There is a wide range of experience with being a parent in recovery. Some of us have our children with us through our addiction and our recovery; some start new families after we get clean; some of us never have children of our own, but become an important part of a child’s life anyway. It’s hard to talk about the experience without getting distracted by our different theories or beliefs about parenting, or even our different styles of communication.
We all have opinions about what’s right and wrong. Recovery in NA gives us the freedom to figure out what is right for us and the chance to live it to the best of our ability. Just as there is no model of the recovering addict, there is no model of the recovering parent.
When we have responsibility for our children it can be very confusing to distinguish what is and what is not within our control. Writing an inventory helps us sort out what we believe so we can better act on it. “I was freaked out when I knew we were going to have a baby. I didn’t have a clue what to do. My sponsor asked me to write about a few simple questions that were very helpful to me: What is a child? What are the needs of a child? What are a child’s responsibilities? What is a parent? What are a parent’s responsibilities?” Parenthood is one area where our self-centeredness can do real harm. Working a program of recovery keeps us from getting drawn into our self-obsession, and helps us to see when we are re-creating old patterns that we don’t want to carry on to the next generation. Simply living lives of honesty and integrity sets a pattern for change. Our example teaches our children more than our words ever can.
If we have been separated from our kids for a while, we may need to get to know each other again as we learn to deal with each other. There is often a struggle when we reunite with our children; they have their feelings about what has happened, and it can be painful to acknowledge them. Our relationships with our children can be poisoned not only by the damage we do in our addiction, but by the guilt and shame we feel for what happened. Self-loathing is just another form of self-obsession, and blinds us to the needs of the person in front of us. When we get out of the way, we find that we can be good parents at any stage of our children’s lives: Even if they are already adults, we still have something to offer them. Our experience with selfless service in recovery teaches us that if we show up with willingness, the opportunities for us to help will naturally appear.
“I let my kids take the lead on love. They showed me warmth and nurturance I hadn’t known before, and I learned to stop controlling and just enjoy,” another parent in recovery said. “My partner’s big, warm family taught my child how to love and hug and call back. I am learning from him to accept their affection for what it is, even when it feels uncomfortable to me.” Part of the joy and the difficulty of parenting is that we are constantly experimenting. No two children are the same, and no two parents are, either. We learn to adapt our beliefs to reality, check our behavior, and use the tools we learn in NA to build a family we are glad to be part of.
But even the best parents may have times when they are not so sure they like their kids. We are human; we are not our child’s Higher Power, and there are times when just not doing the next wrong thing is the best we can manage. “I used to run into the bathroom and close the door,” said one woman. “I’d get on my knees and just pray until the desire to hit my child would pass.” Another said, “I would go in my room and just pray for bedtime.” Our frustration and our fear can lead us to respond in ways we think we have grown past. We aren’t perfect, but we are getting better. We start by not doing harm, and find that we can do a lot of good, if we are willing to try.
Having children while in active addiction is always hard. Generally, not even the worst parents mean to bring harm to their children, but in our addiction we harm them by what we do and what we don’t do. Some of us did our best out there, but still came up short: “I thought being a good parent was buying my son fast food and toys with the money I got from stealing,” said a member. In many cases, it seemed simpler for all involved if we just weren’t around. We left our children with their other parent, with our relatives, or in foster care while we pursued our addiction, and found when we got clean that our desire to be a good parent was not enough to make parents out of us. Some of us were physically present but emotionally absent or unpredictable. Some of us know that we have done more damage than we can repair: “I was a lousy parent,” one member said. “There’s no denying it, and no way I can undo the harm. I will spend a lifetime making amends for it.”
We know we harmed our own children, but we sometimes forget about the other children who were around us in our addiction: We babysat when we were using, or we ignored the neglect and abuse of children in the places where we used. If we cannot undo the harm, at least we can stop causing more of it. That in itself makes a world of difference. The program helps us stop doing damage, and then gives us opportunities to share our experience with others through meetings, sponsorship, and the power of example. We can break the cycles in our own families, and help others do better with their children as well.
On the other hand, some of us want to take responsibility for more than we could possibly control. We see our children struggling, and want to blame ourselves for their difficulties. We project the worst, based on our own experience. It’s another kind of self-centeredness to see our child not as who he or she is, but as a reflection of ourselves, our parenting, or our decisions. “I thought my child was a little version of me,” said one member. “I just figured we would like the same things and want the same things and think the same way. It took a terrible fight to learn that he’s his own person, but I’m grateful. Now we are getting to know each other. He’s not me, but he’s someone I really like.” Trusting that our children have their own path and their own relationship with a Higher Power can bring us to a new understanding of our own Third Step. When we get out of the way, our children come into focus as the unique human beings they are. Our recovery is a message to them and to us that there are such things as second chances.
