Amateur Geology

I thought I should address the title of my blog, just in case you're wondering what rocks have to do with scapegoating, Narcissistic Personality Disorder and recovery from childhood abuse.

I'm a sober alcoholic and have been active in recovery for a few years.  The split with my FOO happened prior to my sobriety, but in retrospect I can see clearly how one event spurred on and created the momentum for the other in my life.  A large part of my early recovery path involved my learning how to let go of people, places and things that had never been my responsibility in the first place.

Letting go is hard for alcoholics.  Here's one of my favorite recovery jokes: Question: How does an alcoholic let go of something?  Answer: With claw marks!

Letting go is also hard for those of us who've been trained to function as family scapegoats.  I learned from an early age that it was my job to take care of my NM, EF and siblings.  If I did a good job taking care of them and they thrived or succeeded in something, it was then my job to step to the side and allow them to soak up the limelight and applause.  If they failed, however, it was because I had failed at taking care of them or I hadn't supported them correctly which meant that it was then my job to take the blame.

I lived for over thirty years believing this, and eventually this idea and my choice to believe it helped to speed me along in my hard dive toward rock bottom.  I found recovery before I started sleeping under any bridges, thank goodness, but for a while there I was just a quivering mess of tangled, complicatingly knotted and confused emotion.  I'd stopped self-medicating, but I couldn't let go of my imprinted belief that I wasn't worth very much.  A lot of my feelings of uselessness came from my subconscious perception (helped along by the conscious smear campaign and hateful words that members of my FOO were spreading around our small town,) that when I'd separated myself from the FOO, I'd stopped doing my job.

The other sober alcoholics who helped me through would tell me to 'just let go and let God.'  To my credit, I never acted on my impulse to react to this simple suggestion with physical violence.  I smiled and nodded and found quiet places in which I could shake and cry by myself.  I couldn't let go of the notion that I had somehow failed at my job.

I was in a meeting of sober alcoholics one day and a lady came in who had years of experience with crazyness.  Susan talked a mile a minute and would often say things like, "I woke up crazy this morning!"  By the gleam in her eye, she meant it.  I had a hard time following her usually, but this day what she said was entirely clear.  In talking with her sponsor, she'd identified an unwillingness to let go of something that wasn't hers in the first place.  What her sober sponsor told her, she said, was, "Look at that rock!  Does it say Susan on it?"  Of course the huge boulder that she was pointing at didn't have 'Susan' spray-painted on it.  "Well," said her sponsor, "if it doesn't have your name on it, then don't fucking pick it up!"

Ding!  The fog lifted for me.  I am responsible for my actions, and my actions alone.  I can't change anyone else's circumstances, I can't make or break anyone else's exploits.  I can control - and therefore be responsible for - what comes out of my mouth, what I do with my day, how I live my life.  And that's about all I can control.  It was a major turning point in my sobriety and my life.  I started looking at problems and situations from the perspective of ownership; if it said Vanci on it, well, I'd do my best to carry it.  If it didn't say Vanci on it, well, I kept walking on by.

My NM wanted me to fix her and 'make her feel better.'  My EF, OS and YB accepted and purported that it was my job to fix mummy dearest as well as each of them.  Even when I was a single mom working three jobs, EF would show up at job number three to 'borrow' money from me, with only a sketchy repayment plan that might or might not pan out. It was part of my job to loan it to him, whether I had it or not. 

When I removed the Crazymakers from my life, it was the first step in my realizing that I didn't have the responsibility or the capability to fix those problems or people.  That the members of my dysfunctional, heartbreaking, crazymaking family were responsible for their own lives and that I wasn't tied to an obligation to take care of them. 

It took a while, but after a while I started to realize that their problems didn't have my name on them, so I could finally let go and say, "Hey, it's Not My Rock."

Love,
Vanci