Acceptance

Turning It Over

Marilea C. RabasaLeave a comment

From Experience, Strength and Hope, July 24:

“I admit that I am powerless over my life’s situation, that my life is unmanageable. My friends do not want to be around me when I am out of control. I do not want to be around me! I am learning to take my pain to my Higher Power and let that power handle it while I go out and play.

By not acknowledging my powerlessness, I am lying to myself. Recovery is not easy, that is why we are here, why we go to meetings, and why we work on ourselves. The Steps are written in a specific order for a reason, to bring us to a healthy, sane and serene life, learning to live life on life’s terms. Because of this program, life can once again be good for us. This is the hope of recovery. I remember that as a child I was powerless over my alcoholic father, and his physical abuse of my mother and me. It was frightening growing up in abuse. But you know what? I survived, and I believe I can move forward. If we stay in denial about our situation, we cannot begin to hear the message of recovery. When recovery begins, there is a completely new life out there waiting for us.

Thought For Today: Once we accept our powerlessness, we can learn to live a better life. However, just because we have recovery, does not mean there will be no more problems. It means that now we have the tools to help us recover without being crushed or broken.”

Though I didn’t write this, I could have. It’s my story. There are so many of us in the world with similar stories, and sharing our experience, strength and hope empowers us all. Every day in recovery makes me stronger and more able to cherish what’s good in my life. Especially at this time of year, that’s an awful lot to be thankful for.

More On Healthy Detachment

Marilea C. RabasaLeave a comment

A parent emails me:

“Oh how I wish I were able to detach as you do! How do you do it? I can’t eat or sleep. I am constantly obsessing about where my daughter is and what she’s doing. I want some peace from all this. I’m so tired.”

My heart goes out to this mother because I’ve been in the same place myself. I am all too familiar with her feelings. I drove myself crazy worrying about my daughter. I wanted, no I NEEDED, to save her from this horrid disease. It’s counterintuitive NOT to, isn’t it? She’s my child.

Fourteen years ago I was exactly where this mother is now. But a lot of water has gone under the bridge since then. It’s a roller coaster ride we’re all on. And mine has been long and bumpy. Maybe I just got tired of being sick and tired. In my memoir I talk about what this obsession cost my health and my career. I think that was a turning point for me. I knew I would have to cut the umbilical cord and separate, not from Angie, my child, whom I will always love dearly, but from the addict that is living in her body. If I didn’t learn how to detach I would be lost. At that point, back in 2008, I started to truly believe that I deserved to have a happy life, regardless of my daughter’s choices.

Detachment is a gift we can give ourselves. How did I finally think I was worth this gift? The principles for living that I learned in Al-Anon and other 12-step fellowships have given me a newfound spiritual foundation to guide me through my life. I say “new” because I’m not a religious person and have never had a strong faith in anyone other than myself. But as they say in the Program, “my mind is a dangerous place to be!” Working the steps has helped me to get to know myself and finally like myself as I strive to be a better person. Coming from an alcoholic family, and with addictions of my own, low self-esteem has always been an issue with me. And so when Angie became a victim of the same illness that had crippled me, I just added that to my long list of defects that weighed me down as I hung on the cross!!! Well, I got bored with being a martyr. I decided I’d rather be happy. So I needed to grow up.

As I’ve said many times, I grew up in Al-Anon. My evolving recovery from addiction and the effects of addiction has paralleled Angie’s roller coaster ride through Hell. But at some point on this journey, my daughter and I started walking in separate directions. Our paths stopped intersecting. She was the first to let go, angrily and defiantly. I might have followed her; I used to. I just kept coming back to face her abuse and manipulation. I thought I had it coming to me. But now I’ve changed. Now I’ve found the courage to change; I’ve found the courage to let her go. And nothing on God’s earth could be harder for any parent. Here’s something I picked up at a Nar-Anon meeting:

“I am learning the meaning or concept of detachment and it is becoming a big help to me. I no longer stay up nights worrying about my daughter sleeping in alleys. I no longer obsess at wanting to know where she is at any given time. I no longer worry about that call at 3 in the morning asking me to bail her out of jail. This is, by the way, something that I will not do….This is painful to me but I am learning to deal with it so I can get on with my life…I am learning that the darkness is not worth it.”

