You'd Think I'd Make a Better Cop

You’d Think I’d Make a Better Cop

 

I recently started working part-time as a counselor’s aide in a drug and alcohol treatment program.  I love it.  Being in a group session with people I can relate to and potentially help is one of the most rewarding things I can do.

I was recently in a group session where one of the patients was checking in on his day and any challenges he had faced.  He had been doing some maintenance work on his property and had offered someone in his home group the opportunity to do some work with him as this other person was struggling financially.  The first day working together had gone really well but the second day had been a disaster.  The person was lethargic, unhelpful, saying they were not feeling well etc…  This made my patient worry that perhaps this person was under the influence.

He struggled with that and with feeling guilty that he was being judgmental and jumping to conclusions.  This had been confusing for him and he was really shaken by the experience.  He said to me, “It’s like, I’ve been a criminal for so long that you would think I’d make a better cop.”

That phrase struck me as being so apt.  The confusion that people feel when dealing with an alcoholic or an addict is like trying to walk a straight line in the midst of heavy fog or stand still in the midst of a tornado. 

Even fellow addicts become confused and question what they are seeing or hearing.  It has happened to me as well.  I have had friends relapse and been swept up in the storm of lies and hidden agendas and confusion.  It is very difficult to deal with this disease from the other side just as it is hard for us to deal with it ourselves.  I know for myself that I want to believe that people are telling the truth.  I want to see the best in others and that can at times come back to bite me.  If you are dealing with a family member who is in active addiction I can’t even imagine how wrenching and exhausting that must be.  Frank and my in-laws and close friends can tell you. 

I have only dealt with it with friends from my program and my connection to them is not nearly as strong, yet I feel some of the pain of seeing someone you care for struggle with this and change for the worse.  I hope that this patient uses this as a learning experience as I have.  That seeing our disease from the other side allows us to feel a small portion of the pain we inflicted on others ourselves.

Buy Yourself Flowers

Buy Yourself Flowers

 

 

“Your problem is you are too busy holding onto your unworthiness.”  Ram Das

 

I recently was in the grocery store with the kids.  It works much better now that they are older!  One pushes the cart and the other checks things off the list and there are very few shananegans anymore.  Just before going to the check-out I told them I wanted to pick out some flowers for the house.  Wren picked out a couple of bouquets and I rejected them for being too expensive and we finally settled on one.

I noticed that Dermot had gotten very quiet, which is rare!  I asked him if he was alright and he told me he was sad.  He was sad for two reasons.  He wanted me not to have to worry about money as much and he found it sad that I was buying flowers for myself because that was something that Frank used to do for me.  In fact the best and most thoughtful gift he ever got for me was a year’s worth of seasonal, monthly flower/plant deliveries from the local florist.

I thought for a moment and answered that it is never a bad thing to be cautious with your spending.  It was something that I never paid attention to when I was in our marriage.  I didn’t really become good at budgeting until I was responsible for myself.  I told him that and I also told him that I love fresh flowers and that there was no shame in me buying them for myself.

This started me thinking.  How often in my life have I not done something because I wasn’t good enough in my own mind or because some societal norm told me that I shouldn’t or couldn’t?  How many times have I denied myself joy because it wasn’t gifted to me from someone else or was outside the realm of the mainstream?  Why have I spent so much of my life navigating by anyone else’s compass than my own?

I am working on challenging myself in my actions going forward, making careful decisions and following my own path because I now know that I am worth it.  I am worth gifting small parcels of joy to myself, I don’t have to wait for someone else to deem me worthy.  We all, I think, need to let go of our unworthiness.  We all need to love ourselves more and treat ourselves more gently.

I wrote a long time ago about being challenged by a chaplain at a rehab to treat myself as I would my own child.  Would I use the same negative language with and to my child as I use to talk to myself?   Of course I wouldn’t, so why do I flay myself over and over again?  Treat yourself as you would treat your own child and be kind, teach, bring joy and nurture.

            So I say, don your bathing suit when the weather gets warm.  Don’t wait until you lose those last 20 pounds.  Don’t wait for someone to ask you out on a date, go out to a movie or enjoy a dinner, take an adventure, do what brings you joy.  Buy yourself flowers.

You're Doing it Wrong

You're Doing it Wrong

 

This topic has been on my mind a lot lately.  It has been churning in my head because I have had many different examples of this crop up in my life lately and in the lives of those close to me so I feel compelled to write about it.

I have written in “Waves” about how feelings are not facts.  Now I want to talk about what to do with negative emotions like guilt, shame, remorse and regret.  These are heavy hitters and they carry a lot of weight. 

