Eliminating Anger and Suffering!
When we face Addiction in our family, or major problems in our life, we besides being sad, we are scared and fearful of what the present and future holds for our loved ones with problems. Many of us are ill-equipped to deal with these issues. Many of us have never lived with drug addicts, nor have we been trained to deal with addicts and their behavior. Not only are we incapable of dealing with the addict, we also do not know how to deal with the complex family issues that surround the addict. The actions we take have no effect on the addict and we become Angry. The actions of the addict when they are using, makes us Angry. Our bodies can’t stay in Anger forever so we bounce back to Sadness. It takes too much energy and we run out of steam so we bounce back to the right side of the loop and we become Fearful, Sad or Depressed (we need a little Variety in our lives). Once our mind and bodies get tired of Sadness or Depression, we then bounce over to the left side of the loop and we go into Anger, Pissed or Frustrated. What makes all of this worse in many cases, is the feeling that we are alone and very helpless, battling these problems.
Ultimately we end up in a “Crazy Eight” pattern. We bounce from Fear to Anger, from Depressed to Resentful, from Sad to Pissed. Around and around we go! We end up hating how we act, how we live, and we begin to hate life, hate our addicts and hate the fact we have no effect on our addicts. Our addicts don’t do this to us, we do it to ourselves. We do not do this to ourselves knowingly, yet virtually every parent I have talked to is in this “infinity loop”. When we are stuck in this loop we start to suffer. The longer we are in the cycle the longer we suffer.
Once we get into this infinite loop and we understand we are in it, we must make a conscious decision to change and break the cycle and stop the suffering. it is difficult, when we are in this cycle it is tough to get anything done! In my next post I will talk about how you begin to break the cycle with “Empowering Choices”…..