“You are either in agreement with (like) us or against us.” That mentality is the ancestral curse I am working to crush, one day at a time.
Before recovery, my intense, short-lived relationships were built on perceived sameness: shared urges, shared enemies, shared certainty. I had learned this was proof of belonging. It wasn’t sustainable. These fast entanglements, rooted in glimpses of sameness, consistently fizzled or died swift and confusing deaths. We are the same and belong together, or we are different and one of us is wrong and bad.
You must know, believe, feel, and choose correctly. That is how you earn your place inside instead of outside—how you remain undivided from the invisible army and the royal we. This, I have learned, is trauma bonding.
I think Anne Lamott or Brené Brown once shared that the opposite of faith is certainty. Recovery asks us to examine and release the things we were absolutely certain about—ourselves, others, love, goodness, God. Much of what we “knew” was fear-based, handed down through generations of fearful people desperate to feel strong, safe, right, and in control. Uniformity was their assurance. Certainty was their armor.
I realized today that one of my favorite things is discovering I have been wrong. Because I value learning and expansion, I refuse to miss out by clinging to rightness. Greg and I laugh hardest when we realize we were ill-informed about something we felt certain of. One of our only real conflicts ended with him saying, “I’m sorry, I was too busy being right.” For the record, he is rarely the one who needs to apologize. And when he does, it is disarming and deeply lovable.
We are not the same and not always in sync. Still, there is immense loyalty between us, rooted not in sameness, but in shared commitment to reflection, growth, and healing.
One of us, though, still has much more work to do. Deep sigh. I am a work in progress.
