What is selfishness? What is self-centeredness? How about selflessness and “other”-centeredness? The ability to define these and learn to move from selfish to selfless can prove to be the difference between frustration and fulfillment.

In 12-Step recovery circles there is the promise that:

“We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows”

As children, it was natural for us to be egocentric. We believed that the world revolved around us and for some of us, it did. We expected the adults around us to do what we wished, and our needs were catered to most of the time. If it did not make us feel good we were not interested in it. This is a partial description of a normal childhood. It is a selfishness of innocence.

Now that we are adults, we understand the world does not exist simply to do our bidding and satisfy our wants and needs. This can be difficult at times. When we allow our focus to remain on our own desires and wants, we begin to look very much like the toddler who is stumbling and colliding with things and people. If  we see ourselves as the center of the universe we are apt to end up “lost in space”.

But we are not toddlers. In order to find true peace and happiness, we must shift our perspective to others and find ways in which we can be of service to them and contribute to their success and fulfillment. This requires humility on our part and the acceptance that it is not “all about me.”

This is especially true of our romantic partners. How often do you remember to include your romantic partner when you think of being of service to others? Initially this is a difficult challenge for most of us. When we are attempting to be of service to our partner we may fear that our efforts may not be accepted. We may doubt how fulfilling an experience it may be for ourselves. We become blindsided by our fear that our needs may not get …

The health of your romantic relationship can either enhance or diminished the quality of the lives of those who come into contact with it.  Whether your relationship is strong and in good health or floundering and weakened by disease or dysfunction, it is sure to have an impact on others.

For example, your loving care of each other can envelop and soothe your children. Alternatively, your arguing and discord will frighten and generate insecurity and instability for them. Your family member can benefit from your happiness and they can be confused and hurt by the pain they see you endure or inflict on each other.

They may not know it, but the people that are closest to you, like your children or parents, are studying your relationship and at times making a decision about their worth and value based on how they see you and your partner treating each other. This is not only true of your children and close family members however. As a couple in recovery, you are affected by and have an affect on other recovering couples as well.

No man is an island …and neither is a couple in a romantic relationship. People need people. People need people regardless of our belief that we can have a successful life with only each other. When you are in a committed, successful romantic relationship, you affect many others and many others are able to affect you. Allow your romance to enjoy the give and take of support from others. Allow others to assist your coupleship to grow into the supportive unit you know it can be and allow yourselves to give freely of what you find in your loving romance.

When you are in a committed, successful romantic relationship, you affect many others. You will influence others to take risks in their own relationship because you have demonstrated how thankful you are that you were willing to take the same risks. Many couples in recovery will want to emulate your happiness.

So, as a recovering couple who continues to find the joy …

As kids we were intrigued by an honesty game that has been known by many other titles depending on where you grew up and in what generation you grew up in.  The game has many twists and turns but the goal is always the same – manipulate others to step out from behind their masks and take risks to expose the real you or expose you to a real challenge.  In our neighborhood the game usually ended with a good many hurt feelings.

The idea of dropping our facades that prevent others from really getting to know us is a good thing however, and while it often feels uncomfortable it is seldom a game. If we are to be true to ourselves and to our romantic partners, we must remove our masks.

We originally wear our masks to ensure our acceptance by others. We originally wear our masks to heighten other’s perception of our status. We originally wear our masks to ensure “his” or “her” interest in us.

We might have believed that these masks protected us from rejection and satisfied the profile that we believed others were looking for, but that was seldom the case.  We cannot pretend to be someone that we are not without real consequence.  The act of masquerading will eventually cut us off from the care of the Higher Power of our understanding that we committed to in our 3rd  Step.

Let others see you for who you truly are – the person you asked your Higher Power to care for – and you will be enough.

If you have ever had the opportunity to deliver or receive a 5th Step, you have experienced the acceptance that is possible when one person rightly aligns himself or herself with another.  The alignment is one of honesty, openness, and willingness.   During these 5th Step encounters we intuitively know that honesty and acceptance are vital elements of the healing experience.  We strive to be non-judgmental to those who choose …

Sometimes, we enter relationships for all the wrong reasons. Perhaps we are looking for “real love,” or affirmation of our self-worth, or any one of a hundred different reasons. We might have felt that our personal recovery had progressed to the point that we could handle any problems that might arise in a romance. We may even have believed that exclusive devotion to our love relationship or over-valuing the importance of a romantic partnership in our lives would help us to retain our self-worth.

Recovery wisdom suggests that “we will lose whatever we place before our recovery.”  We are not suggesting therefore, that you place romantic happiness or a relationship ahead of your recovery or ahead of your pursuit of spiritual fulfillment.  Romantic success however, is meant to be a byproduct of sober living and not a replacement for or it or a guarantee of it.

