Archive for the ‘Frustrations’ tag
JFT January 2
January 2
Take a deep breath and talk to God
?Sometimes when we pray, a remarkable thing happens: We find the means, ways, and energies to perform tasks far beyond our capacities.?
Basic Text, p. 46
????=????
Coping successfully with life?s minor annoyances and frustrations is sometimes the most difficult skill we have to learn in recovery. We are faced with small inconveniences daily. From untangling the knots in our children?s shoelaces to standing in line at the market, our days are filled with minor difficulties that we must somehow deal with.
If we?re not careful, we may find ourselves dealing with these difficulties by bullying our way through each problem or grinding our teeth while giving ourselves a stern lecture about how we should handle them. These are extreme examples of poor coping skills, but even if we?re not this bad, there?s probably room for improvement.
Each time life presents us with another little setback to our daily plans, we can simply take a deep breath and talk to the God of our understanding. Knowing we can draw patience, tolerance, or whatever we need from that Power, we find ourselves coping better and smiling more often.
????
Take a deep breath and talk to God
?Sometimes when we pray, a remarkable thing happens: We find the means, ways, and energies to perform tasks far beyond our capacities.?
Basic Text, p. 46
????=????
Coping successfully with life?s minor annoyances and frustrations is sometimes the most difficult skill we have to learn in recovery. We are faced with small inconveniences daily. From untangling the knots in our children?s shoelaces to standing in line at the market, our days are filled with minor difficulties that we must somehow deal with.
If we?re not careful, we may find ourselves dealing with these difficulties by bullying our way through each problem or grinding our teeth while giving ourselves a stern lecture about how we should handle them. These are extreme examples of poor coping skills, but even if we?re not this bad, there?s probably room for improvement.
Each time life presents us with another little setback to our daily plans, we can simply take a deep breath and talk to the God of our understanding. Knowing we can draw patience, tolerance, or whatever we need from that Power, we find ourselves coping better and smiling more often.
????
Language of Letting Go - Dec. 27 - Near The Top
You are reading from the book The Language of Letting Go
Near the Top
I know you're tired. I know you feel overwhelmed. You may feel as though this crisis, this problem, this hard time will last forever.
It won't. You are almost through.
You don't just think it has been hard; it has been hard. You have been tested, tried, and retested on what you have learned.
Your beliefs and your faith have been tried in fire. You have believed, then doubted, then worked at believing some more. You have had to have faith even when you could not see or imagine what you were asked to believe. Others around you may have tried to convince you not to believe in what you were hoping you could believe.
You have had opposition. You have not gotten to this place with total support and joy. You have had to work hard, in spite of what was happening around you. Sometimes, what motivated you was anger; sometimes fear.
Things went wrong - more problems occurred than you anticipated. There were obstacles, frustrations, and annoyances en route. You did not plan on this being the way it would evolve. Much of this has been a surprise; some of it has not been at all what you desired.
Yet, it has been good. Part of you, the deepest part that knows truth, has sensed this all along, even when your head told you that things were out of whack and crazy; that there was no plan or purpose, that God had forgotten you.
So much has happened, and each incident - the most painful, the most troubling, and the most surprising - has a connection. You are beginning to see and sense that.
You never dreamt things would happen this way, did you? But they did. Now you are learning the secret - they were meant to happen this way, and this way is good, better than what you expected.
You didn't believe it would take this long, either - did you? But it did. You have learned patience.
You never thought you could have it, but now you know you do.
You have been led. Many were the moments when you thought you were forgotten, when you were convinced you had been abandoned. Now you know you have been guided.
Now things are coming into place. You are almost at the end of this phase, this difficult portion of the journey. The lesson is almost complete. You know - the lesson you fought, resisted, and insisted you could not learn. Yes, that one. You have almost mastered it.
You have been changed from the inside out. You have been moved to a different level, a higher level, a better level.
You have been climbing a mountain. It has not been easy, but mountain climbing is never easy. Now, you are near the top. A moment longer, and the victory shall be yours.
Steady your shoulders. Breathe deeply. Move forward in confidence and peace. The time is coming to relish and enjoy all, which you have fought for. That time is drawing near, finally.
I know you have thought before that the time was drawing near, only to learn that it wasn't. But now, the reward is coming. You know that too. You can feel it.
Your struggle has not been in vain. For every struggle on this journey, there is a climax, a resolution.
Peace, joy, abundant blessings, and reward are yours here on earth. Enjoy.
There will be more mountains, but now you know how to climb them. And you have learned the secret of what is at the top.
Today, I will accept where I am and continue pushing forward. If I am in the midst of a learning experience, I will allow myself to continue on with the faith that the day of mastery and reward will come. Help me, God; understand that despite my best efforts to live in peaceful serenity, there are times of mountain climbing. Help me stop creating chaos and crisis, and help me meet the challenges that will move me upward and forward.
From The Language of Letting Go by Melody Beattie ©1990, Hazelden Foundation.
Near the Top
I know you're tired. I know you feel overwhelmed. You may feel as though this crisis, this problem, this hard time will last forever.
It won't. You are almost through.
You don't just think it has been hard; it has been hard. You have been tested, tried, and retested on what you have learned.
Your beliefs and your faith have been tried in fire. You have believed, then doubted, then worked at believing some more. You have had to have faith even when you could not see or imagine what you were asked to believe. Others around you may have tried to convince you not to believe in what you were hoping you could believe.
You have had opposition. You have not gotten to this place with total support and joy. You have had to work hard, in spite of what was happening around you. Sometimes, what motivated you was anger; sometimes fear.
Things went wrong - more problems occurred than you anticipated. There were obstacles, frustrations, and annoyances en route. You did not plan on this being the way it would evolve. Much of this has been a surprise; some of it has not been at all what you desired.
Yet, it has been good. Part of you, the deepest part that knows truth, has sensed this all along, even when your head told you that things were out of whack and crazy; that there was no plan or purpose, that God had forgotten you.
So much has happened, and each incident - the most painful, the most troubling, and the most surprising - has a connection. You are beginning to see and sense that.
You never dreamt things would happen this way, did you? But they did. Now you are learning the secret - they were meant to happen this way, and this way is good, better than what you expected.
You didn't believe it would take this long, either - did you? But it did. You have learned patience.
You never thought you could have it, but now you know you do.
You have been led. Many were the moments when you thought you were forgotten, when you were convinced you had been abandoned. Now you know you have been guided.
Now things are coming into place. You are almost at the end of this phase, this difficult portion of the journey. The lesson is almost complete. You know - the lesson you fought, resisted, and insisted you could not learn. Yes, that one. You have almost mastered it.
You have been changed from the inside out. You have been moved to a different level, a higher level, a better level.
