For the past two years, I have shared in meetings that the worst threat to my recovery came when my wife left my daughters and me. Last month (Sept. 97), that record was surpassed.
I am a black belt codependent, and have been all my life. Probably the most codependent thing I ever did was to take over my Union in 1983, eight years before I got clean. Being the President of my Union wasn’t enough for me, because people still had problems that weren’t being solved. Soon I had taken on more Union positions than an addict could remember; such as Chief Steward, Chairman of the Layoff Committee, Chairman of the Employee Assistance Program, Chairman of the Local Executive Board, positions on the EEO committee, Co-Op committee, Contract Negotiating committee; the list seems endless. I lived in airplanes at that time, flying around North America, fighting every battle that came before the 8,000 employees who worked with me. And when I was home, I was writing hundreds of grievances and Union newsletters; and presenting arbitration hearings, Workers Compensation Board hearings, EEO hearings, Unfair Labor Practice hearings, etc.
Then, when I got clean, I wanted everyone else to get clean, so we could fight for the people more efficiently. But my fellow Union representatives wouldn’t do that. So I went to the Labor Dept. in Washington and started a brand new Union called the Union of American Federal Employees, of which I became the National President. I returned to Virginia, challenged my former Union, and we beat them by 250 votes. However, the Government stepped in and decided that we didn’t beat them by a “large enough margin” and they ordered another election. We lost the next election by 98 votes, and the Government decided that the second election was fine. I don’t think the Government wants new unions to be formed. They are happy and content with the dilapidated infrastructure of the existing ones.
Once out of the Union business, I started working with addicts in all of my spare time. Opening and chairing meetings. Carrying the message to Psychiatric Hospitals every week for the past six years. Carrying NA meetings on the Internet, and trying to save the whole planet. And now trying to rewrite recovery on the Web. The addicts that really want recovery really appreciate it when we work our 12th Step, and it usually always temporarily satisfies my codependent urges.
However, my codependency met it’s match two months ago. At that time, a lesbian asked me to sponsor her. It was an interesting situation. I scheduled a meeting with my psychiatrist and asked him about it. Both he and my sponsor told me to go ahead, but proceed with caution. I quickly found that actively codependent people need to be very careful in regards to who they sponsor. It is far too easy for us to cross the line between carrying the message, and carrying the addict. And that’s exactly what I did. I soon grew to love this addict very much, telling my friends that she was like “my sister and my best friend, combined into one person”. That’s when I should have fired her, but I did not.
Even before then, signs of trouble appeared, but I remained in denial, in my mission to “save” her. In our first sponsor/sponsee meeting, she told me that treatment was “out of the question”. When male sponsees had told me that in the past, I fired them, telling them that they weren’t ready to do whatever it took to recover. It DID take treatment for me to get clean. If I’d had that same reservation six years ago, I would be dead. However, I decided to help her “work through” her reservations, by "teaching" her that treatment wasn’t so bad.
The next red flag came when she repeatedly kept using drugs, over and over, due to her reservations. I asked her to write a list of those reservations. Her answer to me each night after that was, “later”; and she never wrote the list. But I still didn’t fire her. I was on a mission to save my little sister.
I went to her house every night, carrying her to meetings, at the expense of being absent from my own children as their single parent. As my involvement with her got deeper, I developed physical problems. I started losing sleep worrying over her, and developed an upset stomach and diarrhea to the point where I started missing work. Then one night, on the way home from an NA meeting, she told me that she was going to go buy drugs, whether I went with her or not. I waited for her at a convenience store, worrying to death that she would get shot. I had horrible “unearned” feelings of shame and guilt, for “letting” her go there alone and putting her life in danger. She then returned, and we went home. Her significant other had told her that she would leave her if she relapsed again. I knew from personal experience in the rooms that a crack addicts’ odds of getting clean are very low, and that her chances would be better with a stable place to live and a significant other to support her. So I started lying to her partner, telling her that she was clean, and working a wonderful Program. I had transformed from my sponsee’s sponsor into her enabler, but still couldn’t see it. I continued to lie for her for the rest of the time I sponsored her, and those lies to someone I cared about eventually became my biggest source of guilt from the entire ordeal.
The second time she wanted to buy drugs after a meeting, I could not do what I did the last time, so I went with her, to "protect" her. I wanted her to survive long enough to get to the point where she became willing to do whatever it took to stay clean, but my codependency and my love for her would not allow me to care how stupid and life threatening that was for me. I sat outside a crack house waiting for her, thinking thoughts like, “What am I going to do if I hear shots in there?”, “What if someone comes and robs me?”, and many other crazy thoughts that enter your head when you are somewhere you are not supposed to be. The next day, as I was driving her to the airport, she asked me for money, and I gave her $20. She then asked me to stop off on the way to the airport, so she could use the money to buy drugs, and I did. Giving money to an active addict was a mistake that I regretted immediately. And driving her to cop was even worse. That turned out to be one of the worst mistakes I've made during my recovery. It became the main factor that caused me to lose two very dear friendships.