We can easily lose ourselves in the process of idolizing our partner or elevating a romantic relationship to the position of a higher power. We must retain our sense of self and remain spiritually fit if we expect a romance to thrive.  It is a spiritual axiom that our romantic life will never be fuller than our spiritual life.  We can have sobriety, spiritual well being and love if we are first true to ourselves.

If we are interested in enhancing the quality of a current romantic relationship or working to avoid ending up in relationships that are emotionally lopsided or that do not fulfill your emotional needs there will need to be change.

Many of us have been guided by our support group and sponsors to follow the recovery wisdom that encourages that we “do the next right thing” when we find ourselves confused about how to avoid repeating mistakes from past failures.  Some of us have had such an unsuccessful history of romantic relationships we are hard-pressed to know what the “next right thing” is.

If you find yourself confused about what to do differently this time perhaps you will gain meaningful insights from a focused Fourth Step …

Do you wear two faces? Are there two sets of behavior that you employ – one for the world and the other for the privacy of your home?

So many of us were taught, as children to wear a smile when going out in the world, even as the chaos in our home continued. We grew up thinking that this was acceptable behavior. We could be pleasant and personable at work and then come home and be discourteous and unkind to our mate.

Recovery wisdom suggests that it is a great deal easier to be sober at a 12 Step meeting than it is to be sober at home with family and in our romantic relationships.  Perhaps it is because people at meetings “really understand us” – but perhaps it is because we work to understand them more than we expect to be understood.

Time has taught us however, that no one will have quite the view of our behavior as will our romantic partners.  We sometimes think to ourselves that “if only my husband or wife understood me the way my sponsor did” then life would go a lot smoother.  It could also be argued that, perhaps, life would go a lot smoother if we behaved with our romantic partner the way that we do with our sponsor.  When is the last time you asked your spouse for input about how you are working your program – the way you might with your sponsor?  And when is the last time you sarcastically dismissed your sponsor who attempted to share a concern that he or she had for you – the way you might with your spouse?

The solution is simple (most good answers are!).  Let’s treat our romantic partners with the dignity and respect that we grant our sponsors, generally without them having earned it.  And let’s let our spouse answer our sponsor’s question about how we are doing when he or she calls us at home.

…Ok, so maybe that is a little too challenging for right now.  How about this: work every day …

It is so important to understand that how we react to emotional stimuli in the present moment is very much influenced by where we travel back to in our feeling-memories. How we cope (or do not cope) as adults with any given situation will also depend on the tools we have developed along our journeys.

Over the last few weeks we have been blogging about the important role our past experiences have played in the evolution of how we have become the people we are today. Here are two questions to ponder in your quest to become an expert at your own story: Where did your methods of coping with challenges come from? Who “taught” you how to behave as an adult?

In previous blogs we have mentioned that when we are children, we are, in effect, attending Marriage College. Our professors are the adults we grow up around – our parents, adult friends, and extended family members. The lessons we learn are related to how to behave in adult relationships, or more often than not, how not to behave.

If our education is a negative one, we swear we will never be like that, and we often blame our role models for what they have taught us. What we must understand though, is that they never realized they were “teaching” anything; they were simply living their lives the way they themselves had been taught when they were in Marriage College.

Rather than living that same life and blaming them for it, it would be better for us to study where they went wrong and learn how to get it right.

We are blessed with choices. We can emulate the things our parents taught us, the good and the bad, or we can choose to search through all those lessons and separate the useful ones from the ones that challenge the new-found values that we have learned in recovery. Our fathers may have told us that women will always hurt us or our mothers may have taught us that men are only good for bringing home a paycheck. That does …

When we are beginning a new relationship or attempting to rebuild a shattered one, we tend to wear our best face. As our romance progresses, we begin to reveal more and more of our inner selves. We reveal more of the good and the bad as we express our thoughts, beliefs, and judgments to each other.

Although it can be frightening at times to share our most intimate selves with our partner (will he or she accept me knowing who I really am?), still we must work to develop an honest, open relationship if we hope to grow in this partnership. If your partner turns away when you reveal something about yourself, remember that it is not “all about me.” Your partner may be distracted by something having nothing to do with you. Acknowledge that you have fear of being rejected, and let your Higher Power know that you trust in His care for you.

“You always hurt the one you love.”  Great, as a song title but not so great when it describes our behavior with loved ones.  It is no more an explanation for why we have mistreated a loved one then blaming our emotional irritability on having awaken on the “wrong side of the bed”.

We all say things in anger or fear that we cannot take back, and immediately regret saying them. Why do we wait so long to express our feelings that they become explosive and distorted when they are finally released?

