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Old 08-14-2014, 07:53 AM
  # 22 (permalink)  
FireSprite
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Join Date: May 2012
Location: Florida
Posts: 6,781
Raise your hand if you've heard me say this 1000x & are tired of hearing it...... Early Recovery Sucks. It can be as hard if not harder than active addiction with the added bonus of completely new curve balls to dodge that you couldn't have known or planned for.

In the very beginning I had a very hard time not taking a lot of it personally because I really didn't get how we were in the same crisis but had different needs, different methods of healing, different focus points at that point in recovery. Quite literally it was like speaking separate languages.

I often felt like Alice In Wonderland, struggling to stay sane among the babbling , whacked-out characters & ultimately questioning whether I WAS the sane one after all? Time & space apart were what we needed most, if for no other reason than to stay out of each other's line of fire. I found that it was best to simply remove myself as a target & refuse to rise to the bait. There was only ever a battle when I engaged..... if he poked & prodded & got no results he had to move onto another victim (no takers there) or actually deal with the BS internally that was the REAL driver behind his issues anyway.

It sounds like she is carting around a bucketful of resentments or somehow is assigning the "blame" for all of this on you. This is when detachment, dropping the rope, removing yourself, whatever, is always going to be your best bet. I also had a lot of anger at this point in my own recovery & I was freaking exhausted so I did not manage everything with grace & clarity. I kept setting my expectations on "Unrealistic" & setting my own recovery back as a result more than anything.

It took me a while to see that I was still using so-called Normal as a basis of comparison for what my life had become & that THAT was the most unrealistic expectation of all....
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