What are they for?  I would say that these are here to teach.  If I do something that makes me feel guilty or brings me to feel shame it doesn’t feel good.  I used to use those feelings like whips and self-flagellate, repeatedly and often.  I beat myself frequently for things I had recently done and things I had done years ago.  I would cradle these feelings close to my heart in fear and self-loathing and the more I did it the worse I felt and the more I hated myself.  It was a self-fulfilling prophecy.  I am ashamed of what I have done, I am a bad person, I am destined to do it again because I am such a bad person and then low and behold I would do the thing again and again and again.

 I was doing it wrong.  Some people with tell you that negative feelings are useless and should be avoided at all cost.  I would tell you that negative emotions like these heavy hitting four, are warnings.  They are devices of learning.

If I now do something that makes me feel ashamed or something that makes me feel guilty, I examine the act closely.  I look it over from all angles.  I see the lesson contained therein and recognize my errors and the gravity of the situation.  I take responsibility for my actions and make amends if necessary, apologize and make it right.  I then put those feelings down and walk away from them.  I don’t carry them with me into the next day or experience.

In the past few months I made an error in judgment that was foolish and could have been potentially dangerous to myself.  I had reached out to a friend before doing so and she had rightly been worried.  I felt guilt and did all the self-examination described above for a day or so.  I did apologize to her for worrying her.  Through the course of our conversations though it became apparent that she felt the need to point out my lack of judgment a number of times even after we had put the issue to bed.  I finally had to say, “I think you are expecting me to still feel guilty about this and I don’t.”  I did not say this to be arrogant by any means and what I said came from a place of love, but I needed stick up for myself on that front.  I explained that I had learned from the experience and that I no longer live with regrets as they serve no other purpose than to weight me down spiritually.  I know she was taken aback by this but for so many years I abused myself with negative self-talk that I refuse to do so any longer.

I have seen examples of people “doing it wrong” a lot lately.  At work, a co-worker made an error.  She discovered the problem, put a best practice in place to ensure it does not happen again and sent an e-mail explaining the situation.  She took full responsibility and made an effort to rectify the situation as best she could.  She beat herself up all day, but I would say to her now it’s time to let it go and move on.

I have a friend in the program who recently relapsed.  He is feeling so broken and dejected right now and all I say to him is learn from this.  Accept that it happened and take responsibility.  Reach out for help and put the shame behind you so you can move forward.  If you don’t put the shame down you are going to remain sick.

So many of us hang onto guilt, shame, remorse and regret and it does no one any good.  Shame holds back so many people from seeking help, from seeking recovery, from seeking advice and counsel.  Hanging onto these emotions will keep you in sickness and struggle.

So for those negative emotions.  Learn from them as they are internal warnings that a mistake in judgment has been made.  But once you have received the warning and taken responsibility, turn the alarm off and get on with your day.  If you are hanging onto to these emotions you are simply doing it wrong.

Jenga

Jenga

 

 

A therapist of mine used the word metanoia to describe recovery.  I had never heard the word before and went home and looked it up.  It is a Greek word that means changing one’s mind.  In psychology Carl Jung used it to “indicate a spontaneous attempt of the psyche to heal itself of unbearable conflict be melting down and then being reborn in a more adaptive form.”  That was taken from Wikipedia.  Think in terms of recovery, breakdown and mid-life crisis.

I know for me, I did have to completely unravel in order to get better.  All pre-conceived notions about myself, the world around me, institutions like motherhood and marriage had to be scrapped and I had to start over again with a fresh set of eyes.  I keep thinking of the stacking game “Jenga”.  I feel as though my life had gotten too elevated, too big and was resting on an unsteady foundation.  Drinking was the block I removed that caused the whole tower to crumble.

I love that I can be so less judgmental now.  I feel as though that fresh set of eyes has me seeing the world with all the colors turned up high.  I am not saying I am never judgmental, but certainly I am so much less so than ever before.  I see people more for who they are and not their religion, their color, their class. 

Dustin Hoffman did an interview about his role in “Tootsie”.  He talks about how he saw himself on screen during the make-up tests before the start of the movie and said to the make-up artists, can you make me beautiful.  They essentially told him that they had gotten him to look as good as possible.  He talks about going home and weeping and telling his wife he knew now that he had to make the movie and when she asked him why he explained that he knew he was interesting as a woman.  But he realized that he would never have talked to her because she did not fulfill a societal norm of beauty.  He at that point realized that there were too many interesting women that he had ignored because he had been brainwashed to believe women should look a certain way.