What we easily share in a fellowship meeting seems too risky to reveal to our partner. This is because we think our romance might not survive the truth of our feelings. But we feel what we feel: there is no right or wrong to our feelings, and our partner should not have to be comfortable with everything we share.

“Partnership” implies a shared responsibility for how we cope with what we experience and how we feel.  You do not have to have proof for what you are feeling – a fact that is as relieving as the notion that our feelings are not facts and cannot be proven. For some partners this can …

How many nights, as a child, did you lie in bed listening to the eruptions of your parents’ dysfunctional relationship, and swear to yourself that when you grew up, you would never allow yourself to be caught in the same tumultuous life? Maybe you’d never even get married. But time passed and the childhood terror faded. Suddenly you found yourself in a mirroring replica of your own childhood all over again.

While it is our hope that this has not been your growing up experience, it is unfortunately an all too common reality for many.

We all grow up as children in environments watching and learning from the adults around us. We all grow up with moments we cherish and with moments we rue. We may not know it, but we are watching the adults deal with life and we are taking notes.

We tell ourselves that “when we grow up” we are going to do this and we are going to do that. But when we grow up we reach into our bag of how to deal with real life and all we find is what we have seen. We do not know another way! That is why at some point of our adulthood it seems like we have replicated everything we said we wouldn’t.

It is said that we marry our parents, whether good or bad, but it doesn’t have to be that way. We can be open and honest, sharing our feelings with our partner, embracing the differences as well as the similarities, and we can enact change because now we know how to change. We know how to change because we are no longer children. We are adults who are ready to learn a new way and implement changes in our lives.

The new way is to bring our feelings and discomfort about how to deal with a given situation in our relationship directly to the partner with whom we may see as the source of our discomfort. We do not blame others for how we feel anymore and we are willing to do …

When we are hurting, we want to be comforted. We expect that the people in our lives who know us best will know exactly what we need and when we need it. If those needs are not met, we feel betrayed by our uncaring partner (or, we will blame our indifferent Spiritual Power).  We are angry and resentful.

In a desperate attempt to capture feelings of personal security and comfort, we often seek ways to fill up the hole inside ourselves. Most of us unfortunately, seek comfort in all the wrong places. Some of us engage in new relationships – looking for another person to fulfill the loneliness we feel. Others seek comfort in obsessive behaviors such as overspending, compulsive eating, and uncontrollable rehashing of the harms done to us from others.

Instead of waiting for other people and external stimuli to bring us comfort, perhaps the best way to find comfort is to give it to others:

…rather to comfort than to be comforted…

When we are committed to being of service to our partner and to others, we have found that we no longer need the anger and resentments to address our emotional discomfort. As the result of our service towards another we will receive the comfort and strength that are sufficient to accept and address our own hurts in a calm and adaptive way.

Let us contemplate on the opportunities we can find to bring peace and comfort to those we love most. Let us allow ourselves to discuss with others how each of us can be of service to the other. When we are being of service to someone else in pain, the preoccupation with self will soon fall away and we will know the joy of helping others!

This article is our fourth and final article in our series on how to use Step Eleven in our romantic relationships using the “Prayer of St. Francis” as our baseline. The article was written by John & Elaine Leadem, senior supervisors …

What does it take to be a channel of peace?

There are so many ways that peace in our relationships can become threatened. Some of these challenges are external; they threaten the peace from the outside in. Other challenges are internal; they begin within the relationship itself.

When, for instance, relationships face a clear financial danger such as the national economic slowdown, there is an outside force threatening the peace between partners. Coping with the illness or death of a mutual friend is another possible stress that can potentially affect the serenity of the relationship. Many couples find it possible to work through their individual fears because they view the threat as if they are joining against a “common foe.” Thus they learn to be a source of support for each other.

However, when financial fears have developed in reaction to the spending habits of one’s romantic partner, or, when one of the partners’ physical ailments begins to negatively disrupt the couple’s normal functioning routine, the threats that these may pose are more internal.

Unfortunately, when the peace of our relationship is threatened from the inside, we tend to blame or attack each other. We look to blame him or her for the condition of our checkbook, or for the frustration we are feeling.

What does it take for one of us to channel peace back into our relationship when the threat is coming from the inside?

For starters, let us remember that no one can make us feel anything! That means that we must take responsibility for how we think, how we feel, and how we behave. As long as we see change in another person as the solution to our problems, peace will continue to elude us. When we look towards others waiting for them to change, we cannot be a channel of peace.

In order to serve as a channel of peace to our partner, we will first need to accept responsibility for the quality of our own life. If we can learn to take responsibility …