Letting Go

Not My Will—But Thine

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Ego and Control

OMG, what I’ve learned about ego and control could fill a book. A friend once told me that ego is what separates us from oneness with God. What she meant, I think, was that our ego run amok might separate us from a lot of things here on earth.

It separates us from others when “we have to be right.” It separates us from a lot of people when we feel we know what’s best for them and try to impose our will on him or her. When it’s a loved one who is self-destructing, we feel and ARE utterly justified in our well-intentioned attempts to influence him or her. And we can be right until the cows come home, but others will follow their own will (especially if the physiological need for drugs is present). We can hope and pray, but in the end we must accept our powerlessness over another adult’s illness—and let go.

Just—let—go…boy, is that hard!

The Spirit Coming Alive

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Happiness woman stay outdoor under sunlight of sunset

Memoir Excerpt: 

“One of the promises of Al-Anon is that we shall learn to be “happy, joyous and free.” I like the free part best. For too many years I’ve been chained to my own human failings. I never understood with such clarity my own defects and limitations until I started to work this Program. I was so lonely and isolated. But when I came to believe after much trial and error that I was in fact powerless over addiction—mine, Angie’s and anyone else’s—I fell to my knees and turned this struggle over. And I felt so much lighter. Now, at last, I was off the hook. I’ve turned over all the lost years with Angie and turned my attention to things I can control now. And that has given me the freedom to focus on other things.

My spirituality is based on three factors: far less EGO (Easing God Out), humble acceptance of whatever my lot is in life, and the vision to appreciate every day for all the good that I can see and experience. In this way, the principles of this Program have changed my life. It’s really great to be alive, and for so many years my life was utterly joyless. That’s the power of the spirit coming alive in me through my spiritual Program.”

“Guilt Is A Terrible Crippler…”

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From Survival to Recovery, p. 25-26:

“Unless recovery is found, blame, guilt, anger, depression, and many other negative attitudes can go on for generations in a family affected by alcoholism…Focusing on ourselves actually allows us to release other people to solve their own problems and frees us to find contentment and even happiness for ourselves.”

We all have different stories of how addiction has touched our lives. In my life, guilt was a constant theme from very early in my childhood, and, as I said in my memoir, “Guilt is a terrible crippler.” It crippled me, especially, when my own child mirrored the addict in me and morphed into a worse and more dysfunctional addict than I ever was. Guilt and self-blame put me at risk in setting and enforcing boundaries, in becoming an enabler, in shielding Angie from the logical consequences of her behavior. In short, guilt kept me from parenting my daughter intelligently and kept me stuck in a hole. Fortunately I found recovery and release from my own guilt, much of it misplaced, which in turn is freeing Angie to live her own life and solve her own problems.

“Changed Attitudes Can Aid Recovery”

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SharingExperienceStrengthandHope

From SESH, June 27: T-H-I-N-K

“Today I express my fears and know that my Higher Power will control the outcome. I am where I need to be. When I feel anxiety, I can focus on the slogan T-H-I-N-K, which reminds me how to react differently.

T – Thoughtful

H – Honest

I – Intelligent

N – Necessary

K – Kind”

Our shortest slogan, T-H-I-N-K, can be very helpful. However, as with most tools, I need to use it with care and reason. As I’ve heard it said around these rooms, ‘my best thinking is what got me here.’ For me, thinking too much or in a negative way is almost as dangerous as thinking not at all. Obsessive thinking can be my symptom of this family disease as much as obsessive drug use is the addict’s.

I will try to free myself of pointless rumination and stay focused on the freedom of my recovery.

 

Whereto, Persephone?

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Memoir Excerpt:

“Something snapped in me back in the woods of Virginia. Not because I saw with such clarity what Angie was falling back into. In fact, my wailing in the woods had very little to do with my daughter. Losing her to the madness of addiction was just the final loss in a string of losses I had never properly grieved or shouted out or laid to rest. Loss of self more than anything—that was my greatest loss. I’d been carrying the empty weight of that around since I was a child and I wanted to be free of it.

The way I’d been managing the challenge of Angie’s illness, certainly in the beginning, reflected an unhealthy lack of self-regard much of the time. It wasn’t my load to carry anymore and doing so only slowed my progress in my own recovery. Slowly through a decade of Twelve-Step work I’d become a better person, though being only human, I’ve had plenty of slips. But somehow Angie’s latest relapse pushed me to the front of another perfect storm: of old useless attitudes confronting renewal, growth—and love. Love in all its forms: from detachment with love to a joyful embrace of myself. I was finally letting go of my painful past and moving forward lighter and freer.

