Letting Go

What Do You Mean, Accept?

Marilea C. Rabasa2 Comments

From Hope for Today, February 3:

“How ready and willing am I to invite the transforming power of acceptance into my will and my life?

‘Al-Anon offers us a new beginning…We can learn to accept ourselves and become willing to change our attitudes for the better.’”

On the topic of addiction, there are a myriad of things to accept—or not accept. I recognize that this topic invites debate. But I believe that addiction is a brain disease, and accepting this as true has simplified my life a great deal.

It has enabled me, for one thing, to take the first step in my recovery program, admitting my powerlessness over addiction. I’m powerless over all illnesses. I can assist my loved one to get help, but I can’t wave a magic want and wish her illness to go away. Just like a diabetic, my daughter Angie needs to take her medicine if she wants to manage her illness and stay healthy.

So, this is my truth. Avoiding it and continuing to deny, judge, control, and enable only add to the sorrow and suffering I’m already going through. For me, acceptance and faith go hand in hand, and practicing them both on a daily basis lightens my load a great deal and improves the quality of my life.

Loosen Your Grip!

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From From Survival To Recovery, page 268:

“Living fully requires enough trust to release our manipulative, tight-fisted control of life, for only then can we accept the guidance of a Power greater than ourselves. For adult children of alcoholics, our damaged, devastated trust has to be healed and nurtured bit by bit until we feel safe enough to truly let go and let God. Trust does not come from reading a book, however inspired, but from experiencing new relationships in which we are trusted and we can learn to trust those around us…If we willingly surrender ourselves to the spiritual discipline of the Twelve Steps, our lives will be transformed…Though we may never be perfect, continued spiritual progress will reveal to us our enormous potential…We will laugh more. Fear will be replaced by faith, and gratitude will come naturally as we realize that our Higher Power is doing for us what we cannot do for ourselves…”

“We will laugh more.”  How can I, beset by depression and instability for many of my early years, come to revisit my life now from another perspective? How have I learned how to laugh and see the comedy in things? What has enabled me at last to live well and be happy?

Being in the rooms.

But I hasten to add that we can learn the same tools elsewhere: the tools of letting go and accepting what we can’t change; the tool of gratitude (a big one—half the world is starving; I have enough food and a roof over my head); the tool of detachment and understanding our personal boundaries in relation to our addict.

I might have been luckier, like many of you out there, and learned these tools in a happy, functioning family when I was growing up. But I didn’t; I learned them later.

And it’s never too late to learn how to be happy.

Chasing The Butterfly

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From Each Day A New Beginning, July 19:

‘At fifteen, life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.’—Maya Angelou

“We had to surrender to a power greater than ourselves to get where we are today. And each day, we have to turn to that power for strength and guidance. For us, resistance means struggle—struggle with others as well as an internal struggle.

Serenity isn’t compatible with struggle. We cannot control forces outside of ourselves. We cannot control the actions of our family or our co-workers. We can control our responses to them. And when we choose to surrender our attempts to control, we will find peace and serenity.

That which we abhor, that which we fear, that which we wish to conquer seems suddenly to be gone when we decide to resist no more—to tackle it no more.

The realities of life come to us in mysterious ways. We fight so hard, only to learn that what we need will never be ours until the struggle is forsaken. Surrender brings enlightenment.”

Thank you, Amazon customer, for this wonderful review of my book, A Mother’s Story: Angie Doesn’t Live here Anymore, by Maggie C. Romero (pseudonym):

“One of the most honest and insightful accounts to date of a mother’s struggle to win the battle over her daughter’s addiction. Told in unsparing detail, it takes us step by step through the dark tunnel of despair with all the triumphs and mistakes on the road to recovery. It is an inward journey that reveals three important concepts: understanding the powerlessness of addiction, the willingness to let go and the courage to change. This is not just a recovery book but a riveting story from beginning to end that flies in the face of despair and embraces the strangest paradox of all – absolute surrender in order to win.”   ~Claire Demers

The Poison Of Resentment

Marilea C. Rabasa1 Comment

I think we often forget how much carrying resentments burdens us. As they say,”It’s like swallowing poison and waiting for the OTHER person to die.”

It’s only natural to feel angry sometimes, to develop a resentment. But if we have no control over it, it’s best to let it go. There are many healthy ways to do this: go for a run, write in a journal, confront the person in question and try to talk it out peacefully, turn the resentment over to God; the list goes on. Before I got into recovery I lost sleep a lot, overate a lot, shopped a lot, and buried my feelings a lot. But these are not healthy ways to respond to resentments. And they didn’t go away anyway.

Another jingle I hear in the rooms is this: “expectations are premeditated resentments.” So once I’ve developed a resentment, I take a step back and look at the expectation that probably got me there. And I try to confine my expectations to myself—to people, places and things that I have some control over. Staying in control is important to us, so I try to keep my expectations within reasonable bounds. Staying focused on me is a step in the right direction, and ensures that I’ll have a happier day.

There Is No Glory In Martyrdom

Marilea C. Rabasa2 Comments

“Early in Angie’s illness, I flailed around in denial, sometimes strong, as when I handed her logical consequences for being abusive. I felt like a moth turned into a butterfly then. But I later added, ‘Oh how this butterfly would flutter and die in the years that followed, as I backtracked over and over again, trading in my courage for equal does of martyrdom.’” ~except from A Mother’s Story: Angie Doesn’t Live Here Anymore by Maggie C. Romero

It’s been quite a roller coaster ride these past fifteen years. At first I wouldn’t believe it was really happening. “This sort of thing happens to other people’s children,” I wrote in my memoir. What arrogance! I simply couldn’t accept it.

But when she was living with me and stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down, it was hard to ignore. So for a while I got tough, even told her to live elsewhere more than once. But addicts are, if nothing else, resourceful.