I am so glad that my “Jenga” tower crumbled.  In the process of re-building I have lost my arrogance.  I have lost my old perspective of what people should and should not be.  I sometimes sit in twelve-step meetings and feel like weeping myself because the room is filled with so many good people I would never have deigned to speak to before.  Now I love them all and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Waves

                  Waves

 

 

I can remember counselors in rehab telling me that “feelings are not facts.”  I can remember them telling me that and I can also remember wanting to punch them in the face when they said it.  In my mind they could not possibly have experienced the depths of feelings that I had and if they had, they would not be saying anything quite that trite and cliché.

I spent a great deal of time in my previous life experience, identifying with my emotions.  I became those feelings.  When I was sad, I wallowed in the depths of despair and clung to the familiarity of the weight of it.  It was almost as though if I let go I would lose myself.  I think I had lived so long in that sort of depressed state that I was afraid that if I let it go, I would no longer know who I was.

I see that with others I speak with who are still in rehab or still living in their sickness even if they are no longer drinking.  It is as though they have their talons sunk so deep into the flesh of their emotions that they see no way of setting themselves free.

Through the process of being introduced to mindfulness, meditation and some other Eastern philosophies as well as learning more about religion and spirituality, my perspective on emotions began to change. 

I can remember our marriage counselor encouraging me to no longer identify with my feelings.  He suggested acknowledging them and experiencing them but then letting them go.  The image he used was that of a balloon floating by.  He was saying that our emotions were like these balloons floating by and for ones that were unpleasant you could imagine that in your mind you are pushing them along gently with a leaf.  To some this will sound hokey and it did to me at first, but I understand it better now.  Now I have feelings and they are transient.  All of them, good and bad.  I am never always going to be sad, and I am never always going to be happy.  I am just going to be, and in the course of simply being, I will be visited by various emotions and feelings.

This same marriage counselor also encouraged me to say things like, “I have sadness” or “I am experiencing sadness” rather than to say “I am sad”.  I thought that was pretty stupid at first but I use this inwardly now.  When I have feelings I could do without, I take a moment and say to myself, “I have anxiety about this” or “I have sadness about this” because when I phrase it that way in my head it makes it something that is in passing, something that is not going to stay.  You know what?  It works every time.

Feelings to me are like waves.  They come toward me and wash over me in varying degrees of intensity. Some of them are so strong that they knock me down.  A few years ago, when I got knocked down by a wave of emotion, I would simply lay there in the surf and wait to drown.  Then I learned to stand back up again because that wave had passed.  Now I stand back up again, face the surf and recognize that even though some of the waves are strong, the surf still holds beauty and I look forward to seeing what the next wave will bring.

 

 

Paradoxical Living

Paradoxical Living

 

 

I was asked to speak at a meeting the other night about step 2.  “Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.”  This step is a stumbling block for so many people because many of us struggle with religion and concepts of God.  It certainly was that for me for so long – thankfully it is not an issue any longer.

In the process of speaking about how I came to find a higher power, it struck me that my life is full of powerful paradoxes now.  In fact much about recovery is paradoxical.  So many of the things I cherish in my life now are things I would never have even considered in my previous existence.

I wrote before about how there is freedom in discipline.  That if I am disciplined about where I place my car keys when I get home, remembering to put them in the same spot each time, then I will be free to leave and drive anytime I like because I will know where they are.  If I am disciplined about charging my phone, then I will be free to make a call or send a text whenever I want.  If you are disciplined about exercise then you are free to enjoy life with more energy.

Similarly, there is liberation in limitation for me.  I am limited in that I can’t drink alcohol, but through that limitation, I am free to live an extraordinary life now.  Through this non-drinking limitation I have gained so much.  I have learned to love myself, I have learned to live in the truth, I have learned to learn from mistakes and let them go.  I have independence and pride and can look the world in the eye.  I no longer have regrets and my future stretches out before me and the possibilities are endless.

There is strength in vulnerability.  The more I open up to others the stronger I feel.  When I admit that I struggle, I get some of the richest connections with others and in turn that strengthens my recovery.  St. Paul talks about that in Corinthians 12:9-10.  I love this passage, particularly, “for when I am weak, then I am strong.”  It has certainly been the case for me.  I had to be brought to my knees before I could stand tall.

I don’t think I truly started getting better and thriving until I made a decision to let go.  It makes me think of the Carrie Underwood song, “Jesus, Take the Wheel”.  It is so counter-intuitive for me to do so but the road I was travelling only became passable and smooth when I let go of the wheel and let my higher power steer.  Now, the road has made turns I would not necessarily have chosen, but the journey has been amazing so far and I can’t wait to see where it leads me next.

