CODEPENDENCY A SECOND HAND LIFE
Stephanie Abbot

Hazelden

POWERLESSNESS AND OBSESSIVE THINKING

If you are in a relationship with an alcoholic, this pamphlet was written for you. If you have had a normal reaction to living with alcoholism, then you are familiar with the feelings of helplessness and confusion, and you have spent time obsessively trying to solve the problem. Perhaps by now you are exhausted and depressed, wondering what’s wrong with you that you can’t make things better. Or perhaps you now understand that addiction to chemicals is a disease, and the alcoholic needs special help you can’t give, yet you can’t seem to stop the “helping’’ behavior you know is useless.
You know it is useless because you have tried everything you can think of to change that person’s behavior and nothing works for very long. You may know it is useless because your Al-Anon group tells you it is, or your counselor has pointed out that nothing you do changes anything.
A wife tells of her efforts: “1 hid his bottles, and looked for the ones he had hidden. I spent hours putting water in the vodka, and marking levels of alcohol on the bottles. Looking back, I can see how pointless it all was, but it seemed important at the time. I used to pace the floor crying, my mind so blank I couldn’t think. I rehearsed what I would say to him, and imagined what he would answer. I was sure if I could plan the right words, I could reach him.”
The reason nothing you do works is because chemical dependency is powerful. Addiction to mood-changing drugs, including alcohol, makes people self-centered, and the only thing that gets their attention for very long is a threat to their well being. People go into treatment and get well only when they begin to feel threatened by what will happen to them if they continue drinking or using. That is why it is so important that you do not solve the problems or prevent the crises that drinking causes others.

Powerlessness

If you are the parent, child, or spouse of an addict, you may find it extremely difficult to admit complete powerlessness over the behavior of that person. You have spent a great deal of energy trying to deny that feeling. You may have covered debts, lied and covered up for the alcoholic, or spent many hours counseling that person. This behavior helps you feel better temporarily. It’s normal to tidy up the alcoholic, to pretend to outsiders that nothing is wrong, or to cover up to the employer.
It just doesn’t work. As long as you deny your powerlessness you will continue to rescue the alcoholic from crises. As long as you rescue the alcoholic from consequences of drinking, that person will drink. It’s as simple as that.
If we look at what it means to be powerless, we understand it means to be completely unable to change or control. In Alcoholics Anonymous, the First Step is to admit powerlessness over alcohol. In Al—Anon, the First Step is the same — you have no power over the alcohol within someone else.
It is very natural when you are under stress to try to control what is happening. It has been shown in lab animals that a feeling of control over the environment reduces stress. Those animals with choice and some power have less pathology, and fewer negative chemical changes. If the researcher induces stress but gives the animal no opportunity for control, and no way to predict events, eventually it will have problems with eating and sleeping, which are symptoms of depression and anxiety.
High stress, lack of predictability, and powerlessness are all part of the environment for the family living with a chemically dependent person. To avoid depression and anxiety, the family tries to deny reality with efforts to control the drinking and behavior of the alcoholic. To admit the truth, that the traumatic events can’t be controlled or completely avoided, is to admit powerlessness and feel the depression.

For example, you may find you spend hours counseling the alcoholic; you explore the behavior, you lecture and explain. You may begin to feel like a cassette player forever set to ‘‘play.’’ Somehow none of these conversations do any good, but you feel better temporarily because you have avoided that feeling of powerlessness.
Unfortunately’ these efforts at control on your part do accomplish something. They give the addict the idea that there is no need to change anything, because the family member will take the responsibility for the lecture, the forgiveness, and whatever is necessary to avoid disaster.
When the family is still struggling for control of the situation, the alcoholic is firmly in control of the family. As long as you are trying to get good feelings from the relationship, which is actually impossible as long as the person is using chemicals, you will walk on eggs to minimize problems. For example, you may agree to anything to avoid a fight, or take on all the chores rather than see them undone. This gives all the power in the relationship to the alcoholic. When you stop trying to control, and let the natural consequences of the disease occur, you can no longer he manipulated.
A father commented, “We couldn’t bear to face the truth about our daughter’s addiction. She kept the house in an uproar but we kept trying. We bribed her not to drink, we let her break rules we wouldn’t tolerate the other children breaking. Finally, we had to admit to ourselves that nothing we could think of would work. We gave her the choice of treatment or leaving home. It was very hard to do. But in admitting powerlessness over her condition we gained the strength to do it.”
As the spouse or parent, you may feel the drinking or drug taking is rebellion, as though the person were ‘‘getting drunk at you.” You may feel loss of self-respect because you believe somehow you should be able to control that person’s defiance. As long as you believe this, you will feel as though you have lost a contest every time the addiction manifests itself.