The next day, I set the absolutely non-negotiable boundary that I would NEVER be present during any more of her drug buying activities, and she always bought her drugs alone after that. Still, I hoped that she would soon become willing to embrace the Program. Three weeks later, she told me on the telephone that the only reason that she was still continuously using was because she didn’t have a female sponsor. I asked what good would ANY sponsor do her if she didn’t do what they suggested? I had worked harder for her than any ten other addicts I’d sponsored combined! And then it finally hit me. That was the problem. I was isolating her from the pain that she needed to feel to motivate her to get clean. My enabling her to continue using by lying to her partner demanded that I end my sponsorship of her. It finally became obvious to me that she was “B.S.ing” the Program to manipulate her partner into staying with her. I had been in total denial of the fact that she had absolutely no intention of getting clean, and that she was using me as her fool. I drove to her house and fired her.
Then things got worse. Up until that point, she had been telling everyone that I was the best sponsor that anyone could ever ask for. But the moment I removed myself to a position where she could no longer manipulate me, and I was no longer useful to her, I became the most horrible person since Hitler. Since I was no longer enabling her, she did what addicts do, and started immediately blaming me for her addiction. She told her partner that I was the one getting her high. Her partner bought it, stayed with her, and got mad at me. But who am I to judge her partner for being codependent? I lived in the exact same denial with the exact same person for two months, with the truth slapping me in the face every day. I didn’t see the truth because I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to lose my relationship with her, either. As my sponsor warned me, it was clearly time for me to absolutely and totally let go of both of those relationships, because they came as a packaged deal.
On October 10, 1997, I celebrated six years clean. I went to my favorite Friday night meeting and picked up my black keytag. When my friends asked me “How’d you do it”, I told them that I almost didn’t, and explained how I had endangered my recovery. After the meeting, one person told me that he had done the exact same thing earlier this year; but he finally stopped sitting outside of the crack house and went in and relapsed. Then when I got home, I had an email letter from another person at the meeting who went home and wrote to me the entire story of how he had relapsed just three days earlier performing the exact same mistakes that I was, at the exact same time. I felt a lot better. The Program had worked for me that night. By knowing that what I had been through was also threatening the recoveries of others close to me, I felt less alone. And I felt very fortunate that God had spared my recovery once again, in spite of my blatant stupidity.
Later that night, I found the following list of “characteristics of codependency” on the Internet. I printed it and placed it in my wallet, after I re-titled it, “Glenn’s autobiography”...
Characteristics of Codependency
1. My good feelings about who I am stem from being liked by
you.
2. My good feelings about who I am stem from receiving approval
from you.
3. My mental attention is focused on you.
4. My mental attention is focused on protecting you.
5. Your struggle affects my serenity. My mental attention focuses
on solving your
problems/relieving your pain.
6. My self-esteem is bolstered by solving your problems.
7. My self-esteem is bolstered by relieving your pain.
8. My fear of rejection determines what I say or do.
9. My fear of your anger determines what I say or do.
10. I use giving as a way of feeling safe in our relationship.
11. I put my values aside in order to connect with you.
12. The quality of my life is in relation to the quality of yours.
My sponsor summed up this event in my life perfectly. In his usual words
of wisdom, he told me that I should be thankful that my former sponsee came
into my life, because she was the best TEACHER I’ve had in my recovery.
She probed every molecule of my recovery for weak spots, and clearly (though
painfully) showed me that my codependency was the biggest threat to my recovery.
My sponsor was absolutely correct. I picked up a white chip at my first
Co-Dependents Anonymous meeting on October 23, 1997, and I’m actively
working on that area of my life. My recovery will stand on a firmer foundation
now, as a direct result of the education that my former sponsee gave me.
Here's a neat story that my friend Sharon B sent me. It's something that all of us codependents should read and heed...
Do You Act Or React?
I walked with my friend, a Quaker, to the news stand the other night, and he bought a paper, thanking the newsie politely. The newsie didn't even acknowledge it.
"A sullen fellow, isn't he?", I asked.
"Oh, he's that way every night", shrugged my friend.
"Then why do you continue to be so polite to him?", I asked.
"Why not?", inquired my friend. "Why should I let him decide how I'm going to act?"
As I thought about this incident later, it occurred to me that the important word was "act". My friend acts towards people; most of us react toward them.
He has a sense of inner balance which is lacking in most of us - he knows who he is, what he stands for, how he should behave. He refuses to return incivility, because then he would no longer be in command of his own conduct.
When we are enjoined in the Bible to return good for evil, we look upon this as a moral injunction -- which it is. But it is also a psychological prescription for our emotional health.
Nobody is unhappier than the perpetual reactor. His center of emotional gravity is not rooted within himself, where it belongs, but in the world outside him. His spiritual temperature is always being raised or lowered by the social climate around him, and he is a mere creature at the mercy of these elements.
Praises give him a feeling of euphoria, which is false, because it does not last and it does not come from self-approval. Criticism depresses him more than it should, because it confirms his own secretly shaky opinion of himself. Snubs hurt him, and the merest suspicion of unpopularity in any quarter rouses him to bitterness.
A serenity of spirit cannot be achieved until we become the masters of our own action and attitudes. To let another determine whether we shall be rude or gracious, elated or depressed, is to relinquish control over our own personalities, which is ultimately all we possess. The only true possession is self-possession.
Author Unknown
Author writes well, but he has a strange last name, doesn't he?
Here's one of my favorite books, Melody
Beattie's
"Codependent
No More"
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