I've started to write new posts a few times in the last few weeks, but something has always come up to reinforce how very relevant the last one about self-will is. That's been pretty much how things have gone lately...
My blogger friend is, to my surprise, seemingly doing pretty well. He's still employed, has a new girlfriend, has begun a small lawn-care business, and has seen a new psych doc who has cut way back on his meds. He seems to be coping with the changes from what he is writing, and doesn't seem to be drinking excessively (or much at all). Again, I realize this is a very one-sided report since there is nothing except his blog to verify it, but I'm glad for his success. May it continue. It brings me hope that healing is possible.
In other ways, however, the self-will phrase is still applicable in our daily lives, as I suppose it always will be. I struggle daily with the need to exercise and be careful about what I eat, and blew it pretty well at a lovely dinner Friday night.
We'd taken some friends out to eat at our local golf club where we have a strictly social membership. It's a pleasant evening, looking at lush greens of the course, a lake, and trees. The food is just excellent, and the four of us enjoyed fresh, well-prepared food. And then the server asked about dessert. Well, I'd already indulged in a mound of garlic red=skinned mashed potatoes which were delicious and most definitely not something I need to be eating regularly. But she proceeded to describe the cookies and cream ice cream cake and the Reese's peanut butter cup ice cream cake, and we ordered BOTH for the table. Homemade cakes, they were, and seriously decadent. So while I ended up taking home a good-sized portion of my meal, we ate every drop of the desserts.
So I'm back to being very prudent and will climb on the treadmill shortly, just to salve my guilty conscience and to move forward on the path I need to be on. It's not all about perfection, but about the ability to pick up and move forward when there is a slipup.
There's also been a disturbance in the daughter forces which has resulted in some difficulty sleeping and a lot of discussion. It's yet another exercise in setting reasonable boundaries and letting go lovingly, and we have been consciously trying to do this for some time, although we keep revisiting it.
In reading recently, I found this quote from Mary Tucker: "I had to take my own advice and be a responsible adult and let her go, let her go to whatever broken bridge may be in her future and know deeply that it is her life to live, her mistakes to make and learn from and it does not make me less her mother or that I love her any less."
Applicable, of course, for Tony as well, since we make decisions together...
This is easier said than lived with, I might add. I've written before about setting boundaries with adult children, read some really good books about it, but it is hard to set a boundary when you are watching your child in distress. No parent ever wants to watch a child suffer. And yet. AND yet...
They begin and end one place. We begin and end somewhere else. They get to make their own decisions and choices as to how to live their lives. We are not responsible for those choices or decisions, and are not obligated to approve, disapprove, finance, or otherwise support them.
Unfortunately, repeated requests take an emotional toll on relationships. And it becomes an endless circle of rebuilding and repairing and re-establishing some measure of trust, and there is always a wariness of 'what's next,' alas. Love is not the issue: we love our children NO MATTER WHAT. But we cannot afford any longer to rescue them from their choices and actions either financially or emotionally. It is not our right to do so, it is not our responsibility, we cannot control their lives -- nor do we want to! And it definitely is not the best thing for them.
Dear heavens, making choices and taking responsibility for ourselves is quite enough for anyone!
So in the end, it still boils down to creating our own destiny. We choose our future by our choices today and our today is based on choices we've made in the past. While we cannot change past choices, we do have choices at this moment, this day, and can go forward onto a different path that takes us where we want to go.
Had I made different choices as a young woman, I would not be here now. Looking back, I see crossroads all through my life, although only in the past 20 years or so have I been able to actually realize when I am standing at one (and still miss some). Sometimes they're big enough to slap you upside the head. Sometimes they are much less obvious but just as life-changing. Few are easy choices, even the logical ones.
It takes self-will to break out of a pattern, even a destructive one, and move forward on a new path. Self-will run riot is merely repeating the same choices and actions over and over and over in hopes of a new, more beneficial outcome. And it will never, ever work.
