Kernel of Truth

In case you wondered, I am good. Sobriety continues and although there are bad days sometimes, it mostly just keeps getting better. I was trying to think about why I haven’t blogged recently. Maybe I only like to blog when I need to get something out, and therefore I must be doing better cause there’s nothing to get out. Or maybe I am not getting it out so I’m not better. Ahh, alcoholic, spinning head, must figure it out behavior…. I’m going to blog when I feel like it and that’s that!

I had a bit of an epiphany a couple days ago, funny how this seems to keep happening in sobriety. My epiphany is about how finding the “kernel of truth” just makes everything better for me.

Once in a while, in our more heated moments, my wife will say “You Haven’t Changed”. Yes, this hurts. You might consider it mean or whatever, but that’s not the point of this post – I love my wife and all of us say things sometimes. The point I do want to make is that finding the kernel of truth set me free from this statement. When she said this it would really bother me, it was bullshit, I have changed a lot and she knew it, she even recognizes it sometimes, she’s just trying to stab me, on and on. Believing that her comment was completely false essentially kept me in chains. My breakthrough was this: I realized that, to her, at that exact moment and time, I hadn’t changed. Maybe not even just to her, maybe at that moment in time, or on that day, I was acting like I used to when I was drinking. A kernel of truth. For some reason, that realization set me free. The “You Haven’t Changed” comment carries a lot less power now, I am comfortable with my change and I don’t need to argue whether it is there. My therapist called this “reframing”, I don’t really know what that means. I do know that releasing myself from this comment in this way goes against everything I would have ever believed. Amazed every day.

Revisionist History

Currently I am working on my 9th Step:

Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

When I sat in AA as a newbie, looking at this on the wall, it was scary but also simple. “I am sorry for …”  Done. Oh how naive I was…

It turns out (for me) that those type of amends are the easy ones. The 9th Step is an additional action step to 4 and 5. As such I need to dig deep for MY part in relationships, even when I feel had done a person no wrong or that they were the a-hole. Finding your part is tough enough, and making amends without bringing up their defects – now that is difficulty.

In going through that “find my part” exercise yesterday, I came across a “shocking” discovery, that my mind has the powerful ability to rewrite factual history, here is that story:

My father died in January of 1987, after a horrible 1 year struggle with a brain tumor. My father was a USMC Drill Instructor and growing up that is the relationship we had – him the commander and I the recruit. If you had asked me, even 2 days ago, about how my father’s death affected me I would have said “I have always felt cheated that the opportunity to have an adult relationship with my father was taken away from me, he died when I was 17 or 18 and I never had the chance.” Aside from the obvious self-centeredness of this belief I held for 25 years, I discovered that it isn’t entirely true. As I wrote my 9th Step letter to my deceased father, I realized I was 19 and a half when he died. I dug into this and realized that I had a full year or more as an “adult” when he wasn’t outwardly sick. Suddenly I remembered how during my first year at college, despite the obligatory weekly phone call, I never really reached out to him. My fear of his disapproval, or disappointing him, resulted in me never inviting my parents to visit my crappy dorm room or apartment, meet my party friends, or see the campus they were paying for me to attend. I am sure he would have loved to visit me and been invited into my world. While maybe not a lot of time, I did in fact have time to reach out and and have an adult relationship with my father. Instead, my brain would shift time a year here, a year there, until the blame was properly lifted and I was an innocent victim.

The point of this story is not to beat myself up, or assign blame to anybody – including myself. The point is that things are not always as we remember and if we look hard enough we can see our part in almost anything.