You have been climbing a mountain. It has not been easy, but mountain climbing is never easy. Now, you are near the top. A moment longer, and the victory shall be yours.
Steady your shoulders. Breathe deeply. Move forward in confidence and peace. The time is coming to relish and enjoy all, which you have fought for. That time is drawing near, finally.
I know you have thought before that the time was drawing near, only to learn that it wasn't. But now, the reward is coming. You know that too. You can feel it.
Your struggle has not been in vain. For every struggle on this journey, there is a climax, a resolution.
Peace, joy, abundant blessings, and reward are yours here on earth. Enjoy.
There will be more mountains, but now you know how to climb them. And you have learned the secret of what is at the top.
Today, I will accept where I am and continue pushing forward. If I am in the midst of a learning experience, I will allow myself to continue on with the faith that the day of mastery and reward will come. Help me, God; understand that despite my best efforts to live in peaceful serenity, there are times of mountain climbing. Help me stop creating chaos and crisis, and help me meet the challenges that will move me upward and forward.
From The Language of Letting Go by Melody Beattie ©1990, Hazelden Foundation.
Losing the Ego - Info Requested
Greetings
This is my first post on the board. Nice to meet you all and thanks for all your help. Binge drinker here. 4 days sober (5 days starts in 25 minutes).
I have been reading a lot about "lose the ego". I would have to admit that my EGO when drinking was large but I believe it must carry over from the drinking to the sober times. I am sitting here trying to write this while dropping the EGO and god is it scarry because I know that some people think I am an EGOtistical A-Hole when I drink. I believe it masks my insecurities and frustrations from trying to change things that I cannot.
So, what does "Lose the EGO" mean? It seems to me like it means that a recovering alcoholic should drop all defenses, denials, and thoughts caused by their drinking and start learning to re-think. Am I right?
God, is this scarry because when I think of dropping my ego, I feel scared of the world. Vulnerable. Defenseless. It makes me feel like the people in my life that have wronged me are right when I know they are not.
How long does it take before losing the EGO sees benefits? Because I feel really naked right now and so out of my skin that it is not even funny. :Xmasrstar
This is my first post on the board. Nice to meet you all and thanks for all your help. Binge drinker here. 4 days sober (5 days starts in 25 minutes).
I have been reading a lot about "lose the ego". I would have to admit that my EGO when drinking was large but I believe it must carry over from the drinking to the sober times. I am sitting here trying to write this while dropping the EGO and god is it scarry because I know that some people think I am an EGOtistical A-Hole when I drink. I believe it masks my insecurities and frustrations from trying to change things that I cannot.
So, what does "Lose the EGO" mean? It seems to me like it means that a recovering alcoholic should drop all defenses, denials, and thoughts caused by their drinking and start learning to re-think. Am I right?
God, is this scarry because when I think of dropping my ego, I feel scared of the world. Vulnerable. Defenseless. It makes me feel like the people in my life that have wronged me are right when I know they are not.
How long does it take before losing the EGO sees benefits? Because I feel really naked right now and so out of my skin that it is not even funny. :Xmasrstar
Addicted To Misery
I realize, looking back that I subjected myself to, painful relationships most of my life, and truly believed it was my (addicted/alcoholic) partners causing my "misery".
I see a lot of people obsessing over hurtful partners and I would like to share something...
I read a book called, "Addicted To Misery", by Robert Becker. It scared the crap out of me at first, but the truth of it helped me REALLY change my life. Heres an excerpt I found particularly eye-opening (and helpful).:
"Getting Familiar With Misery:
Co-dependency teaches us many ways of dealing with life. Unfortunately, these ways often create prolonged unhappiness, making us so familiar with misery that we come to feel it is normal. We learn that being unhappy and having things go wrong is to be expected. Whether our codependency expectations come from the families we grew up in or from living with someone who is dependent, we are prepared for a life with many disappointments, frustrations and misery. Getting used to the traumas and unpredictable situations is hard at first, but we do learn, in order to survive. These experiences shape our thinking such that we imagine and experience situation after situation that is never what we want, never the way it should be, never right. This is where our familiarity with misery begins as a co-dependent.
Pre-existing Developmental Impairments
Children growing up in dysfunctional (another new word) families where things are out of control, develop emotional impairments which stay with them for life. These may take the form of not trusting themselves or others, inability to talk about their feelings, and the most hurtful, the inability to feel their feelings. Imagine the frustration of having something that hurts inside your body, yet not being able to point to where the pain is. Additionally, we become rigid and inflexible, we only like things that are either black or white, right or wrong, and we hate situations that leave unclear results. When that happens, we have feelings of nervousness and anxiety that we can't explain but we suffer with them patiently. As adults we see the world this way and cope with it by seeking ways to deal with our distrust, repression of feelings and rigidity. Avoiding boredom, finding excitement and looking for approval and acceptance become our daily tasks.
These conditions set the emotional stage for us to develop co-dependency. They also dictate the direction that many of our adult interpersonal relationships will take. Tragically, we choose persons to have relationships with for all the wrong reasons like:
"He needs me. I can make him better. Who will take care of him if I don't? I know I can make him happier than he has ever been. I don't think I can get anybody else." These reasons show how we feel about ourselves. Woody Allen had a line in his movie, Annie Hall, that fits co-dependents so well. "I would never want to be a member of a club that would have me as a member."
Who would really take us seriously? Our only real value lies in what we can do for others and that is never appreciated. Our self-image is so poor, our way of addressing feelings so inadequate, that we remain hopelessly stuck. We need to understand the origins of these conditions if any meaningful change is to occur in our lives.
Internalizing Feelings And Our Self-Image
Probably the earliest behavior we learn in getting familiar with misery is to internalize or stuff our feelings. Simply put, this means we don't talk about what feels bad, what feels good, what feels sad or what we feel. Instead, we keep the feelings inside and try to make them go away.
Having to push our emotions inside makes us feel that no one cares. For a child, this is devastating. Unresponsive parents, caught up in their own problems, give children inaccurate messages. The distressed mother, struggling with her alcoholic husband, is oftentimes too preoccupied to deal with the emotional needs of her child. I've seen this over and over with many adult children of alcoholics. They say, "I never talked about how I felt. I was too busy trying to help keep the peace. I never felt anyone cared."
Familiar Versus Unfamiliar Experiences
Power and Control
The experiences of a child living in a dysfunctional home, be it alcoholic, abusive, divorced or emotionally dead, certainly teach two things, first, how important it is to gain as much control in life as possible, and second, never to be powerless over anything because being powerless means to lack control and having no control results in misery.
Dysfunctional families give us the terrible feeling of being out of control and the knowledge of how powerless we are. You make a pact with yourself early in life that, as soon as possible, you will gain control and have power over the events of your life. You can see this happen in young children when they begin withdrawing from people. They shy away from others, especially grownups, and want to be left alone. This is the root of shyness or self-centered fear of what others might think about us. Yet we do this as a way to use our power to stop others from controlling us.
