Hope for a new day

One of the things I cherish about recovery is that storytelling is the lifeblood of the process. Not just telling, but also listening. "Speaker meetings" are great for this reason- simply sitting and listening to the authentic stories of what it was like, what happened, and what it is like now. There's no other arena I have found in contemporary existence where life stories are told as a core part of the experience, several times a week, in a group setting. 

 The Storyteller, by Evan Burk

Yesterday I went to a day long workshop on love addiction, love co-addiction, love avoidance/anorexia and relationship codependency in general. The room was overflowing- about 180 women and maybe 20 men, reflecting somewhat of the imbalance that still remains in relationship recovery, although the Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings are the other way around- usually about 90% men. I find this fascinating- I doubt the disparities actually reflect differences in compulsive behaviors, so much as cultural training. Women are trained to be caretakers and to think all of their "problems" are in relationship and emotions. Men are trained to sexually objectify, and to think that all or most of their "problems" are sexual. I bet there are a ton of sex addicts in CoDA and love addicts/codependents in SAA. In fact, when I realized I needed a deeper level of recovery than I was personally able to find in AA, the first thing I thought of was SAA. I went for a couple of years but slwoly realized that my sexual acting out was a symptom of an even deeper codependency, and the break up with A made that absolutely clear.

Anyway, the woman who ran the workshop shared her story for about an hour, at the beginning. Recovery absolutely dissolves shame. She told of her pre-puberty experience of her dysfunctional family- her emotionally needy mother and her raging father, and how she was always deployed by her mom to "go help" her dad in the garage, as he tried to fix things. She was "the son he never had," and he got to be the expert and to be boosted by male expertise, as she pretended to be stupid and to not understand (even though she did). Then she told how, after she went through puberty, her father pursued an incestuous sexual interaction with her, and that all of her prepubescent context was actually years of grooming for that. And the incest was not the extent of the abuse- it was combined with her father brainwashing her by making it intensely romantic, convincing her they were "soulmates" and that God himself had put him with her mother so that, eventually, the "true love" that was "destined" for father/daughter could manifest. Combined also, of course, with the usual molester's brainwashing of "the world would never understand this. God has made it so. He alone can judge us, and He approves. You can never mention this to anyone else, but it's not a problem, because God already knows and is cheering us on." 

Now, I don't know about you, but I find this kind of incestuous, manipulative, sexual, physical, intellectual and spiritual global transgression to be almost unimaginable. I was molested by my oldest brother, so I have some sense of the damage that can do- and that was a single encounter, at least as far as I can recall it. The incestuous, toxically "spiritualized" and "romantic" interaction between this woman and her father went on for five years. 

She launched herself out of it by falling in love with a guy at the business she and her father ran, and they split in the middle of the night. They got married. She had an affair. They got divorced. She became a crystal meth addict. Her first bottom that led to recovery was with drugs. She then put together 10 years of sobriety in NA, before she hit her CoDA bottom and realized the depth of what had happened to her. 

I was especially struck by how she described the dynamic of her kind of love addiction. She sees her role both before puberty and after as that of being a drug. She herself was the drug her parents needed in order to feel okay. In return for trying to be their drug, trying to "make them feel better" and trying to bring meaning and fulfillment to their lives, she had the hope of being loved and not being abandoned. The rip off was of course that she still lived in excruciating fear of being abandoned, and felt unloved and worthless, no matter how she showed up as the drug her parents needed. She lived her entire childhood and young adult life as a means to the ends of others, and got nothing in return, yet was compulsively driven to keep trying. 

The role continued when she fell in love with men. She was their drug, the hit that made them feel good, that rescued them from their squalor or sadness. In return, she got the unreliable faux love and ultimately disposable role as an appendage to men who were not taking responsibility for their pain, and when they got bored, they discarded her and found a new drug, fell in love with a new person, and she became irrelevant or even contemptibly inconvenient. Everyone at all times was using everyone else, in a total lie of "true love" and intensity. None of the men she had ever been with knew that she had been in a molestation bind with her father- in fact, she thought no one at all knew.

Anyway, when I have betrayed supposedly monogamous partners of mine, it has always been about something similar to this pattern. I am no longer getting my fix from the partner. In fact, I have even helped create situations where I am contemptible, boring, and resented by the partner, usually more than I am feeling those things. (One of the avoidance patterns of codependency is "Codependents often act in ways that invite others to reject, shame, or express anger toward them.") Sex has become rote, repetitive and passionless, and usually infrequent, and I usually feel anxiety about it and try to avoid it altogether. But even more importantly, the two of us have unilaterally withdrawn our trust, communication and mutual interest, connection, curiosity and enjoyment of each other, in every way. Yet, we have not had any or at least not very many conversations about any of this- it is all operating below the surface. We often have become merely housemates in a domestic nightmare of friendliness, trying to avoid each other, sleeping separately, or one of us is staying up way later than the other and tiptoeing into bed in the middle of the night, rigid, a few feet away.  

Something clicks inside me when things get to this point. I have sometimes begun at that point to be a fantasy addict, with a mostly auto-erotic sexual experience, thinking about other women or compulsively relying on porn. Rather than mindfully and skillfully recognizing the dire situation, I have used the stability of the partnership as a bulwark, while "trying to get my needs met" elsewhere. This has then led to acting out behavior with sex workers, or to affairs. The porn and sex workers have made it possible for me to be compulsively sexual to change my feelings of worthlessness, inadequacy and loneliness but without having a "romantic" experience (although I did develop a romantic crush on one sex worker I saw regularly for a while there- a pattern my father had developed, apparently paying the same woman for sex for years, and thinking of it as a romance). 