If you grew up with an alcoholic parent and now have an addicted spouse or child, you respond with behavior you learned in the past, behavior you used for survival. You may feel a drive to change others, to control and fix for the ‘‘good’’ of other people. If you had an alcoholic parent and now find yourself married to an alcoholic, you may have unconsciously repeated the original family conflict in order to give it a happier ending this time. There may be despair and depression when you discover that your goal of changing the past by doing it differently in the present can’t work.
If you are a fairly typical adult child of an alcoholic, you will deny your powerlessness and try to solve all the problems by yourself. It has been said that children of alcoholics are seen in all the best self-help bookstores.
Again, power lies in accepting powerlessness. When you stop exhausting yourself with useless attempts to change someone else, when you stop blaming yourself for not achieving what no one could achieve, you are free to look at other options. As Al—Anon literature states, living with alcoholism is too much for most of us.

Obsessive Thinking

You may find you spend hours each day, or lie awake at night, worrying about your situation. This may take the form of fantasies in which drinking becomes physically impossible for the alcoholic, or you may scheme about techniques to avoid drinking situations. Or you may rehearse your lecture to the addict. You may torture yourself worrying where that person is, and with whom. You are afraid the addict will get killed on the highway and yet you are afraid he or she won’t.
You may go over and over the past, reminding yourself of the pain. Or you may project horrors into the future, as if you could solve problems before they happen. You may be quite aware this sort of thinking does you no good and wish you could stop it.
You may question yourself, analyzing your behavior, past and present, as to how it might affect the alcoholic. Living this way can be a form of addiction. Addiction has been described as an experience that blocks our awareness, fills time and occupies attention, and has an overwhelmingly compulsive quality. It also is a relationship to an activity that harms the person and affects self-respect. You may decide this thinking and behavior, revolving around another person, is indeed addictive.
There are other kinds of obsessive preoccupation. A spouse may become overly involved with work and begin to use it as the only source of good feelings, or the spouse’s energies may switch to the children, so there will be the kind of emotional involvement more appropriate to a marriage, plus an engulfing kind of control.
A teenager may obsess about collections or sports to block out negative feelings, or use compulsive achievement as the connection with life. If you can’t get good feelings from relationships, you may work all the harder to feel good about accomplishments.

Why Obsession?

Obsession does serve a purpose. It gives an illusion of power and control over life. Some people even experience worry as an accomplishment of a task, and have a worry quota, whether the problems are large or small. Obsession gives a sense of movement, though there is no change, so that it is an “action’’ that fills the day, whether it is scheming, actively rescuing the chemically dependent person, or blocking out awareness by endless, pointless tasks.
From the fear of loss of control and the feeling of omnipotence comes compulsive behavior, which helps you feel you are doing something, and covers the feelings of helplessness.
Obsessive thinking may allow you to blame all your problems on The Problem, which releases you from the effort to solve them. In this way, it blocks out solutions and creative problem solving. If you were freed from the fears that lead to obsession, you would have the serenity in which you could identify choices and options. What, for example, would you be thinking about if you were not thinking about the alcoholic in your life? What would you be feeling if you were not using activity to block your emotions?
If you did not have a compulsion to play counselor to the alcoholic, if you stopped helping and watching, what would you be doing with your life?
A grown daughter looks back on her adult years with her alcoholic mother: ‘‘My sisters got as far away as they could but I got stuck. I still spend too much of my time checking on her, thinking about her, and helping her solve her problems. It’s kept me from ever having much of a life of my own. In a way, I guess I’m living hers.’’
Obsessive thinking and behavior serve to block out anxiety, which may feel overwhelming. This may be a fear of abandonment, of being alone and unsupported. These fears may have a traumatic origin. Perhaps you had an alcoholic parent. If you were raised in an alcoholic home it’s very likely neither parent gave you focused attention. Your chemically dependent parent was unable to be emotionally close, or to put your needs first. Your other parent was usually too absorbed in the problems created by the chemical dependency to have energies for you, either. You may have felt emotionally abandoned. Now, in your adulthood, these fears of still another abandonment can he so intense you will do anything to avoid that terrible feeling, even to living in a toxic, chaotic environment. This is a very normal and natural reaction, but you stay in pain to avoid pain. To survive you will do whatever ‘‘works,’’ even if it means walling off your feelings by compulsively focusing on something outside yourself.
Other people may think it is remarkable that you will cling to a painful, abusive relationship. That is because they can’t understand your terror of being alone and abandoned is far stronger than the pain of the current situation. On the emotional level, you may even believe you can’t survive without the alcoholic in your life.