Monday, August 02, 2010
Wednesday, July 07, 2010
Self-will run riot
One of the blogs I read regularly is written by a young man who has a mental illness and is also an alcoholic. He is very forthcoming about his problems and his relationship with his family, and he writes very well -- you can 'see' the scenes he describes, and 'listen' to the dialogues between him and the few people who populate his world. He could certainly write a book that would be interesting and descriptive.
He's sort of gone off the rails lately and seems to be in a rather manic phase, doing things that are likely to lead to devastation and relapse and perhaps even hospitalization, in my inexpert opinion. His past blog posts pretty much bear that out -- this is not new behavior. He is talking all the right stuff, but I'm very skeptical. Guess that's a problem when you've been around for a while -- not much really is new behavior or situations that can't be seen pretty clearly.
It's a classic example of "self-will run riot" -- a description of an alcoholic who wants to deny that "... he is bodily and mentally different from his fellows. Therefore, it is not surprising that our drinking careers have been characterized by countless vain attempts that somehow, someday we will control and enjoy our drinking is the real obsession of every abnormal drinker. The persistence of this illusion is astonishing."
We've used this phrase for years to describe many situations: our daughters' behaviors, for instance, when they go off to do something that, they explain to us, "is something I just have to do for me." And then we watch when the train derails, or at best, loses a couple of cars as it careens around the twisty, wind-y bends. Or situations at work, or in meetings when self-interest prevails over the goals of the group to the point of being damaging.
But we're not picking up as many pieces as we used to in any of the situations, hard as it has been. It's hard not to leap in and save people from themselves, to throw money at something to ease the pain, to smooth out whatever problems have arisen from the individual's self-will rioting.
We've set boundaries for ourselves: beyond this place be dragons. And we don't go there, at least not often, and not with everything we can muster.
We create our own destiny. Our actions will have re-actions, and when -- despite past history, despite the cautions of those who know and love us, despite (perhaps) that tiny voice deep inside us saying "Danger, danger, Will Robinson!" -- we forge ahead anyway, the resulting issues are ours to deal with.
This phrase applies in so many ways! Right now we are trying hard to curtail portion sizes, to limit foods that we know are not good for us (like anything my seriously bad sweet tooth wants), and to lose weight. We are on the edge of diabetes (both of us have immediate relatives who had it), and the way to forestall it is to lose weight and do some kind of regular exercise.
If we don't do all we can now, it IS going to happen. It WILL shorten our lives and cause us other health issues.
I don't want to get there knowing that I could have done something to prevent -- or at least deterred -- the disease.
So when I'm tempted to pick up a box of candies at the store, I remember "self-will run riot" and put it back down. If it's not in the house, I can't eat it. And I can't afford too many more 'just this once -- I deserve it' excuses. It's too easy to slip back into bad habits.
In my blogger friend's case, he has made a bunch of changes in only a few days -- like getting a job after having been on disability for years, like drinking again, like deciding that he doesn't really have an alcoholic problem but it's the stress of dealing with his anxieties (caused, of course, by the pressure his family has put on him) that made him drink.
And it's not that I think some of his decisions aren't good ones in the long run. But positive change occurs with planning and talking and slowly implementing first one thing, then another, then another, and in concert with your doctor and caregivers. That hasn't happened.
To change everything all at once, to leap without considering the effects of your choices on your finances, your body, your loved ones, and your mental state is a sure-fire way to crash land.
Self-will is what it takes to change, for sure. Disciplined, planned, determined self-will got me to California. It got me into healthier lifestyles in years past. But it was planned, and it was not done without regard to consequences.
I hope my blogger friend will be all right. His parents have, from what he writes, picked him up and rescued him many times over the years, and he is incredibly lucky for that, I suppose. I'm sure they will do the same this time, although I think their doing so continues to set up a pattern that will eventually repeat with the same results.
And when you love someone, especially a child, it's very hard to watch the crash landing and do little or nothing. But sometimes that is the best thing one can do: be compassionate and loving, but acknowledging that the choices and consequences are someone else's to deal with.
