Step Two, Part One---"Came to believe"/Faith

In his wonderful book about a Buddhist approach to AA, Kevin Griffin says,
Alcoholism is a disease of faith. Alcoholics often develop a cynical attitude
toward life, not seeing anything to believe in. When you persistently feel
the need to change your consciousness through drugs or booze, you are
expressing a lack of trust in life itself.

That was certainly true of me when I was drinking and getting stoned. I didn't trust myself nor did I trust anyone else. Not a good attitude to have if you want to be in a loving relationship. And I was not. In fact, during my last couple of years of using, I had decided I would be single the rest of my life because relationships were "impossible."

As I have indicated in earlier posts, meeting S changed a lot of things in my life. Talking to her moved me out of denial and into a recognition of my addiction. It also convinced me that maybe a close relationship in my life might be possible after all. And more than 20 years later, I have definitely come to believe in that possibility.

One of the hardest things for me to come to believe about being in a close relationship was the possibility of win-win instead of the old zero-sum attitude of winner and loser. A long time ago a couple, whose name I can't recall, wrote a book about relationships entitled Do I Have to Give Up Me to Be Loved by You? Before I met S, there was no question in my mind that the answer was "yes."

But during the first decade of our relationship I came to believe that it is possible for both of us to "win" even when we want quite different things. I learned this through an experience that required a lot of faith in that possibility because it took 5 years for us to find a solution to the problem created by our different wants about a particular issue.

I spent the first 3 years of my life living along the Pacific Ocean. As a result, I had always been drawn to spend time "at the beach" (as we say in this part of the world), especially during the winter when the huge storms made it a very dramatic place to be. So it wasn't long after S and I began living together that I began talking about finding a home at the beach. S, who loves going to the beach for a weekend anytime, and a week in September when the weather is magnificent, had no desire to live there full-time.

So we talked about the issue. And talked and talked. We spent many weekends at a friend's place at the beach, using our time there to look around and see if there was a suitable house we could afford as a second home (there wasn't.) The more time we spent at our friend's home, the more urgent was my desire to move to the beach. And S was just as clear that she didn't want to leave family and friends to move to a place where she would feel isolated.

Since so many other things had worked out well in our relationship, we had faith that we would find a solution to this dilemma if we remained patient and didn't force a decision that would leave one of us feeling we had won and the other feeling they had lost. Finally, after five years of dealing with these conflicting desires, a solution appeared when my father died and left us a larger inheritance that we had anticipated. S suggested that I cut back my practice to half-time and use part of the money to finance spending 3 days a week at the beach for four months during the upcoming winter.

I found a lovely small home just a few yards from the beach whose owner was happy to have someone rent 3 days during the week in the winter when renters were scarce. The 4 months were even better than I had anticipated, but when they ended I realized that my desire to live at the beach was finished. There had been some kind of healing going on below the level of my conscious awareness, and I no longer "needed" to live at the beach.

This experience taught me the importance of having faith in being able to find solutions for problems in relationships that both preserve the health of the relationship and the satisfaction of both partners. Given all the problems there are in relationships in recovery, it is vital for couples in such relationships to come to believe there is an inherent and potent power in their relationship which will restore it and them to sanity. Such faith will sustain partners in early recovery when their focus is on their individual recovery programs, as it should be, and it will sustain partners in later recovery when they are ready to begin tackling the many difficult problems created by their behavior during the years of active addiction.