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Woo boy, I had an eventful Monday. It wasn’t a life-changing horrific incident. But it’s the maddest I’ve been in a long time. Or, as the children say these days… I was Big Mad.
My kids were acting really crappy toward me. Really crappy. And it got me boiling-hot mad. Like, I didn’t know what to do with this amount of anger.
I say it that way because it’s in those moments when I would rely on drinking and drugging in the past. I’d have an overwhelming feeling that I didn’t know how to process, and I’d just try to get so numb I didn’t have to feel it. I’d get loaded.
Well, you can’t do that in recovery. It’s life on life’s terms—and let’s be honest, life on life’s terms really sucks sometimes.
When you feel something you don’t know what to do with? That’s been one of the hardest things about longterm sobriety. Anger and sadness are the obvious ones, but I really don’t know how to handle success, either. I tend to handle Ws as badly as Ls.
I remember I got promoted at work twice within my first six months of sobriety, and I called my sponsor to let him know. “Guess who got another promotion?” I said. “This guy!”
He was happy for me and congratulated me, but at the end of our conversation he slipped in, “Remember, this too shall pass.”
I was so pissed at him. How dare he rain on my parade like that?!?!
But the more I asked him about that statement, the more I understood what he meant. “You can’t get promoted every day,” he said. “If you’re relying on that to keep you sober, it’s going to be difficult for you. You need a program that helps you be able to handle really bad days and really good days.”
I didn’t love hearing that, but I’ve grown to realize how true that idea is. It’s awesome how much life improves when you get sober, and how many beautiful things become a part of your life. But I can’t bank on getting high every day on anything—money, food, job promotions, whatever—as a sustainable recovery plan. It’s just not realistic.
Okay, so back to my crappy Monday.
I didn’t know what to do. My kids had a blowout argument in the car and we couldn’t even get out of the driveway. So I made everybody go back in the house and I went for a drive. I didn’t really yell at all. I realized I was not in the right headspace to sort this out in the moment, so I thought of restraint of pen and tongue and didn’t say much.
I noticed my blood pressure getting back down to normal as I drove, and then I sat down in a restaurant that had a fountain soda machine. I tried to breath and do a mini fourth step on my anger. I will confess that I smashed about 10 Diet Cokes in a half hour as I contemplated my resentment—the manager probably should have cut me off and called for a designated driver by the time I got my last refill from the soda machine.
I slowly unpacked everything, with Diet Coke coursing through my veins, and I really believe the initial resentment was justified. My wife told me later that she totally understood my hurt and would have felt the same way. It was thoughtless, silly behavior from my kids.
But I’ve found that justified resentments are… still resentments. I need to ask myself hard questions when I feel like I am in the right. Am I taking this personally? Am I overreacting? Am I crossing over from feeling hurt to hurting others?
I can’t be in that place. I just can’t. I cannot afford to be angry in a way where I have no spirituality and am rationalizing it as being justified. Everything falls apart and I am a lot closer to a drink. It’s not a sustainable sobriety plan for me. And it’s actually not helpful in any way. As our literature says, “It is a spiritual axiom that every time we are disturbed, no matter what the cause, there is something wrong with us.”
So I collected myself. It took about a half hour. I wish I didn’t ever do the fight-or-flight thing any more but hey, I’m going to forgive myself a little bit in that situation—I think it was better for everybody that I get away from the situation for awhile.
By the time I got back home, I was cooled down, and I calmly told my kids why I was upset with them. They were apologetic and we worked through it. No yelling. And we ended up having a beautiful Memorial Day together. Lots of laughing and bad food. It was great.
I’ll say this, though: I kept those a******s’ devices for awhile. One thing about anger and forgiveness in recovery is that it also means figuring out healthy boundaries and repercussions for kids when necessary. And that’s what I did.
What’s so cool about how things ended up is that I did have to dole out some not-so-fun stuff for the kids. But it came from a place of love, not rage—I consulted with my wife and we decided that there was an important lesson here that involved some sting for the kids.
Later that night, I got to an in-person meeting and somebody else at the meeting shared about having a brutal day with their kids and how they worked through it. I felt, for the millionth time, that I was in the right place, hearing what I needed to hear. I’m not alone. Raising kids is hard for anybody. Raising kids while sober is like winning an Olympic gold medal.
That dude seemed a little more spiritually fit than I might have been so I think he got to a good place with his kids without having to guzzle a gallon of Diet Coke.
I’ll keep coming. Hopefully next time I won’t need a keg of soda to work through my issues. But it’s better than the kegs I used to need!
ALCOHOLIC/ADDICT JOKE OF THE DAY
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.
A scientist runs into a meeting and yells, “Incredible announcement: We just discovered a cure for alcoholism. All you have to do is take one pill daily and you’re cured!”
A man in the back raises his hand. “Uh, what happens if you take nine?”
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