Seeing Myself In Others

Most of my life I was terminally unique and did not feel much commonality with others while talking with them.  There was a gaping lack of compassion and empathy in my relationships that was driven by fear of emotional intimacy.  My emotional intelligence was on par with an IQ of retarded.  I did not know how to do healthy relationships.

Today when listening to others, I hear the commonality and have stopped listening for the differences.  Seeing more of myself in others enables me to be more honest and open when talking with others when I realize how much we do have in common.

I see more of myself in Lea than I ever have with another person, especially those negative traits were a part of my using persona which was essentially my personality before recovery.  Today she did her 5^th of 7 fittings to get dentures via the UW Dental School.  The process is almost complete.  Judging by her having been gone for hours, she is out using.  That is classic alcoholic behavior of self-destruction right before an important long sought really good goal comes into fruition.

She is frustrated by and complains about the 40 pounds she has gained while on methadone for 7 months.  She declined to go swimming with me tonight.  I was all too often stuck in the problem (whatever it was) and could not take action on implementing obvious solutions aka paralyzed by fear.    Today I am able to work a spiritual program of action that provides me with enough faith and courage to take solution-oriented action that will help me get what I want.

A good friend was a nurse at the psych ward at Harborview.  She said the saddest cases were the people that almost got it together and then screwed-up/self-destructed.  Lea is in that boat.  She obviously wants to get a life that works (which can really only be done by being sober in recovery by the AA paradigm my friends and I live by), yet she is overwhelmed by fear and PTSD conditioning that keeps her balking from success.  I certainly used to be like that.  There is a reason I only have 6.5 months of sobriety after 14 years of AA meetings.

Today I get to watch Lea and not have to keep reliving those same self-destructive behaviors myself while thinking thank god that is not me having to live like that.

I promised Lea to help her get dentures.  After that, if she does not do the work to get and stay sober I will have to let her go.  Doing the work and being sober is best case scenario.  I would rather have her do the work and intermittently relapse versus not doing the work and not relapsing—that is an unstable unhealthy nerve-wracking negative situation just waiting to explode. It is unlikely, more nearly statistically impossible, she will land on her feet in a better recovery oriented living situation than a decent 2-bedrooom apartment in Bellevue that is three miles round-trip to the methadone clinic, the grocery store and 80 meetings a week at the Alano Club.

I am grateful to see so much of myself in Lea, for being able to use her object lessons to help me stay sober one day at a time and for my firm belief in the viability of AA’s 12-step spiritual solution for the treatment of alcoholism one day at a time.