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I just got done watching the new movie Deep Water, and woo boy, let me tell you, it is a wild ride. In case you’re unfamiliar, it’s the new Ben Affleck/Ana de Armas movie on Hulu right now. It is an R-rated erotic thriller. I will give you a brief plot summary and I don’t think it is a spoiler because it is in the trailer. Here goes:
Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas play a married couple. They have an unorthodox marital relationship because she openly flirts and seems to have affairs with men, right in front of him and all of their friends. And then the men start disappearing, and the movie gets even crazier from there.
I am writing about this on my sober newsletter because it reminded me a lot of rehab, and what I learned about dysfunctional relationships once I got sober. It was my experience that as raging addict, I created lots of dysfunction myself, but that dysfunction can be an infectious disease. People around me got swept up in the dysfunction themselves sometimes, and pretty soon, many dynamics were a disaster.
The weird thing is, lots of my relationships bent toward the dysfunction, and the dysfunction became functional. I stayed married. I stayed employed. I stayed welcome at family gatherings. In retrospect, it’s really strange and unhealthy how many people in my life ended up adjusting to my dysfunction, often times with some dysfunction of their own.
What do I mean by that? Let me give you one example. When I was hardcore using drugs and alcohol from about 2005-08, my financial situation turned into a disaster. I was married, and suddenly all of our money is disappearing, I’m transferring balances from credit card to credit card, trying to take out loans with banks and then getting loans from family and friends instead. And my wife was experiencing all of this without the key to the whole puzzle—that I was spending probably $1000 a week on painkillers and booze—and she was getting alarmed… but ultimately she just adjusted and it became the norm.
What happened to last week’s pay check? Why is this collection agency hounding us? How are we both working and we’re spending so much more than is showing up in our bank accounts?
She just got used to that being a part of our life. My dysfunction had spread like water on a sidewalk, finding the cracks to keep running. I would show her some credit card bills and not others, and have all sorts of explanations for what I thought was going on. It was all lies and fake noise. But it’s amazing how functional that dysfunction became.
In Deep Water, Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas just kind of get used to having a mess of a relationship. It becomes normal. And then you see everybody else around them sort of start to get used to it. The dysfunction had become functional.
I guess that concept translates into sobriety, too. I’m occasionally a little chaotic to be around, and pretty soon the chaos spreads. But it’s mostly harmless when I have a good recovery program going. The kind of dysfunctional I am these days tends to happen around 8:30 in the evening, when my 7-year-old is laying down to go to bed and I decide to start a jiujitsu match that spirals out of control. My wife lovvvvvvvvvvvvves that.
But hey, that’s better than one of us having to murder all the people we are cheating on the other with!
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
At an AA meeting the other day, a woman said she wanted a husband. Seven of the next eight women who spoke offered theirs.
(Credit: AA Grapevine, January 2006, by Richard M. of Golden, Colorado)
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