The material presented
here is not Al-Anon Conference Approved Literature. It is a method
to exchange
information, ideas, feelings, problems and solutions on a personal
level.
Yesterday the exAH spent the day at my home with the kids. I had work to do so I stuck around. The kids have set up this big airsoft course...and the ex had bought new guns and equipment..including an expensive mask for my 11 YO. This with no job, no place to live...living with his sister. And of course he can't afford child support.
I've been spinning since. I smile and have courteous conversation when he is here ...and I do this for the kids...but inside I just want to PUKE. I know...not very zen and alanon-ish, ey? Then he posted this on his FB wall and I just want to SCREAM. And people buy his BS. Whatever. Feeling POed.
He's a kid himself inside. He's not an adult. His behavior matches his emotional maturity. He's not an adult. Can't think like an adult. Can't behave like an adult. When I could accept this about my x (with my Mom's keen wisdom), I could relate to him better as he was and not as the adult I wanted him to be. And I'm not saying I didn't kick a few cans along the way. You're working your program. He isn't. The gap between you both will continue to grow.
Hey, my sister's STBX just posted this picture on his wall for FB, too. Funny, but he just left her and his 2 kids in CO to go move across the country to live with his second girlfriend. My sister is finally divorcing the guy after he gave her an STD while pregnant, then left her after the baby was born for 9 months for girlfriend number 1, then left her again in May when their baby was 22 months old.
Like PP, I just sit there and shake my head, but as grateful said: they are kids themselves. Actually, sometimes I don't sit there and just shake my head, sometimes I stomp my feet and want to scream at the computer because he's so out of touch with reality. Yet, I know that doesn't do any good so I pick up my Courage to Change and I put the focus back on me. But, I'm sure that's harder to do when he's in your home and in your space. I know that's probably why I struggle the most because AH is always around.
Those days, that day I was finally able to let go of my alcoholic/addict wife as Harry Tiebout speaks of in the ODAAT daily reader...on a subconscious level as surrender rather than on a conscious level as submission only was when I learned to change my choices of focus. Those days, that day when I was finally able to understand Dr. Pauls offering on Acceptance being the solution to all of his problems. Those days, that day that I caved into the awareness that I was powerless without exception was the day that I had absolutely no negative thoughts, feelings, judgements for my alcoholic/addict wife or anyone else and I could behave within the definition of "Love" as taught by another Al-Anon elder. "Love is the complete and total acceptance of every other human being for exactly who they are"; and I thought she didn't even mention her alcoholic directly in the definition. Rocket science again!! and her body language revealed that she walked it and didn't only talk it. I wanted what she had and so I went after what she had. Lately as a solution to an earlier post here about being taken out over and over again by resentments and the feedback that I got, I came to understand that I needed to refocus not only my intention and my thinking and my behavior on these lessons and to bring them down to the sub-conscious level where I could "walk" and live them without having to think about them and find reasons to intensify. To walk them and live them as if they were habits like breathing and a heart beat. I got local program support last Sunday at my morning meeting...one member saying "you cannot retrain the sub-conscious" and another "you so can train the subconscious" with me in the middle..."I have retrained it and not to the level where I need it to be yet". I was and had been taken off of my serenity with reaction to other outside people, places and things I needed to come back to the practice...I had no alcoholic/addict to blame and haven't for a long time. As another local sister has taught me, "My only problem is me....and my only solution is God". I was giving my serenity away because my relationship to the problem was stronger than my relationship to the solution. I'm working it still...I received lots of love and support in my MIP family and in my local recovering families and I'm practicing again...putting the solution into my sub-conscious where I won't have to even think about it and how to walk it because it will be come a default habit of life for me. When this happens I have no problems outside of myself. Serenity is the continuous and orderly process of balance...mind, body, spirit and emotions.
They can be brilliantly irrational! It's a baffling, cunning, and very powerful disease! So maddening, and, at the same time, so very sad.
Consistently, it would take me at least 10 times the amount of energy to regain serenity for each amount of effort of trying to figure out my exAH. All of that energy over years and years and the only outcome was more energy than I can ever imagine is needed to climb out of the deep, dark hole that I created for myself.
My exAH carries on how he carries on, irrespective of what I do or don't say or do.
With the help of my HP and Alanon, I continually practice letting go and I disengage as much as I can. ... and, as frustrating as it can be, it is my experience that those who believe the lies and manipulations aren't usually meant to stay with me in my life-time journey...
Thank you for your post and for being here- validation because of common understanding and encouragement for the steps towards healing.
It helps SO much to have a place to put this "stuff." I am doing well...but recovery for me is hard when like someone said here, I have lots of contact with the exAH. I just always feel like I've entered a parallel universe where the communication does not resemble reality...
It IS part of the disease...and I have learned not to let his antics disturb my serenity for too long...thank you compadres, and thank you alanon tools. Helps me stay off the train to crazy town...
It also helps to know that you all know where I'm coming from...
