Control

One simple word sums up the amount of control any human has over those things that abide outside of their own thoughts, words and actions: none. To sum up the amount of control most of us perceive ourselves to have is far less simple. To most of us, the attempt to control people, events and outcomes is a tragically flawed waltz we dance daily with our surroundings.  We struggle hopelessly to exert control over things that hold influence in our lives and become distraught when it doesn’t work out.

Addicts, codependents and those riddled with any of a myriad of compulsive behaviors are masters of playing this game, We are not very good losers (anywhere except in the big-picture sense in our active addiction, at least) and our favorite game is one we can never win. Our penchant for self-defeating behaviors is never more evident than during our attempts at controlling everyone around us. It’s about as effective as grabbing a handful of water to carry in your bare fist. Life spills out everywhere and we’re left cleaning up a mess that we created and for which we refuse to be responsible.

There is a common saying in the rooms of recovery that “Our very best thinking got us here.” The fact is that no addict, active or in recovery should relish the idea of controlling anything when he or she can simply step back and play the footage over once more in their mind of the utter insanity and misery that their attempts at control birthed. If you are being honest with yourself, you realize that the struggle to maintain control over your own thoughts, words and actions is time consuming enough to keep you occupied and preclude any attempts at controlling anyone or anything else.

Surrendering your illusion of control is a truly monumental undertaking (and an equally valuable step forward).  The counterintuitive mantra “Surrender to win” finds meaning in this context. You must surrender your notion of control for your own sanity’s sake; it’s simply letting go of a thought but not nearly as easy as that statement suggests.

Surrendering control does not mean giving up on making the effort to be the best version of you that is possible. It simply means having the courage to relinquish something that the loss of which is at first a very scary proposition. After you let go, you realize the truth: control is something you never actually had. You’ll win the battle every day if you can simply and successfully control yourself, and that is all you can ever really do anyway. Controlling everyone and everything else? That's too much for any person.

Let it go.

What Now?

There is an immediate and very real danger to each and every recovering addict the moment they decide to get clean, and that is the reality that their support network may have been alienated to the point of no return. Most of us have driven our loved ones to the very brink of sanity and in some cases they completely wash their hands of us, and deservedly so. We have destroyed many of the relationships we may have developed in the years before the madness set in and those that we cannot revive become dangerous pitfalls of guilt and remorse on our journey.

The addict must somehow make peace with the fact that not being able to revive some of our friendships and relationships is simply another form of being held accountable. Our transgressions are not wiped clean just because our eyes become clear once more. There are repercussions for all our actions (sober or in active addiction) and some have lifelong implications.

On the off chance that the people who love and care for them haven’t been driven as far away as they can possibly get, odds are strongly in favor of those people not really knowing how to support them in their recovery. From the first bender to the last breath, it is a tenuous, tedious balance between support and enabling. How do you know where that boundary lay?

An addict who chooses to be admitted to inpatient treatment has made a significant step towards living the kind of life they have fooled themselves into believing only exists at the bottom of the bottle. If you are a friend or loved one, the key then becomes supporting them in such a way as to not set them up to fall back into the self-destruction by enabling. How do you help without inadvertently hurting their chances for survival?

First things first, you cannot give them anything without receiving something substantive in return. The recovering addict is only set walking down a path of manipulation and ill spiritual health if given anything for free. Everything must be earned, no matter how small. This also serves to boost the long-shattered sense of self-worth and gives him or her something about which they can be proud.

Structure and regularity are also necessary. The chaos and insanity of their past lives must be supplanted with the type of routine in which they can become grounded and upon which they can rely. This means schedule and routine must be the order of the day every day for as long as it takes.

Finally, love and acceptance must be in abundant supply. The extension of these is much to ask, but if you’ve stuck by them this long the odds are that you have both by the boatload. Understand that a recovering addict can be the loneliest person on Earth, and everyone has good and bad days. The key is remembering that eventually the good will greatly outnumber the bad.

Good things happen when a person adopts an upright way of living and the residual effects are sure to touch their loved ones even more than the heartbreak ever did. Love, integrity, patience, honesty, kindness and loyalty are adjectives that only scratch the surface of what’s in store when an addict resolves him or her self to becoming who they were born to be by laying down the very thing that without fail cripples their ability to be happy. If you have been there while they were crawling, you deserve to see them fly as well. 

What Can I Do?

Few situations can produce the kind of helpless hurt and confusing conflict that a front row seat to the self-destruction of an active addict cultivates. Loved ones are affected without much ability to do anything to help and are often the primary victims of the collateral damage from our chaotic existence.

We usually don’t mean to hurt them; sometimes we intend to do just that. Hurting and disappointing our dearest friends and family is almost like another way to hurt ourselves and feeds our hunger for the self-mutilation of the soul. We have a strange way of becoming accustomed to being a disappointment. We are a very adaptable breed and can lower our standards in the blink of an eye to try and keep ourselves from feeling too guilty or ashamed.

At some point our status quo changes and becomes that of a constant state of abandoned dreams, ambitions and goals. Our natural sense of self-loathing feeds into this and convinces us that while we’d like to be happy, it is a state we surely will never deserve. If we can’t be happy, we don’t really want to see anyone around us being very happy either and to the untrained eye we don’t appear to have any qualms with making sure of it.

On some level we do care that we are hurting people who love us, but that thought just feels like another salvo in the war for control of our lives. We are unwilling and by extension unable to cede the control we think we have. We can’t see past our addiction long enough to see that we’d be better off giving that “control” over to a doorknob. Our lives are an absolute wreck but we refuse to admit it or take responsibility for the mess.

The addict is a living paradox. Our self-loathing inspires us to reach new lows while we are simultaneously trying to dig ourselves out of our spiritual grave by doing despicable things as coping mechanisms. We can’t win for losing because we practice self-sabotage at every turn while cursing our luck or everyone around us.  No one can utter a word that will turn us; there is no magic phrase. Inside us lurks an egomaniac with a self-esteem issue who won’t listen to the desperate pleas of our loved ones urging us to save ourselves. To us it all sounds like someone telling us what to do and NOBODY tells US what to do. We would rather hang ourselves in a noose we tied than save ourselves from the gallows by heeding another’s advice.

We have to reach a point where we just cannot stomach sinking any lower. It must eventually cost us more than we are willing to give. Our standards must get to a point where we are unable to lower them further. This is bottom, and for every addict it is different. For some it is the loss of a job; others must lose connection with family members before they will consider a change. For some it may be a near-death experience, while for others it may involve the loss of someone else’s life. There are few hard and fast rules about the bottom, outside of the absolute that each person’s bottom is his or her own and no amount of pleading, prodding or threatening will make it arrive any sooner than it must.

Acceptance is the key to your happiness. You have to divorce yourself from the idea that there is much of anything that you can do to help, no matter how much it hurts to see someone killing themselves a drink, snort or pill at a time. You must realize that the only control any of us has in this world is the control of our own thoughts, words and actions. You must admit that you are powerless over someone else’s problems and realize that trying to change another person is an unmanageable task. You have to let go and trust that things will unfold exactly as they should and that your timetable is not applicable to everyone else.