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I have a spot on my couch that is my spot. Let me just say that again: IT IS MY SPOT.
The couch is gigantic and could comfortably fit five people, with room for about eight if you really wanted to squish in there. So the corner that I occupy for long stretches of time is only one small corner.
And yet, these people that live at my house—who you might refer to as my family—insist on sitting there sometimes. How dare they, right?
I came back the other day and my 20-year-old was home from college. She was camped out in that spot, and I asked her to move. She said she would in a few minutes.
A few minutes went by and I asked again. Now I could see that she was digging in. “In a few minutes, I said,” she told me.
“It’s been a few minutes,” I said.
“Well, it’s our family couch, not your couch,” she said.
I walked out of the room. This was such outrageous behavior.
Then I remembered one of my favorite passages from the book Living Sober, where the authors unpack what anger and resentments really are. They came up with a list of 16 descriptions of forms of anger other than just flat-out being pissed off.
The list is: intolerance, contempt, envy, hatred, snobbishness, rigidity, cynicism, discontent, tension, sarcasm, self-pity, malice, distrust, anxiety, suspicion and jealousy.
That is such a provocative list to me. Who thinks they are angry when they’re being sarcastic and having a good laugh? Who thinks of snobby s**t-talking as anger?
Rigidity is the most intriguing to me, because I think lots of people would say they are not rigid. But I also think most people have significant moments of rigidity, even though they don’t call themselves rigid people. I certainly do, as evidenced by my couch incident. I also think that I sometimes struggle with timing on things—if we decide to go to dinner at 6 pm at a restaurant a half hour away, I am breathing out of my mouth at 5:31 when all of my kids are wandering around whining that they can’t find their water bottle.
I also think most of us—alcoholics and normies—have a hard time managing work projects, a personal budget, a birthday party, whatever, without thinking everything should be done as we believe it should be done. I think I often convince myself that because I am running the show, the show should only be run the way that I think it should be run. That’s rigidity, and that’s anger. Think about how pissed you usually get when something isn’t done the way you wanted it to be done.
The ultimate nightmare rigidity scenario is when you dig in, and the other people digs in, too. That is rigidity butting up against more rigidity, and guess what? It’s usually two cinderblocks smashing into each other.
That was certainly the case with my daughter. Neither one of us wanted to budge on our couch demand until I ultimately decided to take a few deep breaths and walk away. Deep breaths are big for me—sometimes I visualize my aggravation as a knot that is caught in my chest, and I picture me just blasting it out of my body through my lungs. It doesn’t always get rid of the irritation completely. But it makes it a more manageable blob.
I went upstairs and watched a few minutes of football. When I came down to the living room, she was sitting in the kitchen. I knew she wasn’t sitting there because she wanted to; she moved because she was ultimately giving me back the spot. I also knew she wasn’t going to say, “Sorry I snapped at you. Please have your spot back.”
And I certainly wasn’t going to say, “Sorry for overreacting about one small area of our large couch. I love you and am so glad you’re home from college.”
What do you think I am, spiritually fit?!?!?!?!
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 woman in a bar spotted her friend, a heavy-hitter, drinking by herself at a table. Concerned, the woman went over and said, “Sally, you look terrible. What happened?”
“My mother died in June and left me $10,000. Then in July my father died and left me $50,000. And last month, my aunt died and left me $15,000,” Sally said.
“Three close family members lost in three months? That’s tragic,” the woman said.
“Yes,” Sally agreed, “and then this month, nothing!”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, September 2001, Melissa R. from Calgary, Alberta)
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