The Insanity of the Pink Cloud in a Codependent Relationship – Mary R.

To accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Codependence Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women, and women and men, whose common problem is the inability to maintain functional relationships. We share with one another the hopes of solving our common problem and helping others to recover. The only requirement for membership is a desire for healthy and fulfilling relationships with others and ourselves. CODA is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization or institution, does not wish to engage in any controversy, neither endorses nor opposes any causes. We rely upon the wisdom, knowledge, 12 Steps and 12 Traditions as adopted for our purposes from AA as the principles of our program and guides to living healthy lives. Although separate entities, we should always cooperate with all 12-step recovery programs. Thank you. Friends of mine, co-founder of CODA. And I had the honor to stay for the last two days, and I met her in Ohio last year, and met her here in Arizona also. Thanks. my name is Mary and I'm codependent just to shorten down the CODA team we had a vacancy come up on that committee for chairperson first part of the year and in my codependency I raised my hand and volunteered so I am now the national chairperson actually it was something I really wanted to do basically where that is at right now, we have a national committee and because it's a national committee we do a lot of everything by the mail so everything moves a little bit slower than if we were all in the same area. We do have a CODA team starter packet that has been pretty much take all information in and then kind of assimilate it through the committee to be able to have some writings for CODA team. That's pretty short, thanks. Do I start over? My name is Mary, I'm codependent. This is really neat. I got overwhelmed when I walked in the room and saw how many people. This is real exciting to see this taking place within CODA. And I'm real grateful to be a part of it, that for whatever reason, and I haven't to date been able to figure that out, that God had Ken and I start this program. But my gratitude is immense to see what's taken place. Just to go back in my own history, and I tend to keep that shorter today so I can talk about recovery more, because that's real exciting to me. But I am a survivor, and I choose to call myself a survivor today instead of a victim. But, I am the survivor of physical abuse, of emotional abuse, sexual abuse slash incest, and of intellectual abuse and all of it spiritual abuse. And lots and lots of neglect. And I'm finding today that that is my biggest issue. I was not taught how to do life, basically. And today it's continually, when new things come my way, I'm always having to go to people and go, what do you do? I don't know how to do this. Nobody ever taught me. And, uh, I feel like I'm in about the seventh grade now. Maybe sixth grade, I don't know, some days first grade. But it's neat to know that there are answers out there today and that there are people who care about me enough to be able to teach me and confront me when I'm doing things that are destructive to myself. And I'm real grateful for that. I was born into a family from Kansas and moved to Arizona when I was five years old. My father is a coach and my mother was a bank supervisor, both extremely well-loved in our community and well thought of. I would hear from people a lot about how wonderful they were and all the neat things, especially about my dad. He was an excellent coach, still is today, and took many teams years after years after years to championships and all this type of thing. so he was well thought of. I was the third child, third girl in this family and my father and mother both wanted a son real bad so I come from that place of we were all supposed to be boys. For me it happened a little bit more so than my other two sisters because I was a last child and the last hope of having a son and they didn't, they had a boys and girls name I picked out for my first sister, my oldest, and the middle sister they had a boys' and girls' name. By the time they got to me it was a boys name only. They came up with a girls name after I was born. And I heard stories about how my dad was depressed after I Was Born because I was female. I heard from as early as I can remember that I was supposed to be a boy to the point of playing with cowboy and Indian sets and doing things that boys would do. I didn't play with dolls or do things that girls did. The only pictures that I have of myself to where I look like a little girl for that, I was born in 1953, so for that time period. We took dance lessons for about, I think I took them for two years, age three and four. And I had on these little Shirley Temple outfits with bright red lipstick and all of that. What was interesting to me is the sexual abuse and incest started when I was age three. And the pictures that I had taken of me in these dance costumes, I was extremely seductive looking. Did not look like a three or four year old little girl. I looked like this older woman in this itty bitty body. And that told me that I could do anything. I had already learned by that point how to be manipulative, how to get my needs met, all of that through sex. And that continued on up until recovery. That's been one of my hugest issues to deal with. As I said, we moved to Arizona when I was five. And I don't have a lot of memories about childhood. I have sporadic memories. And I've been told that the reason for that is either too scary or too painful to remember. And that when it's time, the memories will come up. and probably not all of them will. There's a reason that I buried them. So I just trust in that and know that God will give me what I can handle it at the time that I can tackle it and I don't need to force it out. It's funny to me because we had lived together with another family right before we moved from Kansas and then we moved to Arizona and so for a period of time I had four other brothers and sisters and two other parents. So when I was growing up, I not only had my parents as my caretakers, I had this other two parents as my caretakers, and I had this whole set of coaches because what I did was I started doing all the sports as I grew up and trying again to be that boy for my dad. I've gotten to the point to where