I Just Feel Stupid

It’s one of those days where every time I replay the events of this most recent wretched wretch of a Monday I shut my eyes tight and want to bang my head against a wall. I just feel stupid.

I was the one who got him to open the door and then the rest followed in the spirit of “Surprise! It’s your intervention!” We all were standing there extending our hearts in love and begging to be accepted, to be selected, to be more than that thing - that cocaine there in the glass tube. And what happened? We were pushed out, shoved away. He wouldn’t even give me a hug. All over. Gone. He hasn’t tried to call, text message, email, show up unannounced and repent. Nothing. He’s gone and made his choice.

At least that’s how it feels and I can’t shake the sense that I was lied to all along. There I believed him when he said he wanted help. I thought we were helping. But it wasn’t the truth. He spoon fed me the lies I wanted to hear so I would be a good little codependent and keep quiet about my discontent.

I just can’t believe he chose the drugs over me! Not just over me but over his entire family and his best friends. He couldn’t even in that crisis, break through the denial to accept help.

Q. What are your reasons?

A. I don’t have any! I’m just not going!

And so we ended it. In failure. Heartbroken.

Intervention Love Letter

Dear Sweets,

I join your family here today because I love you. It breaks my heart to watch these drugs take you away from me and away from the potential for a future relationship.

I miss going to brunch with you on the weekends. I miss how you would read to me aloud from Harper’s, and how we would watch Keith Olberman and talk politics. And I miss making sweet, sweet love with you. I miss feeling like we were growing closer, because now it seems we are so far apart.

Because of your drug use I have experienced so much fear and anxiety. I have stayed up nights crying because I did not know if you were dead or alive. The time has offered me much opportunity for personal growth and I am not badly hurt by the experience. However, I realize now that I have learned as much as I can from this and it is time to move onto a better life. I hope that you will join me in this better life as my wonderful, sober boyfriend.

You are an intelligent, caring man of skill and integrity. You’re also sexy as hell. I want more of you. You without drugs - the you that you are when you’re just you.

I hope you accept help today and get the treatment you need to overcome this affliction.

I love you!

Yours always, Darling

Fringe: Rumi sings the song of the modern codependent

Consider the verse presented here. It is the poetic heart-song of every codependent whose love and lover tear them apart. As I say, calling myself Poetreearborist, I claim the right to be ripped "limb from limb". If they are addicted to their chemical, we are addicted to them. Through complete destruction we are seeking God - but when do we know we have found what was right there all along?

You wreck my shop and my house and now my heart, but how can I run from what gives me life?

I'm weary of personal worrying, in love with the art of madness!

Tear open my shame and show the mystery. How much longer do I have to fret with self-restraint and fear?

Friends, this is how it is: we are fringe sewn inside the lining of a robe.

Soon we'll be loosened, the binding threads torn out.

The beloved is a lion.

We're the lame deer in his paws.

Consider what choices we have!

Acquiesce when the Friend says, Come into me. Let me show my face. You saw it once in preexistence, now you want to be quickened and quickened again.

We have been secretly fed from beyond space and time.

That's why we look for something more than this.

Addicts in denial misuse AA concepts to rationalize continuance

The denial of the relapsed addict who knows concepts of AA and has lived them and walked others through the steps for years may sound like this:

"I cannot and do not choose this addiction. I am powerless here! If I could choose to get better I would, but I can't. I am waiting for God to pull me through in a moment of divine grace. Therefore, until God elects for me to become sober I am unable to do so because I am powerless over my addiction."

The rational and yet emotional person who loves and cares about this person who appears to be suffering from demonic possession (for it seems his soul is ensnared) cannot argue the point further. Indeed, it appears that if choice were possible, he/she would choose life over death, health over disease, love over grief. But in the world of addiction all cycles are flipped and actions are inside out.

So turn now to the mystic Rumi who understood this great paradox - choosing and total submission: both are true. Rumi wrote,

Every human choice bows like a slave in submission to the absolute's creative will, yet this does not deprive us of freedom or of taking responsibility for what we choose. (Masnavi, V, 3097-98)

God gives free will so that each and all may choose to submit to God. The Universe provides opportunities to receive this lesson (for example, the addict suffers extreme consequences). Some see they are powerless unless they choose to submit. Others do not see, or else they do not choose to submit. They continue to say, "If God wills" - but fail to see that God wills for us to submit out of choice, not out of design.