be in the position to learn it.

The Root of Happiness

Pema Chodron, in her brilliant little book, "The Places That Scare You," talks about the four limitless qualities, which are loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. Here is how she introduces them:

It's up to us. We can spend our lives cultivating our resentments and cravings or we can explore the path of the warrior--nurturing open-mindedness and courage. Most of us keep strengthening our negative habits and therefore sow the seeds of our own suffering. The bodhichitta practices, however, are ways for us to sow the seeds of well-being. Particularly powerful are the aspiration practices of the four limitless qualities--loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity.
~p. 51, The Places That Scare You

In four chapters, she describes meditations that explore and expand these qualities in ourselves towards all people. The first one, which I have actually tried, focuses on happiness. It is based on the following chant:

May all sentient beings enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.
May we be free from suffering and the root of suffering.
May we not be separated from the great happiness devoid of suffering.
May we dwell in the great equanimity free from passion, aggression, and prejudice.

This meditation has seven parts. Basically, you first focus on yourself: May I enjoy happiness and the root of happiness. Then you focus on the same thing for someone very close to you--your mate, your closest friend, etc. Then you expand that thought to someone you feel fondly about, but are not terribly close to. Then you expand that thought to someone you feel neutrally about--the mailman, or the barista you order your coffee from. Eventually you focus this thought on someone you dislike or who annoys you. Then you try to keep all of these people in your thoughts and expand your wish for all of these people, and for all beings everywhere, to enjoy happiness and the root of happiness. The idea is to practice feeling the same expansive wish for joy for all people, and ultimately to realize that the idea that we are separate from any other beings is an illusion. Why shouldn't we wish for every being to experience happiness? Even the ones we dislike.

I found after practicing this meditation that it stayed with me for quite a while. I saw people out in the world that I didn't know, and thought that thought: May he enjoy happiness and the root of happiness. One of the people I dislike that I meditated about was a doctor I work with, and when I saw him at work I thought: may he enjoy happiness and the root of happiness. The thought actually made me happier; instead of seeing him and feeling surly or irritated, I felt more expansive and less separated by my dislike or resentment.

The root of happiness, as I see it, is freedom from suffering. The Buddha taught that suffering is caused by attachment, which is characterized by clinging. I think this is one of those deceptively simple teachings that one can learn about one's entire life. How simple, just stop clinging! Stop clinging to our ideas of ourselves and others, to our desires, our cravings for objects and endless affirmation from others and our hurts and pains that we nurture. This last one has particularly been on my mind, for I have been clinging to the ways that I have been wronged by my SA husband. I am trying to understand why I would cling to those resentments and hurts. After all, it only serves to increase my own suffering, and then I reflect that back on him, which doesn't make him feel very good.

I think I cling to these injuries because I am afraid that if I forget, and if he forgets, then it will happen again. I will become complacent, he will think I am spineless, and the cycle will continue until I finally leave. I guess that is the pattern I have known, so it makes sense that I would assume it will continue like that. But as I said, the clinging only increases my own suffering, and it doesn't prevent any of those things. I cannot control what anyone else does--not my husband, not my family, not even my cat. And nursing these wounds increases the feeling that I am special in that I am the only one who has ever been hurt like this--and that I am purely a victim, that I have never done any harm to anyone else. It increases that illusion of separateness from others, when in reality we are much more interconnected than our illusions suggest. (It will likely become a little harder to keep up that illusion of being purely a victim after I have done my inventory of character defects, and later have to make amends.)

I don't know exactly how to stop clinging to my little wounds, but I think this kind of meditation exercise can help. It is no small thing to learn how to stop clinging, how to release ourselves from our attachments. It is the very nature of our human minds to grasp for these things. But this is the goal if we hope to release ourselves from the endless cycle of human suffering. I don't actually know if I'll ever be released from the endless cycle of human suffering, but maybe I can reduce my own suffering and that of others a little bit while I am here, by learning to stop clinging to the perceived slights and very real injuries that have occured in the past, and practice expansive loving-kindness towards others. It certainly can't hurt to try.

As It Is

It's been an interesting week for my program. My husband had to serve his week of jail time as part of his sentence for the DUI/accident. We live 400 miles away from the scene of the crime, as it were, so he had to travel there to go to jail. All told, he was gone about 9 days.

I didn't know what was going on with him when he was there. It turned out he was unable to call me because they didn't allow calls to cell phones, and we don't have a land line. I knew that he would have called me if he could, so the lack of phone calls from him indicated to me that he wasn't allowed to call. Still, without the reassurance of his voice telling me he was okay, I had to work hard not to worry. That doesn't come easy to me.

About all I could do was tell myself, "I'm not in control." It did help. I was very busy with school during that time, even had a class over the weekend, so there wasn't too much down time to really get into a good codie worry fest. And when I did have time, I was able to enjoy it. It has been a long time since I regularly had private time to relax, so I went for hikes and runs, went out with friends, and read. Sometimes the thought crept in that my husband wasn't having nearly as relaxing a time, and I would worry again. "I'm not in control."

I've been reading a book called "The 12-Step Buddhist" by Darren Littlejohn. I've gotten to the part on Step 1 where he describes meditating on "as it is." We have to learn to accept everything--life, people, situations, our thoughts--as it is. It isn't just addicts and codependents--everybody is in some degree of denial of things as they are. We all think we can change other people or change the future, but all we have is the present moment. Failure to accept others and ourselves as we are simply perpetuates our own suffering and denies us the lessons of the present moment. As a program friend recently said to me, "You are exactly where you need to be right now."

"As it is" has become a useful mantra for me. It helps calm me and reminds me that I am not in control of very much at all--really just my own actions. Especially when I spin out of control about the future, afraid that things in my life are inevitably going to go in a direction that I fear, saying this to myself helps remind me to stay in the present and realize I can't control others or the future.