Ultimately, I want to say "because I'm codependent, service is hard." But this deserves a preface: I made my understanding into a God, instead of letting God be himself. I called my own will God’s and imagined I was living for a higher purpose. When I was that delusional, I called my nervous energy zeal and ran myself into the ground attempting to live up to my own unrealistic standard. I served as I understood service, not as they needed to be served. I denied all of this and blamed God for what I thought was divine malice. Over and over again, I burned out.
I fell into that most classic of codependent blunders: care taking trumped caregiving. When I am helping someone, I still have to ask myself whether I am giving them the help they need, or the help I think they need. In my early days, I was in it for the self-referential payoffs, for the ability to claim my own specialness. So, these days, I don’t “do ministry.”
And I don’t “work the steps” as its traditionally understood. I don’t currently go to meetings. I don’t have a sponsor. I do try to curb my desire for secrecy and self-delusion, and have people who will straight talk me, regularly and whether I need it or not. I do try to work my own recovery and sustain healthy belief in a genuine higher power.
Though traditionally step 12 comes last, when AA was in its infancy, Bill W discovered the other steps by doing step 12. I believe I found healthy recovery as I began to prioritize “recovery as I understand it.”
From the beginning, I made very specific missteps, which “recovery as I understand it” needed to address. Allowing God to be himself meant, for me, yielded to a truth: to know what I don’t know, I have to go by the way of unknowing. Overthinking and hyper-vigilance were the earmarks of an inherited dysfunction. Recovery had to be marked by empathy, had to do the work of mourning the generational pain I inherited. I gradually acquired the vocabulary to talk about it.
Recovery is not a matter of thought, but of “limbic resonance.” In short, the human brain is composed of 3 different brains, which have done service at different phases of human development. The Reptilian Brain regulates heartbeat, breath, and other automatic functions essential to survival. The Limbic Brain regulates emotion, often on a preverbal level. The Neo-Cortex regulates the limbic brain, rendering its emotional life describable.
This is the science behind it. I learned about “limbic resonance.” I came to suspect that some of my ancient hang-ups were actually inherited emotional patterns from my parents. I know for certain that my premature birth caused my parents a good bit of pain. I see a link: between the anger at God that I came into adulthood feeling, and the anger at God my parents felt, despite themselves, when I was first born. When I’m quiet, my head is a cacophony of judgmental thinking. I grew up knowing that my parents, at their worse, could be judgmental, and I have come to believe that tendency was passed on to me through limbic resonance.
Recovery, for me, must counteract the three mandates of dysfunctional families: don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel. Breaking the cycle of dysfunction means deliberately doing all three. To a certain extent, grief is an obligation as well. I don’t mean sorrow, with its cloying manipulations: I mean grief—of all of the generational pain with which I am faced, that family members before me were either unable to face, or unable to face fast enough.
As an adult, learning the “limbic regulation” skills I should have picked up in early childhood is catch-as-catch-can. Luckily, I’m learning to surround myself with people who possess those skills. But as I get older, I myself am becoming, slowly, a source of the guidance I need.
I recently chaperoned a school retreat, on which three of my teenaged students were participating in a process they will one day lead. My students did some stellar introspection, sharing their vulnerabilities with a good balance of revelation and tact. A student on the retreat, who hailed from a different school, talked about her history with complex ptsd. Though her issues are more severe than mine, I recognized myself in her, and found myself writing her a letter.
Because we knew nothing of each other previous to the retreat, I never gave her that letter. ACA’s particularly run the risk of spending recovery in a constant attempt to manage others’ dysfunction, rather than expose their own to light. For ACA’s, and for me, the needed “13th Step” that withdraws my focus from the group’s neuroses to my own, seemed more important than any advice I might give.
But the advice I gave her, I might as well have given myself. I told her three things: to care for herself, to share with similarly afflicted others, and to feel her feelings, even if she can’t describe them.
The advice doesn’t matter, I suppose. It was one of the clearest examples of a truly healed, truly adult voice emerging from my psyche. In the writing, I surprised myself: and therein lay the value of the note. Perhaps it is truer than I’ve been willing to acknowledge, that dictum that ends each 12 step meeting. “It works if you work it,” says the members in unison “so work it. You’re worth it.”
I’ll never get past the saying’s corniness. But I have come to believe—nay, I’m coming to believe the truth of it.
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