When addiction is present in one or more members of a family, it touches all members of the family, and is often unconsciously perpetuated by everyone. Thus, recovery is a process that can benefit everyone and is also everyone’s responsibility, and when individuals begin to change it can positively impact the entire family system. I offer this series to raise awareness of issues related to addiction and recovery, point to trusted resources, and offer personal reflections from my own family recovery journey. No two journeys are alike, and these essays are not meant to be a prescriptive guide or suggested course of action. Rather, I hope what I offer here is a support to other work you are doing, or sparks curiosity that leads you down new paths.
~Matt Opatrny
#1 – Self Talk on an Uneven Journey
| “Recovery is a process. It is a gradual process, a healing process, and a spiritual process. A journey rather than a destination. Just as codependency takes on a life of its own and is progressive, so recovery progresses. One thing leads to another and things, as well as us, get better. We can relax, do our part, and let the rest happen. Today, I will trust this process and this journey that I have undertaken.”
-from The Language of Letting Go: Daily Meditations on Codependency by Melody Beattie |
Real growth and lasting change seldom come quickly, and the journey of recovery is never really done. In the language of 12 step programs, no one is ever recovered, but always recovering. The path we follow to make change is seldom smooth, consistent, or direct, and that’s totally OK. This is true of personal change as well as changing patterns in our family relationships. We have habitual ways of being and relating to each other that have been established over many years, often since childhood. These patterns create mental and emotional pathways that are well trodden and familiar, but perhaps are not serving us as well as we would like. We may know that we have outgrown these patterns, that they are too small for us, or even that they are damaging us or our loved ones, but their familiarity keeps drawing us in.
Creating new patterns and establishing new ways of being takes time, effort, practice, and patience, and no one does it without many “failures”. We will inevitably fall back occasionally into old ways of being. At times we will go to extremes, which may succeed in altering old patterns while also creating new challenges and fostering new kinds of pain. When any of that happens…
BE GENTLE WITH YOURSELF.
Most of us have a consistent habit of self-criticism. Our culture tells us on the regular in a million ways that we are not enough: not smart enough, attractive enough, successful enough, big enough, small enough, old enough, young enough, and on and on. We can’t help but have internalized this, and our daily experiences in life often serve to reinforce these messages as we turn any setback or mistake into further evidence of our inadequacy. A voice inside our head might give us regular jabs of “There I go again…”, or even profanity laden attacks like “Oh my god I’m such a …!” We speak to ourselves in ways that we would never allow others to speak to us, and may be doing it so frequently that we hardly notice. This type of self-criticism is a familiar pattern as well, and can be an addiction of its own.
When we become aware that we are self-criticizing, we then often add another layer of criticizing ourselves for the self-criticism, something like, “There I go again criticizing myself! I’m such a.…!” This pattern of attempting to grow and change, failing, and self-criticizing in layers can become a self-defeating downward spiral that keeps us and our relationships stuck, or inspires us to avoid the whole growth process.
The best way that I have found to break this pattern is to simply notice it, at whatever point I realize that it is happening, and then meet it with gentleness. This may be as simple as taking a moment to tell myself, “Oof. This is hard.” That alone can be enough to pull me out of the spiral. Sometimes I go further and talk to myself as I would to a dear friend, saying something like, “Hey, you’re going through some stuff, and you’re not perfect. Nobody is. But you’ve got some tools and you’re learning to use them. You’ve got this.” I often even take some pleasure in the fact that I noticed, with a little pat on the back of, “Hey, I noticed my mistake. That’s a step in the right direction,” or “Hey, I noticed my self-criticism. Good for me.”
Of course I fail at this, too, and hear myself saying, “I’m supposed to be gentle with myself! Why am I still being so harsh and self-critical? I’m such a….!” Again, when I notice that voice, I can just start there with a gentle, “It’s OK that I’m frustrated. Change is hard. Easy does it.” Then I take a deep breath, feel the ground beneath my feet, reconnect with my intention to change and grow, and press on.
I’m not saying that we simply excuse our mistakes or shortcomings with a reassuring “Oh that’s OK, I’m just doing my best and that’s good enough.” That represents the other extreme that tends toward apathy and stagnation. However, we can find a balanced middle way between self-abuse and apathy, where we are aware of our mistakes, see the areas where we want to grow and change, work toward them, and be kind and gentle with ourselves along the way.