Dependent on Feeling Miserable
As the emotional trauma of our dysfunctional family unfolds, teaching us so many wrong realities, our codependency is spawned. Seeing the world as chaotic, out of control and not meaningful, forces us to learn to cope in poor ways. Yet, living with constant stress causes us to use defenses to deal with the real world. We become defended rather than defensive. The psychic numbing, or repression of memory and feelings, starts the misery which begins the dependency. It is what we come to expect. It is what feels normal. It is what we miss when it is absent. We depend on feeling miserable and we find the uncertainty, when that misery subsides, to be frustrating, worrisome and downright uncomfortable.
Attachment and Detachment
Getting familiar with misery teaches us many painful things. The relationships we form become places of great misery, making loneliness and disassociation the only sanctuary for an absence of misery.
Attachment is a process whereby you become emotionally and physically dependent on someone to take care of you. Children attach to parents as a means of survival. The process is appropriate in that case but when adults attach themselves to other adults, relationships are threatened, power and control issues are great and sick dependencies are spawned.
Even though closeness is avoided, misery addicts and co-dependents often become attached to people and relationships that are destructive, uncaring and unsupportive. The attachment provides a false sense of security and belonging. For most ATMs and co-dependents, fear of abandonment is so great that they will do anything to avoid it. This comes from living in families where people were never really there for them emotionally.
The main problem with attachment is the pain and restriction of freedom experienced by being so emotionally connected to someone. The dependency on this attachment makes it impossible to be independent and secure. Until the co-dependent learns to detach, recovery is threatened.
Detachment is a process of letting go of that "I can't live without this person" feeling. To detach, self-confidence must emerge and the person's self-reliance must take over. When I explain this to my clients, sometimes they think I am suggesting that they stop loving or caring about their spouses or partners. As I discussed earlier, taking care of is a very unhealthy process, though caring for is certainly desirable. Detaching is learning to care for, not take care of. It is a process of becoming un-dependent on the effects of others. This prevents us from being controlled by the emotional needs of others, or worse, trying to change them, as a way to feel better.
Anhedonia
Most of the discussion in this chapter has been to explain the process of how we get familiar with misery. It is important to understand this and see what getting familiar with misery does to us emotionally.
Anhedonia is a psychological condition, defined as the inability to be happy, have fun, or experience common sensual pleasures. Becoming familiar with misery results in just these things. We don't consider ourselves emotionally ill but we find it difficult to balance unpleasant experiences with pleasant ones. As experiences accumulate and we are chronically unhappy and scared, we become anhedonic. Another way to view anhedonia is as a state of numbness. So often, as people seek help, they discover how difficult it is to identify any feelings, after such prolonged exposure to these conditions.
This inability to be happy is not symptomatic only of depression. Certainly, a symptom of depression is the loss of interest in common activities, but that disappears after successful intervention with medication or psychotherapy. This symptom, loss of pleasure, remains only until the biochemical elements kick in, in an endogenous depression caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. In a reactive depression there is a direct causal connection to a situation, e.g. in a divorce, once the person has therapeutically worked through the trauma or crisis, he is able to revert to normal functioning and experience pleasure once again.
Not so with ATMs! ATMs who have left the reactive situations which caused loss of pleasure may continue to have the symptom for up to two years. Their anhedonia is connected to their long familiar history of misery and even when life improves, things just don't feel good.
This condition must be identified and worked with as a treatment issue if the addiction to misery is to be dismantled. Due to chronic unhappy experiences, it will take time for the emotional system to respond to things as they really are. During the recovery period, we will have to work very hard at identifying and processing these good feelings until they are familiar.
Laboratory Experiments
1. Try to remember what the rules were in your home when you were growing up. Identify what your family taught you about your feelings, about trusting and talking. Be specific.
2. If stuffing feelings is what you generally do, think back to when this began. Ask yourself why? Work hard at remembering how feelings were dealt with while you were growing up. List specific situations when you remember not being able to express feelings.
3. Explore what you think was familiar for you as a child about trusting others, risking, caring for yourself.
4. Think about how long you have felt miserable and how many times, when things were going well, you somehow found a way to mess them up and get back to the misery.
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I see a lot of people obsessing over hurtful partners and I would like to share something...
I read a book called, "Addicted To Misery", by Robert Becker. It scared the crap out of me at first, but the truth of it helped me REALLY change my life. Heres an excerpt I found particularly eye-opening (and helpful).:
"Getting Familiar With Misery:
Co-dependency teaches us many ways of dealing with life. Unfortunately, these ways often create prolonged unhappiness, making us so familiar with misery that we come to feel it is normal. We learn that being unhappy and having things go wrong is to be expected. Whether our codependency expectations come from the families we grew up in or from living with someone who is dependent, we are prepared for a life with many disappointments, frustrations and misery. Getting used to the traumas and unpredictable situations is hard at first, but we do learn, in order to survive. These experiences shape our thinking such that we imagine and experience situation after situation that is never what we want, never the way it should be, never right. This is where our familiarity with misery begins as a co-dependent.
Pre-existing Developmental Impairments
Children growing up in dysfunctional (another new word) families where things are out of control, develop emotional impairments which stay with them for life. These may take the form of not trusting themselves or others, inability to talk about their feelings, and the most hurtful, the inability to feel their feelings. Imagine the frustration of having something that hurts inside your body, yet not being able to point to where the pain is. Additionally, we become rigid and inflexible, we only like things that are either black or white, right or wrong, and we hate situations that leave unclear results. When that happens, we have feelings of nervousness and anxiety that we can't explain but we suffer with them patiently. As adults we see the world this way and cope with it by seeking ways to deal with our distrust, repression of feelings and rigidity. Avoiding boredom, finding excitement and looking for approval and acceptance become our daily tasks.
These conditions set the emotional stage for us to develop co-dependency. They also dictate the direction that many of our adult interpersonal relationships will take. Tragically, we choose persons to have relationships with for all the wrong reasons like:
"He needs me. I can make him better. Who will take care of him if I don't? I know I can make him happier than he has ever been. I don't think I can get anybody else." These reasons show how we feel about ourselves. Woody Allen had a line in his movie, Annie Hall, that fits co-dependents so well. "I would never want to be a member of a club that would have me as a member."
Who would really take us seriously? Our only real value lies in what we can do for others and that is never appreciated. Our self-image is so poor, our way of addressing feelings so inadequate, that we remain hopelessly stuck. We need to understand the origins of these conditions if any meaningful change is to occur in our lives.
Internalizing Feelings And Our Self-Image
Probably the earliest behavior we learn in getting familiar with misery is to internalize or stuff our feelings. Simply put, this means we don't talk about what feels bad, what feels good, what feels sad or what we feel. Instead, we keep the feelings inside and try to make them go away.
