At an Al-Anon meeting a few weeks ago, the subject was control. (That’s the subject of a lot of Al-Anon meetings, actually.) Or, more accurately, the illusion of control. The hardest thing about dealing with an alcoholic is letting go of the false belief that through sheer force of will you can change their behavior. You can’t. One of the women in the meeting said that when she finds herself trying (yet again) to change someone else’s behavior, she asks herself “…and how’s that working for you?” It’s a great line, because it highlights the futility of that behavior.
But what is working for me is the Al-Anon program itself.
Last night, a woman at one of her first meetings asked the group whether she’d be able to walk out with an answer to her main question—how to detach from her sister’s self-destructive behavior. It scared her, she said, to hear that some of the people in the room had been coming to meetings for as many as 20 years. How could she wait that long for help, she wondered.
Many of us answered. One person reminded her that recovery was a bit like going to the gym. You can’t walk in and say to the trainers that you need to be fit right now. If you ask how you can be strong and fit like them, they’ll tell you to start doing what they’re doing…and to keep doing it. You have to keep coming back.
But just like going to the gym, you can see some results soon. Maybe not the first day, but certainly in the first few weeks. You start to recognize the flaws in your thinking, in part because you hear other people talk about how they recognized theirs. You hear about new ways of interacting with people. Those of us with co-dependence issues, for example, tend to tie their emotional state directly to the people around them. So the idea that I could be happy even if the people I cared about were not…well, that was pretty novel. Amazingly (to me), it’s even true!
This summer I’ve spent a lot of time on my emotional well-being (through the recovery process, and healing time with my family) and my physical well-being (through the resumption of regular exercise, and a return to anti-depressants). What’s suffered has been my intellectual well-being, as evidence by my lack of attention to blogging (my intellectual gym, really) and other scholarly activities. As the new school year approaches, it’s time to shake off the summer doldrums and shift my brain into a higher gear…hopefully without losing any of the ground I’ve gained in other areas of my life.
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