 

My Love Is Forever

Marilea C. RabasaLeave a comment

Memoir Excerpt:

Quote from Cherishing Our Daughters by Dr. Evelyn Bassoff: “ ‘Veronica is learning to live with her real disappointment and to be supportive but not overly invested in her daughter’s life. ‘I am learning important lessons in therapy. One is that the only life you can direct is your own; my good advice (to Anne-Marie) only falls on deaf ears. Unless my daughter musters the courage to make changes, I cannot do anything more for her. And so, over and over again, I say to myself, I am not responsible for the way (Anne-Marie) chooses to live. Another is that you love your child forever not because she is happy or successful or makes you proud but because she is your child.’”

“Joy and Woe…”

Marilea C. RabasaLeave a comment

Memoir Excerpt:

“Angie was flitting back and forth between hotels in expensive cabs, with garbage bags of stuff and her terrier, Loki. Sometimes I think she got that dog to stay alive—to be accountable to something or someone other than herself. She and Loki stayed with me a couple of nights in my motel. By the time I checked out I was covered with fleabites. When I told her that she should have the dog defleaed, she flew into a rage. “It’s not Loki, Mom, you’re just too cheap to stay in decent motels. You always pick fleabags to crash in.” Whatever.

When Angie was in her first psych ward back in October 2007, they used art therapy on the patients. She made me a bead bracelet. “These are your favorite colors, Mom, ” she said, carefully placing it on my wrist. I finger those beads now and again, like Greek worry beads, a reminder of the hope I nurtured then. On one of the nights she stayed at my motel, she was out all night while I tossed and turned, wondering where she was. When I awoke, there was the most fragrant smelling flower in a glass of water at my bedside. She had picked it outside of her hotel in Japan Town and left it for me to enjoy in the morning. I still have what’s left of that flower, all dried and brown, another reminder that “Joy & Woe are woven fine.”

“God, Grant Me The Serenity…”

Marilea C. RabasaLeave a comment

Memoir Excerpt:

“Blissful dishonesty—that’s what I indulged in for five days in San Francisco. We were walking in parallel universes. Well, we had been for years, but it’s a strange feeling when you’re together up close. I chose to overlook the obvious. One word from me, one reprimand, one emotional “Give up drugs, Angie, or you will die!” would have sent her back across the cable car tracks and I wouldn’t see her again. This was the truce we had made together at the beginning of my visit. It ensured that she would see me at all. And I wanted to see her. At this point in our long goodbye, I never knew if I would see her again. It was such a desolate, helpless feeling. Let go, Maggie, I thought to myself, she has her own Higher Power and you, dear girl, had better cling to yours. You’re gonna need Him more than ever now.

This was where I was in my recovery as I left San Francisco, at that hard won place I’d fought through years of resistance to find: the end of the battle—acceptance. I had tried to help her over the years and admittedly made so many mistakes: I begged, I pleaded, I covered up, I manipulated, I enabled, I moved boundaries so often I couldn’t even find them anymore. I confronted her behavior; then I did the opposite, lapsing into momentary denial.”

Love, Change, and Moving Forward

Marilea C. Rabasa4 Comments

Memoir Excerpt:

“My Twelve-Step recovery, so far, has brought me a great deal of gratitude and serenity, mostly when I remember that voice from God telling me to let go of control and resistance. Yet there’s another part of me that hurts terribly when I witness the destruction of my daughter at the hands of Addiction. How can I be well while Angie is so sick? I’ve spent all these years searching for an answer.