Lastly, I had to literally become a lie before I could learn to seek the truth.  I used to lie without thought – it was automatic.  I lied about big things, I lied about small things, I lied to others and I lied to myself.  Now when and if I tell I lie, (I still do from time to time because I am human) it physically hurts me.  I feel sick to my stomach and I fess up fast because I don’t like that feeling.  I have read the children’s book “The Big Fat Enormous Lie” to my kids and in the story the little boy tells a lie and throughout the day the lie becomes larger and uglier and follows him around until he tells the truth.  That is how it feels to me now.

Paradoxical living suits me just fine now.

Perspective and Choice

Perspective and Choice

 

 

I have come to believe that so much of what makes for a mentally healthy outlook is down to perspective and choice.  So much of how we see things and how we deal with things affects our lives – it can really make or break us.

Take the trials that we face.  You can look at a trial and tell yourself it is unfair and wallow in anger and bitterness about it, or you can look at it as a lesson.  It is a choice to change your perspective.  For example, after I came out of my first rehab I signed up to voluntarily be monitored by random urine tests.  I did this for a year.  I had to call into a phone number every week day morning and I would find out if I had been called for a test that day.  It was an inconvenience, but it was a check and balance for me and a way to allay some of Frank’s fears.  The year of monitoring ended and then I relapsed and went back to rehab.

I again signed up for the volunteer monitoring program but for an even more intense level of monitoring.  While in rehab I had admitted that I had cheated the test the last time I went because I knew I would not pass and just wanted to keep drinking for a few more days before I got caught – because at that point I knew I would.  This is the depth you fall to in addictive thinking.

In any case, since I admitted this in rehab, I was to be monitored for a year by random urine tests each week and once every two months by a blood test that can look back over the past three months to see if you have used.  Not only that, but now the random urine tests would be observed.  I can’t tell you just how humbling it is to have to pee in front of someone once, let alone every week for a year.  I could have been very bitter about this but I made a choice to learn from it.  I made a choice to carry myself with dignity.

I was fortunate in that the woman at the lab who had to accompany me and observe me during the tests each week was a consummate professional and one of the most respectful and most kind women I have met.  She did not judge and treated me with the dignity I was attempting to harness.  I appreciated her treatment of me so much, that at Christmas time I baked her some goodies and wrote her a card.  Nothing like thanking someone for watching you pee for a year!  Perspective and choice personified…

I look back on the hardest time of my life, that being the birth, life and death of Liam, and I know that perspective and choice brought Frank and I both through that biggest of trials with bottomless grace. 

I did not have the easiest of childhoods, as so many of us have not, and did not have the best role model in a mother being that she was so mentally ill and so utterly untreated.  When I got pregnant with Liam, I was secretly terrified that I would not be a good mother.  I was afraid that I would harm them emotionally and frankly that I would simply not know what to do.  The moment that he was born something shifted in me and my heart expanded exponentially.  I could not imagine anything that I would not do to make him better, to keep him safe, to hold him close, to care and love him with all my being and I knew instantly that I could be a mother, that I could be a good mother and I was capable of doing all that I needed to in order to care for him.  I am not saying that it was easy, because it wasn’t, and I am not saying that I did not have doubts and fears, but I knew.  Liam taught me that and perhaps God taught me that, I am an unsure.  What I am sure of still to this day, is that I am a good mother when I am not in active addiction.

After his death we went to a grief support group for parents who have had miscarriages, still births and infant deaths.  So many of the parents there were angry about the death of their babies, and understandably so.  I was fortunate enough to feel so differently.  I was grateful, so very grateful that I got to meet Liam, hold him, love him and be his mother.  I was, in fact, honored to hold him as he died.  I could have been angry, I could have lashed out and I could have strayed away from other babies in my grief, but I didn’t and neither did Frank.  Perspective and choice.

During this latest trial: the separation and divorce that Frank and I have been going through and are still going through, I could easily harbor resentment and bewail any injustices that I might perceive.  I could easily curl into a ball and wallow in sadness and distress, but I choose not to.  I choose to accept the situation, allow myself to feel sadness but to look at this as the ending of one chapter and the beginning of another.  I am only 42, I am still young and there is so much of life ahead of me and so much I want to learn and explore.  There is so much to be grateful for and so many people that care.  I have sadness but I also have joy and I choose to allow that to balance my life.  You can either learn from trials or you can let them bury you.  Perspective and choice.