in my mind I thought, okay, if I was supposed to be a boy, then if I can beat all the boys in sports then maybe dad would approve of me and somehow I'd be acceptable to him and and I got to that point where I could outrun out throw out basketball play out football play out whatever it was um boys that were at my school um and then I my father had uh started a girls and women's track club that was um with the amateur athletic union and we travel around the Southwest doing track meets, and this was all girls, and there was about 100 girls in this club. So I also found out that there were these girls now I had to compete with. So from growing up and then the competition just within my family for my dad's attention, there were four females in that family, and we kind of all revolved around dad, trying to get him to notice us, and dad was pretty quiet. so I learned real early that men and women were both my competition which for me meant that I couldn't be close to anybody and I would stay pretty isolated I wouldn't let myself get too close I went into the needless part of me and then at times in order to deal with before I started using drugs and alcohol the way that I would deal with a lot of these feelings come up is I would go and be very rebellious and that started for me in 5th grade I, for whatever reason and I don't have any memories of this but the incest stopped then physical abuse stopped my mom was a rager and physically abusive all of that stopped in 5rd grade and I started rebelling and I was being obnoxious in class and told to go play tetherball to burn off some energy people look at me because I have this, what I've been told is this nice-looking face. And they hear about some of the things I did as a child, and they go, that doesn't make sense. You don't look like somebody could do that. But what I did was real destructive. We were talking in the car yesterday on the way back from a drive, and part of the thing that I did when I was a child is I had a bag of cherry bombs that my sister's boyfriend brought back from Mexico and I would take cherry bombs and let them off everywhere and scare people with them. I mean, I thought that was just lots of fun and I had portable classrooms at my grade school and so there was this space underneath there and that was the teacher's room and I'd take the cherry bombs and throw them under there and let him go off and then see these teachers get all scared and what happened and all this kind of stuff and it's funny but I could have hurt somebody with that or myself and that was the mildest form of my destructive behavior I went on to using drugs and alcohol to smoking at a real early age I started by age 10 I was experimenting with alcohol around 11-12 years old and then I started using it on a regular basis by the time I was 13 had been using sex by that point, started using drugs when I was 14 and all of that just kind of continued and progressed at a rapid pace all throughout high school. I was very much into the hippie movement and protesting and dressing kind of bizarre and hanging out at this place called in Cano Park in Phoenix which is where all the hippies hung out. Ken and I found that later we knew the same people even though we didn't know each other, which was kind of funny. And by age 16 I found out I was pregnant with my oldest child. This was going into my senior year of high school. So I did what I thought I was supposed to do and got married for the first time. And my first husband was what I call a drugstore biker. I used this at one meeting everybody laughs so I use it at every meeting now but it is funny though he in Arizona used to hear this thing about drugstore cowboys and they were cowboys who dressed the whole thing with the hats and the boots and all this and they'd go sit in drugstores and talk about cowboy stuff even though they weren't cowboys well my ex-husband was dressed like a biker leathers and looked like a biker, hung out with bikers. That's who all of our friends were, but never owned a motorcycle. But he was pretty bizarre. He would use acid LSD on a daily basis, and he was just bizarre all the time. He would take off and run down the freeway when he'd be high on acid and at one point would take cigarettes and burn himself. This guy was just gone all the time. Had burned a cross in his chest because he thought that would be cool as being a biker. All these different things. We didn't stay together too long. we were legally married I think a year and a half before I could afford the divorce but we only lived together for just under a year and it was kind of like a high school thing we got married because we thought that's what we were supposed to do so after that divorce I didn't want to waste around too much time so within about two months I was married again and this time to an alcoholic alcoholic, a rager, physically abusive, and first husband was athlete too. And we stayed married for about seven years, and during that time I had another child, and had lots of complications during birth as a result of my alcoholism, and she was a real low birth wave, the whole scenario around all that. And then after we were divorced, I tried AA for the first time. I'm also a member of AA. And what happened is I stopped drinking and didn't stop using. That was still kind of going on. But all these feelings started to come up. And I thought, no, no. We've been working at staying away from these for a long time so I went back out and drank again and used even more drugs at that point and it was about two and a half years before I finally was able to go into AA and say okay I'll see what happens this time and this was after numerous numerous times of trying to stop using. I just couldn't last very long because the feelings would emerge and that was just too much for me and too overwhelming so what happened this last time is I went into the program and I said okay God you know we'll go through this and I hit a real total emotional bottom and I don't surrender easy at all I'm rebellious still at times just it doesn't last as long but that's the first thing that will come up for me as I will fight my surrendering. And so I had to hit a real strong emotional bottom before I was willing to get sober and get clean. So I did that, and went in day A, and was on what they called a pink cloud for a period of time, and met Kim during that time. And we started a relationship not too long after