Meghan O’Rourke, author of The Long Goodbye, in an interview discussing her own grief about losing her mother, says this: “I’m changed by it, the way a tree is changed by having to grow around an obstacle.

It’s the subliminal mother force in me. Grief and loss—they change us. I keep getting beamed onto Planet X, then back again, my molecules getting rearranged every time. Just as Angie has changed, so have I. I’ve loved my daughter as best I could for half of my life. How can losing her to this living death not change me?”

A Different Lens

Marilea C. RabasaLeave a comment

more predawn colors

 

“We are all broken—that’s how the light gets in.” Ernest Hemingway

As I’ve watched Angie slipping away all these years, I’ve learned to view my life through a different lens. The tools of recovery have taught me how to be grateful for what I have, how to let go of people and situations that I can’t change, and to have faith in something greater, wiser, and more powerful than I am. Losing my child to addiction did break me a few years ago, and in my brokenness I turned toward the light that had never left. I’m so grateful that I still had the eyes to see it.

Midstream

Marilea C. RabasaLeave a comment

peaceamidthestorm

“The whole course of things goes to teach us faith. We need only obey. There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word…Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which flows into you as life, place yourself in the full center of that flood, then you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect contentment.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Resistance Training

Marilea C. RabasaLeave a comment

From In All Our Affairs, Making Crises Work For You, Surrender:

“Let go and Let God. It sounds so simple. But when our circumstances or the circumstances of those we love weigh heavily on our minds, we may have no idea how to do it. Some of us struggle with the very idea of a Higher Power. Others begin to question long and deeply held beliefs, especially in stressful times…

Many of us review the same scenario again and again, looking for that elusive answer that will solve everything, obsessively wracking our brains for something that we could do differently or should have done differently in the past…As long as there is a chance of figuring out a solution, we reason, we should keep trying…We may secretly feel that this problem is too important to trust to God, as if we had the power to prevent God’s will from unfolding by the mere exercise of our resistance. We fear that if we surrender, anything could happen—

Actually, anything could happen whether we let go or not. It is an illusion that as long as we cling to the situation we have some control…Surrender means accepting our powerlessness to change many of the realities in our lives…It means trusting instead in a Power greater than ourselves. Faith has been likened to being in a dark tunnel and seeing no glimmer of light but still crawling forward as if we did. Though our circumstances may seem dark indeed, when we turn to a Higher Power rather than to our own stubborn wills, we have already begun to move toward the light.”

My resistance training at the gym has shown me that pain comes from putting resistance on the force exerted, and that has served me in strengthening my body. But my spiritual life demands just the opposite. I will let go of my strong will to save Angie and trust that God has a bigger plan. I have faith that things are unfolding as they are meant to—and in God’s time.

About Addiction

Marilea C. RabasaLeave a comment

From the blue Nar-Anon pamphlet:

                                                                          About Addiction

“We have learned that addiction is an illness. It is a physical, mental, and spiritual disease that affects every area of life. It can be arrested but never cured. We have found that compulsive use of drugs does not indicate a lack of affection for the family. It is not a matter of love, but of illness. The addicts’ inability to control their use of drugs is a symptom of the disease of addiction. Even when they know what will happen when they take the first drink, pill or fix, they will do so. This is the “insanity” we speak of in regard to this disease. Only complete abstinence from the use of drugs, including alcohol, can arrest this disease. No one can prevent the addicts’ use of drugs. When we accept that addiction is a disease, and that we are powerless over it, we become ready to learn a better way to live.”

These words reinforce my belief that when my daughter is under the influence of drugs, she ceases to be the person I raised. It’s all a matter of degree, of course, and we don’t all experience the same extremities of behavior with our children. But in Angie’s case, there is little resemblance to the wonderful, talented young woman I knew. And though I have no power over the change in her, it does give me some peace to know that it wasn’t her choice to leave her family. Rather that—and so many other bad choices—is just one of the difficult roads onto which drug addiction leads many of our children. We can only hope and pray that they’ll find their way back home.