I often write that deep pockets are dangerous, enabling us to be generous and feel good about it. I was able to put Angie through rehab four times, but one time would have been enough to teach her the tools of recovery. For recovery to be successful, whether it’s once or ten times, the addict has to be ready.  I was just buying time, trying to keep her off the streets long enough to get sick and tired of being sick and tired.

In the program there’s a wry saying: “Sit there. Don’t do anything.” And so I was the one who was getting sick and tired. I stopped doing anything, mostly because it didn’t really matter what I did. Angie was a runaway train, and I couldn’t stop her in the grips of addiction.

I stopped trying to control a situation that was clearly out of my control. I stopped obsessing and enabling. I started focusing on other people in my life who deserved my attention. I learned to practice gratitude for all I have. And though my changed attitude hasn’t brought my daughter back, it has shown me how to live better.

“We don’t always get what we want in life. But to make the best of what we have is the only way to be happy.” ~Jenny Jerome Churchill

Let Go…And Strive To Be Happy Yourself

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“Third Step Prayer:

God, I offer myself to thee

to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt.

Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will.

Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness

to those I would help of Thy power, Thy love and Thy way of life.

May I do Thy will always!”

My willfulness has always been my Waterloo. But I never saw it as a bad thing. I saw it as strength, determination, and power—the opposite of weakness.

But I’ve had to modify my will and determination to save Angie. After years of using my strong will and stubbornness to fight a battle that wasn’t mine to fight,  I’ve learned to let go. From well-meaning friends over the years, I’ve heard these comments:

“But how can you drop the ball like that? How can you give up on your own child? She’ll think you don’t love her anymore! How can you be so cruel?”

Those people need to walk a mile or two in my shoes.

The cruelty belongs to the Monster (if it had an appearance), the brain disease, that is claiming millions of our children. After years of educating myself about the nature of addiction, I have settled on my own path to recover from the effects of this illness.

I have  no more power to cure Angie of her addiction than I would have if she had schizophrenia. Drug addiction and co-existing mental illness is very common, and there are many treatments out there. My daughter suffered from depression for years before she turned to hard drugs, and she tried therapy and antidepressants when she was just a teenager. Then when full-blown drug addiction took over, she was in and out of recovery, including four rehabs, for fifteen years. But she’s still out there, in active addiction.

My story with my daughter isn’t unique. Many of us share the same tragedy. But if I’ve learned one thing from all these years of chaos and pain, it’s that life is too precious to waste. I want to make the most of mine with the years I have left. I’m grateful now to make good use of my stubbornness and determination: to live well and strive to be happy.

Expectations

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In recovery, we learn to profoundly adjust our expectations, hard as it is. We raised one child, and now we have another. We are all too aware of the change that drugs have produced in our children. A parent wrote in Sharing Experience, Strength and Hope (the SESH book) a very revealing statement, something I could have written myself. It is a key to understanding my story, my mother and father’s stories, and my daughter’s painful struggle:

“I expected my children to be perfect, to always do the right thing. I tried to control them by giving them direction and making them do things in a way that I felt was correct! When they didn’t, I could not handle it.

I could not accept their drug use and I felt that their behavior was a reflection on me. I was embarrassed for myself and scared to death for them. I became so distrusting of my children that I showed them no respect. I would meddle and invade their privacy looking for any excuse to challenge and confront them.

When I came to Nar-Anon, I learned that my interference and my attempts at controlling them were actually standing in the way of their recovery. I learned to let go of the control I never had in the first place.”

 

Those words echo my own from a recent blog: “I would finally, thank God, let go of the oppressive burden I was placing on my daughter by demanding she get well so that I could be OK.” This is a difficult statement for many of us to make.

Angie’s active drug addiction shook me to the core and made me decidedly unwell. Her illness had the power to ruin my day (and my life) before I got into a recovery program and started practicing the concept of detachment with love.

This concept has placed me at a healthy distance from my daughter so that I could view her situation with some objectivity and respond to her with intelligence and compassion. I’m very grateful for the education I’ve received in the rooms of recovery. I will always love Angie and I grieve the loss of her. But there are other people in my life, and I want to stay well for them. Thank you, Nar-Anon, for helping me reclaim my life!

En”light”enment

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Ernest Hemingway famously said: “We are all broken; that’s how the light gets in.” This speaks to me, and to many of us.

In my search to be free of my emotional pain, I have found en”light”enment in a recovery program with tools to help me live better. It hasn’t been an overnight cure for my misery. I will always mourn the loss of my daughter Angie to this cruel disease. But, over time, I’ve learned to let go of some bad habits that weren’t serving me anymore—and contributed to me serving her even less. What didn’t serve me? Guilt. Untreated, that led to enabling, which served her not at all.

Working this miraculous program has helped me see that I’m just another child of God—and that I’m worth something. My years in various 12-Step fellowships have saved my life. Back in 2001 when a school counselor told me to go to an Al-Anon meeting, I told her, “No, that’s not for me.”

Yes, it was.

Resistance Training

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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.”

“Moving toward the light…” I really love the sound of those words. What could be darker than watching my daughter self-destruct over the course of fifteen years? How have I learned to “dance in the rain,” even as she has continued to slip away?

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. My strong will and determination to save Angie from drug addiction was instinctive; it would be counterintuitive NOT to step in and interfere in my child’s self-destruction.

But once I became educated about the nature of addiction as a brain disease, I realized that other than offering my love and emotional support, there was very little I could do. I did send her to four rehabs, which bought her some time. Once or twice would have been enough to show her the tools of recovery. At what point do we need to make our adult children responsible for their own recovery from this cunning disease?

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. In my view, faith and acceptance go hand in hand.