Thread: Headlines
View Single Post
Old 07-03-2013, 10:32 PM
  # 33 (permalink)  
lillamy
Member
 
lillamy's Avatar
 
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: right here, right now
Posts: 6,516
For what it's worth...

I laughed out loud at Hammer's first post, because I see that a lot in myself when I come here -- I get really frustrated when confronted with people who say the same thing about their A and their situation that I did when I first came here. AND I WANT TO FIX THEM DAMMIT!

It's not that I'm upset with them -- it's that I feel a bit like I do when you watch horror movies: You sit there and go "don't go down the basement don't go down the basement don't go down the... oh MAAAN! WHY do you have to go down in the BASEMENT??? You KNOW that's ALWAYS where he is!!!"

I feel like I've read the next chapter. I feel like I want to swoop in like a codie eagle and lift codies out of their situation. You know, like a few women did with me when I was married to my A. And I scoffed at them and was upset at them and told them they didn't understand my situation and how dared they suggest my husband was abusive?

Well -- they dared suggest it because they had been there. They saw the signs. In him and in me.

I think it's often similar for me here. While I know that nobody could have hurried me on my way to figuring out how to handle my codependency and my relationship with an A, I still wish when I read other people's stories that they didn't have to experience the downhill ride themselves, that they could learn from other people's experiences.

And then there's people whose As actually find recovery. And who are glad they stuck it out and set boundaries and learned to live with an active A. And every time that happens, it makes me happy and it makes me humble and it reminds me that I actually don't know everything.

I see a lot of myself in your posts, MT. Because like me, you seem to have a faith/belief/ideology that you lean on, one that you seem to perceive as different than (and maybe superior to) that of others.

I was worse: I didn't just think my faith was superior; I thought I was superior. That's where I lived for a decade or more. I was convinced that my Christian faith would save me (that is, make my A stop drinking and become the man I knew he could become), and if I just lived as a good Christian and did X instead of Y, things would turn out OK. And I felt sorry for people who didn't have my insight and depth of faith. I would discuss addiction as a theoretical construct and try to understand it.

And then sh*t got real. And my trying-to-behave-correctly faith didn't work. And my distance-myself-by-theoretical-constructs didn't work. Understanding didn't work. I went from problem solving to fearing for my life, in seconds flat it felt like.

I am trying very hard to accept that we're all fellow strugglers on a path that isn't straight for any of us. Some days it's easier than others. Some days I have more compassion for addicts than others. Some days I have more capacity to listen than others. It's still not a straight path.

The only thing that gets my hackles up -- and it's happened here a few times -- is when someone says something that plays straight into my old codie fears: If I had only had the magical word/behavior/tactic/belief, things could have turned out differently. If I had only known the correct magical spell to fix addiction, I could have saved AXH and my marriage. I think that's what I react to in MT's posts -- and that's on me, not on her. That's my issue, not hers.

TG's post about having faith in the universe has set me on a track of examining my attitudes and reactions this week. And in that vein, selfish though it sounds, I find the threads started by MT and the reactions to them to be very useful for me to monitor my own responses.

And Hammer, you can drop f-bombs any time you want to in my company. Makes me feel right at home.
lillamy is offline