Fighting and Freedom

I had a fight with my husband. It was one of those with the repeating theme. It was our same fight, but with different details. And, yes, me saying, “Why don’t you…?” and “You always…”

As much as I really wanted to enjoy my righteous rightness (and I am 89.5% right) I also felt the undeniable familiarity of this fight. That’s one of the downsides of longer recovery—you can’t hide from yourself so well anymore—knowing that you own part of it  takes the fun out of fighting in a flash.

So what was I going to do? How could I walk through a conflict that was hard and where I really did have hurt feelings?

I used some recovery tools. I sent email to my sponsor; called another sober woman and I also went to my bookshelf. I always go to books. I came to recovery by the grace of Robin Norwood’s books, so for me bibliotherapy is real.

I started with our Big Book. Step 3, yep, and surrender—yuck --but also yep. I added some Alice Miller—definitely—I have those issues for sure. But “how”—how could I move past hurt feelings? How could I shift the energy from fantasies of revenge to using this situation for growth?

I landed on the book called How Can I Forgive You? By Janis Abrahms Spring and I got relief. Spring writes about really hard stuff like overcoming infidelity and parental betrayal so I knew I could lean into her wisdom for this fuss we were having. Here’s what I read:

“Your freedom lies not in protesting the unfairness of the violation or in getting the offender to care. Your freedom –perhaps your only freedom—is in deciding how to survive and transcend the injury. Don’t underestimate this freedom: it’s enormous. With it comes the power to decide how you’re going to live the rest of your life. As you take the task of healing into your own hands, you empower yourself and have peace.”

Bingo! It was peace that I really wanted…not to let my husband off he hook necessarily but to get me off my own hook and out of my spinning head. It’s that wonderful paradox of AA and Alanon—being selfish enough to take the focus off of being right and take back your own good life.

The rest of her book is even more wonderful and you can apply her Ten Principles of Acceptance to home and work. Check it out: “How Can I Forgive You” by Janis Abrahms Spring, Ph.D.

Criticism

I have much to thank Oprah for. She’s covered many difficult topics and introduced language so that more folks can talk about addictions, abuse, sex, family issues etc. But here’s a recent piece of my Oprah Gratitude List.

Last week I saw news anchor Diane Sawyer interviewed on Oprah and she talked about her marriage to Mike Nichols. She said the best piece of advice she was given for marriage was: “Criticism is just a very poor way of making a request—so maybe you can just make the request.”

I love that. I get it. “You are selfish and lazy” is just a really poor way to ask: “Can you help me?”And “You never listen” is a poor way to say, “Could you sit and listen to me for five minutes?”

Thank you Diane. Thank you Oprah.

Fighting

It’s so hard to fight when you are a woman in recovery. Yes, you can still call names and make a fuss. But you know at some level that you have to care for your side of the street, and you know also that if you play out of bounds that you will have to make amends. You know that you really want to tell the emotional truth, you know that the truth you need to attend to is yours not his. You know you will have to talk to others about this so that keeps the really nasty stuff from coming out of your mouth. Recovery is the best revenge and you can hear an old sponsor laughing and saying, “You can do it in this relationship or the next one.” You can feel how much you hate that but you also know it’s true.