However, my affairs all led to the dissolution of my monogamous partnership. The new woman was too god of a drug. I would feel emotionally attached, she would fall in love with me, and we would embark- I'd exit out of my failed monogamous partnership directly into a "long term commitment" to the woman I was having an affair with. Many of my long term domestic and other relationships started in secret. Two started with women who were also in long term relationships or marriages that were unsatisfying for them. My own form of serial monogamy has also been overlapping serial monogamy, with no period of grieving, singlehood or sense of self in between. In the past, I had only been in an affair with a married woman once- that was A- and we decided not to be sexual until she moved out and started the process of divorce. This happened over a two month period, but she had been miserably unhappy in her marriage for years prior. (I remain astonished at the staying power of some, who find ways to navigate loveless domestic relations for years on end that do not involve affairs- I have never had the stomach for it).

Anyway, it occurs to me that, on the level of relationship addiction and codependency, agreeing to be in a secret affair with a married person is, for me, agreeing to try to make their lives work without them having to make any changes. I had not been interested in that in the past, but with U, the situation was attractive to me for many other, rather complicated reasons, some of which are still becoming apparent to me. For one thing, it was a tremendous ego boost to play the role in her life of being the drug, the excitement and fascination that was lacking. I felt useful and purposeful. Powerful and important. I reveled in offering her the adventure, passion, attention and excitement. 

It was a boost to be able to be the person who made her life as it was, without any changes, okay for her. When that started to wear off for both of us- when in fact I started to make her life worse and more complicated and help create remorse and guilt, shame and nightmares- and when I began to sense that I was more a problem than a solution- I went a little bit crazy, let's say. I redoubled my efforts to show up for her as a rescue, she began to withdraw, I chased, she ran. I couldn't let go for a long time. 

One of the truths that complicated this standard love addiction narrative for me is that, alongside the toxic exchanges we tried in order to do our best to be happy, for which, by the way, we can be forgiven as can all sentient beings using unskillful means in an honest effort to find happiness, I honestly love her in all authenticity, in ways that have never, ever been true for me before. I admire her, enjoy her mind, enjoy being friends, did not feel dependent on her for my self worth at the same time that I did, which I realize is paradoxical but for me it is accurate. I valued her and still do. 

I could have had the experience of authentic love along with my love addiction in the past, if I had been awake enough to have a recovering consciousness alongside my addictive and compulsive patterns. But I have not had that with anyone else. I was so absorbed in being the drug and drugging myself that I rarely caught glimpses of who the actual woman was, no matter how authentically they loved me for who I was. I was not able to show up. Instead of an authentic encounter, and contrary to the story I was telling, I was using and being used, in most ways. I loved all the women I was with to the utmost best of my ability at the time, but must admit I was not good at it. When I do the forgiveness meditation now, most of the harms for which I am asking forgiveness accumulate around those harms- using women and then abandoning them. It's a source of deep and enduring remorse for me. It is lifting, but it is still there. The lesson, of course, is to not fucking do that anymore, and I'm grateful to have a chance of getting out of the pattern. 

It's interesting to note my rush and high from being "the reason my life is better" to the anxiety and remorse of "the reason my life is even worse than it was before." I persisted in wanting to make it right, repeatedly, with U. It was a futile effort, but I had a very difficult time accepting how things had shifted. 

Of course, I have to look clearly at how the affair also made it possible for me to have my drug, yet not make any significant changes in my life either. When I would tell friends of mine about it (a very very few trusted friends), they would often say "you wouldn't want her so badly if she were available." I get that, and I can see why it seems true to people, but ultimately, in fact, it was not true for me. If she had wanted to be available, I would have wanted things even more than I did. This is one of the complicating factors of all of the admittedly dysfunctional things happening for me since July 2017. At the core, the reality was real reality, really. (Do I protest too much?). I found this unrelentingly confusing, painful and baffling. If it had been a simple matter of waking up in recovery one day and being clear- "whoa, this whole thing was a painful delusion based on compulsive re-enactment patterns"- that would have been different, of course. But my true heart had its reasons which reason did not know. Still does, still does not know.

Thus, the grief. It's legit. I have to grant myself, with compassion and openness, that authentic experience, no matter the surrounding circumstances. While, of course, also being honest about my codependent and addictive dynamic. 

The CoDA welcome includes, "No matter how traumatic your past or despairing your present may seem, there is hope for a new day in Codependents Anonymous." It's good to hear that at every meeting, to be reminded, to remember that there is light on the other side of this passage. The speaker at yesterday's workshop is living proof- even in the face of years of unimaginable boundary violation and intellectual and spiritual toxicity and annihilation, she is not just surviving life, but living her life with fearless love and an obvious embrace of vulnerability. 

I want an enduring love largely free from the mutual use, the drug exchange. An adventurous and interesting love rooted in authentic connection and trust, passionate and wild, but not in secret. I want it in the sunlight. If it were ever possible, there's a person I'd want it with. If that particular is not feasible someday, I at the very least want to be in a love relationship like that with myself- connected, authentic, present, accepting of myself. Since there's nothing else happening, I might as well see how I can grow into the latter right now.