Detachment Works
Hello Interested Readers!
I learned about detachment in Al-Anon. I learned that we can't save the alcoholic. There is no intervention from us that solves anything. I learned that the highly charged "conversations" were manipulations and designed to engage me in a tail chasing situation so that the alcoholic could keep blaming me for his problems.
Detachment is a powerful tool in transformation. It is an over-used word that means very little until you actually attempt to practice it. It is one of the most important elements in a 12 step program and probably the most side-stepped concept in recovery. I use it frequently these days as a form of being objective.
Imagine that you are in the room with a person who is watching the news. This person is triggered by a topic and simply begins yelling at the TV. This person is not detached. They are attached to the way they feel when they are yelling. They are getting a dose of chemicals; some are endorphins and some are adrenaline and others are beyond my vocabulary.
When this person turns toward me and continues the tirade, they are using me to continue the input of their chemical dose. Many people are addicted to the chemicals that surge through their bodies while yelling at other people. That is why they keep doing it and find new people to yell at when the old ones leave them.
If you share the addiction you may not even mind the yelling and the manipulation. Lots of people think it is normal and actually think I should toughen up and get used to it. Today I understand that those people really don't care how I feel. They just want their dose and don't care if it is at my expense.
Angry energy triggers my fight or flight system. It doesn't open a conversation for change or growth. I am not ever impressed or enlightened in this environment. I've never had my opinion of a topic changed in this manner. I usually just want to leave and not come back. When I start to express my opinion or even just try to back up and leave, this often triggers another tirade with a person or people using emotionally charged phrases. If I can't leave and am backed into a corner, I can cause a lot of harm. I no longer feel justified in harming people even if they harmed me, so I do my best to remove myself before anything gets violent, physically or verbally.
I have become aware of the manipulative turn of phrase to the degree that I frequently don't understand the basic message of the speaker. Because of my hyper-vigilant past, I'm not likely to remain in any conversation or room where people are being incited into an aggressive stance even over sports.
As I practice detachment I am empowered to activate the part of my brain that can reason instead of the part that acts defensively. So far I have not found much reason in anger stimulated conversations.
I knew something was really wrong with my husband. I attempted to get help on his behalf. All efforts met with dead ends. One of his family members told me that my marriage was none of their business and his doctor's office told me that there wasn't anything I could do but get some help for myself. I realized what the nurse meant was that I could get therapy. So I did. The day I made my first appointment with the therapist, she told me to join Al-Anon. So I did.
Through therapy I learned that I am valuable and that I have a right to be me. It's not that I didn't know these things. It's that I thought they were supposed to be given to me. I was always a caregiver in some form. I was a rescuer and a codependent. I began to learn to stand up for myself and keep right on growing instead of feeling like I was a failure. I had to do that on my own. I began to understand that I have been an inferior person and that I accepted this status. It was time to change that. When I began to stand up for myself and treat myself with compassion and beef up my self-care routines, I changed. I learned to listen to my body because it was giving me a lot of information.
No matter what we do to detach, it takes practice. Practice is the act of doing something again and again, every day, all year long. It takes support and that means we have to find our tribe or at least find a 12 step program in the beginning. I highly recommend a 12 step program for at least 2 years. I found validation and understanding even though the experiences of the others were different. No one blamed me and no one expected me to be able fix the problems of the alcoholic. No one told me to leave him or stay with him. We learn what we are doing that keeps us enmeshed in chaos. We learn to work on ourselves and not on others.
I thought that my partner's input was important. It wasn't easy to let go of my need for my husband to like me. Detachment seemed very wrong at first simply because I had a belief that something might be able to be fixed. As I listened to my body, I clearly got the messages that my body knew that my marriage was irrevocably changed.
Understanding detachment came in a flash of insight but acting on it has been a slower process. It is something that I must attend to daily with compassion and understanding for myself. The most powerful thing I have ever done that took me to the state of detachment quickly was to watch funny cat videos. If one cracked me up a lot, I'd watch it again. Because my home was filled with tension and the alcoholics' desire to control me, I made a practice of doing this every night for at least one week. I didn't do anything to acknowledge the angry person making the angry not so subtle moans, groans and other assorted noises. My laughter created a higher vibration around me. It empowered me to feel better. This caused the alcoholic to back up and avoid me instead of trying so hard to control and manipulate me. His ludicrous comments landed in a bed of laughter instead of fearful anticipation. My laughter allowed my grandson, who was also suffering in the same environment, to raise his vibration too. My alcoholic retreated into his own world. He made it very clear that if he couldn't be abusive to me, he didn't want to have any kind of relationship with me. He actually packed up and moved out with the help of his family. He refused my assistance in any form even though he was in a lot of pain and struggling with a malfunctioning shoulder and wrist. I don't know what he told his family but I didn't force him to let me help him. I let them struggle with whatever they were doing with absolutely no need to know what they were doing as they packed up his belongings in the pouring rain. I am confidant that the pouring rain helped me to maintain detachment.
