DISCIPLINE MONTH: DAY 17: “Showing a lack of self-control is in the same vein granting authority to others: ‘Perhaps I need someone else to control me.” ― Criss Jami
I have been sitting recently with the concept of “learned helplessness”. This is a feature of some form of abuse.
When children are abused in some way, they learn to become victims, because that is all they can be. Even when they become older and learn to stand up for themselves, they revert to a victim role. We see this a great deal in the rooms, because so many people in our culture have been abused in some fashion.
When I get to sit with a concept like this, it expands for me and I begin to grasp it in new ways. It leads to a path of healing that I may not have embraced before. This occurs, quite often, in the process of steps 4-9.
By the time we get to step 10, it is important for us to recognize our patterns of being the victim, because we need to stand up and take our lives back into our own hands and become responsible for our own behaviors and attitudes. This is made nearly impossible when we are stuck in victim.
A lot of newly recovering addicts get stuck and then feel victimized by God when life is uncomfortable or challenging for them.
This is a big place for being stuck. And the quote above tells about that, for me. I was a victim of my family, then boys and men, then the police, then drugs and booze, then God.
I had to get down to some deep “causes and conditions” to see the role I played in creating the story I was living. And then the story was transformed into a miraculous series of astonishing events, instead of the story of what others kept doing to me or at me.
Then I can be free of others having the voice in my life and others who create my pain. This is all an illusion anyway, but we get to see more clearly when we begin to examine these stories. For me, step 10 is where a lot of this happened, because I could only see the full patterns in working through steps 4 to 9. What a brilliant set of instructions we are given for this life thing!
And what miraculous healing comes when we sit with what we are given and see it all for the tremendous gift it is! There has not been a moment wasted. The Universe does not deal in extra anything. And I have been fighting this with all my strength for so damn long that I got worn out and discouraged and hopeless and defeated. All of that happened long after I quit drinking and drugging!
So the cessation of substances is not the healing…the healing comes when I get to do this work and see where the REAL problems lie…not in what happened to me, although we love to focus on that. But on how I perpetuate the abuse by thinking I can somehow control it if I work hard enough.
Or that I am the product of that time and space, even when I want to revise and reframe the story. It is an amazing thing, this recovery! I am astonished and my breath is taken away by its power and its majesty and its beautiful patterns of love and light! Yay!
Dolphin Hug 