Something is Rotten in Recovery

Last week we talked about the Dark Night of the Soul and the upside of spiritual darkness in our recovery journey. This week I want to say a little more about balancing darkness and goodness.

Granted, this is a conversation for women in long-term recovery. It would just be too darn hard to explain in a newcomer’s group. And, remembering my own early recovery, the proportions were off—there was too much that was dark and rotten.

My big insight this week comes not from The Big Book but rather from Vogue, my fashion
Bible.

I was reading an article about perfume, which included an interview with legendary perfumer Frederic Malle. He was explaining what goes into creating a truly great perfume.

He’s had his hand (and nose) in many of the world’s great enduring and seductive scents. Malle said, “You always have to have some darkness in a scent, even if it is way in the back.” That penetrating and usually very expensive darkness in perfume turns out to be something rotten. (Think sweat, sex, wet dog, dirt.)

Malle continued, “It’s like in your intimate relationships. I think everybody wants someone who is nice, but too nice becomes miserably boring. A little darkness and mystery make things so much more interesting.” In the language of the perfumer, the rotten element in a perfume is called “animalic” or “skatolic”. Yes, does that word make you think of skunk? Exactly. 

For a fragrance to seduce and endure it has to have a touch of something rotten at the core. And, maybe, this is true in our own lives—our recovery lives. “We are not saints,” the book and the tee shirt proclaim, and we should never seek to be saints. Again, boring, and worse: not attractive. And since ours is a program of “attraction rather than promotion” don’t we want those who may be attracted to see (maybe smell) our imperfection?

This embracing of our rottenness—in just the right proportion—makes us whole and desirable and enduring in recovery.

From Head (And Sticky Note) to My Heart

Has this happened to you: You know some stuff. You have been around a long time; you understand how your mind and emotions work. You know the best ways to respond or to not react to certain triggers in your life. You know your family role and how that influences you; you know your Myers Briggs or Enneagram Type and how that influences you; you know the character defects you are working through and you can visualize how you’ll be different and many days you are different.

Maybe, like me, you have sticky notes—in your planner, on your desk top, on the bathroom mirror that tell you things like, “The critics do not matter, being in the game does.” or “Humility is perpetual quietness of the heart.” or my new one, “The cure for resentment is boundaries.” 

And when you look at those sticky notes, or hear yourself giving similar advice to another person, you think, “My God I am growing; I really am changing.”

And then…

And then a day like yesterday happens and it feels like I never saw the 12 steps, never heard a spiritual teacher, and never understood that detachment and forgiveness are the handrails to my emotional freedom.

Instead I felt slighted, hurt, petty, competitive, angry, and like a very young girl in a crazy family.

The only good news is that now it mostly happens inside of me, but that’s also the bad news—it happens inside of me. Serenity? Poof!

That hardest part is knowing so much and understanding so much and really meaning what I see on my little sticky notes but having the feelings of a newcomer. 

My prayer last night—and it was a long tossing, turning night—was to have what I write on those sticky notes make the journey from my head to my heart.