When addicts and co-addicts begin to feel the pain that develops over the course of the progression of their perspective illnesses, they will look for something outside of themselves to explain the problems they or others are experiencing. (This inclination to blame others represents the core of every addict and co-addict’s DENIAL.)

When we are looking to blame someone for the quality of our own lives, a target, irrational or not, must be identified! 

There must be someone, something, or some event to blame for why we behave the way we do. This is true whether our relapse is back into an active addiction, or even if the relapse is back into the unhealthy patterns of our character defects.  Relapse of any kind, remember, begins with feelings of discomfort that we look to avoid or deaden in some way.  Since the tendency to blame other people, places and things for the quality of our own life is a hallmark feature of our denial, the individual headed for relapse will always find a target to blame.

While the list of possible targets to blame is endless, our romantic partners unfortunately often take the brunt of our blame and justification. They are our closest accountability mirrors and thus the easiest targets for us to pick. The consequences of blaming others for our own discomfort however, can be enormous. When we set out to blame people, situations, and events for the quality of our own lives, we are merely trying to deaden the painful reality of the costs of our own behavioral choices – both past and present.  In an effort to lessen the pain of our reality anything and anyone is fair game.

Selecting our partners to blame for how we are feeling or why we intend to misbehave or have misbehaved in the past is really quite easy. We will always find a target somewhere if we are looking for one.  Life is full …

Waking up to the demands of life can sometimes make for a frightening start to our day. This can be true of general day to day demands as well as what we perceive to be the demands within our romantic lives too. While most of us retire the night before with expectations for the coming day, there can be much about tomorrow that is still unknown. Each day can have a wide range of variable that we can not anticipate or prepare for.  Whether you and your partner awake with an expectation that the day will hold challenges or with an expectation that the day will hold promises, the unknown variables can generate anxiety and fear for many of us.

We can easily slip into preoccupation with problems of the past rather than anticipation for the rewarding promises of the future because many of us tend to project negative outcomes rather than positive ones.  It is not uncommon for those of us engaged in romantic relationships to focus on the injuries that we have endured or have perpetrated in the past rather than recognizing the positive momentum our work has created. We get stuck on the fear of “what if” things do not work out? If we remain focused on the “What if” scenarios it could create an insurmountable wall between us and the change that we desire.

If only there was a way to foresee the future!

Many of us struggle with what to do when a loved one is troubled in some way.  Some of us believe that we need to mind our own business: it is not my place to say anything! Others interpret detachment to be a license to disregard the responsibility for loving another person.  Still others would rush into every problem to “fix it,” regardless of whether or not they have permission to do so.

While it is true that you cannot control the physical, emotional, and spiritual health of your mate, you share a responsibility for being of service to him or her when you are spiritually fit.  Few people will be as well equipped as you are to see the signs that your romantic partner is struggling.

The art of blaming situations, people, and events for the quality of our own lives is a skill we acquire as a child. Children however, do not start out lying and blaming others.  In fact, children generally begin by blaming themselves for the poor behavior of others.  A child will eventually learn to lie because it eases the pain of what he or she has done, or what he or she is experiencing.  (Lying is therefore a mood changing behavior and can become habit forming.)

For example, a child will break something and generally feel bad even though they might not look that way to others when the incident is first discovered.  The broken object is now of less value.  Even worse, the child may also feel like he or she are of less personal value as well, because he or she had failed to properly care for the object that is now broken.

This experience is painful enough for a child to endure without the hurtful consequences often imposed by adults.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the recovery literature we are assured freedom from the fear of economic insecurity. The big book of Alcoholics Anonymous states that during the painstaking process of the 12 steps:

“Fear … of economic insecurity will leave us.”*

If we examine that statement closely, we will find that no promises of wealth were made. Rather, the promise is that we will not be afraid of never having enough, or of using our financial status as a yardstick for our worth.

The fears associated with economic insecurity will go a long way toward undermining the security and integrity of a romantic relationship depending upon how we cope with them. If the way one partner copes with the fear is by denying the need for any material possessions and there is “not enough” because every penny has to be saved, there are going to be problems.  Likewise if one partner spends money on financial “feel goods” which are usually short lived, there are going to be problems.

How many of us have made foolish purchases for the purpose of feeling better or different? We have bought things we did not need with money we did not have, only to find ourselves mired in credit card debt and feeling worse than before we walked into the store. Spending money to feel better and then feeling worse when the bill shocks us into reality is a trap that snags many a recovering couple.

Overspending can easily become another addiction with the same debts of powerlessness and unmanageability you will see in other addictive disorders.  Learning to live within our means is yet another byproduct of sober living if, in fact, we are willing to apply the same spiritual principles to our budget as we do to our abstinence from our primary “drug of choice”.

We are more than our possessions and we have more than that. If we practice the principles of recovery in all of our affairs, and rightly align ourselves to the God of our understanding, we will truly be richer and not just trying to appear …

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 …