Another anniversary...

I am extremely grateful to the counselors at the treatment program I attended, for many reasons. Today I am grateful that they pushed recovery from the family illness nearly as much as from our own.They knew the type of homes most of us had grown up in, and the relationships we were likely returning to. 

On 2/28/86, I attended my first Alanon meeting, hoping for ideas on how to get my heroin addicted boyfriend clean & sober, even though I knew in my heart that this wasn’t how recovery worked. What they said, instead of telling me what to do, is that I didn’t cause the addiction, couldn’t control it and couldn’t cure it.Through the example of fellow members I learned, painfully, to detach from the addict's behavior, and to not contribute to the sickness. I did take him to a few meetings and an AA dance, and drove him to a methadone program for his daily dose. I took a Big Book to him at the jail, and introduced him to several of my new sober friends, actively promoting recovery when all he really wanted from me was a few dollars and to be left alone. Understandably, we drifted apart, as I got deeper into recovery and it became obvious that we were speaking different languages. In 1988 he died of an overdose, alone in a low budget motel.

I could’ve stopped going to Alanon after he died, if Alanon were just about active addiction. But, lo and behold, I’d begun to understand that I'd been impacted by the alcoholism I'd grown up with. This one was tricky. While there was a lot of alcoholism on both sides of my family, I was lucky – my people were mainly good-natured drunks, and my dad sobered up when I was in the 8^th grade. After a lot of step work, therapy and patient sponsorship, I now characterize my childhood as one of benign neglect – I know that my parents loved me, we got all the basics, including strong values – and they were preoccupied with my father’s alcoholism and depression. My recovery from the family illness has been more about what was missing than what happened, which means, for me, that it has taken a long time to unravel the subtleties of that impact. Why did I keep chasing after depressed introverts? How could I stop trying to be invisible? When would I learn how to speak up for myself in close relationships? Recovery from the effects of someone else’s drinking, which is all about relationships with others and myself, isn’t cut and dried. With drugs and alcohol, you are either using or not. Relationships are complicated. I’ve drifted in and out of healthy relating, over time listing to the healthy side, but with semi-regular flare ups of my particular “isms” – controlling, fears of the future, trying to figure out what’s going to happen next. Learning to identify my "internal spiritual maladies" is an ongoing lesson.

And so, 31 years ago I began the journey of healing. I don’t have active alcoholism in my life today, at least partly because of the healthy decisions I’ve learned to make through my association with 12 step recovery. Where once I could only identify myself in relation to who I was sleeping with, today I know who I am. That part of me that sometimes feels like a scared little kid doesn’t come out much anymore, and when it does, is more easily comforted. Life is good, even when it isn’t, one day at a time.

So thank you through the years to Marsha M. Thank you Barb B and Barbara M. Thank you for helping me decide not to see my addict boyfriend that long ago day he came to visit, nodding out on heroin in the day room. Thank you for suggesting that he needed to move out if I truly intended to try this recovery thing. And thank you, thank you for suggesting Alanon. Not everyone chooses that route to address childhood hurts and adult communication, but it has definitely worked for me, and continues to do so as I navigate long term recovery.