Misty Days by Lensburgchandru
Periodically, I have felt the need to retake the 12 steps of recovery. Because I seem to be stuck in one place and have been using procrastination for a long time now, I started asking for God’s help in identifying what character defects I needed to be willing to surrender.
The emotion I now know that has dominated my choices for over 15 years is guilt. Because I had a need to punish myself, I have kept my expectations very low of how much love I deserved to receive.
I have been in a large extended family so have been able to have my affection needs met by the wonderful children as well as my daughters-in-law. Since this is not the family I was born into, I have chosen to have little to no contact with anyone in the family during the duration of getting a divorce. I made this decision for two reasons: (1) I have too much respect for most of the family members to in any way make them uncomfortable with anything my husband and I decide in the divorce, and (2) it shuts off all communication except direct communication. I know this has been the best decision for me.
In order to have my emotional needs met, I have stepped up my AA meetings, groups and activities. I am presently looking for a good Al Anon meeting because my husband of the past 15 years is an active drinker. He probably drinks 5 out of 7 days. So communication with him has been filtered through a brain that thinks it is in control of the world. We call them “King Baby” in AA because their self-centered, arrogant and cowardly deeds impact and damage most relationships he/she has. Not exactly what I would call “direct communication”. We each have lawyers now so my messages can be filtered to him from someone else.
Step 6 of AA states that we become entirely ready to have our character defects removed. We can’t remove them—only God can. But He needs our willingness to complete the process because He gave us self-will. I am now completely ready to have all my imaged and projected guilt removed. I only want to feel guilt if I do something wrong in the present. The guilt helps me to remember to treat others as I want to be treated.
Two months ago when he left, he took my Rolodex so I have been scrabbling to try to get everything done that was in the Rolodex. He also took all my small frame picture collection. I have been creating that collection for over 30 years. Included in the pictures he took ware pictures of my grandmother as a young girl, pictures of me 20-25 years ago, pictures of my parents, my daughter’s wedding picture. I have carefully documented the growth of his family and have created many beautiful montages of everyone in the family. I had planned to give him many of them but he stole from me the opportunity to give him any. He just took them all. I have pictures of all he took so hope to be able to retrieve them in the settlement. These are choices made by someone arrogant enough to believe there will be no one stopping him.
There is obviously a lot to know about this. I think you made some good points about how to relationships work.