The Easter Bunny

The Easter Bunny

 

            So many people struggle with the 12 steps, particularly steps 1, 2 and 3 because they bring up the concept of a higher power and talk about God.  I did and I see many other people struggling with it also.

            As I have mentioned I am working part-time as a counselor’s aide in an addiction treatment program.  At the moment my job is to introduce the patients to the 12 steps and to take them through where they are outlined in the Big Book.  The population of the treatment program is chiefly medical professionals in recovery.  So as you can imagine they are highly educated but I am finding not very spiritual.

            The concept of surrendering to something we can’t see or touch but only hopefully feel is hard for most people.  These patients however, are trained to be rational.  They are trained to be powerful.  A certain amount of arrogance goes with the territory.  We see doctors as authority figures, they are like gods among us and they are often treated as such.  It only goes to follow that they would want to hold onto control and rational thinking, refusing to consider taking leap of faith.

            To lead them in a discussion on spirituality and surrender is no easy feat.  I have had to appeal to them as rationally as I can (which for me isn’t all that simple!).  I was trying to say to them that perhaps we are over-complicating the search.  Maybe, just maybe, we are making this so much more difficult than it needs to be.

            My kids are at an age where they are starting to grow out of some of the childhood staples.  Wren is 9 and she is a skeptic by nature so it is hard to tell if she still believes in such things as Santa, the tooth fairy, the Easter Bunny.  Sometimes she will voice doubts but mostly I think she chooses to play along with a good think.

            Dermot is turning 11 soon and is much more of a dreamer and a magical thinker.  You can see him starting to question these childhood heroes but also willing them to exist. 

This past year we celebrated Easter at my house.  We had Wren’s family birthday at the same time.  We had presents and a meal and cake and an Easter egg hunt with eggs and baskets.  It was fun and just before the kids were leaving with Frank for the night, Dermot called Frank into his bedroom.

            He looked at Frank and said he wanted to talk to him about something.  Frank says he prepared himself a little and asked what was up.  Dermot looked a little sad and said, “You always say you never lied to me, but now I know you have.”  Frank was a little taken aback by this and asked what Dermot was talking about and Dermot quietly said while shaking his head, “I saw you and mom go out the back door with eggs. I figured it out.  That means that Santa isn’t real, or the Elf on the shelf because the Easter Bunny isn’t real.”

            Speaking very wisely, Frank said, “Dermot I have never lied to you.  The Easter Bunny is real… he just looks different than you thought he would.”  Dermot thought about this and seemed to accept it.  He patted Frank on the head and said, “Good job tooth fairy, and don’t worry I want to keep the magic alive for Wren so I won’t say anything.”

            So maybe it’s that simple.  Maybe God, or a higher power is there and that higher power just doesn’t look like we thought it would.

Dancing in the Rain

Dancing in the Rain

 

In recovery they talk a lot about being present and living in the moment.  This is something I think is very difficult for people to grasp in general but especially in today’s modern, fast-paced society.  We seem to rush from appointment to appointment, task to task, chore to chore and are frequently spending most of our days thinking ahead to the next thing on our long to-do lists.  I do this far too much, even now – I am a professional list-maker.  I am one of those people who makes a list and puts on them things I have already done just to get the gratification of being able to immediately cross them off!

But when we spend so much time thinking forward to tasks and then thinking backward to history and possible regrets, when do we actually live?  In reality a certain amount of planning is needed, there are responsibilities to be tended to and looking back over the past is necessary as well to reflect on mistakes and triumphs – the key is not to get stuck on either end of the spectrum and try and balance those with the middle present.

I remember about 5 years ago now when we were living in Annapolis, I had the luck to be shown, by my children, how gratifying truly living in the present can be.  I was working full-time from home and Frank was frequently working long hours and there was always any number of things that had to get done.  It was August and I remember wrapping things up for work before heading out to pick the kids up from day camp.

It was raining pretty hard when I pulled up to the school and I waited as long as I could to leave the car as I had not had an umbrella.  I gave up realizing that the rain was not going to abate and struck out knowing I would get soaked on the way.  I got the kids and we made our way back to the car, all of us getting pretty wet in the process.

The kids gabbled away at me about their day while I drove them home and all the while I was cataloging what I was going to make for dinner, how much laundry still had to be done, feeding the dogs… whatever I had on my on-going list…

We reached the end of our long cul-de-sac and Dermot (just about to turn 6) said urgently, “Mom!  Stop the car!”  I braked suddenly thinking that I was about to run over a small animal I hadn’t seen or something and said tensely, “What is it?”  He looked at me in the rear view mirror with a glint in his eye and said, “I want to run home in the rain!”

I remember staring at him for a moment in shock before something in me decided, “Why not?”  I got out, opened the car door and let him out.  I can’t describe the sheer joy he had on his face as he took off down the sidewalk, his little tanned legs and arms pumping as he ran and whooped.  I drove slowly to our driveway and turned around to look at Wren (then 4.5) and said, “That looks like a lot of fun doesn’t it?”  She agreed and before I knew it we were all three of us stomping in rain puddles, pretending to swim down the street, singing songs and dancing in the rain.  We were soaked to the skin and I didn’t care.  We laid down across the driveway holding hands with me in the middle blinking up at the rain coming down and trying to drink.  We laughed so hard our sides were hurting. 

We finally went in, cold and fingertips wrinkled about 20 minutes later, drenched and happy.  I had for those view precious moments been completely in the now.  Completely present as a mom, as a human being.  My to-do lists were forgotten and I think we may have had leftovers for dinner, but it didn’t matter.  The kids still talk about this as one of their favorite memories with me.

            As I said, life has priorities, responsibilities and forward planning.  It also has regret and pain from the past.  But to get stuck in either one all the time means we can’t experience the real-time magic of life.  To be stuck in either the future or the past means we will miss the chance to dance in the rain.

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.