LOVE MONTH: DAY 5: “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” ― C.S. Lewis
This, I think, is how most of us live, often even into recovery of some time. We are so scarred and wounded from our battles in early life that we do not recognize the old ideas we operate with when it comes to love.
I get to sit with a lot of folks in treatment and family groups who are toxic lovers. We know who this is…those who come from long lines of addiction and dysfunction. It is not popular to talk about this stuff in the rooms.
Most believe they are doing all they need to when they stop drinking and work the steps with a sponsor and do not know why they are miserable and unsatisfied in their relationships with others. They continue to manipulate and con others in relationships, as well as being conned and manipulated by others. This exchange of toxic love is not what we came here to get.
How many of us say “F___ it!” when we consistently walk away from relationship after relationship because we do not grow past the stuff that we learned about love when we were young, if we learned anything at all?
Most of us are in relationships with people that are terribly toxic. We practice all kinds of things that have NOTHING to do with healthy love. BUT, we are terrified that if we begin to practice boundary setting and other things that indicate we are getting healthier that we will be left all alone. It is so sad to see what most addicts believe about love and what they are willing to live with rather than face themselves fully alone and apart from their deep attachments to people, places and things.
This is what, I believe, prevents us from deeply engaging in recovery. Sometimes it is the stuff that keeps us from getting into recovery in the first place. My book talks about “causes and conditions”; and I believe this is it. Toxic beliefs about love and what that is.
Of course, there is a great deal of work to do, always on ourselves. We do NOT need to lock ourselves in those caskets spoken about in the quote to recover. We MUST learn to engage in relationships around this deal. They begin with other members, then deepen into a sponsorship relationship of trust and confidentiality.
As we begin to heal, we can examine, with a safe guide, those things we believe about love. We can begin, with that first 4th Step, to look at how we operate behind our old ideas and learn to let go of expectations and resentments, along with demands for having life go our way all the time. Then we begin to clean up wreckage.
The primary point of that stuff is that we need to continue to learn how NOT to create more. I did my share of toxic love in the rooms when I was new. Thank God it didn’t last long before I really needed to do the work of learning about relationships by digging deeper into the steps and other forms of healing I really needed. This is me learning to love me…that inside job we hear about.
This job is never over. I love differently today than I did in the past. I believed all the cultural crap we see in the media about being half of a whole and empty without a partner. Today, I have a whole new way of seeing all of it. We move on and we grow. I do NOT know of any way to do this other than to continue to process through those steps and deepen my spiritual relationship with me and my Creator. That is how it has unfolded for me.
I hope I never believe I am done with this. I have learned more in the last nine months of my life than I could have ever believed! And that is AFTER 30 years of doing this consistently! Wow! Life is such an amazing adventure…I am so glad I got the best ticket for the best seat on the best ride of all!
Dolphin Hug 