Busting Out the Map

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but I seriously love Melody Beattie’s The Language of Letting Go, a book of daily meditations for recovering codependents. It’s kind of like a roadmap I bust out whenever I’m a little lost and not quite sure where I am in my process. I flip through the index, search for a topic that seems to resonate, and, sure enough, the first or second reading on that topic will usually provide the words, the language, to describe my feelings and what I’m going through. It’s sort of like how when I go to a meeting, the topic and the shares always seem to provide me with the answer to some pestering question.

A lot of good stuff has been happening in my life lately. I’m consistently getting more and more pieces of the “job plan” filled in (I just got more good news today). My divorce is going smoothly—Mark and I have been in semi-regular contact for the past few months without any boundary or communication breakdowns. I’ve also been feeling myself emerging from my grief. I’ve been feeling much more lighthearted and spontaneous, and I’ve been partaking in more activities and just generally engaging with life in a way I haven’t felt safe doing in a long time. But, at the same time, I’ve been experiencing these pangs of fear once in a while—a type of fear I didn’t feel even at rock bottom. At first, I could only identify this fear as pain, and, not being able to see it clearly, I felt the need to step away from it until I had a little more information. But then I read what good ol’ Melody had to say, and she helped fill in the details :

Letting the Good Stuff Happen

…The good stuff can scare us. Change, even good change, can be frightening. In some ways, good changes can be more frightening than the hard times.

The past, particularly before recovery, may have become comfortably familiar. We knew what to expect in our relationships. They were predictable. They were repeats of the same pattern—the same behaviors, the same pain, over and over again. They may not have been what we wanted, but we knew what was going to happen.

This is not so when we change patterns and begin recovering. We may have been fairly good at predicting events in most areas of our life. Relationships would be painful. We’d be deprived. Each year would be almost a repeat of the last. Sometimes it got a little worse, sometimes a little better, but the change wasn’t drastic. Not until the moment we began recovery.

…Things get good. They do get better all the time. We begin to become successful in love, in work, in life. One day at a time, the good stuff begins to happen and the misery dissipates. We no longer want to be a victim of life. We’ve learned to avoid unnecessary crisis and trauma.

Life gets good.

“How do I handle the good stuff?” asked one woman. “It’s harder and more foreign than the pain and tragedy.”

“The same way we handled the difficult and the painful experiences,” I replied. “One day at a time.”