Having to push our emotions inside makes us feel that no one cares. For a child, this is devastating. Unresponsive parents, caught up in their own problems, give children inaccurate messages. The distressed mother, struggling with her alcoholic husband, is oftentimes too preoccupied to deal with the emotional needs of her child. I've seen this over and over with many adult children of alcoholics. They say, "I never talked about how I felt. I was too busy trying to help keep the peace. I never felt anyone cared."
Familiar Versus Unfamiliar Experiences
Power and Control
The experiences of a child living in a dysfunctional home, be it alcoholic, abusive, divorced or emotionally dead, certainly teach two things, first, how important it is to gain as much control in life as possible, and second, never to be powerless over anything because being powerless means to lack control and having no control results in misery.
Dysfunctional families give us the terrible feeling of being out of control and the knowledge of how powerless we are. You make a pact with yourself early in life that, as soon as possible, you will gain control and have power over the events of your life. You can see this happen in young children when they begin withdrawing from people. They shy away from others, especially grownups, and want to be left alone. This is the root of shyness or self-centered fear of what others might think about us. Yet we do this as a way to use our power to stop others from controlling us.
Dependent on Feeling Miserable
As the emotional trauma of our dysfunctional family unfolds, teaching us so many wrong realities, our codependency is spawned. Seeing the world as chaotic, out of control and not meaningful, forces us to learn to cope in poor ways. Yet, living with constant stress causes us to use defenses to deal with the real world. We become defended rather than defensive. The psychic numbing, or repression of memory and feelings, starts the misery which begins the dependency. It is what we come to expect. It is what feels normal. It is what we miss when it is absent. We depend on feeling miserable and we find the uncertainty, when that misery subsides, to be frustrating, worrisome and downright uncomfortable.
Attachment and Detachment
Getting familiar with misery teaches us many painful things. The relationships we form become places of great misery, making loneliness and disassociation the only sanctuary for an absence of misery.
Attachment is a process whereby you become emotionally and physically dependent on someone to take care of you. Children attach to parents as a means of survival. The process is appropriate in that case but when adults attach themselves to other adults, relationships are threatened, power and control issues are great and sick dependencies are spawned.
Even though closeness is avoided, misery addicts and co-dependents often become attached to people and relationships that are destructive, uncaring and unsupportive. The attachment provides a false sense of security and belonging. For most ATMs and co-dependents, fear of abandonment is so great that they will do anything to avoid it. This comes from living in families where people were never really there for them emotionally.
The main problem with attachment is the pain and restriction of freedom experienced by being so emotionally connected to someone. The dependency on this attachment makes it impossible to be independent and secure. Until the co-dependent learns to detach, recovery is threatened.
Detachment is a process of letting go of that "I can't live without this person" feeling. To detach, self-confidence must emerge and the person's self-reliance must take over. When I explain this to my clients, sometimes they think I am suggesting that they stop loving or caring about their spouses or partners. As I discussed earlier, taking care of is a very unhealthy process, though caring for is certainly desirable. Detaching is learning to care for, not take care of. It is a process of becoming un-dependent on the effects of others. This prevents us from being controlled by the emotional needs of others, or worse, trying to change them, as a way to feel better.
Anhedonia
Most of the discussion in this chapter has been to explain the process of how we get familiar with misery. It is important to understand this and see what getting familiar with misery does to us emotionally.
Anhedonia is a psychological condition, defined as the inability to be happy, have fun, or experience common sensual pleasures. Becoming familiar with misery results in just these things. We don't consider ourselves emotionally ill but we find it difficult to balance unpleasant experiences with pleasant ones. As experiences accumulate and we are chronically unhappy and scared, we become anhedonic. Another way to view anhedonia is as a state of numbness. So often, as people seek help, they discover how difficult it is to identify any feelings, after such prolonged exposure to these conditions.
This inability to be happy is not symptomatic only of depression. Certainly, a symptom of depression is the loss of interest in common activities, but that disappears after successful intervention with medication or psychotherapy. This symptom, loss of pleasure, remains only until the biochemical elements kick in, in an endogenous depression caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. In a reactive depression there is a direct causal connection to a situation, e.g. in a divorce, once the person has therapeutically worked through the trauma or crisis, he is able to revert to normal functioning and experience pleasure once again.
Not so with ATMs! ATMs who have left the reactive situations which caused loss of pleasure may continue to have the symptom for up to two years. Their anhedonia is connected to their long familiar history of misery and even when life improves, things just don't feel good.
This condition must be identified and worked with as a treatment issue if the addiction to misery is to be dismantled. Due to chronic unhappy experiences, it will take time for the emotional system to respond to things as they really are. During the recovery period, we will have to work very hard at identifying and processing these good feelings until they are familiar.
Laboratory Experiments
1. Try to remember what the rules were in your home when you were growing up. Identify what your family taught you about your feelings, about trusting and talking. Be specific.
2. If stuffing feelings is what you generally do, think back to when this began. Ask yourself why? Work hard at remembering how feelings were dealt with while you were growing up. List specific situations when you remember not being able to express feelings.
3. Explore what you think was familiar for you as a child about trusting others, risking, caring for yourself.
4. Think about how long you have felt miserable and how many times, when things were going well, you somehow found a way to mess them up and get back to the misery.
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Addicted To Misery…
I realize, looking back that I have been subjected myself to, painful situations most of my life, and truly believed it was my (addicted/alcoholic) partners causing my "misery".
I see a lot of people obsessing over hurtful partners and I would like to share something...
I read a book called, "Addicted To Misery", by Robert Becker. It scared the crap out of me at first, but the truth of it helped me REALLY change my life. Heres an excerpt I found particularly eye-opening (and helpful).:
"Getting Familiar With Misery:
Co-dependency teaches us many ways of dealing with life. Unfortunately, these ways often create prolonged unhappiness, making us so familiar with misery that we come to feel it is normal. We learn that being unhappy and having things go wrong is to be expected. Whether our codependency expectations come from the families we grew up in or from living with someone who is dependent, we are prepared for a life with many disappointments, frustrations and misery. Getting used to the traumas and unpredictable situations is hard at first, but we do learn, in order to survive. These experiences shape our thinking such that we imagine and experience situation after situation that is never what we want, never the way it should be, never right. This is where our familiarity with misery begins as a co-dependent.