that. Once we were living within in the same, uh, complex in another state about a few months later. After about two months, I guess it was into the relationship. Um, it's like all the codependency hit and the pink cloud of the relationship was gone by then. And we were, um, I'll talk for myself. I was insane for the next year and a half and was jealous, was paranoid, thought that most of the time that Ken was the worst person in the world, thought that I was the worse person in the world. I go on for a whole list of things. But I just completely became totally insane and come to find out now I understand what happened as I got into the relationship. And it's one thing for me to be by myself, but when I get in a relationship, even more of the family stuff starts coming up. And that happened for me. So I was sitting in group therapy, or kind of a support group, it was aftercare, at a treatment center that Kim was working at. And this woman turned around and looked at me and she said, you need therapy? And I went, oh, okay. Um, I somehow had a clue that something was needed there, but I just didn't know what it was. Um. So she gave me a name of a therapist who dealt with codependency issues and I went in, um, on April 22nd, 1984 to my first therapist therapy office for the codependency. And it took me, after that point, probably about a year to really admit my powerlessness and to admit my unmanageability. Again, I did not want to surrender to it. And I didn't want to see how it was things that I was doing. I wanted to see how it were things that Ken was doing or it was things that my kids were doing or that my family was doing. I didn't want to look at myself at all and didn't want to surrender to it. So it was about a year, I'd say, maybe a little bit more than that, to do my first step. And she had me doing all sorts of writing and reading all sorts books and talking with her in meetings and all this type of thing. And Coda wasn't around back then, so I would go into AA and I'd pretend. And I'd stay while I'm talking about living life on life's terms and then I'd start going through all my codependency stuff which all had to do with the reason why I drank and used in the first place so there was a point after that, Ken and I had, I guess it was a little over a year after that had gone through a point of separating going through separation in our marriage and I guess that lasted about two months and during that time is when I did my second and third step our therapist said okay why you guys are separated she says you two are so enmeshed with each other there's no way for you to get any clarity on who you are individually and I want you to really take time to look at yourself individually and then we'll bring you back together but you need to get some strength in your own recovery first and that was when I worked my second and third step and when I finally said, okay God, I'm willing to turn my will and my life over to you and I'm going to believe that you're there and I am going to trust that you are there and do these things even though it's scary. And that was real hard for me although that was a big milestone for me. into my fourth step, it had taken me also during that first year to be able to stop protecting my family, especially my dad. And again, what I found out is that the victim always protects the victimizer and I was always real protective of my father and who he was. and it took me a while to be able to hold my family accountable not blame them and not get into raging at them all the time but just to hold them accountable for what took place and know that they learned it from their parents and that it's intergenerational my fourth step when I got to that I had to hold myself accountable and just as much as I wanted to protect my family I wanted to protect me, and I didn't want to look at how I offended other people. What I found out is I was real offensive. I come from a passive place, and I thought, well, I'm passive. I can't be that offensive. That was a joke. My therapist continued to point out time after time for me. What I find out mainly just in being in fear and having that wall of fear around me and being passive I was being real offensive to people because I would not let anyone know who I was and in my marriage with Ken I was not letting Ken know who I wasn't and I wasn t being honest with him I was controlling, I was managing, Iwas manipulating our marriage so that it wouldn t rock the boat at all doing all these things and that s real offensive And I was also, I've got two kids, as I said, from my previous marriages. I would go over and have this little relationship with my kids and then I'd come over and had this little friendship with Ken and I wouldn't let them have a relationship. I needed to stay in that middle, which I learned that from my childhood. I was in between mom and dad all the time. and so I had to learn how to stop offending my kids by controlling and manipulating them and stop offening Ken by doing the same thing there were lots of other ways that I found out that I was offensive and they all came down for me out of being in fear of shame it's kind of like being afraid that shame is going to happen one more time so I get into doing all these behaviors in the here and now out of fear of the future and I'm going to control the future somehow and that kept me in my dysfunction and it kept me doing things that were hurtful to other people and to myself so the fourth step was real eye-opening for me to say the least and I was able to finally start getting to know who Mary was on the inside instead of who I kept trying to fantasize to be. Because ever since a child, I would go into creating these fantasies like I want to be this, I wantto do this job, have this type of personality, all this kind of stuff and then I'd try and do it and it'd never work or last very long or I'd have a shame attack at even trying to do it and retreat from all that. But the fourth step let me start to know really who I was the healthy and the unhealthy side and to be able to start beginning to love myself a little bit more doing the fifth step and again because Coda wasn't around at the time I ended up doing my first one in therapy with my therapist and that was real wonderful for me too again I was able to see how I learned all the different behaviors from childhood and how they were affecting me in my adult life and how I was