Affiliations and Attachments

Because I was raised without healthy sustained connection with my care givers, I attempted to build an identity around attachments and affiliations-  which would not ever satisfy my need for safe and nurturing connection. I had no idea how to identify or participate in safe connection. 

My program of recovery is where I first was introduced to healthy and appropriate ways for relating and connecting:  to discern a standard for wholesome, benevolent, and acceptable conduct within non-essential relationships. 

By doing the work suggested by my program, I became able and willing to trade my sick marriage and family affiliation for healing and sanity: emotional and spiritual wellness. In recovery, my relationships were either fortified by my spiritual commitment–or they died natural but still painful, if not violent deaths. The losses of those affiliations and attachments were exactly as devastating as they were intended to be.  

An unshakable connection to my sponsor and a power greater than myself, allowed me to stay the course of recovery.  As it turns out, I am more driven by truth and connection than avoidance of pain and punishment.  This is what I have come to know as my Good Orderly Direction. My finding is that– the people who feel themselves in charge of pain and punishment are not FOR me.  I understand why my commitment to change agitates them.  My recovery fails to elevate them. In this way, I am rendered not only useless, but also offensive. They preferred it when I was losing my shit and yelling profanity in response to the pain they imposed. My inability to cope allowed them to continue defining themselves (and me) the way they need to.

In my 20+ years in and out of touch with my sister, I observed with a fleeting and pathetic sense of comfort (grateful when it was not me) and horror as she persecuted various females in the family– cousins, nieces, sisters in law, aunts— routinely mocking, gossiping about, and passively, if not overtly diminishing them. When I openly declared my refusal to engage that way, she came hard for me. Similarly, I watched in pain as my husband experienced alienation for his failures to comply in his affiliations with his sisters. My sister’s unsurprising alliance with my (NOW ex-) husband(a man who she knew to have harmed me) has forever compromised our ability to co-parent our boys. In her mind, I guess, she won. I don’t think he will ever admit it or do the work to repair his part in that, but I believe he recognizes the price to be paid for snatching at that lowest hanging fruit. The aim was to alienate me and boast attachment and an affiliation that would crush me. It did crush me and our sons.