Stop Helping Them To Death!

     Nothing changes until something changes. If one member of the family changes, that changes the whole family dynamic. As a practicing codependent you can make the changes necessary to allow the other (s) in your family suffering from addiction. The way you do this is; allow them to suffer!

     Stop the little things first. Stop picking up after them. Stop preparing lunches in advance if you are doing that and they could be doing that for themselves. Stop “taking up the slack” every time the addict does not fulfill his or her obligations to the family. Yes, you will catch some flack, and yes you will have to experience the discomfort of not having those chores completed. Everybody will. But do not allow the flack to pull you back into the helping role.

     Next, openly ask the addict for help with larger issues, such as managing the family finances, doing the “running around” to places like the laundry, the grocery store, the post office, and the bank. In my case, I picked up eight bounced checks one weekend after working out of town all week that my now X-wife had written. I then told her that I was never going to do that again, AND I DIDN’T!  Yes, it was a hard week after I opened a new checking account the following Monday morning in only my name, but she learned that I had set a boundary, and no matter how much screaming, silent treatment, dirty looks, or jawing she gave me, I would never spend another Saturday picking up her bounced checks!

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Just A Little Willingness

Despair is the basic "affect" of the newcomer to recovery. Affect is what psychologists and psychiatrists call the basic emotion projected by a person. By the time we finally "hit our bottom" as a result of the ravages of addiction we have truly surrendered. We have given up on other people, on ourselves, and even on a God of any kind!

Recovery, from day one, becomes a matter of possibility. Possibility is just a glimmer of light flickering through the ink-like darkness of our soul. During our first meeting we experience other people demonstrating that they too walked through that door at some point in the past, that they stayed and began their own recovery process, and that IT WORKED!

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Five Lies About Men

Lie #1: Having Feelings is wrong and bad

            Men are confused. We are taught early in the game a basic lie. We are taught as little boys that FEELINGS (yes, I'm goanna talk about the "F" word here guys) are bad and WRONG. We therefore confuse emotions with faults or short-comings if you are a 12-stepper, sins if you are many Christians.

As a man in al-Anon, a 12-step program for people who are being adversely effected by somebody else's drinking, I have listened to men speak during meetings about how hard they are working to overcome such feelings as fear, guilt, and (heaven forbid) ANGER! ‘Ya think that they will ever really eliminate those feelings? Is that going to happen? Is that even desirable? Here are some questions to ponder; if feelings are sins, why did God make them a part of us? If we had no feelings, what kind of beings would we be? If anger is a short-coming, then how could the only perfect man who walked the earth, Jesus, show it so obviously and so often?

So here is a way to live with this conundrum. Suppose feelings and emotions are perfectly normal acceptable experiences for men. Suppose feeling them, expressing them, and accepting them for what they are is all OK. Suppose these feelings only cause moral problems when we make the wrong decisions about how to express them or how we allow them to dictate our behavior choices!

Life might be a lot easier for us (as well as for those who have to live with us) if we just gave ourselves permission to be healthy emotional men who acknowledge to ourselves and to others that we have feelings. Heck, we might  even get so "out there" that we are able to admit them out loud to another trusted person (even another man), and then let them go until another one happens along. If I feel honest anger toward another person and I have the nerve to tell him or her so, and if I am ready to deal with whatever reaction that person has to my honest anger we might even engage in some conflict. Wow. Wait a minute...is that a sin too?

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Why is it that alcohol and drug addicted family systems create adults who are addicted to crisis? I see this pattern year after year as a sponsor and a regular attendee of meetings. Here are some of my thoughts as to why followed by what I have learned are soun solutions to the problem.

1. We come into the world often in crisis because alcoholism and drug addiction tends to "run in families." Infidelity, out-or-wedlock births, single parenthood, poverty, ignorance, incarceration, and premature deaths all around us throughout childhood; these are commonplace where there is active addiction. Why shouldn't we expect crisis in this life? It is all we have really ever known!

 2. Habits will not break without immense effort. Try to do anything in a different way and see how that feels emotionally. Just crossing your arms differently is uncomfortable. Codependency, enabling, and a host of our own addictiver behaviors all serve to buffer us from orininal thinking. Habit is just easier on a moment to moment basis, so we tend to rely too heavily upon it.

 3. Boredom comes easily to we who are addicted to crisis. Crisis is interesting to us, because at least something is happening. Besides, distraction from reality is always a big plus for members of dysfunction addicted families because reality is often not that much fun!

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