You Don’t Have To.
Nov 6, 09- (by JunkysWife)
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- Sober Salon
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Creative Commons/ photo by Self-portrait_Girl
One of the girls I sponsor was having a nasty time yesterday with a boundary she has been struggling to set with the addict in her life around money. It’s a new boundary, and it’s one she wants desperately so that her own finances can be safe. She’s struggling in the ways that all of us in Nar-Anon struggle with financial boundaries…she doesn’t want to hurt the addict in her life’s feelings. She doesn’t want to seem bitchy or cold. She loves this person, and she hates for him to suffer. She doesn’t want to enable him. She wants him to change. She wants to have her own money for herself, her bills, and her needs. She wants to get it right, to find the perfect answer to this problem, and she wants it now. Now!
Watching her work through this stuff has given me some clarity in my own struggles with financial boundaries. So many of us in the “Anon” rooms have black and white thinking around these issues…either we do it right or we do it wrong. We give or we don’t give. We help or we don’t help. We want there to be clear answers…a user’s manual to loving a person who struggles with addiction.
She said, “I just don’t know if I’m ready to do this right now. I don’t feel good, and I need to go to the doctor, and I don’t know if I can tell him no right now.”
My response to her was to say, “You don’t have to do anything right now. You’re working on it. You’re doing the best you can, and it’s ok to make mistakes.”
I need to take my own advice. I can beat myself up for not being perfectly fixed, for not having all the solutions for the rest of my messy life mapped out perfectly for the next 10 years. The perfectionist voices in my head tell me that if I was doing it right, either my husband would have gotten all the way better or I would have left him alone by now.
And that’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve learned in recovery. It was the answer my sponsor gave me almost every time I called her with a new crisis during the worst of my husband’s active addiction: Do nothing. Wait and see. Pray about it. Wait for answers. They’ll come.
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Thanks so much for sharing this. Waiting for clarity has been one of the toughest lessons I’ve been learning in recovery. It’s so tough to do! But when I think about some of the crazy-ass decisions I’ve made in the heat of anger, frustration or shame, I can see that the waiting is worth it.