Often we see signs of our own disease manifesting in our children, and it’s not always clear whether they are just going through a phase or they are addicts like we are. We teeter between denial of what is happening and labeling any troublesome behavior as a symptom of addiction. Our desire to spare our children our experience can sometimes cause us to assume too quickly that we know what is best. Ensuring that our children have access to recovery might mean not pushing it on them too hard. Even for the people we love the most, this is still a program of attraction.
Many of us have lost our children in one way or another: They were taken from us, or we gave them up to ensure their safety, or something happened to them. For some of us, this is the deepest wound of our addiction, the loss we feel most acutely. With time and the tools of the program, we begin to heal, whether or not our relationship with them is restored.
If we are fortunate to have our children with us in recovery, we may find that our process and theirs really aren’t that different: “We grew up alongside one another,” said one addict. “I was as much a child as they were, and I had to be parent to us all. It’s pretty embarrassing when your children mature faster than you do.” We need help, we need advice, and we need the power of example. Turning to our friends in NA, the people in our communities, and the other adults in our children’s lives, we find the tools and information we need. “I was a single parent, but I didn’t do it alone,” a member explained. When we are free to ask for help, we are able to acquire the tools we need to raise our children the way we believe is right.
Whether or not we come into recovery with families, we have a tendency to build them once we get here. Some of them look like the families we are used to—we find a partner and have children, or find a partner and share the children we already have. But we also put together families in other ways: We take in the children of family or friends who are not able to raise their own; we adopt or foster. We blend families in surprising patterns. “I was heartbroken when I learne
d that one of the consequences of my addiction was being unable to have children. A sponsee was sharing her stepwork with me, and she wondered aloud if the childless mother was here to mother the motherless child. It was as if a light went on—I looked around the rooms and there were these kids fresh off the streets who had no one, and it seemed like God’s will for me was clear.” Some of us end up taking care of elderly or sick friends who have no families of their own. However it happens, many of us find our homes full of love and full of people we love, whether or not we are related. The ties that bind us are not limited to those we first recognize when we come together in unity. Family can be a pretty hard concept for some of us.
We make peace with it one way or another, sometimes by reinventing it altogether.
Amends and Reconciliation
As our behavior changes, we no longer leave a path of chaos and damage in our wake. But we recognize there is no way to “unring” a bell; there are instances where the damage we caused may be difficult for others to forgive. Making amends is necessary to live free of the guilt, shame, and remorse that keep us trapped in self-destruction. But the process neither begins nor ends when we sit down with the person we have harmed to have that talk. With the help of our sponsor, we reconcile ourselves to the truth of what we did, and begin the process of making peace with the consequences of our actions. An honest relationship with ourselves and real, tangible change in our lives are necessary for amends to have much value. There is a reason we come to this work so late in the steps. The process is one of the most important we ever undertake, and we do not enter it lightly.
The direct amends we make in words are crucial to our recovery, but that’s only part of the process. Living those amends means allowing the changes in our personalities and our behavior to become reliable and consistent in the lives of those we care about. We do this whether the people we care for are changing or not, whether they forgive us or not, whether our relationship becomes what we wish for or not. When we clean up our side of the street, we can feel easier in our hearts and spirits. But that by no means obligates anyone else to clean up their part, nor does it suggest that our families will magically transform into what we always wished they were. More likely, we learn to make peace with the families we have, and to accept the reality of who they are. We learn to meet them where they are without conditions or expectation.
There are some people who never forgive us. Often those people are members of our family. As dearly as we may want their forgiveness, the simple truth is, it’s not going to come until they are ready. Living with that can be enormously difficult. The desire to fix it can be so powerful that we make things worse by not letting go and letting them heal in their own time. One member shared that twelve years after her initial amends, her daughter finally declared that she was forgiven. “It was grace that all those years I didn’t know that she was still struggling with this,” she said, “because if I had known I wouldn’t have let go, and I don’t know if we could ever have gotten there.” Whatever we need to say to the people we have harmed, we know that the deepest amends we make is that we change. And while we can feel the depth of the change in our lives, people who struggled with us for years of our addiction may take a long time to trust or believe it. We may have trouble trusting it ourselves. We harbor that same doubt that the changes we are making will stick, and when others don’t believe we have changed, we can fall into that trap with them. Having people who believe in us and in our recovery can be essential to walking through this process, especially when it’s long. The reward can be a deep self-acceptance: We forgive ourselves, we forgive others, and we find peace—regardless of what others may think or feel or tell us. A member shared, “I am not who I was, no matter who is not convinced. That lie is dead.”
