Episode 207 -- April 7, 2022

Those of us in early recovery know about loss and change and how these things can affect our sense of self. We belong to a club of people who are working to set down regret and bitterness while also embracing personal responsibility and making amends with people we've harmed or who have hurt us. According to bestselling author Melody Beattie, this also makes us members of the grief club.

Beattie's book The Grief Club: The Secret to Getting Through All Kinds of Change blends healing wisdom and pragmatic guidance to help us face life's most difficult moments and do the work that allows us to move ahead with integrity. In this excerpt, Beattie describes the importance of claiming our own space for grief, and the challenge of detaching from feelings, behaviors, and people who aren't—and never will be—our responsibility.

Many of us in recovery also have family members who are addicted. Most of us can relate to the out-of-control feeling that comes when we try and control outcomes and manage other people's choices. The following excerpt begins with a reference to Melody's friend Kate, whose experience of family addiction challenged her to grieve the losses in her life and work to find a path of forgiveness, peace, and meaning.

This excerpt has been edited for brevity.

Kate and I went out to lunch. I told her what an incredible woman she is. I'm not sure she believed me. That's the thing about us codependents. We see the beauty in other people, but it's hard to see in ourselves. While it might be hard for some people to understand, there's a good reason for that too. Side effects of loss—and having an alcoholic or crazy parent is a loss—are low self-esteem and guilt. If the people we're involved with aren't feeling guilty for their behaviors, we pick up their guilt. Even though we know intellectually we aren't the person drinking and causing problems, we feel bad about ourselves. This is the story we tell ourselves: We must have done something wrong, or else this bad thing wouldn't have happened to us. There must have been something we could have done to prevent it, to make the story turn out another way. Thinking that way is a survival device. Feeling responsible and guilty gives us a sense of control. If we feel like random tragedy has rained down on us, we feel too vulnerable and unsafe in the world.

There's a natural order to life, we think. If we do good things, then good things will happen to us. Carrying this thinking forward, if something bad happens to us, then that means we did something wrong. At least that's what we erroneously believe. We did something to bring tragedy on ourselves. It's difficult to accept that painful, horrible things happen to children and adults, and there's no good reason these things happen, none at all. They happen because they happen, and life doesn't always make sense. That's a tough concept to grab for a child or an adult.

It's normal to go through loss and let it create low self-esteem, to tell ourselves we don't deserve whatever it was we lost, and that's why we experienced that loss. It's easy to follow that by thinking that what we do doesn't matter because bad things can happen to anyone—even us—no matter what we do. Then we give up on ourselves. This doesn't happen only to children of alcoholics. This syndrome can happen with any loss. One woman I know was a health fanatic. She exercised, ate right, didn't smoke or do anything "wrong." When she was diagnosed with cancer, she thought, What good does it do to take care of myself? I can take great care of myself and still have bad things happen to my health. For a while, she stopped taking good care of herself and said that what she did didn't matter. But we know—and now she does too—that's not true.

Are we willing to surrender to how vulnerable we are and still take care of ourselves? Are we willing to live by our code and create the best life we can—knowing in one moment for no good reason it can all be taken away? Something mysterious and wonderful happens when we take the high road knowing how vulnerable we really are. We connect with a deeper spirituality. We connect with our destiny when we choose to show up for life fully aware of how unfair life is and can be, knowing life has disappointed us before and that it may do that again. We'll know a new freedom and power.

The whys can be endless. Why does my friend Kate's mom have this illness? Why doesn't her mother get well? Why was this her destiny? People turn themselves inside out coming up with explanations trying to make sense of loss—everything from karma, to past lives where we did the same thing to someone else, to being tested or punished by God. Most loss experts agree that asking Why? isn't a question; asking Why? is similar to saying Ouch! It's also a stage we may need to go through until we're ready to take responsibility for ourselves and our lives and get back in the game.

Sometimes the reason for our loss isn't one we'll ever see—at least not while we're here. In Ambiguous Loss, author Pauline Boss says the people who live with ongoing loss most successfully are people who find a spiritual way of life and let go of their need to control. That's why groups like Al-Anon, Adult Children of Alcoholics, and Co-Dependents Anonymous work. The Twelve Steps help us find a spiritual way of living. Working the Steps helps us detach. Healthy detachment means we care, we feel our feelings, we do what we reasonably can, and we let go of what we can't.

There's an unhealthy form of detachment—when we freeze, coldly deny having any emotions, and say "I don't care" when we really do care. (And we may need to do that for a while.) We can be more than survivors of abuse and alcoholism. Surviving means we're waking up alive. We deserve more than that. We can thrive, but to do that, most of us need some help. Being around other people who have similar problems and goals gives us that magic mirror. We see ourselves in others. They see themselves in us. Together, we trudge the road of happy destiny—well, it's happy some of the time.

Activities

• Set yourself free. Have you turned recovery from adult children of alcoholic issues, Al-Anon issues, or codependency issues into a heavy set of rules? We used to use the unhealthy family system rules to control ourselves. Now some people use the rule of recovery to keep themselves in line. The purpose, the heart, the goal of codependency recovery is to set ourselves free. Trust yourself. Give if, when, and what you want. Be nurturing. Be loving. Be yourself. Be that way with others, but also be that way toward yourself.


• Chart your course. Have you been allowing other people's problems and pain to control your destiny and the choices you make? Maybe it's time to shake off their negative behaviors, realize they don't have to control you, and start choosing your own path. What would you like to have happen with your life? Get a notebook or journal. Make it your wish, goal, treasure, or dream book. Start thinking about what you'd like to have happen. Meditate on it. What are you passionate about? Let God show you what you can have. Put your ideas in your book. Cut out pictures. Write about it. You don't have to follow in others' footsteps. Go for your dreams. If those dreams die, life will give you some more. You survived. Now it's time to thrive. Give up the addiction to struggle. Be happy now.


• Write your own legacy. It's easy to unconsciously accept a legacy of suffering and pain. Sit down with pen and paper. Write a legacy of all the positive attributes you claim from your ancestors. Give yourself what you deserve. You may want to write a list of the negative legacies that you refuse to accept.

About the Author:
With her trademark candor and intuitive wisdom, Melody Beattie has written numerous best-selling self-help books, including Beyond Codependency, The Language of Letting Go, Stop Being Mean to Yourself, and 52 Weeks of Conscious Contact.

© 2006 by Melody Beattie
All rights reserved