hurting other people with it. It's kind of like, okay, there's mom and dad over here, but now you've got to look at yourself and be responsible for who you are. And I was good at being irresponsible most of my life. What I found out with going through the fifth and then the sixth and seventh step is I was able to get to a place of forgiveness with myself. And when that happened, I had no problem forgiving Mom and Dad and the other people that were involved. But I had to have that for myself first. And I kept hearing that recovery is an inside job. You've got to do it for yourself before you can do it for anybody else and all of that. And I heard that hundreds of times. But that's finally when it made sense and it went from my head to my heart. And I was able to really get into that forgiveness place with my family. My relationship with my parents is not healed today. I don't know that it ever will be. That's only for God to deal with now, and I have done as much as I can without selling out on my side of my relationship with the Lord. I've been with my family, and I've left the door open that I want to have a relationship, but I'm not willing to be who they're wanting me to be. and they have pretty much told me that they don't want me talking about the incest don't talk about any of the abuses don't talked about the alcohol and drugs and it's like don't be don't talk about who you are and what goes on with you just come in here and be happy and that just doesn't work going through the making amends to everybody even that too because I did that with my family and I did that with Ken and I do that with children and some other people that I needed to make amends to and then staying with the maintenance steps the 10th 11th and 12th step I want to make things so complicated at times and so it's helpful for me to go back and reread the 10th, 11th, and 12 and just see where it is i'm supposed to be today because even today i want to get into that fear of shame and it's like i want i wantto get up here in front of all of you and do my talk just perfectly so that you're all happy and you'reall pleased and i won't have to feel shame about what i just said and uh and i was feeling that before i got up to up here because that's the normal response that comes up for me and have to go through again okay god i'll get up there and open my mouth and and we'll see what happens, and that's the way it's supposed to be. So it's kind of a continuous learning process. I was telling Ken not too long ago, I finally realized for me what recovery is. And it's not that I am void of all those unhealthy behaviors because they still come up periodically, but what happens for me is when I get into them, they don't last as long, and I'm able to do some things to get out of them pretty quickly, and there's more time in between them. And to me, that's recovery. When I got to that point of going to see that therapist for the first time, I was where I would go and isolate. If Ken and I'd have a fight, I'd go find a corner and want to get in a ball and just stay there and isolate? I was seeing things, I was hearing things all sorts of bizarre things were happening to me as a result of my codependency physical things that were going on with me as a resultado of my co-dependency and I was just a mess what's neat is those things don't take place unless I'm in meditation and then maybe they take place but on a regular basis those things don't takes place for me today and I don't have to isolate myself or worry whether any of you are going to like me or not. And that's real neat for me. I have spent my whole life trying to get everybody to be happy with me and I got busted on that real fast in AA and was told that only a small percent of people are goingto be happywithme and most of the people don't care and the other percent are not goingto like me And so that that's okay. So it helped put some of that in perspective, although I kept trying to give up easy. But this has just been real neat. When we got to the point of starting CODA, I kind of came up with the idea one summer and came home and talked about it, and we kind of talked about for a period of time and then decided to go ahead and start the meeting. And to us, we were just going to have this support group in Phoenix. You know, and it's like God took this thing and went, whoa! And it's just been amazing. One thing that I know and I trust in my heart is I know that Ken and I let go of the program. we went through at the first national conference giving the program to CODA and said okay here it is and now it's up to everybody putting their input in because up until that time we hadn't had a conference and really didn't have much organization with it and God has I believe honored that and taken that and done with it what God wants to do with this program and as long as I know as long as I stay out of the way in my own program and stay out of the way in what's going on with CODA that lots of things happen with it and they're not by my doing they're by God's doing and that is what has brought about my recovery program today it's like my biggest job in recovery is staying out of the way and doing the footwork and that's all I have to do and staying out of any kind of expectations going on. And the rest of it just falls into place. It's only when I want to get in and control and fix and manage and manipulate everything that everything gets a little screwy and gets chaotic for me. And that, as I said, still happens periodically. I am real grateful to be here and it's nice, my fear is just normal now thanks God but you're next I'm real grateful to see all of you here I truly believe for what codependency dependency does to a person and does to a family and does your community in a nation in a world that we're seeing the effects of all that worldwide and again it comes down to each one of us just doing it individually and getting into recovery and doing what we can do so we can pass that on and it's neat to see so many people. It's awesome to me, just awesome. And I'm real glad to be here. And God bless you all. Thank you. We're going to divide right now into the workshops. The shame and guilt workshop is going to be in the small auditorium outside in here. All the others are going to go upstairs. After that, we have lunch. And then we'll come in here, we will go for the other workshops, and then we will come in here for the ending. Thank you.