12 stepping

Step 1: Admitting we are powerless over the effects of addiction and that our lives had become unmanageable.

My father called me drunk last night. I doubt he remembers. It was a pointless phone call, just for him to brag about the new fire pit he and Mom got to sit around a fire. In Florida. Don't ask.  The point is, as I'm going through some of this literature from ACoA, and trying to figure out how to wrap my brain around the whole Higher Power stuff, I think I need to just take a step back and figure out exactly what I'm looking at.

I am, indeed, powerless over my father's problems with addiction. I have tried to micro-manage every situation, I tried endlessly as a kid to be good enough, smart enough for him to actually SEE me. I apparently even told them when I was little that I didn't like someone because of the way they touched me. But in the mind of an alcoholic, or at least, in HIS mind, much more rested on the way things appeared to others.

I have to accept that nothing I could have done, and nothing I can do now, will change who he is; will change the dynamic that I grew up with; will change the way he knows how to interact with me, or with the world around him in general.  I have to give up hope that there's anything I can do or say that will make him different, or change what our history is. And I have to accept that everything I grew up thinking was "normal" was distorted and wrong.

I continue to live my life in the way I was shown: I go through the motions of what seems to be normal, to me...I have a very hard time being present. Even without being an alcoholic myself, I have that personality trait emblazoned on whatever I take to be my soul.  Part of the ACoA definition of "The Problem" is co-dependency and taking on the characteristics of the diseases (alcoholism) without necessarily ever using chemicals or behaviour to mood alter.  


But here's the funny thing. I was always such a control freak that I DIDN'T get drunk, or let myself feel out of control, maybe because some part of me, even years ago, recognized that what I came from was twisted. But no matter how far away from home I got, or how much I tried to be everything my parents weren't/aren't, it's all I know.  And I still couldn't let myself be present for my life. Because all I've known is surface, cover-up, superficial, impress-the-neighbors bullshit.

The promise of a solution through ACoA is tho hopefully begin to "...begin watching for present day self-destructive patterns, recognize these patterns and make better choices for ourselves...to change sick attitudes and characteristics that have plagued us for years and made our lives unmanageable".

So here we are back at Step #1.  In all my attempts to micro-manage, my life has, indeed, become unmanageable.  Trent sees right through me, I am desperate to be a good wife and parent, and to be a real honest to goodness, present part of the world around me.  So this is me. Admitting my powerlessness over what my parents' dysfunction has rendered in me. In the hopes that I can forgive them, and myself, for a life only half-lived up to this point.