Pre-existing Developmental Impairments
Children growing up in dysfunctional (another new word) families where things are out of control, develop emotional impairments which stay with them for life. These may take the form of not trusting themselves or others, inability to talk about their feelings, and the most hurtful, the inability to feel their feelings. Imagine the frustration of having something that hurts inside your body, yet not being able to point to where the pain is. Additionally, we become rigid and inflexible, we only like things that are either black or white, right or wrong, and we hate situations that leave unclear results. When that happens, we have feelings of nervousness and anxiety that we can't explain but we suffer with them patiently. As adults we see the world this way and cope with it by seeking ways to deal with our distrust, repression of feelings and rigidity. Avoiding boredom, finding excitement and looking for approval and acceptance become our daily tasks.
These conditions set the emotional stage for us to develop co-dependency. They also dictate the direction that many of our adult interpersonal relationships will take. Tragically, we choose persons to have relationships with for all the wrong reasons like:
"He needs me. I can make him better. Who will take care of him if I don't? I know I can make him happier than he has ever been. I don't think I can get anybody else." These reasons show how we feel about ourselves. Woody Allen had a line in his movie, Annie Hall, that fits co-dependents so well. "I would never want to be a member of a club that would have me as a member."
Who would really take us seriously? Our only real value lies in what we can do for others and that is never appreciated. Our self-image is so poor, our way of addressing feelings so inadequate, that we remain hopelessly stuck. We need to understand the origins of these conditions if any meaningful change is to occur in our lives.
Internalizing Feelings And Our Self-Image
Probably the earliest behavior we learn in getting familiar with misery is to internalize or stuff our feelings. Simply put, this means we don't talk about what feels bad, what feels good, what feels sad or what we feel. Instead, we keep the feelings inside and try to make them go away.
Having to push our emotions inside makes us feel that no one cares. For a child, this is devastating. Unresponsive parents, caught up in their own problems, give children inaccurate messages. The distressed mother, struggling with her alcoholic husband, is oftentimes too preoccupied to deal with the emotional needs of her child. I've seen this over and over with many adult children of alcoholics. They say, "I never talked about how I felt. I was too busy trying to help keep the peace. I never felt anyone cared."
Familiar Versus Unfamiliar Experiences
Power and Control
The experiences of a child living in a dysfunctional home, be it alcoholic, abusive, divorced or emotionally dead, certainly teach two things, first, how important it is to gain as much control in life as possible, and second, never to be powerless over anything because being powerless means to lack control and having no control results in misery.
Dysfunctional families give us the terrible feeling of being out of control and the knowledge of how powerless we are. You make a pact with yourself early in life that, as soon as possible, you will gain control and have power over the events of your life. You can see this happen in young children when they begin withdrawing from people. They shy away from others, especially grownups, and want to be left alone. This is the root of shyness or self-centered fear of what others might think about us. Yet we do this as a way to use our power to stop others from controlling us.
Dependent on Feeling Miserable
As the emotional trauma of our dysfunctional family unfolds, teaching us so many wrong realities, our codependency is spawned. Seeing the world as chaotic, out of control and not meaningful, forces us to learn to cope in poor ways. Yet, living with constant stress causes us to use defenses to deal with the real world. We become defended rather than defensive. The psychic numbing, or repression of memory and feelings, starts the misery which begins the dependency. It is what we come to expect. It is what feels normal. It is what we miss when it is absent. We depend on feeling miserable and we find the uncertainty, when that misery subsides, to be frustrating, worrisome and downright uncomfortable.
Attachment and Detachment
Getting familiar with misery teaches us many painful things. The relationships we form become places of great misery, making loneliness and disassociation the only sanctuary for an absence of misery.
Attachment is a process whereby you become emotionally and physically dependent on someone to take care of you. Children attach to parents as a means of survival. The process is appropriate in that case but when adults attach themselves to other adults, relationships are threatened, power and control issues are great and sick dependencies are spawned.
Even though closeness is avoided, misery addicts and co-dependents often become attached to people and relationships that are destructive, uncaring and unsupportive. The attachment provides a false sense of security and belonging. For most ATMs and co-dependents, fear of abandonment is so great that they will do anything to avoid it. This comes from living in families where people were never really there for them emotionally.
The main problem with attachment is the pain and restriction of freedom experienced by being so emotionally connected to someone. The dependency on this attachment makes it impossible to be independent and secure. Until the co-dependent learns to detach, recovery is threatened.
Detachment is a process of letting go of that "I can't live without this person" feeling. To detach, self-confidence must emerge and the person's self-reliance must take over. When I explain this to my clients, sometimes they think I am suggesting that they stop loving or caring about their spouses or partners. As I discussed earlier, taking care of is a very unhealthy process, though caring for is certainly desirable. Detaching is learning to care for, not take care of. It is a process of becoming un-dependent on the effects of others. This prevents us from being controlled by the emotional needs of others, or worse, trying to change them, as a way to feel better.
Anhedonia
Most of the discussion in this chapter has been to explain the process of how we get familiar with misery. It is important to understand this and see what getting familiar with misery does to us emotionally.
Anhedonia is a psychological condition, defined as the inability to be happy, have fun, or experience common sensual pleasures. Becoming familiar with misery results in just these things. We don't consider ourselves emotionally ill but we find it difficult to balance unpleasant experiences with pleasant ones. As experiences accumulate and we are chronically unhappy and scared, we become anhedonic. Another way to view anhedonia is as a state of numbness. So often, as people seek help, they discover how difficult it is to identify any feelings, after such prolonged exposure to these conditions.
This inability to be happy is not symptomatic only of depression. Certainly, a symptom of depression is the loss of interest in common activities, but that disappears after successful intervention with medication or psychotherapy. This symptom, loss of pleasure, remains only until the biochemical elements kick in, in an endogenous depression caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. In a reactive depression there is a direct causal connection to a situation, e.g. in a divorce, once the person has therapeutically worked through the trauma or crisis, he is able to revert to normal functioning and experience pleasure once again.
Not so with ATMs! ATMs who have left the reactive situations which caused loss of pleasure may continue to have the symptom for up to two years. Their anhedonia is connected to their long familiar history of misery and even when life improves, things just don't feel good.
This condition must be identified and worked with as a treatment issue if the addiction to misery is to be dismantled. Due to chronic unhappy experiences, it will take time for the emotional system to respond to things as they really are. During the recovery period, we will have to work very hard at identifying and processing these good feelings until they are familiar.
Laboratory Experiments
1. Try to remember what the rules were in your home when you were growing up. Identify what your family taught you about your feelings, about trusting and talking. Be specific.
2. If stuffing feelings is what you generally do, think back to when this began. Ask yourself why? Work hard at remembering how feelings were dealt with while you were growing up. List specific situations when you remember not being able to express feelings.
3. Explore what you think was familiar for you as a child about trusting others, risking, caring for yourself.
4. Think about how long you have felt miserable and how many times, when things were going well, you somehow found a way to mess them up and get back to the misery.
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I see a lot of people obsessing over hurtful partners and I would like to share something...