What You Can Do

The Truth Shall Make Ye Free—but first it shall make ye miserable. - Proverb

It’s hard to let go. We hang onto habits, relationships, and defenses long after they stop being good for us. It’s natural to ignore what we know, hoping that if we don’t notice it, we won’t lose what we thought we had. But as Freud commented, ‘‘Much is won if we succeed in transforming hysterical misery into common unhappiness.’’ It is very sad to face the reality of our Powerlessness over someone else and the uselessness of obsessive behavior, but it will release us from hysterical misery!
The First Step, as Al—Anon states, is to admit the situation to yourself: you are powerless over alcohol and your life is unmanageable. Your thinking and feelings have become obsessive. The alcoholism is not the problem you can solve; your anxiety and fear are. Your misery and what to about it is the problem that lies before you. The chemically dependent person needs help, but so do you.
To admit powerlessness is to surrender to a new way of looking at your life. Many people equate surrender with defeat and humiliation. They are like the alcoholic who chooses death over admitting the self-destructiveness of his or her life-style.
Yet those who have made the choice to let go of a drug or another person have found that surrender was liberation. You can’t stand guard over someone else without losing your own freedom.
You can make a decision for acceptance, and live through that pain until it is finished, rather than staying in pain for a lifetime. Today you can decide to learn how to feel better, by changing your own thinking and actions.

This sounds like a very large job, and it is. But it is to be done slowly, in small steps, and at your own pace. There are many people who have gone ahead of you, and they can be there for you as in sponsor, a counselor, or in their writing. Use all those resources when you need them.
You will discover change brings anxiety and that is normal. The fear will diminish as you get used to new patterns in your life. It’s important to be gentle and nonblaming with yourself. Remember, your goal was good and reasonable -- to help someone else and to feel better yourself. The problem was that it didn’t work. You are now beginning a process that will work and it will be accomplished in small steps, a day at a time.
You begin with the basic philosophy of allowing the alcoholic the right to be wrong, the right to hurt, and the right to get well or not. You will begin today to concentrate on your own thinking, behavior, and needs.
Remember, when you begin to become obsessed about anything, your thoughts circling around and around, it is simply a process you’ve used to solve a problem, but it doesn’t work. Whether you are scheming about methods to control someone else, rehearsing what you will say next time, or going over painful events from your past, you are wasting valuable time. You could be productive instead, by doing something that feels better, or organizing your own day. Be aware also, that though it may feel to you that the alcoholic is the source of your feelings, actually you generate them yourself by your own thoughts and actions. When you notice your feelings come from you and are not put in you by another person, you begin to take charge of yourself. This will do a great deal to lessen your feelings of helplessness. Then you can begin to change nonproductive bad moods.
For example, when feelings of panic take hold, it helps to remember that every mood passes. This one will too. Switch these thoughts by a firm message to yourself to stop it. You may have to repeat it several times. Next, follow with whatever aids you in switching these thoughts. It may he strenuous exercise, an Al—Anon meeting, or talking it out with a friend. Other helpful devices include reading Al—Anon or other literature written for family members. It may help to immerse yourself in mental work, something challenging what absorbs all your attention. Others do better with physical chores. Remember to be gentle with yourself, and that all growth and change means a certain amount of temporary dislocation.
These are immediate first aid tactics for obsessive thoughts and actions, or feelings of anxiety and helplessness. They all work by breaking the cyclical patterns and giving you a sense of control.
A woman with many alcoholic relatives looks at her recovery program like this: ‘‘I decided to look at it like a project. I was so overwhelmed with problems, most of them belonging to other people, that for me the easiest way was to deliberately be my own helper. I slowly improved my life by asking myself every day what a caring friend would recommend. Today I enjoy most days and accomplish a lot because I think about what I need for the first time. I can allow myself to get help from other people.’’
For the longer view, think about how you would live your life if you were not involved with an addicted person. What would you be thinking about if you were not thinking about this person and the problem? There lies the clue for what you could be doing with your life, and it deserves careful thought.
Al—Anon suggests we ‘‘act as if,’’ and to live our way into healthy thinking. While you are at work on attitudes, examine what ideas are upsetting, such as the belief that anyone can control someone else’s drinking. You can behave as though you did not secretly believe you had enormous power over others. The new behavior — putting challenge, pleasure, and accomplishment into your life — will make it more rewarding to continue the efforts with your emotional growth.

As you make these outward and inward changes in things you do have power over, you will feel much more comfortable about surrender to lack of power over someone else, even if that person is greatly loved by you, and is getting very sick.
In spite of all your good intentions and insight, you may still find yourself devoting time each day to circular thinking, or yet one more attempt to control the uncontrollable. Pay attention to the pain it gives you because its message is, you need more help. Many have found a spiritual counselor is a helpful guide. Health professionals who understand alcoholism have helped many. You deserve as many allies as you call find to help you on your journey.