Blog article about fear I was pissed off. My wife wouldn’t kiss me or let me kiss her for a week. I had a cold sore in the corner of my mouth. Also, her boobs are sensitive because of some progesterone therapy she is on because of her menopausal symptoms. I felt like my hands were tied when I was around her. Another irritation, my step daughter keeps ‘forgetting’ to clean the kitchen and put away the clean dishes out of the dishwasher. She will even open and close the machine to turn off the green light that signifies they are done. She has been bugging the shit out of all of us to help her rearrange her bedroom. My step son was down from Goshen College over the weekend to attend a planning meeting for KOMIAC (an annual meeting of teen members of alanon from the midwest). He had promised his sister to bring over a friend and they would help her rearrange her bedroom that involved some moving of furniture around. A queen size bed had to be disassembled from her bedroom and taken down into the basement. On the trip downstairs, the boys carelessly bonked the chandelier hanging in our front great hall with the large mattress and it’s chain unhooked and it was now hanging just by its electric cord. That’s just great! Now, I have to hire an electrician to rehang the chandelier. More money going out. So I decide to talk to my wife about why I am feeling so peeved and acting so shitty. I start out with the story about her being unapproachable and difficult to touch. I move onto how Sophia has been avoiding her chores. I finish with how careless Alex and his friend were with the mattress and that we will have to hire an electrician to fix the chandelier. All these worries and events are conspiring to put me in a bad mood. She looks at me and says, ‘I think there is something else going on here’ ‘Oh crap’, I think. She is going to try to tell me that none of this is anybodies fault, especially her stuff. I start to heat up, getting ready to be sarcastic and defensive of my position. I’m like a sniper waiting to blow up whatever argument she says back at me. I know I am right! She then says to me, ‘what I am hearing you say is that I, my daughter, and my son are all screwing up things for you’. I protest, ‘No, I don’t think that any of this was deliberately directed at me!’ When I hear myself say that, I start to realize that maybe I just told a lie. Thats when the light of sanity starts to break through my befogged brain. I just told my loving wife that I thought there was a conspiracy in my household by my loving family to make me irritable and discontent! My training as a RIM facilitator and having been in the rooms of recovery since 1999 then tells me I better take another look at these events that are ‘pissing’ me off. In the cascade of thoughts that occur, I realize that I need to look underneath these irritations and see what is really making me afraid. Every time I am afraid and alone, I will look for a way to sooth myself. If I become shitty and drive people away, that gives me license to act out. I feel I have the perfect excuse. But I know there is another way. I can open up my mouth and talk to another addict. I can pray for the fear to be rightsized or removed. I can become vulnerable and tell my wife just what is going on in my lizard brain. I say lizard brain, because this is not intellectually high thinking. There is not much rational thought involved. It is fear driven and is the result of me not accepting things exactly the way they are. The reason I have difficulty doing that is that my inner little boy is feeling very insecure. Now my next task is to find out why that is, today and help him pass through his fear, just for today. I have done extensive work on moving myself towards being vulnerable. Sober people feel their feelings, even the bad ones. Compared to where I was, this is pretty advanced. I help coach other addicts get to this point of being able to feel everything. My addictions tried to protect me from all discomfort and did a pretty good job of it until they stopped working. But they also stopped me from feeling joy and connection. Let me help you regain the most important relationship in your life. The one with yourself.
Posted on: Mon, 16 Sep 2013 11:02:00 +0000
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