When I met the ex A event hough I was middle aged and had been in therapy for years, I was still in the mode of trying to find someone to make it up to me.  I wanted the knight in shining armor, the person who would give me all the love I had missed when I was a child.  Most of all I wanted a fall back.  I wanted someone I could depend on.  I wanted to feel "safe" something I did not get in childhood and a concept and feeling I desperately clung to as a way I could be in the world.

That symbolism the need for someone to transform my childhood into something meaningful was of course how I survived as a child.  My adolescence was a time when I dreamed of getting married, escaping my family and living a fantastic existence.  During that time the violence in my family escalated, my sister became an alcoholic and our life disintegrated.  I had no tools to deal with all those issues.  I had no one.  Fantasy had to help me out.  I have had deep deep shame about my adolescence and now I do not.  I did absolutely the best anyone could do and more.

The problem for me is that I didn't ever revise the "assumptive world" I had created to get me through childhood.  When I met men, friends, associates, I was working from that view point.  I felt lost in the world and needed someone to guide me.  Blind with emotion, hate, grief, deprivation, I could not actively "choose" the right partner.  Moreover working from an assumptive world that "God" had to somehow make it up to me with this knight in shining armor was my will over everything.  How could "God" after all give me my parents, poverty and such hardship, the knight in shining armor had to be around the next corner for me to make it all right.

So when I met men like the ex A my view of them was that I would make them into something they never were in order to align with the world I held as true.  Certainly th ex A  played the role of knight in shining armor when I first met them.  When he dropped that role because of his addiction and problems,  due to my "assumptive world" of make it up to me for the rotten childhood, I could not make the change to reality.  I held on for dear life because I did indeed feel my life depended on him becoming the knight he once was.  So when I lost him to addiction I also lost the world where God was fair and would make it up to me.

I can't say I like the "assumptive world" I have been able to put together as a al anon member.  I can't say I relish the nitty gritty of working two sometimes three jobs, bone tired, fed up and wondering what's next, poverty, scrambling for resources, dealing with addicts and more.  At the same time its a world based in "reality' acknowledging fully the childhood I had, the relationships I had and my struggles.  No one can make it up to me I have to start from today.  My sponsors, friends, bosses will not become something that will transform my loss.  I have to do that and find meaning in the process.  At the same time I can see "meaning" in my life.  I know that my struggle and my journey affects others, some people even say it helps them.  I know that I am compassionate, sincere and loved.  I may not have the love of the knight in shining armor (this fantasy absolutely kept me alive as a child)  but I certainly have the love of the members of this program.  I have tools, I have goals modest ones and I am no longer in prison with the knight in shining armor.

Maresie.