If I was to say to you ‘I need to get clean’ what would you think I was talking about?
Apart from the really obvious, literal sense – sponges, soap etc would you think it was something to do with drugs?
Well, that’s certainly how the phrase is used, and yes that’s what I mean. Sort of.
‘Getting clean’ is a way of describing how someone frees themselves from the compulsive behaviours that come with addiction. Interesting.
But what if I said that, even though I do mean that, I’m not talking at all about drugs?
What I mean is the way I relate to people.
I have come to realise over the years that getting clean for me means knowing how to have healthy relationships. And I don’t just mean with romantic partners, although yes that is a huge factor. I mean relationships in general.
Actually, there are relationships even more fundamental than the ones with other people.
This I will come back to.
But before that, this notion of being in unhealthy relationships, being addicted to them, needs some attention.
The definition of addiction
There is a definition of addiction which I think encompasses most of human behaviour. It comes from the circles of Gabor Mate’s thinking and one espoused wholeheartedly by my friend Tommy Rosen.
At the height of my immersion into the world of Recovery circa 2015 at The Brink in Liverpool, Tommy himself came to Liverpool as part of his UK tour for his book Recovery 2.0. It was an incredible week, meeting first in (some town south of the border I have forgotten the name of) before moving on to London for an event there, and meeting up again back in Liverpool a few days later for the event there. This week was impactful in numerous ways and contributed greatly to my understanding of addiction that ultimately fuelled my own recovery.
This definition of addiction was the one I could relate to most:
‘any behaviour that has negative consequences for you, yet you are unable to stop’.
Let’s think about that for a minute.
Any behaviour.
Any behaviour.
That harms us.
But we can’t stop.
A world of addiction
So rather than your stereotypical drug addict or alcoholic, this seems to include how we eat food, and what types of food, our sexual behaviour, the way we earn our money, what we do with our money and much more. Basically, it’s most of what we do. There is addiction everywhere and with everything. It includes people and relationships.
Using that definition let’s start with the obvious, the extremes. People seek out relationships that don’t serve them in some way. Even when the pain and confusion comes, it’s not enough for things to change as there is some ‘pay off’ in the dynamic, on some level, usually a level below the conscious mind.
There are however, more subtle versions of this.
What about a situation where people just resent most people they meet?
Yes that’s true, that does happen.
I can testify to that.
Codependency
There is no one person I’ve met who hasn’t caused me some kind of disturbance or resentment. This might sound shocking to you but I’m going to bet you that it’s more common than you think.
The thing is, I didn’t actually know this was the state of play. This only became apparent when I began to lift the lid on my psyche and do immense amounts of inventory to begin my recovery. From what, I didn’t even know at first. Something was just wrong at its very core and I knew it.
My predicament isn’t the same as being addicted to a harmful person. What the addiction or compulsion is lies in knowing that I am active in forming unhealthy relationships but being unable to stop or change my behaviour.
Further, this isn’t something that I enjoy or want. I always wanted to be loved, to feel loved and liked and to have those loving feelings within me. Somehow somewhere I was just a person living on bitterness and pain and resentment. And OF COURSE it wasn’t my fault. It was everyone else’s.
It took the pain of bitterness, loneliness, discontent, confusion, sadness and failed romance to lead me into ways of addressing it that told me what the common denominator was; Me!
Living in the solution
This was many years ago. Now I am practicing a way of living that provides a solution. One thing for sure is that it’s never truly ‘fixed’. It’s a lifetimes work of changing patterns of behaviour, or even knowing them in the first place. Being human means we have our conditioning, our ways of being, and we are up against it.
Codependency amounts very much to having your value and worth depend on others and their thoughts. This plays out in many many other patterns and varies from person to person. One by one I am coming to terms with my own, beginning to understand them, their root cause and slowly being able to release them to be replaced by new, healthier behaviours. Again, a lifetimes work but there are little miracles every so often, and a real sense of health (in relationships) starting to emerge. Something is working.
For example, one of my other codependent traits was to take on other people’s feelings and act on them as if they were my own. I literally only discovered the severity of this in the past couple of weeks. There was a situation recently where I wanted to interfere with a loved one’s decision. In my head it was dressed up as something that I thought was ‘right’ but what was smouldering underneath was my sense of anxiety at someone else (incidentally, a complete stranger to me) feeling loss or pain.
