I am a member of the twelve step community. I am not an addict or alcoholic but I love addicts and my program of recovery follows the twelve steps just like AA does. We replace the word alcohol with alcoholics because we are recovering from an addiction to thinking that the alcoholic or addict that we love is our responsibility. They are not. They are the responsibility of themselves and their program of recovery.
The Al-Anon program has been my home for over 20 years. Never did I think when I walked in the doors twenty years ago, that I would still be there and that the healing would still be so actively happening in my life. Part of this was that I was young and doing anything for the long term was foreign to me. Part of this was that I had no idea how deeply affected I was by the behavior of alcoholics/addicts and the learned and taught behaviors I inherited.
When I first joined the twelve step community, I heard the steps and when we would talk about the fourth step, people would talk about healing. The fourth step is admitting our shortcomings, our character defects to God, ourselves, and another human being. I was always a good student (well I tried to be) so I went hard. I got a book to guide me and I went deep into what I thought was wrong with me. I wanted to get it all out there and to heal it quick. No mercy. I wrote out all of the terrible things that made me an awful, wrong, and defective person. I talked to a sponsor, I told anyone who would listen, and made sure God knew just who He/She was dealing with. I waited to be fixed, healed, have my shortcomings removed.
I’m not going to lie, things did change and get better for me in certain ways right away. I gained knowledge and skills about alcoholism and how to let go of people and things that weren’t my responsibility. I became more peaceful, more reliable, less frantic and less co-dependent. I didn’t always allow someone else’s choices or words or actions affect me greatly. It was a great relief and I felt so much better when I attended my meetings and practiced my program. I do think it saved my life in that I learned to take myself out of danger. I learned boundaries and I learned about safety.
In meetings I would hear people say that healing or recovery was like peeling back the layers of an onion. I understood that to mean that each time you took a look at yourself in a fourth step, you would heal on a deeper level. It made sense to me that you would start with small things and move on to bigger and bigger things until you got to the core. I kept going in the program not ever really wondering what the core would be like but knowing that it was the goal or the true healing. I wanted to get there.
I’m beginning to realize that the core is a moving target. It is not a place you ever arrive at because you are never the same person. Day after day you grow and change. Day after day you heal, you hurt, you grow, you learn and you never stop. Day after day you have experiences in this world that affect you and others around you and you will have to process it at some point. I was never meant to get to the core, as I thought I would. It isn’t a destination or an ending. It is an idea like a mountain summit where you rest before continuing the climb because the mountain never stops growing.
I am gifted with a sponsor who is a wayfarer. She never stops traveling the mountain of healing and recovery. There is no dust on her hiking shoes, she does her work, and she works her program. The most important lessons that I have learned from her are that life never stops coming at you, no matter how healed you are, no matter how much work you have done, there is always more to do, because life happens. And that life is messy, unfair, wonderful, scary, marvelous, and that it just is. If we want to have a life, we have to accept whatever comes our way.
No one I know is more healed and no one I know deserves a life of ease and joy as much as her. And yet she is still healing. The lessons come, the memories continue, the path gets blocked, the legacy of the affects of alcoholism and loving alcoholics continues. I feel so honored that she trusts me enough to tell me the truth about recovery. That she doesn’t pretend that if you only follow a program, work your steps, and attend your meetings, life will be easy and that you can rest in the notion of finally being healed once and for all. She tells me often that it is like riding a bike, if you want to keep going places on your bike, you have to keep pedaling, you cannot coast forever or your bike won’t go.
I’m at another mountain summit. This last leg of the journey has been tough. I’ll be honest in that this was one of the more challenging climbs that I’ve had in a while. I feel like there were energy sucking lessons all along this path. I feel like I had these views that I would catch a glimpse of but couldn’t make out until I got to the summit. The lessons hurt, in my heart, my soul, my mind, and especially my body on this leg of my journey. I have been physically ill for many months with many different things, letting me know that all is not well in me.
