The Anchor

I read Annette's latest post. My interpretation of it was that some anger was present because of a feeling that she is the one  jumping through hoops, when she is not the person with an addiction.  It got me thinking, and I kinda feel the same way.  Racking my brain to see what I said or did wrong.  Did I bake enough cookies, go to enough school plays, comfort enough bad dreams?  We have become a society that has been forced to tolerate a lot, and made to feel guilty if we don't.  I have to tolerate individual differences, ideas, life choices.  Most of the time I'm okay with it.  Sometimes, I'm not.  Sometimes tolerating isn't the right choice and there aren't always clear boundaries as to what should and shouldn't be tolerated. For instance, I will not tolerate murder, or child abuse (or abuse of any kind for that matter), or cruelness, or bullying, there is a big long list of what I will not tolerate.  But society wants me to tolerate certain school curriculum that goes against my ethical code, or be okay when a jury clears a person for murder just because they had a savvy lawyer who made people feel guilty for not being accepting.  My point is, tolerating can break down normal if you're not careful, and there has to be a normal. 

Normal is necessary.  If we didn't base situations on being normal, we wouldn't be able to diagnose medical problems.  There has to be a normal blood pressure so that we know when it's too high or low.  There are normal growth patterns in children so that we know when there is a problem.  Normal is necessary.  However, when it comes to people and family behaviors, all of a sudden, that  normal gets so stretched and pulled out of shape, in defense of individual differences, that the normal behavior of parenting and knowing how to raise your own child, is distorted into controlling and selfishness; when it's the child who is still too emotionally immature and selfish to understand how to maneuver in life, so the parent, who has more experience and wisdom, is there to guide and discipline them (discipline as in teach not hit, I don't believe in hitting).  That's what parenting is!

I don't like that because I didn't know how to deal with addiction and its insidious nature that I'm considered the 'sick' one because I was enabling.  I don't understand how I got to be the one who needs all of the internal analyzing when I'm not the one in hot pursuit of ruining my life through addiction.

I think that addicts who point the judgment finger toward the people in their lives who are upset with the addiction are  a variation of enablers in their own addiction.  My daughter will say to me when we're arguing, "You don't understand! You don't have this addiction thing! You don't know how hard it it!"   True, I don't have an addiction.  But I have gone through hard times, and I have seen what addiction has done and I do know the difference between the destruction it is doing verses the much better life that could be had if you worked harder at not giving in to the addiction.  The very fact that I don't (and a lot of us enablers don't) have an addiction is the very reason we should be giving advice.  Often during our arguments, my daughter has said, "You just want to control me!"  One day it hit me, and I commented back, "Yeah, I do, because if I did control you, you wouldn't be doing what you're doing!  So, obviously I'm not controlling you because you're still giving in to your addiction!" 

Addiction makes everyone crazy.  It not only ensnares the mind of the addict, it sends out tentacles to the minds of the people involved with the addict.  I think a big, important step for the 'enabler' is to pull free of that tentacle, and know that you are the normal. You are the plumb line. Your experience, strength, vantage point of sobriety, and life wisdom is what makes you the stable normal.  So, rather than running here and there, trying to reestablish and rethink and reset yourself all of the time, I think the answer is return to who you are with all of your experience and wisdom and nurturing, stay steady, keep those boundaries and remain the anchor--the boat on the surface might be tossing and turning, but you stay secure and planted and fixed on what you know to be true.