Emotions masquerading as morals
My old self would have done the following; felt the discomfort for the other person/stranger, worried about it, and tried to intervene in my loved one’s decision, trying to change their actions. Basically it would have amounted to interference and control. To appease my sense of discomfort.
This time around was different and this was truly how I noticed how far I had come in my awareness.
I heard the news. Instantly I felt the discomfort. I almost went to intervene, to interfere, without even realising my own discomfort was the fuel, but I stopped, I checked in with how I felt and was knocked for six. I couldn’t believe how much discomfort and pain was there. My mind was blown that I had taken on, to my detriment, someone else’s feelings, and was about to interfere in the situation because of it.
I couldn’t believe I had full awareness of something, the very thing, that caused me to act in controlling ways in the past, cause harm to others, and cause misery in my relationships. This is called ‘caretaking’. It presents as ‘being caring’ but ultimately amounts to manipulation to ease one’s own sense unease.
I had to own the pain, and admit it was mine. I had to sit with it. Feel it. It sounds crazy but I had to grieve the pain for someone else who I’ve never even spoken to. Recovering from codependency, or from any addiction requires this ‘feeling feelings’ properly. I have spoken about this in earlier blogs. But it felt so much healthier to do this rather than interfere. It was empowering, not just for me but for other people. I feel more able to let people have their pain without trying to fix it. Things like this happen constantly now.
Within You, Without You
Further to this, when it comes to ‘getting clean’ this amounts to restoring something within, not without. And this leads me to what I mentioned earlier, the relationships that are even deeper, more fundamental to those even with loved ones.
‘Fixing’ your codependency is a way of restoring the disconnect within yourself. For me and countless others, for some reason there is a lingering sense of discomfort, uneasiness, ‘dis-ease’, uncertainty, maybe even outright pain, fear or loneliness behind and underneath most of the waking experience. This can be glossed over with good times or busyness, numbed out, soothed or escaped from in numerous ways, but it plays out into eventual misery with how we as codependents relate to other people, in countless different ways.
The relationship that needs attention is the relationship with ourselves. How indeed we relate to ourself.
I am certain this strikes a chord with many.
The ultimate relationship
I will take it one step further though. Much of what I have said so far is the wisdom of others.
My final offering, whilst also being in the realm of many other wise minds, is an idea that felt like it has appeared as an original one in mine. True realisations always feel like this.
The actual word ‘relationship’ describes for me the primary mode of being that any living thing in this universe has – that it relates to things. Everything is in relationship to everything else. Nothing ‘is’, without its relationships to other things. Nothing exists in isolation.
Using that reasoning, we can ask, what is the ultimate thing we are in relationship with?
My ultimate take on things is that the one fundamental relationship, even more so than the one with ourselves, is the relationship we have to everything ‘other than’ or ‘outside of’ ourselves.
Everything. Reality. The Universe. God?
For practical terms, this can mean simply how we relate to our very experience of life.
With that said…
How healthy is it?
Do we fear life or love life?
Do we trust it? Have we got it within ourselves to do that?
Are we a victim in it? Are we open to it, are we able to yield to it? Or do we want to dominate it?
Do you want to control your experience of life?!
Are we able to surrender to each and every passing moment which ultimately presents itself as the complete unknown?
How is our relationship with the unknown?
Do we want to manipulate it? Do you want to know that which is unknowable? Or even destroy it?
How much of our love, in the form of the willingness to understand and withhold judgment are we able to give to the unknown? How vulnerable do we feel when we do this? Or are we at the other end of the spectrum where we ourselves, our values, judgments and way of thinking is the only thing we trust? Is this the reason we then try to manipulate, to judge, and ultimately to feel victimised or in competition with other people in the world, who would then be the source of our pain and misfortune?
When I say I want to get clean, I really mean it. I really hunger for healthiness in my relations with others. I desire it so much. I am sick of these interactions that result in yet more misery to have to undo or gloss over or stuff down and forget about or mask with smiles. But I know that what this depends on is the relationship I have with the locality of my own body and mind, and my relationship to what I would call, for want of a better word, God itself. And I see these as the same thing.
Thank you for another insightful exploration of the human condition.
It shows how much we do, to our detriment, automatically, without thinking. And how we can change things for the better.