Reconciliation is an important spiritual principle for us to consider: We come to terms with the reality of our actions, and we also reconcile with people we have had conflict with. Sometimes reconciliation means that we restore the relationship to its previous state, or to a new state based on current reality, and sometimes it means that we make peace with the fact that the connection with that person is lost. Reconciliation can also mean restoring balance—like when one “reconciles accounts.” When we take on what is not ours, as when we take responsibility for someone else’s feelings or actions, we are out of balance, and the result is often destructive. We do what we can to amend the harm we have done and to restore balance in our relationships, and we let go of the results. Facing the responses of some people from our past may give us a much sharper vision of who we had been, and it can take some work to make peace with that. We want to be very aware of who we are becoming, and use this new information about our past to help move us forward.
If making amends is about change, one change we can make is not to subject ourselves to abuse anymore. Finding the balance between hearing someone out and putting ourselves in danger is difficult. We are the only ones who can say where that line is, and we may not find it in the moment. Like so many things we work through and walk through in recovery, it comes in layers. It can be useful to know that addressing something once does not necessarily mean we are “done” with an issue, a memory, or an amends. More is continually revealed to us, and sometimes in the course of dealing with what we know we learn more than we had expected.
Walking with the knowledge that someone has not forgiven us is hard, but through it we find levels of forgiveness and acceptance that we may not have known were possible. It brings us to a clearer understanding of what the Ninth Step is for, and we learn to recognize the difference between hope and expectation. As much as we might want someone to forgive us or to own their part of a situation in which harm was mutual, we have no right and no reason to expect that. Sometimes the path to forgiving ourselves begins with forgiving another for their lack of forgiveness. As we forgive them, we may find compassion for the pain they experience at carrying that resentment—and for the pain we caused them in the first place. We understand that everyone’s sense of harm is different. Something that we might find easy to let go of, someone else may find unforgivable: That is not our business to decide or to change. When we understand the gravity of the damage we did, we can see that accepting their lack of forgiveness may, in fact, be part of our amends. We realize, too, that forgiving us may have other consequences for the person to whom we are making amends. It may threaten their other relationships, or their sense of themselves. We are the only ones whose recovery we have any control over. We can only amend what is ours. The rest is out of our hands, and we practice letting go.
Miracles do happen, and we are not the only ones who experience healing. Sometimes reconciliation is possible, but not necessarily on our schedule or our terms. We practice forgiveness, patience, and acceptance. We must give time, time—even if it’s a lifetime. In the meantime, we are surrounded by people who believe in us and care for us—and if we pay attention, there is always someone who needs our help. We can turn the love we feel toward those who welcome it, building and cherishing the relationships that are present in our lives today.
Romantic Relationships
The Basic Text offers a suggestion about romantic relationships: that we begin by writing about what we want, what we are asking for, and what we are getting. When we explore these simple questions, we begin to see how we can use the tools of recovery to change our behavior and our experience of intimacy. We learn to check our motives and to be honest about what we want; we begin to get free of our old baggage and experience relationships in the present tense. Practicing principles like honesty, courage, and faith opens us to the possibility of love, acceptance, and trust in our lives.
what we want
We often hear that if we made a list for ourselves in early recovery of what we wanted, we would be selling ourselves short. It’s not just in the beginning that this is true—over and over, our dreams for ourselves are glimpses of God’s will, not a road map. Many of us have found this in our romances, as well. We ta
ke on the project of finding a partner in much the same way we might shop for a new car: We make a list of the features we want or don’t want, and begin evaluating available models based on our list. We may be surprised, on finding the one who seems to meet our criteria, when things still don’t work out as we had planned.
Our sponsor might suggest turning that list back on ourselves, asking what it would take for us to become the person we imagine as a partner. Others might suggest stepping away from such a list altogether, thinking instead about what would constitute a relationship we would like to be in. Some of us are masters of projection: By the time we go on a first date with someone, we have already imagined the whole relationship, from steamy beginning to bitter divorce. Allowing ourselves to be present means that we can have a relationship with a person, rather than a fantasy. Learning to live in the moment frees us to enjoy ourselves. Applying skills like communication and active listening, practicing principles like unity, compassion, and sharing, we can learn to use the tools we need to be in a solid relationship long before we are actually there. These behaviors don’t just make us more likely to get what we want; they also make us happier and more fulfilled where we are.
There is so much in the way of our ability to have the kind of relationships we want: fear, selfishness, reservations, the belief that it will just end badly. The more we take inventory, the more clearly we see the obstacles inside ourselves that stand between us and what we want. We may mistake our impulsiveness for intuition, and imagine that we have fallen in love as soon as we get excited. Or we might resist feeling at all. Not wanting to risk our hearts means that they never really get full. As we learn to open up, we also learn to survive being hurt. Strangely, as it gets easier to withstand that kind of hurt, it seems to happen less often. We choose better, come into relationships a little more cautiously, and learn to recognize and address signs of difficulty much sooner. Healthy relationships begin to replace the chaos that had consumed our lives. Sometimes we miss the chaos. Living without the drama and clutter of active addiction is strange. We may be compelled to create drama in recovery just so it feels familiar.
Living Clean Page 14