About Yesterday's Angry Moment

Well, it's been an enlightening 24 hours.

The sponsor I got angry with yesterday and exploded at fired me tonight. He left a message on my machine telling me in essence to find someone else to work with. I feel a whole mixture of emotions. Sadness, fear, powerless rage, yes. But mostly relief.

The Recovery Spiral by Cynthia Jane Collins has been a real help to me in the process of sorting through my feelings. In retrospect, I realize I have not been able to be completely honest with my sponsor, and because of this I have been reticent to share all of my feelings about things. Really, our sponsorship relationship hadn't been working for quite a while and last night, a lot of feeling just came out sideways. I wish I had caught myself before I blurted out my insanity, and I at least had the presence of mind to clip off the conversation before I went to town on the guy. In retrospect I see that I'd been getting a lot of mixed messages from my fellow addict, but minimized my own reactions thereto. It's easy to forget that all of us coming together in 12-step work have a disease that tells us we don't have a disease, and it's part of the process of becoming aware that we participate in making our relationships murky.

There's a saying in the rooms: "Before recovery, a drunk horse thief. In recovery, a sober thief." I still approach my relationships with that addict mentality of "what can I get from this?"--even when I tell myself I'm not doing that. There are some people with whom I don't do that, but more often than not, that limbic brain sizes others up on several different rubrics. I have to be very careful where sponsors are concerned. My needs are changing as I gain awareness and I need gentleness and truth-telling combined. Not an easy combination. I so wish that the castles of my imagination would manifest and we'd all be living "the life of the spirit made manifest." We inhabit these flesh packets and we have to negotiate with other flesh packet-inhabitants. These bodies, hearts, minds and souls have certain requirements to meet, and these come into conflict. And if there's one thing I HATE, it's conflict.

I need others to tell me not to beat myself up during this difficult moment, and not to judge what happened yet as a mistake. In other words don't diagnose before I'm ready. Like I said, there are a lot of things to sort through in this short, troubled relationship. I need to honor myself and my former sponsor both, by owning up to only what is mine, for it is a tendency to say "Global warming? That's my fault and my fault alone." Even as I tease out what is mine, I have to not point my finger at my former sponsor. The outburst came at a difficult moment for both of us I fear, and I know we each have to take care of ourselves through this process. The goal is to heal, after all, to learn to live with the disease of addiction much like the diabetic or someone with MS has to live with their disease. Being painstakingly honest during the process is not something I want to volunteer for, but I must if I'm to stay abstinent. I need to stay put and sort it out with people I trust. This will take time.

Meanwhile, I need to grieve. Yesterday, after I had my outburst, I wanted to cry. My body shook with emotion and horror. I feel this rawness in my chest cavity, an aching. This is the nature of an emotional hangover. There's more to this than meets the eye, and I know that I owe an amends. But I need to take my time with this. Even though the 10th Step says "When we were wrong, promptly admitted it," and I admit I was wrong, I still need to walk through it with others to nail down where exactly I was wrong.

Fun fun fun!