I read a book called, "Addicted To Misery", by Robert Becker. It scared the crap out of me at first, but the truth of it helped me REALLY change my life. Heres an excerpt I found particularly eye-opening (and helpful).:
"Getting Familiar With Misery:
Co-dependency teaches us many ways of dealing with life. Unfortunately, these ways often create prolonged unhappiness, making us so familiar with misery that we come to feel it is normal. We learn that being unhappy and having things go wrong is to be expected. Whether our codependency expectations come from the families we grew up in or from living with someone who is dependent, we are prepared for a life with many disappointments, frustrations and misery. Getting used to the traumas and unpredictable situations is hard at first, but we do learn, in order to survive. These experiences shape our thinking such that we imagine and experience situation after situation that is never what we want, never the way it should be, never right. This is where our familiarity with misery begins as a co-dependent.
Pre-existing Developmental Impairments
Children growing up in dysfunctional (another new word) families where things are out of control, develop emotional impairments which stay with them for life. These may take the form of not trusting themselves or others, inability to talk about their feelings, and the most hurtful, the inability to feel their feelings. Imagine the frustration of having something that hurts inside your body, yet not being able to point to where the pain is. Additionally, we become rigid and inflexible, we only like things that are either black or white, right or wrong, and we hate situations that leave unclear results. When that happens, we have feelings of nervousness and anxiety that we can't explain but we suffer with them patiently. As adults we see the world this way and cope with it by seeking ways to deal with our distrust, repression of feelings and rigidity. Avoiding boredom, finding excitement and looking for approval and acceptance become our daily tasks.
These conditions set the emotional stage for us to develop co-dependency. They also dictate the direction that many of our adult interpersonal relationships will take. Tragically, we choose persons to have relationships with for all the wrong reasons like:
"He needs me. I can make him better. Who will take care of him if I don't? I know I can make him happier than he has ever been. I don't think I can get anybody else." These reasons show how we feel about ourselves. Woody Allen had a line in his movie, Annie Hall, that fits co-dependents so well. "I would never want to be a member of a club that would have me as a member."
Who would really take us seriously? Our only real value lies in what we can do for others and that is never appreciated. Our self-image is so poor, our way of addressing feelings so inadequate, that we remain hopelessly stuck. We need to understand the origins of these conditions if any meaningful change is to occur in our lives.
Internalizing Feelings And Our Self-Image
Probably the earliest behavior we learn in getting familiar with misery is to internalize or stuff our feelings. Simply put, this means we don't talk about what feels bad, what feels good, what feels sad or what we feel. Instead, we keep the feelings inside and try to make them go away.
Having to push our emotions inside makes us feel that no one cares. For a child, this is devastating. Unresponsive parents, caught up in their own problems, give children inaccurate messages. The distressed mother, struggling with her alcoholic husband, is oftentimes too preoccupied to deal with the emotional needs of her child. I've seen this over and over with many adult children of alcoholics. They say, "I never talked about how I felt. I was too busy trying to help keep the peace. I never felt anyone cared."
Familiar Versus Unfamiliar Experiences
Power and Control
The experiences of a child living in a dysfunctional home, be it alcoholic, abusive, divorced or emotionally dead, certainly teach two things, first, how important it is to gain as much control in life as possible, and second, never to be powerless over anything because being powerless means to lack control and having no control results in misery.
Dysfunctional families give us the terrible feeling of being out of control and the knowledge of how powerless we are. You make a pact with yourself early in life that, as soon as possible, you will gain control and have power over the events of your life. You can see this happen in young children when they begin withdrawing from people. They shy away from others, especially grownups, and want to be left alone. This is the root of shyness or self-centered fear of what others might think about us. Yet we do this as a way to use our power to stop others from controlling us.
Dependent on Feeling Miserable
As the emotional trauma of our dysfunctional family unfolds, teaching us so many wrong realities, our codependency is spawned. Seeing the world as chaotic, out of control and not meaningful, forces us to learn to cope in poor ways. Yet, living with constant stress causes us to use defenses to deal with the real world. We become defended rather than defensive. The psychic numbing, or repression of memory and feelings, starts the misery which begins the dependency. It is what we come to expect. It is what feels normal. It is what we miss when it is absent. We depend on feeling miserable and we find the uncertainty, when that misery subsides, to be frustrating, worrisome and downright uncomfortable.
Attachment and Detachment
Getting familiar with misery teaches us many painful things. The relationships we form become places of great misery, making loneliness and disassociation the only sanctuary for an absence of misery.
Attachment is a process whereby you become emotionally and physically dependent on someone to take care of you. Children attach to parents as a means of survival. The process is appropriate in that case but when adults attach themselves to other adults, relationships are threatened, power and control issues are great and sick dependencies are spawned.
Even though closeness is avoided, misery addicts and co-dependents often become attached to people and relationships that are destructive, uncaring and unsupportive. The attachment provides a false sense of security and belonging. For most ATMs and co-dependents, fear of abandonment is so great that they will do anything to avoid it. This comes from living in families where people were never really there for them emotionally.
The main problem with attachment is the pain and restriction of freedom experienced by being so emotionally connected to someone. The dependency on this attachment makes it impossible to be independent and secure. Until the co-dependent learns to detach, recovery is threatened.
Detachment is a process of letting go of that "I can't live without this person" feeling. To detach, self-confidence must emerge and the person's self-reliance must take over. When I explain this to my clients, sometimes they think I am suggesting that they stop loving or caring about their spouses or partners. As I discussed earlier, taking care of is a very unhealthy process, though caring for is certainly desirable. Detaching is learning to care for, not take care of. It is a process of becoming un-dependent on the effects of others. This prevents us from being controlled by the emotional needs of others, or worse, trying to change them, as a way to feel better.
Anhedonia
Most of the discussion in this chapter has been to explain the process of how we get familiar with misery. It is important to understand this and see what getting familiar with misery does to us emotionally.
Anhedonia is a psychological condition, defined as the inability to be happy, have fun, or experience common sensual pleasures. Becoming familiar with misery results in just these things. We don't consider ourselves emotionally ill but we find it difficult to balance unpleasant experiences with pleasant ones. As experiences accumulate and we are chronically unhappy and scared, we become anhedonic. Another way to view anhedonia is as a state of numbness. So often, as people seek help, they discover how difficult it is to identify any feelings, after such prolonged exposure to these conditions.
This inability to be happy is not symptomatic only of depression. Certainly, a symptom of depression is the loss of interest in common activities, but that disappears after successful intervention with medication or psychotherapy. This symptom, loss of pleasure, remains only until the biochemical elements kick in, in an endogenous depression caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. In a reactive depression there is a direct causal connection to a situation, e.g. in a divorce, once the person has therapeutically worked through the trauma or crisis, he is able to revert to normal functioning and experience pleasure once again.