Angie ran away from Virginia only to find out that she couldn’t leave the addict behind. I’ll never know exactly how she ended up in the hospital for the second time, and it doesn’t matter. Angie was a grown woman learning to live in a new city. Her sister was close but unlikely to be drawn into her drama. Caroline knew a few addicts and knew plenty about addiction. But she was carefully and lovingly detached. Angie was really on her own again with no parents around. She was at yet another crossroads where she was faced with the same choices that had confronted her many times before. Would addiction continue to squeeze the life and humanity out of my daughter as it had in the past?”

 

“Blame Is For God And Small Children”

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Memoir Excerpt:

“Lately I’ve been reading a few books on suicide: Jill Bialosky’s query into her sister’s suicide (84); and Judy Collins’ heartfelt story about the addiction and suicide of her only child, Clark (111). Both of these authors consulted with the late Dr. Edwin S. Shneidman, a well-known suicidologist. His word, “psychache,” resonated with me. From watching Angie grow into the addict she has become as an adult, I can see how that term would apply to her. If ever there was an aching psyche, it was hers, so in pain and so unable to express that pain effectively to those she loved. I often feel that drug addiction and the pain that accompanies it is a form of suicide, slow and relentless, if left untreated.

My father made attempts here and there to give up gin and tobacco. When he had his gall bladder removed the nurses made him cough into a bag, and he was so disgusted with what came up that he stopped smoking for a while. But he never completely set aside his self-destructive behavior. It was like an old friend who reminded him of what he’d often felt as a child from an uncaring, abusive father: ‘You’re not good enough, not important enough.’ As a young man working in the family business, he met and fell in love with my mother, who spent a good part of their marriage echoing his father’s disappointment in him. Where do the seeds of addiction take root? It’s the old chicken and the egg confusion. Was my father predestined to become an alcoholic? Or was he made one by the emotional abuse he endured? And if the latter is true, then how and when was I an emotional abuser of my own daughter?

But Twelve-Step recovery gently steers us away from questions like that; we can’t go back and do things over. And I’m only human. I sometimes ask myself what I did wrong or what I missed seeing. Then I remember that addiction is a disease: ‘I didn’t cause it, I can’t control it, and I can’t cure it.’ And like a gentle breeze blowing away the clutter of remorse, I let go of those thoughts and embrace my life again, free of responsibility.

God meme

In any case, whatever she chose to do now, I needed to leave her alone to do it. I knew better than to scream and wail in the night to God and all the graces that protected the innocent to save my daughter. Whatever the roots of addiction are, whatever holes were missing in her that this opportunistic disease filled in, I didn’t have the power to combat them. And I just had to let go of the struggle, or I would disappear down that rabbit hole with her.”

“We Are All Broken, That’s How The Light Gets In.”

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monsoon red

 

Memoir Excerpt:

“This journey of mine, this parenting journey, would involve going two steps forward sometimes and then three steps backward. It was not vertical progress I was making, but it was progress. And strangely, the more I kept the focus on myself and striving to be happy, the easier it was to let go of my child. I knew I had paid my dues, and I feared no one’s judgment, least of all God’s.

I’ve railed at God many, many times during these dozen years of joy and pain, this God they speak of at Twelve-Step meetings. How many times had I sinned in my life? Many, more than I want to remember. And so the child in me had been sure, earlier on, that I was being punished for all of them. It was my karmic payback. “What goes around comes around,” etc. Indeed, for all of my life, before my breakdown, I had no faith in any thing or any one other than myself. I grew up very lonely and isolated, and if there was a god, he wasn’t paying any attention to me. So I learned to be very independent and self-reliant.

But when I finally found myself on my knees, I felt broken and whole at the same time: broken because my MO for dealing with my problems hadn’t been working; and whole because I finally let myself believe in something outside of myself to strengthen me, to fill in the gaps that were missing in me, and to help me cope. I was starting to develop and cling to a faith that assured me that I was not being punished and that I would be OK in the end, no matter what happened to my daughter. And I realized that fighting Angie’s battles for her was not only a waste of time; it was also useless and of questionable value.

