Read Codependent No More Workbook Online
Authors: Melody Beattie
Codependent No More Workbook (6 page)
As this woman’s story concludes, we see how she is now able to face her control issues and finally work an effective Twelve Step program.
“I HONESTLY THOUGHT that surrendering to the truth and letting go of trying to control my husband would be the only time I’d need to detach from trying to control someone. That couldn’t have been further from the truth. It began the process of me learning a new behavior and reframing reality. I grew up with an extraordinarily controlling mother. I’m not blaming my behavior on her. I grew up in an era that accepted control as normal. Society believed that people should control their spouse, their children, and themselves. I didn’t have a dysfunctional relationship only with my husband. I had a dysfunctional relationship with control. I didn’t know the difference
between what I couldn’t control and what I could. My first and instinctive reaction to almost everything that happened that I didn’t like? I tried to control it.
“Years later I saw my husband as my teacher. He taught me about letting ago.
“He never did stop drinking, at least not for long. After I divorced him, his drinking got worse. Eventually he died at age fifty-eight from an alcohol-related incident. Although I didn’t get my dream of a loving family, I consider myself blessed. I had two beautiful children, and when I admitted the truth about what I couldn’t control, I began a loving relationship with myself and a realistic relationship with power and control.
“I began to work the Twelve Steps for the second time. Gradually I understood what it meant to be a Double Winner. I had won twice. First I received the gift of sobriety. Then, instead of spending every waking moment obsessing about my husband, I began taking care of myself and my responsibilities. God didn’t abandon me. I abandoned myself. I began to learn for the first time in my life what it meant to take care of myself. I got my life back.”
The Twelve Steps are powerful tools. Some require action. Some require a new way of thinking. We need to work the Steps, but when we reach out to them, they meet us halfway. The Steps start working us.
Activity
- Is there someone in your life who’s come to teach you something? Who? You may not understand the lesson yet. We usually don’t until later, in retrospect, after we master the lesson. When a problem arises, try to remember that life is a classroom and any person you’re having difficulty with is a teacher. Then keep an open mind. Let yourself go through the experience and learn the lesson.
- Make and continue adding to a list of your teachers and the lessons you learn, especially the hard lessons, when you didn’t know you were going to be learning something. Find as many teachers and lessons from your past as you can. Know that you’ll likely be learning and growing the rest of your life.
- Learning doesn’t always have to spring from difficulty, pain, and opposition. Include on your list the teachers who taught without pain or situations where you didn’t have to learn the hard way, and what you learned from that.
It’s not crazy to want to save your marriage. Just because you begin working the Steps doesn’t mean you need to file for divorce. Two people can do the same behavior, and for one, it’s a sign of codependency, and for the other, it’s a healthy choice. You can leave someone for all the wrong reasons, and it won’t help your healing process or advance your growth. Or you can end a relationship as a healthy decision that advances your spiritual growth.
“I spent years worrying about whether our marriage would work or not,” the woman in the above story said. “I later learned that worrying is also a form of control. The problem is that control doesn’t work. One day I realized the time had come to end our marriage. I felt clear, no confusion. I didn’t have to force the decision or make anything happen. The longer I work the Twelve Steps, the more I realize I can’t control things and I don’t have to,” she said.
“Al-Anon and working its Twelve Steps reprogrammed me. There’s a new program in my head that clicks off the facts, reality. I evaluate the situation and decide what I can control and what I can’t. Although I still get sucked into trying to control certain situations, especially when they involve accepting a loss, I usually catch myself when I start controlling. Then I detach.”
Working the First Step can be the appropriate response to many situations that we’d otherwise try to control. Most of those situations involve losing something or someone important. Losing a relationship, admitting that someone we love has a serious problem or illness, or losing our health are three common loss situations that can trigger our need to control.
It can be heartbreaking to lose a family member to alcoholism or addiction. It can feel good to take Step One even when we’re hurting. It validates us when we finally surrender to the truth. All the time we spend searching through someone’s pockets, looking in his or her day planner, or trying to catch him or her doing a behavior we know in our heart that person is doing, we’re actually trying to validate ourselves. It’s crazy-making to believe lies, or to know the truth at a deep level and consistently be lied to about it.
The truth shall set you free
is an ancient saying and a recovery slogan.
We can stop waiting for someone else to tell us we’re not crazy. We can take the First Step and validate ourselves.
Obsessively focusing on other people while remaining oblivious to our behaviors is another symptom of codependency. Becoming and staying aware of ourselves takes intention, discipline, and practice. When we believe lies and obsess about other people, we lose touch with ourselves, our emotions, and our intuition. We lose touch with what we know is true. Here’s the rest of the Double Winner’s story and a happier ending.
“Many years later, the principal at the high school I attended asked me to come back and talk to the students about alcoholism and drug addiction. I hated myself so much as a child and teenager that I’d destroyed all pictures of me. Because the principal wanted to surprise me, he managed to find the one picture that existed of me in my teenage years. Before I began my speech, he flashed this larger-than-life photo of me on the auditorium wall. I looked at myself and saw a picture of a teenage girl who looked so dark, so depressed, so burdened. My heart went out to her. You could see how much she hurt. Seeing that picture threw me off balance. It took everything I had to calmly give my speech.
“That began a process of months of healing from feelings I’d repressed from my childhood and teenage years. I’d felt lost and despised by everyone. I felt so ugly, unwanted, and unlovable. I despised myself. All these emotions tumbled into consciousness.
“I could barely handle these feelings as an adult. No way could I have handled them as a child, especially without help. I believe that medicating my feelings by drinking and using drugs kept me from committing suicide, something I thought about a lot as a child. Alcoholism and addiction can kill us, but in a strange way, it saved my life. I had tried to deal with the emotionally overwhelming situation of sexual abuse and life in a crazy family the only way I knew—by drinking and using drugs.
“Now I could stop judging myself and thinking of myself as a bad person for being an alcoholic and an addict. If I felt as a child the way I did for five months after giving that talk, it’s a miracle that I didn’t kill myself when I was a child.”
Recovery comes in layers. We peel away one problem, and underneath it we find another. Often we address these problems in the reverse order they appeared. The problem that developed last is the one we address first. But there’s no set rule for it, and we’re each unique.
Codependency isn’t minor. It’s a major problem, and it can be deadly. Even if we don’t die or kill ourselves, we can feel like the living dead. At first, people attending fundamentalist Alcoholics Anonymous meetings didn’t want to acknowledge that many recovering alcoholics had codependent behaviors underneath alcoholism. But many of them felt miserable to the point of being suicidal after becoming sober. Things change. Now many cities offer dual disorder or Double Winner groups. People can go to one meeting and work two Twelve Step programs. Or they can take one First Step that includes powerlessness over both alcoholism and codependent behaviors.