It is nearly impossible to be detached if one's self esteem is linked to someone else's opinion. By definition, self-esteem is your esteem of yourself. Those of us who have been abandoned by our mothers at a very early age find ways to fill in the gaps and mostly by making sure other people like us. When the fear of abandonment is stronger than our self-esteem, we will probably find it impossible to detach. This is why supportive therapy is helpful. I had a very wise therapist. She worked with me in many ways. One of the most powerful things she did was to have me list 10 things that were good about myself. It was agonizing and took all week but I did it. She read the list with a great deal of appreciation and told me to make another. After agonizing again, I finally sat down with pen and paper. I was amazed when I wrote another 10 things in less than 20 minutes. Another powerful thing she did was to have me take an IQ test. This isn't about promoting the test. What it proved to me as she knew it would, that not only am I not mentally deficient, I am gifted. With this understanding I began to see that both of my late husbands struggled with self-esteem issues and it was beneficial to them for me to be treated as a "lesser-than" person so that they could be more important. I learned that I was agreeing with them by my own actions.
The more I embraced detachment the more gleeful I became. I was free at last. And it was me that freed me. Even though my finances were uncomfortably tight, I chose to invest in myself by taking a course titled Dreams to Reality, by Laurie Sterling. I had already found a lot of the same information via YouTube which I still listen to as I go about my daily tasks, but Laurie brought a tighter, cleaner, more straight forward, essence to my education. A year later, I took a second course from her. I'm not trying sell Laurie even though she is worth it, I am pointing out that I have not stopped learning and growing and expanding my understanding of detachment.
Sincerely, Carmen
I learned about detachment in Al-Anon. I learned that we can't save the alcoholic. There is no intervention from us that solves anything. I learned that the highly charged "conversations" were manipulations and designed to engage me in a tail chasing situation so that the alcoholic could keep blaming me for his problems.
Detachment is a powerful tool in transformation. It is an over-used word that means very little until you actually attempt to practice it. It is one of the most important elements in a 12 step program and probably the most side-stepped concept in recovery. I use it frequently these days as a form of being objective.
Imagine that you are in the room with a person who is watching the news. This person is triggered by a topic and simply begins yelling at the TV. This person is not detached. They are attached to the way they feel when they are yelling. They are getting a dose of chemicals; some are endorphins and some are adrenaline and others are beyond my vocabulary.
When this person turns toward me and continues the tirade, they are using me to continue the input of their chemical dose. Many people are addicted to the chemicals that surge through their bodies while yelling at other people. That is why they keep doing it and find new people to yell at when the old ones leave them.
If you share the addiction you may not even mind the yelling and the manipulation. Lots of people think it is normal and actually think I should toughen up and get used to it. Today I understand that those people really don't care how I feel. They just want their dose and don't care if it is at my expense.
Angry energy triggers my fight or flight system. It doesn't open a conversation for change or growth. I am not ever impressed or enlightened in this environment. I've never had my opinion of a topic changed in this manner. I usually just want to leave and not come back. When I start to express my opinion or even just try to back up and leave, this often triggers another tirade with a person or people using emotionally charged phrases. If I can't leave and am backed into a corner, I can cause a lot of harm. I no longer feel justified in harming people even if they harmed me, so I do my best to remove myself before anything gets violent, physically or verbally.
I have become aware of the manipulative turn of phrase to the degree that I frequently don't understand the basic message of the speaker. Because of my hyper-vigilant past, I'm not likely to remain in any conversation or room where people are being incited into an aggressive stance even over sports.
As I practice detachment I am empowered to activate the part of my brain that can reason instead of the part that acts defensively. So far I have not found much reason in anger stimulated conversations.
