FREEDOM MONTH: DAY 24: “Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and its time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.” ― Bill Moyers
When we have strained or broken relationships with others, they get to write our story. If we have trauma in a relationship with someone, they get to write our story.
I love this quote because it tells us exactly how steps 4-9 give us our power back. If I make all of my choices in life around broken, dysfunctional, painful relationships, I am not free to make the best choices, nor am I free to really choose. It is always like a Catch-22 situation where I have options that are either A or B, both of which are really less than I want to live with.
If I bear resentments, you get to keep me awake at night. You invade my life in horrible and painful ways until I clean that up. Most of the time it is going to become apparent to me that my unreasonable expectations of you and how you should behave in our relationship are the driver of that bus. Sometimes you may have done something that was hurtful; but me carrying it around for 20 or 30 years is not a healthy way of resolving the conflict either.
Addicts have very poor relationship skills. We jump too quickly into relationships of dating, sex and marriage, believing we can navigate them without a compass or guide and figure it out as we go along. This is really not the way things work best. Thank God for this roadmap of recovery and what it gives us for skills in cleaning things up.
We have to get rid of all those things that stand in the middle of our relationship with a Higher Power to recover from addiction and our old ideas and ways of behaving. If we attempt to use those same ideas and ways of behaving when interfacing with others, it is going to be a big problem! We are completely unskilled and make more messes than friends quite often.
If it weren’t for the fellowships where we all get to practice these principles together and on each other, there would be no world where we could practice healthier attitudes and behaviors. That would suck! So we get to have these dysfunctional fellowships, where others guide us with their behaviors and we get to see into the mirrors they provide for us. Yay!
And we can quit dragging around those people with whom we have troubled interactions and clean them up and move on to write our own story, make our own choices and be FREE of all that crazy! Ain’t this shit wonderful????
Dolphin Hug 