Not so with ATMs! ATMs who have left the reactive situations which caused loss of pleasure may continue to have the symptom for up to two years. Their anhedonia is connected to their long familiar history of misery and even when life improves, things just don't feel good.
This condition must be identified and worked with as a treatment issue if the addiction to misery is to be dismantled. Due to chronic unhappy experiences, it will take time for the emotional system to respond to things as they really are. During the recovery period, we will have to work very hard at identifying and processing these good feelings until they are familiar.
Laboratory Experiments
1. Try to remember what the rules were in your home when you were growing up. Identify what your family taught you about your feelings, about trusting and talking. Be specific.
2. If stuffing feelings is what you generally do, think back to when this began. Ask yourself why? Work hard at remembering how feelings were dealt with while you were growing up. List specific situations when you remember not being able to express feelings.
3. Explore what you think was familiar for you as a child about trusting others, risking, caring for yourself.
4. Think about how long you have felt miserable and how many times, when things were going well, you somehow found a way to mess them up and get back to the misery.
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it never rains but it pours
I've been waiting anxiously for a month to get my sister back into seeing the doctor/therapist she's had some success with in the past. She had a long history of irresponsible living and drug abuse that built up to 2 arrests within a month last December for faking prescriptions for percs and oxy. She made some progress in recovery for the first half of this year, but fell back into the old habits over the summer. All this time she's had a live-in bf (with previous alcohol problem) who's stood by her but whose patience is nearly at an end. And 2 weeks ago she found out she's pregnant. It all seemed ready to blow.
So Monday I go with her back to seeing the doctor. It'll be weekly visits from now on with me coming to all of them. They discuss both her treatments and what's in store if she keeps the baby (as she seems determined to do). I leave feeling hopeful that maybe her relapse can be turned around, the bf's fears eased, and maybe, just maybe, having a baby in all this won't be a total disaster.
Well. The next night at 3am I get a frantic call from her that the bf has come home drunk out his head and is trashing the place and screaming at her about all the the bad things she's done over the months. Cops take him away and now he's got to live in a different city with his mother who posted his bond. At the moment she's alone, except for me checking in and friends.
Then today we found our dad's chemo is no longer working and won't be continued. Not sure how much longer he's got, but whether he'll be around to see her baby born is in doubt.
All these things are connected. The BF's relapse in alcohol abuse by his frustrations with her, her fears over whether he'll stay and our dad's health making her own recover harder, the pregnancy thrown in which makes him feel trapped now, and her fears of being abandoned. One big knot to unravel!
While at times I've been sick with worry this week about where this is going and why it all hit at once, I'm hoping that maybe after the shocks are over, and time goes on some good could come of it. He's required to get alcoholism treatment now (and I know he will), she has continued to make her therapy appointments with me as the moral support, and knowing a baby is on the way and our dad's time could be short seems to be focusing her mind on staying clean for those reasons.
So Monday I go with her back to seeing the doctor. It'll be weekly visits from now on with me coming to all of them. They discuss both her treatments and what's in store if she keeps the baby (as she seems determined to do). I leave feeling hopeful that maybe her relapse can be turned around, the bf's fears eased, and maybe, just maybe, having a baby in all this won't be a total disaster.
Well. The next night at 3am I get a frantic call from her that the bf has come home drunk out his head and is trashing the place and screaming at her about all the the bad things she's done over the months. Cops take him away and now he's got to live in a different city with his mother who posted his bond. At the moment she's alone, except for me checking in and friends.
Then today we found our dad's chemo is no longer working and won't be continued. Not sure how much longer he's got, but whether he'll be around to see her baby born is in doubt.
All these things are connected. The BF's relapse in alcohol abuse by his frustrations with her, her fears over whether he'll stay and our dad's health making her own recover harder, the pregnancy thrown in which makes him feel trapped now, and her fears of being abandoned. One big knot to unravel!
While at times I've been sick with worry this week about where this is going and why it all hit at once, I'm hoping that maybe after the shocks are over, and time goes on some good could come of it. He's required to get alcoholism treatment now (and I know he will), she has continued to make her therapy appointments with me as the moral support, and knowing a baby is on the way and our dad's time could be short seems to be focusing her mind on staying clean for those reasons.
Spouse, Family.. stuck in the middle
Ok, I'm not going to go all into this, but I wanted to just vent a bit.
Parents are overprotective and overinvolved in my quest for sobriety. Husband is pretty ignorant to the nuances of addiction/alcoholism. Parents are alcoholics, 13 years dry. Husband drinks a beer once a week.
They cannot come together, and i'm stuck in the middle. My parents stop by my house, joined my gym, call, e mail a LOT. If I don't respond immediately, they assume I'm drinking (in the past, sometimes because I WAS), so I understand. BUt I'm married, my husband sees how crazy this makes me.
He's the opposite, very hands off, likely enabling without even knowing it. We have been married for 3 years, we're still figuring out the marriage thing, and make mistakes sometimes. He's as supportive as he can be, with the tools he has.
Most recently the three of them have had 'words'. My hubby telling them to back off, them getting feelings hurt and backing off WAY more than necessary, I'm sure they are hurt that he told them his frustrations. They 're mad because they don't see him AS involved as he should. See the polar opposites? My parents think I need to be in AA every day, in therapy, in a facility. My husband is opposite, thinks I need to "chill", and watch how much I drink.
I KNOW I cannot drink. I cannot take care of everyone else.. while I try to care for myself. Breaks my damn heart that everyone I love is having such a hard time not only with my issues, but with each other.
My parents likely have some regrets from our past, my hubby is just simply inexperienced, period.
Drives me nuts! Thanks for letting me spill that all over the place!!
I'm being torn in half, and trying to stay stober. Torn between overinvolved parents and underinvolved husband. Alcoholics 13 years sober, no treatment, no counseling (my parents), the 1-2 beer a week drinker with no history of alcoholism/problems with alcohol.
Parents are overprotective and overinvolved in my quest for sobriety. Husband is pretty ignorant to the nuances of addiction/alcoholism. Parents are alcoholics, 13 years dry. Husband drinks a beer once a week.
They cannot come together, and i'm stuck in the middle. My parents stop by my house, joined my gym, call, e mail a LOT. If I don't respond immediately, they assume I'm drinking (in the past, sometimes because I WAS), so I understand. BUt I'm married, my husband sees how crazy this makes me.
He's the opposite, very hands off, likely enabling without even knowing it. We have been married for 3 years, we're still figuring out the marriage thing, and make mistakes sometimes. He's as supportive as he can be, with the tools he has.
Most recently the three of them have had 'words'. My hubby telling them to back off, them getting feelings hurt and backing off WAY more than necessary, I'm sure they are hurt that he told them his frustrations. They 're mad because they don't see him AS involved as he should. See the polar opposites? My parents think I need to be in AA every day, in therapy, in a facility. My husband is opposite, thinks I need to "chill", and watch how much I drink.