I knew something was really wrong with my husband. I attempted to get help on his behalf. All efforts met with dead ends. One of his family members told me that my marriage was none of their business and his doctor's office told me that there wasn't anything I could do but get some help for myself. I realized what the nurse meant was that I could get therapy. So I did. The day I made my first appointment with the therapist, she told me to join Al-Anon. So I did.
Through therapy I learned that I am valuable and that I have a right to be me. It's not that I didn't know these things. It's that I thought they were supposed to be given to me. I was always a caregiver in some form. I was a rescuer and a codependent. I began to learn to stand up for myself and keep right on growing instead of feeling like I was a failure. I had to do that on my own. I began to understand that I have been an inferior person and that I accepted this status. It was time to change that. When I began to stand up for myself and treat myself with compassion and beef up my self-care routines, I changed. I learned to listen to my body because it was giving me a lot of information.
No matter what we do to detach, it takes practice. Practice is the act of doing something again and again, every day, all year long. It takes support and that means we have to find our tribe or at least find a 12 step program in the beginning. I highly recommend a 12 step program for at least 2 years. I found validation and understanding even though the experiences of the others were different. No one blamed me and no one expected me to be able fix the problems of the alcoholic. No one told me to leave him or stay with him. We learn what we are doing that keeps us enmeshed in chaos. We learn to work on ourselves and not on others.
I thought that my partner's input was important. It wasn't easy to let go of my need for my husband to like me. Detachment seemed very wrong at first simply because I had a belief that something might be able to be fixed. As I listened to my body, I clearly got the messages that my body knew that my marriage was irrevocably changed.
Understanding detachment came in a flash of insight but acting on it has been a slower process. It is something that I must attend to daily with compassion and understanding for myself. The most powerful thing I have ever done that took me to the state of detachment quickly was to watch funny cat videos. If one cracked me up a lot, I'd watch it again. Because my home was filled with tension and the alcoholics' desire to control me, I made a practice of doing this every night for at least one week. I didn't do anything to acknowledge the angry person making the angry not so subtle moans, groans and other assorted noises. My laughter created a higher vibration around me. It empowered me to feel better. This caused the alcoholic to back up and avoid me instead of trying so hard to control and manipulate me. His ludicrous comments landed in a bed of laughter instead of fearful anticipation. My laughter allowed my grandson, who was also suffering in the same environment, to raise his vibration too. My alcoholic retreated into his own world. He made it very clear that if he couldn't be abusive to me, he didn't want to have any kind of relationship with me. He actually packed up and moved out with the help of his family. He refused my assistance in any form even though he was in a lot of pain and struggling with a malfunctioning shoulder and wrist. I don't know what he told his family but I didn't force him to let me help him. I let them struggle with whatever they were doing with absolutely no need to know what they were doing as they packed up his belongings in the pouring rain. I am confidant that the pouring rain helped me to maintain detachment.
It is nearly impossible to be detached if one's self esteem is linked to someone else's opinion. By definition, self-esteem is your esteem of yourself. Those of us who have been abandoned by our mothers at a very early age find ways to fill in the gaps and mostly by making sure other people like us. When the fear of abandonment is stronger than our self-esteem, we will probably find it impossible to detach. This is why supportive therapy is helpful. I had a very wise therapist. She worked with me in many ways. One of the most powerful things she did was to have me list 10 things that were good about myself. It was agonizing and took all week but I did it. She read the list with a great deal of appreciation and told me to make another. After agonizing again, I finally sat down with pen and paper. I was amazed when I wrote another 10 things in less than 20 minutes. Another powerful thing she did was to have me take an IQ test. This isn't about promoting the test. What it proved to me as she knew it would, that not only am I not mentally deficient, I am gifted. With this understanding I began to see that both of my late husbands struggled with self-esteem issues and it was beneficial to them for me to be treated as a "lesser-than" person so that they could be more important. I learned that I was agreeing with them by my own actions.
The more I embraced detachment the more gleeful I became. I was free at last. And it was me that freed me. Even though my finances were uncomfortably tight, I chose to invest in myself by taking a course titled Dreams to Reality, by Laurie Sterling. I had already found a lot of the same information via YouTube which I still listen to as I go about my daily tasks, but Laurie brought a tighter, cleaner, more straight forward, essence to my education. A year later, I took a second course from her. I'm not trying sell Laurie even though she is worth it, I am pointing out that I have not stopped learning and growing and expanding my understanding of detachment.
Sincerely, Carmen
Fantastic Carmen. Thanks so much for sharing your story there for helping me to understand mine❤
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