“You are either in agreement with (like) us or against us.” That mentality is the ancestral curse and cycle which I strive to crush, one day at a time. My pre-recovery, short lived, and highly intense relations were established on perceived synchronicity or uniformity: a shared urge, or common enemy. I had learned to recognize these as appropriate foundations/ proof of belonging & connection. It was unsustainable, though. Those fierce and fast entanglements, shallowly rooted in glimpses of sameness, consistently fizzled without explanation or died swift and confusing (for me) deaths. We are the same and belong together OR we are different, and one of us is wrong and bad.
You must know, like, believe, feel and choose a particular way. This is how we earn and keep our place, sense of belonging on the inside instead of the outside –to remain undivided from the invisible army and the royal we. This type of connection, I have learned, is called trauma bonding.
I think Anne Lamott or Brene Brown once shared how the the opposite of faith is certainty. In recovery, we learn to develop and practice faith through examination and release of THE things we have known and believed(about ourselves, others, god, love, connection, goodness)—things of which we were absolutely certain. In recovery, we come to see that much of our beliefs have been fear-based, untrue, and destructive- handed down through generations of fearful people, desperate to feel in charge of the knowing, in order to feel strong, safe, right, and in control. Uniformity and synchronicity were their assurances. Those clinging to these fixed mindsets may often be both politically correct and morally & spiritually undeveloped.
I realized today that one of my favorite things is discovery of a thing which I have been righteously wrong about. Because I prioritize my learning and expansion, I refuse to miss out on either– by staying too busy in my knowingness and rightness. Sweet Greg and I enjoy the best laughs when we realize and own that we have been incorrect, misguided, ill-informed about a thing, especially something we have felt terribly right about. One of our only real conflicts ended with him saying to me: “I am sorry, I was too busy being right. ” For the record, he is rarely the one in need of apologizing. And when he does falter, how he handles that is extraordinarily charming and lovable. We are not the same at all and not always in sync. Still, we enjoy immense loyalty and solidarity, I think because of our shared commitment to self-reflection, growing, learning, healing. One of us though, still has much more of all of those things to do than the other. Deep sigh. I am a work in progress.