My energies, spent though they were, would be better directed toward reclaiming my own life, which had been sorely compromised in the fight to save my daughter. And in reclaiming my own life, I was bidding for my redemption, long overdue, but just within my reach. This was my journey now, I knew it; I sadly accepted it. I wanted us to be connected but we weren’t. I wanted her struggle to be our struggle, but it wasn’t. I wanted to save her life but I couldn’t. I could only save my own. And I’d keep working at it—or this relentless disease would claim two more victims instead of one.”

Echoes From The Past

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Memoir Excerpt:

“The condo will soon be on the market. There is so much those four walls hold inside the beams and drywall. I went from room to room looking for memories, the happy and sad evidence of Angie’s presence. There it is, the cigarette hole in my sheets, the burn marks on the porcelain sink where she carelessly left her butts. The black dye she spilled on my new wood floors that I tried to sand away. The bottle of muriatic acid in the laundry room I had no clue about at the time. Why didn’t I throw it away years ago? I remembered the night she had free-based and lost her eyelashes, noticed the knife mark on the door she had locked and couldn’t open. I walked around and felt the walls she had brushed against, sat in her favorite chair, ate from her Asian bowls, smelled her perfume on the jacket she’d left hanging in the closet. They were everywhere, the reminders of Angie’s presence, of the cruel illness that had claimed her, of her loss of self. Why haven’t I walked away from all that sooner? Many would have. What does that say about me?

But Angie, my daughter, was there too. I left them around, remnants of her lost innocence: the hand-painted ceramic heart for “The Greatest Mom in the World” on Mother’s Day in 1988; the picture of wild geese she bought me at the flea market in Greece; the dried coral roses she gave me for my birthday one year; the Scrabble game we played together on her weekend visits in 2010; pictures of her on holidays there with family while she was in recovery. How could I have known then how fleeting it would be?”

“Surrender To Win”

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From Each Day A New Beginning, January 9:

 ‘The Chinese say that water is the most powerful element, because it is perfectly nonresistant. It can wear away a rock and sweep all before it.’ —Florence Skovel Shinn

“Nonresistance, ironically, may be a posture we struggle with. Nonresistance means surrendering the ego absolutely. For many of us, the ego, particularly disguised as false pride, spurred us on to struggle after struggle. ‘Can’t they see I’m right,’ we moaned, and our resistance only created more of itself. Conversely, flowing with life, ‘bubbling’ with the ripples, giving up our ego, releases us from an energy that heals the situation—that smoothes the negative vibrations in our path. Peace comes to us. We will find serenity each time we willingly humble ourselves.”

‘Resistance is more familiar. Nonresistance means growth and peace. I’ll try for serenity today.’

I wrote in my memoir toward the end: “This is 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.” That’s what the above reading is all about, I think. Letting go of my desperate need to save Angie from her addiction, and coming to accept that I simply don’t have that power. “I can only love her. And loving is enough. Loving is always enough. That has been my lesson.”

The Courage To Change

Marilea C. Rabasa4 Comments

From Each Day a New Beginning, 10/12:

“…there are two entirely opposite attitudes in facing the problems of one’s life. One, to try and change the external world; the other, to try and change oneself. —Joanna Field

God grant us the courage to change what we can—ourselves. How difficult it is to let go of our struggles to control and change someone else. How frequently we assume that everything would be fine if only someone else would change. All that needs to change is an attitude, our own.

Taking responsibility for improving one’s own life is an important step toward emotional health. Blaming another for our circumstances keeps us stuck and offers no hope for improved conditions. Personal power is as available as our decision to use it. And it is bolstered by all the strength we’ll ever need. The decision to take our lives in hand will exhilarate us. The decision each day to be thoughtful, prayerful, and wholly responsible for all that we do will nourish our developing selves. Each responsible choice moves us toward our wholeness, strengthening our sense of self, our wellbeing.

I will change only who I can today: myself.”

I read a good definition of addiction the other day. It said something like this: when we focus on another substance, or the love of someone else, or another activity as the source of our happiness and well being, then it takes on the attractive power of addiction. This includes our belief that if someone else would change, we’d be happy. I’ve stopped measuring my happiness on things and people outside of myself. If I keep the focus on myself, and keep my side of the street clean, all will be well in my world. I pray for the happiness of Angie and all my loved ones, and then I let it go and get back to the business of living. I believe that things are unfolding as they are meant to.