March 19, 2005
Well, I went to my very first Alanon meeting, and it was wonderful. As a newcomer, I was allotted time to share, and I shared about realizing, this week, that I am not God. (I know, what a shocker). Yes, of course I knew this intellectually, but in the way I’ve been operating in many of my relationships, I “got” that I was behaving with an exaggerated sense of my powerfulness. Yes, of course I impact others, sometimes powerfully. But that doesn’t mean that I can control the results of my impact on them, and it doesn’t mean that I am running the show.
I can’t tell you what a relief it is for me to come to grips with this. And how, after a very rocky start, it is starting to bear very positive fruit in my current dealings. I’m starting to own my own resentments, my own need to control the results. And practice loving detachment.
This is something my mother started practicing with my father, years ago. It didn’t get him sober, but that wasn’t the point. It got her “sober” or the Alanon equivalent. (Give me a few weeks to get the lingo down.) My younger sister has also been going to Alanon for years as well, and I never understood, after the death of my father, what she was powerless over. Like everybody there, she is powerless over life itself, not just alcoholism and its effects. The 12 steps are truly a design for living. (In fact I got a big laugh at the end of my share when I “publicly” apologized for all these years to my mother and my sister, for imagining Alanon to be a bunch of women raising their hands to whine “My husband drinks and I haaate it!” Nothing could be further from the truth. It is about talking responsibility for your own life, and letting others take responsibility for theirs.)
MCO 2005
P.S. The title of this entry refers to an old joke about a 12-step group for people who talk too much.