I KNOW I cannot drink. I cannot take care of everyone else.. while I try to care for myself. Breaks my damn heart that everyone I love is having such a hard time not only with my issues, but with each other.
My parents likely have some regrets from our past, my hubby is just simply inexperienced, period.
Drives me nuts! Thanks for letting me spill that all over the place!!
I'm being torn in half, and trying to stay stober. Torn between overinvolved parents and underinvolved husband. Alcoholics 13 years sober, no treatment, no counseling (my parents), the 1-2 beer a week drinker with no history of alcoholism/problems with alcohol.
Annoying day (really long, sorry)
Hi all,
I feel bad starting a thread about this when others are going through much worse things, but SR and a raging headache are honestly the only things keeping me from a bottle of wine right now.
I had a crappy day at work. I used to have this awesome boss who thinks just like me and had the same priorities as me. Then she hired this middle manager who is a personal friend of hers... he's a really nice guy and very smart, but doesn't fit into our company culture and has not made any attempts to understand it or operate within it. He has totally different ideas than the other boss about how things should be done, which he has imposed on me. Even though she's his boss, she always sides with him because he's a personal friend and (my opinion) she's afraid to manage him. Recently he did some things that made us (namely ME) look really bad to our clients. Even though she looked really bad because of that, she still won't tell him he's done anything wrong.
I just recently finished up a project that involved a lot of writing. I have always been praised about my writing, and told it is clear and concise and delivered well to clients. So, the new boss has started COMPLETELY REWRITING everything I write, not to make any substantive changes, but just to put it in his own style. I mean, entirely redlined documents here. He puts them into this style that's confrontational and scares people away, a way that I would NEVER write, and then I'm the one that has to sign my name to them. Even though I KNOW the other boss wouldn't agree, today I went to her with my frustrations and she totally blew them off like I wasn't respecting the wishes of my boss. I just need to "get used to it". Again I think she does this because she is afraid to confront him. The clients I'm writing these documents for have already complained to her about feeling "shut down" by us (because of something my boss did), and she has already had to spend considerable time doing "damage control" for that. Even though "damage control" is the exact phrase she used, she won't take any action to correct it with my boss.
I am so frustrated... this is causing my reputation to be damaged and I feel like I don't have anybody's support at work. I used to think my original boss actually cared about me and my career, but I feel like that's not the case anymore and it sucks. I had to leave my desk twice today to have a crying fit because I was so upset.
Phew, sorry this is so long! I guess I just needed to vent.
I feel bad starting a thread about this when others are going through much worse things, but SR and a raging headache are honestly the only things keeping me from a bottle of wine right now.
I had a crappy day at work. I used to have this awesome boss who thinks just like me and had the same priorities as me. Then she hired this middle manager who is a personal friend of hers... he's a really nice guy and very smart, but doesn't fit into our company culture and has not made any attempts to understand it or operate within it. He has totally different ideas than the other boss about how things should be done, which he has imposed on me. Even though she's his boss, she always sides with him because he's a personal friend and (my opinion) she's afraid to manage him. Recently he did some things that made us (namely ME) look really bad to our clients. Even though she looked really bad because of that, she still won't tell him he's done anything wrong.
I just recently finished up a project that involved a lot of writing. I have always been praised about my writing, and told it is clear and concise and delivered well to clients. So, the new boss has started COMPLETELY REWRITING everything I write, not to make any substantive changes, but just to put it in his own style. I mean, entirely redlined documents here. He puts them into this style that's confrontational and scares people away, a way that I would NEVER write, and then I'm the one that has to sign my name to them. Even though I KNOW the other boss wouldn't agree, today I went to her with my frustrations and she totally blew them off like I wasn't respecting the wishes of my boss. I just need to "get used to it". Again I think she does this because she is afraid to confront him. The clients I'm writing these documents for have already complained to her about feeling "shut down" by us (because of something my boss did), and she has already had to spend considerable time doing "damage control" for that. Even though "damage control" is the exact phrase she used, she won't take any action to correct it with my boss.
I am so frustrated... this is causing my reputation to be damaged and I feel like I don't have anybody's support at work. I used to think my original boss actually cared about me and my career, but I feel like that's not the case anymore and it sucks. I had to leave my desk twice today to have a crying fit because I was so upset.
Phew, sorry this is so long! I guess I just needed to vent.
Its a slippery slope!
My Husband had been gone almost 5 months in rehab..Stayed sober for 7 months total,,and relapsed.. and again. As soon as I set my boundries in place, He says he will take the steps he needs to take to get back on track.. Im worried he might be hiding drinking from me and Im not sure how to handle it.. He preaches about how in love he is with me and our daughter and he wants us over the alcohol..However I see him slipping.. How much is too much help.. How firm is too firm and how do I get involved without it being too much?? I get confused... Hes my husband and what he does under our roof does effect us. I cant walk around minding my own business just focusing on myself. The energy is too strong.. and even if I went through life just paying attention to my needs I might as well be single. Why be married then??I made a vow to love in sickness and in health.. and we have been together 9 years and I am so commited...However I can only tolerate so much .He could go either way at this point.. he says he doesnt ever want to go back to his old selfdestructive ways, yet hes not putting the energy that he needs to get the help.. He seems depressed and has been isolating.. Then he wil wake up and everything will be fine. His moods change pretty drastically. I cant do the one foot in one foot out the door.. I need ful commitment and willingness to change for one self.. A part of me feels he does not want to change and be well. and do it for himself..I feel like he is doing this all for us and that is why he continues to remain stagnant.. He must want his recovery and sobriety for himself first.. Thanks for letting me vent. I go to alanon..Im involved in couples therapy that seems to help... Still I feel I have no answers to how I should handle this.. THanks for letting me voice my frustrations.... bye for now
Hello
Hi everyone...
I believe this is my first post in this forum. I do have a number of various family members who have had/do have various substance abuse problems, but I don't have anything meaningful to contribute concerning them at this time.
Instead, I wanted to thank the people here who post about their experiences with their loved ones. Sometimes I come here when I need a reality check about my drinking problems. I know the main purpose of this particular forum is a means of support concerning the pains and frustrations you deal with, but you all are helping this alcoholic as well. Thank you.
I believe this is my first post in this forum. I do have a number of various family members who have had/do have various substance abuse problems, but I don't have anything meaningful to contribute concerning them at this time.
Instead, I wanted to thank the people here who post about their experiences with their loved ones. Sometimes I come here when I need a reality check about my drinking problems. I know the main purpose of this particular forum is a means of support concerning the pains and frustrations you deal with, but you all are helping this alcoholic as well. Thank you.