All we have control over is ourselves: not others, not our children or our friends or our grandchildren or our relatives. They must take responsibility for their own choices and actions even if those choices impact us and our emotions. By rescuing too often, we try to take their lives into our own hands -- and that is not good for anyone.
He's sort of gone off the rails lately and seems to be in a rather manic phase, doing things that are likely to lead to devastation and relapse and perhaps even hospitalization, in my inexpert opinion. His past blog posts pretty much bear that out -- this is not new behavior. He is talking all the right stuff, but I'm very skeptical. Guess that's a problem when you've been around for a while -- not much really is new behavior or situations that can't be seen pretty clearly.
It's a classic example of "self-will run riot" -- a description of an alcoholic who wants to deny that "... he is bodily and mentally different from his fellows. Therefore, it is not surprising that our drinking careers have been characterized by countless vain attempts that somehow, someday we will control and enjoy our drinking is the real obsession of every abnormal drinker. The persistence of this illusion is astonishing."
We've used this phrase for years to describe many situations: our daughters' behaviors, for instance, when they go off to do something that, they explain to us, "is something I just have to do for me." And then we watch when the train derails, or at best, loses a couple of cars as it careens around the twisty, wind-y bends. Or situations at work, or in meetings when self-interest prevails over the goals of the group to the point of being damaging.
But we're not picking up as many pieces as we used to in any of the situations, hard as it has been. It's hard not to leap in and save people from themselves, to throw money at something to ease the pain, to smooth out whatever problems have arisen from the individual's self-will rioting.
We've set boundaries for ourselves: beyond this place be dragons. And we don't go there, at least not often, and not with everything we can muster.
We create our own destiny. Our actions will have re-actions, and when -- despite past history, despite the cautions of those who know and love us, despite (perhaps) that tiny voice deep inside us saying "Danger, danger, Will Robinson!" -- we forge ahead anyway, the resulting issues are ours to deal with.
This phrase applies in so many ways! Right now we are trying hard to curtail portion sizes, to limit foods that we know are not good for us (like anything my seriously bad sweet tooth wants), and to lose weight. We are on the edge of diabetes (both of us have immediate relatives who had it), and the way to forestall it is to lose weight and do some kind of regular exercise.
If we don't do all we can now, it IS going to happen. It WILL shorten our lives and cause us other health issues.
I don't want to get there knowing that I could have done something to prevent -- or at least deterred -- the disease.
So when I'm tempted to pick up a box of candies at the store, I remember "self-will run riot" and put it back down. If it's not in the house, I can't eat it. And I can't afford too many more 'just this once -- I deserve it' excuses. It's too easy to slip back into bad habits.
In my blogger friend's case, he has made a bunch of changes in only a few days -- like getting a job after having been on disability for years, like drinking again, like deciding that he doesn't really have an alcoholic problem but it's the stress of dealing with his anxieties (caused, of course, by the pressure his family has put on him) that made him drink.
And it's not that I think some of his decisions aren't good ones in the long run. But positive change occurs with planning and talking and slowly implementing first one thing, then another, then another, and in concert with your doctor and caregivers. That hasn't happened.
To change everything all at once, to leap without considering the effects of your choices on your finances, your body, your loved ones, and your mental state is a sure-fire way to crash land.
Self-will is what it takes to change, for sure. Disciplined, planned, determined self-will got me to California. It got me into healthier lifestyles in years past. But it was planned, and it was not done without regard to consequences.
I hope my blogger friend will be all right. His parents have, from what he writes, picked him up and rescued him many times over the years, and he is incredibly lucky for that, I suppose. I'm sure they will do the same this time, although I think their doing so continues to set up a pattern that will eventually repeat with the same results.
And when you love someone, especially a child, it's very hard to watch the crash landing and do little or nothing. But sometimes that is the best thing one can do: be compassionate and loving, but acknowledging that the choices and consequences are someone else's to deal with.
All we have control over is ourselves: not others, not our children or our friends or our grandchildren or our relatives. They must take responsibility for their own choices and actions even if those choices impact us and our emotions. By rescuing too often, we try to take their lives into our own hands -- and that is not good for anyone.
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