This leg of my journey has been filled with grief. I feel like I’ve reached a part in my healing and recovery journey where I can see more clearly the places I have visited in the past and can only now see and feel how hard it was to be in those spaces having those experiences. I am remembering the people who I loved so much that aren’t traveling with me anymore and I miss them. Many of them didn’t want to travel any higher on the mountain. Some of them weren’t capable and I had to decide whether to stay on that summit or keep traveling. Some of them aren’t alive anymore.
The most grief I feel is when I look back and I can see the version of me that I was when I had reached each summit, and especially the me that wandered around in the valley below not even knowing that there was a mountain to climb. She has my whole heart, that girl down there with no hope, no direction, no idea what a great hiker she would be if only she knew about mountains. I look back now and see my first summit, where I found my voice and my courage and I love that me so much. She was so brave to seek out recovery. She was so brave to leave. She was so brave to ask for help. She was so brave to stay in those recovery rooms. She was so brave to ask for a sponsor. She was so brave to challenge all of her training and forge a new path.
The grief comes as I admire her and acknowledge that she had no idea that none of it was her fault. She was climbing that mountain with a giant bag of inherited generational trauma. Hiking alone is hard, hiking with a big bag of shit that isn’t yours is almost impossible. At every summit, I have chucked rocks that I realize weren’t mine out of that bag. Even in that lightening of my load, there is grief and confusion. How did that get in my bag? And sometimes when I get the answer, it just shows me that many other people that I loved had carried that weight around their entire life too. You grieve when you know that the ones you love have hurt also. Generations of pain and hurt create deeper and deeper valleys that many never get out of. Many didn’t know there were healing mountains to climb, they never had a chance.
I feel like the lesson I have just learned is that it is okay to travel alone. That if someone is slowing down my journey or asking me to wait up, it is okay to say no and leave them. One of the weights in my big bag I inherited or learned is codependence. People pleasing. Not being okay if the people around me aren’t okay. I learned to give my energy, time, attention, focus, love, and self away to others. I learned to shrink to please smaller thinking people. I learned to dim my light for people not used to the sunshine. I learned to comply, to appease, and to invest in others before investing in myself.
This makes traveling up a healing mountain very tiring. It slows me down. The thing I never realized until now is that I did not trust myself to travel alone. I didn’t want to be alone. I thought it was my job to drag everyone I love or who loves me up that mountain with me. I didn’t trust that I would meet new people at the next summit or further up the mountain if I let go of the ones that were slowing me down. I will admit that there is an abundance of people down in the valley of dysfunction. I couldn’t walk a step without running into potential friends or lovers and family down there. The further up the healing mountain I go, the less people I see traveling. It scares me. It makes me wonder if there will come a point where I stop seeing people on the path or at the summits. I yearn for connection so badly but do not want to travel down the mountain to get it.
My decision has been to trust. To look around, really look around for people who are on the mountain with me. They aren’t all gone. Some are just people I am used to traveling with and I forget to be grateful for their love and presence. My children are here and they love me. My recovery friends are here and they love me. My family is here, we may not be at the same summit but they see me and they are proud of me. My pets are happy to travel wherever I go. My co-workers are good people and they challenge and inspire me in my professional journey. There is love and support available to me and I won’t close myself off to it because it didn’t show up in the form I thought it would or in the person I had hoped it would be in. I will be grateful for anyone I encounter on this healing journey.
I am willing to leave this rock called codependency and all the other rocks I have found in my pack this year that weren’t mine to carry here at this summit. They will be left in 2023. I’m going to go forward up the mountain. I feel lost without the weight of these things I am leaving, I got used to their weight and I thought they would always be with me. There is guilt leaving them behind because some people rely on me to have these rocks to be in my life. I will leave them too. The grief will come, maybe now and maybe far from now as I look back, but it will come.
I’ve decided that I do trust myself to travel alone. I have decided that I’m good company and that I enjoy being alone with myself. The mountain is my mountain. The healing is my healing and I’ve decided that I want it no matter what. The never ending onion peel doesn’t scare me like it used to because I am letting go of the fantasy that I’ll reach a point in life where life stops happening and it is just an easy coast everyday. The only place that coasting happens is in the valley or down the mountain and I do not live in the valley anymore. I am not going down the mountain. I have chosen to climb and to heal and so I will keep looking forward, up, toward healing deeper and deeper.
